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No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

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Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#111

Post by wahern »

thedance wrote: post #96
new_realist wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are fewer of them and they are more efficient, running at higher passenger utilization.

This can’t be true. Taxis often run with zero passengers, whereas a private car never does.

I could only find two studies on capacity utilization:

* Judd Cramer, Alan B. Krueger, "Disruptive Change in the Taxi Business: The Case of Uber", 2016, https://www.nber.org/papers/w22083

and

* Y.M. Nie, "How can the taxi industry survive the tide of ridesourcing? Evidence from Shenzhen, China", 2017 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X1...

Both seem to confirm that ride-hailing has better utilization rates, though Nie qualifies that--e.g. sometimes too many private cars might turn out. However, at least in San Francisco all the licensed taxi cabs also use ride-hailing apps, so their utilization should be at least as good as unlicensed cars.

The real issue with ride-hailing is induced demand. In places like San Francisco public transit took a huge dip, and ride-hailing simply isn't anywhere as efficient as mass transit. Studies have shown that ride-hailing has contributed to a substantial increase in traffic and traffic delay: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaau2670

Ride-hailing can even be worse than personal cars because a personal car has a 100% utilization rate at minimum, whereas the average utilization rate for ride-hailing, even accounting for multiple riders (e.g. >100% for any particular trip) is Ride-hailing only pencils out for the last mile--to and from transit hubs in a local vicinity. But too many people take it to cross town. It's hard to blame ride-hailing companies, though. Cities need to be build more subways. Perhaps companies like Uber, if they were allowed to build subways as cheaply as The Boring Company can do (i.e. small diameter tunnel, though still larger than London and Budapest; no red tape; no extravagant stations) and to capture the revenue, would invest the money. They'd finally be able to ditch drivers, too, because driverless cars will probably only ever work, if they work at all, in moderately dense residential areas.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#112

Post by dkarl »

half_way wrote: post #36
asjw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more people are using their bicycles now means that there will be less people left stuck in traffic in their cars It doesn't follow though More people using bikes is not a direct consequence of less people using cars It could be, but there is no cause-effect relationship For example in Milan where I live more people are using bikes because many people moved in recently and owning a car is expensive here and the wea…

> Most of them don't even hold a driving license Maybe true in Milan, but not anywhere in the US. Driving is near imperative in all areas of the country, unfortunately even in big cities, meaning everyone who can get a license, does.

I live in the U.S., and I've been surprised to hear from several people I know that their kids refused to learn to drive and get a driver's license. They all live in the suburbs, so it's utterly impractical and in every case took their parents completely by surprise. Their reasoning is, driving is harmful and passé and everybody knows we should live in dense cities and take public transit. They've never lived in a place where it's practical, but the place and way they live already seems like a relic of the past to them.

To me it's stunning how powerful that presumption is, that suburban teenagers will forgo the independence that a car would give them because they perceive it as a relic of an age when people didn't know better. It gives me a lot of hope that in the future there will be political support for more radical changes than we've seen up to now. I love where these kids' idea of normal is at. However, it also makes me afraid of the degree of political and cultural polarization we're headed towards.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#113

Post by Symbiote »

jiofih wrote: post #95
brnt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Dutchie blunders like the one you mention are so stupifying... Takes you a ten minute visit to NL to figure out why you need to separate modalities consistently, yet even as close as Germany and France cities are designed so obviously by people who never ever bike.

The curb is a hazard to cyclists, more so than a crash with inattentive pedestrians. The majority of Dutch cycle lanes are level with the sidewalk and how often do you hear of accidents (not caused by mopeds)?

> The majority of Dutch cycle lanes are level with the sidewalk

That doesn't fit with my memories of visiting the Netherlands, or a quick Streetview-tour of The Hague.

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0645825,4.2251355,3a,75y,172...

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#114

Post by _jal »

Traster wrote: post #51

>His conclusion: When cities shut streets off to cars, people drive less. The myth of a “carmageddon”-style traffic jam is apparently overblown. This seems to completely ignore the fact that what actually has occured here is that the reduction of drivers is a negative for those drivers. Those drivers now either have to cycle or use public transport instead of their cars or have to move. That might seem positive to th…

Yes, there are winners and losers. The "loss" here is pretty tiny, but I'm sure there are a few people, by accident of where they live/work, for whom this is very inconvenient.

I don't mean to be crass, but, so what? There are zero-sum tradeoffs made by cities every. single. day. In comparison to, say, adding a new road, this is a tiny inconvenience for a tiny group of people.

I think it is strictly the novelty of drivers "losing" for once that brings this sort of thinking out. Things have been tilted towards cars for so long that if they aren't treated as entitled to environmental dominance always and everywhere, it seems like a status attack.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#115

Post by bparsons »

Symbiote wrote: post #3

The linked article (1) says the redesign will have "sidewalk level bike lanes". If there's a way for local people to comment on this, please encourage these to be changed to in-between-road-and-sidewalk level. (Or road level with a continuous kerb in between). This makes it much, much easier for pedestrians not to accidentally wander into the lane. (2) 1 https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Car-free-Market-...…

Real bike lanes make a huge difference. They finally started doing it in Vancouver and it completely transformed the neighborhoods.

It is the single cheapest/easiest thing a city can do to improve a street.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#116

Post by stevenwoo »

There was a world wide meeting on transportation similar to the Paris climate change one, same result, almost everyone but USA committing to better standards for future - https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/02/1057721 The USA response that the market and self driving cars will fix this was pretty delusional.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#117

Post by dublinben »

close04 wrote: post #61
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd just like to point out that we've known that mixing classes of traffic in the same space is bad for safety since the industrial revolution brought heavy rolling objects to the workplace. This stuff is well known. It's a politics and resources problem.

If you bother to build the cycling lane then differentiating it a bit more obviously from the sidewalk is not such a big expenditure. Loot at this [0] setup (just outside of Copenhagen). Simply having a few centimeters of difference in height between the 3 lanes (pedestrians, bikes, cars) makes them very obvious and a lot harder to accidentally cross them. It also allows treating the cycling lane as another traffic l…

Do drivers actually respect cycling lanes like the first one? In the US we have much more separated lanes which are routinely disrespected by drivers.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#118

Post by dsfyu404ed »

acdha wrote: post #105
chrisseaton wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is driving an imperative even in cities like NY and SF? Where would you even be driving to or from in cities like that? Where would you be parking? I wouldn’t attempt to drive in NY in a million years.

It's not mandatory but it's quite common because it's been so heavily subsidized for the previous century. Fire up street view and look through residential neighborhoods: notice how many street parking spots and driveways there are? Here in DC, the figure is something like 40% of residents not owning cars in a city with well above average transit options by U.S. standards. That leaves a lot of people driving and if y…

>Fire up street view and look through residential neighborhoods: notice how many street parking spots and driveways there are?

Number of parking spaces means nothing without the number of residential units. Two lanes (one on each side) of street parking in a neighborhood that's all six apartment triple deckers is very different than two lanes of street parking in a neighborhood that's all single family homes.

Some of the most walk-able and bike-able places (at least in the US) still have street parking in their residential neighborhoods, there's just not much of it relative to the number of people so people use other options.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#119

Post by ghaff »

abyssin wrote: post #13
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same in Austria, we simply grew accustomed to bikes sharing the road with cars, busses and trams which I'm sure would be terrifying to someone from NL. The problem is, after the post war boom, the cities were planned for cars and now there's simply no space left for cycling lanes unless we ban cars which as much as I wish for will never happen in my lifetime.

Why do you think it will never happen? It did happen and is happening in several places, like Brussels at the moment.

I was in Brussels a few weeks ago. And, while the work is still in progress, my reaction was that the area near the Bourse was much more inviting than in times past. I've actually been sort of negative on Brussels previously and I didn't feel that to the same degree this year.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#120

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

Quequau wrote: post #85
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also live in Graz now and as much as it loves to advertise itself as a bike friendly city, outside of the inner city center and student quarters biking here is very dangerous due to poor infrastructure cyclists have to share with pedestrians, cars or trams and cyclists not respecting any rules (crossing on red lights, never hand signaling a turn or a stop, etc.). Compared to the Netherlands or Denmark, biking cultu…

You've reminded me that there's a five-way intersection next to Uni Graz. Some years ago they basically removed all traffic signals and most signs, basically ceding the whole area to priority for pedestrians. When I first came across it the apparent chaos was a little concerning but after walking through that place on more than one occasion I was surprised how well it worked. I've not actually been to that part of to…

That intersection[1] works so well without signs by accident not by design, since it's in the most central and densest part of the city with lots of cafes that's crawling with students and cyclists coming from every direction so drivers have no choice but to drive slowly and carefully. They can't replicate this in other parts outside the city center where cars pick up speed.

[1]https://maps.app.goo.gl/WeN2Q2MhVdA8Y1RK8

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