Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I'm all for "flexibility" but I think you can get *too* flexible, too. In Denver and Minneapolis, to name two cities, you can be sure that most tenants/owners in multi-family housing have cars. In NY/NJ, not so much.
While far fewer in NYC car owners (and in a few closer in parts of NJ) the lack of off-street parking for many residents + the high density means the streets are completely filled with resident's cars. So any additional cars on the street impacts the few drivers more than it might, in say Denver.
A friend living in NYC who drives to work (reverse commute, which is relatively rare there): parking isn't too bad, takes up to 5 minutes to find a space. Her thought on a new development: her only concern is that it doesn't make parking harder. But the local expectation for convenient parking as in distance from home is probably much lower than in Denver.
Let those that use the public streets for walking and bicycles chip in too.
What really drives me up the wall is people without kids or kids in private schools paying up to 50% of their property tax to fund public schools.
One interesting tidbit is much of Highway 5 in California was funded to provide a rapid inland route for military mobilization...
I made a counter-argument to the idea that everyone benefits from interstates and, thus, interstates are a public good for which the cost should be shared by everyone, direct user or not. I agreed that there was a public good argument to be made. But most of the use of controlled-access interstates, freeways, and highways is for personal or economic use. As such, most of the cost should be carried by direct users. Any benefit I receive as an indirect user (eg, when I go to Costco) will be passed along to me by the direct user (eg, the freight carrier to Costco to the end consumer), so it's not as if I wouldn't be paying for the benefit I receive.
Hunger is a big problem in the US and being fed is a public good. Should you subsidize the food I buy at Whole Foods? There's good reason to subsidize food for the poor, but that argument doesn't extend to me buying expensive craft beer at an overpriced supermarket. It's the same with interstates, in that I shouldn't subsidize the shipping of your Amazon purchase, your trip to Disneyland, etc.
And your counter about pedestrians and cyclists is asinine. That comes out of a city's general fund, such that if you pay local taxes in any way, you pay for sidewalks and local streets. In some cities, like my own, most sidewalks are the burden of the property owner, so it isn't even a shared cost; that's right, I, not other residents or taxpayers, have to pay for the upkeep of the sidewalk in front of my house. And the lifetime cost to providing sidewalks? It's so low that, even if I paid a pedestrian toll to the city that was equivalent to the cost of my use of my use of them, it would be pennies at a time. Your counter suggests they are remotely comparable, but they simply are not.
Please keep in mind that their comparison of poverty rate and vehicles has a pretty bad r squared. That said, it makes a certain amount of sense that high-poverty cities would have lower ownership ratios because cars are expensive. If you're poor, it's just going to be harder to afford a car. But, where this evidence, and where evidence from developing countries, takes us is to the idea that cars are a symbol of status more easily obtainable than, say, a house or land, so people try really hard to own a car, even when the economics of ownership is upside down.
And this quote really tells the story of what's happening and why it's so hard to get cars off the roads in the US:
Quote:
Ultimately, despite growing appeals to take cars off roadways, there just isn’t a viable alternative yet to getting behind the wheel in most places. “If you ask people to take an extra two hours to take a bus or walk a mile,†Polikov says, “they’re typically not going to do it.â€
To which I say, of course. But we end up in a circular argument: cars are the most practical way to get around our cities, so anti-car elitist urbanistas shouldn't criminalize car use; cities are built around cars, so cars are the most practical way to get around our cities. That circle can be simplified to say: the alternative is terrible, so the alternative is terrible.
The Bay Area Toll Authority is expected to approve a $1.3 million engineering study and cost analysis to determine how best to attach 5 miles of bike lanes to the west span of the Bay Bridge between Treasure Island and downtown San Francisco - at a cost of $160 million to $390 million
Hardly pennies unless the pennies are gold.
Now to bring it home.
Several state highways in my city and neighboring cities are 4 lane that have recently been re-striped making them 2 lane plus dedicated bike lanes in each direction.
The cost per mile of the bike lane costs more than the cost per mile of road because of the extra and ongoing cost to stripe and signage.
In closing... not a day goes by on my route where cars dutiful obey traffic signs and signals and bikes simply blow through...
PS... at least two cities where I have lived and the city where I work REQUIRE the property owner with sidewalk frontage to bear the cost for ongoing sidewalk repair... and YES... I have had to pay for repairs in Hayward and Oakland... and in Oakland a person tripped on a city sidewalk from 1930 and MY Insurance paid the claim because Oakland Ordinance makes adjacent property abutting property owner responsible... how them for apples?
Yea, it could use some stop consolidation, I think they've been doing some of that recently. I think you're bashing San Francisco unfairly;all American cities have done similar. The difference is San Francisco unlike Boston, Philly or Chicago never built a subway to denser neighborhoods. Well, there's BART to Mission. San Francisco seems to run it's bus system in a more efficient manner than Boston, and seems to be trying improvements (signal priority, proof of payment and more).
Muni has good coverage and terrible performance. The reason Uber/etc took off here so quickly is because cabs sucked, buses are extraordinarily slow for getting around town. Honestly it is faster to get to many parts of SF from Oakland (or Berkeley) than the Western half of the city because transit is so slow. Many "able-bodied" people take up biking because Muni is so slow. One of my colleagues lives in a fairly central part of SF, and for him to take the bus to go the 2.5 miles to work is over 30 minutes! He bikes. Walking is almost as fast as the bus. Considering SF is a really small city, only 7 x 7 miles, bus trips should be a lot more efficient (and there should be more transit with dedicated right of way).
Let's not get into the excessive number of transit agencies in the Bay Area. I could easily clock in 3 different agencies to to an area like the Chinatown/North Beach/Marina from Oakland. It is not an exaggeration to say that we have 20 different agencies in our region. That adds cost, complexity and of course time to make so many transfers.
The Bay Area Toll Authority is expected to approve a $1.3 million engineering study and cost analysis to determine how best to attach 5 miles of bike lanes to the west span of the Bay Bridge between Treasure Island and downtown San Francisco - at a cost of $160 million to $390 million
Hardly pennies unless the pennies are gold.
Now to bring it home.
Several state highways in my city and neighboring cities are 4 lane that have recently been re-striped making them 2 lane plus dedicated bike lanes in each direction.
The cost per mile of the bike lane costs more than the cost per mile of road because of the extra and ongoing cost to stripe and signage.
In closing... not a day goes by on my route where cars dutiful obey traffic signs and signals and bikes simply blow through...
PS... at least two cities where I have lived and the city where I work REQUIRE the property owner with sidewalk frontage to bear the cost for ongoing sidewalk repair... and YES... I have had to pay for repairs in Hayward and Oakland... and in Oakland a person tripped on a city sidewalk from 1930 and MY Insurance paid the claim because Oakland Ordinance makes adjacent property abutting property owner responsible... how them for apples?
I think the Bay Bridge is an excessive example for bike lane costs. Look at the cost per mile for roads themselves on the bridge. The cost of a bike lane is a drop in the bucket compared to the bridge. It is an exceptionally challenging project. Here are some more numbers on road costs that also adds in bike lanes on "normal" roads.
There is an assumption that bike riders are breaking more laws than drivers. That is a myth. Many people do the "california roll" at stop signs. On my own street, on any given morning, a dozen cars will not yield at my crosswalk while I am on my way to the bus. Even though I am standing in a perfectly visible location. And this is for the 2 minutes I am there. Each person at the bus stop waits for 5-15 cars to go by before crossing that intersection. And there is a stoplight up ahead. And it is residential. The city could load up on revenue by hanging out at that corner from 7:30a-8:15.
Bicyclists are not more lawless than any other vehicle operators on the road.
Any idea on what some of the bicycle lanes cost per mile?
$10k-$250k/mile for existing streets*, depending on the complexity of the bike lane (simple striping vs. bollards vs. permanent barriers). I mentioned lifetime cost because, while the up-front costs may seem high, the wear-and-tear caused by cyclists is much, much slower to accumulate than on a motor vehicle lane, so maintenance is cheap. So, the 100 year cost of a dedicated bike lane, as compared to a motor vehicle lane of the same traffic volume and same amount of striping (ie, apples-to-apples), is minuscule.
*Just read the TreeHugger link, and SF's costs are out of line with what I've heard about in other cities
I'm all for "flexibility" but I think you can get *too* flexible, too. In Denver and Minneapolis, to name two cities, you can be sure that most tenants/owners in multi-family housing have cars. In NY/NJ, not so much.
In NJ there is only a sliver of area where you can easily live without needing a car and that would be a couple of sections of Jersey City and Hoboken. Other than Manhattan, cars are quite common and needed in NYC (Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island).
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
