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50% of New Yorkers use transit for their trips. It can't suck that bad. For some trips, not driving is a lot faster, even if you are as rich as Bloomberg.
You actually proved my point. I didn't say it sucked...I actually said it was more convenient..yet %50 of people still prefer to drive despite NYC having a good transit system.
I guess I wasn't referring to non-essential stops, such as what you mentioned for convenience purchases that could be eliminated. I am referring to stops for baby diapers, medicine for the baby, baby food/formula, light bulbs, paint, replacement twine spools for the weed-eater, etc. Just the little necessary things that require stops at these stores. Why should we have to restrict our movement and our options for going to get the things we need? Do we want to live in a society where we allow ourselves to be limited in our movement?
I'm usually plan grocery trips out in advance but overall I'm pretty spontaneous. When I have free time, sometimes I like to just go out and about. Also like you mentioned I always find myself having to go somewhere to pick up or do something and if I had to rely on public transportation, that would decrease significantly especially on the weekends.
Okay, the glue example actually happened. Panicked middle school student, project due the next morning. I don't see how that's any different than crying baby, no jars of baby food. I made glue rather than buying it from Office Depot. Maybe you could have boiled a sweet potato or some carrots and mashed them through a strainer rather than jumping in your car and going to the store.
My point is that being able to run out for something using a personal vehicle at the drop of a hat facilitates extra purchases. My husband can't go to a grocery and buy just one thing, and he's not at all uncommon. Ask him to pick up a dozen eggs at the grocery across from his office on his way home, and he comes home with $50 worth of additional stuff that nobody actually needed.
Multiply this behavior by a couple hundred million people, and it has a measurable effect on the economy. Take that option away, and it also has a measurable effect on the economy. If public policy makes it less preferable for people to drive, I think it will have a dampening effect on convenience purchasing. That's all I was trying to say.
Last edited by randomparent; 03-26-2014 at 12:14 PM..
You actually proved my point. I didn't say it sucked...I actually said it was more convenient..yet %50 of people still prefer to drive despite NYC having a good transit system.
It is only good if your world revolves around manhattan. Plenty of places are not well served by the subway etc in the other boroughs. NYC transit is Manahattan centric, but going from borough to borough is not always convenient.
There is always room for improvement in trasit, but you can definitely make it workable and convenient. Most trips starting and originating in manhattan are car-free. Which means, when the transit is good people will use it.
Only 5% go people who live/work in manhattan use a car.
And 16% of people who go from brooklyn to manhattan.
But 75% of people from Staten Island drive (since transit there is sparse).
I'm usually plan grocery trips out in advance but overall I'm pretty spontaneous. When I have free time, sometimes I like to just go out and about. Also like you mentioned I always find myself having to go somewhere to pick up or do something and if I had to rely on public transportation, that would decrease significantly especially on the weekends.
I am going to quote myself here. Transit usage has no impact on if I make other stops. When I took transit to work, I'd still stop at Target to grab toilet paper and take it on the bus. I'd stop for groceries on my way home from the gym with my reusable bag in tow.
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Originally Posted by jade408
Over the past couple years, I have been trying to use my car less in lots of little ways. The last couple of jobs I had were more transit friendly, and that was how I commuted. But lately, I have been trying to work on my non-work trips. I have less control over the work trips, that is all about where my job is at the moment.
But going out to dinner, shopping, getting groceries, dry cleaner, post office, going to the gym etc. All of this tends to happen in a 3 mile radius of my home, and are ideal trips to investigate options. It started with my trips to the gym. Mine is downtown, about 1.25 miles away. It also doesn't have a parking lot, so during the weekdays or Saturday, I'd have to deal with the meter and circling the block. So I started walking or taking the bus there. And then I started multitasking, and toting my reusable bag so I could stop for groceries on the way home.
Let's not even mention the people who have no choice....
Okay, the glue example actually happened. Panicked middle school student, project due tomorrow. I don't see how that's any different than crying baby, no jars of baby food. I made glue rather than buying it from Office Depot. Maybe you could have boiled a sweet potato or some carrots and mashed them through a strainer rather than jumping in your car and going to the store.
My point is that being able to run out for something using a personal vehicle at the drop of a hat facilitates extra purchases. My husband can't go to a grocery and buy just one thing, and he's not at all uncommon. Ask him to pick up a dozen eggs at the grocery across from his office on his way home, and he comes home with $50 worth of additional stuff that nobody actually needed.
Multiply this behavior by a couple hundred million people, and it has a measurable effect on the economy. Take that option away, and it also has a measurable effect on the economy. That's all I was trying to say.
I would argue that not everyone does that, and there are not always homemade solutions. Your example with the glue is awesome, a great money and time saving idea. But in many other ways that kind of solution just isn't possible. An example just the other night- the baby became rather sick with a fever, and we were unprepared, did not have any baby Tylenol- so I had to drive to the store to get some. And that is all I bought- I didn't get side tracked and go pick up a DVD or the latest video game or a TV or anything- I just bought the medicine. If I do make extra purchases they are just other things I remembered I needed so I can avoid another unexpected trip the very next day- such as a gallon of milk, or a loaf of bread, or a bottle of mouth wash.
It would be a ridiculous pain if we were forced to limit these trips, or make them all via public transportation, which would involve planning around a scheduled departure time, a long walk to the bus stop (or even a drive to one), then waiting for the bus and taking far too much time once on the bus as it moves slowly- when I could just hop in my car, open the garage, and go any time of day or night- and be to the store in ten minutes.
And to others who have mentioned how harmful these short trips are to the environment. The fact is modern cars are quite clean- they have good pollution controls in them so you don't have much nastiness coming out of the exhaust pipes these days. Sure there is SOME, but it is very minimal. And with the fuel efficiency our cars get I am using a small fraction of a gallon of gas to make these trips, so it's not like I am burning through lots of our limited fossil fuel resources.
And on the bigger picture, I think people need to stop looking at this as somehow we were forced into using cars by the auto industry back in the day. They came out as an option and people quickly started moving to that mode of transportation because they liked them- they liked how comfortable and convenient automobile transportation is. And it exploded from there as car ownership soared and cities developed to accommodate that mode of transportation. After all, when a massive majority of your population uses cars as their primary mode of transportation, why would governments NOT design around that? And besides, up until recently gas tax money did pay fully for the roads- it's only a more recent issue where that tax income did not completely cover the costs, due to cars getting better fuel economy so less fuel is being purchased (leading to less gas taxes being paid) and fairly significant portions of gas tax revenues being diverted to other things such as transit.
I live in Jacksonville Fl where we have the inconveniently high water table that prevents a subway from being economical. If we were to put an L Train in place properly the city would have to buy billions upon billions of real estate. So we are left with a bus system thats an absolute joke, which still congests the roadways. I would LOVE a subway or L train, cars are way too expensive compared to transit. Its also far too hot here to ride a bike or walk to work. So some towns like ours are FORCED to be auto towns.
To the person that said we need to increase the fuel tax in order to repair the infrastructure of the roads....dont forget that increasing fuel costs increases the cost of EVERYTHING. Because everything is transported at some point in time, or multiple times during production. You think we should collapse the already fragile economy in order to clean up the roads? How about we just reduce the military budget and use that 1.2 Trillion to repair the roads instead.....
Self driving cars are not the savior of the universe. They still have the same problem as regular cars, they require lots of road space and assume people are traveling alone in single occupancy vehicles. If everyone switched to a self driving car, and had one of their own, there will still be road and parking issues. Now there is some potential to reduce the number of cars required, if the self-driving car could be combined with the idea of car-sharing, but this isn't exactly going to revolutionize congestion and traffic. There needs to be a way to move lots of people quickly to specific destinations.
Road capacity goes up by a factor of EIGHT. We are pretty much done expanding capacity of the road system.
Make self-driving cars like taxi's that you can call with your smart phone. Now let the car pick up people heading in the same direction. Pretty soon you have a point to point mass transit system that is very efficient. These will be smaller and much more fuel efficient than the "personal" vehicles. If it helps...think of self-driving pods instead of cars.
My prediction is that urban people will end up with one car that is theirs and used for long trips or weekends. The remainder of the trips will be done on "communal" cars that are essentially rented for the trip.
Self-driving cars are not like regular cars....for one thing they get rid of the worst part of a car....the human driver.
There is a revolution coming in personal transportation. We need to focus on solutions for the future that don't look at obsolete "solutions".
In most parts of the country, driving is the only way. You are not going to get people to accept high gas tax.
Not to mention that high gas tax hurts the poor the most as they live way out. Transit is lousy in most cities. Around transit lines, new luxury condos emerge. Progressive politics is too costly to the poor.
Without a good transit system, people will have to pay more for gas and keep driving. Improving transit systems might work better. We are a long way from that kind of transit system. Given the ridership, transit funding is too much.
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Originally Posted by 2nd trick op
Yep!! The free play of human interaction won't produce the result which We, the Enlightened and Absolutely Politically Correct have decided is best for all, so we'll just have to crack the whip on the Great Unbelieving.
Spoken like the closeted authoritaran who lives inside the psyche of every eco-Czar wannabee.
For most of us, the decision of how to get to work is a hard choice, determined by individual budgets and employment prospects; but don't worry; the environmental clique will bend the rules for a favored few, providing themselves with a staff, an appropriation, and patronage to dispense; the rest of us peasants will just have to foot the bill.
And the cycle will be repeated, ad infinitum and ad nauseam, until no one can afford to get to work without Big Brother's "help'.
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Originally Posted by prosopis
Providing options is fine, a policy of intentional coercion of taxpayers is not - and that is what I was responding to.
Perhaps the gas taxes (and registration fees - here in NM it is set by GVW since heavier vehicles damage the roads more) would be better able to cover the maintenance costs if the politicos weren't always playing the shell game with existing funds in order to fund new sexy projects like mass transit without having to raise taxes.
I have no problem with the existence of mass transit, and no problem with the taxpayer funding it in areas where it truly is an improvement over heavy traffic.
I do have a problem with people thinking they and they alone have the "smarter" solution to be applied to one and all. Experience has shown me that usually they are wrong in their thinking.
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Originally Posted by Escort Rider
The "experts" advocating for higher driving costs are what is wrong with this country. I think "experts" is a misnomer anyway; I would call them fanatical ideologues.
Let people decide how they want to commute to work, or how they want to go other places. Do many stubborn auto commuters spend too much time stuck in traffic? Well, that's on them - it's their choice. People have a way of choosing what is best for them, using their own criteria, despite what urban planners and other ideologues try to force people to do against their will.
For the record, my reason for coercing people into smarter choices was mostly financial.
Rail is actually less subsidized than driving. The average driver pays only half the actual cost of road maintenance through tolls and gas taxes. The rest is subsidized by general income taxes.
Translation: We are subsidizing people to pollute our environment. I understand a lot of poor rural people will get hurt by it, but that is all the more reason to upgrade our transit infrastructure nationwide. We have things backwards. We should not be artificially lowering the cost of driving and widening our roads. If people want to drive, make them pay the true value of driving.
This would require a gas tax hike, but it will allow us to use the funds to expand transit and have people actually pay for the roads they are destroying.
Everything will change with self driving cars. It will be the end of mass transit.
I suspect given that legislatures can pass the appropriate laws self driving cars within five years will represent at least 25% of cars on the road. Ten years after that most urban areas will be self-driving auto's ONLY due to congestion caused by human drivers.
About that time you will see solutions to commuting with self-driving cars and mass transit systems will in most cases be removed just like trolley lines in the 1950's. I suspect a few VERY high density cities will keep mass transit systems
Nope, you're wrong on that one. Self-driving cars don't eliminate the #1 problem of congestion: parking. Most congestion problems in cities are due to parking. The rest is due to surface street congestion. You can make a highway 30 lanes wide and there will still be massive congestion within city limits. There just isn't enough space. The only way to prevent this is to keep people off the roads and use transit, cycling, or walking.
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Originally Posted by oceangaia
Who's paying the costs, if not drivers? Over 90% of households own an automobile.
Driving costs are subsidized by general income taxes. It is currently eating a nice chunk of the Federal budget (not extreme, but significant). Lawmakers won't increase the gas tax due to political pressure.
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Originally Posted by jm31828
Then next we need to make transit riders feel the real cost of transit- that is highly more subsidized than driving is! At least with driving the gas taxes I pay cover about 60% (in this state, anyway) of the road costs- it would be more but a significant portion of those gas taxes are redirected to subsidize TRANSIT. So take that way, keep what we pay for driving to go directly to roads, and the numbers would look even better. Let's see how many would willingly use inconvenient bus service if the cost went up to the true cost, and they had to shell out something like $10 per ride.
You are joking, right? Washington State only covers 47% of driving costs through fuel taxes and user fees. The national average is 50.7%. People need to get off this terribly wrong misconception that driving is less subsidized than transit. Amtrak, with its intracity inconvenience.. covers 85% of its user fees. The Acela Express in the Northeast actually posts a net operating profit, enough to subsidize the rest of Amtrak. It moves more passengers through BosWash than the airlines do, and is the preferred method of travel by many during holiday season.
As for public infrastructure.. a lot of people get a misconception that they are supposed to turn a profit. Most transit / toll authorities actually run an operational deficit so savers can invest in the municipal bonds (part of how our macroeconomy works).
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Originally Posted by jm31828
As someone else noted regarding China, how overcrowded their cities and roads/highways are, and yet more and more people are driving instead of taking public transportation because they are quickly discovering- just like we know- that driving is almost always more convenient and comfortable than public transportation. This country is just not laid out well for public transport- there is no way you'd ever be able to get directly from your point A to your point B via public transportation with the way our towns/cities are laid out. Why would I go to the nearest bus stop to my home, make TWO bus changes along the way on the 90 minute bus travel time to get to my work place when I can just hop in my car and drive straight there in 20-25 minutes? And there will never be a bus going directly from where I live to where I work because both are in suburban types of areas- I don't work in a major job center such as downtown. So what good does it do to try to force people like me into using the bus?
And then there is also the convenience factor. On my way home from work I can make a slight detour to stop at Home Depot to pick up items I need for the house, make another slight detour to stop at Target or Babies R Us or Best Buy for items I may need or even just for browsing without adding much distance or time to my actual trip. By bus that would be a pain- it would mean trying to plan out yet another trip on another transfer to another bus (or two transfers), why would I ever consider that? I wouldn't get home for hours!
I agree with the convenience factor, which is why transit needs to be upgraded. My issue isn't convenience; it is sustainability of energy / climate change, and cost. Driving is heavily subsidized and very destructive to the environment. If people should have that convenience of driving, let them pay for it.. the real cost. Transit and multi-modal methods are far less invasive on public health and more cost-effective.
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