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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

#721

Post by rangestransform »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #659
rdtsc wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or have minibuses that are smaller and come more frequently. Find a few drivers willing to work after hours as a second job perhaps and let them drive smaller shuttle buses or larger passenger vans. When big buses stop their routes the smaller ones would start. The key is frequency and dependability.

Labor is a huge cost and these transit agency budgets are thin

this is a problem that autonomous driving could fix more easily than the general driving problem due to the fixed route, but good luck having the bus driver union not throw rocks at your AVs

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

#722

Post by rangestransform »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #713
joe_the_user wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DC Metro service, according to wikipedia, was effective transit service that has been trashed over the years by neglected - like BART. And like BART, it's hard single extension but is basically in terrible shape now. My point is that growing demand for mass transit hasn't translated into anything.

Is BART measurably worse than 10 or 20 years ago? I didn't see anything in the news.

bart is on the precipice of going bankrupt unless it can stick more fingers into taxpayers pockets

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

#723

Post by rangestransform »

Jensson wrote: post #583
rangestransform wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

you can reduce the per capita rates of incidents by adding normal people, but even in a city like NYC where most households don't own a car, the subway still has an unacceptable amount of non-violent incidents like the aforementioned one (yeah yeah yeah i know the likelihood of dying on public transit is less per mile than driving)

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

#724

Post by talldatethrow »

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…

Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still.

Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir. Even state camping spots are $40+ it seems in areas I know aren't full all the time.

It costs like $20 in extra gas tax to drive to LA with your friends because California can't just set the income tax appropriately?

I could go on and on. The income tax to me sounds pretty fair. But making a poor person living paycheck to paycheck come up with $40 to go to the lake with a cheap sailboat seems harsh to me (my dad and I used to go as a Kid. It was $5 then. And my dad made $20 an hour as a recent immigrant in construction).

And don't start that people that use services should pay. My tax money goes to a lot of things I don't use or even agree with.

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

#725

Post by nerdponx »

osigurdson wrote: post #586
jltsiren wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have that in very very few places in the USA.

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

#726

Post by dangus »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #699
Jensson wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say NYC and Chicago has enough highways to fill demand so there is no congestion? I am fairly certain that isn't true, I've read so much about congestion problems in NYC at least. Adding enough roads to fill all demand leads to concrete hellscapes, that was the point, the guy I responded to thought it was reasonable to add roads until all demand was satisfied.

No one is saying no congestion. The idea of highway expansion is to allow more people to travel while keeping congestion about constant. NYC and Chicago's highways allow the massive suburban areas and the tens of millions that live in them to semi conveniently go to the city. To do that with trains would require driving to a commuter rail station and then transferring to the metro to get where you want to go. Suburba…

Chicago and NYC have huge commuter rail networks that accomplish exactly what you’re claiming is impractical.

The Metra commuter rail in Chicago handles over 2.5 million trips per month.

59 percent of the people who commute to Manhattan do so via public transit. People commute to work to Manhattan from Connecticut and New Jersey by train.

Penn Station is the busiest transportation facility in the Western hemisphere, serving 600,000 passengers a day, primarily commuter rail and regional rail. And that’s just one station.

One subway tunnel with two tracks is equivalent to something like a 15 lane highway in passenger throughput. That’s where highway expansion truly falls apart: it only really scales up to a small to mid-sized cities before the land waste becomes a burden.

A lot of urban highways have no way to add lanes because there is no more physical space, or you have to destroy the actual destinations that the highway is supposed to serve to expand it.

I will also add that there are a decent amount of suburbs with walkable downtowns along those NYC and Chicago (and Boston!) commuter rail networks where you can buy a condo, rent an apartment, or even a buy a single family home within walking or biking distance of commuters rail and go downtown. In addition, suburban bus lines that feed people into commuter rail stops also exist. So it’s not all park and rides.

And park and rides still help spread traffic across the metro area highway network instead of sending all traffic into to a handful of highways going downtown. If I drive to my town’s commuter rail stop my car is probably not even getting on a highway.

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

#727

Post by shiroiushi »

talldatethrow wrote: post #724
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…

Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still. Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir. Even state camping spots are $40+ it seems in areas I know aren't full all the time. It costs like $20 in extra gas tax to drive to LA with your friends because California can't just set the income tax appropriately? I could go on and on. The income tax to me sounds pretty…

>Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still. >Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir.

If you can afford a sailboat, you're not "low income".

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

#728

Post by shiroiushi »

bobthepanda wrote: post #694
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next bus is loud, uncomfortable, slow, filled with other people you don't want to share space with, stops every 2 minutes, and doesn't go where you want. The bus is run by a government that doesn't care what you want, and probably is either more expensive than you want, or basically "free". Transit systems need to be about twice as fast, comfortable and convenient as car options to be competitive, and in the US p…

The transit systems used to be private. They went broke competing with free highways. Compare this to Japan, where transit is still going strong because the highways must recoup revenues via tolls.

That's only part of it. Do you mean intra-city transit or inter-city transit? Highways are used by car drivers to move within the city (or between cities in the same metro area, such as between Yokohama and Tokyo), not just between far-apart metro areas.

One huge difference between the US and Japan here is parking. Having a car is one thing, but where are you going to park it when you arrive at your destination? If you're driving between two towns or smaller cities, this might not be an issue, but if you're driving between Yokohama and Tokyo, it probably is. The car is only a feasible choice if you're traveling between points where there's a place for you to park. So of course, this drives a lot of traffic onto the trains and keeps ridership very high.

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

#729

Post by rdtsc »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #659
rdtsc wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or have minibuses that are smaller and come more frequently. Find a few drivers willing to work after hours as a second job perhaps and let them drive smaller shuttle buses or larger passenger vans. When big buses stop their routes the smaller ones would start. The key is frequency and dependability.

Labor is a huge cost and these transit agency budgets are thin

I like the sibling comment idea of using AI eventually.

But in general for public transportation I think running at a loss is not unreasonable. It's nice if it's profitable, but it's ok if it isn't. Hopefully it's reducing emissions, giving people who can't or don't want to drive reliable access to their employment, etc. is still worth it.

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

#730

Post by talldatethrow »

shiroiushi wrote: post #727
talldatethrow wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still. Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir. Even state camping spots are $40+ it seems in areas I know aren't full all the time. It costs like $20 in extra gas tax to drive to LA with your friends because California can't just set the income tax appropriately? I could go on and on. The income tax to me sounds pretty…

>Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still. >Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir. If you can afford a sailboat, you're not "low income".

A sailboat costs $500+ on Craigslist or Facebook marketplace.

We had one when my mom was cleaning a convalescent home as her job, and commuting 35 miles one way to do it.

My dad worked 55+ hours a week, and commuted 60 miles one way to do it.

So unless you think my dad let my mom clean hospital floors and bathrooms while we weren't low income, I'd argue you can.

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