201–210 of 302 posts
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Piling on the nitpicking. Portugal isn't 'on the way' to New Zealand from Tokyo regardless of speed or timelines.
It is "on the way" if that's what your schedule shows. If you need to leave work, pick up the kids, and arrive at home in that order, then you'll pick up the kids on your way home regardless of spatial arrangements.
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Counterpoint: I grew up in an area which allegedly has some of the worst roads in the country. They're fine . Sure they're not silky-smooth surfaces ready for MotoGP but contemporary mass-market vehicles have no problem traversing them. At worst you're going to feel uncomfortable for half a second. Really bad construction might slow you down 10-20 minutes. Meanwhile America's best, most expensive, most politically su…
My lived experience is that public transit is great. I take BART 5 days a week and have a 15 minute late experience once every few months. This to me is something like the “I can’t live in a city because I can’t afford a 2000 square foot detached unit” issue. You just need to modify your expectations. I’m far happier and less stressed not driving every day - but yes, it’s noisy and I have to stand and sometimes somet…
We don't pay for road usage!!!
Anything useful that is handed out to consumers at the cost of $0.00 will be overused and develop a shortage.
This is so ingrained that it can be hard to think about.
Anyway, if we had to pay to access roads, depending on the traffic load, traffic could always flow at full speed, road investments could pay for themselves and a lot of things would be healthier in society.
I know this argument doesn't convince a lot of people... I think we just have to wait for some society to implement it first and the the rest of us can wonder at the miracle and slowly copy it. Perhaps the Chinese? The seem keen on innovating, for better and for worse :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint: I grew up in an area which allegedly has some of the worst roads in the country. They're fine . Sure they're not silky-smooth surfaces ready for MotoGP but contemporary mass-market vehicles have no problem traversing them. At worst you're going to feel uncomfortable for half a second. Really bad construction might slow you down 10-20 minutes. Meanwhile America's best, most expensive, most politically su…
Countercounter point. When comparing the best roads in the world (Say the German Autobahn) to the best mass transportation in the world (Japan Railways Group) we see that when mass transportation is done correctly it can be timely and reliable. It is also cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient than roads. We shouldn't limit our sources of inspiration to one continent when developing transportation solutions.
Inspiration is cheap. Disenfranchising the stakeholders who reliably mess things up is the real work.
Here is the BIG elephant on the road. Why road consumption is different than all other consumptions: We don't pay for road usage!!! Anything useful that is handed out to consumers at the cost of $0.00 will be overused and develop a shortage. This is so ingrained that it can be hard to think about. Anyway, if we had to pay to access roads, depending on the traffic load, traffic could always flow at full speed, road in…
Since driving is the preferred mode of transport, the fact that a reduction in traffic encourages more driving (and congestion) should not surprise anyone.
The question we should be asking is whether people are being better served stuck at home afraid of traffic or would they be better off getting out and going places.
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> we can consume as much transport as we get. If it was cheap and fast I could have ramen lunch in Tokyo. Pick up the kids from crèche in Portugal on my way home to New Zealand. Nitpicking this from a physical perspective, consuming this amount of travel fundamentally requires you to experience a certain amount of acceleration. I'm pretty sure that the itinerary you describe here would kill you, regardless of how che…
At 1g constant acceleration/decceleration you could make it to the Moon (380,000 km) in 3 hours.
A six hour commute is unrealistic, but by my calculations a constant 1g of acceleration is enough to cover a round trip from Wellington, New Zealand to Tokyo and another from Wellington to Lisbon in under 90 minutes of daily commute.
I note that in reality, we don't ever travel with constant nonzero acceleration, but it's fair to ignore that under the explicit assumption that there are no costs involved.
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Bike infrastructure can in fact increase congestion. Fivethirtyeight did a study in Minneapolis on bike lanes constructed earlier this decade and showed that bike lanes did increase congestion for 10 roads they looked at. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-t... Anecdotally, the mid sized city I lived in added a bike lane experimentally on my commute to work. The lanes going into the city decre…
Your windshield perspective is showing. The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent. Fifty cars in the same place is an epic disaster but fifty bikes in the same place is not a problem. Take for example this data in London, which was produced in response to a question from a member of the public having essentially the same bias as your statement "nobody us…
Here is the BIG elephant on the road. Why road consumption is different than all other consumptions: We don't pay for road usage!!! Anything useful that is handed out to consumers at the cost of $0.00 will be overused and develop a shortage. This is so ingrained that it can be hard to think about. Anyway, if we had to pay to access roads, depending on the traffic load, traffic could always flow at full speed, road in…
Some cities have special lanes you have to pay for to use during rush hour, FastPass is one system. They charge by number of wheels.
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Lack of mid-distance transit is also a huge problem. Mid-sized USA cities tend to have half decent transit around their urban core (often woefully under-served especially in cities that don't have either trains/subways or else dedicated right-of-way for buses, but none-the-less serviceable). However, the thing that mid-sized cities almost uniformly lack in the US is any form of regional commuter rail.
We have regional commute rail in the SF Bay Area and in the NYC Metropolitan Region. It doesn't seem to have done much except drive up housing prices near rail stations and create silliness like 5-yr waiting lists for parking at them. It seems clear that commuter rail is not a silver bullet. Housing density is probably what we really need.