In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by tbrownaw » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:18 PM UTC

HDThoreaun wrote: post #271

sokoloff wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It shouldn't be that hard to make it better (for a decent fraction of people) for specific things, like say commuting or nightlife.

It would be very hard to make it better for, say, picking up DIY supplies at the hardware store.

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

#322

Post by anon84873628 » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:18 PM UTC

gotoeleven wrote: post #227

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…

[flagged]

Wow, these are really bad takes. You think "culture war" explains it all? Nah, it's not that easy.

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

#323

Post by kjkjadksj » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:19 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #44

California, always leading the way, has boldly built almost nothing for 5 decades!

What do you mean they just ripped a chunk out of bakersfield a couple years ago for a highway? Also its easy to say no new highways when you take a random dirt road probably laid by the spanish out in the countryside, call it a state highway already, then then turn it into a six lane cement dragon while saying “see we didn't build a new billion dollar highway”.

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

#324

Post by kjkjadksj » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:21 PM UTC

colingoodman wrote: post #220

thebigman433 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get its supposed to be a funny joke, but CA has some of the biggest transit projects in the country going on currently. CAHSR is wildly expensive, but its still being built, and will far and away be the best rail corridor in the country when its done. LA has been building a decent amount of transit for how hard it is to get anything done there. SF already has a fairly robust and solid transit network, and there hav…

Los Angeles is indeed building a lot of public transit. As is the nature of any of these projects, especially in California, it will be many years (decades) before much of it is complete. But it's happening nonetheless. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-10-26/los-angel...

A lot is complete already like over 100 stations. Only got started about 30 years ago too so they are building at light speed compared to the rest of the country.

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

#325

Post by kjkjadksj » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:21 PM UTC

jseliger wrote: post #177

BurningFrog wrote: post #44

California, always leading the way, has boldly built almost nothing for 5 decades!

LA has actually built a lot of subway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail# and much more than NYC or Chicago during the same period.

The entire network so far is only about 30 years old

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

#326

Post by scsilver » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:23 PM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #280

troyvit wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Can you lead me to some background on this? I'd love to look at some of the routes and law behind it.

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

#327

Post by bobthepanda » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:23 PM UTC

throwitaway222 wrote: post #320

Pipe sizes are 3d, so as you go from 1" to 2" to 3" to 4" the amount of throughput skyrockets. Roads are flat, not stacked, so you're just somewhat linearly increasing throughput. It might be a bit more since the leftmost lanes can go increasingly faster, but it's nothing like pipes. So it makes sense to try to think of other ways to handle it... that being said, does having 50 more buses actually reduce anything, 10…

Buses and trains are more space efficient than cars because

1. People can stand in them, increasing vehicle density and

2. A smaller proportion of the vehicle is dedicated to the engine, fuel tank, etc.

There’s also bicycles, e-bikes and such which have higher density as well. Most American trips are not actually that far.

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

#328

Post by Maarten88 » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:25 PM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #225

SSJPython wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

but there is a solution to this problem: education. and i don't mean propaganda, but teaching people not to be selfish, to care for others and consider others needs, to contribute to the betterment of society. to have compassion, remove prejudice, etc. if these values were taught in schools, then the next generation would make better choices and they would know better and vote for better infrastructure.

It's hard to educate the next generation when everyone of all ages is exposed to relentless propaganda (also known as marketing, in all forms including the fully legalized corruption of US politics) at the same time.

Oil and car companies' futures depend on continued public support for free parking, more lanes and housing far away from destinations. It's in their interest to manipulate people into opinions that are beneficial to their bottom line, and they will continue to do so.

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

#329

Post by seadan83 » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:26 PM UTC

HDThoreaun wrote: post #277

seadan83 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good points. Yeah, as the cost of travel goes up, people make various decisions: bite-the-bullet, find alternatives, delay, consolidate, and/or go without. As the cost decreases, the incentives to find alternatives, delay or consolidate trips goes down (which means roads are then used for less important reasons and less efficiently - why go to the grocery store once a week if you can go every day in half the travel time?)

I would agree, at some point when all alternatives are equally unattractive (or non-existent), then going without is a more attractive option.

Though, the "consolidate" option is a big one to consider. Rather than going to the city every day, perhaps people could do so every other day for the same benefit. If traffic is bad, then people will go less often (frequency of travel is a function of cost). Thus, in some cases, highway expansion is filled by people that want to go to the grocery store every day rather than going once a week. Meanwhile, those that commute to work, are still going to do so because they have to. If the commute gets too bad, then some people will decide to move.

On the other side of the spectrum, at some point there are so many people that want to go into the city every day - you can't do it with single occupancy vehicles and roads. It's a scaling problem. For example, someone did an analysis of parking decks in Seattle and whether there were not enough of them. They found if there were all filled and everyone then tried to leave - it would take 2 days for all the vehicles to exit the city.

There are certainly many aspects to consider.

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

#330

Post by kjkjadksj » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 11:27 PM UTC

tomohawk wrote: post #212

They did that in northern Virginia. For decade after decade, they refused to build highways, and after a few million people moved there, it was no longer possible to build or expand what they have without immense expense. The traffic congestion is constant thare.

I felt like congestion is nonexistent the few times i am there. Maybe I am used to real congestion like in nyc though. All those parkways and fast roads are basically highways anyhow. People go 60-70mph on them and some have full on freeway style interchanges. Theres probably what a couple dozen at least in nova alone? Way more when you factor dc and maryland. Crazy highway lane density per capita if the metrics actually considered these highways. West coast has nothing like that honestly. Big old arterial stop light grid no fast stopless cuts through every ravine.