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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

#371

Post by Gibbon1 »

thebigman433 wrote: post #185
BurningFrog wrote: post #44

California, 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…

Worth mentioning is CAHSR paid for half the electrification of CalTrain.

Also the Phase II BART extension that will take BART to downtown San Jose, the high speed rail station at Diridon and to Santa Clara.

https://www.vta.org/projects/bart-sv/phase-ii

Above link says construction to start this year and take 12 years. So eventually you'll have CalTrain, CAHSR and BART as connected system.

A good point is the projects are being rolled out they way they are due to funding constraints and a desire provide ongoing side benefits, like the electrified CalTrain and the grade separation projects in the central valley. (Every over pass over the existing rail is a benefit).

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

#372

Post by NemoNobody »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #266
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…

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…

I had a conversation the other day with someone here from San Diego - which now has the highest cost of living in the US. I briefly looked into it from a rental pov and it seemed his statements checked out.

I'm not saying that NYC is actually cheaper than San Diego - I'm aware it's incredibly expensive but I think that all the cities are more similar than they are not as far as unaffordability goes

That actually really surprised me but it does make sense once thought about - goes against everything I've been taught tho. How can San Diego be as expensive as NYC?

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

#373

Post by geraldwhen »

rangestransform wrote: post #264
Jensson wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think public transit is full of drunkards? Its mostly tired people getting to or from work, those doesn't harass a lot of people. When its late and its a lot of drunks on public transit sure, but not on normal commutes. Columns I've read from women getting harassed its mostly about dance floors at clubs, not commute trains, when people aren't drunk they mostly keep their hands to themselves.

A crackhead grabbed my girlfriend’s hair on the subway recently Tell me, anti car fundamentalists, what are the odds that happens in a waymo?

There is extreme denialism here about the problems of public transit in the United States. Crime goes unpunished. Homeless addicts run amok.

Large groups of people are simply not safe, as police are not empowered to remove problem people.

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

#374

Post by slyall »

detourdog wrote: post #345
anon84873628 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, today's rural areas are tomorrow's suburbs. If you want to stop the rural areas from becoming a car slave suburban sprawl, then you need to do something differently than what we did in the past. It sounds like people in your town are forward thinking. Plus, if there is plenty of room then you'll still have parking, until that land becomes more valuable for something else.

I consider it so forward thinking as to be unrealistic. I hear what you are saying but my town is more or less in accessible and a suburb to know where. We don't uber and taxi's after dark should be considered ahead of time. We have minimal mass transit system that essentially connects towns together. If we ever get train service from a metropolitan city I could see it. Currently I see the people demanding reduced pa…

If your town has just has 2500 people then it should be 5-10 minutes walk/bike from anywhere to anywhere.

No need for a car for most journeys.

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

#375

Post by kiba »

l2silver wrote: post #263
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…

I agree with the urban planning bias here, especially the idea that you shouldn't build more roads to fight congestion because more people will use them, and thus they'll reach the same saturation point anyways. Mind boggling that this is an accepted principal, and one that is completely disregarded when it comes to any form of transport that isn't a car.

Roads are incredibly low capacity for the value we get out of them.

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

#376

Post by basil-rash »

Jensson wrote: post #214
basil-rash wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get harassed by homeless? Or just men in general, if you’re a remotely attractive female (using the broadest term available as it certianly isn’t restricted to what we’d appropriately call “women”).

Do you think public transit is full of drunkards? Its mostly tired people getting to or from work, those doesn't harass a lot of people. When its late and its a lot of drunks on public transit sure, but not on normal commutes. Columns I've read from women getting harassed its mostly about dance floors at clubs, not commute trains, when people aren't drunk they mostly keep their hands to themselves.

Where do you live and what is your background that you think the only way a man might harass a woman is if he is drunk?

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

#377

Post by squeaky-clean »

bsder wrote: post #359
bobthepanda wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

I just checked the bus stop near my parents' place in Miami (I'm living in NYC now). The next bus arrives in 14 hours lol. Busses for that stop run hourly between 11am-4pm.

I don't get how they think anyone can depend on that. Not only is an hour between busses incredibly frustrating, if I needed to do anything past 4pm, (like I don't know... commute to work?) I would have no way back home until the next day.

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

#378

Post by mrangle »

Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant if any experience taking the bus.

I took the urban bus to and from school for years: at least 1.5 hours each way. Often two, with at least one transfer.

Outside of the city center, reliance on buses is a massive poverty tax in terms of reduced quality of life.

Remove these bourgeoise policymakers and their unilateral fake goals. Work on real transportation improvements for the people, not to meet the myopic expectations of the ivory tower. That means making transportation maximally fast and low cost. That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation.

No one who actually cares about society will be working to make it mirror the patterns of poverty. Disagreement with that premise should always be held in high suspicion.

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

#379

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ilyagr wrote: post #366
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…

I agree, "induced demand" is a word phrase to rally behind. The argument must be (and, I believe, is) that induced demand for buses and trains is far cheaper to a society than induced demand for cars. Adding a train car at a peak time serves a lot more people than adding a highway lane at a peak time. I'm actually curious to compare them. Apparently, 100 people is a reasonable capacity for a train car (200 is possibl…

> So, an extra car lane a mile long is about an extra half a train, give it take.

The problem with this math is the last mile.

With a road network you have highways with multiple lanes and a lot of traffic, and those branch out into streets with fewer lanes but more destinations.

You can run a train next to the highway and it will achieve much more throughput, but as soon as you get to the offramp, what now? Those 100 passengers all have different destinations that fork off in every direction. You can't run 100 train cars one for each passenger, that's even worse than the road cars. But you also can't just dump them all right there, miles away from where they want to be.

The reason this works in NYC is the density. You can actually get 100 people who are all going to the same place at the same time. Which is also the only way to make it work anywhere else: Build higher density housing. It cannot work in the suburbs because there isn't enough density to run high-occupancy mass transit at a viable frequency.

Whereas in that environment having the occasional four or eight lane highway increases carrying capacity along more than its own length. The single-lane surface streets that branch off in every direction have a vast amount of otherwise unused carrying capacity, which a highway lane unlocks by connecting low-density destinations together. And which you can't unlock with mass transit because those destinations don't have the density for mass transit, even if the path directly parallel to the highway does.

The problem isn't cars or highways, it's zoning density restrictions.

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

#380

Post by tomtheelder »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #179
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…

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…

I think the argument is a little different. I’d say the best framing of it is that we have sacrificed every other method of transportation at the altar of personal cars. Building for cars is what has made every other option shitty.

So it’s not so much that just make driving cars shitty for no reason as it is that you _have_ to make driving shitty if you want to unshittify walking/biking/transit.

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