It would be nice if they brought back train service from Denver to Ft. Collins and Laramie. In Europe you can go so many places with just a bicycle and a train ticket.
It's in the works, currently scheduled for 2050, if we are lucky.
In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
351–360 of 783 posts
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the bus is a strictly worse version of the car in these kinds of cities You can change that by giving them their own lane so they don't get stuck in traffic with the cars, let them go where cars may not go, give priority at traffic lights etc. That is what they do where I live.
It will change the habits of some but it’s not enough. We should continue to build out bus infrastructure and enhance bus rapid transit especially in the ways you mention, but those efforts won’t result in the large change we need to shift away from vehicle-based infrastructure.
> their own lane so they don't get stuck in traffic with the cars, let them go where cars may not go, give priority at traffic lights etc
I feel like we are in agreement. It might not be enough but it is necessary. Problem is we don't even have enough political capital to enforce this. Bill deBalsio the ex mayor of New York came on a radio show and said (paraphrasing) he can't order cops to ticket cars and trucks that are loading or unloading in the bus lane. The bus lane is NOT a business' property for loading and unloading, especially not at busy hours. I'd you must do so, do it when there is no traffic in the middle of the night.
How can we do more when we can't even do the bare minimum?
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#353Earlier 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.
That's how it is for many in Europe.
You've got a car but using it to get to work is inconvenient due to parking, and buses often have priority lanes.
But the idea of commuting to Paris or Rome in car is...tough..
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/h…
The dutch use bikes a lot. Like really a lot.
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's consider a library with both a manned librarian and a self checkout, two different queues, same objective. Let's call the self checkout the 'highway' queue and the manned one the 'surface street' queue. Each of which could be expanded to improve throughput (more lanes:more self checkout lanes, more streets:more librarians). Ultimately the problem with anti-car rhetoric is that it seeks to limit access to the ob…
Ah, I think i just realized how to fix the analogy! The issue is with how many books are checked out a time. If the line is absurdly long, at some point you will make fewer trips to the library to avoid paying the cost of waiting in line. You would check out more books so you would go less frequently. You would be trading storage space at home in exchange for time (not having to wait in line). If the line were infini…
I think that's a fair extension of the analogy, from which I would make two observations:
First is that with frictionless checkout the library's efficiency is maximized (books are only checked out when being read and people's time isn't spent unproductively).
Second is that there is a limit to the demand of the library. A book will be finished before checking out a new one and a person can only read so many books a day. No matter how entertaining there is a fairly hard cap based on a persons need to sleep and reading rate. So a library would only ever need enough automated checkout lanes to match the populations awake time and reading rate before book demand is fully sated.
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#356I 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]
Ding ding ding. It’s a running meme that my downtown bus station is constantly an area of violent crime. Because it is.
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#357Pipe 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.
However, busses and trains usually only run every 10-20 minutes compared to a road which is going constantly. I can easily see cars on roads having higher throughput.
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#358California, always leading the way, has boldly built almost nothing for 5 decades!
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…
I was thinking more of housing than transport, but sure, some sarcasm may have slipped in :)
California does somewhat better building transport than housing, but it's still far from enough, IMAO.
And I don't think the high speed LA-SF railroad will be finished before most who voted for it in 2008 has died...
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big issue with the market argument in converting car drivers to transit riders is the respective networks operate at different scales. Think of a little neighborhood with a bus line on a road; theres probably I’m not even sure call it 20x as many roads in that neighborhood that don’t have a bus line. There is so much more built out of the comprehensive road network everywhere than there is with transit. Cities are…
Bus coverage isn’t the only metric that matters. Frequency is also terrible. It is entirely a symptom of investment. Bus ridership was found to decline in large part because the actual amount of service hours had declined as well. https://humantransit.org/2015/06/pity-the-poor-city-bus-writ... Canada has significantly higher bus ridership than the US despite having pretty similar urban forms and it is entirely due to…
> Frequency is also terrible.
This is almost completely the issue.
If I can count on a bus every 10 minutes, I will take a bus. If I can't just hop off a bus and back on the next because of long time intervals, I won't take a bus because I know something will go wrong and waste a huge chunk of my time.
The political problem is that you need to keep a bunch of empty buses running continuously in order to change the behavior of people to start taking those buses more often at which point they quit being empty.
The current problem is that in most places I have lived, I can WALK between points faster than I can take a bus. It will be 40-60 minutes between buses and because those buses are unreliable I can't count on my transfer, so I can wind up with a 2 hour+ bus ride for something which is less than 15 minutes by car.
Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
#360Sounds 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.
> Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life How did you quantify this? Or this a purely anecdotal observation?
Since its my experience its anecdotal. That said higher particulate from diesel engines its pretty common when not at highway speeds. Combine significant traffic with highways/interestates close to buildings and residential areas, its a bit nasty. Sure rush hour in Saigon is without a doubt worse but the bay area is pretty bad on a localized level. Keep in mind I am saying localized, just the immediate areas around these high traffic areas. I can recount a number of buildings I have been in where you would get significant soot buildup on a weekly basis.
CA is fairly unique in this respect in that there are major road ways with residential close by.