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It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to forc

It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". On the surface that kind of makes sense, using a large stick to strongly encourage change, but I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bit of traffic, or dropping a few bucks on an Uber/Lyft. For example I live in a very public transit friendly city, but the buses are un-ridable most of the time due to the rampant homeless issue(and all that comes with a large homeless population) while the light rail is usually better about being a semi-safe, semi-clean environment, that just happens to be so overloaded between between 7am-9am, and 3pm-6pm, that there is almost any price I'd pay to avoid it. The sad part is that no matter how excessive the taxes or how limited the parking the ones to suffer first, and worst, will be the low-income families and workers. The homeless will continue to do whatever they can get away with, and those of us with higher incomes will grumble a bit and pay the taxes. The only solution I've seen that has a chance to change this is to come down hard on poor public transit behavior, perhaps by putting actual people on the buses with the specific job of cracking down on the drunk/high/piss soaked/etc types, in an effort to improve the quality of the service to the point that the middle-upper income groups uses it again.

drb91 8y ago
> bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bit of traffic, or dropping a few bucks on an Uber/Lyft. How can this be true? Public transit allows your attention to wander and typically is much, much faster than traffic. Adding uber/lyft will get two of the worst attributes: traffic and high cost, although you’ll be able to do something else simultaneously. Furthermore, it’s not clear how parking fees affect low income families: for my commute (between east bay and SF), public transit is an order of magnitude less expensive than driving, especially if you consider parking. Finally, it’s not clear what homeless people have to do with this. The cost of affordable transit is interacting with your neighbors. If you don’t like your neighbors, please don’t screw them over by investing in car-oriented transit.
- epicureanideal 8y ago
  As the GP said, there are people who are drunk, high, smelling of bodily fluids, etc. There are people who are rude, loud, etc. If this were stopped, then it might be better than being in a car.
  - drb91 8y ago
    It already is better than a car. It has a higher throughput and lower cost. If you value luxury, pay more for private transit. This isn’t contrary to a city that invests in public transit. SF is practically undrivable during the week rush hour because people prioritize comfort over economy. So the only knob a city has is to increase expense of driving, or to make public transit more comfortable. I don’t see any humanitarian route to the latter, so I am emphatically for the former.
    - epicureanideal 8y ago
      High throughput and low cost are not the only metrics that commuters care about, clearly, or else they'd be riding public transit. If you offer to PAY ME a dollar to ride on BART next to a smelly, loud homeless person for an hour, versus me PAYING $10 in gas to drive to work, I'll pick the latter without hesitation.
      - drb91 8y ago
        Well, that’s the rational consumer side of you. What about the side of you that’s a member of a community—how do you start caring about externalities?
        epicureanideal 8y ago
        Theoretically that's what our elected officials should be dealing with. I've tried to intervene with loud or aggressive passengers before and I'll end up being the only person in 40 people on a BART car to do so, and after a couple experiences where I saw that nobody was going to back me up, I decided I should not risk my life over such things. I'd rather drive my car to work and make sure I get home to my children.
ManFromUranus 8y ago
Homeless people using transit as a shelter is a huge problem, it makes transit undesirable. Also politicians are so milquetoast they won't address the problem for fear of looking like a 'bad guy' when in reality transit was never designed to be a homeless shelter, so homeless need to be forcibly removed from the vehicle and excluded from the transit system where possible. Eventually homeless ruin everything they touch and society needs to find a way to deal with them.
- black_puppydog 8y ago
  Okay I guess I have to heavily adjust my view of public transit here. Given, I've only seen European transit systems, but none of them had a problem of that scale. Sure, the occasional junkie and drunk, but nothing even remotely bad enough to have an influence on my everyday transit behaviour. That being said: I prefer biking, and with two saddle bags I can easily do the shopping for two. And I've seen friends get e-bikes and ditch a lifelong car lifestyle on the countryside. EDIT And "by the way": why do the richest societies of the world afford themselves the " luxury " of having homeless people at all? It's so weird...
  - btingle 8y ago
    Because solving the issue of homelessness (or poverty in general) would mean parting with precious, precious currency.
    - ManFromUranus 8y ago
      You can't solve the issue of poverty. Poverty is as unsolvable as stupidity, or having people you don't personally get along with in the world. Those aren't solvable problems. Poverty is relative, so there will always be "poor" people. Even our poor people rich compared to Indias. And I assume you are fine with spending other peoples money to solve homelessness, or spend from the "commons" as is the typical solution to this issue. You want to spend while requiring nothing in return for that spend. So easy to make trite little comments that show you "care".
paulryanrogers 8y ago
There is still the time loss. Private vehicles usually save time and have maximum schedule flexibility. Bicycles a scooters could help with the last mile, if they can be managed well. Of course everyone has different thresholds. But I'd guess most people work hard to earn enough for their own time saving luxuries, even if the external costs will hurt their children later in life.
- wrycoder 8y ago
  In addition, if you are doing shopping which involves any significant volume of goods or groceries, carrying it on public transit is a real problem. The tendency is to buy small amounts frequently at higher prices. If there are two or more in a small car, it's also usually less expensive. If the parking problem were forthrightly addressed, this, along with the increasing use of efficient Uber/Lyft/taxi, would greatly reduce traffic and associated pollution. Most of those cars are orbiting, looking for a parking spot. The half life of a parking spot is about 20 seconds.
  - kasey_junk 8y ago
    The argument about buying “small amounts at higher prices” is really interesting to me. I recently downsized places for a much more walkable environment. Keeping less stuff in my house is a feature. One I was worried was going to cost me. But my budget has largely not changed. Any increase in costs associated with bulk buying are at least offset by lowered transport costs. It’s really hard to exactly account though. My instinct is that it is much more efficient for stores to warehouse things & me do JIT buying. I’d love to see research on it.
    - toomanybeersies 8y ago
      I've moved to lean cooking (as in lean manufacturing, not healthy food). I don't really keep any food in the house, except for herbs and spices, and condiments. I don't keep anything perishable or frozen. Every day or so, I'll go to Aldi and get my vegetables for one or two meals. My food wastage these days is about zero. Conveniently I live practically next door to an Aldi so I don't pay a lot for my food, I'm down to $7 day or so as I've moved to a vegetable based diet.
Zarath 8y ago
How much can you condense a city if you have no roads at all? What I mean is that walking/biking/scootering in a city with no roads is probably twice, if not more, times more efficient.
- 2trill2spill 8y ago
  How are you suppose to move goods around if you have no roads? On bike?, on foot?, by rail? Biking and on foot would be impractical for large items or many items, and if we used rail it would have to be all over the city, so your back to the same problem with roads but instead of cars and roads its trains and rail.
  - rorykoehler 8y ago
    Design in distribution systems that are separate to human systems. There are plenty of ways you could do that from the superblock Barcelona style system to, if we're designing from scratch, hyperloop tunnels or similar sci-fi approaches.
  - pg314 8y ago
    Cargo bikes? Something like an Urban Arrow Tender [1] can transport up to 350 kg. How often do you need something heavier? [1] https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/urban-arrow-e-cargo-bike-revisited.html https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/urban-arrow-e-cargo-bike-re...
- abdullahkhalids 8y ago
  You can compress a lot, but you can't compress away all the space currently used as roads. The space is important for allowing sunlight and fresh air to enter buildings and also acts as a noise damper in a community. Not to mention, some amount of visual privacy from neighbors. There is also the problem of emergency services (ambulances, fire trucks, police etc) being able to move around quickly. Finally, you should probably have some amount of bus/train transit in the city. Good reasons for it are bad weather, night time safety, tired or sick people, people with disabilities or long-term health problems and children. I think the best you can do is that every building is next to one one-way car lane (shared with bikes going the same way) and one bike lane (for going in the opposite direction). The road should not be asphalt but some softer, less conductive material. No street parking. If you want to own a car, you can't externalize the cost to society but build a garage for yourself. Of course, there is a maximum size on the cars that you can buy and 30 km/h speed limit on most roads. You can have mini-buses (20ish people) and subways to take people around. I think this is already a massive improvement on car centric cities. With the right distribution of retail and housing, you can have people enjoying a really nice life.
peterwwillis 8y ago
> The homeless will continue to do whatever they can get away with, and those of us with higher incomes will grumble a bit and pay the taxes. The only solution I've seen that has a chance to change this is to come down hard on poor public transit behavior, perhaps by putting actual people on the buses with the specific job of cracking down on the drunk/high/piss soaked/etc types, in an effort to improve the quality of the service to the point that the middle-upper income groups uses it again. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Or should I say, the city for the abandoned human beings. If you aren't taking public transit because you don't like the homeless people on the buses, how about you help them become less homeless or have a place to stay, rather than just shooing them away?
- btingle 8y ago
  What do I look like, mother Theresa? It's not my job to solve the city's homelessness problem. Do you mean to say that politicians/public officials/etc should be dealing with the problem?
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    No, I'm saying citizens should solve the problem. And I know it's not your job. It's nobody's job. That's why nothing has been done. I mean, the stupidest thing about this is this isn't that hard a problem to solve. Homeless people are just regular people with a problem and no resources to fix it. You provide them resources and help and they are no longer homeless and no longer a nuisance. Instead, people see them like pests, as if rats invaded the buses and need to be exterminated. Typically the government would be the best way to provide funding and access to the resources and help, but they suck at execution, and they always get screwed in funding. If citizens would see that funding for helping homeless people would improve their commute & community, they might invest more, which would both solve their immediate problem, as well as the homeless' problems. A citizen led organization could do this with a combination of private funding and grants (as many today are), but first they have to convince selfish privileged assholes to reach out and help. Good luck there, as it seems privileged people just don't want to help, even though it would actually be helping themselves.
eveningcoffee 8y ago
The main issue is that the people can not live near the place they work.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". It's more like the other way around: the idea is to make public transport cheap and efficient enough that it's a reasonable alternative to driving everywhere. >> For example I live in a very public transit friendly city, but the buses are un-ridable most of the time due to the rampant homeless issue(and all that comes with a large homeless population) while the light rail is usually better about being a semi-safe, semi-clean environment, that just happens to be so overloaded between between 7am-9am, and 3pm-6pm, that there is almost any price I'd pay to avoid it. I live in a small town on the South coast of England, which just happens to have one of the largest populations of homeless people, nationally. It also has very good public transport, namely, buses, that are always full. I've never seen a homeless person using a bus as crashing space, or causing trouble of any sort. I can't say I ever particularly noticed homeless people on a bus. If homeless people on buses are a problem where you live, that has nothing to do with public transport in general. Anyway, I think everyone gets the public transport they deserve. If everyone wants to go around by car, then we won't have good public transport- because why would we?
- calohorn 8y ago
  >> If homeless people on buses are a problem where you live, that has nothing to do with public transport in general. When you hear of people being aggressive, high, inconsiderate, or here in Portland two people had their throats slit on the light rail recently near my house, it makes the public not feel comfortable using the public transportation. Since it's called public transportation and these things effect the public and the transportation, it actually has a lot to do with the public transportation.
  - rorykoehler 8y ago
    It has nothing to do with public transportation. Wrong level of abstraction. It has to do with the fact the US is turning into a inequality dystopia.
    - 8y ago
smileysteve 8y ago
> some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient We could stop by not subsidizing it in the U.S. Corn, Oil Exploration, Oil Reserves, federal highway funding, and many state highways and local roads, and vehicle police are subsidized by income tax payers instead of tolls, fuel taxes, or vehicle registrations.
Bekwnn 8y ago
There was an anecdote from a woman in Vancouver about how she would never again use public transit. She described being groped a dozen times in private places, and being followed off the bus by men on 3 occasions or more. I dont see how anyone could blame young women who go through that for refusing to use transit. Just as a man riding on the same transit system, I totally believe that level of frequency and wouldn't expect anyone to be willing to put up with it. There were other anecdotes about drunks vomiting, fist fights on buses, racist slurs, and more. I love the idea of transit, but it has some serious personal space, privacy, and safety problems that make personal transportation much more appealing.
- mrep 8y ago
  My girlfriend experiences the same thing which is why she refuses to take public transportation without me. It is a huge problem that nobody here has claimed a solution for nor really talked about (not too surprising since HN is composed of 94.6% males according to [0]). Just google search "public transportation women" or use this link [1] to read into it more. It is one of the reasons we plan to move to suburbia once we get married/start having kids. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309 [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=public+transportation+women&oq=public+transportation+women https://www.google.com/search?q=public+transportation+women&...
  - Karrot_Kream 8y ago
    Not doubting your experience at all, but my SO feels more comfortable on public transit than on an Uber/Lyft, where she feels like she has no control over what the driver chooses to do. She also avoids the last hour of transit.
    - mrep 8y ago
      She also tries to avoid taking Uber/Lyft but not too the extreme of public transportation. We also got a car recently and this was one of the big reasons.
- 8y ago
mr_toad 8y ago
> solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit" Most of the article talks about walking, and making cities more walkable. This isn’t about public transport. The housing problems and transport problems in many cities are both symptoms of the same urban planning decisions; in a nutshell it’s about zoning regulations.
wokky 8y ago
It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient... Driving is subsidised in about a zillion different ways in the US; it's already hideously, ruinously expensive, we just don't realize it. You wouldn't have to artificially raise the price of driving to make it less appealing, you'd only have to make the actual costs more transparent.
- supertrope 8y ago
  Roads are indeed often financed from the general government budget in addition to fuel, registration, tire tax. But many voters like having more roads. In effect the majority is subsidizing its own desires. It's a self-reinforcing status quo of people who accept government spending on roads, traffic congestion, crash casualties, total cost of ownership of a car in the thousands of USD per year, physical inactivity, and air pollution. And they expect free parking and cheap gasoline.
st26 8y ago
I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bit of traffic It's chicken and egg. Public transit needs ridership to get better. It won't get ridership until it's better. The large stick of presenting more of the previously hidden costs of driving, is partly banking on public transit getting better as more people are nudged towards it.
- epage 8y ago
  > It's chicken and egg. Public transit needs ridership to get better. It won't get ridership until it's better. This is why I'm really happy to see in my area two towns are putting in a rapid transit bus system between all the major hubs (two malls, a downtown, regional transport, and two universities) and the universities are getting all students, faculty, and staff plus families passes. These passes will also cover regional transit (mostly useful to get to the airport). There is enough incentive in all of this for a massive influx of people to use public transit and make it a way of life (the universities signed 10 year contracts) such that I hope the way of life will have sticking power if they don't renew the contracts.
saosebastiao 8y ago
> It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". On the surface that kind of makes sense, using a large stick to strongly encourage change, but I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bit of traffic, or dropping a few bucks on an Uber/Lyft. The solution is to charge correct prices. Nobody in the US knows what the actual societal and cost burden of driving is, because none of them pay for it. Yes, that would make it "too expensive" to drive for those at the margin, if that didn't happen it wouldn't be a solution. The way that you get the benefit of correct prices without burdening the poor specifically is to refund the difference via a general tax mechanism like the income tax. If driving taxes go up by $5000/yr but income taxes go down by $5000/yr, then the net burden is zero for those who don't change their behavior but it's a net benefit for those who do.
rorykoehler 8y ago
>"make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". Two observations. 1) We need to think outside of the box. 2) We need to redefine what public transportation means. I would classify Uber/Lyft and dockless bikes/escooters as public transportation, at least from a city planning perspective.
- supertrope 8y ago
  Urban planning is the most important factor. Density of buildings and people is essential to how desirable a mass transit system is to potential riders and how economically viable it is.
megablast 8y ago
The number and variety of excuses car drivers will make to continue with their selfish activity is really impressive. I guess it comes form the ability to ignore the 50,000 deaths a year due to cars, the horrible companies they help fund, the many more deaths due to pollution, the destruction of cities and suburbs due to roads etc... To even consider driving you have to be a completely selfish scumbag. I can't see any other way about of thinking about it.
jaredklewis 8y ago
What's interesting is that I don't think any of the problems you describe with mass transit are inherit to or really even related to mass transit. I think they are just our cultural problems, spilling over into public spaces, such as mass transit. For example, in Japan there are many less homeless people on the buses and trains. No surprise there though, as there are very few homeless people in Japan. Even in Tokyo there only about 0.1 per 100k, compared with 795 per 100k in San Francisco. If someone is in a car, that does naturally insulate them from the homeless people, though it certainly does nothing to alleviate the root problem of there being a lot of homeless people. If our homeless epidemic is so bad that it is ruining our public parks, transit, and sidewalks, one would hope fixing it would become a political priority. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much political will in the US these days to take on big, difficult issues. :/ Also, just curious, where did you see the strategy of cracking down on public transit behavior that was effective?
naravara 8y ago
I don’t see what homelessness has to do with transit viability aside from them making you uncomfortable. When everyone rides the bus or train, the share of people behaving badly goes down fast. The reason areas with poor transit have their busses overloaded with vagrants is because every public good gets overloaded with vagrants if not enough people are using it. >I've seen that has a chance to change this is to come down hard on poor public transit behavior, perhaps by putting actual people on the buses with the specific job of cracking down on the drunk/high/piss soaked/etc types, in an effort to improve the quality of the service to the point that the middle-upper income groups uses it again. Or you could, I don’t know, treat them like human beings, get them counseling, and reintegrate them into society?
CaptainZapp 8y ago
"make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit" Zurich did just that in 1973 after a public referendum killed a projected metro. The city figured out long and hard what makes public transport attractive and determined that it's not necessarily the time that you spend to get from A to B, but more importantly the expectation of time needed. Consequently trams (streetcars) were provided independent tracks wherever possible and trams and buses were granted priority at all signals. Additionally the attractiveness of roads for private vehicles was reduced and parking was restricted. In 1996 the "historical compromise" was reached to restict the number of parking spaces on the level of 1990 [1]. Another important factor was the creation of the S-Bahn (regional rail transport system, comparable with Paris' RER). Combined with that an integrated ticketing and fare system for the entire canton was introduced. Except taxis you can use any mode of transport within your tickets validity. I think calling it a roaring success and extremely visionary is not an exaggeration. Now if the city would only become more bike friendly it would just be about perfect in all respects of public transportation. With a more leftwing government chances are that there's finally more movement in that direction. Sure, that model is not easily transferable to other cities and it took decades to grow to what it is now. But there certainly are other shining examples of successful public transport implementations in (mostly) Asian and European cities. It's not impossible once the fetish for cars and parking (which is heavily related) is put aside. [1] (https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/08/lessons-zurichs-parking-revolution/2874/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/08/lessons-zuric...)

drb91 8y ago

> bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bit of traffic, or dropping a few bucks on an Uber/Lyft. How can this be true? Public transit allows your attention to wander and typically is much, much faster than traffic. Adding uber/lyft will get two of the worst attributes: traffic and high cost, although you’ll be able to do something else simultaneously. Furthermore, it’s not clear how parking fees affect low income families: for my commute (between east bay and SF), public transit is an order of magnitude less expensive than driving, especially if you consider parking. Finally, it’s not clear what homeless people have to do with this. The cost of affordable transit is interacting with your neighbors. If you don’t like your neighbors, please don’t screw them over by investing in car-oriented transit.

epicureanideal 8y ago
As the GP said, there are people who are drunk, high, smelling of bodily fluids, etc. There are people who are rude, loud, etc. If this were stopped, then it might be better than being in a car.
- drb91 8y ago
  It already is better than a car. It has a higher throughput and lower cost. If you value luxury, pay more for private transit. This isn’t contrary to a city that invests in public transit. SF is practically undrivable during the week rush hour because people prioritize comfort over economy. So the only knob a city has is to increase expense of driving, or to make public transit more comfortable. I don’t see any humanitarian route to the latter, so I am emphatically for the former.
  - epicureanideal 8y ago
    High throughput and low cost are not the only metrics that commuters care about, clearly, or else they'd be riding public transit. If you offer to PAY ME a dollar to ride on BART next to a smelly, loud homeless person for an hour, versus me PAYING $10 in gas to drive to work, I'll pick the latter without hesitation.
    - drb91 8y ago
      Well, that’s the rational consumer side of you. What about the side of you that’s a member of a community—how do you start caring about externalities?
      - epicureanideal 8y ago
        Theoretically that's what our elected officials should be dealing with. I've tried to intervene with loud or aggressive passengers before and I'll end up being the only person in 40 people on a BART car to do so, and after a couple experiences where I saw that nobody was going to back me up, I decided I should not risk my life over such things. I'd rather drive my car to work and make sure I get home to my children.

ManFromUranus 8y ago

Homeless people using transit as a shelter is a huge problem, it makes transit undesirable. Also politicians are so milquetoast they won't address the problem for fear of looking like a 'bad guy' when in reality transit was never designed to be a homeless shelter, so homeless need to be forcibly removed from the vehicle and excluded from the transit system where possible. Eventually homeless ruin everything they touch and society needs to find a way to deal with them.

black_puppydog 8y ago
Okay I guess I have to heavily adjust my view of public transit here. Given, I've only seen European transit systems, but none of them had a problem of that scale. Sure, the occasional junkie and drunk, but nothing even remotely bad enough to have an influence on my everyday transit behaviour. That being said: I prefer biking, and with two saddle bags I can easily do the shopping for two. And I've seen friends get e-bikes and ditch a lifelong car lifestyle on the countryside. EDIT And "by the way": why do the richest societies of the world afford themselves the " luxury " of having homeless people at all? It's so weird...
- btingle 8y ago
  Because solving the issue of homelessness (or poverty in general) would mean parting with precious, precious currency.
  - ManFromUranus 8y ago
    You can't solve the issue of poverty. Poverty is as unsolvable as stupidity, or having people you don't personally get along with in the world. Those aren't solvable problems. Poverty is relative, so there will always be "poor" people. Even our poor people rich compared to Indias. And I assume you are fine with spending other peoples money to solve homelessness, or spend from the "commons" as is the typical solution to this issue. You want to spend while requiring nothing in return for that spend. So easy to make trite little comments that show you "care".

paulryanrogers 8y ago

There is still the time loss. Private vehicles usually save time and have maximum schedule flexibility. Bicycles a scooters could help with the last mile, if they can be managed well. Of course everyone has different thresholds. But I'd guess most people work hard to earn enough for their own time saving luxuries, even if the external costs will hurt their children later in life.

wrycoder 8y ago
In addition, if you are doing shopping which involves any significant volume of goods or groceries, carrying it on public transit is a real problem. The tendency is to buy small amounts frequently at higher prices. If there are two or more in a small car, it's also usually less expensive. If the parking problem were forthrightly addressed, this, along with the increasing use of efficient Uber/Lyft/taxi, would greatly reduce traffic and associated pollution. Most of those cars are orbiting, looking for a parking spot. The half life of a parking spot is about 20 seconds.
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  The argument about buying “small amounts at higher prices” is really interesting to me. I recently downsized places for a much more walkable environment. Keeping less stuff in my house is a feature. One I was worried was going to cost me. But my budget has largely not changed. Any increase in costs associated with bulk buying are at least offset by lowered transport costs. It’s really hard to exactly account though. My instinct is that it is much more efficient for stores to warehouse things & me do JIT buying. I’d love to see research on it.
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    I've moved to lean cooking (as in lean manufacturing, not healthy food). I don't really keep any food in the house, except for herbs and spices, and condiments. I don't keep anything perishable or frozen. Every day or so, I'll go to Aldi and get my vegetables for one or two meals. My food wastage these days is about zero. Conveniently I live practically next door to an Aldi so I don't pay a lot for my food, I'm down to $7 day or so as I've moved to a vegetable based diet.

Zarath 8y ago

How much can you condense a city if you have no roads at all? What I mean is that walking/biking/scootering in a city with no roads is probably twice, if not more, times more efficient.

2trill2spill 8y ago
How are you suppose to move goods around if you have no roads? On bike?, on foot?, by rail? Biking and on foot would be impractical for large items or many items, and if we used rail it would have to be all over the city, so your back to the same problem with roads but instead of cars and roads its trains and rail.
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  Design in distribution systems that are separate to human systems. There are plenty of ways you could do that from the superblock Barcelona style system to, if we're designing from scratch, hyperloop tunnels or similar sci-fi approaches.
- pg314 8y ago
  Cargo bikes? Something like an Urban Arrow Tender [1] can transport up to 350 kg. How often do you need something heavier? [1] https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/urban-arrow-e-cargo-bike-revisited.html https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/urban-arrow-e-cargo-bike-re...
abdullahkhalids 8y ago
You can compress a lot, but you can't compress away all the space currently used as roads. The space is important for allowing sunlight and fresh air to enter buildings and also acts as a noise damper in a community. Not to mention, some amount of visual privacy from neighbors. There is also the problem of emergency services (ambulances, fire trucks, police etc) being able to move around quickly. Finally, you should probably have some amount of bus/train transit in the city. Good reasons for it are bad weather, night time safety, tired or sick people, people with disabilities or long-term health problems and children. I think the best you can do is that every building is next to one one-way car lane (shared with bikes going the same way) and one bike lane (for going in the opposite direction). The road should not be asphalt but some softer, less conductive material. No street parking. If you want to own a car, you can't externalize the cost to society but build a garage for yourself. Of course, there is a maximum size on the cars that you can buy and 30 km/h speed limit on most roads. You can have mini-buses (20ish people) and subways to take people around. I think this is already a massive improvement on car centric cities. With the right distribution of retail and housing, you can have people enjoying a really nice life.

peterwwillis 8y ago

> The homeless will continue to do whatever they can get away with, and those of us with higher incomes will grumble a bit and pay the taxes. The only solution I've seen that has a chance to change this is to come down hard on poor public transit behavior, perhaps by putting actual people on the buses with the specific job of cracking down on the drunk/high/piss soaked/etc types, in an effort to improve the quality of the service to the point that the middle-upper income groups uses it again. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Or should I say, the city for the abandoned human beings. If you aren't taking public transit because you don't like the homeless people on the buses, how about you help them become less homeless or have a place to stay, rather than just shooing them away?

btingle 8y ago
What do I look like, mother Theresa? It's not my job to solve the city's homelessness problem. Do you mean to say that politicians/public officials/etc should be dealing with the problem?
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  No, I'm saying citizens should solve the problem. And I know it's not your job. It's nobody's job. That's why nothing has been done. I mean, the stupidest thing about this is this isn't that hard a problem to solve. Homeless people are just regular people with a problem and no resources to fix it. You provide them resources and help and they are no longer homeless and no longer a nuisance. Instead, people see them like pests, as if rats invaded the buses and need to be exterminated. Typically the government would be the best way to provide funding and access to the resources and help, but they suck at execution, and they always get screwed in funding. If citizens would see that funding for helping homeless people would improve their commute & community, they might invest more, which would both solve their immediate problem, as well as the homeless' problems. A citizen led organization could do this with a combination of private funding and grants (as many today are), but first they have to convince selfish privileged assholes to reach out and help. Good luck there, as it seems privileged people just don't want to help, even though it would actually be helping themselves.

eveningcoffee 8y ago

The main issue is that the people can not live near the place they work.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". It's more like the other way around: the idea is to make public transport cheap and efficient enough that it's a reasonable alternative to driving everywhere. >> For example I live in a very public transit friendly city, but the buses are un-ridable most of the time due to the rampant homeless issue(and all that comes with a large homeless population) while the light rail is usually better about being a semi-safe, semi-clean environment, that just happens to be so overloaded between between 7am-9am, and 3pm-6pm, that there is almost any price I'd pay to avoid it. I live in a small town on the South coast of England, which just happens to have one of the largest populations of homeless people, nationally. It also has very good public transport, namely, buses, that are always full. I've never seen a homeless person using a bus as crashing space, or causing trouble of any sort. I can't say I ever particularly noticed homeless people on a bus. If homeless people on buses are a problem where you live, that has nothing to do with public transport in general. Anyway, I think everyone gets the public transport they deserve. If everyone wants to go around by car, then we won't have good public transport- because why would we?

calohorn 8y ago
>> If homeless people on buses are a problem where you live, that has nothing to do with public transport in general. When you hear of people being aggressive, high, inconsiderate, or here in Portland two people had their throats slit on the light rail recently near my house, it makes the public not feel comfortable using the public transportation. Since it's called public transportation and these things effect the public and the transportation, it actually has a lot to do with the public transportation.
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  It has nothing to do with public transportation. Wrong level of abstraction. It has to do with the fact the US is turning into a inequality dystopia.
  - 8y ago

smileysteve 8y ago

> some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient We could stop by not subsidizing it in the U.S. Corn, Oil Exploration, Oil Reserves, federal highway funding, and many state highways and local roads, and vehicle police are subsidized by income tax payers instead of tolls, fuel taxes, or vehicle registrations.

Bekwnn 8y ago

There was an anecdote from a woman in Vancouver about how she would never again use public transit. She described being groped a dozen times in private places, and being followed off the bus by men on 3 occasions or more. I dont see how anyone could blame young women who go through that for refusing to use transit. Just as a man riding on the same transit system, I totally believe that level of frequency and wouldn't expect anyone to be willing to put up with it. There were other anecdotes about drunks vomiting, fist fights on buses, racist slurs, and more. I love the idea of transit, but it has some serious personal space, privacy, and safety problems that make personal transportation much more appealing.

mrep 8y ago
My girlfriend experiences the same thing which is why she refuses to take public transportation without me. It is a huge problem that nobody here has claimed a solution for nor really talked about (not too surprising since HN is composed of 94.6% males according to [0]). Just google search "public transportation women" or use this link [1] to read into it more. It is one of the reasons we plan to move to suburbia once we get married/start having kids. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309 [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=public+transportation+women&oq=public+transportation+women https://www.google.com/search?q=public+transportation+women&...
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  Not doubting your experience at all, but my SO feels more comfortable on public transit than on an Uber/Lyft, where she feels like she has no control over what the driver chooses to do. She also avoids the last hour of transit.
  - mrep 8y ago
    She also tries to avoid taking Uber/Lyft but not too the extreme of public transportation. We also got a car recently and this was one of the big reasons.
8y ago

mr_toad 8y ago

> solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit" Most of the article talks about walking, and making cities more walkable. This isn’t about public transport. The housing problems and transport problems in many cities are both symptoms of the same urban planning decisions; in a nutshell it’s about zoning regulations.

wokky 8y ago

It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient... Driving is subsidised in about a zillion different ways in the US; it's already hideously, ruinously expensive, we just don't realize it. You wouldn't have to artificially raise the price of driving to make it less appealing, you'd only have to make the actual costs more transparent.

supertrope 8y ago
Roads are indeed often financed from the general government budget in addition to fuel, registration, tire tax. But many voters like having more roads. In effect the majority is subsidizing its own desires. It's a self-reinforcing status quo of people who accept government spending on roads, traffic congestion, crash casualties, total cost of ownership of a car in the thousands of USD per year, physical inactivity, and air pollution. And they expect free parking and cheap gasoline.

st26 8y ago

I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bit of traffic It's chicken and egg. Public transit needs ridership to get better. It won't get ridership until it's better. The large stick of presenting more of the previously hidden costs of driving, is partly banking on public transit getting better as more people are nudged towards it.

epage 8y ago
> It's chicken and egg. Public transit needs ridership to get better. It won't get ridership until it's better. This is why I'm really happy to see in my area two towns are putting in a rapid transit bus system between all the major hubs (two malls, a downtown, regional transport, and two universities) and the universities are getting all students, faculty, and staff plus families passes. These passes will also cover regional transit (mostly useful to get to the airport). There is enough incentive in all of this for a massive influx of people to use public transit and make it a way of life (the universities signed 10 year contracts) such that I hope the way of life will have sticking power if they don't renew the contracts.

saosebastiao 8y ago

> It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". On the surface that kind of makes sense, using a large stick to strongly encourage change, but I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bit of traffic, or dropping a few bucks on an Uber/Lyft. The solution is to charge correct prices. Nobody in the US knows what the actual societal and cost burden of driving is, because none of them pay for it. Yes, that would make it "too expensive" to drive for those at the margin, if that didn't happen it wouldn't be a solution. The way that you get the benefit of correct prices without burdening the poor specifically is to refund the difference via a general tax mechanism like the income tax. If driving taxes go up by $5000/yr but income taxes go down by $5000/yr, then the net burden is zero for those who don't change their behavior but it's a net benefit for those who do.

rorykoehler 8y ago

>"make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit". Two observations. 1) We need to think outside of the box. 2) We need to redefine what public transportation means. I would classify Uber/Lyft and dockless bikes/escooters as public transportation, at least from a city planning perspective.

supertrope 8y ago
Urban planning is the most important factor. Density of buildings and people is essential to how desirable a mass transit system is to potential riders and how economically viable it is.

megablast 8y ago

The number and variety of excuses car drivers will make to continue with their selfish activity is really impressive. I guess it comes form the ability to ignore the 50,000 deaths a year due to cars, the horrible companies they help fund, the many more deaths due to pollution, the destruction of cities and suburbs due to roads etc... To even consider driving you have to be a completely selfish scumbag. I can't see any other way about of thinking about it.

jaredklewis 8y ago

What's interesting is that I don't think any of the problems you describe with mass transit are inherit to or really even related to mass transit. I think they are just our cultural problems, spilling over into public spaces, such as mass transit. For example, in Japan there are many less homeless people on the buses and trains. No surprise there though, as there are very few homeless people in Japan. Even in Tokyo there only about 0.1 per 100k, compared with 795 per 100k in San Francisco. If someone is in a car, that does naturally insulate them from the homeless people, though it certainly does nothing to alleviate the root problem of there being a lot of homeless people. If our homeless epidemic is so bad that it is ruining our public parks, transit, and sidewalks, one would hope fixing it would become a political priority. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much political will in the US these days to take on big, difficult issues. :/ Also, just curious, where did you see the strategy of cracking down on public transit behavior that was effective?

naravara 8y ago

I don’t see what homelessness has to do with transit viability aside from them making you uncomfortable. When everyone rides the bus or train, the share of people behaving badly goes down fast. The reason areas with poor transit have their busses overloaded with vagrants is because every public good gets overloaded with vagrants if not enough people are using it. >I've seen that has a chance to change this is to come down hard on poor public transit behavior, perhaps by putting actual people on the buses with the specific job of cracking down on the drunk/high/piss soaked/etc types, in an effort to improve the quality of the service to the point that the middle-upper income groups uses it again. Or you could, I don’t know, treat them like human beings, get them counseling, and reintegrate them into society?

CaptainZapp 8y ago

"make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit" Zurich did just that in 1973 after a public referendum killed a projected metro. The city figured out long and hard what makes public transport attractive and determined that it's not necessarily the time that you spend to get from A to B, but more importantly the expectation of time needed. Consequently trams (streetcars) were provided independent tracks wherever possible and trams and buses were granted priority at all signals. Additionally the attractiveness of roads for private vehicles was reduced and parking was restricted. In 1996 the "historical compromise" was reached to restict the number of parking spaces on the level of 1990 [1]. Another important factor was the creation of the S-Bahn (regional rail transport system, comparable with Paris' RER). Combined with that an integrated ticketing and fare system for the entire canton was introduced. Except taxis you can use any mode of transport within your tickets validity. I think calling it a roaring success and extremely visionary is not an exaggeration. Now if the city would only become more bike friendly it would just be about perfect in all respects of public transportation. With a more leftwing government chances are that there's finally more movement in that direction. Sure, that model is not easily transferable to other cities and it took decades to grow to what it is now. But there certainly are other shining examples of successful public transport implementations in (mostly) Asian and European cities. It's not impossible once the fetish for cars and parking (which is heavily related) is put aside. [1] (https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/08/lessons-zurichs-parking-revolution/2874/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/08/lessons-zuric...)