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In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

nytimes.com

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Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#191

Post by silisili »

wongarsu wrote: post #61
Drakim wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I feel it's fine for them to operate at a loss, it's a public service, akin to the fire department or library. The amount of good it does society to get cars off the road is staggering. The lack of bus drivers simply comes down to an unwillingness to pay more. It's the exact same problem with teachers, where the wage is extremely low but they would rather just have a shortage rather than paying more.

Crucially, the road network also operates at a loss

From what I'd read, the majority of road wear comes from tractor trailers, who don't nearly cover their costs.

It may help to either tax them directly, or indirectly via diesel. Yes, costs pass to consumers, but it would also encourage more done via ship and train, I feel. Even that would be a huge help to clearing up traffic and lowering infra spend.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#192

Post by deepsun »

SSJPython wrote: post #82
rufus_foreman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy.

> You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy. Infrastructure should not be subject to peoples' opinions. Like utilities and defense, infrastructure is crucial for security and commerce. People simply don't know better.

Remember in the movie Don't Look Up they democratically decided that the Comet is not real, and everything will be fine.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#193

Post by sien »

Gigachad wrote: post #182
Gibbon1 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to transit I think the lol make driving sucky so people will support mass transit is inane because of the backlash potential. Much better to get ahead of the hose than always be trying to grab it's ass. You're not going to get boomers and GenX to take the bus. You probably could get younger generations to do that especially if there are options. Really there should be a high speed rail along the front r…

If boomers want to continue driving, they can. Just make them pay for what they use. Work out the real market value for the space and charge for it.

Yep. The same should be done for public transport.

In the US Farebox Recovery Ratios of 20% or less are common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_...

Only 58% of fuel tax in Australia is spent on any kind of transport including rail.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-21/fuel-excise-not-being...

Australians drive a similar amount to the US.

From

https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/11/13/how-trains-could...

Yet only 8% of the distance travelled by land in the EU is by rail. Even in the most train-happy countries, Austria and the Netherlands, the figures are 13% and 11%. In those countries, more than 75% of land travel is done by car.

So even in Europe and Australia where cars more than pay for their costs people still drive a lot. This is with all the effort put in to public transport in Europe.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#194

Post by hammock »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #190
languagehacker wrote: post #51

I just read Paved Paradise as well as The High Cost of Free Parking. This seems like the current gradual trend towards reversing the hidden subsidy for drivers, first by giving them less affordances at remarkably low prices or for free. A few folks in the comments have mentioned a couple of times that it doesn't make sense to make a policy like this without supporting transit. I believe the argument would be that not…

>> I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit Induced demand is a concept that anti-car people use, but I don't think it makes much sense. Imagine a library that only has a few copies of some best selling children's books. There's a very long queue to check out those books. Someone might argue that, "We should buy more copies of the bes…

> The induced demand argument in this case would be: "If we buy more copies of those books, the queue wont disappear, since it is so long, but also, if the queue gets shorter, we might have people who don't use the library because of the queue start using it. We would be no better off!".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#195

Post by thereisnospork »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #66
someguydave wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because people are waiting too long on other roads! There is a point where traffic will not increase as all the demand has been sated.

No. There is not. You've totally misunderstood induced demand. You can build unlimited roads and they will all be used up and commutes will increase for everyone. People engineer cities and development around transit. If you provide massive amounts of transit to a desirable location people will saturate it. This is why initially highway projects look like successes. Wow. My commute is so much better. And then. In a d…

>People engineer cities and development around transit. If you provide massive amounts of transit to a desirable location people will saturate it.

well yes, that is the objective of building transit[0]: to get people where they would like to go. That people 'induce demand' by moving to a place where they can go where they would like to go with (initially) less friction is the system reequilibrating - from places where demand was not adequately sated[0].

Consider the opposite situation: we remove one lane from all highways, and drop the speed limits on all surface streets by 25 percent, and reduce the departures of all trains and planes by 25%. If adding capacity is bad, then reducing it must be good [for the economy and people's quality of life].

[0]If demand was adequately sated, where was it induced from? Adequately sated here might also be read as 'optimally sated' or even just 'less well sated'. Obviously there is a point where cost exceeds the marginal benefit, e.g. adding 10 new bay bridges would surely reduce mean transit times across the bay, but at a patently unreasonable cost-benefit ratio.

[1]Unless you like to argue that we are at the local or global optimum for transit capacity?

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#196

Post by S_A_P »

ambyra wrote: post #24
infecto wrote: post #15

Sounds like the Bay Area. We don't like cars but we refuse to build comprehensive transit. To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen. Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life was while living in the Bay Area with the massive traffic jams.

Try a motorcycle! The laws for lane splitting are the best in the country. You could probably fit 6 motorcycles in the space of one car.

The #1 killer of people I know up to this point in my life is motorcycle accidents. I would never ride one and would do all I can to prevent my kids from doing so.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#197

Post by tromp »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #190
languagehacker wrote: post #51

I just read Paved Paradise as well as The High Cost of Free Parking. This seems like the current gradual trend towards reversing the hidden subsidy for drivers, first by giving them less affordances at remarkably low prices or for free. A few folks in the comments have mentioned a couple of times that it doesn't make sense to make a policy like this without supporting transit. I believe the argument would be that not…

>> I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit Induced demand is a concept that anti-car people use, but I don't think it makes much sense. Imagine a library that only has a few copies of some best selling children's books. There's a very long queue to check out those books. Someone might argue that, "We should buy more copies of the bes…

Except that having more car traffic induces more pollution, more casualties, and more time spent unproductively (you can do other things on public transit, or get exercise commuting by bike), whereas more book reading has few downsides.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#199

Post by kloop »

nullindividual wrote: post #48
duxup wrote: post #17

I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like. I can imagine this easily being responded to negatively in the end and the political response is to give in and the pendulum swings wildly in the other direction. In the e…

People are driven by the cattle prod. If the government wants to reduce something, it needs to be more painful to acquire or use, i.e. sin taxes. It's worked on cigarettes, alcohol, soda, etc. to varying degrees. The government would likely have a very big uphill battle to out-market the automobile industry given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government. I ultimately agree with the appro…

> The government would likely have a very big uphill battle to out-market the automobile industry given a large segment of the population distrusts or dislikes the government.

It seems weird that the response to "a democratic government, which derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, has lost the confidence of large swaths of the electorate" is to give that institution more direct social control.

That seems like the opposite of what a sane system would do.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#200

Post by Gibbon1 »

Gigachad wrote: post #182
Gibbon1 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to transit I think the lol make driving sucky so people will support mass transit is inane because of the backlash potential. Much better to get ahead of the hose than always be trying to grab it's ass. You're not going to get boomers and GenX to take the bus. You probably could get younger generations to do that especially if there are options. Really there should be a high speed rail along the front r…

If boomers want to continue driving, they can. Just make them pay for what they use. Work out the real market value for the space and charge for it.

My response to that sort of argument is yes indeed you are 100% correct in theory and 100% wrong in practice. It's the result of framing everything as a moral argument and shooting for perfection. That never ends well.

You're better off depending on age and grim reaper to get old people to stop driving and focus on habituating young people to just not.

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