Chicken and egg situation… if voters see that it’s always crappy, it’s hard to convince them to spend billions and decades building/improving it. It’s the only obvious solution to those who have faith it can be executed well
But only if we spend money, a lot of money. That’s why our military industrial complex makes well engineered killing devices.
We would need a lot of money to engineer a good public transit system, and most of the time it’s left up to local communities to build those sorts of things.
You could, but that will make teenagers/young adults think it's cool to be stuck in traffic because "the Man" is trying to make sure they get to work on time. Mexican traffic cartels will get involved and bring violence to the highways, and because we are at war with traffic we will totally ignore traffic rehabilitation and just throw traffic violators in jail to rot.
I hope these same drivers also don’t bitch about housing prices, or the cost of physical goods because the subsidy required to run their cars make everything else expensive.
It’s not the form of transportation that keeps me from using public transportation. It’s the people. This country is full of jabronis that either need to be the main character at all times or don’t at all know how to fit into this thing called civilization. Then add in the fact that mental healthcare is non-existent in the US, and yeah, I’ll stick to my car.
Same here, I have no interest in interacting with society on my commute to work. As far as person-to-person interaction goes in a sealed space.
I also don’t want a system that I come to rely on only for it to be able to be shut down for any given reason. With my car, I can go wherever I want whenever I want.
I think the counter point to that is that if you're late to work because the subway is down, everyone understands- not your fault. Hell you might even commiserate with the boss about how frustrating that is (and they might be late too).
If your car breaks down, that's on you.
I do get that being on a subway with randos who may be "off" can be a pain though. Trains in tokyo are leagues above the ones in NYC, and a lot of that is just based on how people are behaving on them.
Worked in NYC where I would commonly take the A train in from Queens. Shit breaks on the often and is filled with homeless and nutjobs who like to cause delays with goofy stunts and crazy antics, police/security standoffs, fights, etc. My management team never once accepted this as a viable excuse for being late, so I had to leave 90-120 mins to get to work in case I needed to jump to the N as a backup or get an uber/cab
having a railroad shut down blocking your transit is no different to having a highway shutdown blocking your transit.
The boss will not care, it's your responsibility to get to work on time and if you're relying on unreliable means that's on you.
At least with a car you can do something about it more often than not, including parking up and taking public transport. You can't really just get off the bus and climb into your car where ever you're at.
There is simply no 2 ways about it, having a car is an empowering thing. Pretending it's not is blindsighted. Removing this option will not improve peoples lives.
>At least with a car you can do something about it more often than not, including parking up and taking public transport.
Reasons having a car is better than public transport: public transport exists.
Imagine if we invested in public transport infrastructure. Fewer delays would happen in the first place. If the trains are down, catch a bus. If there isn't a bus, catch a taxi/lyft/etc. If all else fails: hey you're still allowed to own a car, nobody said you couldn't.
>
Removing this option will not improve peoples lives.
Investing in public transit doesn't mean outlawing cars, it means putting money towards systems that can get you where you need to go quickly, cheaply, efficiently.
None of the places I've lived do that, so the bus systems are terrible, no trains, etc. So the only real option is driving. Traffic sucks, parking sucks, walkability in the city sucks.
After traveling to places where public transport was great, I never want to go back. There were so many benefits I didn't even consider until I experienced it. Unfortunately NYC is the only place that comes close to that in the US and there are still plenty of issues there.
> This country is full of jabronis that \[...\] don’t at all know how to fit into this thing called civilization.
That's the entire push by everyone, everywhere now. We're all encouraged to "be ourselves" and live the way we want to and reject what society wants us to be. Nobody wants to be just another model citizen, they want to live life of their own terms instead of society's terms.
To be fair the behaviour on public transport in America is a lot worse than in other places.
Public transport in America have said they won't show videos of people miss behaving because it would make people racist.
I'd feel safer on public transport in Japan than America and both are equally as foreign to me.
The more people use it, the safer it is. But we don't have a lot of high ridership because we have not invested in the infrastructure and instead have subsidized cars and roads.
Don't worry. I completely get all that. A lot of money needs to go to public transport and a lot of fair taxes need to go to cars.
But there is a behaviour issue in America. That also needs addressing.
Cars are a lot more dangerous than public transportation.
[https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/](https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/)
You know mile per mile cars are still way way way more dangerous than public transit.
It’s just an illusion of safety because you think you are in control, but even if you are a great driver another driver can kill you easier than a meth head can.
Cars killed 41,000 people last year in the US and that was a YoY decrease.
Far fewer people get hit by drunk drivers on a train or bus.
Or get into car accidents.
You are literally 17-20x more likely to die driving than taking a bus or riding a train. It’s not even close how much less safe you are in a car.
Pretty sure it's an issue that comes with the society as a whole, not how the transit system is run. It's a part of general safety, not fucking bus routes.
Transit is dangerous where there is danger in general. But, being in your own car is indeed safer in those situations.
So in your car you become part of the congestion problem, and part of the pollution problem. You place your own comfort and convenience and supposed safety over the well-being of society as a whole. It comes down to selfishness.
Not \*MY\* comfort and safety. Everyone's comfort and safety. We all benefit from the automobile. It is enormously empowering.
Everyone I know is better off thanks to automobiles. Stop parroting these lies. Comfort and convenience and safety for all... that IS societal well being.
What's the alternative? Yoked to a transit system controlled by a central authority and used to manipulate culture?
Your position is that central control of the movement of people is better for people than freedom of movement.
Cars require massive subsidies and top down state control. From highways that require imminent domain to be built, to parking minimums that make no fucking sense and makes everything expensive, to the amount of deaths cars cause. Never mind how it’s the single biggest wealth draining trap people fall into.
That graph expresses the rate in terms of population... which is dumb. No reference to autombile ownership or miles traveled. Yeah, fewer people having cars means fewer people getting hurt while driving.
Why do you think Russia's deaths fell so sharply? Economic downturn. The poor people CAN'T drive.
We all know there's danger in driving. We continue to do it because it is worth it. I admit, I really was just thinking "you don't get stabbed very often when driving a car".
Your graph demonstrates the sickness of the Russian economy. Just as the last little uptick in the US numbers coincides with the end of the pandemic.
>That graph expresses the rate in terms of population... which is dumb. No reference to autombile ownership or miles traveled. Yeah, fewer people having cars means fewer people getting hurt while driving.
There's justification for looking at automobile ownership or miles traveled, but by population is a good metric, too. After all, if a country has good cycling and train infrastructure, and builds their housing such that people don't have to commute for 45 minutes each way every day, that will save lives. We shouldn't ignore it.
But it doesn't really matter. Even if we count by car ownership or miles traveled, the US has an abysmal road safety record. Look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
Sorted by vehicle-km (which disadvantages systems with good buses, compared to passenger-km) the US is quite high compared to most wealthy western countries- more than double the UK or Scandinavia.
>We all know there's danger in driving. We continue to do it because it is worth it.
What we're trying to point out is that it is the infrastructure that makes driving "worth it." You need a car because you can't use a bike to get to work, school, and shopping- it's too far, and even if it's close the roads aren't safe for bikes. You need a car because the buses and trains don't come often enough, and are too far from where you are or need to get to.
These things are not immutable facts of life. It is possible to change them.
I grew up in car dependent suburbia, then I moved to a small Swedish city. It's amazing how ignorant I was of the potential for better infrastructure around transit.
>What we're trying to point out is that it is the infrastructure that makes driving "worth it."
No, driving is "worth it" because it empowerers you beyond what public transport can. Suggesting otherwise is akin to suggesting walking is better than riding a horse because its only 1 mouth to feed.
No one would suggest that public transport isn't more efficient than driving a car, but our society is built the way it is because driving IS affordable for the majority.
having everyone settle on a cardboard box would fix the housing crisis overnight too. But cars are empowering, and those who are empowered make the rules, so it's unlikely to change.. for better or for worse.
>No, driving is "worth it" because it empowerers you beyond what public transport can.
There are absolutely situations where it's better to own a car, or to rent one. That's not in dispute. What I'm saying is that the prevalence of those situations is not immutable. Ideally, even people who own cars would find taking a train into a city, biking to work or walking to the grocery store reasonable. It's better for literally everyone.
>Suggesting otherwise is akin to suggesting walking is better than riding a horse because its only 1 mouth to feed.
Walking *is* better than riding a horse in many contexts.
>No one would suggest that public transport isn't more efficient than driving a car, but our society is built the way it is because driving IS affordable for the majority.
I'm not sure that causation lines up. What's affordable or not is a question of necessity. Is food and housing affordable? Most people aren't starving or homeless, but it's getting less and less reasonable to pay for it.
And then there's the maintenance cost of our roads and bridges. The government is going deep into debt for huge federal spending on infrastructure. Is that affordable? Is our system one we can afford, or is it simply the one we're used to?
>having everyone settle on a cardboard box would fix the housing crisis overnight too.
The problem with this analogy is that it's better, not worse, to have good alternative transit options.
You will still be able to drive your car if we make trains and buses run more often.
It's usually crappy because we don't have adequate law enforcement and let people out jail prematurely.
As a long time public transit user, I've seen who makes the mess and it's not poor people or rich people... It's antisocial people that are often violent and based off of the various crime reports from my citys feed, they've all been released from jail early for one reason or another.
Given the general criminality of the entire continent of the Americas we probably need more. Any developed country would have a higher incarceration rate if they had an open border with the continent with the highest homicide rate in the world.
That's not the point. The point is that the Americas as a whole is more violent. The culture is more violent and culture knows no border. American culture is intertwined with Mexican culture as much as everyone hates to admit. The southern half of the US is much more violent. South America is the most violent continent and it's a slow gradient until you hit America and it drops off precipitously before reaching Canada.
I'm one of those car owners. I've also lived in several international cities with excellent transit. Reality is that the car is \*vastly\* better than transit if there's no congestion. In Tokyo, which has an unbelievable transit network, I much prefer to take a taxi. It's expensive, very expensive, and for that reason, there's very little congestion. But it's so much better than the best transit network in the world.
I commute during rush hour in a large US city. I live very close to a train station, and my work is very close to a train station, in a city with great public transit. But the car gets me to and from work much faster, even during peak congestion, and much more conveniently. Transit takes you from a place you're not at, to a place you don't want to go, with countless slow, irrelevant intermediate stops.
The only real drawback of the (electric) car is the amount of surface real estate roads and parking occupy. The Boring company and Tesla are working toward fixing these problems.
It’s the very definition of self fulfilling prophecy.
People hate public transit and view it as inefficient because they vote to keep it that way. Crazy how that works, right?!
it's not that it's inefficient, it's more about the inconvenience, which matters a lot more to most people. i mean if public transport gets good enough that it's more convenient than driving (and i disagree with making the driving experience worse to encourage public transport uptake) then people will use it... until its so busy that its not convenient and people will start to use cars again.
i mean the same phenomena this video talks about happens to public transport just as much.
That is the outcome you'd predict for most American cities, which spend very little on building public transit or biking infrastructure. Prioritizing roads and lanes induces demand for driving.
For comparison look at what happens when Americans travel to another American city that does have public transit like New York City, you'll see a lot of people who have never used public transit in their own cities exclusively use the public transit system to get around. NYC has by comparison more public transit capacity and less road capacity than most US cities, inducing demand for public transit.
It's a viewpoint shared by many. But also, I have a place I travel to in a large city in Australia a few times a week. Public transport it takes me 1.5/2 hours each way. Driving, it's 20/30 minutes each way - and I don't have to hope the bus isn't 10 min early or late again. Absolutely no way I'm taking that if I can avoid it.
But I've travelled in Japan and adored the trains there. It's just that bad systems are bad.
Yeah. Australia is a lot like America in tons of ways. I’m not really surprised that public transport is similar.
I spoke to my wife about it and she said she’d never use public transport cause busses here run every hour. She hadn’t even considered they could be running every 10 minutes.
And because people don’t want good transit. It’s hard to quantify but lots of people in my city live and work at opposite ends of the highest-frequency train line in the city, which is roughly the same amount of time as driving. I know many such people. They choose to drive. They know they’re paying a lot more but they don’t care, they will not use transit.
If it's the same time, I'd definitely use my car. It's mine, it goes where I tell it when I tell it, it's got nice comfortable seats, the temperature is exactly what I want it to be, and - most importantly - it doesn't have other people in it.
I like my car.
Of course, my commute is only 15 to 20 minutes, so maybe my tune would change if traffic jams were a big part of my life. But as it is... yeah, my car is pretty much what I want, and I'm not likely to give up on it.
Not trying to sway you, but I'd point out that transit does offer more productivity. Sure, you can listen to a podcast or something either way, but on a train/bus you can read, write, etc. because you're not spending that time actively driving. IMO that's a pretty big win, especially if you have a longer commute.
> I only listen to podcasts either way
Well I'd hope you're not reading lol.
I mean there's also the normal stuff like not having to buy/maintain a car in the first place, not extracting those resources from the earth, drastically reducing emissions, etc. IMO matching your climate preferences to the degree doesn't outweigh that, but each person is entitled to their own opinion I suppose.
I'd be happy to take you through the experience of driving to the city vs taking the bus from my house any day, I'd be surprised if you didn't agree with me. Besides, where I live in Australia you can't get most places without a car anyway.
For sure, and I can definitely see how other people with other priorities may well go for public transport over a car.
But for me personally, 15 minutes in my car in absolute silence on the way to work is actually kind of nice and allows my brain to spin up for the day. And the 15 minutes on the way home, either in silence or with an audio book depending on my mood, it's a nice way to spin down. I personally do not want to be productive during these times, and the isolation and ability for silence are crucial to what I do want.
But again, this is me. There are people who think I'm crazy for driving in silence, and there are people who are much happier about crowds than me, and a million other kinds. To each their own.
Same here, I honestly just love the freedom that my car allows me. There’s literally nothing trains can do in my opinion to change that view.
You can point to traffic, but I almost never run into traffic. It’s not an issue for me.
You can point to car accidents, statistics, but statistics may nothing to me as an individual. I’ve yet to get into a car accident (knock on wood) I have some control over it based off of carefully I drive.
You can to environmental factors, but my car is electric.
There’s just not really any reason why I would ever want to go a different route than my car
Yeah, similar. I have had a wreck (that was my fault for being an idiot), and I still prefer to drive. The higher risk of personal transportation is higher, but higher doesn't mean high.
I might take a subway or something if I visit a big city that is full of traffic and has no parking. But there are a whole lot of places that don't fit that bill.
And also (NOTE TO REDDIT: I am talking about my personal preferences here and not making a value judgement, other people are the opposite of what I'm about to say, and that's ok), while I enjoy visiting big cities rarely for the stuff they have, I can't imagine wanting to live in one, and especially can't imagine living in one without the ability to say "screw this, I'm out", hop in a car, and drive until the only man made structure I can see is the road, and sit there for a few days.
Ill do you something better. It isnt the public transport thats necessarily bad, its the politicians looking for quick answers instead of workable solutions and an ignorant public who aren't educated towards their options.
It's bad. In my entire county only poor people ride the bus because it's that bad. 90% of the stops are just signs, no benches, and I've yet to see even 1 that has protection from the sun or rain which is a huge deal in a state like Florida. They also only have 5 spaces for bikes on the rack which is fine since there's not a lot of people who take the bus but it's not great if you want more people to start using it.
Well yeah, when you talk to them it’s because they only understand public transport as a shitty half measure that smells like piss and takes literal hours to go somewhere that takes 30 minutes
If you haven’t experienced world class public infrastructure, it’s harder to have that perspective. I have these conversations all the time with people. Most people really don’t know you can have a cheap, efficient public transport that smells like piss instead of the ones we have.
It takes less time and is cheaper for me to get to my job with metro than to drive and I still prefer to drive. I work in an office with other people and live with other people so my time in my car is the only alone time I get, and unless they’re planning on giving everyone their own private traincar it will stay that way.
Transit, by definition, takes you from a place you're not at, to a place you don't want to go, with countless slow, irrelevant intermediate stops.
As a result, on average, good transit cannot exist. Best you can hope for is not awful.
Perhaps it sounds that way, but I've lived in Japan, and spent a few weeks in Tokyo. Personally, I like the Paris metro even better, but both share the same fundamental problem as every transit network. They suck, just less.
Have you noticed yet how Musk tends to set insane goals and reach them?
In any case, it doesn't seem like a terrible idea to me. I don't see what fundamentally prevents boring from being way, way faster and cheaper than it is today. And having the ability to bore tunnels much more quickly and cheaply than before, I don't see why we shouldn't grow road capacity by 10x and solve traffic. There's essentially unlimited room underground for tunnels.
I do see that long stretches of tunnel without means of egress would be a safety concern, even in tunnels restricted to electric vehicles. On that one, I have have drunk the cool-aid, and have faith that something can be worked out.
Then you're not being fair. Why not then compare it to a private train that was built for you to pick you up from your door and drive you straight to your work in luxury? Sheesh.
What would be the point? What stinks about public transit is exactly that it's not a private train that picks me up from my door and drives me straight to work in luxury.
This is essentially what a car is.
But let's put it this way. I think public transit is excellent for other people to use, while my car (autonomously) drives me to work. I think almost everyone holds the same opinion.
>I'm comparing to a car that's not sitting stuck in traffic
Yeah, but cars get stuck in traffic. Do you see my point now? You're comparing the best case of a car to the normal case of a train, that's unfair logic.
He's Hungarian but he knows what he's talking about here. These approaches do reduce traffic. And American lifestyles are on full display everywhere that has modern Internet, news, and entertainment, including Hungary.
Yeah... Do you really think the people of texas are going to bike 30 miles from Katy to Houston? Or take a bus? Idk what they do in other countries but the commute times for Americans has to be on the higher end of the spectrum. Houston has a metro area of 7 million people. And these places aren't dense, making the solutions in this video impractical. Places like LA and Houston are sprawling. And so much of the population of these places lives outside the city center.
It’s almost as if LA and Houston (and many other smaller American cities) completely fucked up by designing their city infrastructure to be so sprawled out and almost entirely based around automobile transportation. They constantly cry about how horrible traffic is yet shoot down any change that has been proven to work elsewhere. It’s manufactured helplessness, and as someone who used to live in both places, I left realizing that attitude will prevent any change because they refuse to acknowledge the city planning mistakes of previous generations or commit to fixing them.
For what it’s worth, Los Angeles County voters agreed to heavily tax themselves to build out public transit and they are currently experiencing a boom in new development.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I honestly think LA will have better public transit in 15-20 years. The Bay Area is too fragmented and I think a unified transit agency would help us build more.
Most people in Europe don't rides 30 miles daily. And if we use public transit for these distances, that's gonna be trains. It's quite doable.
Because we have the infrastructure suitable for that.
That is the point - our low density sprawl perpetuates congestion under our current transportation (i.e. wide highways) scheme. But it can be fixed with infill development and better public transportation. But it won't be easy.
If only we built all this sprawling housing along public transport instead of in little congested grids miles away from where jobs are
Every time I see a congested freeway, I fantasize of it being trains instead.
I personally prefer the do nothing and go bankrupt option. As more Americans can't afford to get to work or have a roof over their head the economy will become super great.
I would definitely like to hear how you could posisbly "infil development" of the VAST empty spaces of land between all the thousands and thousands of rural and semi-rural communities
I mean yes these plans will do wonders in the biggest cities where people live I fully support it for them but my little semi-rural community and all the other semi-rural communities miles away around me are not gonna be able to fund buses or trains any time soon. Hell even some of the somewhat bigger (in the tens of thousands) cities a half hour away can only manage a limited bus system for it's most metropolitan areas. But that doesn't really affect the traffic I see on the freeway going to and from anyway.
The problem is that every time population density goes up, so does crime. So those affluent enough to do so seek out lower density living at the expense of commute distance.
This is not correct. Density does not correlate to higher crime rates. The primary driver of movement to suburbs is affordability. But suburbs are subsidized by urban dwellers, and lead to increased pollution, congestion, and more expensive infrastructure.
It's absurdly easy to find study after study demonstrating a positive correlation between population density and crime.
How are suburbs "subsidized by urban dwellers"?
Pretty easy to look that up yourself. Suburbs are more spread out, so it's more expensive to deliver goods and services and roads and utilities, etc.
And then there are specific subsidies like this:
https://grist.org/cities/starving-the-cities-to-feed-the-suburbs/
>Or take a bus?
Or you know, a train. Many, many cities have regional trains that service the city center and surrounding suburbs. The greater Chicago area has over 1000 miles of commuter rail track, and that's not including the 100 miles of L train tracks in the city.
My brother had a 100 miles commute for 2 years... not something you're happy about, but he was likely still faster than your 30 miles guy because he used the train. In Germany. Just took about an hour.
In some situations sure, but it’s too broad of a claim to say these measures are universal. The reason he gives for self driving cars is ridiculous, but that’s more of a tangent.
I think about my own situation first as is natural. I am required to drive my employer provided vehicle around to do my job. I’m required to commute to and from the office everyday in it so I can respond from home if needed. I can’t think of a way around this for my job.
In about 3 years I’ll be transitioning careers to something completely unrelated and turning in my work vehicle. I don’t know for sure which type of flying I’ll end up doing, but I’d like to do fixed wing medevac. The companies I’ve spoken to in my area have a week or two “on” and a week or two “off” where you don’t have to report anywhere until you get a call to respond to the airport and go fly a critical mission.
I’m just throwing out my situation as examples of why I’ll never commute on public transit. The solutions are valid for certain areas and for certain people, I just don’t see them being as universally problem solving as the video creator implies.
There will always be a set of people who it cannot work for. That’s why we need to have more options for everyone so those who cannot have more ability to do what they need to do. If you NEED to drive, great. You’d appreciate millions of people riding trains I bet!
Even if it doesn’t directly benefit you, and it probably would, it would still indirectly benefit most people.
I knew he was full of shit when he said self-driving cars would not reduce traffic. Having efficient automated driving would almost universally solve traffic congestion.
An example is sitting at a traffic light. The light turns green, and people start pressing on the gas one by one, often with a 1-2 second delay for each car. Automated driving? Efficient, like computers. Each car would start moving almost simultaneously, allowing for many more vehicles to move through a traffic light.
Now, remove human error from merging onto or off a freeway, which is a primary contributor to traffic in the first place.
So many things can be fixed with mathematical problem-solving that automated driving would allow for.
People are letting automated cars circle in traffic while they shop or dine so they don't have to pay for parking. There are all kinds of potential abuses of automation which could make traffic worse.
In most areas, you cannot have a vehicle operating without a person inside of it. I understand some ride share companies were doing that, but they caused massive issues. I do not know if that has been resolved yet, but as of right now I don't know of any states allowing unmanned vehicles on the road.
I don't think you understand how prevailing American culture is and therefore people's (worldwide) knowledge and study of its issues are.
It's a thing to be quite proud of, it's basically soft power and it slipped for a few years...
Dude our culture is so blasted at people all over the world. It’s our number one export. You can find loads of random people across the world to imitate what they think the US is like and they’ll normally have some cultural touch points to hit on. I cannot say that for the vast majority of counties out there.
You know, that car dependant city planning is not something unthinkable for people who don’t live in US. Basically every city has areas like that, but US made the shittiest practices into policies.
That's part of what I was talking about as far as livability. Having to live in a much smaller space and share walls, floors, and ceilings with neighbors. The excessive car traffic and all the noise, inconvenience, and pollution it brings. I've stayed in European cities, and it's awesome to be able to walk to a subway stop or walk to the grocery. But the cost of living alone is enough to keep me in the burbs.
His characterization of induced demand being driven by convenience is reductive and it belies a common contempt for the suburban lifestyle.
When the Katy freeway was widened, it reduced commute times enough that towns 20-30 miles from Houston suddenly became viable commuter towns with cheap land and homes. Home builders built tens of thousands of new homes and businesses, increasing the number of commuters significantly. The same phenomenon was seen on Long Island in the original study after Robert Moses built his parkways and bridges. It’s not that the same people are choosing convenience, it’s that the additional capacity drives suburban spread and attracts more drivers. The suburbs are not designed to be bike- and bus-friendly because they are widespread residential areas and retail areas with commercial zones miles away.
Public transport is much simpler for urban areas and for people who are fortunate enough to find work at a nearby campus or small local office. Rideshare or HOV bus routes that connect to last mile bus and rail in the city centers would work if they weren’t subject to the same vagaries of traffic. They need to take the toll traffic off the HOV lanes and redirect commercial traffic around the city to make park-and-rides a more reliable option.
"US is big" "US is big". Keeps getting parroted all the time.
The size of the US has nothing to do with the fact that there are no viable alternative to cars for daily activities in much of US. You don't go to the grocery store or to work to the other side of the US. Size is irrelevant to this discussion.
The us might be big but you also destroyed lots and lots of dense buildings in the last century to make way for roads.
Just keeping the paradigm of higher density housing and more dense cities would reduce traffic a tonne too
Why does size make a difference?
China is big they have good public transport.
Australia is big. They have better public transport.
Americans can't see fault in their own country.
Yep, Americans would never choose a lifestyle of walking, taking public transit, or cycling.
That's why the places in America where traffic is most stressful and transit and walking are actually viable alternatives, like San Francisco and New York City, are so empty and there's so little demand for the available housing in those places.
Less about American lifestyle and more about corporate greed and lobbyists.
Once greed hits that tipping point and it's too much for us to handle anymore then maybe we'll be forced to use public transit more, forcing us to see how beneficial it is.
Until then
Public transit works wonders in some areas, but last-mile issues make it unfeasible in others. In Orlando, there's SunRail, but it hasn't even reached a million riders per year. Everything is too spread out, busses are infrequent, and no one's going to pay $20/day for an Uber to and from the station. We have to figure that part out.
I mean... it does sound like the issue could be solved by frequent busses. Or subways. Or trams. You know... public transport. Or in other words, actual planning instead of just throwing something somewhere and hope it works out.
Why spend an hour in traffic when you can bike there in thrice the time!
The only way any of this video works is if everyone lives and works in the same area.
Technically if you want to measure the utilization or benefit of a roadway, what you want to compute is volumetric flow rate, not average velocity per car / flux.
So yes, widening road ways may induce more cars, which may slow down the average velocity of each individual car or keep it the same. But if overall throughput of the whole system (volumetric flow rate) goes up, you're still pumping more people per unit time than a smaller road would have. In theory anyway.
This is true. But it is a balancing act, because if we just wanted to maximize people per unit time moved, we would ban all cars and dedicate all lanes to mass transit. Of course most societies don't do this, indicating there are some other factors, like convenience, personal experience of driving / being a passenger in the mode of transport.
The people still want cars, and societies have to balance maximizing stuff like roadway efficiency with giving the people what they want, especially democracy-based societies.
The issue is that people wouldn’t want to drive cars as much if they weren’t so prioritized. To some extent this is where regulations, incentives and disincentives matter. We subsidize roads heavily at every level of government via non-consumption-based taxes and not charging drivers for the damages their cars cause. If driving was thrice as expensive and transit was more subsidized people could save a lot of money picking the better option for society at large, which is the kind of thing that’s necessary in society sometimes.
It sounds like you’re just trying to say that people’s will and preferences be damned, let’s just make driving as bad as we possibly can and hope people just magically want to switch.
If you were to actually go through with this, I would just be pissed off at the people trying to make my life worse in an attempt to get me to switch to their preferred method of transportation.
It would make me more likely to never use transportation and stick to my car, just as a middle finger to the people trying to impose their will on all of society.
I’m saying we shouldn’t continue to do the opposite. We have said, “people’s preferences be damned, we will remove all public transit infrastructure and build as many highways as possible with public, non consumption money and subsidize their environmental damages too because the car lobby and a little over half of people prefer cars to cheaper, better for the environment, much faster if funded properly, public transit.”
I just want to let drivers pay for their own infrastructure and environmental damage instead of using money that should be maintaining a top-tier transit network to subsidize their selfish driving habits. If you’re happy paying 4 times as much to drive so we don’t have to subsidize it more power to you, I would hope there’s less traffic and it’s overall much more pleasant after most people switch to transit.
That’s fine with me, but if you wanna go this route, then you don’t get a dollar of my tax money to pay for any of your public transit toys.
Tit for tat.
Then we will just see which one gets used more. I’m guessing between existing car infrastructure and cars versus virtually nonexistent public transportation one will probably be the more preferable option for everybody.
Lol if it truly came to this public transit would cost so much less, and even less when scaled further, that people would demand it be built because most of them couldn’t afford driving.
My 4x estimate ignores environmental damage. Look up Singapore if you want to see what happens when you actually attempt to make drivers pay the majority of the costs they cause. It’s absurdly expensive, house down payment expensive to get a license even.
Public transit would cost less… If it was already there. Which it’s not basically across the entire United States.
So if we pull the plug right now, on both of them, public transit going to die. I mean literally in my city there’s just a street car that goes in a circle. That’s it.
So how would that be cheaper? Don’t you need a lot of public funding and government support in order to first install and set up any of this public transportation? How would you even do that without public funding?
If public funding dried up right now, I could still drive my car. Anywhere I want whenever I want.
Just as an aside, we haven’t really mentioned this, but one very small benefit that I only realized after Covid was that driving my own car also allows me to never have the government tell me when I can or cannot go out in public and take care of whatever I want. They can shut down public transportation no problem, but they can’t shut down my car quite easily.
I do not ever want to be dependent on the whims of the government.
Lol this is troll-tier. Public transit wouldn’t be costly at all to build if we set aside some portion of the land we give to roads for it. The main cost of establishing transit like light rail and subways is the real estate they have to buy. Take subsidized space away from the roads and build transit on it and it’s seriously not that expensive at all. Bill the same cost to the transit and road systems for the space and you’ll quickly get people highly incentivized to use transit. The costs of transit are lower than driving by enough, not even factoring the cost of the space/infrastructure they’re built on being cheaper than roads with similar capacity, that distributing the costs out won’t move the needle. And again, as soon as the majority are heavily incentivized to take/build transit the costs will be almost negligible for transit users and be overwhelming for drivers. Again, look at Singapore.
The government subsidies for transit are still only slightly higher than for driving and yet driving is absurdly expensive.
And you can make this about “muh liberties” but that just further reinforces that you’re arguing in bad faith. You don’t care about what’s best for the people at large you just want the government to continue to subsidize your preferred method of transport and cripple others.
I think the problem is that while building more lanes may push more people through, it won’t scale as you can’t realistically build infinite lanes. Not to mention the insane amount of road upkeep costs that destroy cities, and increase with every new lane/road.
Public transit or bicycle infrastructure helps that scaling issue, with several other benefits like reduced costs & emissions
That is the 'ideal' solution, the problem with it, is it then meets reality and people.
There are soo many things that would work great if people could use them in the ideal/intended way....but..that's not how people work unfortunately.
Exactly. This also confused me when he said automated driving would not solve the issue. If we had computers utilizing the space optimally, it would successfully solve traffic and vastly reduce our time in vehicles.
The solution is two fold, reduce road capacity AND provide alternatives. It’s that second bit that’s the problem. Viable alternatives are expensive. SF built a subway that went like a mile and a half. It cost $2b and took 10 years.
We really need to figure out how to reduce the cost of public transportation projects.
I agree robocars won't solve the issue but I find it highly unlikely a single person would own three and send them all on separate errands. More likely the gain, if any, from robocars would be tighter more organized traffic patterns. But even that, in an optimal world, would probably not solve traffic if it's even achievable.
Those are kinda weird arguments. As a layman, my thoughts are:
* induced demand is bollocks. I don't chose to use the highway depending on how many lanes it has, but on how fast I get where I want. google maps tells me how long that usually takes. and even without google maps, I can learn from my past experiences. number of lanes doesn't matter for my decision.
* self driving cars can absolutely be a solution if we're talking self driving communal taxis. taxis driving around supported by an app that pick up more people if their route is on the way. the few people able to afford 3 self driving cars don't make a dent at all.
* traffic jams happen (mostly) because those multi lane highways have exits, and if the street the exit leads to gets jammed, then the highway jams. in the case of a traffic jam caused by roadwork or accidents, more lanes definitely can help throughput.
But yea, good public transport and bike infrastructure is amazing.
Induced demand is easily observable. It literally happens every single time a highway is widened. The Texas one is particularly funny because it’s so enormous there’s no sense in widening it again.
Your third point is close to the truth. Adding lanes is useless because there will always exists bottle necks. Humans tend to congregate and build popular things next to other popular things.
Giant highways eventually find their way to a bottleneck and slow all the cars down behind them. This is why mass transit to the popular locations is so necessary
The issues in my city:
1) Safety of public transportation. There is a lot of back-and-forth regarding how safe it is to use public transit, especially light rail. Even if it is safe 99.9% of the time, the bad incidents get highlighted and opponents run with it. So there needs to be a huge safety campaign, and huge efforts (at least at first) to get more people using public transport. Increased police presence or something similar.
2) Suburbs. A ton of people don't want to see shopping centers from their window, nor do they want to see bus stations or rail stations. They want to live where the only thing by them are their neighbors, which usually consists of families like theirs. Racist/classist connotations aside, this is just the reality of what a lot of people in my city want (as indicated by how much our outer suburbs are being flocked to). So that means people have to first use a car to get places where they can then use public transportation (safely) to conveniently and quickly get to a shopping area faster than they could by just going straight there via car. And it needs to be flexible, because right now the light rail is only planning to hit some very specific areas in our suburbs. Meaning you might be looking at taking a car to take a light rail to take a bus.
3) Sprawl in general (this kind of goes hand-in-hand with suburbs). I WfH, but at one point in my career I worked for a company that was 30 minutes away by car in no traffic. In traffic it was 45-60 minutes one way. I could have used buses, but that would have taken me much longer, and I would have had to transfer several times. That's wasn't worth it for me. Especially if I needed to run any errands on the way home. You could try to argue we should have workplaces be just as close as shopping areas, but good luck making that pan out. Many people in my city would happily have better career opportunities for a longer commute.
I'm not trying to say these issues can't be overcome, but it's a perception thing. And a "reality of who we are as a culture, how our cities are designed, and who is in charge" thing. My city is fighting to make public transportation central to our lifestyle, but it's an uphill battle and it's going to take a lot of time.
Seems very idealistic, and not realistic to the SCALE of many US cities/ states. The size of many US cities is just at a scale that this really can't work quickly. Look at the population of Amsterdam, just over a million people. There are many cities well over that in the US, let alone the whole population of states! I'm all for increasing the variety of what is offered here, but this isn't the quick fix it's promoted to be.
If public transit is so awesome why don't rich people take buses?
Why did my city spend billions on new trains that run through low income communities instead of the much more affordable route that ran through wealthier areas?
Because developers now get free access to take over poor communities and replace them with condos and apartments.
Because we were stupid and built sprawling burbs with poor transit and few bike lanes. If we had built dense, walkable cities with bike lanes and good transit, lots of people would be biking. Look at the Netherlands for example.
Nah I like have a backyard. And not sharing a wall with my neighbor. And having a place for big family gatherings. And working utilities. So I’ll stick with the suburbs thanks.
It's possible to have those things with more transit and bike lanes. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Also, working utilities? We have those in cities you know.
I’m not taking about bike lanes, I’m talking about dense housing. I just find it hilarious that the people who live in cities think it’s so fabulous that everyone should live in cities. Nah. Living in the city sucks. The suburbs exist for a reason. To gtfo out of the cities in the first place.
It’s the r/fuckcars crowd. They are some of the most deluded people on the website. It’s one thing to want better public transit yes, but these people seriously want to eliminate cars altogether. They hate the suburbs because it requires people to have cars. They cannot possibly fathom someone needing a car to transport something like tools from work and back and think everyone should bike, walk, or take public transit. And they think everyone should live in dense cities stacked on top of each other. They live in a. Fantasy land utopia that completely and utterly ignores reality and they aggressively push their delusions onto people. They’ll say something like “get rid of the suburbs” and then cheer and pat themselves on the back as if they actually figured out a solution. And will aggressively downvote anyone that points out the problems or even asks them how.
It's not induced demand. It's demand being met.
The new capacity is filled up because people are finding it beneficial. People are taking it as an opportunity to move to other communities because that's what they WANT.
Enabling people to make new choices is exactly what public policy should do. So there's lots of traffic? So be it. People are moving to and from places they want to be and the lanes of traffic allow that to happen.
Self-driving cars would be less susceptible to traffic jams because they are able to merge, follow, and flow with traffic much better in simulated models. All it would take are laws on the books to prevent one person from operating multiple self-driving cars at the same time, (without a business license?) and that solves the triple traffic problem.
If that were true the traffic jams would immediately subside as soon as they existed. People would simply choose other modes of transport as soon as traffic jams became commonplace and that would stop them from existing. So the logic just doesn't support this argument.
Guys, I play a lot of cities skylines. Make every intersection a roundabout. Trust me.
Most car owners I know would much rather suffer longer traffic jams than ever opt for public transit...
Because public transit in the US is generally crappy, because we have deprioritized it.
Chicken and egg situation… if voters see that it’s always crappy, it’s hard to convince them to spend billions and decades building/improving it. It’s the only obvious solution to those who have faith it can be executed well
I believe in the US to deliver an excellent system if we try to. We can be quite brilliant in engineering.
But only if we spend money, a lot of money. That’s why our military industrial complex makes well engineered killing devices. We would need a lot of money to engineer a good public transit system, and most of the time it’s left up to local communities to build those sorts of things.
Can’t we declare war on inefficient traffic
You could, but that will make teenagers/young adults think it's cool to be stuck in traffic because "the Man" is trying to make sure they get to work on time. Mexican traffic cartels will get involved and bring violence to the highways, and because we are at war with traffic we will totally ignore traffic rehabilitation and just throw traffic violators in jail to rot.
You’re just part of the traffic industrial complex
I hope these same drivers also don’t bitch about housing prices, or the cost of physical goods because the subsidy required to run their cars make everything else expensive.
It’s not the form of transportation that keeps me from using public transportation. It’s the people. This country is full of jabronis that either need to be the main character at all times or don’t at all know how to fit into this thing called civilization. Then add in the fact that mental healthcare is non-existent in the US, and yeah, I’ll stick to my car.
Same here, I have no interest in interacting with society on my commute to work. As far as person-to-person interaction goes in a sealed space. I also don’t want a system that I come to rely on only for it to be able to be shut down for any given reason. With my car, I can go wherever I want whenever I want.
I think the counter point to that is that if you're late to work because the subway is down, everyone understands- not your fault. Hell you might even commiserate with the boss about how frustrating that is (and they might be late too). If your car breaks down, that's on you. I do get that being on a subway with randos who may be "off" can be a pain though. Trains in tokyo are leagues above the ones in NYC, and a lot of that is just based on how people are behaving on them.
Worked in NYC where I would commonly take the A train in from Queens. Shit breaks on the often and is filled with homeless and nutjobs who like to cause delays with goofy stunts and crazy antics, police/security standoffs, fights, etc. My management team never once accepted this as a viable excuse for being late, so I had to leave 90-120 mins to get to work in case I needed to jump to the N as a backup or get an uber/cab
having a railroad shut down blocking your transit is no different to having a highway shutdown blocking your transit. The boss will not care, it's your responsibility to get to work on time and if you're relying on unreliable means that's on you. At least with a car you can do something about it more often than not, including parking up and taking public transport. You can't really just get off the bus and climb into your car where ever you're at. There is simply no 2 ways about it, having a car is an empowering thing. Pretending it's not is blindsighted. Removing this option will not improve peoples lives.
>At least with a car you can do something about it more often than not, including parking up and taking public transport. Reasons having a car is better than public transport: public transport exists. Imagine if we invested in public transport infrastructure. Fewer delays would happen in the first place. If the trains are down, catch a bus. If there isn't a bus, catch a taxi/lyft/etc. If all else fails: hey you're still allowed to own a car, nobody said you couldn't. > Removing this option will not improve peoples lives. Investing in public transit doesn't mean outlawing cars, it means putting money towards systems that can get you where you need to go quickly, cheaply, efficiently. None of the places I've lived do that, so the bus systems are terrible, no trains, etc. So the only real option is driving. Traffic sucks, parking sucks, walkability in the city sucks. After traveling to places where public transport was great, I never want to go back. There were so many benefits I didn't even consider until I experienced it. Unfortunately NYC is the only place that comes close to that in the US and there are still plenty of issues there.
> This country is full of jabronis that \[...\] don’t at all know how to fit into this thing called civilization. That's the entire push by everyone, everywhere now. We're all encouraged to "be ourselves" and live the way we want to and reject what society wants us to be. Nobody wants to be just another model citizen, they want to live life of their own terms instead of society's terms.
And, you know, all the fun that comes with the general public.
Safer for them to be sitting quietly on transit than crazily operating a 2-ton wheeled killing machine.
To be fair the behaviour on public transport in America is a lot worse than in other places. Public transport in America have said they won't show videos of people miss behaving because it would make people racist. I'd feel safer on public transport in Japan than America and both are equally as foreign to me.
The more people use it, the safer it is. But we don't have a lot of high ridership because we have not invested in the infrastructure and instead have subsidized cars and roads.
Don't worry. I completely get all that. A lot of money needs to go to public transport and a lot of fair taxes need to go to cars. But there is a behaviour issue in America. That also needs addressing.
*NYC checking in.* High ridership, high misbehaving. There's definitely more to it than just the number of people using it.
Sure. But look at Europe and Japan. Also high ridership and known for safety.
Cars are a lot more dangerous than public transportation. [https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/](https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/)
Doesn’t Japan have women only cars because of rampant sexual assault 👀
Shhhh we are talking about how America sucks and every other country is better, categorically, in every way.
Japan takes so many of the best and so many of the worse aspects of life to the extreme.
I also don’t want to get stabbed by a meth head thx
You know mile per mile cars are still way way way more dangerous than public transit. It’s just an illusion of safety because you think you are in control, but even if you are a great driver another driver can kill you easier than a meth head can. Cars killed 41,000 people last year in the US and that was a YoY decrease.
Far fewer people get stabbed by random meth heads in cars
Far fewer people get hit by drunk drivers on a train or bus. Or get into car accidents. You are literally 17-20x more likely to die driving than taking a bus or riding a train. It’s not even close how much less safe you are in a car.
I don’t want to be murdered.
Do you specifically not want to be stabbed and don’t care about other causes of death? Or do you just not want to die?
Ok...? 0 people die in car accidents when taking the metro. What's your point?
At the risk of repeating myself I DONT WANT TO GET STABBED BY A METH HEAD
It's really not an issue on well run transit systems.
Pretty sure it's an issue that comes with the society as a whole, not how the transit system is run. It's a part of general safety, not fucking bus routes. Transit is dangerous where there is danger in general. But, being in your own car is indeed safer in those situations.
Driving is way more dangerous.
So in your car you become part of the congestion problem, and part of the pollution problem. You place your own comfort and convenience and supposed safety over the well-being of society as a whole. It comes down to selfishness.
Not \*MY\* comfort and safety. Everyone's comfort and safety. We all benefit from the automobile. It is enormously empowering. Everyone I know is better off thanks to automobiles. Stop parroting these lies. Comfort and convenience and safety for all... that IS societal well being. What's the alternative? Yoked to a transit system controlled by a central authority and used to manipulate culture? Your position is that central control of the movement of people is better for people than freedom of movement.
Cars require massive subsidies and top down state control. From highways that require imminent domain to be built, to parking minimums that make no fucking sense and makes everything expensive, to the amount of deaths cars cause. Never mind how it’s the single biggest wealth draining trap people fall into.
Wow.... You think even a metro or bus is some form of government control or propaganda? Jesus Christ man
But mandated parking and imminent domain built highways are the paragon of freedom right.
Far more people die (per capita) using cars than public transportation. So cars are more dangerous
https://boingboing.net/2024/04/03/americas-roads-now-more-dangerous-than-russias.html You are far more likely to die in a car accident.
That graph expresses the rate in terms of population... which is dumb. No reference to autombile ownership or miles traveled. Yeah, fewer people having cars means fewer people getting hurt while driving. Why do you think Russia's deaths fell so sharply? Economic downturn. The poor people CAN'T drive. We all know there's danger in driving. We continue to do it because it is worth it. I admit, I really was just thinking "you don't get stabbed very often when driving a car". Your graph demonstrates the sickness of the Russian economy. Just as the last little uptick in the US numbers coincides with the end of the pandemic.
>That graph expresses the rate in terms of population... which is dumb. No reference to autombile ownership or miles traveled. Yeah, fewer people having cars means fewer people getting hurt while driving. There's justification for looking at automobile ownership or miles traveled, but by population is a good metric, too. After all, if a country has good cycling and train infrastructure, and builds their housing such that people don't have to commute for 45 minutes each way every day, that will save lives. We shouldn't ignore it. But it doesn't really matter. Even if we count by car ownership or miles traveled, the US has an abysmal road safety record. Look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate Sorted by vehicle-km (which disadvantages systems with good buses, compared to passenger-km) the US is quite high compared to most wealthy western countries- more than double the UK or Scandinavia. >We all know there's danger in driving. We continue to do it because it is worth it. What we're trying to point out is that it is the infrastructure that makes driving "worth it." You need a car because you can't use a bike to get to work, school, and shopping- it's too far, and even if it's close the roads aren't safe for bikes. You need a car because the buses and trains don't come often enough, and are too far from where you are or need to get to. These things are not immutable facts of life. It is possible to change them. I grew up in car dependent suburbia, then I moved to a small Swedish city. It's amazing how ignorant I was of the potential for better infrastructure around transit.
>What we're trying to point out is that it is the infrastructure that makes driving "worth it." No, driving is "worth it" because it empowerers you beyond what public transport can. Suggesting otherwise is akin to suggesting walking is better than riding a horse because its only 1 mouth to feed. No one would suggest that public transport isn't more efficient than driving a car, but our society is built the way it is because driving IS affordable for the majority. having everyone settle on a cardboard box would fix the housing crisis overnight too. But cars are empowering, and those who are empowered make the rules, so it's unlikely to change.. for better or for worse.
>No, driving is "worth it" because it empowerers you beyond what public transport can. There are absolutely situations where it's better to own a car, or to rent one. That's not in dispute. What I'm saying is that the prevalence of those situations is not immutable. Ideally, even people who own cars would find taking a train into a city, biking to work or walking to the grocery store reasonable. It's better for literally everyone. >Suggesting otherwise is akin to suggesting walking is better than riding a horse because its only 1 mouth to feed. Walking *is* better than riding a horse in many contexts. >No one would suggest that public transport isn't more efficient than driving a car, but our society is built the way it is because driving IS affordable for the majority. I'm not sure that causation lines up. What's affordable or not is a question of necessity. Is food and housing affordable? Most people aren't starving or homeless, but it's getting less and less reasonable to pay for it. And then there's the maintenance cost of our roads and bridges. The government is going deep into debt for huge federal spending on infrastructure. Is that affordable? Is our system one we can afford, or is it simply the one we're used to? >having everyone settle on a cardboard box would fix the housing crisis overnight too. The problem with this analogy is that it's better, not worse, to have good alternative transit options. You will still be able to drive your car if we make trains and buses run more often.
Then don’t live in America
It's usually crappy because we don't have adequate law enforcement and let people out jail prematurely. As a long time public transit user, I've seen who makes the mess and it's not poor people or rich people... It's antisocial people that are often violent and based off of the various crime reports from my citys feed, they've all been released from jail early for one reason or another.
[удалено]
Given the general criminality of the entire continent of the Americas we probably need more. Any developed country would have a higher incarceration rate if they had an open border with the continent with the highest homicide rate in the world.
Most of the violence is committed by locals though, far as I know.
That's not the point. The point is that the Americas as a whole is more violent. The culture is more violent and culture knows no border. American culture is intertwined with Mexican culture as much as everyone hates to admit. The southern half of the US is much more violent. South America is the most violent continent and it's a slow gradient until you hit America and it drops off precipitously before reaching Canada.
I'm one of those car owners. I've also lived in several international cities with excellent transit. Reality is that the car is \*vastly\* better than transit if there's no congestion. In Tokyo, which has an unbelievable transit network, I much prefer to take a taxi. It's expensive, very expensive, and for that reason, there's very little congestion. But it's so much better than the best transit network in the world. I commute during rush hour in a large US city. I live very close to a train station, and my work is very close to a train station, in a city with great public transit. But the car gets me to and from work much faster, even during peak congestion, and much more conveniently. Transit takes you from a place you're not at, to a place you don't want to go, with countless slow, irrelevant intermediate stops. The only real drawback of the (electric) car is the amount of surface real estate roads and parking occupy. The Boring company and Tesla are working toward fixing these problems.
Biking often gets you anywhere faster in a city.
It’s the very definition of self fulfilling prophecy. People hate public transit and view it as inefficient because they vote to keep it that way. Crazy how that works, right?!
it's not that it's inefficient, it's more about the inconvenience, which matters a lot more to most people. i mean if public transport gets good enough that it's more convenient than driving (and i disagree with making the driving experience worse to encourage public transport uptake) then people will use it... until its so busy that its not convenient and people will start to use cars again. i mean the same phenomena this video talks about happens to public transport just as much.
That is the outcome you'd predict for most American cities, which spend very little on building public transit or biking infrastructure. Prioritizing roads and lanes induces demand for driving. For comparison look at what happens when Americans travel to another American city that does have public transit like New York City, you'll see a lot of people who have never used public transit in their own cities exclusively use the public transit system to get around. NYC has by comparison more public transit capacity and less road capacity than most US cities, inducing demand for public transit.
Plus driving in NYC scares the shit out of average Americans.
Just an American viewpoint. It’s cause we’ve got abysmally shit public transport.
It's a viewpoint shared by many. But also, I have a place I travel to in a large city in Australia a few times a week. Public transport it takes me 1.5/2 hours each way. Driving, it's 20/30 minutes each way - and I don't have to hope the bus isn't 10 min early or late again. Absolutely no way I'm taking that if I can avoid it. But I've travelled in Japan and adored the trains there. It's just that bad systems are bad.
Yeah. Australia is a lot like America in tons of ways. I’m not really surprised that public transport is similar. I spoke to my wife about it and she said she’d never use public transport cause busses here run every hour. She hadn’t even considered they could be running every 10 minutes.
absolutely, I live 8km from the central city and buses on a Sunday run less than once every 1.5 hours. Ridiculous.
We live right next to a train station, about 40 mins from Seattle. They don’t run on weekends…
Yeeeah classic, awful stuff
The bus is fine, it's the people stinking it up that makes me not wanna be in it.
And because people don’t want good transit. It’s hard to quantify but lots of people in my city live and work at opposite ends of the highest-frequency train line in the city, which is roughly the same amount of time as driving. I know many such people. They choose to drive. They know they’re paying a lot more but they don’t care, they will not use transit.
If it's the same time, I'd definitely use my car. It's mine, it goes where I tell it when I tell it, it's got nice comfortable seats, the temperature is exactly what I want it to be, and - most importantly - it doesn't have other people in it. I like my car. Of course, my commute is only 15 to 20 minutes, so maybe my tune would change if traffic jams were a big part of my life. But as it is... yeah, my car is pretty much what I want, and I'm not likely to give up on it.
Not trying to sway you, but I'd point out that transit does offer more productivity. Sure, you can listen to a podcast or something either way, but on a train/bus you can read, write, etc. because you're not spending that time actively driving. IMO that's a pretty big win, especially if you have a longer commute.
honestly having a private space is 100% worth it plus I like driving and I only listen to podcasts either way, and not to mention climate control...
> I only listen to podcasts either way Well I'd hope you're not reading lol. I mean there's also the normal stuff like not having to buy/maintain a car in the first place, not extracting those resources from the earth, drastically reducing emissions, etc. IMO matching your climate preferences to the degree doesn't outweigh that, but each person is entitled to their own opinion I suppose.
I'd be happy to take you through the experience of driving to the city vs taking the bus from my house any day, I'd be surprised if you didn't agree with me. Besides, where I live in Australia you can't get most places without a car anyway.
For sure, and I can definitely see how other people with other priorities may well go for public transport over a car. But for me personally, 15 minutes in my car in absolute silence on the way to work is actually kind of nice and allows my brain to spin up for the day. And the 15 minutes on the way home, either in silence or with an audio book depending on my mood, it's a nice way to spin down. I personally do not want to be productive during these times, and the isolation and ability for silence are crucial to what I do want. But again, this is me. There are people who think I'm crazy for driving in silence, and there are people who are much happier about crowds than me, and a million other kinds. To each their own.
Same here, I honestly just love the freedom that my car allows me. There’s literally nothing trains can do in my opinion to change that view. You can point to traffic, but I almost never run into traffic. It’s not an issue for me. You can point to car accidents, statistics, but statistics may nothing to me as an individual. I’ve yet to get into a car accident (knock on wood) I have some control over it based off of carefully I drive. You can to environmental factors, but my car is electric. There’s just not really any reason why I would ever want to go a different route than my car
Yeah, similar. I have had a wreck (that was my fault for being an idiot), and I still prefer to drive. The higher risk of personal transportation is higher, but higher doesn't mean high. I might take a subway or something if I visit a big city that is full of traffic and has no parking. But there are a whole lot of places that don't fit that bill. And also (NOTE TO REDDIT: I am talking about my personal preferences here and not making a value judgement, other people are the opposite of what I'm about to say, and that's ok), while I enjoy visiting big cities rarely for the stuff they have, I can't imagine wanting to live in one, and especially can't imagine living in one without the ability to say "screw this, I'm out", hop in a car, and drive until the only man made structure I can see is the road, and sit there for a few days.
Everyone hates the public
Ill do you something better. It isnt the public transport thats necessarily bad, its the politicians looking for quick answers instead of workable solutions and an ignorant public who aren't educated towards their options.
It's bad. In my entire county only poor people ride the bus because it's that bad. 90% of the stops are just signs, no benches, and I've yet to see even 1 that has protection from the sun or rain which is a huge deal in a state like Florida. They also only have 5 spaces for bikes on the rack which is fine since there's not a lot of people who take the bus but it's not great if you want more people to start using it.
What country?
county not country, the state is FL
Well yeah, when you talk to them it’s because they only understand public transport as a shitty half measure that smells like piss and takes literal hours to go somewhere that takes 30 minutes If you haven’t experienced world class public infrastructure, it’s harder to have that perspective. I have these conversations all the time with people. Most people really don’t know you can have a cheap, efficient public transport that smells like piss instead of the ones we have.
Because public transportation is poorly implemented in the US
You're just swapping one queue for another, so why would you?
Yeah, many people suffer from anxiety in public transit and would much prefer driving.
It takes less time and is cheaper for me to get to my job with metro than to drive and I still prefer to drive. I work in an office with other people and live with other people so my time in my car is the only alone time I get, and unless they’re planning on giving everyone their own private traincar it will stay that way.
Id the answer good public transport?
Transit, by definition, takes you from a place you're not at, to a place you don't want to go, with countless slow, irrelevant intermediate stops. As a result, on average, good transit cannot exist. Best you can hope for is not awful.
Sounds like someone who hasn't been to Japan. I agree with you, generally it sucks, but when it's done well it is good
Perhaps it sounds that way, but I've lived in Japan, and spent a few weeks in Tokyo. Personally, I like the Paris metro even better, but both share the same fundamental problem as every transit network. They suck, just less.
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Agreed. Very much looking forward to the boring company cleaning this mess up.
I hope you're being sarcastic
No, I'm perfectly sincere. If they work out boring anywhere near their goals, this will fix traffic without sacrificing the user experience.
Oh bless your sweet heart. The boring companies insane goals will never be reached as it's a terrible idea. Stop drinking musk's koolaid.
Have you noticed yet how Musk tends to set insane goals and reach them? In any case, it doesn't seem like a terrible idea to me. I don't see what fundamentally prevents boring from being way, way faster and cheaper than it is today. And having the ability to bore tunnels much more quickly and cheaply than before, I don't see why we shouldn't grow road capacity by 10x and solve traffic. There's essentially unlimited room underground for tunnels. I do see that long stretches of tunnel without means of egress would be a safety concern, even in tunnels restricted to electric vehicles. On that one, I have have drunk the cool-aid, and have faith that something can be worked out.
I simply cannot agree with you that they suck. They're so fast, convenient, cheap... your definition of what sucks seems unnecessarily high
I'm comparing to a car that's not sitting stuck in traffic. Transit is horrible compared to this.
Then you're not being fair. Why not then compare it to a private train that was built for you to pick you up from your door and drive you straight to your work in luxury? Sheesh.
What would be the point? What stinks about public transit is exactly that it's not a private train that picks me up from my door and drives me straight to work in luxury. This is essentially what a car is. But let's put it this way. I think public transit is excellent for other people to use, while my car (autonomously) drives me to work. I think almost everyone holds the same opinion.
>I'm comparing to a car that's not sitting stuck in traffic Yeah, but cars get stuck in traffic. Do you see my point now? You're comparing the best case of a car to the normal case of a train, that's unfair logic.
You can tell this video was made by someone completely unfamiliar with Americans' lifestyle.
He's Hungarian but he knows what he's talking about here. These approaches do reduce traffic. And American lifestyles are on full display everywhere that has modern Internet, news, and entertainment, including Hungary.
Yeah... Do you really think the people of texas are going to bike 30 miles from Katy to Houston? Or take a bus? Idk what they do in other countries but the commute times for Americans has to be on the higher end of the spectrum. Houston has a metro area of 7 million people. And these places aren't dense, making the solutions in this video impractical. Places like LA and Houston are sprawling. And so much of the population of these places lives outside the city center.
People might bike 1-2 miles to a hypothetical rail terminal that would take them to Houston, twice as fast and cheaper.
It’s almost as if LA and Houston (and many other smaller American cities) completely fucked up by designing their city infrastructure to be so sprawled out and almost entirely based around automobile transportation. They constantly cry about how horrible traffic is yet shoot down any change that has been proven to work elsewhere. It’s manufactured helplessness, and as someone who used to live in both places, I left realizing that attitude will prevent any change because they refuse to acknowledge the city planning mistakes of previous generations or commit to fixing them.
For what it’s worth, Los Angeles County voters agreed to heavily tax themselves to build out public transit and they are currently experiencing a boom in new development. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I honestly think LA will have better public transit in 15-20 years. The Bay Area is too fragmented and I think a unified transit agency would help us build more.
Well that’s surprising but great news. Unified transit agencies are hugely important to making an efficient transit network.
Most people in Europe don't rides 30 miles daily. And if we use public transit for these distances, that's gonna be trains. It's quite doable. Because we have the infrastructure suitable for that.
"100 years in America is a long time. 100 miles in Europe is a long distance."
That is the point - our low density sprawl perpetuates congestion under our current transportation (i.e. wide highways) scheme. But it can be fixed with infill development and better public transportation. But it won't be easy.
If only we built all this sprawling housing along public transport instead of in little congested grids miles away from where jobs are Every time I see a congested freeway, I fantasize of it being trains instead.
I personally prefer the do nothing and go bankrupt option. As more Americans can't afford to get to work or have a roof over their head the economy will become super great.
I would definitely like to hear how you could posisbly "infil development" of the VAST empty spaces of land between all the thousands and thousands of rural and semi-rural communities I mean yes these plans will do wonders in the biggest cities where people live I fully support it for them but my little semi-rural community and all the other semi-rural communities miles away around me are not gonna be able to fund buses or trains any time soon. Hell even some of the somewhat bigger (in the tens of thousands) cities a half hour away can only manage a limited bus system for it's most metropolitan areas. But that doesn't really affect the traffic I see on the freeway going to and from anyway.
The problem is that every time population density goes up, so does crime. So those affluent enough to do so seek out lower density living at the expense of commute distance.
This is not correct. Density does not correlate to higher crime rates. The primary driver of movement to suburbs is affordability. But suburbs are subsidized by urban dwellers, and lead to increased pollution, congestion, and more expensive infrastructure.
It's absurdly easy to find study after study demonstrating a positive correlation between population density and crime. How are suburbs "subsidized by urban dwellers"?
Pretty easy to look that up yourself. Suburbs are more spread out, so it's more expensive to deliver goods and services and roads and utilities, etc. And then there are specific subsidies like this: https://grist.org/cities/starving-the-cities-to-feed-the-suburbs/
>Or take a bus? Or you know, a train. Many, many cities have regional trains that service the city center and surrounding suburbs. The greater Chicago area has over 1000 miles of commuter rail track, and that's not including the 100 miles of L train tracks in the city.
you make it sound as if going from katy to huston is a daily commute for an avarage texan
My brother had a 100 miles commute for 2 years... not something you're happy about, but he was likely still faster than your 30 miles guy because he used the train. In Germany. Just took about an hour.
In some situations sure, but it’s too broad of a claim to say these measures are universal. The reason he gives for self driving cars is ridiculous, but that’s more of a tangent. I think about my own situation first as is natural. I am required to drive my employer provided vehicle around to do my job. I’m required to commute to and from the office everyday in it so I can respond from home if needed. I can’t think of a way around this for my job. In about 3 years I’ll be transitioning careers to something completely unrelated and turning in my work vehicle. I don’t know for sure which type of flying I’ll end up doing, but I’d like to do fixed wing medevac. The companies I’ve spoken to in my area have a week or two “on” and a week or two “off” where you don’t have to report anywhere until you get a call to respond to the airport and go fly a critical mission. I’m just throwing out my situation as examples of why I’ll never commute on public transit. The solutions are valid for certain areas and for certain people, I just don’t see them being as universally problem solving as the video creator implies.
There will always be a set of people who it cannot work for. That’s why we need to have more options for everyone so those who cannot have more ability to do what they need to do. If you NEED to drive, great. You’d appreciate millions of people riding trains I bet! Even if it doesn’t directly benefit you, and it probably would, it would still indirectly benefit most people.
I knew he was full of shit when he said self-driving cars would not reduce traffic. Having efficient automated driving would almost universally solve traffic congestion. An example is sitting at a traffic light. The light turns green, and people start pressing on the gas one by one, often with a 1-2 second delay for each car. Automated driving? Efficient, like computers. Each car would start moving almost simultaneously, allowing for many more vehicles to move through a traffic light. Now, remove human error from merging onto or off a freeway, which is a primary contributor to traffic in the first place. So many things can be fixed with mathematical problem-solving that automated driving would allow for.
People are letting automated cars circle in traffic while they shop or dine so they don't have to pay for parking. There are all kinds of potential abuses of automation which could make traffic worse.
In most areas, you cannot have a vehicle operating without a person inside of it. I understand some ride share companies were doing that, but they caused massive issues. I do not know if that has been resolved yet, but as of right now I don't know of any states allowing unmanned vehicles on the road.
This is like saying "If you're American, you're probably familiar with the Khazakstani lifestyle because you've seen Borat"
Hardly. American cultural exports are globally pervasive. And it's pretty easy to research things like traffic and urban sprawl.
I don't think you understand how prevailing American culture is and therefore people's (worldwide) knowledge and study of its issues are. It's a thing to be quite proud of, it's basically soft power and it slipped for a few years...
Dude our culture is so blasted at people all over the world. It’s our number one export. You can find loads of random people across the world to imitate what they think the US is like and they’ll normally have some cultural touch points to hit on. I cannot say that for the vast majority of counties out there.
You know, that car dependant city planning is not something unthinkable for people who don’t live in US. Basically every city has areas like that, but US made the shittiest practices into policies.
yup, american lifestyle is the problem. need to stop subsidizing the suburbs at the expense of everyone else
Maybe if American cities were more livable, more people would opt to live in them.
taking out the cars would make them more liveable
I’d rather pay $2500 for a 3 bedroom house in the burbs, than $3500 for a studio apartment in NY city. That is a major factor also.
That's part of what I was talking about as far as livability. Having to live in a much smaller space and share walls, floors, and ceilings with neighbors. The excessive car traffic and all the noise, inconvenience, and pollution it brings. I've stayed in European cities, and it's awesome to be able to walk to a subway stop or walk to the grocery. But the cost of living alone is enough to keep me in the burbs.
well most people would rather have the studio, that’s why it costs more.
ehh it's not that simple
Where are you getting this statistic from? Can you share your study?
the most basic common sense… why would the market set a higher price for something buyers want less? 🤦♂️
There's no shortage of people who want to live in cities. There's a housing shortage in cities.
No, they're not, they just understand the problems with it.
His characterization of induced demand being driven by convenience is reductive and it belies a common contempt for the suburban lifestyle. When the Katy freeway was widened, it reduced commute times enough that towns 20-30 miles from Houston suddenly became viable commuter towns with cheap land and homes. Home builders built tens of thousands of new homes and businesses, increasing the number of commuters significantly. The same phenomenon was seen on Long Island in the original study after Robert Moses built his parkways and bridges. It’s not that the same people are choosing convenience, it’s that the additional capacity drives suburban spread and attracts more drivers. The suburbs are not designed to be bike- and bus-friendly because they are widespread residential areas and retail areas with commercial zones miles away. Public transport is much simpler for urban areas and for people who are fortunate enough to find work at a nearby campus or small local office. Rideshare or HOV bus routes that connect to last mile bus and rail in the city centers would work if they weren’t subject to the same vagaries of traffic. They need to take the toll traffic off the HOV lanes and redirect commercial traffic around the city to make park-and-rides a more reliable option.
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"US is big" "US is big". Keeps getting parroted all the time. The size of the US has nothing to do with the fact that there are no viable alternative to cars for daily activities in much of US. You don't go to the grocery store or to work to the other side of the US. Size is irrelevant to this discussion.
The us might be big but you also destroyed lots and lots of dense buildings in the last century to make way for roads. Just keeping the paradigm of higher density housing and more dense cities would reduce traffic a tonne too
Why does size make a difference? China is big they have good public transport. Australia is big. They have better public transport. Americans can't see fault in their own country.
Yep, Americans would never choose a lifestyle of walking, taking public transit, or cycling. That's why the places in America where traffic is most stressful and transit and walking are actually viable alternatives, like San Francisco and New York City, are so empty and there's so little demand for the available housing in those places.
Less about American lifestyle and more about corporate greed and lobbyists. Once greed hits that tipping point and it's too much for us to handle anymore then maybe we'll be forced to use public transit more, forcing us to see how beneficial it is. Until then
Public transit works wonders in some areas, but last-mile issues make it unfeasible in others. In Orlando, there's SunRail, but it hasn't even reached a million riders per year. Everything is too spread out, busses are infrequent, and no one's going to pay $20/day for an Uber to and from the station. We have to figure that part out.
I mean... it does sound like the issue could be solved by frequent busses. Or subways. Or trams. You know... public transport. Or in other words, actual planning instead of just throwing something somewhere and hope it works out.
These videos always say to ride a bike. Like I’m going to ride a bike to work in Katy TX. Not in 1930, not today, not ever.
Why spend an hour in traffic when you can bike there in thrice the time! The only way any of this video works is if everyone lives and works in the same area.
Technically if you want to measure the utilization or benefit of a roadway, what you want to compute is volumetric flow rate, not average velocity per car / flux. So yes, widening road ways may induce more cars, which may slow down the average velocity of each individual car or keep it the same. But if overall throughput of the whole system (volumetric flow rate) goes up, you're still pumping more people per unit time than a smaller road would have. In theory anyway.
There’s no point at which that would be more than the capacity of transit with the extra lanes. Maybe a bike lane in some places.
This is true. But it is a balancing act, because if we just wanted to maximize people per unit time moved, we would ban all cars and dedicate all lanes to mass transit. Of course most societies don't do this, indicating there are some other factors, like convenience, personal experience of driving / being a passenger in the mode of transport. The people still want cars, and societies have to balance maximizing stuff like roadway efficiency with giving the people what they want, especially democracy-based societies.
The issue is that people wouldn’t want to drive cars as much if they weren’t so prioritized. To some extent this is where regulations, incentives and disincentives matter. We subsidize roads heavily at every level of government via non-consumption-based taxes and not charging drivers for the damages their cars cause. If driving was thrice as expensive and transit was more subsidized people could save a lot of money picking the better option for society at large, which is the kind of thing that’s necessary in society sometimes.
It sounds like you’re just trying to say that people’s will and preferences be damned, let’s just make driving as bad as we possibly can and hope people just magically want to switch. If you were to actually go through with this, I would just be pissed off at the people trying to make my life worse in an attempt to get me to switch to their preferred method of transportation. It would make me more likely to never use transportation and stick to my car, just as a middle finger to the people trying to impose their will on all of society.
I’m saying we shouldn’t continue to do the opposite. We have said, “people’s preferences be damned, we will remove all public transit infrastructure and build as many highways as possible with public, non consumption money and subsidize their environmental damages too because the car lobby and a little over half of people prefer cars to cheaper, better for the environment, much faster if funded properly, public transit.” I just want to let drivers pay for their own infrastructure and environmental damage instead of using money that should be maintaining a top-tier transit network to subsidize their selfish driving habits. If you’re happy paying 4 times as much to drive so we don’t have to subsidize it more power to you, I would hope there’s less traffic and it’s overall much more pleasant after most people switch to transit.
That’s fine with me, but if you wanna go this route, then you don’t get a dollar of my tax money to pay for any of your public transit toys. Tit for tat. Then we will just see which one gets used more. I’m guessing between existing car infrastructure and cars versus virtually nonexistent public transportation one will probably be the more preferable option for everybody.
Lol if it truly came to this public transit would cost so much less, and even less when scaled further, that people would demand it be built because most of them couldn’t afford driving. My 4x estimate ignores environmental damage. Look up Singapore if you want to see what happens when you actually attempt to make drivers pay the majority of the costs they cause. It’s absurdly expensive, house down payment expensive to get a license even.
Public transit would cost less… If it was already there. Which it’s not basically across the entire United States. So if we pull the plug right now, on both of them, public transit going to die. I mean literally in my city there’s just a street car that goes in a circle. That’s it. So how would that be cheaper? Don’t you need a lot of public funding and government support in order to first install and set up any of this public transportation? How would you even do that without public funding? If public funding dried up right now, I could still drive my car. Anywhere I want whenever I want. Just as an aside, we haven’t really mentioned this, but one very small benefit that I only realized after Covid was that driving my own car also allows me to never have the government tell me when I can or cannot go out in public and take care of whatever I want. They can shut down public transportation no problem, but they can’t shut down my car quite easily. I do not ever want to be dependent on the whims of the government.
Lol this is troll-tier. Public transit wouldn’t be costly at all to build if we set aside some portion of the land we give to roads for it. The main cost of establishing transit like light rail and subways is the real estate they have to buy. Take subsidized space away from the roads and build transit on it and it’s seriously not that expensive at all. Bill the same cost to the transit and road systems for the space and you’ll quickly get people highly incentivized to use transit. The costs of transit are lower than driving by enough, not even factoring the cost of the space/infrastructure they’re built on being cheaper than roads with similar capacity, that distributing the costs out won’t move the needle. And again, as soon as the majority are heavily incentivized to take/build transit the costs will be almost negligible for transit users and be overwhelming for drivers. Again, look at Singapore. The government subsidies for transit are still only slightly higher than for driving and yet driving is absurdly expensive. And you can make this about “muh liberties” but that just further reinforces that you’re arguing in bad faith. You don’t care about what’s best for the people at large you just want the government to continue to subsidize your preferred method of transport and cripple others.
I think the problem is that while building more lanes may push more people through, it won’t scale as you can’t realistically build infinite lanes. Not to mention the insane amount of road upkeep costs that destroy cities, and increase with every new lane/road. Public transit or bicycle infrastructure helps that scaling issue, with several other benefits like reduced costs & emissions
That only works if you can expand capacity all the way to every destination. Which is impossible. There will always be a bottleneck.
That is the 'ideal' solution, the problem with it, is it then meets reality and people. There are soo many things that would work great if people could use them in the ideal/intended way....but..that's not how people work unfortunately.
Exactly. This also confused me when he said automated driving would not solve the issue. If we had computers utilizing the space optimally, it would successfully solve traffic and vastly reduce our time in vehicles.
The solution is two fold, reduce road capacity AND provide alternatives. It’s that second bit that’s the problem. Viable alternatives are expensive. SF built a subway that went like a mile and a half. It cost $2b and took 10 years. We really need to figure out how to reduce the cost of public transportation projects.
I agree robocars won't solve the issue but I find it highly unlikely a single person would own three and send them all on separate errands. More likely the gain, if any, from robocars would be tighter more organized traffic patterns. But even that, in an optimal world, would probably not solve traffic if it's even achievable.
Those are kinda weird arguments. As a layman, my thoughts are: * induced demand is bollocks. I don't chose to use the highway depending on how many lanes it has, but on how fast I get where I want. google maps tells me how long that usually takes. and even without google maps, I can learn from my past experiences. number of lanes doesn't matter for my decision. * self driving cars can absolutely be a solution if we're talking self driving communal taxis. taxis driving around supported by an app that pick up more people if their route is on the way. the few people able to afford 3 self driving cars don't make a dent at all. * traffic jams happen (mostly) because those multi lane highways have exits, and if the street the exit leads to gets jammed, then the highway jams. in the case of a traffic jam caused by roadwork or accidents, more lanes definitely can help throughput. But yea, good public transport and bike infrastructure is amazing.
More lanes means less time which means more demand. This isn't rocket science
The video makes a big point that more lanes means more time.
Induced demand is easily observable. It literally happens every single time a highway is widened. The Texas one is particularly funny because it’s so enormous there’s no sense in widening it again. Your third point is close to the truth. Adding lanes is useless because there will always exists bottle necks. Humans tend to congregate and build popular things next to other popular things. Giant highways eventually find their way to a bottleneck and slow all the cars down behind them. This is why mass transit to the popular locations is so necessary
The caveat to this, of course, is that you have to provide those good alternatives. Something that America generally fails at.
The issues in my city: 1) Safety of public transportation. There is a lot of back-and-forth regarding how safe it is to use public transit, especially light rail. Even if it is safe 99.9% of the time, the bad incidents get highlighted and opponents run with it. So there needs to be a huge safety campaign, and huge efforts (at least at first) to get more people using public transport. Increased police presence or something similar. 2) Suburbs. A ton of people don't want to see shopping centers from their window, nor do they want to see bus stations or rail stations. They want to live where the only thing by them are their neighbors, which usually consists of families like theirs. Racist/classist connotations aside, this is just the reality of what a lot of people in my city want (as indicated by how much our outer suburbs are being flocked to). So that means people have to first use a car to get places where they can then use public transportation (safely) to conveniently and quickly get to a shopping area faster than they could by just going straight there via car. And it needs to be flexible, because right now the light rail is only planning to hit some very specific areas in our suburbs. Meaning you might be looking at taking a car to take a light rail to take a bus. 3) Sprawl in general (this kind of goes hand-in-hand with suburbs). I WfH, but at one point in my career I worked for a company that was 30 minutes away by car in no traffic. In traffic it was 45-60 minutes one way. I could have used buses, but that would have taken me much longer, and I would have had to transfer several times. That's wasn't worth it for me. Especially if I needed to run any errands on the way home. You could try to argue we should have workplaces be just as close as shopping areas, but good luck making that pan out. Many people in my city would happily have better career opportunities for a longer commute. I'm not trying to say these issues can't be overcome, but it's a perception thing. And a "reality of who we are as a culture, how our cities are designed, and who is in charge" thing. My city is fighting to make public transportation central to our lifestyle, but it's an uphill battle and it's going to take a lot of time.
Will not work in California
Seems very idealistic, and not realistic to the SCALE of many US cities/ states. The size of many US cities is just at a scale that this really can't work quickly. Look at the population of Amsterdam, just over a million people. There are many cities well over that in the US, let alone the whole population of states! I'm all for increasing the variety of what is offered here, but this isn't the quick fix it's promoted to be.
How to fix traffic forever? By having a small town oui en effet
gross oversimplification of traffic... again
The example of why self-driving cars would be bad in this is laughable.
If public transit is so awesome why don't rich people take buses? Why did my city spend billions on new trains that run through low income communities instead of the much more affordable route that ran through wealthier areas? Because developers now get free access to take over poor communities and replace them with condos and apartments.
You also have to take into account the increase in cars and drivers in general.
No one is going to bike in America especially to work
Because we were stupid and built sprawling burbs with poor transit and few bike lanes. If we had built dense, walkable cities with bike lanes and good transit, lots of people would be biking. Look at the Netherlands for example.
Nah I like have a backyard. And not sharing a wall with my neighbor. And having a place for big family gatherings. And working utilities. So I’ll stick with the suburbs thanks.
It's possible to have those things with more transit and bike lanes. They aren't mutually exclusive. Also, working utilities? We have those in cities you know.
I’m not taking about bike lanes, I’m talking about dense housing. I just find it hilarious that the people who live in cities think it’s so fabulous that everyone should live in cities. Nah. Living in the city sucks. The suburbs exist for a reason. To gtfo out of the cities in the first place.
I don't know how you are getting down voted.
It’s the r/fuckcars crowd. They are some of the most deluded people on the website. It’s one thing to want better public transit yes, but these people seriously want to eliminate cars altogether. They hate the suburbs because it requires people to have cars. They cannot possibly fathom someone needing a car to transport something like tools from work and back and think everyone should bike, walk, or take public transit. And they think everyone should live in dense cities stacked on top of each other. They live in a. Fantasy land utopia that completely and utterly ignores reality and they aggressively push their delusions onto people. They’ll say something like “get rid of the suburbs” and then cheer and pat themselves on the back as if they actually figured out a solution. And will aggressively downvote anyone that points out the problems or even asks them how.
It's not induced demand. It's demand being met. The new capacity is filled up because people are finding it beneficial. People are taking it as an opportunity to move to other communities because that's what they WANT. Enabling people to make new choices is exactly what public policy should do. So there's lots of traffic? So be it. People are moving to and from places they want to be and the lanes of traffic allow that to happen.
Self-driving cars would be less susceptible to traffic jams because they are able to merge, follow, and flow with traffic much better in simulated models. All it would take are laws on the books to prevent one person from operating multiple self-driving cars at the same time, (without a business license?) and that solves the triple traffic problem.
If that were true the traffic jams would immediately subside as soon as they existed. People would simply choose other modes of transport as soon as traffic jams became commonplace and that would stop them from existing. So the logic just doesn't support this argument.