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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)

#291

Post by ubercow13 »

dovvdkc wrote: post #267
ubercow13 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered using the bike lane yourself?

To start off that’s ableist. And reeks of privilege (can he afford to live a biking distance to work?) But that doesn’t matter - someone unilaterally changes something and everyone else is supposed to get with the program or find a hole to die in.

I don't think its ableist, I wasn't suggesting that there shouldn't be a road for cars, or that they should even bike themselves. I was just wondering if they had considered why they didn't want to use it as that might shed light on why it wasn't a successful bike lane.

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

#292

Post by magduf »

closeparen wrote: post #109
magduf wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could teleport around like that instantly, I'd be acting like that too. However, real-world transport has a real cost: time (in addition to money for fuel/maintenance/insurance/etc.). If teleporting was cheap but took 3 hours for every trip, I'm not going to be having any kind of lunch in Tokyo unless I'm living there. The weird thing is how much time Americans are willing to waste on a commute. So many of them…

>just so they can have some big McMansion in the exurbs with a giant lawn they have to spend hours maintaining every weekend. What other options provide good public schools, homes that are pleasant to be inside, and a clean/safe/well-functioning environment? I hate sprawl and fast-casual architecture as much as the next guy, but it is the only thing that can grow at scale under our economic and political reality. Alt…

>What other options provide good public schools, homes that are pleasant to be inside, and a clean/safe/well-functioning environment?

Try traveling to Europe or Japan sometime. They have dense cities with nice homes, great public schools, and a clean and safe environment. Japan in particular has basically zero crime. Cities in Europe are walkable and bikeable, and it's commonplace to have residential units on top of commercial space so that people can easily walk to a nearby cafe or restaurant or grocery store. You see this in NYC too to an extent.

>I hate sprawl and fast-casual architecture as much as the next guy, but it is the only thing that can grow at scale under our economic and political reality.

Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Sprawl doesn't scale, that's the whole problem: you're just going to get worse commute times, more traffic congestion, etc. It isn't going to help, it's going to hurt.

>So of course we are going to see a large and growing segment of the population in the only kind of housing it's both legal and profitable to build.

Then you need to change the laws.

>Commuting 1-2 hours each way is something transit riders do; for drivers it's very rare.

Here in the DC area, it's extremely common.

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

#293

Post by magduf »

throw0u1t wrote: post #164
ip26 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing is how much time Americans are willing to waste on a commute. Some studies have basically found that people chronically overvalue how happy a nice house will make them, and undervalue how unhappy a long commute will make them. I don't know if Americans are uniquely guilty of this, but humans are prone to lots of little errors like this.

I spent the last year living 30 minutes walk from work in Central London. Neither the 4 mile walk through congested, diesel-fumed London or the small, expensive flat with single glazed windows did make me happier. I now live 30 miles outside London and take a 30 minute train to work. It is much cheaper, much more pleasant (I stand on the train most of the time) and I get to hear the birds and smell the fresh air when…

Um, I don't see your point here. You swapped a 30-minute commute for a 30-minute commute....

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

#294

Post by magduf »

bradknowles wrote: post #139
sbov wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know a single American commuter who thinks nothing of spending 1-2 hours in traffic each way. Every commuter I know balks at a single way commute of more than 30 minutes. Any commuter I know that has ever spent more than 1 hour in traffic each way moved within a couple years to be closer. You're assigning beliefs to Americans that, in my experience, they don't have in any significant numbers.

When I lived and worked in the DC area from 1989 to 1998, it was automatically assumed by everyone I knew that if you were going to commute anywhere by car and you had to intersect with major infrastructure like the beltway, then you'd be spending at least an hour on the road, just to go one way. So, that's a one-hour commute right there for many people in the Northern Virginia/DC/Suburban Maryland area. And at that…

>When I lived and worked in the DC area from 1989 to 1998, it was automatically assumed by everyone I knew that if you were going to commute anywhere by car and you had to intersect with major infrastructure like the beltway, then you'd be spending at least an hour on the road, just to go one way. So, that's a one-hour commute right there for many people in the Northern Virginia/DC/Suburban Maryland area.

It hasn't changed, and if anything it's worse. The traffic on I-66 into town every morning looks like a parking lot, all so a bunch of people can live in McMansions in Manassas and Haymarket and Gainesville.

>And at that time, I knew people who commuted down to the Pentagon from Baltimore, so spending 2-3 hours on their commute, one-way.

Yep, I've met people who live in DC and commute to Baltimore (because they don't want to live in Baltimore...), and people who live in NoVA and commute to Annapolis.

This stuff is common here. You can see it in the massive traffic jams on I-66 and on the beltway every workday: those people aren't getting to work in 15-30 minutes in that traffic.

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

#295

Post by magduf »

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #175
magduf wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could teleport around like that instantly, I'd be acting like that too. However, real-world transport has a real cost: time (in addition to money for fuel/maintenance/insurance/etc.). If teleporting was cheap but took 3 hours for every trip, I'm not going to be having any kind of lunch in Tokyo unless I'm living there. The weird thing is how much time Americans are willing to waste on a commute. So many of them…

> So many of them think nothing of spending 1-2 hours in traffic, each way, every workday, just so they can have some big McMansion in the exurbs with a giant lawn they have to spend hours maintaining every weekend. That would be a poor decision indeed. But more likely, in my experience, is that they live far from their work because there is no affordable housing near their work.

That's not my experience at all, even here in the DC area. Houses far from work still cost a lot, what's different is the cost per square foot. The problem is that those people aren't willing to live in a smaller dwelling, or a non-single-family home. Then they whine about there not being any "affordable housing" because they can't afford a free-standing house with a giant lawn right in the middle of (or close to) the city. There is affordable housing, but it means they need to settle for a condo or townhouse.

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

#296

Post by magduf »

phil248 wrote: post #128
closeparen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>just so they can have some big McMansion in the exurbs with a giant lawn they have to spend hours maintaining every weekend. What other options provide good public schools, homes that are pleasant to be inside, and a clean/safe/well-functioning environment? I hate sprawl and fast-casual architecture as much as the next guy, but it is the only thing that can grow at scale under our economic and political reality. Alt…

"What other options provide good public schools, homes that are pleasant to be inside, and a clean/safe/well-functioning environment?" Cities at one time were far superior to non-cities in precisely those ways. It is not an inherent flaw of cities, just a problem with how we manage American cities.

At one time? Go to cities in Europe or Japan and they still are!

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

#297

Post by JAlexoid »

dovvdkc wrote: post #267
ubercow13 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered using the bike lane yourself?

To start off that’s ableist. And reeks of privilege (can he afford to live a biking distance to work?) But that doesn’t matter - someone unilaterally changes something and everyone else is supposed to get with the program or find a hole to die in.

Like the motorists changed laws concerning pedestrian traffic and road laws?

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

#298

Post by JAlexoid »

bb88 wrote: post #284
alistairSH wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of related infrastructure is a real problem. Bike lanes built one at a time, and not connected. So, if you happen to live and work along a single bike lane, great. If not, you're back in the car. Lack of bicycle facilities at destinations. My office has a tiny, poorly constructed rack outdoors. I wouldn't trust it to hold my bicycle, even with a good lock. Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything mo…

> Bike lanes built one at a time, and not connected. That's probably the number one problem of bike lanes. The second problem is that if you add a bike lane, you have to take something away. Usually it's parking or traffic lanes. And neither of those are super popular. > Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating Or there's snow on the ground 4…

On street parking is a horrible thing to have in any urban area. That MUST be banned.

Bike lanes are beneficial in urban areas, and that's pretty much it.

But when it comes to US, the bike lanes is the last thing when it comes to the kindergarten level of infrastructure planning. In my experience infrastructure in US was planned exclusively by NIMBYs...

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

#299

Post by JAlexoid »

electric_muse wrote: post #278
StillBored wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Average newyorker isn't a driver, dear. Congestion isn't going to go away in NYC. Mostly because New York wasn't built for this much traffic in the first place... And new bike lanes is a welcome sight in NYC. Based on how much CitiBikes move around the city, you can easily determine that those bike lanes are a welcome change.

But then... I haven't been to a city with a good motor vehicle infrastructure in a long time. Certainly none of the major US cities are designed well to handle even remotely appropriate levels of private motor vehicle use.

PS: I have a car in NYC. Use it for some cases, but would never drive daily in NYC.

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

#300

Post by lmm »

twblalock wrote: post #275
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Japanese companies do not have much of a reputation for red-in-tooth-and-claw competition (e.g. the "gentleman's agreement" about advertised car horsepower).
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