611–620 of 653 posts
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"Low density" just means that the entire area is covered in asphalt. That's not what well designed looks like.
Yes, and? > That's not what well designed looks like. It is more flexible, people-friendly, enables better living. So yeah, "well designed".
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Yes, and? > That's not what well designed looks like. It is more flexible, people-friendly, enables better living. So yeah, "well designed".
Unless you’re one of those people who can’t drive?
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2000 people per hour is really not that much. And reducing density will not buy you much - density itself doesn't mean anything. If you have a suburb with 50 000 people living there and an office park with 25 000 people working there (both not particularly high numbers), you get a traffic flow of 25 000 people moving both ways, during rush hour. That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the poi…
> That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the point. No, that's called "lying by omission". A person working in an office park doesn't live in one particular housing area assigned to it. So you get a distributed flow instead. And it's also why transit sucks (sucked, and will always suck): it's unlikely that there's a direct fast transit route between your house and your job. And each connecti…
This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
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Private passenger car driver is paying 12x Taxi toll / 6x Uber toll. Taxi/Uber toll is passed directly onto he rider. Why should it be cheaper to be chauffeured? Also your average Taxi may not even cross into the CPZ 12x per day, so unclear we are making it up on volume either.
Small correction, every ride that starts and/or ends in the zone incurs the fee so a taxi that enters, does 12 trips, then leaves pays the same amount as a private car even though they only entered the zone once.
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That is literally what the money is for
You're gonna need a lot more money than that when ~40% of MTA total spending goes to pay pensions and healthcare for people that don't even work anymore by ~2040. You need ~35% just to keep the system running functioning (which does not include operations - like the actual drivers). That's only going to leave you ~25% leftover for everything else - and a non-trivial percentage of that comes from the Federal Governmen…
PDF Source, page 9: https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-17-2025...
It should be noted that the MTA has made at least some pension reforms so that current and future employees won't be as costly. Employee contributions are increased as well as the retirement age.
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> That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the point. No, that's called "lying by omission". A person working in an office park doesn't live in one particular housing area assigned to it. So you get a distributed flow instead. And it's also why transit sucks (sucked, and will always suck): it's unlikely that there's a direct fast transit route between your house and your job. And each connecti…
I almost got into an accident today when a car swerved 4 lanes to the right because an absentminded driver wanted to take the exit at the last second. Like most attentive drivers, I don't like driving on public roads — it brings out the worst in us. This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
> This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
Yeah. They are waaaaay too good at allowing people to move, so urbanists wage an all-out war on them.
Transit has this inherent problem: it HAS to suck. You can't realistically build a fast public transit network allowing easy arbitrary point-to-point trips. It's just mathematically impossible. So transit does what it can only kinda-sorta do well: move people to Downtowns from dense living residential areas.
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> Public transport is already largely cheaper than owning a car in many places, yet people drive. This is not a binary distinction. If you save $0.20 by taking public transport but it takes an hour longer, of course people drive. If you save $3 by taking public transport and it only costs you five minutes, that's different math. > You can get anywhere in Germany with this, and 58 EUR is not even remotely achievable a…
> Which it can, if you make it zero. But you can't. Transit costs A LOT, its costs are just pushed onto car owners. Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?" "bUT poOR peoPLE@@!!!" - poor people also deserve comfort. I'm all for sponsoring…
Well sure you can. We know how much it costs, the budgets are public. Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget. Meanwhile it would save the public money on net, because collecting the cost as taxes has lower overhead than operating a parallel fare collections infrastructure. And it benefits drivers by giving them exactly what they've always wanted -- an incentive for other people to use mass transit:
https://theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-favo...
> Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?"
Which is exactly the problem with your plan. If you build a rail line and set the price at $20/trip then people don't use it, so the amortized cost of the rail line becomes $30/trip because you have to pay for all the same fixed costs with fewer riders. But a $30 fare reduces ridership even more and soon there is no mass transit which in turn makes it suck to drive because there are too many people in cars and your commute is 20 miles in two hours.
Whereas if you set the price to zero, the actual cost per trip which is now being covered by taxes comes out to $4/trip, because at lower cost you get higher ridership and more usage to spread the fixed costs over. Which in turn means less traffic congestion on the roads for the people in cars.
> I'm all for sponsoring car purchases for poor people and/or giving them money to buy transit passes at full cost.
You're all for subsidies as long as they're paying the full cost? Subsidies are the thing where they're not paying the full cost.
Moreover, you want the same incentive for everyone -- if a free fare would get someone at the 70th percentile income to take the subway instead of a car, give it to them so they do that.
The converse where you use means testing is not only bringing in high administrative costs, it creates a poverty trap where making a little more money causes you to lose the subsidy and thereby removes your incentive to do it. Means testing is effectively a scheme to impose high marginal tax rates on the poor.
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> Which it can, if you make it zero. But you can't. Transit costs A LOT, its costs are just pushed onto car owners. Instead, we should be honest and price it at the full 100% recovery rate, with 100% capital cost return. People will then start to think: "Should I continue paying that $20 per trip on a light rail, or should I get a car?" "bUT poOR peoPLE@@!!!" - poor people also deserve comfort. I'm all for sponsoring…
> But you can't. Well sure you can. We know how much it costs, the budgets are public. Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget. Meanwhile it would save the public money on net, because collecting the cost as taxes has lower overhead than operating a parallel fare collections infrastructure. And it benefits drivers by giving them exactly what they've always wanted -- an…
Nope. A realistic public transit network can NEVER be as efficient as a car network in a city. It's mathematically impossible, unless you sabotage your city so much, it's a hellscape (e.g. Manhattan).
> Completely zeroing out fares would be a single-digit percentage of the government budget.
So would be giving everyone a (cheap) car.
> Which is exactly the problem with your plan. If you build a rail line and set the price at $20/trip then people don't use it
Good, then don't build it! Easy peasy. Price is a GREAT signal. Subsidies, hidden fees, misplaced incentives and other crap lead to suboptimal outcomes.
You basically have a circular argument: transit is needed because it allows density, and density is good because it allows transit. And since we need transit, it must be cheap.
> But a $30 fare reduces ridership even more and soon there is no mass transit
Great, we need exactly that.
> which in turn makes it suck to drive because there are too many people in cars and your commute is 20 miles in two hours.
Nope. People will adapt and start to move out office space out of Downtowns.
And yes, this can work even at a gargantuan scale. Greater Houston Area has comparable population to New York City, yet it has faster commutes and far better living conditions.
Ideally, though, cities should stay reasonably small. 300k seems to be the sweet spot from the efficiency standpoint.
> Which in turn means less traffic congestion on the roads for the people in cars.
Nope. It just doesn't. Research shows that more transit use does NOT decrease traffic, except in very narrow cases (on arterials immediately parrallel to fast transit). Moreover, over time it leads to MORE traffic, as transit brings in density, and density results in more traffic.
> You're all for subsidies as long as they're paying the full cost?
I'm OK with giving poor people money so they can THEMSELVES decide on what they can use it, instead of trying to social engineer them by giving them "free" rides. When each ride costs $20 just in op-ex (true cost for Seattle, btw).
Richer people should pay the full cost of rides. This also applies to cars (although in my state car user fees already pay for 98% of all road maintenance and construction).
> The converse where you use means testing is not only bringing in high administrative costs, it creates a poverty trap where making a little more money causes you to lose the subsidy and thereby removes your incentive to do it.
That's exactly what transit is achieving. It keeps people trapped in poverty, by reducing their economic choices.
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Situational awareness shouldn't be discounted.
I was hit by a car once, due to the driver's lack of situational awareness. I was turning from a major road into a minor road, a car was stopped at the exit to that minor road , but they failed to look in my direction, and pulled out into me. My bike was a write-off, fortunately I was uninjured — they had started from stationary, so probably less than 10 mph when they hit me, and I always wear a helmet.