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Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

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Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#271

Post by ummonk »

CalRobert wrote: post #228
ummonk wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>4) You could cycle the long distances needed on the road, but the US has made it legal to kill people with your car so long as you're sober, so this is dangerous. No, the US accepts that traffic accidents happen, and absent irresponsible behavior like drunk driving, drivers should not be held responsible for accidents. When these accidents involve collisions between cars, they're usually simple fender-benders. When…

I think operating your car in a way that kills a cyclist, where there could be cyclists (anywhere not the freeway) should be criminal negligence, not an "accident". Presumed liability laws exist in places that are nice to cycle so drivers know they could face real legal consequences. I can't go accidentally shooting people on the street and expect just a fine. Generally people who kill others with their car get off f…

>I can't go accidentally shooting people on the street and expect just a fine.

On the other hand if a gun range built a pathway for people downrange right by the targets, you wouldn't be the one responsible if you accidently shoot someone. It would be the gun range's fault for creating such a dangerous setup in the first place.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#272

Post by scythe »

baddox wrote: post #193
scythe wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I’d rather be in traffic. I’ll grant trains are way better for the atmosphere and take up less space, but people are noisy and smelly.

That’s not an uncommon view, I’m sure, but I suspect if the externalities of driving an automobile with a single person in it were internalized, so each driver paid the full cost of driving, you and a lot of people would change your minds and instead invest in some (comparably vastly cheaper) noise-canceling headphones for the train/bus.

Minus air pollutuon, I’m not convinced. With air pollution cars are obviously way worse. For commuting your point stands: I prefer current trains to Bay Area traffic because they’re not crowded. But for everything else the car wins by a mile.

The land use required to merely own cars is not great but it’s not the primary cause of sprawl in the US. There are plenty of examples that show car-oriented development with transit to a city center can work at up to 2000 people per km^2 and a typical American suburb has less than a fourth of that population density.

The traffic deaths can be reduced dramatically by reducing miles travelled and speed, but if we’re playing that game they also rank lower than infectious disease which spreads just fine on transit. Traffic deaths also are only a bit higher than suicide in America and lower than it in Europe; suicide is a crude example of the excess death burden of unhappiness, which ought to be considered.

And furthermore I’m not even convinced you’ve been on a crowded train. BART is almost never truly crowded. Trains in Wuhan are crowded. Crowded often means literally shoving your way in if you want to go anywhere. And the person I responded to claimed he thinks about the tollbox operator on a crowded train.

So yeah, dying in traffic on an ugly highway? Cool story bro.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#273

Post by Johnny555 »

lazyjones wrote: post #244
Johnny555 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally, people live near transit (not so common in this country, but Transit Oriented Development near transit stations is becoming more popular), so they don't necessarily need to drive to the station. But even when they do, it's easier to handle traffic spread among dozens of stations spread out over 100 miles of track than to have all of those commuters drive to the city center.

> But even when they do, it's easier to handle traffic spread among dozens of stations spread out over 100 miles of track than to have all of those commuters drive to the city center. Commuters don't all drive to the city center, they drive to 1000s of working places and arguably that's easier to handle traffic-wise than the traffic around fewer train stations (in one city!).

No, then you end up in a situation like the SF Bay Peninsula where businesses are spread among small office parks that are hard to serve by transit, and it's impossible for families to live near where they work since the spouses may end up working in offices 30 miles apart, so at least one of them is in for a long commute and since there's no planning or zoning that kept their employer near transit, then they end up driving... or taking the employer sponsored shuttle bus if they are lucky enough to have that option.

If businesses were spread out near major transit lines, that'd be another matter, but as it is now, the density is too low to serve well, transfers are a hard sell to commuters, no one wants to commute 40 minutes by train only to have to wait 15 minutes to transfer to a bus that takes another 15 minutes to get them to work.

VTA transit tries to serve a huge area with light rail, but everything is so spread out and there are so many stops that it takes forever, you can take light rail the 12 miles from downtown San Jose to Mountain View, but it'll take over an hour with 28 (!) stops in between. You could bike faster.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#274

Post by twblalock »

belenos46 wrote: post #42
fabioborellini wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Old World we have public mass transit. One vehicle can transport a thousand commuters, and it does not need to be stored in the most desired area of the city for the duration of a working day. Sometimes it looks like the Silicon Valley is trying to solve transit problems either against the laws of physics and economics or, alternatively, ignoring solutions that were there already in the 1800s.

Likely the latter, and for that we can largely thank large motorist groups in the US. Michelin comes to mind, as they created their "Michelin star" metric to give people a reason to drive places, and then lobbied like hell to create town/city layouts that mandated driving. A hundred years later, driving is a massive part of US culture, and we have trouble seeing the problem because that's "just how things are".

This scheme would not have succeeded if people preferred public transit to driving.

Honestly it's not hard to see why it succeeded. Back in the early postwar period, driving was cheap and easy, parking was plentiful, traffic was light, and the new interstate highway system made long-distance car travel practical.

Even if the motorist groups had not lobbied for it, cars would have taken over anyway because people liked them so much.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#275

Post by twblalock »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #29
lmm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in London. Many people don't own cars. Many who moved here with a car give up their cars. Working public transport systems leave everyone better off.

Public transport in London is incredibly good, I'm always amazed. But then it's NOT run by 5 competing companies that couldn't care less about linked up journeys.

On the other hand, transit in Tokyo and Osaka is run by a number of public and private companies, some of which compete with each other, and linked-up journeys are no problem at all. It's totally doable.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#277

Post by StillBored »

bb88 wrote: post #159
Isinlor wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also question of externalities. Building roads is not without hidden costs. Splitting communities in cities, making distances to travel longer because adding places for streets and parking places spreads infrastructure, air pollution killing people, lack of movement killing people, noise pollution, ugliness etc. I really like Dutch approach. Take away some space from cars in order to build biking infrastruct…

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…

Sounds like Austin, where the prevailing wisdom is to covert car lanes to bike lanes. Which causes nothing but problems because the couple people a day who use the lanes in no way compensates for the cascading problems as fewer cars can drive through an intersection during a light cycle, which means the cross streets start to pile up/etc.

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#278

Post by electric_muse »

StillBored wrote: post #277
bb88 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like Austin, where the prevailing wisdom is to covert car lanes to bike lanes. Which causes nothing but problems because the couple people a day who use the lanes in no way compensates for the cascading problems as fewer cars can drive through an intersection during a light cycle, which means the cross streets start to pile up/etc.

This is happening in New York right now. Massive investment in bike infrastructure. But congestion hasn’t improved at all. Combined with increased ride sharing, NYC roads are now 15% slower. We need solutions for average people, not high brow idealism for people who have fancy bikes and showers at work.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/ride-ha...

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#279

Post by CalRobert »

ummonk wrote: post #271
CalRobert wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think operating your car in a way that kills a cyclist, where there could be cyclists (anywhere not the freeway) should be criminal negligence, not an "accident". Presumed liability laws exist in places that are nice to cycle so drivers know they could face real legal consequences. I can't go accidentally shooting people on the street and expect just a fine. Generally people who kill others with their car get off f…

>I can't go accidentally shooting people on the street and expect just a fine. On the other hand if a gun range built a pathway for people downrange right by the targets, you wouldn't be the one responsible if you accidently shoot someone. It would be the gun range's fault for creating such a dangerous setup in the first place.

Very true. The designers of modern roads are culpable for many, many deaths. People were outraged much as we are by school shootings when drivers first started killing people. http://thedollop.libsyn.com/193-when-the-cars-came

Re: Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)

#280

Post by Johnny555 »

scythe wrote: post #272
baddox wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not an uncommon view, I’m sure, but I suspect if the externalities of driving an automobile with a single person in it were internalized, so each driver paid the full cost of driving, you and a lot of people would change your minds and instead invest in some (comparably vastly cheaper) noise-canceling headphones for the train/bus.

Minus air pollutuon, I’m not convinced. With air pollution cars are obviously way worse. For commuting your point stands: I prefer current trains to Bay Area traffic because they’re not crowded. But for everything else the car wins by a mile. The land use required to merely own cars is not great but it’s not the primary cause of sprawl in the US. There are plenty of examples that show car-oriented development with tr…

I prefer current trains to Bay Area traffic because they’re not crowded. But for everything else the car wins by a mile.

Which Bay Area trains are you taking that are not crowded? Both BART and Caltrain are full during commute hours -- Caltrain express trains are usually standing room only (in rail cars that aren't well designed for standing passengers) and BART is running crush-loads out of Embarcadero in the evening.

The Caltrain local trains are usually less full but those all stop trains take forever to go any significant distance. (SF to RWC is about twice as long on a local as on a baby-bullet)

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