Earlier quoted context omitted.
CA doesn't do policing. It's all about the feel-good.
Is that why we have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world ?
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The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
191–200 of 205 posts
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
CA doesn't do policing. It's all about the feel-good.
Is that why we have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world ?
It's like a low-grade fever: the fact that you stay sick while others are well is a sign that you didn't take your meds, not that you took too many.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Got to remember BART carries around 400,000 riders a day, 365 days a year. Seems like the issue is lack of security/policing, not the number of passengers. There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent.
> There are plenty of subway networks with far greater traffic that don't have this problem to nearly the same extent. I think you can go a lot further: almost all public transport networks, regardless of type or usage, don't have this problem to any extent. Some people in large European or Asian cities don't like using public transport because of overcrowding, slow journey times, cost, inflexibility, infrequency, st…
If a dog or child pisses everywhere do you tolerate it? There is a way to deal with it. It does not start with the word "tolerance" though, so no, politicians aren't going to be pressured into solving anything, because they were the ones that got voted in in the first place to turn a blind eye. People get the society they deserve.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scooters and bikes are not exclusive of mass transit -- they complement mass transit by working on the "last mile" problem that no mass transit system has ever really found a good solution to.
In a walkable area there is no "last mile" problem for able bodied people. A mile is a perfectly reasonable 20 minute walk provided the streets are safe. And if the streets are built safely, scooters and bikes will be usable as a natural consequence. And if you're disabled, scooters and bikes aren't helping you much anyway. Scooters and bikes are great supplements to a system, but they won't actually do much good wit…
>And if you're disabled, scooters and bikes aren't helping you much anyway.
Lots of disabled Americans ride around on scooters (4-wheeled motorized carts). They would do much better on the streets of Europe where there's bike lanes and nice sidewalks than in suburban America, though they'd have problems navigating the shops.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed) For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years. Including the bridges, cuts, and grading. Including through a mountain range.
Um... Its estimated that somewhere between 1,000-2,000 people died building the first transcontinental railroad. That wouldn't exactly be acceptable today.
No, but we also have lots of mechanized equipment now that eliminates most of the danger and speeds up work enormously. There's really no excuse for construction taking as long as it does now.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a walkable area there is no "last mile" problem for able bodied people. A mile is a perfectly reasonable 20 minute walk provided the streets are safe. And if the streets are built safely, scooters and bikes will be usable as a natural consequence. And if you're disabled, scooters and bikes aren't helping you much anyway. Scooters and bikes are great supplements to a system, but they won't actually do much good wit…
>And if you're disabled, scooters and bikes aren't helping you much anyway. Lots of disabled Americans ride around on scooters (4-wheeled motorized carts). They would do much better on the streets of Europe where there's bike lanes and nice sidewalks than in suburban America, though they'd have problems navigating the shops.
>Lots of disabled Americans ride around on scooters (4-wheeled motorized carts).
I believed we were talking about the razor scooters/scoot-share services, which are too finicky for people with mobility issues to be able to use on bumpy streets.
The types of scooters you're talking about basically use the same infrastructure as wheelchairs. So if you're pedestrian friendly and have inclusive urban design (like curb-cuts) that won't really be a big deal.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
. . . I like riding the bus though. You get a window instead of being stuck in an underground tunnel. It's quieter than the train. And the drivers can actually make detours and improvise if there are problems. The only issue is traffic, which dedicated lanes and automatic right of way takes care of. There is also the issue of having to wait outside in bad weather for it, but if you keep headways low that's not so bad…
>It's quieter than the train. Huh? What kind of trains have you been riding? Buses are noisy and have herky-jerky motion because they drive in traffic and have noisy diesel engines and are constantly accelerating and braking and turning. Trains ride on metal rails with no traffic in their way. Of course, the shitty subways in America's east coast cities somehow manage to be extremely noisy and bumpy; I'm not sure how…
>What kind of trains have you been riding?
Subway trains roll on tracks in concrete tunnels that reverberate sound. They're extremely loud. It's metal on metal with grinding disc brakes.
>Buses are noisy and have herky-jerky motion because they drive in traffic
Buses are huge. They're generally too huge to accelerate or decelerate rapidly, so I have no experienced this herky-jerky motion you're talking about. That's much more likely in a car.
>and have noisy diesel engines
At this point most big cities I've been in the buses run on CNG, which is still super loud but burns much cleaner. Eventually they'll be all electric fleets though, and should be predictably quiet.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a walkable area there is no "last mile" problem for able bodied people. A mile is a perfectly reasonable 20 minute walk provided the streets are safe. And if the streets are built safely, scooters and bikes will be usable as a natural consequence. And if you're disabled, scooters and bikes aren't helping you much anyway. Scooters and bikes are great supplements to a system, but they won't actually do much good wit…
20 minutes is practically an entire commute. It’s not at all reasonable to burn that much time on the last mile alone.
>20 minutes is practically an entire commute. It’s not at all reasonable to burn that much time on the last mile alone.
If 20 minutes is "practically an entire commute" then you're already in a dense enough area to where transit coverage should minimize the number of people who are a mile away. At that point, proximity to transit just becomes part of what you pay for in your house. If the transit is there, development patterns will tend to build up around it.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
20 minutes is practically an entire commute. It’s not at all reasonable to burn that much time on the last mile alone.
>20 minutes is practically an entire commute. It’s not at all reasonable to burn that much time on the last mile alone. If 20 minutes is "practically an entire commute" then you're already in a dense enough area to where transit coverage should minimize the number of people who are a mile away. At that point, proximity to transit just becomes part of what you pay for in your house. If the transit is there, developmen…
The median commute time in the US is 25 minutes, up to 32 in the most congested metro areas. This is overwhelmingly due to driving on freeways across suburbia, enabled by sufficiently low density.
Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Competition is the easiest path to refinement. See the space race.
Competition also drove the Soviets to get lots of their people killed because they cared more about hitting arbitrary deadlines to win the geopolitical dick-measuring contest than they did about safety or even accomplishing their goals. (And before I get called out: Yes, I realize NASA got people killed for the same reason but the difference is seriously orders of magnitude. NASA's failures were publicized while the…
I wouldn't attribute bad practices to "competition"