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Once I take that train and reach my work, what if I have to go somewhere nearby work? Then you walk or take a train there? You may say "But my area doesn't ha

Once I take that train and reach my work, what if I have to go somewhere nearby work? Then you walk or take a train there? You may say "But my area doesn't have good transit", but if you're going to spend billions of dollars building relatively low capacity car tunnels, you could spend those same billions to build higher capacity transit. The car only offers a certain type of freedom. When you take a train (or cab) from work to go across town to meet friends for dinner/drinks (since you don't want to drive during commute traffic or try to find parking in a busy downtown), why should you have to make that same trip all the way back to your office just to get your car so you can drive home? Just hop on a train from the restaurant and go directly home. At least that was my biggest discovery when I first moved to an area with good transit -- without the car I had a lot more freedom to go where I wanted and didn't have to structure my activities around where I parked my car. Also I didn't have to pay for (and protect) a $20,000+ car and the transit pass was less than the monthly car insurance alone.

pdelbarba 10y ago
This works especially well in areas like Boston with multi-layer transit. Take the subway under the city to one of the stations and if you need to go somewhere local, hop on the light rail that runs above ground and has stops placed much more frequently. Beyond that, you have buses and taxis all over the place as well. It's driving in that city that's inconvenient...
seanp2k2 10y ago
Yep. I would actually prefer to just drive on the weekends / to places without trains, hopefully out in the mountains or something. Europe even has trains which go to remote locations. Having to park a car is terrible in cities. Combine this with the social acceptance of alcohol consumption plus the danger (and laws) of driving intoxicated and public transit is fantastic. Public trans like trains also avoid traffic, so they can be significantly faster than driving. Pollution-wise, it's also no contest. Hong Kong has a great subway system and because of it, most people there don't need personal vehicles. Taxis are also cheaper and much better service-wise than in the US. Busses service more remote routes, like to the beach (which is kinda far on HK Island).
- arcticbull 10y ago
  Closer with the opening of the South Island line! I was there just a few days before opening so I didn't get a chance to ride it >.< I was very disappointed. Maybe this year!
avn2109 10y ago
>> "... you could spend those same billions to build higher capacity transit." Former tunnel boring engineer here. This is true, but the real elegant solution is to build everything closer together by an order of magnitude, thereby raising the number of destinations in an N minute walking radius and eliminating the need for tunnels. If your urban design depends on cars-in-tunnels, it's a "code smell" that you've made a grievous system-scale architectural error. We should keep building cities the way people did for thousands of years, with mostly little 10-foot wide (building-face-to-building-face) streets and a very few larger boulevards. This is how Venice works. This is how Tokyo works. This is how lower Manhattan works, and it's awesome. LA's streets are probably ~100 ft between building facades, on average, so we could infill a bunch of little narrow streets of buildings in each one, raising destinations-per-acre by ~an order of magnitude or maybe more. This destroys demand for transit by inspiring a modal shift to pedestrianism, and now you have a much smaller problem to solve. You can take all the tax revenue from the new buildings in your newly-densified city, and the money you saved on paving/traffic lights/street upkeep, and use it to build a real 12-trains-per-hour, quad-tracked, express-and-local service, 24 hour subway. Elon's Boring company can dig the tunnels for these if you want. If you have money leftover you can build through-core commuter rail, that comes from the northern suburbs and goes through downtown out the other side to the southern suburbs, with a one-seat ride. If you still have money leftover you can give it to the homeless or something; under no circumstances should anyone ever spend money on putting cars in tunnels, which is one of the all time dumbest ideas and a prodigiously ugly solution to a prodigiously ugly problem.
- geezerjay 10y ago
  > We should keep building cities the way people did for thousands of years, with mostly little 10-foot wide To do that, first you need to forget about all best practices and problems that have been fixed and issues regarding quality of life and even safety. No one bothers building little 10-foot wide streets because that's an appalingly bad idea. Slums aren't known for their quality of life, and no emergency service can pass through 10-foot wide streets. You're a former boring engineer talking about issues that you know nothing about.
  - 10y ago
nsxwolf 10y ago
Everyone keeps saying this is a bad idea that makes no sense, but it's exactly what I want. I'd love to not have to commute with my car, but have my car. My car, with all my stuff in it, not somebody else's car.
- Johnny555 10y ago
  That's fine when a few people want a car in the city, but when millions of people in a busy city want the same thing, then it's unsustainable, there's literally not enough room for everyone to have a car since (even ignoring the amount of road space you need for everyone to drive around after they get off the high-speed car-train) you need two spaces for every person (one at home, one at work) -- the size of a person's required parking spaces (and the travel lanes to get to them) approach the size of an urban housing unit, so parking alone cuts urban density by 1/2. The kind of low to mid-density area that can support everyone owning a car is not the kind of high-density area that can afford to pay billions of dollars for high-speed car tunnels. If you want to use your car, use it outside of the city, don't displace housing in the city so you can park your car for the 22 hour a day you're not using it. I may find it very convenient to drive every where in my 40 foot motorhome so literally all of my stuff is with me at all times, but that's not going to happen.
- geezerjay 10y ago
  > Everyone keeps saying this is a bad idea that makes no sense, but it's exactly what I want. My take is that the only people who ever claim that it's a bad idea happen to be US citizens who have been conditioned to see a car as a sort of extension of their own body and even a social tool, and don't have any first-hand contact with working mass transit systems operating in urban areas. The rest of the world knows that a working mass transit network greatly improves quality of life in multiple aspects of everyone's life. Anyone who experienced the metro system in cities like Berlin or Paris or Madrid, with a city-wide network criss-crossing the city with stops every 300-500 meters and trains passing by each 2-10 minutes, knows that it works well and does wonders to everyone's life and even personal disposable income.
  - candiodari 10y ago

pdelbarba 10y ago

This works especially well in areas like Boston with multi-layer transit. Take the subway under the city to one of the stations and if you need to go somewhere local, hop on the light rail that runs above ground and has stops placed much more frequently. Beyond that, you have buses and taxis all over the place as well. It's driving in that city that's inconvenient...

seanp2k2 10y ago

Yep. I would actually prefer to just drive on the weekends / to places without trains, hopefully out in the mountains or something. Europe even has trains which go to remote locations. Having to park a car is terrible in cities. Combine this with the social acceptance of alcohol consumption plus the danger (and laws) of driving intoxicated and public transit is fantastic. Public trans like trains also avoid traffic, so they can be significantly faster than driving. Pollution-wise, it's also no contest. Hong Kong has a great subway system and because of it, most people there don't need personal vehicles. Taxis are also cheaper and much better service-wise than in the US. Busses service more remote routes, like to the beach (which is kinda far on HK Island).

arcticbull 10y ago
Closer with the opening of the South Island line! I was there just a few days before opening so I didn't get a chance to ride it >.< I was very disappointed. Maybe this year!

avn2109 10y ago

>> "... you could spend those same billions to build higher capacity transit." Former tunnel boring engineer here. This is true, but the real elegant solution is to build everything closer together by an order of magnitude, thereby raising the number of destinations in an N minute walking radius and eliminating the need for tunnels. If your urban design depends on cars-in-tunnels, it's a "code smell" that you've made a grievous system-scale architectural error. We should keep building cities the way people did for thousands of years, with mostly little 10-foot wide (building-face-to-building-face) streets and a very few larger boulevards. This is how Venice works. This is how Tokyo works. This is how lower Manhattan works, and it's awesome. LA's streets are probably ~100 ft between building facades, on average, so we could infill a bunch of little narrow streets of buildings in each one, raising destinations-per-acre by ~an order of magnitude or maybe more. This destroys demand for transit by inspiring a modal shift to pedestrianism, and now you have a much smaller problem to solve. You can take all the tax revenue from the new buildings in your newly-densified city, and the money you saved on paving/traffic lights/street upkeep, and use it to build a real 12-trains-per-hour, quad-tracked, express-and-local service, 24 hour subway. Elon's Boring company can dig the tunnels for these if you want. If you have money leftover you can build through-core commuter rail, that comes from the northern suburbs and goes through downtown out the other side to the southern suburbs, with a one-seat ride. If you still have money leftover you can give it to the homeless or something; under no circumstances should anyone ever spend money on putting cars in tunnels, which is one of the all time dumbest ideas and a prodigiously ugly solution to a prodigiously ugly problem.

geezerjay 10y ago
> We should keep building cities the way people did for thousands of years, with mostly little 10-foot wide To do that, first you need to forget about all best practices and problems that have been fixed and issues regarding quality of life and even safety. No one bothers building little 10-foot wide streets because that's an appalingly bad idea. Slums aren't known for their quality of life, and no emergency service can pass through 10-foot wide streets. You're a former boring engineer talking about issues that you know nothing about.
- 10y ago

nsxwolf 10y ago

Everyone keeps saying this is a bad idea that makes no sense, but it's exactly what I want. I'd love to not have to commute with my car, but have my car. My car, with all my stuff in it, not somebody else's car.

Johnny555 10y ago
That's fine when a few people want a car in the city, but when millions of people in a busy city want the same thing, then it's unsustainable, there's literally not enough room for everyone to have a car since (even ignoring the amount of road space you need for everyone to drive around after they get off the high-speed car-train) you need two spaces for every person (one at home, one at work) -- the size of a person's required parking spaces (and the travel lanes to get to them) approach the size of an urban housing unit, so parking alone cuts urban density by 1/2. The kind of low to mid-density area that can support everyone owning a car is not the kind of high-density area that can afford to pay billions of dollars for high-speed car tunnels. If you want to use your car, use it outside of the city, don't displace housing in the city so you can park your car for the 22 hour a day you're not using it. I may find it very convenient to drive every where in my 40 foot motorhome so literally all of my stuff is with me at all times, but that's not going to happen.
geezerjay 10y ago
> Everyone keeps saying this is a bad idea that makes no sense, but it's exactly what I want. My take is that the only people who ever claim that it's a bad idea happen to be US citizens who have been conditioned to see a car as a sort of extension of their own body and even a social tool, and don't have any first-hand contact with working mass transit systems operating in urban areas. The rest of the world knows that a working mass transit network greatly improves quality of life in multiple aspects of everyone's life. Anyone who experienced the metro system in cities like Berlin or Paris or Madrid, with a city-wide network criss-crossing the city with stops every 300-500 meters and trains passing by each 2-10 minutes, knows that it works well and does wonders to everyone's life and even personal disposable income.
- candiodari 10y ago