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

#391

Post by iteria » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 1:54 AM UTC

mtalantikite wrote: post #385

mrangle wrote: post #378

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.…

As someone who has never had a license and admittedly doesn’t know much about car costs, aren’t they expensive? Like how much is a car payment plus insurance every month? And then gas and maintenance? It seems like requiring car ownership to survive is also not great. But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local pub…

I took the bus for nearly a decade and I drive a car now. My life was greatly improved by having a car and while a car is more expensive technically, in indirect costs, it feels like a break even to me. At least as someone who buys cheap cars, tends to live within 30mins drive of my job and keeps them for a good long time. Even in a good public transit area in the US there is a significant time sink to using public transit for literally every aspect of your life. Getting to work is efficient and not significantly more time intensive than driving, but doing everything else like visiting a friend, going to a hair salon, get groceries can be a huge difference depending on what city you're in. I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive, but getting groceries was a harrowing 45mins journey. Places where getting to work took twice as long, but I could walk to the grocery store. In the US there's just no way to make public transit really work across all dimensions. Especially as we add in specificity. Like needing to bring home a large amount of items or visit humans instead of businesses. EU was much better about this just because of how mixed housing and businesses were.

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

#392

Post by Cheer2171 » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 1:55 AM UTC

mrangle wrote: post #378

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.…

Are you open to the possibility that your particular experience with buses is not what all buses are or must be like? This is also sounds like an underfunded and sparse bus system. You can do buses right or you can do them poorly, same with anything. If you have a dense enough network that most people don't have to transfer, or enough frequency it doesn't matter, it makes a huge difference. Public transportation (and particularly buses and coaches) are ubiquitous in some transportation systems in some very rich world cities. London comes to mind. The double decker buses are beloved.

Bus rapid transit can actually be really nice. You know that rock stars and politicians practically live on buses while they do traveling events? Of course a BRT isn't going to be that private luxury, but even a middle quality charter bus that makes limited stops is pretty darn good. Having dedicated lanes removed the worst part of buses compared to trains.

I used to daily take the AC Transit transbay buses from the East Bay to San Francisco, which are double-decker Greyhounds and have comfortable reclining seating with tables and wifi. The single entrance/exit is a benefit, because it only runs commuter hours and so in the morning it only picks up in the East Bay and drops off in SF. It allows enforcement of fares too. It's a higher fare, but that also attracts a commuter clientele. The main problem with it is that it is too popular and gets crowded, and you're SOL if all the buses are already full at your stop. But that if the flaw is that it is too popular, that's the best and easiest problem to have. Sometimes a regular AC Transit bus would show up and we would all groan and curse.

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

#393

Post by mrangle » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 2:00 AM UTC

mtalantikite wrote: post #385

mrangle wrote: post #378

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.…

As someone who has never had a license and admittedly doesn’t know much about car costs, aren’t they expensive? Like how much is a car payment plus insurance every month? And then gas and maintenance? It seems like requiring car ownership to survive is also not great. But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local pub…

Public transportation isn't exactly cheap when used every day. Then factor in your time and frustration. Nothing is as expensive as your time.

Cars are amazing at their current cost, comparatively. And as I said, we should work on making them cheaper.

Toward an ultimate goal of making everyone "richer". Which begins with reducing hidden poverty taxes like unavoidable multi-hour public transportation commutes.

My ultimate dream for society, as a whole, is for everyone to "be rich". I don't necessarily mean having a disgusting surplus of money in the bank, but rather to eliminate the innumerable aspects of being "not rich" that boil down to an endless string of otherwise unnecessary daily sacrifices, sufferings and indignities. Then, at least, we'd begin to see the trauma of poverty be reduced and hopefully eliminated.

In this case, that means turning a gimlet eye to the human cost of unavoidable mass transport that isn't rail. Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category. This opens up easier access to work, relationships, housing, and food including breaking down the barriers of food deserts.

Thanks. The commute time was more an aspect of the innate slowness bus transportation combined with the unavoidable route through city side streets. In other words, it would be hard to improve upon. By car, the route is thirty minutes.

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

#394

Post by ohmyiv » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 2:03 AM UTC

angmarsbane wrote: post #384

ohmyiv wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A city next to me (L.A. area) has some dedicated bus lanes and bike lanes. Unfortunately, they dont have one of the other benefits that you mention, like banning cars in some areas. There are also connections to the train to go farther, but the buses are still mostly empty except for students and laborers who live outside the city. The buses themselves are typically faster and decent, as I ride them a lot. Meanwhile,…

Culver City?

Yes, exactly! Lol I take it you've been or live there? Afternoon traffic is ridiculous and even in surrounding areas like Palms and Mar Vista, which I think are people avoiding Culver City. Just way too many drivers here in general.

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

#395

Post by ColonelPhantom » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 2:04 AM UTC

mrangle wrote: post #378

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.…

Just because public transport is a poverty tax where you went to school does not mean buses and especially other transit are inherently for poor people. Buses do tend to be mediocre for longer distances, but the main issue is general quality of service.

I grew up in a region with fairly mediocre transit, but because the living environment is not hostile most things can easily be done by bike unless you need to go to another city. Hell, I biked 8km to school, and while somewhat time consuming it was quite literally free exercise.

When I went to uni, before moving to that city I relied on transit. Because of the low density in the region, trains are only half-hourly (which is by far the most sucky part) and it's on single-track rails so every train stops at all stations. However during rush hour it's still time-competitive with cars, and transfers are generally pretty good because those are the reason transit works in that region at all.

Something like "you need a car to be able to get to (store)" that's mentioned in another comment would be literally unthinkable here. You can get practically anywhere with a bike and a transit card.

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

#396

Post by fragmede » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 2:06 AM UTC

NemoNobody wrote: post #372

kjkjadksj wrote: post #266

Earlier 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…

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 real…

https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/cost-of-living-calculat...

doesn't agree with that. It says cost of living in San Diego is almost 40% lower than living in Manhattan. it pulls from ACCRA.

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

#397

Post by newsclues » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 2:07 AM UTC

mrangle wrote: post #378

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.…

As someone that’s taken bus rides that are over a day long.

I want good inter city rail. I want good urban railway or subway in metropolitan areas. And I want bike lanes for last mile travel.

Once we do that and reduce the demand and congestion on the roads, we can plan new roads accordingly.

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

#398

Post by fragmede » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 2:11 AM UTC

troupo wrote: post #224

thereisnospork wrote: post #218

Earlier 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…

The people who freely use terms like "anti-car" always assume that the car is always the fastest most efficient way of getting anywhere... and then sit stuck in standstill on a 6-10-lane highway

don't forget driving around looking for parking for 20 mins as well

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

#399

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 2:13 AM UTC

iteria wrote: post #391

mtalantikite wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has never had a license and admittedly doesn’t know much about car costs, aren’t they expensive? Like how much is a car payment plus insurance every month? And then gas and maintenance? It seems like requiring car ownership to survive is also not great. But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local pub…

I took the bus for nearly a decade and I drive a car now. My life was greatly improved by having a car and while a car is more expensive technically, in indirect costs, it feels like a break even to me. At least as someone who buys cheap cars, tends to live within 30mins drive of my job and keeps them for a good long time. Even in a good public transit area in the US there is a significant time sink to using public t…

[deleted]

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

#400

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 2:14 AM UTC

mtalantikite wrote: post #385

mrangle wrote: post #378

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.…

As someone who has never had a license and admittedly doesn’t know much about car costs, aren’t they expensive? Like how much is a car payment plus insurance every month? And then gas and maintenance? It seems like requiring car ownership to survive is also not great. But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local pub…

Car ownership costs vary widely. If you buy a new $50,000 car every two years, that is obviously very expensive, and then will be expensive to insure, and many of those luxury vehicles aren't amazingly efficient.

Whereas you can usually find a reliable and efficient used car for under $5000 and keep it for quite a bit more than 2 years, with a good driving record and the lower cost vehicle it can cost less than $1000/year to insure, and maintenance is dramatically less expensive if you do it yourself. And I mean the difference is $60 for a part on the internet vs. they charge you $250 for the same part and $500 for the labor to put it in.

By contrast, a monthly NYC subway pass will run you a little over $1500/year, which will in most cases be less but not necessarily a whole lot less. Plus whatever you get stuck paying to Uber whenever you have to go somewhere the subway doesn't.