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My office is 5 miles away; it takes about 12 minutes there (sometimes 11) and about 10-11 coming home as I don't have to stop for a long, left-turn light.
Ok. I thought you were referring to city driving speeds not suburban ones.
Actually, thinking about it, you'd trouble getting those speed for many typical drives in Long Island as well.
Driving in Budapest is not that bad, especially outside downtown. The car lanes are narrower than in North America and people drive more slowly, but traffic seemed to be free flowing most of the time. There are basically no freeways in the city (let alone downtown), they mostly just exist in the suburbs. A few make their way into the outer neighbourhoods of the city proper before becoming boulevards.
The boulevards have relatively few signalled intersections and people drive around 30-40mph on them. That 5 mile trip can be done in about 15-20 minutes by car. 5 miles in 30 minutes by surface transit is pretty good, especially since I had to make a transfer, but nothing exceptional.
The main point I wanted to make is that you could get from a suburb to downtown in 30 minutes. Budapest is not that small, the urban and metro area is about the size of Denver, and the suburb I came from is comparable to Broomfield, CO in the context of the metro area. Getting from Broomfield to downtown Denver probably takes around 30 minutes by car in good traffic, and from google maps, an hour or more by transit. So there is a ton of stuff within a 30 minute transit ride if you live in Budapest, not just everyday shopping like the grocery store or bank but museums, parks, thermal spas, more specialty shopping and just about everywhere you might want to go, and you don't have to live downtown. It's not just fast transit that is needed to live car-free, but also a compact built form and density around important transit stops.
Admittedly, looking at a map of Budapest, the suburb I came from is one of the closest, but there are still probably around 1 million people within a 30 minute transit ride of the downtown and 2 million within a 50 minute transit ride.
I think it would be helpful for there to be a standard definition of "Transit Oriented Development". But I guess that's like trying for a standard defintion of "suburban", probably a pipe dream.
There's no technical definition, but I think it means development chosen to center around transit, rather than say highways. Many office parks in American suburbs are built right off expressway exits, they would be examples of the highway rather than transit oriented development.
The red circled Arlington, Virginia development around subway stops is a good example?
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Actially, IIRC, the train stations of my youth actually were in kind of seedy areas of town, with no frou-frou coffee shops, boutiques, etc surrouding them. Of course, my hometown didn't have much of that stuff period.
Were those trains local / commuter rail or longer distance rail stops? If the latter, I wouldn't have expected it to be a magnet for desirable development, as it wouldn't get a huge volume of people going through. I didn't really have "trendy" shops in mind, just a concentration of normal ones.
There are some east coast suburb that have development clustered around a train station; shops and apartment buildings. It's a common enough pattern in Long Island to see a cluster of shops and an old town center around a train station; though often larger shops are elsewhere.
The British Edgeware example I mentioned earlier has development almost completely oriented around the train station; most shops are within a short walk of the train station. These were all built before the automobile; but the development still clusters around an existing rail station.
Decentralized employment is only easier if everyone's driving (especially if there's uncongested highways). With transit lines, especially rail lines, it's much easier to funnel everyone to one point. I don't mean almost everyone, maybe 50% (making up numbers there) of jobs at or near the center. And it's also nice to be able to plan that your job will be in the same place even if you change jobs.
I wonder how mass transit will work in the context of the DC suburbs. There have been proposals for a Purple Line that would go around the Beltway and link up all of the suburban office districts. The only problem I see is that the routes will only be used from 9am-5pm Monday through Friday. Who's going to board a train traveling from one office park/subdivision to another on a Saturday morning?
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Originally Posted by nei
Having very dense housing right next to the city center can make up for some of the time loss. Downtowns are far less sterile than scattered office parks, more jobs in downtown = more shops and mixed use = more vibrant city center and more appealing city in general.
Light rail is not the only form of public transit. It is incredibly expensive. Our transit district ran out of money to complete its light rail system as planned. Now they're considering asking us for another tax hike. I think its popularity has something to do with little boys' fascination with trains.
I agree. Once the term "transit" gets thrown out, people get all giddy about the prospect of a light rail gently gliding through downtown streets. "Transit" rarely conjures images of new high-tech, natural gas or electric buses. And once visions of light rail trains and streetcars start dancing in their heads, there's pretty much nothing you can say to convince them otherwise.
"Kewl! I can't wait til Atlanta looks like this once we get our light rail!"
I agree. Once the term "transit" gets thrown out, people get all giddy about the prospect of a light rail gently gliding through downtown streets. "Transit" rarely conjures images of new high-tech, natural gas or electric buses. And once visions of light rail trains and streetcars start dancing in their heads, there's pretty much nothing you can say to convince them otherwise.
"Kewl! I can't wait til Atlanta looks like this once we get our light rail!"
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