[HN Gopher] In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not ...
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In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
Author : lxm
Score : 94 points
Date : 2024-05-31 13:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| ocschwar wrote:
| Massachusetts has not widened highways inside of 128 for 50 years
| now.
|
| And I am so grateful for that.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| 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.
| ocschwar wrote:
| 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.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| I cycle in the area but I value my life too much for that!
| Happy travels.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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.
| aqme28 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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_er wrote:
| 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.
| n8henrie wrote:
| I thought brake dust would be drastically decreased due to
| regenerative braking?
| zdragnar wrote:
| There's some offset due to the increased weight from the
| battery pack. Highway driving is better, city driving is
| worse. Also, the tires emit more, since wear is also a
| function of weight.
| wonder_er wrote:
| that sounds right. Tire rubber microplastic generation
| would go way up, though, because of the vehicle weight.
|
| I propose small motor scooters (as is common in asia) as
| the solution. Cars also take up a godawful amount of space,
| all the time. Especially in a city. That's the real harm,
| the tailpipe emissions are trivial compared to the space
| consumption.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Small motor scooters are not a good solution in the rain
| and snow
| rangestransform wrote:
| Yeah but I can just buy a Tesla with hepa filters so I'm not
| breathing it in
| thrillgore wrote:
| There are still emissions from cars: rubber from the tires,
| steel, aluminum, and other metals from part wear...
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| You are dismissing the weight factor a bit too quickly.
| Many EVs regardless of their size weight as much as some
| ICE heavy pickups, especially as the trend of driving SUVs
| hasn't disappeared with EVs.
| infecto wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| standardUser wrote:
| > 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!
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| cars bad
| someguydave wrote:
| rich people cars very bad
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| turnsout wrote:
| 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.
| someguydave wrote:
| Punishing people into having correct desires is the role of
| government?
| turnsout wrote:
| Sometimes it is. If you desire to be naked on the subway,
| the government will punish you.
|
| You don't just get to do whatever you want. The
| government's job is to look after The Public and ensure
| that _most_ people get what they _need_ --not to ensure
| that _all_ people get what they _want._
| someguydave wrote:
| Indeed, and when The People voted to pay and appoint
| people to build roads they were expressing Thier Needs
| baq wrote:
| yes? from the perspective of the larger group of people
| that the government governs? isn't that the purpose of the
| government?
| lofatdairy wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| lofatdairy wrote:
| I meant complicated as in not necessarily good/bad. I agree
| it's not complicated in the general sense that it's an
| intrinsic part of supply and demand.
|
| That said it's definitely more complicated in how to
| article is discussing it. The article is clearly talking
| about a Braess's Paradox-like situation where an
| individual's optimal decision incentivized by changes in
| the system is worse for more participants than the previous
| system, due to anticipatory and dynamic effects. This is
| inherently more complicated to measure and predict.
| xp84 wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| xp84 wrote:
| Thanks for the reply.
|
| You have a 1 hour commmute because the good house you can
| afford is about 1 hour away. I would propose that if we
| (all taxpayers) added 6 more lanes to the road you drive to
| work, your commute would dip for a short while, more people
| just like you would move to the new suburbs beyond yours,
| that are now an (improved for them) 1 hour commute,
| eventually re-saturating the new wider road. Now your
| commute is, best case, the same, maybe a little worse,
| because if it gets better, more people will squeeze into
| your suburb. You also have the option to move even farther
| out, but your commute will on average always be roughly as
| bad as it is today because people in your situation
| tolerate about that level of 'misery.' (Again that's how i
| conceptualize the variable, not saying you're literally
| miserable).
|
| Yes, I suppose stimulating another splash of suburbs out in
| the countryside does provide Y more people an opportunity
| to become long-distance commuters, but I'd say:
|
| Surely there's some limit, right? You wouldn't say that
| California should bulldoze neighborhoods in all the closer
| suburbs in order to make I-80 30 lanes wide as it gets
| closer to the Bay, so that people can commute from new
| suburbs built 150 miles away... right? And if there's some
| limit to reasonable highway size, why not the current size.
| And if we want to further increase capacity to bring in
| humans to a city, build a bullet train and bring them in in
| a way that's more efficient than individual 6,000 pound
| SUVs for each commuter. That's where I'd direct incremental
| transportation dollars. That, or subsidize commercial
| development nearer population centers so that people who
| live 2 hours from the city have other options.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| To clarify, I'm not dogmatic about Transportation
| methods, at least for work commuting. I would love if
| cheap mass transit took some load off of local roads and
| the highway system so that they could be more effectively
| used for tasks besides commutes.
|
| I mostly wanted to highlight that there's a trade off of
| preferences at play. Using your terms, Urban living is
| also a misery for many people. If you want to talk about
| Misery, listen to some Millennials and Zoomers that feel
| priced out of ever owning a home or starting a family.
|
| It seems like most of these induced demand arguments I
| see start from the conclusion they want (dense Urban
| living) and reverse engineers a justification.
|
| As you point out, High speed rail also induces
| Transportation demand.
|
| It's not that increasing highway bandwidth doesn't work
| (it does). This doesn't preclude the idea that
| alternatives solutions or a hybrid can't be more
| efficient.
| kiba wrote:
| These are all land use policies.
|
| The fact of the matter is, roads and highways required a
| lot of space for use and storing vehicles. Space that
| would otherwise go to homes or supporting mass transit or
| other more desirable infrastructure and uses, part of the
| puzzle why owning homes are so expensive but of course,
| not the only reason why.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| 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.
| ocschwar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| someguydave wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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
| someguydave wrote:
| You want to hurt people by costing their time in order to
| teach them to desire your morals?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Physical systems don't care about your feelings. Live
| somewhere that ignores science and is financially
| irresponsible with infra dollars if that is your MO. We're
| not going to spend to build roads forever because people
| are ignorant and selfish, we can't even pay for the road
| infra we have today. And some folks are demanding _more_?
| Absolutely silly. "I'm not happy they're not building
| roads we cannot afford and will end up congested again,
| won't you think about my happiness!"
|
| Bringing morality into an economic, fluid dynamics, and
| behavioral argument is not helpful, and the private car
| entitlement (which is demonstrably unaffordable and
| unfunded long term) is wild.
|
| https://infrastructurereportcard.org/
|
| https://pirg.org/articles/america-cant-handle-more-
| highways-...
|
| https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/04/13/we-could-never-
| afford...
|
| https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/road-
| funding-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/business/energy-
| environme...
| fastball wrote:
| What science is being ignored? Traffic expanding to fill
| capacity is not a bad thing, that is efficient use of
| capacity?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Fossil energy is artificially cheap (the price its
| consumers pay does not even begin to pay for the negative
| externalities of producing and burning it -- and most of
| it goes into private hands that don't intend to use it
| for any kind of mitigation anyway).
|
| This causes all kinds of problems, has all kinds of
| causes, and is generally a disaster all around, but at
| the very least we shouldn't _deliberately make it worse_
| by also artificially juicing demand in one of the main
| fossil-fuel-burning sectors of the economy (any more than
| we already are). Every petroleum-powered mile not
| traveled (and energy is to a certain extent fungible, so
| in principle this also applies to electric cars burning
| "free" solar energy) is a win for human civilization.
|
| This isn't hippy-dippy environmentalism, just soulless
| Chicago economics: mispriced commodities do real damage
| to a political economy, and in the globalized era, there
| is effectively only one political economy anymore.
| fastball wrote:
| Highways can be filled with electric cars.
| someguydave wrote:
| If the real problem is fossil fuels then leave traffic
| engineering out of it
| kiba wrote:
| The problem with roads and highways is that they are
| inherently _low-capacity_ , so it's very easy to fill
| them with traffic.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| This is the philosophy by which progressives have been
| leading cities across the west for a few years.
| someguydave wrote:
| Not just the west! You can sit in traffic on horrible
| roads all across the country, especially on the east
| coast
| kentonv wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Nobody complains about induced demand when a hospital can
| operates on twice as many patients at a time.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| That's because adding hospital capacity doesn't create
| more sick people. Unless your hospital goes around
| breaking people's kneecaps to make money.
|
| Adding highways creates more traffic by telling
| developers to put housing in the newly accessible land.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I agree, but I think we draw different conclusions. I
| like both having housing and being treated when I am
| sick.
|
| The point of building and expanding highways isn't to
| reduce traffic, but enable more people to go places. Zero
| Highways would mean Zero traffic. a $1000 toll would mean
| zero traffic.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Oh, and look, we've got all this demand for housing that
| isn't being addressed at the moment.
|
| Maybe what you're describing is a _positive_ outcome?
|
| You can't be "we can't build roads because it will cause
| houses to be built" and "it's a crisis that nobody can
| afford a house" at the same time.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| The demand for housing has nothing to do with highways.
|
| Highways proscribe a particular way in which to build
| housing. Low density sprawl. Which results in horrible
| commutes people hate.
|
| We don't need that. We need high density transit. Which
| results in high quality of life.
|
| The reason housing isn't built is because cities abuse
| zoning laws. It's time for states to take back zoning
| regulations.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| To each their own. Most Americans hate high density. I'd
| rather drive 2 hours than live high density.
| kentonv wrote:
| High density is awesome right up until you have kids and
| then it's awful. I think a lot of young people who don't
| have kids have trouble understanding this.
|
| If I had no kids I'd love to live in a downtown high rise
| apartment. Really wish I had done so when I was younger.
| Among a lot of things I wish I could go tell my younger
| self to do...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like a huge personality disconnect and
| critical lack of comprehension that other people simply
| dont like what they do. Ive spent a lot of time in
| excellent dense European cities and it still doesnt
| appeal to me. I dont like going out to bars, crowds, or
| general city life.
|
| I like privacy, having a workshop, chickens, fruit trees,
| and a garden. I like having a huge kitchen, a pantry, a
| meat smoker, and hosting dinner parties. I like having
| room for an off-road vehicle and camping gear.
|
| It is hard to keep my eyes from rolling out of my head
| when someone tells me how much better dense urban living
| is. I have never met anyone IRL that would happily trade
| their suburban home for urban life.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Well meet me. I hated having to spend hours taking care
| of a garden instead of going for a bike ride.
|
| Also you can have a workshop while having high density.
|
| Suburban is probably the worst of both world for me:
| expensive, impractical and not even quiet/isolated enough
| for when you need that. I'd rather have a flat in a
| european city + a small rural house in the middle of
| nowhere than a house in US suburbia.
|
| All this to say that we don't have to agree on what is
| best for everyone because everyone do not value things
| the same way.
| baq wrote:
| plenty of non-Americans live in high density areas, have
| children and are very happy they don't have to drive them
| anywhere and everywhere all the time.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I love having kids that I don't have to drive because
| they can go to school or meet their friends by walking.
|
| I'd rather have that than spending half an hour or more
| driving 2 overweight kids to school twice a day, then
| having to taxi everywhere they want to be after school.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| If you ask people: would you vote for bonds for a highway
| expansion that will not make your commute better, but will
| add a lot more cars to the road, they will overwhelmingly
| say no.
|
| There is only one reason why the public agrees to highway
| construction: the idea that their commute will get better.
| But it won't after a few years.
|
| The highway will always be full! That's induced demand. If
| you have a highway to a desirable destination people will
| build out along it until it's full. You can expand that
| highway as much as you want, it will always be full after a
| few years.
|
| This isn't a solution. It's just a way to design horrible
| cities that punish drivers with stressful, unproductive,
| and long commutes.
|
| You cannot win by adding highways. You can only win by not
| playing that game.
| kentonv wrote:
| How about you ask people: Would you vote for bonds for a
| highway expansion that will not really make your commute
| better but will provide more accessible housing, bringing
| down housing prices, and thus allow you to have a bigger,
| nicer home for less money? (Even if you don't actually
| use the particular highway!)
|
| If people are filling up the new lanes it's because they
| are getting value out of it. It's making people's lives
| better, even if the traffic doesn't go faster (though in
| many cases, it does).
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| But that's not at all what happens.
|
| Housing cost does not go down with highway construction.
|
| No. It's making people's lives worse. They could have
| better lives with transit.
| kentonv wrote:
| You're saying that highway construction encourages
| building of new housing, enough to use up all the new
| highway capacity, but that this doesn't bring down
| housing costs. This is quite an extraordinary claim that
| goes against basic economics. I don't believe it.
|
| I think you and others have convinced yourselves that
| this is true because you like the conclusion: that we
| should stop building highways. But it's a tortured
| argument that doesn't make basic economic sense.
|
| > They could have better lives with transit.
|
| Then build the transit! I am all for building better
| public transit! I am all for dense urban development,
| downtown residential highrises, mixed-use walkable
| neighborhoods, etc. We can do all of these things -- and
| also expand highways. With all the options available,
| people will choose what's actually best for them. If
| you're right, then people will stop using the highway and
| it won't be congested anymore. Win win!
|
| I really do not believe in refusing to give people what
| they want because we think they'd be better off with
| something else that we're also not building.
| kiba wrote:
| Highway and car infrastructure are the most inefficient
| way to use land in urban environments. The higher
| density, the worse cars are. I can't really justify using
| cars except for interfacing with rural areas.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| 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.
| someguydave wrote:
| Yep, being simply "anti-induced demand" is pro-human
| suffering.
|
| I agree that there could be alternatives to widening
| highways that will make everyone better off but I rarely
| see all the tradeoffs being carefully considered.
| walthamstow wrote:
| You are comparing the externalities of car driving to that
| of libraries
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| It wasn't for people but parts & subassemblies deliveries.
| They'd get tied up in the traffic.
| adolph wrote:
| Trains are capable of carrying "parts & subassemblies."
| The question why Boeing hates public transportation so
| much still stands.
| standardUser wrote:
| And who are you the daughter of, since these facts are clearly
| of paramount significance?
| infecto wrote:
| 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.
| ambyra wrote:
| 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.
| someguydave wrote:
| Motorcyles have a roughly 30 times higher fatality rate per
| mile driven compared to cars
| carso wrote:
| And are also not great for air pollution - they burn less
| gas per mile, but the engines are very dirty.
| ambyra wrote:
| But they reduce congestion, which equals less total time
| on the road. Everyone gets better MPGs if there is less
| stop and go traffic.
| ambyra wrote:
| Pollution caused by congestion and manufacturing cars kills
| everyone. By riding a bike people can put their money where
| their mouth is regarding views on climate change; you're
| making a statement that says "I'm putting the environment
| ahead of my personal safety". Also, if you convert enough
| people, motorcycle riding becomes safer for everyone.
| Getting bumped by another 150lb Vespa isn't as nasty as
| getting hit by a "green" 6000lb tesla truck.
| rangestransform wrote:
| I would rather be safe than bear a cross for the
| environment
|
| I'm glad we live in a democracy where telling people to
| endanger themselves for the environment is a nonstarter
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Motorcycles are dangerous because of the speed honestly.
| Especially a lot of these bikes people buy that are just
| way too much power for anyone to be reasonable with. Like
| why do you need to strap yourself to a rocket that can go
| to 60 in less than 2 seconds? I'm sorry you aren't even
| strapped in you are holding on for dear life. Theres no
| where you can do that and claim to be safe and
| responsible short of being a trained rider on a track.
| appplication wrote:
| Agree, a motorcycle is a complete nonstarter for this
| reason. It's just not responsible for anyone with a family.
| balfirevic wrote:
| Would you say the same thing for bicycles, in places
| without dedicated bicycle lanes?
| appplication wrote:
| I'm an avid cyclist who's been in a few crashes. I will
| absolutely not bike commute in dangerous parts of the
| city. So yes, I'd say the same.
| prmoustache wrote:
| you aren't really answering the question.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yes, absolutely
| Gigachad wrote:
| E-bikes are massively safer because they move slower. Yes
| you can still be run over by some chud truck but
| motorbikes are dangerous on their own.
| rangestransform wrote:
| Yes, I would say that biking with a child in certain
| parts of the US is incredibly irresponsible and
| neglectful
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I would not because you don't go 60mph with a leather
| jacket for protection on a bike, you go about a quarter
| that if you are really pushing between lights.
|
| And honestly as a biker taking the entire lane is so much
| safer than some bike lanes even. Sure people honk but
| they arent psychotic they will pass you by merging the
| lane. If you ride on the shoulder they try and squeeze by
| and thats where there are issues. You are also more
| visible to turning traffic from other directions when you
| take the lane.
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| I know a large number of people who commute by bike in
| Melbourne. Every single last one of them has at some
| point been hit by a car or has suffered serious injuries
| trying to avoid being hit by a car. Many of them have had
| this happen multiple times, and these are all cases where
| they have dedicated bike lanes -- they weren't riding
| with general traffic, which is of course far more
| dangerous.
| more_corn wrote:
| That sounds about right. Rode a motorcycle in SF traffic
| for years. About twice a day people would do something that
| could have killed me. Changing lanes without looking,
| blowing a stop sign, just generally not paying attention. I
| had a woman pull up while I was waiting to pull out of a
| gas station. She somehow thought that I should back up, up
| hill and let her in. I don't think she realized that
| motorcycles don't have reverse. She got super mad and her
| boyfriend wanted to fight me. He stormed over with chest
| puffed. People are dangerously stupid and clueless. About
| half way over he noticed the armored knuckles on my gloves
| and realized it probably wouldn't go well for him.
|
| It is super dangerous. I couldn't stop though because my
| commute was 4x as long in a car and 6x-8x as long on public
| transportation.
| someguydave wrote:
| This thread is full of people happy that people are
| wasting so much time in traffic because it will force
| them to change their desires
| sotix wrote:
| Motorcycles are not safe, and certainly not safer than
| cars. However, you can reduce the extreme fatality rate
| significantly if you cut out drunk riding and even more so
| if you have more than six months of experience and wear all
| the gear all the time. It's a risky activity that attracts
| people that don't make smart decisions. When I got my
| license, the five others in my class all owned a motorcycle
| and rode them for a year without a license or training.
|
| It's a weird activity that's simultaneously very unsafe due
| to car drivers but also due to the average rider
| themselves.
| ambyra wrote:
| I think that's limited to the US. In Thailand, kids ride
| motorcycles from a very young age, and don't exhibit the
| crazy driving on that they do here. I think if more
| families drove motorcycles, it would no longer be
| considered cool or extreme, and that behavior would
| disappear. It reminds me of the high drinking age
| situation in the United States. When people here start
| drinking, they end up in emergency room, which is not the
| case in Europe, where they have a much lower drinking
| age.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Traffic fatalities in Thailand are the highest in SE Asia
| and 73% of them are on motorcycles.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_death
| s_i...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The average age of first drink in the us is like 16 years
| old. The law doesn't stop anyone from drinking it just
| serves to ruin peoples lives with a criminal record for
| behavior a huge percent of people engage with.
| ein0p wrote:
| Even better if you only worry about CO2. /s
| prmoustache wrote:
| How much of these fatalities involve some daredevils?
|
| I became a motorbike in my late 30's and I see I am not
| taking risks like a lot of riders around me. I am taking
| ample distance between me and cars, act as if I was
| invisible and other users would do the most insane thing
| possible at all times and don't swerve around vehicles. I
| am even slower descending a mountain pass on my motorbike
| than I am riding my road bicycle.
|
| I know from my experience driving cars at the same age that
| it would have been totally stupid to let 20y old me ride a
| motorbike.
|
| OTOH motorbiking would be much safer with less cars on the
| road.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I've seen way too many clips of bikers to no fault
| getting wrecked that its just not for me. At least with a
| human powered bike you have the physics of only going
| about 15 miles an hour on your side and aren't going to
| turn into a crayon.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, and you're also not going to travel on a high
| speed, congested road. For one thing, there's usually no
| point.
| _blk wrote:
| So what's the problem? Solves the problem, right? (Yes, I
| drive motorcycles)
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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.
| ambyra wrote:
| Everyone sitting in line day in day out, breathing each
| other's fumes is not healthy either:
| https://dceg.cancer.gov/news-events/news/2023/ultrafine-
| poll... The motorcycles also aren't contributing to traffic
| congestion. The auto industry wants to sell big cars with
| high profit margins, they don't care about your lung cancer
| when you're 60 years old.
| Carrok wrote:
| It's not, because they aren't following the law.
|
| If you follow the lane splitting laws as written, it is
| actually pretty safe.
| prmoustache wrote:
| you don't have to zip down at high speed on the lane
| markers when you ride a motorcycle.
|
| It is like the stupid people who say all cyclist burn the
| lights. They are just so jealous they only see the one that
| do and completely ignore those that stop at the lights.
| infecto wrote:
| Nope and this does nothing to the problem of not having
| public transit.
| id00 wrote:
| Where should I put my toddler?
| ambyra wrote:
| Depends where you live. In Colorado there's no minimum age
| to be a motorcycle passenger. In California, the minimum
| age is eight, So you would need to find some alternate
| transportation.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The question you are replying to was rhetorical
| S_A_P wrote:
| 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.
| ambyra wrote:
| 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.
| infecto wrote:
| That is not a solution to not having public transit.
| thorncorona wrote:
| I would rather not die.
| _blk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_foreman wrote:
| >> 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| The US is not a democracy. Not even at the state level. For
| many aspects and holons it is a representative republic.
| tromp wrote:
| The U.S. is a democracy, albeit a deficient one rather than
| a working one [1]. At least is the least deficient one
| amongst those.
|
| [1] https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking
| yencabulator wrote:
| No, that would be Uruguay.
|
| And for context, the ranking says USA is the 36th most
| democratic country, which is pretty darn low if you ask
| me.
| tromp wrote:
| Darn; overlooked that one hiding in the middle of all
| these Working Democracies.
| em-bee wrote:
| apparently by 2023 it got upgraded to working:
|
| https://www.democracymatrix.com/online-
| analysis/matrix#/char...
|
| after further looking it turns out that it was also
| categorized as working before 2020 and after 2020. the
| difference being 0.01 points. in 2020 it took a dive in
| rules settlement and implementation for which there is an
| obvious culprit: covid.
|
| https://www.democracymatrix.com/online-
| analysis/country#/Uni...
| vundercind wrote:
| Describing the US as a democracy is totally normal among
| actual experts in the study of governments (political
| scientists).
| tomrod wrote:
| [citation requested]
|
| I've seen representative democracy, and representative
| republic, but rarely purely one or the other.
| whythre wrote:
| Sounds like terminology slip, then. People use the term
| democracy to describe the US, often in contrast to
| authoritarian dictatorships; but that is more of a crude
| definition, a colloquialism rather than an accurate
| description of US governance.
| SSJPython wrote:
| > 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.
| infecto wrote:
| Totally agree on this one. I am a free market proponent but
| when it comes to infrastructure projects, often its hard
| for even the free market to get it right and its often
| better for a central plan to work off of (roads, electrical
| transmission lines, etc)
| deepsun wrote:
| Remember in the movie Don't Look Up they democratically
| decided that the Comet is not real, and everything will be
| fine.
| em-bee wrote:
| but there is a solution to this problem: education.
|
| and i don't mean propaganda, but teaching people not to be
| selfish, to care for others and consider others needs, to
| contribute to the betterment of society. to have
| compassion, remove prejudice, etc.
|
| if these values were taught in schools, then the next
| generation would make better choices and they would know
| better and vote for better infrastructure.
| infecto wrote:
| 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.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| No, democracy says 51% of people can enforce their will on
| 49% of people.
| troyvit wrote:
| > 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...
| someguydave wrote:
| The tax haul from a house is almost certainly higher than
| food grown on a semi-arid steppe like Colorado
| troyvit wrote:
| Totally, which is why Colorado is producing less and less
| food. I mean towns sprouted up where people settled and
| people settled to grow food, so this has been happening in
| Colorado since farming began here. As a result the land
| left for farming is getting worse and worse. The good spots
| have all been paved.
|
| But say we have to keep that, my next question is, what's
| the tax haul for a house compared to an apartment complex?
| Cities out here will choose the former as much as they can,
| increasing sprawl, because "quality of life."
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Tax haul for 10 houses are better than a 10 unit complex.
| The people also want houses opposed to apartments (hence
| the higher price).
|
| This seems to be an ideological conflict where some
| people are trying to force everyone else into options
| they dont want- why?
|
| The solution seems simple. relax zoning where it exists
| and let people who want to live in tiny urban apartments
| do so, and let people who want to live in suburban houses
| do so too.
| secstate wrote:
| Careful how you swing that axe of relaxed zoning. Got me
| nearly kicked off my local town council. "Why can't that
| town two towns over build more apartments for our day
| laborers?" they all ask in unison.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I dont understand what you are implying. Are you saying
| that NIMBYs will come after you?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It seems weird but you have to look at the market effects
| evangelist perspective to understand their position. A
| person believing in these forces might say that by having
| a large day laboring population and not building housing
| for them, there is now strong incentive for other areas
| to approve new housing and take advantage of guaranteed
| demand. And then they might go on to cite a location like
| (EDIT: not daly city but there is a bay area city that
| recently approved a ton of apartments whose name escapes
| me) that has taken this approach and really changed their
| municipal budget for the better as a result.
|
| However, the market evangelists don't understand that
| just because there is a business case to do something,
| doesn't mean anything should happen either. People and
| therefore their markets don't operate on entropy alone.
| There is a lot of irrationality that is hard to quantify.
| ksplicer wrote:
| That's a weird way to put that. Tax haul for 10 houses is
| definitely higher than the tax haul for a 10 unit
| complex, but how many 10 unit complexes can you fit in
| the space you need for 10 houses? The complex has a much
| better tax haul per square foot.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You are assuming infrastructure costs would be the same
| for a 10x denser population. I've read articles where
| even on a per capita basis just about everything is more
| costly in dense cities, from sewers to schools. It would
| take some careful scrutiny to identify what is actually
| optimal, and I expect that to depend heavily on the local
| economy. For example maybe the fact that the lima peru
| skyline looks like lima peru and the san jose usa skyline
| looks like san jose usa is as simple as being due to the
| cost of labor and materials and what best pencils out. Of
| course we won't know the answer to that experiment
| without removing zoning limits on density and seeing how
| the market responds over decades.
| Maarten88 wrote:
| > Tax haul for 10 houses are better than a 10 unit
| complex.
|
| I thought is is pretty well established that in US
| cities, poorer and denser neighborhoods are subsidizing
| the richer suburbs, tax-wise.
|
| Because 10 houses need 10 of everything, paid for by
| taxes: street pavement, sewer, water, electricity,
| internet, etc. A 10 unit complex needs only one. It all
| needs maintenance too, starting some 25 years after being
| built. Most US suburbs can't pay for their own
| maintenance from taxes.
| someguydave wrote:
| What are you talking about? King Soopers has plenty of
| food
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Colorado producing less food is probably from market
| conditions and not urbanism. Like just consider the land
| area here. Sure denver is sprawly suburbia but what
| percent is that really of the massive swath of farmland
| that is all of colorado east of the front range? Its got
| to be in the single percent range just eyeballing it on
| google maps. And farm yields have absolutely soared over
| the last 100 years so fewer farms are needed to produce
| the same food.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in
| my life
|
| How did you quantify this? Or this a purely anecdotal
| observation?
| throwup238 wrote:
| 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...
| akira2501 wrote:
| Yes, I'm aware of how one would do it, I am questioning
| whether that was actually done in this case or not.
| Further, I would question, what other places outside of
| your commute have you measured air pollution?
|
| They offered it as a data point. I think it's fine form to
| question it.
| galago wrote:
| The EPA Air Quality Index isn't everything, but it is a
| standard value displayed in a phone weather app. I'll
| notice in times and places when I suspect its bad. If you
| live outside a city in place without forest fires or
| other environmental issues you might not notice its
| there. Some people with respiratory issues monitor this
| stuff constantly.
| seadan83 wrote:
| IIRC, pollution from the tail pipe of a car falls off as
| a cubic function as you get further away from it. Similar
| for other sources of pollution. Pollution is very akin to
| smoke, hard to predict, and very localized. It can depend
| on wind, terrain, can get caught in places, underneath
| temperature inversions, etc.. All that said, the
| pollution you experience on a sidewalk next to a road,
| would be significantly higher than at the weather app
| meter station.
|
| Determining pollution exposure can be done anecdotally.
| I've done a number of long distance bike trips, the few
| times where I was next to a highway for upwards of 8
| hours - having a nose bleed by the end of that is pretty
| common for me. In that vein, recognizing air pollution
| effects is not necessarily that difficult. Symptoms
| include: sore throat, headache, burning eyes, etc.. The
| other side, people do get used to low level irritants,
| and yeah - you don't really notice its there until you go
| somewhere else and realize "the air smells different."
| EasyMark wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's a decision of employers, not policy makers
| eikenberry wrote:
| Until they decide to make it their decision and do
| something like tax companies per onsite worker and/or
| increased property taxes for office space that could have
| been better used. Lots of options.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Cities also have their own perverse incentives to
| maintaining the 9-5 downtown status quo. A whole host of
| businesses depend on these workers and they are involved
| in the chamber of commerce and various other orgs city
| leaders listen to when making decisions.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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
| duxup wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| itishappy wrote:
| > Ask the locals, try some sort of ideas?
|
| That's what the article is about...
|
| > Mr. Tafoya was working for the City Council when he heard
| about the plan to expand the highway just blocks from where
| his mother still lived. "I-70 radicalized me," he said. He
| quit his job and helped organize a statewide coalition of
| activists and community members who tried to stop the
| Interstate 70 expansion with lawsuits and protests. In the
| end, Interstate 70 was expanded. But the fight served as a
| warning to leaders like Ms. Lew that future highway
| construction would face spirited opposition.
| Drakim wrote:
| 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.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Crucially, the road network also operates at a loss
| akira2501 wrote:
| In the first level analysis.
|
| Once you realize the sheer amount of commerce and
| business that is enabled by roads you see that they pay
| for themselves several times over.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Once you realize the sheer amount of commerce and
| business that is enabled by a decent metro system you see
| that they pay for itself several times over.
|
| That's even easier to measure because these gains are
| localized.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Right. So let's have both! You can't replace the
| capabilities of roads with metro and you can't replace
| the convenience of a metro with roads.
|
| Specifically, though, viewing roads or metro as a "loss
| leader" is probably an inappropriate analysis.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Actually, it has been shown that removing cars increase
| commerce.
| akira2501 wrote:
| This is a universal outcome with research to back it up?
| prmoustache wrote:
| yes but I am about to go to bed so the link mihht come
| only tomorrow.
|
| Also some studies have calculated the impact on health in
| the society and calculated a cost to the society per km
| of driving a car and the money saved when doing the same
| km walking or with a bicycle.
| twoodfin wrote:
| The difference is that the gas tax or similar user fees
| could easily (if politically feasible) be scaled up to
| cover both capital and operating expenses for the entire
| road and highway network.
|
| If you tried to do that for merely the operating costs of
| many transit systems, they'd enter a death spiral.
| silisili wrote:
| From what I'd read, the majority of road wear comes from
| tractor trailers, who don't nearly cover their costs.
|
| It may help to either tax them directly, or indirectly
| via diesel. Yes, costs pass to consumers, but it would
| also encourage more done via ship and train, I feel. Even
| that would be a huge help to clearing up traffic and
| lowering infra spend.
| burutthrow1234 wrote:
| In TFA, they're literally taking roads and turning them into
| housing near transit hubs? This policy goes hand in hand with
| densifying housing.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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
| ocschwar wrote:
| > 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.
| strken wrote:
| 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.
| someguydave wrote:
| It is punishment if you are intentionally engineering the
| roads to cost people more time using them.
| turnsout wrote:
| But induced demand shows that traffic will only increase...
| more lanes means you're waiting more.
| someguydave wrote:
| That's because people are waiting too long on other
| roads! There is a point where traffic will not increase
| as all the demand has been sated.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| No. There is not.
|
| You've totally misunderstood induced demand. You can
| build unlimited roads and they will all be used up and
| commutes will increase for everyone.
|
| People engineer cities and development around transit. If
| you provide massive amounts of transit to a desirable
| location people will saturate it.
|
| This is why initially highway projects look like
| successes. Wow. My commute is so much better. And then.
| In a decade. They're even worse than they were
| originally.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >People engineer cities and development around transit.
| If you provide massive amounts of transit to a desirable
| location people will saturate it.
|
| well yes, that is the objective of building transit[0]:
| to get people where they would like to go. That people
| 'induce demand' by moving to a place where they can go
| where they would like to go with (initially) less
| friction is the system reequilibrating - _from places
| where demand was not adequately sated[0]_.
|
| Consider the opposite situation: we remove one lane from
| all highways, and drop the speed limits on all surface
| streets by 25 percent, and reduce the departures of all
| trains and planes by 25%. If adding capacity is bad, then
| reducing it must be good [for the economy and people's
| quality of life].
|
| [0]If demand was adequately sated, where was it induced
| from? Adequately sated here might also be read as
| 'optimally sated' or even just 'less well sated'.
| Obviously there is a point where cost exceeds the
| marginal benefit, e.g. adding 10 new bay bridges would
| surely reduce mean transit times across the bay, but at a
| patently unreasonable cost-benefit ratio.
|
| [1]Unless you like to argue that we are at the local or
| global optimum for transit capacity?
| em-bee wrote:
| in some cities where traffic was reduced in specific
| areas (usually the center), business went up, because, as
| more people were forced to walk, they also were more
| spontaneously entering shops and buying more.
| seadan83 wrote:
| It's not that adding capacity is bad, that it can be
| ineffective.
|
| Given that personal transport is such a large percentage
| of the nations' carbon footprint, adding more cars
| detracts from that goal. From that perpsective, or a
| localized pollution perspective, or people wasting time
| in traffic jams (because NO alternative exists) - those
| are bad things.
|
| I've generally lived in places in the US where driving is
| the ONLY viable option. By adding lanes, an ineffective
| tactic, instead of investing in more scalable (ie:
| effective) solutions - therein lies a problem.
|
| > well yes, that is the objective of building transit
|
| The US traffic engineer currently tries to optimize for
| throughput as defined by vehicles per minute, rather than
| passengers per minute. Therein lies the rub. Take a 2
| lane road, dedicate one for buses, and it turns out the
| passenger throughput per minute goes way up, a single bus
| can be equivalent to 50+ cars.
|
| Which is all to say, build more lanes of road for single
| occupancy cars has a limiting factor for when that is no
| longer an effective solution to the transit problem. Yet,
| adding more lanes is often still the only solution
| applied in many jurisdictions.
| jcranmer wrote:
| That's not what induced demand is.
|
| Imagine if there was a portal on your front lawn that
| allowed you instant access to downtown London. How much
| more frequently would you travel to London if it took you
| literally no time at all? All of those trips are induced
| demand--that is, it is _extra_ demand that is _induced_
| by the ease of the trip. Shifting demand from one route
| to another is, by definition, _not_ induced demand, since
| it already existed!
| someguydave wrote:
| If this were absolutely true, the wide highways would be
| completely packed at 2am
| turnsout wrote:
| Induced demand does not turn people nocturnal
| someguydave wrote:
| Neither does it magically summon infinite traffic under
| all conditions
| seadan83 wrote:
| Every time you decide to delay a trip during rush-hour,
| because of rush-hour - that is an example of what you are
| describing.
|
| As an example, in Bellevue, Washington - the evening rush
| hour starts (and is really bad) at 3pm - there are that
| many people leaving work progressively earlier that there
| is still a rush hour of people leaving work early to
| avoid the big rush-hour.
| turnsout wrote:
| You clearly misunderstand the concept of induced demand
| ksplicer wrote:
| This would only be true if additional lanes were built on
| top of each other instead of next to each other. As lanes
| are widened though they just keep pushing things apart
| and making other types of transit less pleasant, which
| will then create demand that wasn't there before (because
| people now need to be on roads longer to get where they
| want to go). There is a maximum density that cars can
| support that is LOWER than most cities are built up at.
| ambyra wrote:
| More lanes only helps the car manufacturers. A nice train
| system up and down the front range would be great. Would
| also help people get their 10,000 steps in every day
| walking to the train.
| itishappy wrote:
| Stop punishing people by widening roads! It hasn't been
| shown to decrease transit times, but it has been shown to
| harm local standards of living.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The point of widening roads is to let more people use
| them, not to decrease transit time.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Roads are widened all the time with the goal to increase
| average speeds.
|
| I can think of counter-example where it's more clear that
| travel time is not an independent variable to road width:
|
| - lanes on highways are extra wide so you drive faster.
| (The wider the lane, the faster people will drive, the
| margin of error is greatly reduced allowing a faster
| travel speed). If what you were saying is true, then
| there would be first a lot of projects to narrow lanes to
| the minimum in order to increase the number of travel
| lanes. IIRC, US highways have as a standard a 13 foot
| width (I might have that somewhat wrong), IIRC as well,
| the absolute minimum width is more like 9 feet. There
| could be almost 50% more lanes by narrowing, but that
| would reduce traffic speeds.
| adolph wrote:
| > 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.
| nullindividual wrote:
| 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.
| someguydave wrote:
| Hurting people to teach them your morality certainly has some
| interesting historical analogies
| nullindividual wrote:
| This is not an argument worth having as it can be extended
| to any law written, up to and including laws against
| murder.
| someguydave wrote:
| There is an difference between the government punishing
| murderers and government bureaucrats employed by elected
| representatives to build roads deciding to punish the
| general population by not building roads (and still being
| paid tax dollars)
| baq wrote:
| everyone's morality is different, one would hope the
| government optimizes for something else, like you paying
| more to slowly kill yourself because it costs the
| government money when you stop paying taxes early and use
| your social security net instead of working
| adolph wrote:
| > 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.
| nullindividual wrote:
| People may use sin taxes or similar as an outward excuse,
| but I doubt rational individuals want to overthrow the
| government because they are paying an extra 25 cents for
| soda or haven't had their wetlands paved over for
| additional parking spaces.
| adolph wrote:
| Goalpost movement noted.
|
| Is being "driven by the cattle prod" a valid excuse to
| hold views described as "distrusts or dislikes the
| government?"
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| kloop wrote:
| > 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.
| itishappy wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Some pretty solid skepticism all around in the comments.
| burutthrow1234 wrote:
| Yeah, the tech forum full of people making 6 figures doesn't
| like a post about mass transit and reducing personal car use.
| Who'd have imagined? The real solution is for all the poor
| Latinos in the redlined neighborhoods to go to a bootcamp and
| learn to code so they can afford a Tesla and a fresh supply of
| clean air delivered by Amazon Prime.
| rangestransform wrote:
| Bloomberg took the subway in nyc to work, not to bear a cross
| for the environment but because it was fast
|
| If a city doesn't have nyc tier public transit first, it has
| itself only to blame
| ambyra wrote:
| 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.
| gizajob wrote:
| *to not build them
| BurningFrog wrote:
| California, always leading the way, has boldly built almost
| nothing for 5 decades!
| jseliger wrote:
| 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.
| thebigman433 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| languagehacker wrote:
| 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.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| 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.
| Gigachad wrote:
| 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.
| sien wrote:
| Yep. The same should be done for public transport.
|
| In the US Farebox Recovery Ratios of 20% or less are
| common.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United
| _...
|
| Only 58% of fuel tax in Australia is spent on any kind of
| transport including rail.
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-21/fuel-excise-not-
| being...
|
| Australians drive a similar amount to the US.
|
| From
|
| https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/11/13/how-trains-
| could...
|
| Yet only 8% of the distance travelled by land in the EU is
| by rail. Even in the most train-happy countries, Austria
| and the Netherlands, the figures are 13% and 11%. In those
| countries, more than 75% of land travel is done by car.
|
| So even in Europe and Australia where cars more than pay
| for their costs people still drive a lot. This is with all
| the effort put in to public transport in Europe.
| Jensson wrote:
| You can see about half of trips are by car in for example
| Germany:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1309333/germany-
| modal-sp...
|
| Public transit isn't all, just being denser so that
| biking and walking is more viable is also a big part to
| why European cities aren't concrete wastelands full of
| parking and roads. The normal way to go and buy groceries
| is to walk not drive.
| bee_rider wrote:
| These transport options--more notably for cars, but
| everything else too--are still heavily subsidized in the
| sense that we're allowing them to ignore the cost of
| cleaning up after them, or the cost of climate change (if
| they aren't cleaned up after). If we stop that theft from
| everybody's grandkids, the economics might get some
| people to switch over to public transit at least.
|
| But it is really easy to steal from these people, they
| are tiny babies or not even born yet, they can't vote.
| Like stealing candy from a baby, except the candy is
| their planet's ecosystem. Sucks to be them, I guess.
| ksplicer wrote:
| How are you coming to the conclusion that cars are paying
| their fair share of costs? I'm not familiar with
| Australian politics at all, but a quick look found that
| local governments pay most of road maintenance, not the
| fuel excise tax[1]. Another hidden cost of cars is that
| they decrease density of cities and suburbs, which causes
| all other infrastructure to also get more expensive
| (sewage, gas, power, etc).
|
| [1] https://alga.com.au/policy-centre/roads-and-
| infrastructure/r...
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| My response to that sort of argument is yes indeed you are
| 100% correct in theory and 100% wrong in practice. It's the
| result of framing everything as a moral argument and
| shooting for perfection. That never ends well.
|
| You're better off depending on age and grim reaper to get
| old people to stop driving and focus on habituating young
| people to just not.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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...
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I think to would be extremely difficult to make the bus
| better than driving for people that already have a car. The
| most obvious option is making parking expensive or hard to
| find but I think that would lead to new politicians before
| people really embrace the bus. Reality is that americans
| dont enjoy being in enclosed spaces with strangers, hard to
| overcome that.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> 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 wrote:
| > 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#
| tromp wrote:
| 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.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> you can do other things on public transit,
|
| What can I do on public transit that people don't do in a
| car in traffic?
| Jensson wrote:
| Browse your phone? Everyone does that in public transit,
| drivers don't do that in cars. You could read HN and post
| messages for example.
| tekla wrote:
| > drivers don't do that in cars
|
| See the problem is that they do, right before they drive
| into a pedestrian or stationary object.
| basil-rash wrote:
| Get harassed by homeless? Or just men in general, if
| you're a remotely attractive female (using the broadest
| term available as it _certianly_ isn't restricted to what
| we'd appropriately call "women").
| Jensson wrote:
| Do you think public transit is full of drunkards? Its
| mostly tired people getting to or from work, those
| doesn't harass a lot of people. When its late and its a
| lot of drunks on public transit sure, but not on normal
| commutes. Columns I've read from women getting harassed
| its mostly about dance floors at clubs, not commute
| trains, when people aren't drunk they mostly keep their
| hands to themselves.
| rangestransform wrote:
| A crackhead grabbed my girlfriend's hair on the subway
| recently
|
| Tell me, anti car fundamentalists, what are the odds that
| happens in a waymo?
| vel0city wrote:
| Read a book? Watch videos on a phone? Play videogames?
| I've done all of these on the train before. I wouldn't
| dare do these while driving.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I assume
|
| > What can I do on public transit that people *don't* do
| in a car in traffic?
|
| was an intentional and funny word choice to include
| terrible drivers doing the things you listed.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Don't? Probably nothing. But they shouldn't be reading or
| using their laptops while driving!
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Investments in infrastructure is investing in huge net
| benefits for all members of society and the economy in the
| broadest sense possible. That's why it's been an
| unparalleled success all over the world to invest in roads
| for motorized vehicles and invest in electrification.
| Getting energy and goods to where they need to be as fast
| as possible is beneficial to all, no matter how you
| structure your government or economy.
|
| Roads are not only for commuting.
| currymj wrote:
| 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.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will
| drive downtown
|
| But that's good if you wan't more people to drive downtown,
| isn't it? What am I missing here?
| Jensson wrote:
| > What am I missing here?
|
| That downtown is now a concrete hellscape instead of a
| pleasant place to be. Your solution ensures that always
| happens, overall people prefer less infrastructure built
| for cars, but if it is there of course they will use it.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This just isnt true. Every metro area in the US has
| highways. Including the dense ones. NYC and Chicago are
| not concrete hellscapes
| zip1234 wrote:
| At some point when you clear out all the actual places to
| go in order to add parking and make it easy to drive
| there, people realize there is nothing down there and
| stop going, at which point you just have what happened to
| Detroit.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Have you been to downtown Detroit lately? It's beautiful
| (and easily navigable by car anytime the Detroit GP isn't
| going on...)
| crooked-v wrote:
| I think the counterpart question to that is, given how
| space-inefficient cars are, how many _actual people_ do
| you enable by adding that car capacity, and how does that
| number compare to even basic public transit options?
| seadan83 wrote:
| If it means way fewer people took alternative means, then
| perhaps it is not good. Particularly when OP mentioned
| the original goal was to reduce travel times - which the
| widening did not.
|
| "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."
| currymj wrote:
| the dream is that if i already have to drive downtown, if
| only there were more parking spots, i could always find
| one easily instead of driving around searching. but this
| often won't happen.
| thefaux wrote:
| 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.
| cebert wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I cannot comprehend why more firms aren't embracing remote
| work more than they do. It helps alleviate a lot of these
| traffic challenges and can result in reduced carbon
| footprints as well as more happy employees. I hope we start
| considering remote work as a solution to some of these
| problems more in the future.
| lkurtz wrote:
| 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.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| Let's consider a library with both a manned librarian and a
| self checkout, two different queues, same objective. Let's
| call the self checkout the 'highway' queue and the manned
| one the 'surface street' queue. Each of which could be
| expanded to improve throughput (more lanes:more self
| checkout lanes, more streets:more librarians).
|
| Ultimately the problem with anti-car rhetoric is that it
| seeks to limit access to the objective because it is
| "wrong" to use a self checkout lane and people must be
| forced to check books out in the morally correct manner.
|
| No one (reasonable) has a problem with the library adopting
| a mobile checkout app, which let's call mass transit. But
| crippling self checkout to force adoption of the mobile
| checkout app could be at best described as a 'dark
| pattern', forcing people to check out books 'the right way'
| at the cost of overall readership.
| troupo wrote:
| The people who freely use terms like "anti-car" always
| assume that the car is always the fastest most efficient
| way of getting anywhere... and then sit stuck in
| standstill on a 6-10-lane highway
| lkurtz wrote:
| In your example, replacing bulky self-checkout machines
| (analogous to removing road/surface parking real estate)
| offers a significant benefit to everyone. More room for
| what everyone actually wants most: books. The preference
| for self-checkout machines forces a cost on everyone for
| the benefit of a few.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| And in a lot of cases it does, but the important point is
| that the argument needs to be framed as you've put it:
| how do we get everyone what the most of what they want
| [transportation/books]? Most cost efficiently being
| implied of course. Being dogmatically "anti" or "pro"
| anything is looking at the problem wrong.
|
| To the specific example, removing self checkout lanes
| makes sense if the removal adds more value than the lanes
| were providing, but not if they are providing more value
| than their opportunity cost -- perhaps because of
| woefully understaffed registers and a buggy mobile
| checkout app the self-checkout machines are responsible
| for a large portion of checkouts. Which would make them
| counter productive to remove.
| seadan83 wrote:
| I believe there is way too much value judgement placed
| here.
|
| If you have two checkouts, people will use whichever one
| is faster (assuming everything else is equal). Make one
| faster, and people will shift from one line to the other.
| Though, to make it an even better analogy, make one line
| shorter, and people will start coming in from off the
| street rather than switching lines.
|
| A much better example - telecommuting. IF commute is bad,
| one is strongly incentivized to have some work-from-home
| days. If the commute time is improved, then that
| incentive disappears and one would then consider
| commuting daily.
|
| Induced demand I think is generally all about the idea
| that when something is painful - people don't do it. Take
| away that pain point, and people come. I don't begrudge
| people too much for driving, as an example I'll note I do
| my errands on a bicycle. As such, I'm strongly
| incentivized to make many stops and fewer trips.
| Meanwhile, I've noticed that people in my family will
| make a car trip errand as soon as the need comes up. "Oh,
| I need to go to the grocery store." They get back, then
| realize they also needed to go to the hardware store,
| drive out again real quick and back when had there been
| more planning, the two trips could have been combined.
| Switching to a bike is an extreme example to avoid the
| excessive/unnecessary trips that are made simply because
| it is so convenient. If the drive time were tripled, then
| there might be a behavior shift to group errands
| together. Why do so though if it takes just a few minutes
| to make the individual trips? Eventually the cost of the
| trip is sufficient that a person will start conserving,
| avoiding that cost (which can be: travelling in off-
| hours, grouping trips together, not doing a trip
| altogether, finding a different mode of transport,
| removing the trip by moving, etc...)
| seadan83 wrote:
| Ah, I think i just realized how to fix the analogy!
|
| The issue is with how many books are checked out a time.
| If the line is absurdly long, at some point you will make
| fewer trips to the library to avoid paying the cost of
| waiting in line. You would check out more books so you
| would go less frequently. You would be trading storage
| space at home in exchange for time (not having to wait in
| line). If the line were infinitely fast, then why not go
| to the library exactly after you have finished one book
| to then go get one new book.
|
| If an automated checkout then exists, the line time would
| be less, making it less expensive to go to the library,
| which means a person would be willing to increase their
| trip frequency to the library. Suddenly, you have a line
| full of people all checking out exactly one book, and
| returning the next day to do the same thing again (rather
| than checking out one weeks worth of books, and coming
| back a week later instead of the next day).
| tidbits wrote:
| 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
| ksplicer wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| People always seem to forget the bus takes advantage of
| having multiple travel lanes and faster intersection
| clearance too. City of LA is starting to take advantage of
| their wide roads and put in bus only lanes, something they
| could easily do with some paint since the pavement already
| exists.
| ksplicer wrote:
| You don't need more than two lanes to dedicate one to
| buses.
| seadan83 wrote:
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Yea but really the choice here is "go somewhere vs stay
| home", not "car vs bus". Highway expansion leads to more
| people travelling because bus service is non existent in
| the vast majority of the country. Of course some people
| need to go where theyre going, but on the margins more
| people will go to the city or what not if traffic is lower.
| l2silver wrote:
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| 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.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| While there seems to always be someone willing to spend money
| on new public goods, there doesn't seem to be much will to
| maintain the ones we have.
|
| Physical public goods, like public transport or public
| restrooms or sidewalks, are left filthy and full of hobos
| because enforcing basic laws is racist (in the critical race
| theory sense of disparate impact).
|
| Social public goods, like norms related to civility and manners
| and integrity and competence, are actively attacked because one
| or the other of them impinges on someone's conception of
| freedom or justice.
|
| It's not surprising that people don't want to expand the scope
| of public goods when we can't be trusted with the ones we've
| already inherited.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _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).
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| detourdog wrote:
| 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.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| 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.
| peapicker wrote:
| 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.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| 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.
| peapicker wrote:
| Even tho I've heard nothing, light rail from 9mile to
| downtown Parker would be another great nice to have.
|
| It is slow.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| 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.
| walthamstow wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| 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.
| walthamstow wrote:
| What I'm saying is that public transport is a reflection of
| the local society. You can accept it, work to improve it,
| or hide from it in your private vehicle.
|
| Here in London, hardly a quaint and sleepy village,
| everyone uses public transport, including beggars and
| hoodlums as you put it, and it's fine.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| We simply disagree that public transport (or society in
| general) has to accept everyone regardless of how badly
| they behave.
|
| It has nothing to do with "sectors of society".
|
| If you want me on the bus, kick off the dickheads. Making
| driving worse will not get me on the bus however much you
| attempt to manipulate me emotionally.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Not every individual, obviously, I meant all sectors of
| society, as you probably knew but chose to ignore in
| favour of a snipe
| walthamstow wrote:
| As my interlocutor has changed his message repeatedly,
| this no longer makes sense.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I'd also drive more if roads weren't full of "dickheads"
| and impaired drivers. You have exactly the same kind of
| issues while driving.
|
| I don't understand your double standard, you should apply
| the same rules for driving and public transits.
| rangestransform wrote:
| > including beggars and hoodlums as you put it, and it's
| fine.
|
| Nope in a waymo I don't have to smell piss snell, get
| begged at, have a crackhead grab my girlfriend's hair,
| have another crackhead leer at my female friend, have
| another crackhead catcall my female friend, etc etc etc
| rangestransform wrote:
| Bangkok has the most expensive public transit line relative
| to local incomes (BTS skytrain), and yet I saw nobody jump
| the turnstile there
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I have to imagine you don't like libraries either
| prmoustache wrote:
| Aren't your "indesirables" waiting at the traffic light as well
| in your part of the world?
| mitchbob wrote:
| https://archive.ph/2024.05.31-101848/https://www.nytimes.com...
| ein0p wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| the Katy Freeway already has 26 lanes since 16 years ago
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_10_in_Texas
| ein0p wrote:
| Based
| gscott wrote:
| Reasonable if you are moving to using flying cars.
| tomohawk wrote:
| 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.
| rr808 wrote:
| Back in the real world the most popular, fastest growing states
| are all Republican, have little mass transport and cars
| everywhere.
| Zamicol wrote:
| 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".
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