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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

#581

Post by graemep »

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…

In the UK where we do not have net subsidies for ICE cars (because of taxes on car ownership and fuel) and we do not have minimum parking requirements (AFAIK - there are certainly newish city centre blocks of flats with no parking at all) this does not seem to happen. We have a lot of policies and a rise in the expense of owning a car, but we have not had the required rise in investment in public transport (we need a lot more of it, and cheaper).

The authorities seem to be quite happy with an outcome that means poor people will just have to travel a lot less. Do you think this will be greatly different in the US?

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

#582

Post by rayiner »

jltsiren wrote: post #468
rayiner wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So don’t build such dense cities. America has plenty of land.

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

#583

Post by Jensson »

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?

That happens because the transit isn't used by enough normal people. The need for security personnel doesn't go up with more normal people, when you have the levels Europe has the crackheads etc gets removed from the trains.

You basically ensures your transit system will remain shitty forever, but that is easily fixable. The more good actors that use it the cheaper fixing it gets per person, you can have people who clean and security remove such bad actors at low cost since so small fraction are causing bad events or pissing where they shouldn't. Good people overwhelmingly outnumber bad people in the real world.

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

#584

Post by rayiner »

nerb wrote: post #510
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…

> 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. what in the absolute f** are you talking about? have you ever experienced the sudden death of a loved one? what about the network impact of someone dying? even if you want to look at it through a capitalistic lens, think of the reduction in capability…

This has nothing to do with capitalism. Quite the opposite, it’s about the needs of the many outweighing the lives of the few. There’s 200 million+ adults in the U.S., who save 5-10% of their waking lives by the US being car dependent compared to transit dependent places. Road deaths amount to 0.015% of that population. For every person who does, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life.

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

#585

Post by rayiner »

8organicbits wrote: post #563
rayiner wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Japanese transit system. It’s a marvel. But rich people in Japan usually drive because it’s faster than even an amazing transit system. And the beauty of somewhere like Atlanta is that everyone can live like that. It’s also extremely inconvenient with three kids, especially if you’re trying to bring a stroller onto the train during rush hour. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every…

Americans have an obsession with strollers that I haven't understood. I took my infants on Caltrain, BART, and light rail using a baby bjorn. When they could walk, they walked or were carried. It's not something you should avoid having kids over.

American babies are heavy.

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

#586

Post by osigurdson »

jltsiren wrote: post #461
osigurdson wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Sure. Trains in very dense areas with homogenous travel patterns (e.g, commuting to work) and roads everywhere else. Essentially what we have today in many places.

Of course, commuting to sit in front of a computer all day is pretty absurd. Maybe unnecessary commuting is the real problem.

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

#587

Post by osigurdson »

tsimionescu wrote: post #489
osigurdson wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree! Instead of bringing the middle class down, instead lift everyone up. The alternative is pure and irrational evil.

The alternative to good public transit for everyone is bad public transit for the majority and cars for a few. You don't get to imagine an alternative like "cars for everyone", because it's simply not possible.

That is literally what we have now.

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

#588

Post by abecedarius »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #496
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…

One solution would be a large fleet of cheap electric self-driving taxis. With current pace of AI development, that could be just 10-20 years away.

Also, robocars and mass transit are complements, or should be.

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

#589

Post by chgs »

graemep wrote: post #581
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…

In the UK where we do not have net subsidies for ICE cars (because of taxes on car ownership and fuel) and we do not have minimum parking requirements (AFAIK - there are certainly newish city centre blocks of flats with no parking at all) this does not seem to happen. We have a lot of policies and a rise in the expense of owning a car, but we have not had the required rise in investment in public transport (we need a…

The lack of parking leads to more demand for on street parking, which is delivered via the ballot box. Majority of housing developments have minimum parking stipulations, although in practice those aren’t really practically met (a garage is claimed as a space for example, or a drive which only fits one behind another), which leads to on road parking.

With public transport there are two elements. The capital expenditure and the operational expenditure. Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?

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

#590

Post by blactuary »

chgs wrote: post #589
graemep wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK where we do not have net subsidies for ICE cars (because of taxes on car ownership and fuel) and we do not have minimum parking requirements (AFAIK - there are certainly newish city centre blocks of flats with no parking at all) this does not seem to happen. We have a lot of policies and a rise in the expense of owning a car, but we have not had the required rise in investment in public transport (we need a…

The lack of parking leads to more demand for on street parking, which is delivered via the ballot box. Majority of housing developments have minimum parking stipulations, although in practice those aren’t really practically met (a garage is claimed as a space for example, or a drive which only fits one behind another), which leads to on road parking. With public transport there are two elements. The capital expenditu…

"Why should I pay for that?" crippling good policy is one of our biggest impediments in the US
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