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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

#461

Post by jltsiren »

osigurdson wrote: post #417
pkulak wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation. That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re luck…

I don't think it is mathematically possible to build trains for everywhere people want to go. Fine for extremely dense areas, otherwise inconvenient and dumb.

It's similarly impossible to build roads with enough capacity for everyone to drive. Cars work fine in small towns and low-density areas, but once the population and/or density grows too high, traffic becomes terrible. If you fix the population density and let the city grow, the traffic that needs to cross any particular cross section of the city grows asymptotically faster than the length of the cross section (and therefore road capacity). The traditional solution was lowering the density by replacing houses with roads, but that's no longer popular.

Traffic is a hard problem. There is no single solution that fits everywhere, and you will never be able to go everywhere with your preferred means of transit. At least if you are not a major political leader such as the US president. If you are, you can just stop the normal traffic and let the peasants wait.

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

#462

Post by ethbr1 »

rayiner wrote: post #410
pkulak wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation. That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re luck…

Cars fit in cities just fine. Just got back from Atlanta. Much nicer and cleaner and cheaper than New York City. The only problem is the pollution, which is fixed by EVs. The other stuff, like a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system. Trains are not the solution. Even the best train systems are…

> Just got back from Atlanta. Much nicer and cleaner and cheaper than New York City.

Minor note that 2/3 of Atlanta was destroyed in 1864.

So in contrast to other major American cities, it had the benefit of being mostly planned in an automotive era.

Add in the fact that the surrounding geography doesn't preclude expansion in any direction, and it's essentially a "best-case" city for cars.

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

#463

Post by bluejekyll »

dmix wrote: post #427
nox101 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should consider experiencing living in places with good non-automobile transportation. a few off the top of my head. Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, London Poor people in these cities don’t feel disadvantaged for not having a car. I fact most people in these cities don’t have a car regardless of income level lived with a car in California for 20yrs, Lived withou…

dont poor people in Paris live on the edges of the city far away from the good jobs downtown and are closer to the highways? I don't know much about European cities but maybe it's easier to build housing there than it is here because that's always the main issue in north america. The only reason people live in the suburbs where everyone is forced to drive is because a) housing it cheaper and b) its safer (most EU cit…

How are you quantifying “it’s safer”? The evidence doesn’t generally support this statement. What calculation are you using to suggest that?

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

#464

Post by Larrikin »

Dalewyn wrote: post #457
nox101 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you don’t. plain and simple. Tons of people living together share the costs. the few in the suburbs need to pay for their own infra. They’re not now. The cities are subsidizing the suburbs. that’s not fair. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Your sentiment can be summarized as "Fuck you, I got mine." Hardly convincing. As an aside, the countryside can survive without cities but cities cannot survive without the countryside. Perhaps consider your dependences before brazenly brushing them off.

There's absolutely no way farmers can be more than subsistence farmers without selling to the masses in the city. Country farmers like to pretend they enjoy living off the land but outside of what they actually sell to make money, they would be losing same amenities as the city that they are not willing to give up.

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

#465

Post by ilyagr »

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…

s/word/weird. Phone keyboards...

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

#466

Post by bluejekyll »

jskrablin wrote: post #434
nox101 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should consider experiencing living in places with good non-automobile transportation. a few off the top of my head. Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, London Poor people in these cities don’t feel disadvantaged for not having a car. I fact most people in these cities don’t have a car regardless of income level lived with a car in California for 20yrs, Lived withou…

I don't want to live in a city. It's noisy, polluted, crowded and I really like my small countryside house with plenty of land around it. Lived in a city for 20 years, got fed up with it, despite all of the alleged 'advantages' it offers. I guess I don't deserve decent infrastructure in your world view?

Most of the noise and pollution in cities comes from cars.

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

#467

Post by jayd16 »

rayiner wrote: post #456
jayd16 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because cars are faster and more convenient They wouldn't be if everyone was in a car.

In Tokyo, that’s true. A fairer comparison would be average commute times in places that are built around cars versus ones built around trains. Average commute in Austin Texas is 22 minutes one way: https://www.ktalnews.com/news/business/shreveport-has-one-of... Average commute time in greater Tokyo is double that: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu...

I'm from Los Angeles so excuse my hardy laughter. I'm sure Austin is great but that commute time will surely balloon as the population density continues to rise. Austin has ~3000/sq mi vs Tokyo's ~16,000/sq mi.

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

#468

Post by jltsiren »

rayiner wrote: post #456
jayd16 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because cars are faster and more convenient They wouldn't be if everyone was in a car.

In Tokyo, that’s true. A fairer comparison would be average commute times in places that are built around cars versus ones built around trains. Average commute in Austin Texas is 22 minutes one way: https://www.ktalnews.com/news/business/shreveport-has-one-of... Average commute time in greater Tokyo is double that: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu...

And that's because Austin is a much smaller city. Of course traffic is much easier if you have 15x fewer people going anywhere. If you go by administrative borders, Tokyo is roughly 2.5x larger by land area, with 5.5x higher population density. And if you look at the metropolitan areas, Tokyo is 20% larger by land area and has at least 13x higher population density.

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

#469

Post by ilyagr »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #379
ilyagr wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 10…

These are all good points. High-density housing makes trains easier. Conversely, trains induce demand for high-density housing near the stations. There are many other considerations that need to be taken into consideration to make trains useful: frequency, right-of-way on road crossings (often a problem for light rail), right-of-way vs cargo trains (long-distance trains in the US), ...

> 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.

In a lot of suburbia, there are large parking lots near train stations. In theory, your point is a great advertisement for this setup. In practice, I never lived in a place where driving to the train station was convenient, but it's quite possible that is an accident. For one, parking lots have to be truly large to fit the number of people that would fit in a train car.

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

#470

Post by anon291 »

I'm personally okay with this in principle but I rarely see it accompanied by a policy to build anything else. If you tell me they're going to invest in trains and actual transit, I'm totally in, but I've not heard anything.

I mean this. I ride transit multiple times a week. I love the experience but it requires actual investment and many cities don't do that. In general, most government in America seems unable to actually build anything. I don't think we should applaud that they're now also choosing not to build highways.

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