4 ms·
No, not just parking. For every passenger that takes a train, that’s one passenger not sitting in a car that takes much much more space. An average subway train
by so33 9y ago
No, not just parking. For every passenger that takes a train, that’s one passenger not sitting in a car that takes much much more space. An average subway train can fit around 800 people seated, and takes up much less space than 800 cars. It is precisely how much space vehicles take while being driven that is the issue here.
Likewise, “flexibility” is precisely the issue here. Why should a train carrying 800 people have effectively the same priority as a car that carries one, maybe two or three people?
I know that it’s tantalizing to think that cheap tunneling can solve this issue, but you are just outsourcing the fundamental problem that traffic exists because people want to go places.
A good example is going to the airport. People need to get off, unload their luggage, and there’s only one place you can do it, at the departures terminal. No amount of self-driving is going to solve the problem that the transport vehicle needs to stop, let these people off with their luggage, and start again.
- closeparen 9y agoTransit-only lanes are a colossal waste of space. Let's say we have a 5-mile long route with 12 minute headways. In San Francisco, buses move about 8.1mph, so that's 3 buses. (Each bus completes a loop every 36 minutes, and we'll "assume a spherical cow" by saying that bus bunching doesn't exist and they're evenly spaced. We'll also assume that the extreme ultra-luxury decadance of a mere 12-minute wait somehow got past SFGov). Three buses, 40 feet long, on 26,400 feet of road. Only 0.45% of the road is utilized. 99.55% of the bus lane is being wasted. It would be smart to keep the road below the point of saturation, where it declines in utility for everyone, but demanding that 99.55% of it sit empty is certainly not an efficiency-minded position.
- ACow_Adonis 9y agoI'm not sure if you're being satirical or not, but the efficiency of a road (or any transport method) is not, and should not, be the density of vehicles able to be contained on it. At least go approximately by how many people can use it in a given amount of time, at what cost, to get people from their trip start to their destinations. Lets not even get started on the additional considerations for transport logistics (where you park, fill up, what you block via each option, who pays), because at the very least you first need to understand the notion of throughput rather than vehicle density :\
- closeparen 9y ago>, but the efficiency of a road (or any transport method) is not, and should not, be the density of vehicles able to be contained on it. Great! Then you will not ever point to parking space to claim that cars are inefficient, and will join me in calling out people that do? >at the very least you first need to understand the notion of throughput rather than vehicle density Yes! And although a road packed with buses has higher throughput than a road packed with cars, in practice our choice is between a road packed with cars and a road which sees a bus every 10-20 minutes. Since each bus has 8800 feet to itself to carry 45 passengers, each passenger can actually have 195 feet to themselves at breakeven. The bus route with realistic headways has much lower throughput than heavy private car traffic. Although I agree, it would be nice to see wall-to-wall buses with multiple buses stopping per minute. (Obviously all of this is crude since at some point stopping and starting at red lights, and waiting for pedestrians before turning, becomes a major concern).