I can’t drive, and I live in New Jersey, a good place to live if you need mass transit. Even still, I have to rely on Lyft and Uber to get anywhere in a reasonable or reliable timeframe. Taking the train or the bus means I have to tack on an extra half hour, if I’m lucky. Going grocery shopping with mass transit is a nightmare, because of size and weight limits (I have to be ready to walk with that stuff for over a mile). Plus, I hurt my foot pretty badly about a month ago (walking between bus stops in an area that has no right to be as hazardous as it is), so any kind of transit is actively painful currently. Heck, even if I could drive, I couldn’t, because it was my right foot that was hurt.
I don’t see how it could be made better without having to do billions or trillions of taxpayer-funded upgrades to every road (and a lot of eminent domain to build sidewalks - very expensive and just as unpopular). I also don’t see how it can get better with the labor costs where they are, unless our taxes go up even higher.
The fact that the system exists is a positive, but improving it is such an expensive endeavor for so little impact that it would be mostly pointless. No one is going to willingly choose to take an hour to get somewhere that a car can reach in ten minutes. No one is going to willingly choose to stand out on a random corner in the snow, rain, cold, or extreme heat just to wait for a bus that might already be delayed, and whose environmental systems might be malfunctioning. I don’t see a way to incentivize people to even begin considering public transit with the time differences. I pay fees to Lyft or Uber that are an order of magnitude higher than what I’d pay NJTransit - and I’m not discouraged, because I just have to look at the difference in time.
I don’t see how it could be made better without having to do billions or trillions of taxpayer-funded upgrades to every road
This seems like a good-faith comment, so I’ll try to keep the snark to a minimum. Honestly, when I hear this sentiment, I think that somebody believes that roads are naturally-occurring phenomena. They just sort of… grow? appear? form from the bedrock?
Good lord, no! Roads are highly resource-intensive structures, and roads for cars have a finite lifetime, typically figured in the range of about 30 years before they have to be re-constructed. And that’s not counting perhaps several rounds of re-surfacing and maintenance in that span. In fact, Strong Towns often points out that when businesses acquire a capital asset, they have to book the cost of future maintenance as a liability. Municipal governments, by contrast, book roads as an asset, and ignore the future maintenance liability. If they followed GAAP, most cities and towns would be bankrupt. Hence, the reason the American Society of Civil Engineers grades our roads as D+. As a country, we keep building roads that we can’t afford to fix.
That is a long way of saying, “We have a backlog of trillions of dollars of maintenance to roads already!” They have to be re-built regularly, anyway, and lots are overdue. One of the major reasons that we can’t afford to do it, and the reason that there are so many lane-miles of road to maintain, is cars. The simple geometry of the space needed for cars means that everything has to be far apart in order to fit the roads, and the parking lots, and the drive-thrus in between.
So, we’re on the hook for a backlog of trillions of dollars of taxpayer-funded basic maintenance to roads, and we can’t afford it. Wouldn’t it be better to re-construct our cities and towns—which again, have to be re-constructed no matter what—around more opportunities for walking, biking, or transit? It would be way cheaper. And without all that pavement for cars, we could put things closer together. Walking to the local grocery would be convenient, because the nearest grocery wouldn’t have to be 5 miles away, on the edge of town, where land for a parking lot is cheap enough. We could be healthier, stopping by the grocery for a few minutes on the way home a couple of times a week to pick up fresh, healthy ingredients, instead of loading up the car with a pallet of highly-processed food from CostCo every two weeks. We could have better weak ties with neighbors by seeing them from time to time at nearby places, which science shows is critical to addressing our mental health crisis. We could let our children, elderly, and disabled people have independence again. And the buses could be fast and convenient, if they didn’t have to go so far and get stuck in private car traffic all the way.
Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough, but I hope that this is a peek at just how bad our car-based system is, and how it could be made better, and for cheaper.
Do you understand how much roads actually cost? Do you understand how bad the ROI on road expansions is?
Besides, I will 100% take a little extra time to not drive. Google Maps will give you a door-to-door driving time which doesn’t include finding parking and walking from said parking and for the metro it gives the longest time so you can pman for waiting for the train+transfers but you can regularly go much quicker than that. I own car, I own a sportscar, and I only drive it when I absolutely need to which often means driving it just so it doesn’t sit still for too long and gather rust. Plus, a monthly metro/bus pass costs less than my insurance on a car which they know I only drive around 5,000km/year and then there’s gas, tires and oil, and any maintenance(which I do myself to save money).
Public transit is awesome and it works. We know this because we can see it working even in rural Europe, places very similar in many ways to North America. The US and Canada spread their cities out in incredibly ineffective ways and they aggressively shoot down public transit expansion. Montréal and New York are cities in North America that prove that there is no magical anti-transit field on the continent. Shit works, and it’s awesome.
TL;DR the only reason that your public transit is bad is because all levels of your governments actively resist the tried-and-true methods that make it work while burning billions of dollars on car-centric projects which are shown to never have any lasting effect on traffic(we’re talking a year or less) due to induced demand.
No one is going to willingly choose to take an hour to get somewhere that a car can reach in ten minutes. No one is going to willingly choose to stand out on a random corner in the snow, rain, cold, or extreme heat just to wait for a bus that might already be delayed, and whose environmental systems might be malfunctioning.
That’s the point of improving things, then it wouldn’t be like that. But the previous sentence you said it was a pointless endeavour so I’m not sure what your point is.
If you have bad public transport you can’t argue against making it good based on the fact that it’s bad now since if it was good then it would no longer be bad. I really don’t know what else to say.
They argued you cant make it better cause the improvements impact does not scale with costs. As an example they mentioned, implementing sidewalks would make walking safer, but cost ridiculous amounts of money that tax payers would have to fork over. Something they likely won’t do because costs will likely outweight the benefits for a lot of people
But the person is assuming the result would still be poor public transport. In a sense they’re right, spending a lot of money to still take “an hour to get somewhere that a car will reach in ten minutes” would not be worth it because that would be a failure, but assuming failure isn’t a reason to argue against it when lots of places do it well and benefit greatly from it. Reaching for an analogy, it’s a bit like saying we shouldn’t make an omelette because it’ll be raw if we don’t cook it and that would be a waste of money.
Probably not. The land to either side of roads is typically owned by the road-owning entity already, in case they need to make improvements.
Even in my urban environment, the city owns the verge, the sidewalk, and something like eight inches past the sidewalk, six inches past everyone’s front fence.
I live in NJ (where this guy is coming from) and I’d say the bigger problem isn’t eminent domain. It’s homeowners who don’t want sidewalks in their neighborhood. The idea is that walking is for the poors, and we are clearly too classy for such things as basic public safety.
The wealthier the town (around here) the less likely a residential area is to have a sidewalk. They advertise and brag about “walkable” downtowns like it’s a cute novelty not a given that should apply to every street.
To be fair though, a lot of these quiet suburban streets are very safe to walk along. Pedestrian accidents on quiet suburban streets here are mostly unheard of.
I can’t drive, and I live in New Jersey, a good place to live if you need mass transit. Even still, I have to rely on Lyft and Uber to get anywhere in a reasonable or reliable timeframe. Taking the train or the bus means I have to tack on an extra half hour, if I’m lucky. Going grocery shopping with mass transit is a nightmare, because of size and weight limits (I have to be ready to walk with that stuff for over a mile). Plus, I hurt my foot pretty badly about a month ago (walking between bus stops in an area that has no right to be as hazardous as it is), so any kind of transit is actively painful currently. Heck, even if I could drive, I couldn’t, because it was my right foot that was hurt.
I don’t see how it could be made better without having to do billions or trillions of taxpayer-funded upgrades to every road (and a lot of eminent domain to build sidewalks - very expensive and just as unpopular). I also don’t see how it can get better with the labor costs where they are, unless our taxes go up even higher.
The fact that the system exists is a positive, but improving it is such an expensive endeavor for so little impact that it would be mostly pointless. No one is going to willingly choose to take an hour to get somewhere that a car can reach in ten minutes. No one is going to willingly choose to stand out on a random corner in the snow, rain, cold, or extreme heat just to wait for a bus that might already be delayed, and whose environmental systems might be malfunctioning. I don’t see a way to incentivize people to even begin considering public transit with the time differences. I pay fees to Lyft or Uber that are an order of magnitude higher than what I’d pay NJTransit - and I’m not discouraged, because I just have to look at the difference in time.
This seems like a good-faith comment, so I’ll try to keep the snark to a minimum. Honestly, when I hear this sentiment, I think that somebody believes that roads are naturally-occurring phenomena. They just sort of… grow? appear? form from the bedrock?
Good lord, no! Roads are highly resource-intensive structures, and roads for cars have a finite lifetime, typically figured in the range of about 30 years before they have to be re-constructed. And that’s not counting perhaps several rounds of re-surfacing and maintenance in that span. In fact, Strong Towns often points out that when businesses acquire a capital asset, they have to book the cost of future maintenance as a liability. Municipal governments, by contrast, book roads as an asset, and ignore the future maintenance liability. If they followed GAAP, most cities and towns would be bankrupt. Hence, the reason the American Society of Civil Engineers grades our roads as D+. As a country, we keep building roads that we can’t afford to fix.
That is a long way of saying, “We have a backlog of trillions of dollars of maintenance to roads already!” They have to be re-built regularly, anyway, and lots are overdue. One of the major reasons that we can’t afford to do it, and the reason that there are so many lane-miles of road to maintain, is cars. The simple geometry of the space needed for cars means that everything has to be far apart in order to fit the roads, and the parking lots, and the drive-thrus in between.
So, we’re on the hook for a backlog of trillions of dollars of taxpayer-funded basic maintenance to roads, and we can’t afford it. Wouldn’t it be better to re-construct our cities and towns—which again, have to be re-constructed no matter what—around more opportunities for walking, biking, or transit? It would be way cheaper. And without all that pavement for cars, we could put things closer together. Walking to the local grocery would be convenient, because the nearest grocery wouldn’t have to be 5 miles away, on the edge of town, where land for a parking lot is cheap enough. We could be healthier, stopping by the grocery for a few minutes on the way home a couple of times a week to pick up fresh, healthy ingredients, instead of loading up the car with a pallet of highly-processed food from CostCo every two weeks. We could have better weak ties with neighbors by seeing them from time to time at nearby places, which science shows is critical to addressing our mental health crisis. We could let our children, elderly, and disabled people have independence again. And the buses could be fast and convenient, if they didn’t have to go so far and get stuck in private car traffic all the way.
Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough, but I hope that this is a peek at just how bad our car-based system is, and how it could be made better, and for cheaper.
Do you understand how much roads actually cost? Do you understand how bad the ROI on road expansions is?
Besides, I will 100% take a little extra time to not drive. Google Maps will give you a door-to-door driving time which doesn’t include finding parking and walking from said parking and for the metro it gives the longest time so you can pman for waiting for the train+transfers but you can regularly go much quicker than that. I own car, I own a sportscar, and I only drive it when I absolutely need to which often means driving it just so it doesn’t sit still for too long and gather rust. Plus, a monthly metro/bus pass costs less than my insurance on a car which they know I only drive around 5,000km/year and then there’s gas, tires and oil, and any maintenance(which I do myself to save money).
Public transit is awesome and it works. We know this because we can see it working even in rural Europe, places very similar in many ways to North America. The US and Canada spread their cities out in incredibly ineffective ways and they aggressively shoot down public transit expansion. Montréal and New York are cities in North America that prove that there is no magical anti-transit field on the continent. Shit works, and it’s awesome.
TL;DR the only reason that your public transit is bad is because all levels of your governments actively resist the tried-and-true methods that make it work while burning billions of dollars on car-centric projects which are shown to never have any lasting effect on traffic(we’re talking a year or less) due to induced demand.
That’s the point of improving things, then it wouldn’t be like that. But the previous sentence you said it was a pointless endeavour so I’m not sure what your point is.
If you have bad public transport you can’t argue against making it good based on the fact that it’s bad now since if it was good then it would no longer be bad. I really don’t know what else to say.
They argued you cant make it better cause the improvements impact does not scale with costs. As an example they mentioned, implementing sidewalks would make walking safer, but cost ridiculous amounts of money that tax payers would have to fork over. Something they likely won’t do because costs will likely outweight the benefits for a lot of people
But the person is assuming the result would still be poor public transport. In a sense they’re right, spending a lot of money to still take “an hour to get somewhere that a car will reach in ten minutes” would not be worth it because that would be a failure, but assuming failure isn’t a reason to argue against it when lots of places do it well and benefit greatly from it. Reaching for an analogy, it’s a bit like saying we shouldn’t make an omelette because it’ll be raw if we don’t cook it and that would be a waste of money.
Probably not. The land to either side of roads is typically owned by the road-owning entity already, in case they need to make improvements.
Even in my urban environment, the city owns the verge, the sidewalk, and something like eight inches past the sidewalk, six inches past everyone’s front fence.
I live in NJ (where this guy is coming from) and I’d say the bigger problem isn’t eminent domain. It’s homeowners who don’t want sidewalks in their neighborhood. The idea is that walking is for the poors, and we are clearly too classy for such things as basic public safety.
The wealthier the town (around here) the less likely a residential area is to have a sidewalk. They advertise and brag about “walkable” downtowns like it’s a cute novelty not a given that should apply to every street.
To be fair though, a lot of these quiet suburban streets are very safe to walk along. Pedestrian accidents on quiet suburban streets here are mostly unheard of.
Fuck that, give me my NJ sidewalks. The sidewalk fucking ENDS and it’s a crime. A crime. Let me walk to fucking wawa without dying!!