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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

#551

Post by AnthonyMouse »

kanbara wrote: post #426
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Problem is we don't even have enough political capital to enforce this. The problem is that you're proposing a new problem rather than a solution. Suppose there are two car lanes and they're somewhat congested. You suggest converting one to a bus lane to encourage people to take the bus. The result is to make the remaining car lane disproportionately more congested, because the bus lane gets 10% of people to take t…

this entire monologue boils down to “people want cars and public transit is bad, so don’t improve it and prioritise access” which sounds a lot like you work for ford

It's not that public transit is bad, it's that if you try to make car travel worse without providing people with a viable alternative to it, you will lose at politics. And just sticking a bus lane in there doesn't provide an alternative unless the bus comes at short intervals to the places where people actually travel, which isn't compatible with the geography of most American cities, because at least one of the endpoints will be in the suburbs which lacks the density for viable mass transit.

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

#552

Post by spacebanana7 »

balfirevic wrote: post #138
appplication wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, a motorcycle is a complete nonstarter for this reason. It’s just not responsible for anyone with a family.

Would you say the same thing for bicycles, in places without dedicated bicycle lanes?

I suspect driving a motorbike in sub 40mph areas in London and other major cities is actually safer than pedal cycling.

You’re subject to fewer overtakes and have much better protective equipment if anything bad does happen.

However I’ve not been able to find any data or studies inspecting this directly. There’s some urban data but I think that can include certain motorways and high speed roads.

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

#553

Post by pembrook »

tcmart14 wrote: post #438
rayiner wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In both Singapore and Hong Kong, I never had to wait more than 10 minutes for a train and the stops were pretty much within 3-4 blocks within anything I'd want to get to.

Great, so all Colorado needs to do is break itself off into a tiny geography on an advantageous sea route to 1) force density due to this unique geography 2) become a global shipping hub and tax haven for the super rich to get the capital to build mega real estate/transit projects 3) 5X population growth rates for 50 years and 4) force all families out of their comfortable homes and into tiny, absurdly expensive apartments. Easy!

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

#554

Post by saagarjha »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #408
ColonelPhantom wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing is as expensive as your time. Then public transport should be way cheaper than driving, as on transit you have some downtime where you can scroll through your phone, listen to some music, or perhaps even crack open your laptop if you're on a proper train. Driving requires constant attention, so you can't relax or do anything else in the meantime.

Scrolling through your phone is not exactly quality time. In general the time spent on any form of commuting is a net cost to be minimized.

Depends on what you're doing. I frequently use my rides to go through email.

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

#555

Post by saagarjha »

tonynator wrote: post #503
infecto wrote: post #15

Sounds 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.

[flagged]

The American spirit isn't about cars, it's about car companies telling you it's about cars.

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

#556

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ilyagr wrote: post #469
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stree…

> Conversely, trains induce demand for high-density housing near the stations.

The primary existing problem is that high-density housing is prohibited through zoning, or made prohibitively expensive through other regulatory rules. It doesn't matter how much demand you generate if increasing supply is constrained by law. Whereas if you could fix the zoning and building codes then you wouldn't need to induce demand because demand is already there -- it's why housing is so expensive.

> 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)

These are all density again. You get frequency by having enough passengers to fill the transit car on that interval, which you get from higher density. There is no point in sending a bus to carry one person to one house, it might as well be a car.

This is also why right of way and bus lanes are the wrong way to think about it. If you don't have enough density you're going to lose regardless and all the bus lane is going to do is make the traffic worse, because people can't take the bus if it doesn't go where they're going when they're going there and then you're just wasting a lane. Whereas if you do have the density then you still don't build a bus lane because instead you build a subway.

> In a lot of suburbia, there are large parking lots near train stations. In theory, your point is a great advertisement for this setup.

That's trying to have it both ways. If you have to drive to the train station then you have to buy a car and insure it and unless the parking at the train station is free you're now paying for parking. At this point people start wondering why they're hoofing it up to the train platform and paying for transit tickets and waiting for the train instead of just driving the rest of the way to their destination.

To fix this you need more people to live within walking distance of mass transit. Which is to say, you need to build higher density housing or allow mixed zoning so people can live closer to where they work.

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

#557

Post by [deleted] »

hamandcheese wrote: post #451
walthamstow wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 'undesirables' are part of your local area, then they'll be on the public transport. The clue is in the name. The reason Japan doesn't have them on the trains is not because the guards have removed them, it's because they weren't there to begin with.

I'm pretty sure if they tried in Japan, the guards would remove them.

[deleted]

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

#559

Post by AnthonyMouse »

saagarjha wrote: post #554
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrolling through your phone is not exactly quality time. In general the time spent on any form of commuting is a net cost to be minimized.

Depends on what you're doing. I frequently use my rides to go through email.

Which you can also do during any of the time you don't spend commuting, without having to do it on a noisy train car.

At the limit the optimal commute is work from home.

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

#560

Post by saagarjha »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #559
saagarjha wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you're doing. I frequently use my rides to go through email.

Which you can also do during any of the time you don't spend commuting, without having to do it on a noisy train car. At the limit the optimal commute is work from home.

I do work from home, actually. Regardless, I still have places to be at times that are not my house.
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