101–110 of 205 posts
For the West Coast, the simplest solution is electric buses with dedicated lanes. Buses better serve the existing low density sprawl than trains. Lack of infrastructure is not the problem, the roads are already built. The real problem of course is lack of political will. Every road with two lanes gets at least one dedicated bus lane. Single occupant traffic would slow to a crawl making the buses faster. Buses would r…
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No - subway trains can travel 50 mph or more - a bus can’t do that on city centre roads.
In theory, but NYCs rarely go that fast. This is changing though. I saw a news article recently about how they are lifting the speed limits on some sections of track as repaired signals come online.
Hahaha. I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on Long Island, spent a summer in Seattle, and I live in San Jose now. One can't speak for the entirety of the either coast, but no city in CA comes close to what NYC offers in terms of public transportation. And what NYC offers is a true car-free lifestyle which carries you to work, leisure, and back home via public transport. E-scooters aren't a reliable way to get anywhere yet,…
What's funny is that they mention that NYC is reluctant to use scooters but don't mention how dangerous those things are in the snow. NYC has wayyy different weather than LA, Austin etc.
Most people in NYC don't even drive snow-capable cars, and on the very few days we have snow on the streets the roads are absolute chaos.
You'd just mandate that the scooter companies disable the scooters when the city tells them to. The robust public transit system would mean that those who normally ride scooters would have no problem getting to their destination.
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Of course it would help, since an overloaded intersection causes a large backlog and waiting in line (for multiple light changes) is how each vehicle pays the cost of the backlog. With dedicated bus lanes, you skip the backlog and cross on the next light, so intersections do not undo the advantage of dedicated lanes. You don't have to take my word for it - just ride any good dedicated lane system at a high traffic ti…
I ride a dedicated BRT lane system every day. Part of the way they have overpasses and it's super fast. Then they hit downtown and have dedicated lanes but have to deal with normal intersections. It's dog slow.
Do you mean it is slow compared to the portion with no overpasses, or slow compared to vehicles w/o dedicated lanes passing through the same intersections?
Passing through intersections is never particularly fast (except perhaps at night on empty reads with sensors far enough away to turn the light green before you even get there) - but at peak times dedicated lanes help a lot even when intersections are involved because you skip the queue.
In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities.
If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation we have to do one or both of those things. Otherwise we can build all we like and no one will ride. Problem is that the same homeowners who brought you Prop 13 also want to keep getting places by car and you’re not going to get reasonable walkability until you de-prioritize the car.
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Having lived in both Seattle and DC... this is wrong, at least comparing those two. DC managed to build a new line out to Dulles with others in the works, Seattle's light rail is a joke if you're trying to use it for more than a straight line through the city. A common misconception people have about the DC metro is that it belongs to DC, but the abbreviation WMATA has nothing to do with DC for a reason. Maryland, Vi…
Boston supposedly has the north/south station rail connector project under way again. It's only been half a century. I'll believe it when I see it. Even then I won't ride on it for a few years in case the ceiling falls down.
Hahaha. I lived in Brooklyn, I lived on Long Island, spent a summer in Seattle, and I live in San Jose now. One can't speak for the entirety of the either coast, but no city in CA comes close to what NYC offers in terms of public transportation. And what NYC offers is a true car-free lifestyle which carries you to work, leisure, and back home via public transport. E-scooters aren't a reliable way to get anywhere yet,…
Yes, NYC is pretty much the only "city" in the US when viewed at global scale, that much is well known. Every other city may as well be podunk.
The article doesn't really mention that most of these expansions will be ready 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed). If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college. What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices a…
> What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? > Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices and airbag helmets. > Few, if any, combustion engine cars > Truly self driving cars If history has taught us anything, it's that technological progress is orders of magnitude slower than people expect. The infrastructure of NYC, LA, Seattle, San Francisco, etc will not look much diffe…
The world 20-40 years ago was far more primitive than it is today.
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What's funny is that they mention that NYC is reluctant to use scooters but don't mention how dangerous those things are in the snow. NYC has wayyy different weather than LA, Austin etc.
or even how insanely crowded NYC is in general. It might make sense to have scooters in a less crowded neighborhood in Brooklyn, but try driving through lower Manhattan on a scooter...
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Boston supposedly has the north/south station rail connector project under way again. It's only been half a century. I'll believe it when I see it. Even then I won't ride on it for a few years in case the ceiling falls down.
That has to be the most frustrating part of bostons transportation, none of the big hubs are conveniently connected.