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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

#271

Post by HDThoreaun »

sokoloff wrote: post #230
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 you make the bus better than driving, people will take the bus. Ideally, you'd do that by improving the bus rather than accepting the current shitty bus situation and degrading driving to the point that it's even worse...

I think to would be extremely difficult to make the bus better than driving for people that already have a car. The most obvious option is making parking expensive or hard to find but I think that would lead to new politicians before people really embrace the bus. Reality is that americans dont enjoy being in enclosed spaces with strangers, hard to overcome that.

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

#272

Post by ksplicer »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #256
ksplicer wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are missing is that every time we widen roads to allow more car throughput we are making every other type of transit and mobility less attractive. Busy streets with big parking lots are unpleasant to walk or bike along, so people just drive to their destinations instead, which makes the street even busier, louder, and smellier starts this cycle all over again. Every time a road is widened or a new parking lo…

People always seem to forget the bus takes advantage of having multiple travel lanes and faster intersection clearance too. City of LA is starting to take advantage of their wide roads and put in bus only lanes, something they could easily do with some paint since the pavement already exists.

You don't need more than two lanes to dedicate one to buses.

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

#273

Post by seadan83 »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #203
currymj wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the point of "induced demand" is that you sometimes can't really fix -- specifically -- traffic or parking congestion problems by building more. if you widen the roads, in many cases it won't make your commute any quicker. if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown. it's not that there's no benefit to the wider road or parking spots, just that the benefit people really care about…

>> if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown But that's good if you wan't more people to drive downtown, isn't it? What am I missing here?

If it means way fewer people took alternative means, then perhaps it is not good. Particularly when OP mentioned the original goal was to reduce travel times - which the widening did not.

"it's not that there's no benefit to the wider road or parking spots, just that the benefit people really care about -- less traffic and quicker trips, less time searching for a parking spot -- often fails to materialize."

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

#274

Post by HDThoreaun »

Jensson wrote: post #205
rufus_foreman wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown But that's good if you wan't more people to drive downtown, isn't it? What am I missing here?

> What am I missing here? That downtown is now a concrete hellscape instead of a pleasant place to be. Your solution ensures that always happens, overall people prefer less infrastructure built for cars, but if it is there of course they will use it.

This just isnt true. Every metro area in the US has highways. Including the dense ones. NYC and Chicago are not concrete hellscapes

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

#275

Post by HDThoreaun »

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…

Absolutely agree. I really think the concept of induced demand with highways is misleading. Im not even sure reducing traffic is the point of highway expansion, pretty sure induced demand is literally the goal.

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

#276

Post by currymj »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #203
currymj wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the point of "induced demand" is that you sometimes can't really fix -- specifically -- traffic or parking congestion problems by building more. if you widen the roads, in many cases it won't make your commute any quicker. if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown. it's not that there's no benefit to the wider road or parking spots, just that the benefit people really care about…

>> if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown But that's good if you wan't more people to drive downtown, isn't it? What am I missing here?

the dream is that if i already have to drive downtown, if only there were more parking spots, i could always find one easily instead of driving around searching. but this often won’t happen.

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

#277

Post by HDThoreaun »

seadan83 wrote: post #250
rufus_foreman wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Perhaps a library vs a commercial book store might have worked as a better analogy. The queue theory part of it I think breaks down a lot. Induced demand is not only about queue theory, but also choosing between options. In short though, induced demand is somewhat simple. If it takes 10 minutes to drive and 30 minutes to take a bus, then I drive. If it takes 30 minutes to drive and 10 minutes to take a bus, then I ta…

Yea but really the choice here is "go somewhere vs stay home", not "car vs bus". Highway expansion leads to more people travelling because bus service is non existent in the vast majority of the country. Of course some people need to go where theyre going, but on the margins more people will go to the city or what not if traffic is lower.

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

#278

Post by ksplicer »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #137
troyvit wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally, which is why Colorado is producing less and less food. I mean towns sprouted up where people settled and people settled to grow food, so this has been happening in Colorado since farming began here. As a result the land left for farming is getting worse and worse. The good spots have all been paved. But say we have to keep that, my next question is, what's the tax haul for a house compared to an apartment co…

Tax haul for 10 houses are better than a 10 unit complex. The people also want houses opposed to apartments (hence the higher price). This seems to be an ideological conflict where some people are trying to force everyone else into options they dont want- why? The solution seems simple. relax zoning where it exists and let people who want to live in tiny urban apartments do so, and let people who want to live in subu…

That's a weird way to put that. Tax haul for 10 houses is definitely higher than the tax haul for a 10 unit complex, but how many 10 unit complexes can you fit in the space you need for 10 houses? The complex has a much better tax haul per square foot.

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

#280

Post by kjkjadksj »

troyvit wrote: post #103
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.

> To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen. Yep.[1] The governor is _trying_ to build comprehensive transit in Colorado[2], but between an incompetent transportation district and the difficulties of building public transit infrastructure to serve our metastatic urban sprawl makes public transit difficult to fund over cars.[3] Our state metro areas just re…

All they have to do is restart the old passenger rail system they had in the 40s. It connected the entire front range with salt lake and all the major cities in utah including park city, went down to santa fe in the south, and hit just about all the towns and ski resorts that were around at the time. Even the ones that are a little more annoying to get to today like aspen or telluride.

What is even more tempting is that all this infrastructure and right of ways are still there. A lot of these towns have the old station land empty still, some have the old station preserved even. A lot of the rail grades are either sustained by freight rail or have been railbanked as trails. Its practically turn key as the hard part of gathering all this land was done over a century ago.

Too bad rail ambition is so paltry in comparison today.

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