In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/headway/highways-colorado-transportation.html

by lxm • 2 years ago

264 723 2 years ago

nytimes.com

ocschwar6• 2 years ago

Massachusetts has not widened highways inside of 128 for 50 years now.

And I am so grateful for that.

light_hue_17• 2 years ago

We're actually going in reverse. In the next 2 years a horrible little spur of elevated highway that cuts through Somerville (McGrath) is getting demolished and replaced with a nice boulevard. That whole area is just blighted at the moment. It's going to become some of the nicest housing with parks and shops.

ocschwar6• 2 years ago

The statute of limitations on traffic offenses is brief, so I'll fess up that I've biked across the whole length a couple times.

Got some Darwin Award honorable mentions doing it.

micromacrofoot2• 2 years ago

Boston has successfully moved one highway underground (the big dig) and shot down an extension of I-95 (there are parks and a train route where it was planned now). The city is much better for it.

kjkjadksj34• 2 years ago

Are you forgetting about the big dig?

ocschwar6• 2 years ago

It did not widen the highway.

aqme28• 2 years ago

If every car on the road were battery-powered and those batteries were charged entirely by renewable energy, transportation emissions would be close to zero.

This is entirely false. I'm surprised to see it in the NYTimes. They're only 0 when you factor out the cost of building the car and maintaining the highway, and those are still pretty high

nyokodo• 2 years ago

They're only 0 when you factor out the cost of building the car and maintaining the highway

And manufacturing the renewable electricity generation infrastructure isn’t zero emissions either.

gh02t• 2 years ago

It's not false, it's misleading. Emissions are from exhaust only according to the EPA https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/smog-vehicle-emissions . Greenhouse gas and pollutants from building the vehicles and roads get lumped into another category. There is a valid reason for this, in that that's the main thing the EPA regulates with respect to vehicles, but it also lets people make misleading statements like this one.

wonder_er3• 2 years ago

also people who care about EVs tend to forget about tire wear and brake dust. Both are emitted in huge quantities, esp. tire microplastics, by EVs.

n8henrie3• 2 years ago

I thought brake dust would be drastically decreased due to regenerative braking?

rangestransform9• 2 years ago

Yeah but I can just buy a Tesla with hepa filters so I’m not breathing it in

thrillgore• 2 years ago

There are still emissions from cars: rubber from the tires, steel, aluminum, and other metals from part wear...

__MatrixMan__• 2 years ago

Also, roads and tires are made out of the goopy parts of oil, so their manufacture impacts the price of the fuel parts of oil. Your EV's roads and tires make it cheaper for others to not buy an EV.

We should be making both out of steel instead.

theodorejb• 2 years ago

Not to mention greater wear on the road and increased particle emissions from brakes and tires due to heavy batteries in EVs. https://nypost.com/2024/03/05/business/evs-release-more-toxi...

MobiusHorizons• 2 years ago

EVs don’t actually use their brakes that much due to regenerative braking being the dominant mode. They are certainly heavier, though, which affects road and tire wear.

the-alchemist• 2 years ago

Very misleading statement.

First, NY Post is kind of a tabloid. You gotta dig deeper. Here's the actual study: https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat09/1...

I recommend reading it. It's actually pretty well done.

Secondly, the report itself and common sense dictate that regenerative braking on EVs (or hybrids) greatly decrease brake usage, therefore brake dust. Some EVs have "one-pedal" modes where you don't use the brakes at all in normal usage.

Thirdly, tires is a different calculation. This looks like a fairly unbiased source (https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/2020/1/28/tyres-not-..., https://www.nokiantyres.com/company/news-article/there-is-a-...).

Looks like tire issue is a toss up, and it depends on what the type of tire and how you drive. The much higher torque on an EV and a heavy foot will wear down the tires a lot more, but that has more to do with driver behavior than EVs.

Also, this whole issue is kind of a red herring because tractor trailers and heavy pickups and SUVs are a much, much larger source of brake and tire dust, and overall particulate pollution.

infecto8• 2 years ago

Road wear is not an issue for 99% of consumer vehicles. Roads are impacted by loaded semis, not a 3-6k lb vehicle. Same goes for brakes as most EVs implement regen braking.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

The goal is zero carbon by 2050. So they might not be now but they should be in the future. Zero-carbon transportation is a large part of decarbonizing infrastructure.

standardUser2• 2 years ago

They're only 0 when you factor out the cost of building the car and maintaining the highway, and those are still pretty high

Breaking: construction and manufacturing require energy and materials, film at 11!

throwaway220325• 2 years ago

"Induced demand" as a reason not to do something is illogical.

The Green Revolution increasing crop yields induced demand for humans. Metro systems existing and building new lines induce demand, in some cases resulting in overcrowding. Building housing and offices induce demand in a location.

There is nothing wrong with improving a thing so that more people are able to do that thing.

I can understand concern about emissions without necessarily agreeing. But induced demand is simply a good thing - you are allowing more people to realise their desires.

dreadlordbone• 2 years ago

cars bad

someguydave20• 2 years ago

rich people cars very bad

s1artibartfast11• 2 years ago

Induced demand is an argument from governments that don't think their purpose is to serve the public.

Public parks, museums, schools, and public safety all induce demand.

turnsout5• 2 years ago

Allowing people to realize their desires is not necessarily a good thing or the role of government. The majority of people would like to pay 0 taxes and never pay for healthcare.

someguydave20• 2 years ago

Punishing people into having correct desires is the role of government?

lofatdairy2• 2 years ago

I didn't see anyone saying induced demand in and of itself is the thing being avoided, just that induced demand for driving caused by highway construction is being avoided, as this implies that traffic won't be alleviated by increased capacity.

Induced demand can be positive, yeah, but I think induced demand is more complicated. It concerns a positive feedback loop phenomena that leads to the saturation of a system beyond its intended capacity. Like more people taking the metro is good, but more people taking it than it can handle can degrade their impression if it.

s1artibartfast11• 2 years ago

Induced demand isn't necessarily complicated. The simple answer is transaction costs.

If people are willing to spend an hour in traffic to go to the beach, you are basically stuck with that travel time. You can only increase the number of people that end up going.

xp842• 2 years ago

Main issue is that traffic ‘misery’ (my term) is the constant. There is a maximum amount of gridlockedness before people naturally stop bothering to think they should begin using a given road (say, by moving farther out into the suburbs, or moving into some far suburb from outside the metro to take a job in the city). You can add 3 more lanes, and right away, more people believe they can make that lifestyle change, and we end up in a couple months right back where we started, with the same gridlock, but an increase in both miles driven and human time wasted, which most people would agree are metrics we don’t want to increase. People should live near where they work, or work near where they live. Let the market fix things — if roads are gridlocked and people can’t afford to live near, the jobs will need to move or to pay more.

s1artibartfast11• 2 years ago

this analysi simply ignores the upside. you say that both miles driven and human time wasted are metrics we dont want to increase, but people are clearly willing to trade them off. You say people should live near work, but at what cost?

In practice, they are public funds so it ends up being a public decision. Do people support spending $X so that Y people can obtain Z preference.

I'm off to my 1 hr commute right now, which I chose because it is preferable to my housing options near work. You couln't pay me enough to live in a condo downtown. I wish transportation infrastructure was even better so that I could live further and this is where I would like my taxes directed.

throwaway220325• 2 years ago

Yes!

You can add lanes, and more people can attain the life that they wish to lead.

You're not back where you started, because more people get to do what they want to do.

It seems as if you have the intrinsic axiom that people should travel less and the fact that they are not doing this is somehow wrong. Your model is wrong.

ocschwar6• 2 years ago

That depends on who you're talking to. If you're talking to people out in the periphery who want their towns to grow, induced demand is not a problem.

But for someone in an inner ring suburb, induced demand means that if the interstate near my house is widened, I don't get an easier commute. I just get more pollution and more noise and the same traffic misery as before.

notatoad• 2 years ago

But induced demand is simply a good thing - you are allowing more people to realise their desires.

projects usually have a goal. especially multi-billion-dollar transportation projects. if the goal of the project aligns with the behaviour it is inducing, then induced demand is good. if the goal of the project (according to the people making decisions about funding it) contradicts the behaviour it induces, then induced demand is a bad thing and it's not going to get funded.

for a highway project, the goal isn't usually to allow more people to drive cars. it's to reduce congestion, improve safety, or to improve the flow of commercial vehicles through a corridor. the demand that more lanes induces is contrary to that goal, which is why the induced demand is a reason not to do it.

drivers99• 2 years ago

That’s kind of a straw man argument because the original argument isn’t “it induces demand therefore it’s bad.” Induced demand is the explanation for why building more lanes (which costs money, especially if you include future replacement costs) doesn’t actually fix traffic, except temporarily. It also increases VMT (vehicle miles travelled) which has its own externalities (pollution, deaths, etc.) but that’s almost a separate matter, but helps explain why encouraging more driving and car based urban design (everything spread far apart, unproductive land use in the form of parking lots) isn’t a great idea either.

someguydave20• 2 years ago

I am skeptical that all the tradeoffs are being considered here, it sounds like a recipe for permanent bad traffic justified with dubious moralizing.

By the way, she is the daughter of Jack Lew who was President Obama’a Chief of Staff.

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

Bad traffic will expand to fill the road you give it (induced demand). You destroy demand instead.

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

https://www.nber.org/papers/w15376

someguydave20• 2 years ago

You want to hurt people by costing their time in order to teach them to desire your morals?

kentonv4• 2 years ago

This is quoted a lot but misunderstood.

The conclusion people seem to draw from this is that widening the highway didn't help. This is wrong.

4 lanes of bad traffic travelling at 30mph is still creating twice the value of 2 lanes of bad traffic travelling at 30mph. With the 2-lane highway you were just forcing half the people to divert to other roads or to give up on their plans entirely. With 4 lanes you're serving twice the people.

But if the highway is still full it implies that there is still demand for more travel. By refusing to widen the highway further you are still forcing some number of people into a worse outcome where they aren't able to exercise the travel that they wanted.

I'm all for public transit alternatives (I personally love taking trains when I can), but the goal should be to make the public transit better, not to make the highways worse.

rufus_foreman5• 2 years ago

The induced demand argument is sort of crazy. It is saying you shouldn't build something because if you do, it will be extremely popular and widely used. We shouldn't build libraries - if we do, people will want to check out books. Instead, let's penalize people who read books. That will destroy the demand for books. Problem solved.

mc322• 2 years ago

Bad traffic is bad for industry/business. Boeing threatened to move some manufacturing out of the Seattle because they'd have parts delivery delays due to traffic from Everett to Renton. Eventually I think they moved some to SC, but not a lot because the WSDOT gave in and widened some road infra.

adolph6• 2 years ago

That's weird on Boeing part.

The Amtrak Cascades 518 goes from Everett (Tukwila) to Renton daily. Surely Boeing should do their part, show a good example for the community and take public transportation.

standardUser2• 2 years ago

And who are you the daughter of, since these facts are clearly of paramount significance?

someguydave20• 2 years ago

Sometimes people on the left are concerned about nepo babies and the outsized influence of the wealthy and powerful, sometimes people on the left are not concerned.

infecto8• 2 years ago

Sounds like the Bay Area. We don't like cars but we refuse to build comprehensive transit.

To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen.

Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life was while living in the Bay Area with the massive traffic jams.

ambyra11• 2 years ago

Try a motorcycle! The laws for lane splitting are the best in the country. You could probably fit 6 motorcycles in the space of one car.

someguydave20• 2 years ago

Motorcyles have a roughly 30 times higher fatality rate per mile driven compared to cars

jcranmer2• 2 years ago

As a passenger in a car, watching motorcyclists zip down at high speed on the lane markers between cars in dense, stop-and-go traffic was incredibly unnerving. I can't see how that's safe.

infecto8• 2 years ago

Nope and this does nothing to the problem of not having public transit.

id00• 2 years ago

Where should I put my toddler?

S_A_P• 2 years ago

The #1 killer of people I know up to this point in my life is motorcycle accidents. I would never ride one and would do all I can to prevent my kids from doing so.

ambyra11• 2 years ago

Here's a nice study: https://newatlas.com/motorcycles-reduce-congestion/21420/

They say 10% of traffic being replaced by motorcycles reduces congestion by 40%. California has pretty good weather so it's probably feasible to commute by motorbike almost every day.

infecto8• 2 years ago

That is not a solution to not having public transit.

thorncorona• 2 years ago

I would rather not die.

_blk2• 2 years ago

Colorado with 300 sunny days a year is a great place for motorcycles. Most of the year it's warm enough too with somewhat decent clothing and a pair of balls. I'll take the bike any day the road is dry and temps are double digit. But if you really want to increase throughput [FWIW, I don't care that much], just enforce driving on the right lanes when not passing. Then anyone who feels they need to go 15 over the limit can safely do that while at the same time funding the police that the metro is trying so hard to defund. Everyone wins. Bam.

cjalmeida• 2 years ago

Motorcycles are substantially more dangerous than cars. We can’t even convince people to buy European style compact cars instead of large trucks and SUVs

HaZeust• 2 years ago

I'm risking enough of my life around the common man in a car - no shot I'm taking the chance in a motorcycle long-term.

Motorbikes as a solution to congestion is a post-autonomous driving game.

rufus_foreman5• 2 years ago

> you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen

You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy.

tomrod2• 2 years ago

The US is not a democracy. Not even at the state level. For many aspects and holons it is a representative republic.

SSJPython• 2 years ago

You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy.

Infrastructure should not be subject to peoples' opinions. Like utilities and defense, infrastructure is crucial for security and commerce. People simply don't know better.

infecto8• 2 years ago

Disagree. I could have done a better job describing it though. In the current paradigm, the N houses/people negatively impacted by a given transit project will be given the same weighting as the N*Y people positively impacted by the project. You cannot have progressive transit projects that work when you allow those N individuals to stop the project. Nothing to do with democracy, different states and local governments handle it differently.

IncreasePosts2• 2 years ago

No, democracy says 51% of people can enforce their will on 49% of people.

troyvit2• 2 years ago

To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen.

Yep.[1]

The governor is _trying_ to build comprehensive transit in Colorado[2], but between an incompetent transportation district and the difficulties of building public transit infrastructure to serve our metastatic urban sprawl makes public transit difficult to fund over cars.[3]

Our state metro areas just refuse to accept that if they want growth they'll need density. They'd rather pave their farms because they value the taxes they get from McMansions more than actual food.

[1] https://www.cpr.org/2024/04/17/rtd-leadership-elections-cont...

[2] https://www.cpr.org/2024/01/12/jared-polis-2024-state-of-the...

[3] https://pressbooks.uwf.edu/envrioscience/chapter/14-3-the-im...

someguydave20• 2 years ago

The tax haul from a house is almost certainly higher than food grown on a semi-arid steppe like Colorado

kjkjadksj34• 2 years ago

All they have to do is restart the old passenger rail system they had in the 40s. It connected the entire front range with salt lake and all the major cities in utah including park city, went down to santa fe in the south, and hit just about all the towns and ski resorts that were around at the time. Even the ones that are a little more annoying to get to today like aspen or telluride.

What is even more tempting is that all this infrastructure and right of ways are still there. A lot of these towns have the old station land empty still, some have the old station preserved even. A lot of the rail grades are either sustained by freight rail or have been railbanked as trails. Its practically turn key as the hard part of gathering all this land was done over a century ago.

Too bad rail ambition is so paltry in comparison today.

akira25015• 2 years ago

Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life

How did you quantify this? Or this a purely anecdotal observation?

throwup238• 2 years ago

Not the OP but air quality monitors that measure particulates at different sizes? It's a pretty standard way of measuring air quality.

There's a map of official California monitors: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/applications/air-monitoring-sites-int...

infecto8• 2 years ago

Since its my experience its anecdotal. That said higher particulate from diesel engines its pretty common when not at highway speeds. Combine significant traffic with highways/interestates close to buildings and residential areas, its a bit nasty. Sure rush hour in Saigon is without a doubt worse but the bay area is pretty bad on a localized level. Keep in mind I am saying localized, just the immediate areas around these high traffic areas. I can recount a number of buildings I have been in where you would get significant soot buildup on a weekly basis.

CA is fairly unique in this respect in that there are major road ways with residential close by.

EasyMark• 2 years ago

There’s another huge way to put a dent it and let people live where they want: work from home works. The pandemic proved it. It’s not a 100% solution but there is seldom a 100% solution that doesn’t involve totalitarian government since not everyone wants to live in the city in concrete towers.

dymk• 2 years ago

That’s a decision of employers, not policy makers

ajsnigrutin• 2 years ago

Or even better, spread out work for those who can't work from home.

I live in a small country, where a lot of jobs are in the capital, A LOT of people drive to the capital daily (20, 30, 50, even 100km one way), and complain about it... and complain how everything is there, complain about centralization, etc...

..and then also complain when a company in their smaller city wants to expand or when someone wants to build something new there. Also complain against the current companies that exist there.... even though their house was built due to closeseness to that factory in the first place (like whole neighhbourhoods that were built by workers in that company nearby, and now, 30, 40 years later, their kids want the company to close, due to a lot of random reasons).

for americans: not all tech has to be in california, other states exist too

duxup3• 2 years ago

I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like.

I can imagine this easily being responded to negatively in the end and the political response is to give in and the pendulum swings wildly in the other direction.

In the end these are policy decisions that can change and I can imagine this backfiring long term in some ways.

mdorazio• 2 years ago

How do you propose doing that, though? Mass transit almost everywhere runs at a significant loss already and if we're talking buses then there's a significant driver shortage. In the US the distances and routes required outside of dense urban centers also pretty much necessitate a huge increase in transit time compared to driving, making the whole thing a bad value for people who can afford a car.

duxup3• 2 years ago

Ask the locals, try some sort of ideas?

I'm not sure if you're saying that it can't be improved or what.

It doesn't change my point, this policy easily could swing the other way if it is perceived by voters as just a stick swung at them.

Drakim• 2 years ago

Personally I feel it's fine for them to operate at a loss, it's a public service, akin to the fire department or library. The amount of good it does society to get cars off the road is staggering.

The lack of bus drivers simply comes down to an unwillingness to pay more. It's the exact same problem with teachers, where the wage is extremely low but they would rather just have a shortage rather than paying more.

burutthrow1234• 2 years ago

In TFA, they're literally taking roads and turning them into housing near transit hubs? This policy goes hand in hand with densifying housing.

wongarsu2• 2 years ago

Ideally you would have to change how zoning and planning works to create denser more integrated neighborhoods that can be efficiently used with public transit.

If that's too difficult the next best compromise is a park-and-ride scheme. Put a couple stations with huge parking lots in strategic locations between suburbs, and offer good rail or subway connections to work places and shopping destinations. That doesn't enable anyone to get rid of their car, but it gives people a faster alternative to the most congested roads

ocschwar6• 2 years ago

How do you propose doing that, though?

Thankfully, Massachusetts has shown how to do that.

The governor has to make a public statement that he will not allow any more eminent domain takings for highways on his watch (and issue executive orders to that effect.)

After that, the people complaining about traffic have to come up with their own ideas, and if road widening (with eminent domain confiscations) are off the table, even the most car-headed idiot out there has no choice but start talking about transit.

ksplicer6• 2 years ago

You're making the assumption that roads pay for themselves, but that isn't true at all either. Across the US cities are going bankrupt because they can't maintain roads and other infrastructure. California has a gas tax that pays 80% of road maintenance, the rest of which is often paid from local city taxes that drivers and non-drivers alike pay. Many cities are falling behind in road maintenance though, the true impact of which won't be felt for ~20 years. A hidden cost of car infrastructure is also that the low density increases the costs of other infrastructure maintenance, such as sewage, gas, and power. Good mass transit is ultimately cheaper for everyone.

anon2915• 2 years ago

Mass transit almost everywhere runs at a significant loss already

All infrastructure runs at a loss? Do roads generate revenue

strken• 2 years ago

Hang on, this isn't taking anything away from drivers at all - the roads aren't suddenly going away or falling into ruin, they're just not getting enlarged. It's not much of a stick and nor is it a punishment, any more than building a road without bike lanes is a punishment for cyclists.

someguydave20• 2 years ago

It is punishment if you are intentionally engineering the roads to cost people more time using them.

adolph6• 2 years ago

the roads aren't suddenly going away or falling into ruin, they're just not getting enlarged.

This is also great for owners of current housing since the road network will not be enlarged to accomodate large new housing developments. Win-win.

nullindividual4• 2 years ago

People are driven by the cattle prod. If the government wants to reduce something, it needs to be more painful to acquire or use, i.e. sin taxes. It's worked on cigarettes, alcohol, soda, etc. to varying degrees. The government would likely have a very big uphill battle to out-market the automobile industry given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government.

I ultimately agree with the approach they're taking. It isn't going to be accomplished by building additional lanes and subsequently asking people to pretty-please take transit.

It does need to be weighed against the practicality of transportation to/from where your transit riders need to go. Given the vast majority of Western states are sparsely populated, transit dollars can only go so far.

someguydave20• 2 years ago

Hurting people to teach them your morality certainly has some interesting historical analogies

adolph6• 2 years ago

If the government wants to reduce something, it needs to be more painful to acquire or use. . .
given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government.

I have a notion the former is related to the latter and might even be a downhill spiral.

duxup3• 2 years ago

And people can make the government change policy.

I don't think the prod that is in the people's hands is a good idea here.

kloop2• 2 years ago

The government would likely have a very big uphill battle to out-market the automobile industry given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government.

It seems weird that the response to "a democratic government, which derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, has lost the confidence of large swaths of the electorate" is to give that institution more direct social control.

That seems like the opposite of what a sane system would do.

itishappy4• 2 years ago

I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way

Where do you think the money is going?

Within a year of the rule’s adoption in 2021, Colorado’s Department of Transportation, or CDOT, had canceled two major highway expansions, including Interstate 25, and shifted $100 million to transit projects. In 2022, a regional planning body in Denver reallocated $900 million from highway expansions to so-called multimodal projects, including faster buses and better bike lanes.

nradov• 2 years ago

In order to make mass transit more attractive we will have to do something about the other riders. A lot of people that I know in the SF Bay Area simply don't feel safe on buses and light rail (although Caltrain seems to be fine). Our failures in housing and mental health public policy have turned mass transit into ersatz homeless shelters. Plus there are plenty of regular antisocial assholes playing loud music, yelling, littering, sometimes begging. Rules are not enforced.

Punishing drivers isn't a solution. We need comprehensive solutions that make regular people feel welcome on public transit. Otherwise those people won't support public transit funding.

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like.

Impossible. Mass transit, walking, and non motorized bicycling do not mesh with individual motorized traffic. It’s just physics.

The classic individualist vs collectivist dilemma that nature presents. You have to sacrifice one for the other.

As proof, simply look at all the best places for mass transit. Individual car usage is painful in all of them. The more painful using a car is, the better the public transit can be.

the_snooze• 2 years ago

Yeah, cars are a tragedy of the commons. They're great if you're the only person on the road: you can get to anywhere you want on your own schedule. But then everyone rationally chooses to drive, which makes it a pretty crummy way to get around. Not to mention all the externalities and inefficiencies involved.

seadan8315• 2 years ago

The Colorado example is about no longer giving out carrots rather than using any type of stick. Tolls and higher taxes would be examples of sticks.

clogging the roads

The roads already be clogged and adding more lanes is not likely to unclog them. Single occupancy vehicles at the end of the day are not a solution for moving hundreds of thousands of people around - there's an intrinsic scaling problem that can't be solved by building infinite roads.

It's kinda like trying to get high speed internet by adding more & more 56k modems.

kobieps• 2 years ago

Some pretty solid skepticism all around in the comments.

ambyra11• 2 years ago

It would be nice if they brought back train service from Denver to Ft. Collins and Laramie. In Europe you can go so many places with just a bicycle and a train ticket.

IncreasePosts2• 2 years ago

It's in the works, currently scheduled for 2050, if we are lucky.

medellin2• 2 years ago

Hahahahaha. Unless we have a major change in direction we aren’t getting crap.

gizajob• 2 years ago

*to not build them

BurningFrog2• 2 years ago

California, always leading the way, has boldly built almost nothing for 5 decades!

jseliger• 2 years ago

LA has actually built a lot of subway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail# and much more than NYC or Chicago during the same period.

kjkjadksj34• 2 years ago

The entire network so far is only about 30 years old

thebigman433• 2 years ago

I get its supposed to be a funny joke, but CA has some of the biggest transit projects in the country going on currently. CAHSR is wildly expensive, but its still being built, and will far and away be the best rail corridor in the country when its done.

LA has been building a decent amount of transit for how hard it is to get anything done there.

SF already has a fairly robust and solid transit network, and there have been some great maintenance projects done in the last 10 years to keep it going. Its only current major issue (imo) is the frequency, which still isnt the worst ever. MUNI is also getting new signaling to improve frequency, and a massive underground train station is going to get built at Salesforce (finally making use of a great transit hub).

BART is a great system with some much needed improvements happening currently, including new fare gates and all new signaling. They also just finished upgrading to the new fleet of cars, and came in under budget!

CalTrain is also rolling out their brand new electrified system in September, with hugely upgraded frequencies, that will make transit up/down the peninsula much better.

It isnt a ton when compared to other countries that build much more efficiently, but its still more than anywhere else in the country.

colingoodman• 2 years ago

Los Angeles is indeed building a lot of public transit. As is the nature of any of these projects, especially in California, it will be many years (decades) before much of it is complete. But it's happening nonetheless.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-10-26/los-angel...

BurningFrog2• 2 years ago

I was thinking more of housing than transport, but sure, some sarcasm may have slipped in :)

California does somewhat better building transport than housing, but it's still far from enough, IMAO.

And I don't think the high speed LA-SF railroad will be finished before most who voted for it in 2008 has died...

Gibbon14• 2 years ago

Worth mentioning is CAHSR paid for half the electrification of CalTrain.

Also the Phase II BART extension that will take BART to downtown San Jose, the high speed rail station at Diridon and to Santa Clara.

https://www.vta.org/projects/bart-sv/phase-ii

Above link says construction to start this year and take 12 years. So eventually you'll have CalTrain, CAHSR and BART as connected system.

A good point is the projects are being rolled out they way they are due to funding constraints and a desire provide ongoing side benefits, like the electrified CalTrain and the grade separation projects in the central valley. (Every over pass over the existing rail is a benefit).

kjkjadksj34• 2 years ago

What do you mean they just ripped a chunk out of bakersfield a couple years ago for a highway? Also its easy to say no new highways when you take a random dirt road probably laid by the spanish out in the countryside, call it a state highway already, then then turn it into a six lane cement dragon while saying “see we didn't build a new billion dollar highway”.

languagehacker2• 2 years ago

I just read Paved Paradise as well as The High Cost of Free Parking. This seems like the current gradual trend towards reversing the hidden subsidy for drivers, first by giving them less affordances at remarkably low prices or for free.

A few folks in the comments have mentioned a couple of times that it doesn't make sense to make a policy like this without supporting transit. I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit, which would then create greater demand for improved transit.

Similarly for housing, the well substantiated claim from modern urban planners is that we've been prioritizing housing for cars well beyond housing for people, and the best solution for that is to overturn minimum parking requirements and unbundle the cost of parking from the cost of housing.

Personally, I still find these opinions somewhat counterintuitive. The weirdest part about it is that it all posits that the solution to a centralized planning problem is market solutions, and it's coming from people you'd expect to have the opposite opinion. However, what we've had in terms of transportation clearly doesn't work for people and for the environment, and the last 20 years of "Shoupism" has shown some serious promise in terms of reversing the trend.

Gibbon14• 2 years ago

When it comes to transit I think the lol make driving sucky so people will support mass transit is inane because of the backlash potential. Much better to get ahead of the hose than always be trying to grab it's ass. You're not going to get boomers and GenX to take the bus. You probably could get younger generations to do that especially if there are options.

Really there should be a high speed rail along the front range and subways in places like Denver. And zoning that prioritizes development that utilized that.

Gigachad2• 2 years ago

If boomers want to continue driving, they can. Just make them pay for what they use. Work out the real market value for the space and charge for it.

sokoloff3• 2 years ago

If you make the bus better than driving, people will take the bus.

Ideally, you'd do that by improving the bus rather than accepting the current shitty bus situation and degrading driving to the point that it's even worse...

TheCleric2• 2 years ago

When I lived in Denver this GenXer gladly transitioned to light rail as it freed up an hour a day that I would have spent concentrating on driving on more relaxing things like reading. I miss it.

tomtheelder2• 2 years ago

I think the argument is a little different. I’d say the best framing of it is that we have sacrificed every other method of transportation at the altar of personal cars. Building for cars is what has made every other option shitty.

So it’s not so much that just make driving cars shitty for no reason as it is that you _have_ to make driving shitty if you want to unshittify walking/biking/transit.

rufus_foreman5• 2 years ago

> I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit

Induced demand is a concept that anti-car people use, but I don't think it makes much sense.

Imagine a library that only has a few copies of some best selling children's books. There's a very long queue to check out those books. Someone might argue that, "We should buy more copies of the best selling children's books".

The induced demand argument in this case would be: "If we buy more copies of those books, the queue wont disappear, since it is so long, but also, if the queue gets shorter, we might have people who don't use the library because of the queue start using it. We would be no better off!".

Of course in this analogy, we realize the fallacy. People are better off because more kids get to read books. Even if the queue stays the same length, we have more throughput, more kids get the benefit.

Now if we translate that to cars, of course, we see the difference. People who write books like "Paved Paradise" or "The High Cost of Free Parking" hate cars. They really do. They hate the suburbs too.

So when they see something that would enable people who don't currently drive cars to drive cars, or for people who live in urban areas to live in suburban areas, they're of course going to be against that.

"Induced demand" is being used here by languagehacker, as it is used by other people who are opposed to private property, as some sort of technical term that supports their case. But that isn't true.

By adding more copies of popular books to libraries, we want to induce demand. We want people to read the books, and we want people who don't currently use libraries to consider using them. The induced demand is not bad. We had a queue, it was too long, we shorten the queue, and by doing so some people who thought the queue was too long will no longer think that. This is good.

What languagehacker is saying, by referring to induced demand, is that, in the opinion of languagehacker cars are bad.

It is as simple as that. It sounds super-scientific when you use terms like "induced demand", but it is not, in fact, super-scientific. It's just a value judgement.

To me, if you build a highway in an area that has high traffic congestion, and after you build the highway, it still has high traffic congestion, it means more people are getting where they want to be. It's called "induced demand".

Induced demand is good. We should have more of it.

hammock• 2 years ago

The induced demand argument in this case would be: "If we buy more copies of those books, the queue wont disappear, since it is so long, but also, if the queue gets shorter, we might have people who don't use the library because of the queue start using it. We would be no better off!".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#

tromp3• 2 years ago

Except that having more car traffic induces more pollution, more casualties, and more time spent unproductively (you can do other things on public transit, or get exercise commuting by bike), whereas more book reading has few downsides.

currymj2• 2 years ago

i think the point of "induced demand" is that you sometimes can't really fix -- specifically -- traffic or parking congestion problems by building more. if you widen the roads, in many cases it won't make your commute any quicker. if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown.

it's not that there's no benefit to the wider road or parking spots, just that the benefit people really care about -- less traffic and quicker trips, less time searching for a parking spot -- often fails to materialize.

thefaux• 2 years ago

This is a flawed analogy and I think there is a false dichotomy by framing skepticism around building more highways as inherently anti-car. I'm going to go out on a limb and say most drivers do not enjoy traffic and most residents near busy roadways do not enjoy the effects of traffic on their neighborhood. The question is what is the best policy approach that manages all people's concerns. For me, the question is how can we get people to live and work in areas where it isn't necessary to inefficiently, and very expensively, move people to and from work.

Since the 1950s, we have optimized for essentially the least efficient form of transit available. It seems completely bonkers to me that in the bay and other high density areas, you have many, many workers, particularly at the low end of the income scale, driving over an hour each way to work. It is an understandable and rational decision for the driver, but crazy to me for society.

lkurtz2• 2 years ago

I don’t think this analogy is quite correct. Driving on a particular route is not a driver’s objective like reading a particular book is a reader’s objective. The driver’s objective is arriving at a destination. The objective in driving is not a finite resource, but the multiple route options to the objective can be, which differs substantially from a library queue.

tidbits• 2 years ago

Books are not a finite resource? Obviously there is a finite number of trees but there are enough for it not to be a bottleneck. Land on the hand is a finite resource, especially in large, urban cities. There is no way to design a highway or other car infrastructure that will meet the demands of any reasonably sized city without dedicating an unreasonable amount of land to cars. Anyway, Ray explains it better than I could and he agrees that the term is bad: https://youtu.be/za56H2BGamQ

ksplicer6• 2 years ago

What you are missing is that every time we widen roads to allow more car throughput we are making every other type of transit and mobility less attractive. Busy streets with big parking lots are unpleasant to walk or bike along, so people just drive to their destinations instead, which makes the street even busier, louder, and smellier starts this cycle all over again. Every time a road is widened or a new parking lot is added the city also becomes less dense, making getting anywhere useful more time consuming. Drivers have to spend longer on the road to get where they want to go, public transit gets more expensive as routes get longer, and walking and biking quickly become too time consuming. There is just a maximum density that cars can support which works totally fine for suburbs but breaks down in denser cities. Personally I think Park and Ride programs are the most reasonable compromise.

seadan8315• 2 years ago

Perhaps a library vs a commercial book store might have worked as a better analogy. The queue theory part of it I think breaks down a lot. Induced demand is not only about queue theory, but also choosing between options.

In short though, induced demand is somewhat simple. If it takes 10 minutes to drive and 30 minutes to take a bus, then I drive. If it takes 30 minutes to drive and 10 minutes to take a bus, then I take the bus. Eventually enough people choose to drive, or take a bus, that that mode becomes congested/inconvenient enough that people start making other choices. In other words, there are some people who avoid highways during rush hour because the traffic jams are bad. If the highway is widened, then they would join the rush hour once again and be part of the traffic jams. Induced demand is about taking away the reason why people avoid something, and thereby doing so they change their behavior to start doing that thing.

l2silver• 2 years ago

I agree with the urban planning bias here, especially the idea that you shouldn't build more roads to fight congestion because more people will use them, and thus they'll reach the same saturation point anyways. Mind boggling that this is an accepted principal, and one that is completely disregarded when it comes to any form of transport that isn't a car.

HDThoreaun13• 2 years ago

Absolutely agree. I really think the concept of induced demand with highways is misleading. Im not even sure reducing traffic is the point of highway expansion, pretty sure induced demand is literally the goal.

ilyagr3• 2 years ago

I agree, "induced demand" is a word phrase to rally behind.

The argument must be (and, I believe, is) that induced demand for buses and trains is far cheaper to a society than induced demand for cars. Adding a train car at a peak time serves a lot more people than adding a highway lane at a peak time.

I'm actually curious to compare them.

Apparently, 100 people is a reasonable capacity for a train car (200 is possible for BART at rush hour). A lane of 100 single-occupancy cars in a traffic jam is about a third of a mile. So, an extra car lane a mile long is about an extra half a train, give it take.

throwaway203711• 2 years ago

From my personal experience, growing up, people used the term induced demand in a strictly negative sense to describe road expansion plans. Then I lived in cities as an adult where new metro lines opened. The effect is real! Whole neighborhoods would get much more foot traffic after a new station opens. In this case, most people would describe the induced demand as positive.

bluecalm2• 2 years ago

You can think of it in terms of simpler concept: "giving people free stuff causes more people to take free stuff".

Cars and infrastructure for them is heavily subsidized so building more if it (giving free stuff away) induces more people to use it.

As car infrastructure has a cost which car drivers don't cover building more if it is very expensive for everyone else that's why we shouldn't want more if it.

joe_the_user3• 2 years ago

I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit, which would then create greater demand for improved transit.

How does demand for public transit produce it? I mean public calls for more transit have been loud for many years and US politicians have taken that as opportunity to tax more and produce garbage transit construction project that enrich their friends and fail to change the situation (see the "mystery" of the US not being able to build public transit).

brailsafe• 2 years ago

How does demand for public transit produce it?

Existing transit lines get pushed to their capacity, or reinvestment gradually helps snowball demand

throwaway203711• 2 years ago

Do you consider the DC Metro garbage and its recent Silver Line extension? People in seem quite pleased with their system.

kjkjadksj34• 2 years ago

A big issue with the market argument in converting car drivers to transit riders is the respective networks operate at different scales. Think of a little neighborhood with a bus line on a road; theres probably I’m not even sure call it 20x as many roads in that neighborhood that don’t have a bus line. There is so much more built out of the comprehensive road network everywhere than there is with transit. Cities are barely establishing their cardinal direction rail transit routes today. Even living in a place as densely railed as nyc most of those routes are extremely biased in the sort of commutes they best serve (in to manhattan for the most part).

Since most cities can’t afford to ever build their rail networks as comprehensively as the existing road network in even a small city, we are left with bussing to build that comprehensive network. And what do you know, if you look up most cities bus networks they look pretty good and high coverage. So why don’t people take them? Its still worse than a car. A car is a direct bus on your own schedule, a bus route is a compromised route of average population and job density, might not help you get to where you are going especially for drives outside a fixed commute to a central business district. Scheduling and especially transfers can be fickle.

As long as the coverage and convenience are so lopsided, people are going to take cars if they can afford it, even with a shiny new light rail line or whatever is attempted. I have yet to see a project like that attract wealthy ridership that can afford choice, transit rider median demographics are working class or even at the poverty line in a lot of metros. Even nyc subway ridership is 40k income on avg, bus ridership 28k. In the most expensive city in north america no less.

ericmay5• 2 years ago

It’s hard to talk about the topic at very high level but for many American cities like Columbus where I live the answer lies at least partially converting surface parking lots in downtown areas into economically productive assets like housing or businesses which are also not extractive to the local economy. This density makes it easier to walk and bike as well.

Many cities, including Columbus, are expanding bus rapid transit and other bus related activities which is laudable, but to your point, and which I agree and would frame it slightly differently, the bus is a strictly worse version of the car in these kinds of cities and so you need category changes to change habits (trams, bikes, walking).

I think we need to focus our efforts on cities like Columbus, or others, which do have the population to support rail development and solve for that and not get too worried about solving everything everywhere all at once.

Most state departments of highways and cars (they are not departments of transportation) simply don’t fund alternative means of transportation. Leadership from the top down needs to change its focus. The mantra should be the best, safest car is the one you never get in. Instead it’s “we need to preserve going from here to there in 20 minutes without traffic surprises” as if not being stuck in traffic is a Constitutional right. It’s bankrupting us and it’s bad for business and wellbeing.

bobthepanda6• 2 years ago

Bus coverage isn’t the only metric that matters. Frequency is also terrible.

It is entirely a symptom of investment. Bus ridership was found to decline in large part because the actual amount of service hours had declined as well. https://humantransit.org/2015/06/pity-the-poor-city-bus-writ...

Canada has significantly higher bus ridership than the US despite having pretty similar urban forms and it is entirely due to the difference in services provided.

Seattle has seen noticeable increases in bus service hours and ridership from across income ranges, and the new rail extensions are performing similarly well.

vegetablepotpie• 2 years ago

To expand on that, with small and midsized cities, daily cost of transit rides vs. gas is on parity. Of course this does not include maintenance, insurance, and depreciation, of owning and driving a vehicle, but most people only encounter those twice a year, vs gas and bus fees are daily and weekly.

In small and midsized cities, driving a car takes less time, likely 1/2 to 1/3rd the time of taking a bus.

Lastly, there’s the sense of control over personal space. When you’re on a bus, you do not control who gets on the bus with you. When you’re in a car, you have total control.

NemoNobody• 2 years ago

I had a conversation the other day with someone here from San Diego - which now has the highest cost of living in the US. I briefly looked into it from a rental pov and it seemed his statements checked out.

I'm not saying that NYC is actually cheaper than San Diego - I'm aware it's incredibly expensive but I think that all the cities are more similar than they are not as far as unaffordability goes

That actually really surprised me but it does make sense once thought about - goes against everything I've been taught tho. How can San Diego be as expensive as NYC?

Beldin• 2 years ago

As long as the coverage and convenience are so lopsided,

Two ways to fix that (in general): improve one side, or worsen the other. Some measures do both simultaneously, eg. bus lanes take away asphalt for cars and improve bus infrastructure.

It's fairly easy to make a bus network more convenient than a car in a city. You can easily take measures such as dedicated bus lanes, one way streets, pedestrian areas, narrower streets + wider pavements and cycle lanes, less and more expensive parking.

The current attractiveness of public transport is roughly how attractive cars should have been. But most US cities have focused for decades on making car use more attractive. Congratulations, it worked.

detourdog8• 2 years ago

The problem I have with reducing minimum parking is that in rural areas it doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t stop people in my rural town of 2,500 houses advocating for reducing parking requirements.

anon848736282• 2 years ago

Well, today's rural areas are tomorrow's suburbs. If you want to stop the rural areas from becoming a car slave suburban sprawl, then you need to do something differently than what we did in the past. It sounds like people in your town are forward thinking.

Plus, if there is plenty of room then you'll still have parking, until that land becomes more valuable for something else.

AnthonyMouse9• 2 years ago

Minimum parking requirements are just that: A lower bound. Which allows the property owner to choose the number that makes sense. In a rural area that might be a higher number because there is no mass transit and everyone will be arriving by car, but so what? Then the property owner will choose to have more parking spaces, because their patrons will demand them and they don't want to lose business.

CalRobert9• 2 years ago

Why doesn't it make sense? I don't see why you should be forced to build parking if you don't want to.

j_m_b• 2 years ago

Transit likely wouldn't exist without heavy government subsidies. Even with them, it's a pretty terrible way to get around, at least in the US. The vehicles are dirty, even dangerous. There are frequent delays and rerouting. Transit is a huge target for government grift as well, from everything to projects that go way over budget and never get completed to outright scams. It's far from that panacea that it's made out to be.

Maybe in Japan or Europe it's better. In the US, public transit has a far from stellar history.

Eric_WVGG• 2 years ago

Heck, they’re better in Russia. Marble, polished brash, chandeliers… and we’re talking the USSR period.

Imagine telling your kid to mow the lawn, and he deliberately does a terrible job so you quit asking him to do it. That’s what legislators have been doing to US public services for fifty years. It’s the same thing with the post office, they are wretched by design.

amanaplanacanal6• 2 years ago

Don’t forget our automobile infrastructure gets heavy government subsidies too. Gas taxes and fees aren’t nearly high enough to pay for all the roads and parking we have.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK3• 2 years ago

One solution would be a large fleet of cheap electric self-driving taxis. With current pace of AI development, that could be just 10-20 years away.

gonzo41• 2 years ago

or you know, trains and trams and busses.

fragmede4• 2 years ago

Waymo's working in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with Austin coming soon. Maybe it'll take 10 years, but the technology's already here, just needs to get scaled up.

abecedarius• 2 years ago

Also, robocars and mass transit are complements, or should be.

dyauspitr2• 2 years ago

What’s so great about transit besides the environmental savings. Having to share space with other people, walk to the train station, put up with a train schedule, have no way to travel past some arbitrary time (midnight to 2am in most places), no way to transport large items or groceries, no way to go off the beaten path, having to live in densely populated cities with no room for any activities. I like the idea of having public transport but not at the expense of the incredible roadways we have.

hkpack• 2 years ago

having to live in densely populated cities with no room for any activities.

Depends on activities, I guess, but my experience is the opposite, densely populated areas has vastly more activities available within 20-30 minutes reach especially to parents with kids.

jfoutz• 2 years ago

I think you might be missing a little part of, market vs free market.

There are many opinions, of course.

Subsidise what you want and tax what you don’t is pretty popular, based on what people actually do.

m463• 2 years ago

Is it possible that ALL infrastructure issues revolve around more people?

If a place is nice, more people move there, and then the infrastructure is overburdened? but momentum just makes things end up bad in the end.

What about finding ways to distribute the population more broadly, by say fighting return-to-office kinds of things? Maybe taxing dense populations somehow?

On the other hand, does fighting all this like colorado is doing - does it make colorado less competitive?

lukas099• 2 years ago

This doesn’t make sense to me. The marginal increase in infrastructure costs for each new person is less than the tax revenue they generate.

If anything we should tax low density, since more infrastructure is needed per person.

lumb63• 2 years ago

It seems to me that most people will not be willing to lower their standard of traveling to the extent required by public transit in most places in the US, even if travel by car becomes very difficult. The gap is simply too wide.

I live in the Boston area and commute by car. My commute by car (despite the recent closure of a lane on the most heavily trafficked road on my commute, for no reason other than to not have it) is between 25 and 45 minutes. The fastest I can pull it off by public transit is an hour, with a long tail up to 1h20m or more in case of shutdowns, etc. I’d gladly take public transit if I could even meet my worst-case commute time consistently, but the worsening of my life by doubling my average commute time far outweighs the benefit of being a little greener and not having to pay attention to driving during my commute.

In other areas of the economy we wouldn’t consider inducing demand for alternative remedies by making the way average person operates worse. It becomes quite dystopian in my opinion. For instance, one could argue that too many people are seeking healthcare rather than pursuing lifestyle changes to improve their health, due to the availability of healthcare, so we should shut down hospitals. Or one could argue that the presence of housing induces demand for housing and so we should stop building new houses while providing no additional place for people to live. That will just create homelessness and/or very expensive housing. Both of these solutions will lower demand, but in a quite painful way for many people.

To me the solution which makes far more sense is to build improved public transit and people will naturally gravitate toward it, reducing demand for roads/cars, AND their quality of life will improve. For instance, if Boston expanded the MBTA with the long-sought-after urban ring project [1], my commute would reduce to perhaps 30-35 minutes by train. At that point it would be an absolute no brainer for me to switch all my commutes to public transit.

This is a rare situation where almost everyone really can win. Easier, cheaper, faster, greener travel. I don’t see why people argue for an approach where the majority of people lose.

graemep2• 2 years ago

In the UK where we do not have net subsidies for ICE cars (because of taxes on car ownership and fuel) and we do not have minimum parking requirements (AFAIK - there are certainly newish city centre blocks of flats with no parking at all) this does not seem to happen. We have a lot of policies and a rise in the expense of owning a car, but we have not had the required rise in investment in public transport (we need a lot more of it, and cheaper).

The authorities seem to be quite happy with an outcome that means poor people will just have to travel a lot less. Do you think this will be greatly different in the US?

chgs7• 2 years ago

The lack of parking leads to more demand for on street parking, which is delivered via the ballot box. Majority of housing developments have minimum parking stipulations, although in practice those aren’t really practically met (a garage is claimed as a space for example, or a drive which only fits one behind another), which leads to on road parking.

With public transport there are two elements. The capital expenditure and the operational expenditure. Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?

ben_w• 2 years ago

My experience of the UK (resident) and the US (tourist use of public transit in both central California and the Newark-Boston strip), is that the UK system is wildly better than the USA system.

I needed to show a passport (perhaps any photo ID would have worked, but still WTF?) to get the train from Davis to Sacramento, the trains were not particularly frequent, and that's the equivalent distance of Petersfield to Portsmouth & Southsea:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Davis,+California,+USA/Sacra...

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Petersfield,+UK/Portsmouth+a...

hifromwork2• 2 years ago

The authorities seem to be quite happy with an outcome that means poor people will just have to travel a lot less.

I'm not poor, I love travelling (and travel a lot), and I don't even have a driver's license. You don't need to drive to travel, at least in Europe.

Tade0• 2 years ago

I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit, which would then create greater demand for improved transit.

Almost everywhere it actually works, mass transit is heavily subsidised, with tickets covering only 20-30% of the operating expenses.

gnicholas• 2 years ago

I was going to read The High Cost of Free Parking, until I saw that it's 800 pages long. Did you read the whole thing, skim, or entirely skip parts? I am familiar with the general argument and feel like 800 pages is too much for a book on the subject (at least for my taste).

languagehacker2• 2 years ago

I listened to the audiobook, and Paved Paradise covers most of the arguments made far more succinctly.

talldatethrow3• 2 years ago

Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still.

Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir. Even state camping spots are $40+ it seems in areas I know aren't full all the time.

It costs like $20 in extra gas tax to drive to LA with your friends because California can't just set the income tax appropriately?

I could go on and on. The income tax to me sounds pretty fair. But making a poor person living paycheck to paycheck come up with $40 to go to the lake with a cheap sailboat seems harsh to me (my dad and I used to go as a Kid. It was $5 then. And my dad made $20 an hour as a recent immigrant in construction).

And don't start that people that use services should pay. My tax money goes to a lot of things I don't use or even agree with.

shiroiushi12• 2 years ago

Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still. Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir.

If you can afford a sailboat, you're not "low income".

mactrey• 2 years ago

Conflating free parking with a childhood core memory, a lake trip with your immigrant father, feels a little disingenuous to me. But I think you understand the core idea: by making something cheap or free, we incentivize the activity but we spend communal resources (tax dollars, or some rival good like space downtown, or space on a lake) to do so. But we as a society get to choose what to incentivize. Cars have externalities (traffic, the space they take up, pollution, their being required is expensive for working families) that other forms of transport don’t, so people are rethinking the various ways we incentivize driving.

rpcope12• 2 years ago

Widening I-25 probably won't do any good (didn't do much good last time we did that), but we keep talking about light rail all the way as far north as Fort Collins, and nothing ever happens other than RTD making money earmarked for new light rail disappear into the aether.

peapicker2• 2 years ago

Since I moved here in the mid 1990’s we now have added light rail to Golden, down to Lincoln on I-25, all the way up I225, and I70 from downtown to the airport. Not exactly nothing. Rail to Loveland/Ft Collins would be a great addition.

rpcope12• 2 years ago

Sure, maybe a little more trackage around Denver, but don't you remember all the controversy how the space and money to run light rail along 36 went away and we wound up with just a new express lane in its place? Maybe Jared will actually get something done and they'll run light rail in tandem with the BNSF line from Denver all the way north, but I'm still really skeptical because I've heard "it's just 3-4 years out, we have a plan" for at least 15 years now.

soared2• 2 years ago

The airport lightrail is incredible, but the Golden one is useless unless you're going to court. Great example of politics getting in the way, since the lightrail only serves the government building which is miles away and very uphill from downtown Golden where people live and work.

throwaway220325• 2 years ago

As someone who loves trains and buses and planes, I wish that people who pushed public transport would actually engage with the reasons why people don't want to use it rather than just making alternatives worse.

There are three main issues that need to be solved for even me, a train lover, to prioritise using them.

1) Undesirables need to be removed. I don't want to deal with beggars or other general hoodlums. Transport police need to be aggressive with stamping out these behaviours. If I have to interact with these people I won't do it.

2) It needs to be clean and comfortable. My car has air conditioning. If I have to feel sweaty and worry about touching surfaces I'm just not going to do it.

3) I like a good walk, and there are also real limitations to scaling here, so I'm less rigid on this, but it does need to go roughly to where I want to go and it needs to be frequent. If I'm out in the rain for fifteen minutes waiting for a bus I'm just not going to do it, I could already be halfway there by car.

I don't think these are insurmountable, Japan does pretty well, but in the absence of that, the stick just isn't going to work. If travel times via car doubled, I'd probably just do less and then eventually move out of the city.

edit: I can't reply about libraries due to rate limiting.

Libraries are a great example of how public transport _could_ work!

I love libraries!

The British Library is truly public. Anyone can go, anyone can enter the reading rooms. It is a lovely environment to read or work in, as they have strict rules. It is peaceful and pleasant because of the way that it's set up.

It's also a great example of how the many can come together to do more than the few. Almost no-one is able to create a home environment with that sort of atmosphere, and by sharing it we all get more.

I would love it if public transport were like the experience of using a good library.

walthamstow5• 2 years ago

If 'undesirables' are part of your local area, then they'll be on the public transport. The clue is in the name.

The reason Japan doesn't have them on the trains is not because the guards have removed them, it's because they weren't there to begin with.

throwaway220325• 2 years ago

If the answer is to throw up our hands and say that nothing can be done, then I'll just drive instead, because there are no beggars in my car, I don't let them in.

rangestransform9• 2 years ago

Bangkok has the most expensive public transit line relative to local incomes (BTS skytrain), and yet I saw nobody jump the turnstile there

hamandcheese2• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure if they tried in Japan, the guards would remove them.

kloop2• 2 years ago

If 'undesirables' are part of your local area, then they'll be on the public transport. The clue is in the name.

Their examples of undesirables are about behaviors, not sectors of society.

Since we're using Japan as an example, Japan does have very strict social rules on public behavior that probably help in this area.

micromacrofoot2• 2 years ago

I have to imagine you don't like libraries either

prmoustache11• 2 years ago

Aren't your "indesirables" waiting at the traffic light as well in your part of the world?

mitchbob• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/2024.05.31-101848/https://www.nytimes.com...

ein0p3• 2 years ago

The great thing about all this is, when the pendulum inevitably swings back 15-20 years from now, we’re going to get a 20 lane highways.

Hello71• 2 years ago

the Katy Freeway already has 26 lanes since 16 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_10_in_Texas

ein0p3• 2 years ago

Based, but insufficient.

gscott• 2 years ago

Reasonable if you are moving to using flying cars.

tomohawk• 2 years ago

They did that in northern Virginia. For decade after decade, they refused to build highways, and after a few million people moved there, it was no longer possible to build or expand what they have without immense expense. The traffic congestion is constant thare.

kjkjadksj34• 2 years ago

I felt like congestion is nonexistent the few times i am there. Maybe I am used to real congestion like in nyc though. All those parkways and fast roads are basically highways anyhow. People go 60-70mph on them and some have full on freeway style interchanges. Theres probably what a couple dozen at least in nova alone? Way more when you factor dc and maryland. Crazy highway lane density per capita if the metrics actually considered these highways. West coast has nothing like that honestly. Big old arterial stop light grid no fast stopless cuts through every ravine.

rr808• 2 years ago

Back in the real world the most popular, fastest growing states are all Republican, have little mass transport and cars everywhere.

Zamicol• 2 years ago

As someone who lives in Colorado I avoid Denver because of its traffic.

Denver isn't the only city on I-25. Forget Denver, I-25 is increasingly more congested because the population and trade in Colorado is increasing.

Politicians myopically prioritizing Denver while forgetting Colorado are colloquially referred to by locals as the "State of Denver".

seadan8315• 2 years ago

I kinda hate that this topic almost always devolves into similar arguments about what exactly is induced demand. Despite that, these conversation threads did give me a new perspective on induced demand that I feel is worth sharing.

That new perspective - I would now say that induced demand relates the efficiency of how well a resource is used to the cost of using that resource. If cost of use is high, then the resource is used more efficiently, and the inverse is also true.

An example, if going to the grocery store takes a literal minute, then buying one item at a time per trip is very viable. OTOH, if that travel time takes one hour, then a person is likely going to avoid that trip, and when they do make it - they'll buy two weeks of groceries at a time and be very careful not to forget anything.

In the latter case, the number of items transported per unit distance increases, usage efficiency goes up. If the cost goes down, then the number of people for whom it is economical to use that resource inefficiently will increase. That's induced demand.

bobthepanda6• 2 years ago

Induced demand gets thrown around a lot, without understanding why it is invoked.

Inducing demand can often be good. We build things so that we can use or sell them. A railroad should induce new trips just as a highway should.

The problem with highway expansion in 2024 in the US is that each new mile of highway gets ever increasingly more expensive and hard to build and produces diminishing returns, at high cost to the neighborhoods that will be bulldozed and divided. And these high costs are sucking the money away from not only the development of alternative modes which could be good backup options, but also the maintenance of the current network. It is not unheard of for a single highway interchange to now cost nearly $2B+: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_Interchange

seadan8315• 2 years ago

Inducing demand can often be good.

I would quibble here, it depends. Another example I am thinking of is toilet paper during the pandemic when it was in short supply. At that time, when we were counting squares of toilet paper and predicting when you were going to run out, people used their toilet paper very efficiently. When it is plentiful, suddenly you don't care about using every last bit as efficiently as possible.

In my previous example in the parent post, everyone is still making it to the grocery store and/or work, but it's a question of how efficient people are incentivized to be when making those trips.

When it comes to highways, I'm guessing that it's more the case that inefficient/unnecessary trips become more economical than typically enabling people to make a given trip at all. I know a lot of people are pretty lazy about planning their trips, I'm guessing there are a lot more of those people than those that cannot go to a city because it requires 45 minutes instead of 30. Just my guess there though, and certainly that is context dependent.

I like your points regarding efficiency of cost for expansion as well. Though, my point is more that induced demand is the minimum efficiency of a resource someone is willing to incur for it to be worth the cost of using that resource. That latter part, is a bit independent of the cost of building that resource in the first place, though that construction cost is still an important thing to consider.

HPsquared• 2 years ago

It all depends on how you define "efficiency". For the grocery example, getting food items Just-in-Time would result in fresher food, less wastage and more flexibility.

seadan8315• 2 years ago

I would define it as simply number of items per distance traveled. How much you get from a location X is a function of how often you are willing to travel to location X. As the cost of travel goes down, your willingness to increase frequency increases.

Food spoilage does come into play and creates a lower limit on the frequency. At some point you'll buy so much you can neither store it nor consume it before it spoils. At some other point on the other side of the spectrum - the cost to travel is not worth the convenience of buying exactly what you want each day. All in all, people would indeed prefer to go more frequently for less, but there are reasons to not do so.

Thus, high frequency does give flexibility, and that is really important. It's a big reason why people like to have their own car, and do things like buy one weeks of groceries and not a full months at a time. That same flexibility is why people rationally choose to make multiple trips when they could make fewer. I do find it quite interesting to think about the various 'sweet spots' in these equations, and the various constraining factors.

veqq• 2 years ago

It's just Jevon's paradox. High prices suppress demand because possible use cases are infeasible/unprofitable, but lower costs make them possible until you have total oversaturation (but e.g. subsidized US corn results in it used in all products!)

seadan8315• 2 years ago

Indeed, not only is total demand a function of cost, but so is frequency of that demand. If my analogy were an actual hypothesis, it could be tested by checking that those who live closer to a grocery store will have on average a lower grocery bill (per visit) than those that live farther away (normalized by the number of people per household and household income), and the absolute total number of trips taken by those that live close by will be higher.

Which is to say, it's profitable to go to a grocery store for very few items if you live close by. Live farther away, and it's less profitable, perhaps to the point where it's not worth doing unless you buy a lot.

I agree that latent demand becomes a factor for sure as well.

throwitaway222• 2 years ago

Pipe sizes are 3d, so as you go from 1" to 2" to 3" to 4" the amount of throughput skyrockets.

Roads are flat, not stacked, so you're just somewhat linearly increasing throughput. It might be a bit more since the leftmost lanes can go increasingly faster, but it's nothing like pipes.

So it makes sense to try to think of other ways to handle it... that being said, does having 50 more buses actually reduce anything, 100 more? Trains.

In many cases people will continue to not want to share their space with someone with boobs hanging out, pee all over the seats, weed smell 24/7.

Hmm, so I guess we're just in a stalemate at this point.

bobthepanda6• 2 years ago

Buses and trains are more space efficient than cars because

1. People can stand in them, increasing vehicle density and

2. A smaller proportion of the vehicle is dedicated to the engine, fuel tank, etc.

There’s also bicycles, e-bikes and such which have higher density as well. Most American trips are not actually that far.

201984• 2 years ago

However, busses and trains usually only run every 10-20 minutes compared to a road which is going constantly. I can easily see cars on roads having higher throughput.

KennyBlanken• 2 years ago

Roads are flat, not stacked, so you're just somewhat linearly increasing throughput.

Per-lane efficiency drops with additional lanes. It doesn't stay the same, and definitely does not increase.

that being said, does having 50 more buses actually reduce anything, 100 more?

Yes. A typical city transit bus can hold 40 seated people, and a "crush" capacity of about 70. Coach numbers are relatively similar give or take. Typical rush-hour max capacity is probably around 60 which is fairly comfortable.

40-60 people taking up about the space of three cars, instead of (if we're being very gracious) 20 cars, to as many as seventy cars.

If we graciously figure that when stopped in traffic each car is 15 feet (length of a compact SUV) and there is one foot of spacing between them (also gracious), that means anywhere from 320ft to over one thousand feet of lane usage, compressed into about forty feet.

Now think about how much roadway space is used when those vehicles are traveling; those cars have to accordion out to have, say, about one car length between each of them (likely more, but we're being gracious.) Now you're looking at 600 to two thousand feet of lane.

This is why bus-only lanes (either during rush hour or all day) and traffic signal prioritization for busses is gaining popularity in municipalities. One full bus erases two thousand feet worth of cars on that road.

We should be looking at the status quo as "look at how much road capacity is being wasted by single occupant vehicles."

osigurdson8• 2 years ago

De-growth, reduced freedom. This is the only kind of "innovation" that governments can deliver.

anamax• 2 years ago

"Induced demand" is a fallacy that planners love because it lets them do what they want.

Demand isn't created. It becomes visible when it looks like it might be satisfied, but that's a very different thing.

mrangle4• 2 years ago

Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant if any experience taking the bus.

I took the urban bus to and from school for years: at least 1.5 hours each way. Often two, with at least one transfer.

Outside of the city center, reliance on buses is a massive poverty tax in terms of reduced quality of life.

Remove these bourgeoise policymakers and their unilateral fake goals. Work on real transportation improvements for the people, not to meet the myopic expectations of the ivory tower. That means making transportation maximally fast and low cost. That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation.

No one who actually cares about society will be working to make it mirror the patterns of poverty. Disagreement with that premise should always be held in high suspicion.

mtalantikite• 2 years ago

As someone who has never had a license and admittedly doesn’t know much about car costs, aren’t they expensive? Like how much is a car payment plus insurance every month? And then gas and maintenance? It seems like requiring car ownership to survive is also not great.

But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local public transit.

FredPret• 2 years ago

I also took transit for 1.5 hours each way when I moved to Toronto, Canada. My monthly transit cost + Ubers was around $400-1000 (I had to take two systems and frequently took Ubers when the bus was cancelled or delayed).

My first car cost about $750 all-in, not counting equity in the car. My commute dropped from 3 hours to less than 1 hour, even in the notorious Toronto traffic. Suddenly I could go to Costco, and my grocery bill dropped by half, from around $800 to around $400.

I got a good deal both buying and selling, and on the subsequent car, so my true cost was less than the monthly payment.

Public transit makes sense in very dense areas. Everywhere else it’s an expensive boondoggle and the working class is better off driving old clunkers than the damn bus.

dogbait• 2 years ago

Expensive. Here in North Virginia (just outside of DC) it was $26k OTD for a 2021 Camry LE. We pay $223/mo in car insurance for my wife and I and $1k/yr in property tax for the car.

Both held a license for 20+ years, both in our early 40s with no accidents in that time.

Car maintenance cost varies - haven't had to deal with that yet.

Depending on the study you look at it costs an owner $8 876 per year and society about 1/3 of the lifetime cost in supporting the vehicle (in the form of roads, pollution, infrastructure etc.)

I never had a car in London (where public transport is used by all regardless of income and background). Here in the US we have a long way to go before we level up our public transportation system.

That said, Washington DC's Metro is very good indeed. I hope they extend it further and further out.

Sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/02/04/lifetime...

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/study-car-ownership-c...

iteria• 2 years ago

I took the bus for nearly a decade and I drive a car now. My life was greatly improved by having a car and while a car is more expensive technically, in indirect costs, it feels like a break even to me. At least as someone who buys cheap cars, tends to live within 30mins drive of my job and keeps them for a good long time. Even in a good public transit area in the US there is a significant time sink to using public transit for literally every aspect of your life. Getting to work is efficient and not significantly more time intensive than driving, but doing everything else like visiting a friend, going to a hair salon, get groceries can be a huge difference depending on what city you're in. I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive, but getting groceries was a harrowing 45mins journey. Places where getting to work took twice as long, but I could walk to the grocery store. In the US there's just no way to make public transit really work across all dimensions. Especially as we add in specificity. Like needing to bring home a large amount of items or visit humans instead of businesses. EU was much better about this just because of how mixed housing and businesses were.

mrangle4• 2 years ago

Public transportation isn't exactly cheap when used every day. Then factor in your time and frustration. Nothing is as expensive as your time.

Cars are amazing at their current cost, comparatively. And as I said, we should work on making them cheaper.

Toward an ultimate goal of making everyone "richer". Which begins with reducing hidden poverty taxes like unavoidable multi-hour public transportation commutes.

My ultimate dream for society, as a whole, is for everyone to "be rich". I don't necessarily mean having a disgusting surplus of money in the bank, but rather to eliminate the innumerable aspects of being "not rich" that boil down to an endless string of otherwise unnecessary daily sacrifices, sufferings and indignities. Then, at least, we'd begin to see the trauma of poverty be reduced and hopefully eliminated.

In this case, that means turning a gimlet eye to the human cost of unavoidable mass transport that isn't rail. Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category. This opens up easier access to work, relationships, housing, and food including breaking down the barriers of food deserts.

Thanks. The commute time was more an aspect of the innate slowness bus transportation combined with the unavoidable route through city side streets. In other words, it would be hard to improve upon. By car, the route is thirty minutes.

AnthonyMouse9• 2 years ago

Car ownership costs vary widely. If you buy a new $50,000 car every two years, that is obviously very expensive, and then will be expensive to insure, and many of those luxury vehicles aren't amazingly efficient.

Whereas you can usually find a reliable and efficient used car for under $5000 and keep it for quite a bit more than 2 years, with a good driving record and the lower cost vehicle it can cost less than $1000/year to insure, and maintenance is dramatically less expensive if you do it yourself. And I mean the difference is $60 for a part on the internet vs. they charge you $250 for the same part and $500 for the labor to put it in.

By contrast, a monthly NYC subway pass will run you a little over $1500/year, which will in most cases be less but not necessarily a whole lot less. Plus whatever you get stuck paying to Uber whenever you have to go somewhere the subway doesn't.

ssl-32• 2 years ago

Cars can be expensive, yeah. I live in a very car-centric area (zero public transportation, with many things too far away for realistically walking there).

To throw some numbers out: A "cheap" used car ($5k), financed over 3 years at 8% is $156.68 per month. At my middle age, decent full coverage insurance is around $100 per month (it would cost a lot more if I were still younger). We're at $256.68 monthly just to have a car that we may elect to drive.

But that doesn't include parking for the car (a place to live with good parking tends to cost more than a place with awful parking). It also doesn't include the costs of actually driving the car, like regular maintenance, stuff that inevitably breaks or wears out, fuel, washing the car, and so on. Let's just make up a number and say that these things average ~$150 per month, for a total of ~$406.68 per month to drive a car.

Now, suppose that a commute is 20 minutes each way using that car, or 1 hour if riding the bus. And that a bus pass costs $62 per month.

And let's say that a person "brings home" $25 per hour worked, and that they work 40 hours in a regular week (173.93 hours in a regular month), and that the commute time counts as unpaid work.

The car commute adds 14.49 hours per month, for 188.42 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $406.68.

The bus commute adds 43.48 hours per month, for 217.41 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $62.

The bus seems cheaper and slower at this point, which we all probably implicitly knew to be true.

But if my math is right: By the time transportation is paid for, the person commuting by car has an effective hourly wage of $20.92 for their time+commute. And the person riding the bus has an effective hourly wage of $19.73/hour for their time+commute.

So owning and driving the car may be a better option than taking the bus, depending on a person's specific situation and proclivities. And of course, it's more nuanced than that in ways that are harder to math out.

With a car, commute time is just lost time. A person driving a car must drive that car the entire time; they don't get to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever, but they're only doing that for 40 minutes a day.

With a bus pass, commute time might be productive time. A person riding a bus might decide to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever. So if a person chooses to do so, they can use some of that 43.48 hours riding back and forth to work doing something that has meaning to them.

On the other hand: Owning a cheap(ish) car means being able to travel to places where a bus doesn't go, and do so on a whim, and (optionally) take a mountain of stuff along with them if that is useful for whatever reason.

So yeah, cars are expensive. But buses are also expensive. (Life is expensive.)

Cheer2171• 2 years ago

Are you open to the possibility that your particular experience with buses is not what all buses are or must be like? This is also sounds like an underfunded and sparse bus system. You can do buses right or you can do them poorly, same with anything. If you have a dense enough network that most people don't have to transfer, or enough frequency it doesn't matter, it makes a huge difference. Public transportation (and particularly buses and coaches) are ubiquitous in some transportation systems in some very rich world cities. London comes to mind. The double decker buses are beloved.

Bus rapid transit can actually be really nice. You know that rock stars and politicians practically live on buses while they do traveling events? Of course a BRT isn't going to be that private luxury, but even a middle quality charter bus that makes limited stops is pretty darn good. Having dedicated lanes removed the worst part of buses compared to trains.

I used to daily take the AC Transit transbay buses from the East Bay to San Francisco, which are double-decker Greyhounds and have comfortable reclining seating with tables and wifi. The single entrance/exit is a benefit, because it only runs commuter hours and so in the morning it only picks up in the East Bay and drops off in SF. It allows enforcement of fares too. It's a higher fare, but that also attracts a commuter clientele. The main problem with it is that it is too popular and gets crowded, and you're SOL if all the buses are already full at your stop. But that if the flaw is that it is too popular, that's the best and easiest problem to have. Sometimes a regular AC Transit bus would show up and we would all groan and curse.

DopplerSmell2• 2 years ago

The biggest problem with public transport is usually the public.

Segregated services for commuters are great, but catching a bus to shop/recreation/restaurants is miserable and restrictive.

As as aside, developing mass transit always has the problem of being at the whim of the next political goal (subsidised bus routes especially). Roads are physical easy to understand, so less subject to political vs.

rayiner14• 2 years ago

Even the best bus systems are slow and inconvenient compared to cars. I went to see Taylor Swift in Tokyo this year, and took the bus to the subway. It was timely, clean, and efficient—far better than anything America could ever be able to do. But I still took an Uber back, because I wanted to get home quickly.

throwaway203711• 2 years ago

    > The double decker buses are beloved.

Ehhh, no. Does anyone prefer buses stuck in traffic over a train? And if the buses are so great, why they build The Elizabeth Line (and dream to build the north-south equivalent)?

mrangle4• 2 years ago

Are you open to the possibility that your particular experience with buses is not what all buses are or must be like? This is also sounds like an underfunded and sparse bus system. You can do buses right or you can do them poorly, same with anything. If you have a dense enough network that most people don't have to transfer, or enough frequency it doesn't matter, it makes a huge difference.

You haven't the slightest idea of what you are talking about. See "little to no experience with daily reliance on buses for urban transportation".

ColonelPhantom4• 2 years ago

Just because public transport is a poverty tax where you went to school does not mean buses and especially other transit are inherently for poor people. Buses do tend to be mediocre for longer distances, but the main issue is general quality of service.

I grew up in a region with fairly mediocre transit, but because the living environment is not hostile most things can easily be done by bike unless you need to go to another city. Hell, I biked 8km to school, and while somewhat time consuming it was quite literally free exercise.

When I went to uni, before moving to that city I relied on transit. Because of the low density in the region, trains are only half-hourly (which is by far the most sucky part) and it's on single-track rails so every train stops at all stations. However during rush hour it's still time-competitive with cars, and transfers are generally pretty good because those are the reason transit works in that region at all.

Something like "you need a car to be able to get to (store)" that's mentioned in another comment would be literally unthinkable here. You can get practically anywhere with a bike and a transit card.

newsclues• 2 years ago

As someone that’s taken bus rides that are over a day long.

I want good inter city rail. I want good urban railway or subway in metropolitan areas. And I want bike lanes for last mile travel.

Once we do that and reduce the demand and congestion on the roads, we can plan new roads accordingly.

gcr• 2 years ago

My dad lived in a Colorado suburb and took the bus to work. He saw firsthand how the bus deteriorates when bad policy doesn’t fund public transportation. When he retired in his sixties, he was running on the order of 50 miles a week or so for his morning commute.

Our governor adopted budget cuts that forced the public busses to run private ads, then called them an “eyesore.” People—especially poor people or families that don’t want to rely on cars — need reliable public transportation!

TomK32• 2 years ago

It's not just poor people who don't want to rely on cars but also those too young to have a license, or momentarily too sick or simply too old to drive safely and of course those with suspended licenses for whatever reason. Mobility should be a right for everyone, not just car owners.

pkulak5• 2 years ago

That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation.

That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re lucky. That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap!

Trains, my friend. We need trains. Busses first, but eventually trains.

rayiner14• 2 years ago

Cars fit in cities just fine. Just got back from Atlanta. Much nicer and cleaner and cheaper than New York City. The only problem is the pollution, which is fixed by EVs. The other stuff, like a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system.

Trains are not the solution. Even the best train systems are much slower than point to point car transportation. When I go to Tokyo on business, I take Ubers, not the (excellent) train system, because cars are faster and more convenient. In Japan, 80% of households have a car. In Tokyo prefecture, there are about 40 cars per 100 households. In Osaka it’s 65 per 100.

osigurdson8• 2 years ago

I don't think it is mathematically possible to build trains for everywhere people want to go. Fine for extremely dense areas, otherwise inconvenient and dumb.

anon2915• 2 years ago

Is Colorado building meaningful amounts of trains?

cscurmudgeon2• 2 years ago

Trains, my friend. We need trains. Busses first, but eventually trains.

For that, we first need density.

And who is against more density in existing cities where naturally more density makes most sense?

More or less the same people arguing against cars.

https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/03/25/letting-aaron-pesk...

https://www.kqed.org/news/11964754/sf-supervisors-to-vote-on...

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/sf-permitting-paltry...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-drivers-say-war-on...

balderdash3• 2 years ago

With perhaps the exclusion of the Amtrak northeast corridor/Acela and a couple of the US subway systems (e.g.NYC) most of the train projects in the us seem like they were designed to as an example inferior alternative to driving. There are so many comically bad examples: the air train to EWR, JFK require multiple transfers and are slower than driving at all but the most severe traffic conditions. The Houston light rail that doesn’t really go anywhere convenient, and is in the street going slower than the cars around it (stopping at traffic lights as well).

It seems as if most of the rail networks in the us are built to serve people with no other alternative as opposed to providing a better alternative to driving. Speaking of airport connections it blows my mind that US cities haven’t built trains like the Heathrow express.

mrangle4• 2 years ago

What's silly is to state that we "can't" make things cheaper.

The rest of your statements are relative to the myriad costs of no cars and other transportation. It's narrative.

That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap!

What? Get a grip.

We already have buses and trains. Trains are great but can't go everywhere a car is required. Buses are a poverty pattern and the working class should be elevated away from their necessity rather than toward. The practical tax is such that it is racist to mean to force people into bus transportation.

Automotive transportation has always been the future. It is not only a form of wealth but a form of anti-poverty and anti-strife, as is freedom of movement that they better facilitate.

osigurdson8• 2 years ago

> No one who actually cares about society will be working to make it mirror the patterns of poverty

Great comment! This is an incredible way to put it.

doubloon• 2 years ago

well i rode a bike for several years and i would love separate interlocking paths for bikes to be everywhere.

right now i cannot even go half a mile to get groceries because someone obsessed with "not modeling poverty" decided there should be no way to safely cross the 6 lane street between me and the grocery store.

yongjik• 2 years ago

That buses take 1.5 hours to an urban center while cars don't is not an immobile fact of life: it is the result of decades of policy decisions that used limited budget on more roads rather than buses and trains.

If, for example, Denver, CO had an actual functioning transportation network, it would cover a decent chunk of its neighboring suburbs, and these parts will be considered more desirable because you don't have to waste time driving in and out of Denver. And then these parts will be developed faster, providing more housing to people who don't like the hassle of driving and parking, which will create even more public demand to extend existing infrastructure.

That it doesn't happen just means Americans are stuck in the worldview of "I have never seen a functional public transit system in my life; I can't imagine why anyone would waste money on that!"

soared2• 2 years ago

Hard agree - look at the development of large apartment complexes right next to lightrail stations in Denver. These were promoted by policy changes, but are effective in providing mass public transit of reasonable quality into the city center from the (extremely small) suburb-ish locations they exist at.

If denver built out that light rail into a network dense housing could exist in the suburbs at an extremely reasonable cost (suburbs are cheaper than downtown, apartments are cheaper than housing). Like the article says, the neighboring counties/etc just don't want this, as the HOAs/homeowners in the suburbs want to entrench themselves and increase property values.

Buses that can drive in the shoulder are better for people who already take the bus, but they aren't going to get many more people riding the bus. A light rail that actually went all the way to Boulder would help. Or a lightrail that actually went to Golden, and not only the government building 3 miles uphill from downtown Golden.

nox1013• 2 years ago

You should consider experiencing living in places with good non-automobile transportation. a few off the top of my head. Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, London

Poor people in these cities don’t feel disadvantaged for not having a car. I fact most people in these cities don’t have a car regardless of income level

lived with a car in California for 20yrs, Lived without in some of those other cities for 15. without was way better. When I really needed a vehicle to carry something I could get a taxi.

Trains are slow when poorly designed. good train systems have multiple levels of express trains.

dmix2• 2 years ago

dont poor people in Paris live on the edges of the city far away from the good jobs downtown and are closer to the highways?

I don't know much about European cities but maybe it's easier to build housing there than it is here because that's always the main issue in north america.

The only reason people live in the suburbs where everyone is forced to drive is because a) housing it cheaper and b) its safer (most EU cities probably dont have anywhere near the crime levels of the US) c) its easier to raise kids because decent schools dont have waiting lists and basic stuff like grocery stores are cheaper

I know it's a meme on Reddit but people living outside metropolitian areas aren't there simply because they are pro-car.

kortilla7• 2 years ago

Poor people don’t get to live in those cities where the transportation is good (at least none of those European examples).

jskrablin• 2 years ago

I don't want to live in a city. It's noisy, polluted, crowded and I really like my small countryside house with plenty of land around it. Lived in a city for 20 years, got fed up with it, despite all of the alleged 'advantages' it offers. I guess I don't deserve decent infrastructure in your world view?

diob• 2 years ago

Yep, I'm looking to move to one of those places rather than argue with USA folks about how they don't work.

locallost• 2 years ago

I took public transport that was pretty bad, and now that I am older, I am still very supportive of public transportation. Unlike personal automotive transportation, it's been made to work somewhere. Cheaper and faster automotive transport does not mix well, people have been dreaming about it for a century and somehow it never worked anywhere. It's a shame you're throwing words like ivory tower around because it's exactly the acceptance of observed reality that is forcing people to think about new ways of doing things. Let's care about working people in ways other than making them spend a huge chunk of their income on inefficient transportation that always takes forever no matter how many lanes you build. Transportation they have to use because it's exactly the middle class that wants to prioritize its own comfort instead of the common good and there are no alternatives.

Colorado has the right idea.

CalRobert9• 2 years ago

Your proposed solution makes the world a dangerous, more hostile, more lonely choice for people who do not drive (and those who do, for that matter). Among other things, car-focused landscapes are terrible for raising independent children. You are removing the ability for them to travel on their own safely and replacing it with sprawling auto-focused landscapes.

globular-toast• 2 years ago

Buses are only bad because everyone else has cars. They get all downsides of car travel (plus more) with none of the upsides. It wouldn't be a "poverty tax" if the alternative was walking or cycling.

hifromwork2• 2 years ago

Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant if any experience taking the bus.

It must be very cultural. I'm pretty well off (as most experienced IT people are), and I travel with Bus (or a Bike) to my job every weekday. Most of my friends and coworkers do the same (I don't even know anyone in my team who drives to work).

I'm sorry about your experience with school bus - this sounds disastrous. But believe me that it's possible to improve. In my (big, European) city public transport and biking infrastructure is pretty good, cheap, and useful.

anon2915• 2 years ago

I'm personally okay with this in principle but I rarely see it accompanied by a policy to build anything else. If you tell me they're going to invest in trains and actual transit, I'm totally in, but I've not heard anything.

I mean this. I ride transit multiple times a week. I love the experience but it requires actual investment and many cities don't do that. In general, most government in America seems unable to actually build anything. I don't think we should applaud that they're now also choosing not to build highways.

rkagerer• 2 years ago

The article cites health effects due to local emissions.

Does anyone else think the timing of this anti-thoroughfare attitude is ironic given that electric cars are gaining traction?

softsound2• 2 years ago

I wish bus stops where I live weren't so hostile to the user, no one wants to sit on metal in 100 degree weather, especially with no shade. Also if the buses came sooner then every 30 mins I would consider them more often but if it takes me 30 mins to walk to a stop where I sweat in the sun with no shade and the bus left early before I arrived I might end up waiting an hour hoping it arrives. So then I have to leave extra early and it's too much effort especially when I have a car.

Tempest1981• 2 years ago

Reminded me of the Embarcadero Freeway in SF, which was torn down in 1991 after being damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake:

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-story-of-the-embarca...

"The city adapted to the new traffic network with few problems"

ricardobeat• 2 years ago

more than half of $1.2 trillion enabled by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 will be spent on highway expansion and resurfacing.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but that sounds like enough to build a China-like countrywide rail network. Spending it on resurfacing asphalt would be criminal.

zbrozek• 2 years ago

Not in this country. It might get you through the first round of environmental studies for such a network though.

Remember that the SF to LA rail line is up over $135B and still has many years of cost growth ahead of it before completion.

someguydave20• 2 years ago

Shoshana Lew is the daughter of Jack Lew, President Obama’s Chief of Staff.

balderdash3• 2 years ago

Anyone interest in the subject of traffic - I’d highly recommend the book: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us by Tom Vanderbilt

Pretty eye opening entry point on the subject

speedylight• 2 years ago

I totally understand why people hate public transit, I relied on it for years before I got my license/car. I happen to live in a state where public transportation happens to be very good on paper, but in practice is actually a hellish, miserable experience; Buses are constantly running late, they’re usually filled with sketchy people (homeless, drug addicts, etc) who make you feel uneasy and in some cases is actually unsafe (such as some having a drug induced episode, this happens a lot more common than you might think.)

In the end I told myself I don’t have to go through all that crap, so I got myself car and it very quickly dawned on me that this was indeed the correct decision and I should’ve done it years ago. The laundry list of positive changes outweighed any negatives associated with owning a car.

Only way I’m giving it up now is if we manage to invent portable teleportation devices.

unethical_ban• 2 years ago

I like vehicles and motorcycles and, barring some transformative life experience, could not imagine going more than an "extended vacation in NYC" without a car in the United States.

But I also love good public transit, and think it's a huge competitive advantage for 2nd tier cities in the US. As remote work becomes a norm for the middle class, transit will be one of the main ways cities can lure people.

I agree that public safety is critical and that cities must take transit safety and cleanliness seriously. (And for that matter, take public safety in general more seriously - my city of San Antonio doesn't seem to take action on crime unless police are able to get there while it's in progress or if it's high-profile.)

lizknope• 2 years ago

I wish governments would incentivize working from home. We've already seen that this can be done effectively for a huge percentage of the population. In 2019 I was spending about $250 on gasoline a month. In 2020 with mandatory work from home that dropped to about $50 a month. When I did go out there was no traffic which lead to even less fuel wasted. Instead we have politicians and business leaders pushing for people to return to the office. I work in a huge office park with huge parking lots. That is so much land that could be used for apartments, condos, single family homes, or anything more useful than half empty offices that very few want to go to.

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

The people pushing these solutions have decided it's too hard to make public transit compelling so they will have to make car driving worse. Which is a net negative for everyone.

In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

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