6 ms·

Want to reduce congestion? Invest in public transit infrastructure.

chc 9y ago
In most of America, this idea seems to be even less practical than self-driving cars. America is pretty much designed to be a pessimal case for public transit. San Diego, where I live, does invest in public transit infrastructure and has relatively extensive mass transit options (buses, trains and trolleys), and yet public transit is still largely unusable outside of fairly small, specific areas. In order to use public transit, I'd have to walk half a mile to a station and then my commute to work would be four times as long as it is by car. So when I hear "invest in public transit infrastructure," I feel like it isn't a concrete enough suggestion. Does it actually mean tear down most of America and replace it with a country where mass transit is practical, or what? I'd love never to have to drive again, but merely investing in public transit demonstrably isn't enough.
- adrianN 9y ago
  I guess investment in public transit has to go hand in hand with saner zoning laws and measures to reduce sprawl. It's certainly not an over-night solution, but few things in city planning are.
- oftenwrong 9y ago
  America is low density because it provides incentives for low density living. The solution, in short, is to remove those incentives. Once the costs of current land use patterns are undistorted, society will adjust, and land use will intensify. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/15/financing-suburbia-how-government-mortgage-policy-determined-where-youlive https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/15/financing-subu... https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subsidies/ https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subs... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/8/a-utah-republican-might-have-the-best-urban-transportation-plan https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/8/a-utah-republic... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/18/highway-spending-is-eating-the-budget https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/18/highway-spendi...
- CalRobert 9y ago
  San drego has a surprisingly good train system with the light rail and coaster. It's just sitting on one of the most ass-backwardsedly designed cities out there. I can take the trolley to Santee, but not the airport?? not south park or north park (the whistle stop on thirtieth is named for the steetcar stop it used to be!!!!)? not Balboa park? It's a disaster of a city and the trolley deserves better.
- akgerber 9y ago
  The issue with San Diego is not the lack of infrastructure, but the land use— many businesses and offices are in unwalkable office park hellscapes that are designed to make driving easy to the exclusion of any other mode of transit. Since public transit requires a walking trip at both ends, it will never be very popular in areas where one needs to take a dangerous mile-long walk across a sea of parking and high-speed arterials, instead of a quick jaunt through a lively neighborhood.
  - chc 9y ago
    That was exactly my point: A lot of the US is laid out in a way that is pessimal for mass transit — "hellscapes," as you put it — so investing in public transit infrastructure doesn't seem like enough to make a big difference. The problem isn't just a lack of investment, but also that mass transit isn't very well suited to America as it exists today. Any proposal to make public transit happen in America that doesn't address this seems pretty unrealistic to me.
rat_1234 9y ago
Or correctly price it. Congestion isn't a capacity problem, it's a pricing problem. EDIT: Given the amount of infrastructure we already have that is.
Johnny555 9y ago
Exactly, I don't understand why people think self driving cars will do anything to reduce congestion -- if anything they are going to make it worse since they make point-to-point car trips easier and cheaper, and instead of driving to work and parking all day, the cars will drive someone to work, then drive somewhere else to get another rider (or park to await the evening commute). They may bring some efficiency to traffic patterns leading to better road utilization, but that only goes so far to make up for the much higher level of traffic that will result when it's much cheaper and easier to call a car when you want one. San Francisco is already feeling the "Uber effect" of greater traffic from car-share services: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-traffic-Uber-Lyft-SFMTA-blame-10791265.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-traffic-...
- dexterdog 9y ago
  Is Uber really comparable? With Uber each vehicle is trying to be in the busiest place to get a fare operating only in its own self-interest. With an autonomous fleet they will be where they need to be and will get out of the way on their own.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    Why would the motivations of a driverless car company be more altruistic than that of an Uber driver? An idle car makes no money, fleet owners will send their cars where they are more likely to get a fare. Even if the cars are privately owned and people just have their car come in to drop them off at work before sending them out of the way to park somewhere (since inner city parking is scarce, so there's no space to park every car at the worker's building), that doubles the number of trips -- once to drop them off, and once to go somewhere and park.
    - dexterdog 9y ago
      But a company will not put two cars in the same place to compete for one fare. And the remote parking may double the number of trips, but the parking is not going to be far away and will take much less space than a normal parking lot.
ballenf 9y ago
Carpooling is made much more viable by self-driving cars. Could easily see people being willing to share a ride if the computer matched up people from the same neighborhood for a ride automatically and the cost was shared.
- brndnmtthws 9y ago
  There's this innovative type of carpooling called a 'bus', where you can fit more than 30 people onboard at once! The cost per person is incredibly low, too!
  - sverige 9y ago
    I suspect that people who don't use buses avoid them because they can't choose the other 29 people who will be riding with them.
  - YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
    Not really. In reality, even the buses of England for example end up driving so many trips relatively or completely empty (to provide adequate service so that you could do without a car) that they end up producing more emissions per kilometre compared to personal vehicles – you can't do that with incredibly low costs, nor can you calculate the costs by thinking of only the full buses, when that's hardly the complete picture.
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    At this particular moment, according to Google Maps, it would take 2hours 5min to get to SFO by a mix of bus and train, or 23min by car. Bus/Trains are cheap, but when you have more than 30 people on board you probably have to make a lot of stops that slow down the trip. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Googleplex,+Amphitheatre+Parkway,+Mountain+View,+CA/San+Francisco+International+Airport,+San+Francisco,+CA+94128/@37.5186343,-122.53035,10z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x808fba02425dad8f:0x6c296c66619367e0!2m2!1d-122.0840575!2d37.4219999!1m5!1m1!1s0x808f778c55555555:0xa4f25c571acded3f!2m2!1d-122.3789554!2d37.6213129!3e3 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Googleplex,+Amphitheatre+Par...
- 9y ago
criddell 9y ago
I would consider that as long as public transportation evolves. Light rail can make a lot of sense, but I have a hard time getting behind buses. I rode one for years to get to work and I hope I never have to again. If instead public transportation worked more like Uber or Lyft I could get behind that. I wonder if some cities with underused buses wouldn't be better off subsidizing their citizens use of Uber?
ryandrake 9y ago
It's unclear how pouring even more money into incompetently managed, failing public transit systems is going to actually reduce traffic congestion. For example, let's say we increased BART's budget by 10X. How exactly would they use it to "reduce congestion"? Are they going to build 10X more routes? 10X more stops along existing routes? 10X more trains serving existing stops? Or are they just going to funnel the money into 10X more bureaucrats' pockets?
- kelnos 9y ago
  While your cynicism isn't entirely unwarranted, I think there's more to "investing" in public transit than just throwing money at the problem. Ensuring that the money actually goes to good use is part of it. Not sure how we do that, though. I would say even the minimal change of funding 2x as frequent trains on BART would do wonders for making it more useful. Unfortunately residents in the bay area have way too much say in what does and doesn't get built, so new stops and new lines are difficult, to say the least.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if there were actually a way to make public transit better! If I could send my money somewhere and know that as a result, I could go places by bus faster than I can by driving myself, my check would be in the mail tomorrow. If I could vote for some politician and as a result, BART would come out to my city (Livermore), I would do so. But nobody is promising any of that. If you convince enough people to invest in self-driving car companies, eventually self-driving cars happen. Voters just approved a $3.5 billion bond measure for BART. They're not even using it to expand service--just to "maintain existing infrastructure". They need billions just to stand still.
    - kelnos 9y ago
      Sure, I get that and agree. I just object to the idea that "investing" in public transit just means "throw money at the transit agency with no plan and no accountability". > Voters just approved a $3.5 billion bond measure for BART. They're not even using it to expand service--just to "maintain existing infrastructure". They need billions just to stand still. Yes, and that's what you get when you underfund something for decades. Technical and maintenance debt piles up, and it costs increasingly greater amounts of money just to hold the status quo. I don't know for a fact that this $3.5B couldn't be managed in a better way than planned, to not only maintain what we've got, but also improve, but it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, either. I'm not saying it's wise, given how BART is currently managed, to throw (say) $10B at them, but, managed properly, perhaps it'd be enough to not only get them out of the hole, but also make actual real improvements? The trick is, of course, giving them that money in a way where we'd actually see good results, and I agree that, without other things changing, we probably wouldn't get much for that money. At least not enough to be worth it. In the end it's the way the bay area is structured politically that's the problem. BART can't build new lines because the citizens along the way are all of the NIMBY mindset, and our governing structure gives them too much power, and politicians are too cowardly to override them. The Fremont->Diridon expansion plan has been on public maps since before I moved here in 2004; and we just finally got the Warm Springs expansion earlier this year. And who knows about San Jose. The delay isn't because BART sucks at building or managing construction projects, it's because the people and municipalities along the track path are selfish.
kelnos 9y ago
Agreed! I would love to look up directions to a destination, and find that the driving and transit time are comparable. As it is now, it's laughable: I live in SF and my SO lives in Oakland; driving time is usually 18-25 minutes, but transit is 50-70 minutes, depending on when I leave. Here there are two problems: 1) "Last mile": it's a 20 minute walk for me to get to the right transit line, and then 10 minute walk after I get off BART. The BART ride itself is only about 20 minutes; my "transit" use is mostly not actually on transit. 2) Timing: during most of the times of day when I'd make this trip, BART runs around every 20 minutes. If I'm one minute off, then I've spent 50 minutes walking or standing around for 20 minutes of actually being on transit. We need more transit lines, going to more places, and more-frequent trains during the entire day.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  I sometimes wonder if Doug Malewicki will ever be able to get his "SkyTran" system accepted and running somewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran It seems like there's always a "we're going to try it here" phase, then it never goes further. The upsides sound great - basically personalized mass-transit, using individual pods on an overhead track system. The pods and track are lightweight, and can likely be put into tighter routes and areas than a full-sized train can go, as well as not disrupting traffic or whatnot when it is installed. It does have the whole "monorail" stigma to get around (which I don't really understand why or how "monorails" got the stigma - they have issues, certainly - but the whole meme seems to only have started since that Simpsons episode)...
akgerber 9y ago
Public transit generally doesn't reduce congestion, but rather provide an alternative to it.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Do you really believe that road traffic in cities like London or Tokyo would be the same if you shut down the trains?
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  > Public transit generally doesn't reduce congestion, but rather provide an alternative to it. yes it does: http://i.imgur.com/RDHyKBh.gif http://i.imgur.com/RDHyKBh.gif

chc 9y ago

In most of America, this idea seems to be even less practical than self-driving cars. America is pretty much designed to be a pessimal case for public transit. San Diego, where I live, does invest in public transit infrastructure and has relatively extensive mass transit options (buses, trains and trolleys), and yet public transit is still largely unusable outside of fairly small, specific areas. In order to use public transit, I'd have to walk half a mile to a station and then my commute to work would be four times as long as it is by car. So when I hear "invest in public transit infrastructure," I feel like it isn't a concrete enough suggestion. Does it actually mean tear down most of America and replace it with a country where mass transit is practical, or what? I'd love never to have to drive again, but merely investing in public transit demonstrably isn't enough.

adrianN 9y ago
I guess investment in public transit has to go hand in hand with saner zoning laws and measures to reduce sprawl. It's certainly not an over-night solution, but few things in city planning are.
oftenwrong 9y ago
America is low density because it provides incentives for low density living. The solution, in short, is to remove those incentives. Once the costs of current land use patterns are undistorted, society will adjust, and land use will intensify. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/15/financing-suburbia-how-government-mortgage-policy-determined-where-youlive https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/15/financing-subu... https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subsidies/ https://granolashotgun.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-hidden-subs... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/8/a-utah-republican-might-have-the-best-urban-transportation-plan https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/8/a-utah-republic... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/18/highway-spending-is-eating-the-budget https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/18/highway-spendi...
CalRobert 9y ago
San drego has a surprisingly good train system with the light rail and coaster. It's just sitting on one of the most ass-backwardsedly designed cities out there. I can take the trolley to Santee, but not the airport?? not south park or north park (the whistle stop on thirtieth is named for the steetcar stop it used to be!!!!)? not Balboa park? It's a disaster of a city and the trolley deserves better.
akgerber 9y ago
The issue with San Diego is not the lack of infrastructure, but the land use— many businesses and offices are in unwalkable office park hellscapes that are designed to make driving easy to the exclusion of any other mode of transit. Since public transit requires a walking trip at both ends, it will never be very popular in areas where one needs to take a dangerous mile-long walk across a sea of parking and high-speed arterials, instead of a quick jaunt through a lively neighborhood.
- chc 9y ago
  That was exactly my point: A lot of the US is laid out in a way that is pessimal for mass transit — "hellscapes," as you put it — so investing in public transit infrastructure doesn't seem like enough to make a big difference. The problem isn't just a lack of investment, but also that mass transit isn't very well suited to America as it exists today. Any proposal to make public transit happen in America that doesn't address this seems pretty unrealistic to me.

rat_1234 9y ago

Or correctly price it. Congestion isn't a capacity problem, it's a pricing problem. EDIT: Given the amount of infrastructure we already have that is.

Johnny555 9y ago

Exactly, I don't understand why people think self driving cars will do anything to reduce congestion -- if anything they are going to make it worse since they make point-to-point car trips easier and cheaper, and instead of driving to work and parking all day, the cars will drive someone to work, then drive somewhere else to get another rider (or park to await the evening commute). They may bring some efficiency to traffic patterns leading to better road utilization, but that only goes so far to make up for the much higher level of traffic that will result when it's much cheaper and easier to call a car when you want one. San Francisco is already feeling the "Uber effect" of greater traffic from car-share services: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-traffic-Uber-Lyft-SFMTA-blame-10791265.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-traffic-...

dexterdog 9y ago
Is Uber really comparable? With Uber each vehicle is trying to be in the busiest place to get a fare operating only in its own self-interest. With an autonomous fleet they will be where they need to be and will get out of the way on their own.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  Why would the motivations of a driverless car company be more altruistic than that of an Uber driver? An idle car makes no money, fleet owners will send their cars where they are more likely to get a fare. Even if the cars are privately owned and people just have their car come in to drop them off at work before sending them out of the way to park somewhere (since inner city parking is scarce, so there's no space to park every car at the worker's building), that doubles the number of trips -- once to drop them off, and once to go somewhere and park.
  - dexterdog 9y ago
    But a company will not put two cars in the same place to compete for one fare. And the remote parking may double the number of trips, but the parking is not going to be far away and will take much less space than a normal parking lot.

ballenf 9y ago

Carpooling is made much more viable by self-driving cars. Could easily see people being willing to share a ride if the computer matched up people from the same neighborhood for a ride automatically and the cost was shared.

brndnmtthws 9y ago
There's this innovative type of carpooling called a 'bus', where you can fit more than 30 people onboard at once! The cost per person is incredibly low, too!
- sverige 9y ago
  I suspect that people who don't use buses avoid them because they can't choose the other 29 people who will be riding with them.
- YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
  Not really. In reality, even the buses of England for example end up driving so many trips relatively or completely empty (to provide adequate service so that you could do without a car) that they end up producing more emissions per kilometre compared to personal vehicles – you can't do that with incredibly low costs, nor can you calculate the costs by thinking of only the full buses, when that's hardly the complete picture.
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  At this particular moment, according to Google Maps, it would take 2hours 5min to get to SFO by a mix of bus and train, or 23min by car. Bus/Trains are cheap, but when you have more than 30 people on board you probably have to make a lot of stops that slow down the trip. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Googleplex,+Amphitheatre+Parkway,+Mountain+View,+CA/San+Francisco+International+Airport,+San+Francisco,+CA+94128/@37.5186343,-122.53035,10z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x808fba02425dad8f:0x6c296c66619367e0!2m2!1d-122.0840575!2d37.4219999!1m5!1m1!1s0x808f778c55555555:0xa4f25c571acded3f!2m2!1d-122.3789554!2d37.6213129!3e3 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Googleplex,+Amphitheatre+Par...
9y ago

criddell 9y ago

I would consider that as long as public transportation evolves. Light rail can make a lot of sense, but I have a hard time getting behind buses. I rode one for years to get to work and I hope I never have to again. If instead public transportation worked more like Uber or Lyft I could get behind that. I wonder if some cities with underused buses wouldn't be better off subsidizing their citizens use of Uber?

ryandrake 9y ago

It's unclear how pouring even more money into incompetently managed, failing public transit systems is going to actually reduce traffic congestion. For example, let's say we increased BART's budget by 10X. How exactly would they use it to "reduce congestion"? Are they going to build 10X more routes? 10X more stops along existing routes? 10X more trains serving existing stops? Or are they just going to funnel the money into 10X more bureaucrats' pockets?

kelnos 9y ago
While your cynicism isn't entirely unwarranted, I think there's more to "investing" in public transit than just throwing money at the problem. Ensuring that the money actually goes to good use is part of it. Not sure how we do that, though. I would say even the minimal change of funding 2x as frequent trains on BART would do wonders for making it more useful. Unfortunately residents in the bay area have way too much say in what does and doesn't get built, so new stops and new lines are difficult, to say the least.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if there were actually a way to make public transit better! If I could send my money somewhere and know that as a result, I could go places by bus faster than I can by driving myself, my check would be in the mail tomorrow. If I could vote for some politician and as a result, BART would come out to my city (Livermore), I would do so. But nobody is promising any of that. If you convince enough people to invest in self-driving car companies, eventually self-driving cars happen. Voters just approved a $3.5 billion bond measure for BART. They're not even using it to expand service--just to "maintain existing infrastructure". They need billions just to stand still.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    Sure, I get that and agree. I just object to the idea that "investing" in public transit just means "throw money at the transit agency with no plan and no accountability". > Voters just approved a $3.5 billion bond measure for BART. They're not even using it to expand service--just to "maintain existing infrastructure". They need billions just to stand still. Yes, and that's what you get when you underfund something for decades. Technical and maintenance debt piles up, and it costs increasingly greater amounts of money just to hold the status quo. I don't know for a fact that this $3.5B couldn't be managed in a better way than planned, to not only maintain what we've got, but also improve, but it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, either. I'm not saying it's wise, given how BART is currently managed, to throw (say) $10B at them, but, managed properly, perhaps it'd be enough to not only get them out of the hole, but also make actual real improvements? The trick is, of course, giving them that money in a way where we'd actually see good results, and I agree that, without other things changing, we probably wouldn't get much for that money. At least not enough to be worth it. In the end it's the way the bay area is structured politically that's the problem. BART can't build new lines because the citizens along the way are all of the NIMBY mindset, and our governing structure gives them too much power, and politicians are too cowardly to override them. The Fremont->Diridon expansion plan has been on public maps since before I moved here in 2004; and we just finally got the Warm Springs expansion earlier this year. And who knows about San Jose. The delay isn't because BART sucks at building or managing construction projects, it's because the people and municipalities along the track path are selfish.

kelnos 9y ago

Agreed! I would love to look up directions to a destination, and find that the driving and transit time are comparable. As it is now, it's laughable: I live in SF and my SO lives in Oakland; driving time is usually 18-25 minutes, but transit is 50-70 minutes, depending on when I leave. Here there are two problems: 1) "Last mile": it's a 20 minute walk for me to get to the right transit line, and then 10 minute walk after I get off BART. The BART ride itself is only about 20 minutes; my "transit" use is mostly not actually on transit. 2) Timing: during most of the times of day when I'd make this trip, BART runs around every 20 minutes. If I'm one minute off, then I've spent 50 minutes walking or standing around for 20 minutes of actually being on transit. We need more transit lines, going to more places, and more-frequent trains during the entire day.

cr0sh 9y ago
I sometimes wonder if Doug Malewicki will ever be able to get his "SkyTran" system accepted and running somewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTran It seems like there's always a "we're going to try it here" phase, then it never goes further. The upsides sound great - basically personalized mass-transit, using individual pods on an overhead track system. The pods and track are lightweight, and can likely be put into tighter routes and areas than a full-sized train can go, as well as not disrupting traffic or whatnot when it is installed. It does have the whole "monorail" stigma to get around (which I don't really understand why or how "monorails" got the stigma - they have issues, certainly - but the whole meme seems to only have started since that Simpsons episode)...

akgerber 9y ago

Public transit generally doesn't reduce congestion, but rather provide an alternative to it.

adrianN 9y ago
Do you really believe that road traffic in cities like London or Tokyo would be the same if you shut down the trains?
CaptSpify 9y ago
> Public transit generally doesn't reduce congestion, but rather provide an alternative to it. yes it does: http://i.imgur.com/RDHyKBh.gif http://i.imgur.com/RDHyKBh.gif