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The place where I live has long straight roads. When it was all busses you could get anywhere day or night up till about 11:00pm when the system shut down. Then they added light rail. They made almost all the busses interline with the train system. ridership dropped. You stopped being able to get into the suburbs after 6:00 by bus. The local transit company is called a costumer disservice company. The long term plan is to go to hub and spoke. It will suck from a user perspective.
You use to be able to take one bus where you wanted to go most of the time. Now two or three transfers are needed.
If you want to get people out of their cars and into mass transit here a good start would be to undo some of the improvements that have been made.
Most drivers don't pay for the costs for wear/tear on the roads, pollution, and congestion/time lost/loss of productivity.
Our roads/highways/interstates are in need of repair and upgrades and the gas tax and drivers fees aren't cover that.
Most development in the US is dictated by zoning and ordinances which generally support the car above everything else. If I want to build a commercial in property in Houston or Austin, I still have minimum parking requirements for most areas.
Transit is about providing more options.
If you think buses don't use roads, pollute the air, and contribute to traffic congestion, then you've obviously never followed one down a city street. Furthermore, how much productivity is lost because bus riders have to arrange their schedules around bus schedules or have to take half a day off to get to appointments that might ordinarily take them an hour if they drove?
This may come as a shock to all you transit afficionados, but most of the US is not NYC, Chicago or San Francisco.
Commerce relies on road infrastructure. Merchandise gets to the retail outlets, food to restaurants, deliveries to business and individuals (remember the online sales delivered by UPS, FedEx, etc.) via roads. And of course how will the trades people get supplies to your abode (apt, etc.) to fix the roof, plumbing, etc.
Mass transit is a fine high cost (NO transit systems cover operating cost with fares) way to move bodies but it is not a way to fully support society transportation needs..
I have never heard of anybody talking about abolishing roads. That's ridiculous. We'll always have the same number of roads and streets that we have now.
What we're talking about is replacing a part of the highways used for commuting to work with train lines, which can move more people without traffic gridlock.
In the time it takes me to drive my car to the nearest park and ride, wait on the next bus/train/etc. to arrive, then walk to my destination after I get off the transit at the other end... I could have driven there the whole way in my car. Probably two or three times over if I wanted to.
In a nice, heated or air conditioned car, listening to the music I want to listen to, putting up with the smells I create (rather than the smells of other people), not being dependent on someone else's schedule to get there... and not having to put up with the various elements from standing around waiting on the train/bus/whatever to show up.
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Yes, a car carries high costs in terms of gas, insurance, maintenance... but the cost is paid back in terms of time you save.
YOLO. Time is something you can't get back... you can always make more money. But you'll never get that time back that you spent waiting on transit to show up.
You live in Dayton, Ohio. Try living in a big city and see how fast you can commute from the suburbs to work by car.
I used the park & ride bus in Houston and it sucked that they always ran the AC even when it was 60F outside, but nobody smelled bad (these are professional people commuting to white collar jobs), and it was a lot quicker than driving because the buses use the HOV lanes. 1 hour instead of 90 minutes.
It would have been far better if it was trains instead of buses, because there's still traffic on the HOV lanes and for a big chunk of the journey the bus is on the regular highway.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data on construction spending, approximately one-third of the nearly 1 million new-home construction projects in the U.S. last year were of multifamily units. That was the highest rate since the bureau began tracking construction spending. Many of these units are in urban areas.
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Last year, a study by U.S. Public Interest Research Group called "A New Direction" found that Americans drove more miles nearly every year between the end of World War II and 2004. However, Americans drive no more miles today than in 2004. The study also showed that people ages 16 to 34 drove 23% fewer miles on average in 2009 than 2001.
I've always advocated for a huge hike to the gas tax. It is the easiest way to fund / repair Public Sector Union Retiree's Gold-Plated Pensions & Cadillac Health Care ...
Not all are well executed. It isn't quite as simple as putting up a mixed use building. But I have seen the development in Concord, it is pretty good. Much of the Peninsula has good potential if it isn't already working. Their problems are a little different.
I have only been to Moraga a handful of times. So I don't know. But the thing is, there are plenty of people who might want to live in a place like Moraga, but not want a single family home. Denser development is ideal for this.
Then it wouldn't be Moraga. It'd be more like all the development going up around downtown walnut creek. Nothing wrong with that, but that isn't Moraga. Moraga is mostly big lot, SFHs. There's some apartments and condos but most of those aren't in dense locations either. Moraga just doesn't have that. It's not to say it couldn't or shouldn't, but it doesn't. The logical place to do dense development in Moraga would be Orinda BART around the Orinda Theater Square... unfortunately, there's not much room to do anything there. People have houses surrounding it. Expensive houses that they probably don't want to give up. You could always use eminent domain to seize them, but I'm not really hot on that for a variety of reasons. The easiest place would be BART's parking lots which are on the wrong side of the freeway and not really big to offer much development potential anyway.
I have never heard of anybody talking about abolishing roads. That's ridiculous. We'll always have the same number of roads and streets that we have now.
What we're talking about is replacing a part of the highways used for commuting to work with train lines, which can move more people without traffic gridlock.
And if some people don't like our "solution', we'll force it on them anyway! (even if we're outvoted).
Always seemed really odd to me that governments use zoning to artificially lower population density, then use peoples tax money to pay for transit that isn't financially practical because of the low population density. Why not just spend money on transit where it makes sense, like the 2nd Avenue of Manhattan? Walkability should exist before transit is added. If the goal is to help poor people with transportation costs, why not give them vouchers for car insurance or something along those lines instead?
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Originally Posted by 2nd trick op
But somehow, I suspect that the prospect of 40-ton highway mastodons on our Interstates with no one at the wheel would scare the daylights out of many of the "pretty people" who gush over the dream of self-driving cars.
Personally I'd feel a lot safer on a highway with driverless trucks than I currently do driving around meth using, sleep deprived, overworked truck drivers who do things like tailgate and drive 70mph in a 55mph zone!
I have never heard of anybody talking about abolishing roads. That's ridiculous. We'll always have the same number of roads and streets that we have now.
What we're talking about is replacing a part of the highways used for commuting to work with train lines, which can move more people without traffic gridlock.
FYI, a highway IS a road.
The other point you're missing... There should be no "replace" of anything with anything. You're robbing Peter to pay Paul.
If people want trains, run the tracks parallel to the highways using currently undeveloped land, or build overhead track systems like in Japan. But under no circumstances should regular freeway lanes be sacrificed because of misguided assumptions about usage.
Any option that is a clandestine attempt at forcing change people don't want, isn't an option at all.
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