Why suburbia sucks (Atlanta, Dunwoody, Buford: costs, linear, transportation)

[arjay57]

Originally Posted by sstsunami55

And why don't some people like driving? When you drive, you can't do anything but drive. When you're on public transit, you can read and do work and when you're walking or riding a bike, you're exercising. Some people might not dislike driving, but they don't want to depend on driving for literally everything they do. They don't want to be auto-dependent.

Au contraire. For one thing, if you've got a good car you're condensed in your luxurious, comfort-controlled, comfy command center. There's plenty of room to carry all your stuff, and if necessary, pick up more. You can easily carry other passengers. You can eat and drink and nearly all cars these days have cup holders. Countless banks, restaurants, dry cleaners and other businesses have drive thrus. If you have a hands free setup it's a terrific place to catch up on your phone calls. A lot of us like to listen to music, books on tape or talk radio. You can come and go on your own schedule and leave directly from home.

No, unless you are the passenger you can't take a nap.

[Gulch]

Originally Posted by arjay57

You can come and go on your own schedule and leave directly from home.

Until you get stuck in gricdlock and said schedule gets blown out of the water.

[demonta4]

Originally Posted by arjay57

Au contraire. For one thing, if you've got a good car you're condensed in your luxurious, comfort-controlled, comfy command center. There's plenty of room to carry all your stuff, and if necessary, pick up more. You can easily carry other passengers. You can eat and drink and nearly all cars these days have cup holders. Countless banks, restaurants, dry cleaners and other businesses have drive thrus. If you have a hands free setup it's a terrific place to catch up on your phone calls. A lot of us like to listen to music, books on tape or talk radio. You can come and go on your own schedule and leave directly from home.

No, unless you are the passenger you can't take a nap.

Cars themselves aren't the problem, it's the built environment. I shouldn't have to hop in my car just to go to the park or grab a simple snack.

[sedimenjerry]

Originally Posted by Gulch

Until you get stuck in gricdlock and said schedule gets blown out of the water.

That happens with any mode of transportation. MARTA gets delays. Airplanes get delays. Nearly every single Amtrak trip I've taken has been delayed. I can account fairly well for delays when driving if it's expected like rush hour. With the ability to check traffic on my phone even "surprise" delays aren't really a surprise and can be planned around fairly easily.

[neil0311]

Originally Posted by arjay57

Not only that, but it's also a myth that living in the suburbs dooms one to steaming hours-long commutes on impossibly jammed mega freeways.

Most suburbanites have a pretty easy commute of 30 minutes or less. And no, most of them don't have to drive to downtown. Many work locally, from home or in one of the numerous massive job centers that are not in downtown.

That's exactly right, and if people prefer the more urban centric life, then they have choices. No one holds a gun to anyone's head and makes them move to the suburbs. It's funny isn't it that for 30 years, Gwinnett, Cobb, Henry, Forsyth, and North Fulton have been where the growth has taken place in the Atlanta area...not the City of Atlanta which has roughly stayed the same or had declining population relative to overall growth.

There must be something to this suburban thing that has attracted people from all over the country and the world in the last 30 years. What has always annoyed me about threads like this on this forum is how a very small but vocal minority of people wants to substitute their judgment for what "sucks" based on their personal preferences or political persuasion.

[abalashov]

Originally Posted by demonta4

Cars themselves aren't the problem, it's the built environment. I shouldn't have to hop in my car just to go to the park or grab a simple snack.

Exactly right. Nobody here is proposing to eliminate cars, to declare cars useless, or to make it impossible to own or drive one. Cars are an integral part of city life, a necessity in any country of significant size, and at times, very convenient.

But for cars to play a role in life is very different than building a society based on, and mediated almost exclusively by the car and by car-based lifestyles. Overlooking the economic and ecological perversion of having to drive for even the most trivial errand (e.g. go to the park, grab a snack), it reshapes our psychology and our social fabric, too, when we start making car-based plans with car-based friends to do car-based things. It goes from a tool to the centre of an entire ontology of community and civic life, and the logical extension of that is a WALL-E type world. The results are disastrous.

[abalashov]

Originally Posted by neil0311

That's exactly right, and if people prefer the more urban centric life, then they have choices. No one holds a gun to anyone's head and makes them move to the suburbs. It's funny isn't it that for 30 years, Gwinnett, Cobb, Henry, Forsyth, and North Fulton have been where the growth has taken place in the Atlanta area...not the City of Atlanta which has roughly stayed the same or had declining population relative to overall growth.

There must be something to this suburban thing that has attracted people from all over the country and the world in the last 30 years. What has always annoyed me about threads like this on this forum is how a very small but vocal minority of people wants to substitute their judgment for what "sucks" based on their personal preferences or political persuasion.

It sounds like you haven't read most of the thread. Much of what has been said in prior posts relates to the lack of choices, the nature and M.O. of the policy agenda that creates overpowering economic incentives for growth in Gwinnett/Cobb/Henry/Forsyth/N. Fulton, and the self-fulfilling, circular nature of the claim that if suburbs exist, it means the vast majority of people want them (in that way, to that degree, in that amount).

[abalashov]

Originally Posted by sedimenjerry

That happens with any mode of transportation. MARTA gets delays. Airplanes get delays. Nearly every single Amtrak trip I've taken has been delayed. I can account fairly well for delays when driving if it's expected like rush hour. With the ability to check traffic on my phone even "surprise" delays aren't really a surprise and can be planned around fairly easily.

Amtrak isn't a great example of polished rail logistics, given that passenger rail in the US is a tiny, insignificant footnote.

Surprise. It turns out infrastructure that isn't used much and isn't critically relied upon for mobility and economic activity tends not to work well. Some things only work as large-scale, directed investments. There are lots of things that can't be done just a little bit, and can only be done as a gestalt regional project with extensive buy-in from all stakeholders.

This goes back to my criticism of MARTA a few posts back: it's not that US municipalities simply won't do, it's that really half-assed public transit is only very marginally better than no public transit. If you're going to do something, do it right; Amtrak is about the worst possible example of that, given how little ridership it sees. (The Acela Express and the northeast corridor stand as a lone, isolated exception.)

And while there's no argument that all infrastructure and modes of transport are imperfect, can experience delays and so on, some do work better than others. In most major municipal and regional public transport systems, routine train delays--if they are routine--are measured in a few minutes. Busy systems run at headways of a few minutes.

It's very easy to get stuck for 30-60 minutes in Atlanta traffic out of nowhere, even outside of rush-hour. I cannot count how many times I've found myself in parking lot traffic on, say, I-75, out of nowhere, at like 11 PM on a Tuesday or Sunday. The cause is usually a wreck; as we know, traffic is a compression wave. This sort of thing is less apt to happen on well-managed municipal transport systems (notice I said well-managed--far from all are).

By the way, interesting that you think it's easy to route around problems on roads and not so easy with rail, tram, BRT and other systems. To be sure, it's probably broadly true, but it really depends on the problem site. Street design in sprawlsuburbia is actually quite hierarchical, lacking in the virtues of a highly redundant grid that we imagine when we think of multiple ways to get to the same place. The curving, winding streets of subdivisions empty out into single collector roads which aggregate much of area traffic, and those in turn connect to large freeways. I wouldn't say collector roads exist in plurality or are extensively parallelised.

Meanwhile, most public transport systems have parallel and/or redundant tracks, lots of side rails, and other means of routing around problems. Dense metro systems generally offer routes to get somewhere, some more circuitous than others.

All in all, it seems to me that the redundancy and resilience of suburban sprawl roads from a traffic perspective is greatly exaggerated, while the redundancy and resilience of [good] public transport is greatly underappreciated.

[sedimenjerry]

Originally Posted by abalashov

Amtrak isn't a great example of polished rail logistics, given that passenger rail in the US is a tiny, insignificant footnote.

Surprise. It turns out infrastructure that isn't used much and isn't critically relied upon for mobility and economic activity tends not to work well. Some things only work as large-scale, directed investments. There are lots of things that can't be done just a little bit, and can only be done as a gestalt regional project with extensive buy-in from all stakeholders.

This goes back to my criticism of MARTA a few posts back: it's not that US municipalities simply won't do, it's that really half-assed public transit is only very marginally better than no public transit. If you're going to do something, do it right; Amtrak is about the worst possible example of that, given how little ridership it sees. (The Acela Express and the northeast corridor stand as a lone, isolated exception.)

My experience with Amtrak is in the NE where it actually is used extensively. The train I'm most familiar with has a dozen daily trips between Harrisburg and Philly (and on to NYC). It's not even a long distance train. There are no "smoke break" stops. This isn't on the shared freight lines.

I've also used SEPTA to and from the airport. SEPTA is a very well built out system with HRT and commuter rail that is used a lot. Also gets delays. If you're used to it and can learn to plan it out it's not a problem but when you're tied to airplane, SEPTA and Amtrak schedules a slight delay for one of those links can make you sweat.

[abalashov]

Originally Posted by sedimenjerry

My experience with Amtrak is in the NE where it actually is used extensively.

That's unfortunate to hear, then.

At any rate, delays do occur in all transportation modes, perhaps even routinely. But I would still argue that the outcomes are much worse when the distances are as vast as in metro Atlanta, where 30-50 mi is a very typical commute distance. Train delays are an occasional phenomenon in cities, and most are only a few minutes. Rush-hour gridlock is literally everyday thing in Atlanta.

And, as others have pointed out, you can't do much in gridlock apart from bang on your steering wheel in frustration. Sure, one can catch up on phone calls and listen to audio books and podcasts nowadays, and I have done all these things in the years I've spent driving around Atlanta. But these things are all rather at odds with the fundamental nature of the enterprise, and have distraction costs. The central cognitive directive is to drive the car. It's hardly surprising that "road rage" is a thing.