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“Oh, and here's the kicker. Everyone would pay for that new transit, but most people wouldn't be able to use it!” You are being a bit shortsighted. Even if you

“Oh, and here's the kicker. Everyone would pay for that new transit, but most people wouldn't be able to use it!” You are being a bit shortsighted. Even if you don’t use it, you’ll benefit from less road congestion. The average speed on roads keeps decreasing. Remove 25% of the cars and driver’s commute times will also improve. Fewer accidents, etc

rayiner 7y ago
It would be much cheaper to just widen the congested roads by 25% instead. (And before you say “induced demand”—removing cars from the road will also create induced demand. Induced demand results from the fact of reduced road congestion, not the specific means by which you reduce congestion.) More broadly, urban congestion is something that only affects a subset of people. The average American commute is 26 minutes, but a staggering 16 miles. People are cruising to work! The US has among the fastest commutes in the OECD: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commuters https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commu....
- melling 7y ago
  That’s what people said 50 years ago. And when we have another 200 million Americans, we just make the roads wider again? Because we didn’t build the proper mass transportation systems 50 years ago, it’s incredibly expensive to build now. It won’t be easier in another 50 years with millions of more people
  - rayiner 7y ago
    > And when we have another 200 million Americans, we just make the roads wider again? Yes! The takeaway from the OECD report is that we didn't build proper mass transportation 50 years ago, and we still have among the shortest commutes in the OECD. Over the next 50 years the population will grow even less, as the population growth rate now is half of what it was in the 50s and 60s. (We're having this debate in Maryland now. People are upset that Hogan wants to widen the highways instead of building transit in the counties near D.C. They invoke the same rationale--we'll just have to widen the roads again in 50 years. Except they ignore that population growth in the area has slowed dramatically. Montgomery County tripled in population between 1960 and 2010, but is expected to grow just another 15% by 2045. Prince George's County grew by a factor of 4.5, but will grow only another 10% by 2045.)
    - matchbok 7y ago
      Widening roads will not fix the problem. There is still a fixed number of road capacity in urban cores, which will inevitably lead to huge problems. Highway-widening is short-sighted.
      - rayiner 7y ago
        You need to solve the right problem. For example in Maryland, the problem is not getting people into the “urban core” (i.e. DC). There is actually a surplus of rail capacity from Maryland into DC. You’ve got six separate rail lines going from the Maryland suburbs into DC (two regional rail, four metro). The problem we have in Maryland is moving people from suburban population centers to suburban job centers. People commute from Bowie to College Park, or Frederick to Bethesda, or Waldorf to Alexandria. Indeed, none of the highways being widened (270, 495, and 295) even go near the urban core. 270 and 295 bring people from the outer suburbs to 495, which passes through the inner suburbs. You couldn’t build a rail line that would solve that problem. I mean you could, it would just cost a ton. Widening 270 and 495 is going to cost about $100 million per mile (or $6.4 billion if you did the entire beltway). The silver line serves just 17,000 riders per day. The beltway serves ten times that in the bush portions.
        kelnos 7y ago
        The problem in less dense areas will always be the last-mile problem. You can implement park-and-ride schemes with ample parking at transit stations, but then what do people do at the destination station? They're still 5-10 miles from their job, and they left their car at the station closest to their house (which still might have been a 5-10 mile drive, or more). If I can drive 60 minutes to go 20 miles door-to-door home-to-work (basically what my dad used to do from Ellicott City to Silver Spring every day), but it takes me 2+ hours to drive to transit, park, wait for transit, take transit, transfer to a bus, etc., then I'm probably just going to buckle down and drive. And of course that wasn't even an option for my dad since the Metro didn't go far enough north, but I imagine this scenario comes up a lot for people who live closer to DC. You even see this in the Bay Area, though the distances can be short enough for workarounds. Before electric scooters were the fad they are now, a friend of mine bought a 35mph folding one so he could ride to the 22nd St Caltrain in SF, take the train to Santa Clara, and ride his scooter from there to work, and stash it under his desk to charge. If he can catch the bullet train, the total commute can be a little over an hour and a half, which is at worst comparable to some of the drive times, and at best a bit shorter. (Ultimately, he still often drives for flexibility, but has to leave by 6am to avoid the worst of the morning traffic.) In SF itself, the issue is the abysmal slowness of the Muni buses. When I lived near Alamo Square, my commute was less than 3 miles, but could take 40 minutes by bus (even with home and work within a few blocks of bus stops), if I timed it perfectly and didn't have to wait 10 minutes for the bus. And that 40 minutes is effectively wasted; I can't sleep in another 40 minutes and expect to work on the bus because it's just not the right environment for that. Muni gives time scales that look like commuter rail, but over much shorter distances and with much less comfort than commuter rail. Also a kicker: I could do that walk in a little over 50 minutes.
  - dsl 7y ago
    Freeways are mass transportation, it might not be the kind you like, but they are pretty effective at getting large numbers of people from origin to destination. The peak capacity of a mile of track will always be less than that of a mile of highway. But we don't have anywhere to put either because we refuse to build up and ruin a bunch of NIMBYs views.
    - jacques_chester 7y ago
      > The peak capacity of a mile of track will always be less than that of a mile of highway. I'd be interested to hear why you think this.
    - melling 7y ago
      Where are you getting your numbers? Are you making them up? How many passenger cars can you get down a mile of highway per hour? I love freeways. It’s just that during rush hour (and holiday weekends), they’re extremely congested. We’ve got local lanes, express lanes, and Waze to help figure out which one to take. Roads don’t scale very well. Mass transit would more acceptable if we can increase the speed. China has low-medium speed maglevs, for example, that will travel 100-120 miles per hour. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-trains/index.html https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-t...
      - rayiner 7y ago
        To use some example numbers. VA7, which goes from the Dulles area where many DC-area data centers are located, through Reston where many tech companies' offices are located, to near DC, carries 50,000-100,000 vehicles per day, and is congested pretty much all day. The Metro Silver line, which follows roughly the same route, theoretically destroys that. An 8-car Metro train carries 1,400 people. With 8-minute headways, that's 7.5 trains per hour, 90 trains over a 12-hour commuting day, or 126,000 people. Except the actual ridership of the Silver Line is just about 17,000 people per day, and declining. Why? Because it's useless for most people. It takes you to DC at one end, and the airport at the other, and a few places that happen to be on the way. But most people who live in that area don't commute to DC. People take VA7 to go from say Sterling (where there is no metro station) to Tyson's Corner. They have to get in a car to use Metro anyway, and by the time they do that, it's faster to just drive to Tysons instead of getting on the Metro for the segment of the trip Metro covers. On the other side of DC, the Maryland suburbs are served by no fewer than 37.5 trains per hour (15 on the Green/Yellow, 15 on the Blue/Silver, and 7.5 on the Orange). That's 50,000 people per hour! But the cars are pretty much empty in Maryland, because few people commute into DC. In the height of irony, Metro is moving one of its main employment centers to Lanham Maryland, located on the terminus of the orange line. That means it's not actually commutable by Metro for most part. Folks who work for WMATA aren't living in DC and doing a reverse commute. They're living in Bowie or Largo or College Park or Hyattsville (the surrounding towns). Taking Metro would involve going all the way to DC, switching from the Green/Yellow or Blue/Silver to the Orange, then going back all the way.

rayiner 7y ago

It would be much cheaper to just widen the congested roads by 25% instead. (And before you say “induced demand”—removing cars from the road will also create induced demand. Induced demand results from the fact of reduced road congestion, not the specific means by which you reduce congestion.) More broadly, urban congestion is something that only affects a subset of people. The average American commute is 26 minutes, but a staggering 16 miles. People are cruising to work! The US has among the fastest commutes in the OECD: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commuters https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commu....

melling 7y ago
That’s what people said 50 years ago. And when we have another 200 million Americans, we just make the roads wider again? Because we didn’t build the proper mass transportation systems 50 years ago, it’s incredibly expensive to build now. It won’t be easier in another 50 years with millions of more people
- rayiner 7y ago
  > And when we have another 200 million Americans, we just make the roads wider again? Yes! The takeaway from the OECD report is that we didn't build proper mass transportation 50 years ago, and we still have among the shortest commutes in the OECD. Over the next 50 years the population will grow even less, as the population growth rate now is half of what it was in the 50s and 60s. (We're having this debate in Maryland now. People are upset that Hogan wants to widen the highways instead of building transit in the counties near D.C. They invoke the same rationale--we'll just have to widen the roads again in 50 years. Except they ignore that population growth in the area has slowed dramatically. Montgomery County tripled in population between 1960 and 2010, but is expected to grow just another 15% by 2045. Prince George's County grew by a factor of 4.5, but will grow only another 10% by 2045.)
  - matchbok 7y ago
    Widening roads will not fix the problem. There is still a fixed number of road capacity in urban cores, which will inevitably lead to huge problems. Highway-widening is short-sighted.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      You need to solve the right problem. For example in Maryland, the problem is not getting people into the “urban core” (i.e. DC). There is actually a surplus of rail capacity from Maryland into DC. You’ve got six separate rail lines going from the Maryland suburbs into DC (two regional rail, four metro). The problem we have in Maryland is moving people from suburban population centers to suburban job centers. People commute from Bowie to College Park, or Frederick to Bethesda, or Waldorf to Alexandria. Indeed, none of the highways being widened (270, 495, and 295) even go near the urban core. 270 and 295 bring people from the outer suburbs to 495, which passes through the inner suburbs. You couldn’t build a rail line that would solve that problem. I mean you could, it would just cost a ton. Widening 270 and 495 is going to cost about $100 million per mile (or $6.4 billion if you did the entire beltway). The silver line serves just 17,000 riders per day. The beltway serves ten times that in the bush portions.
      - kelnos 7y ago
        The problem in less dense areas will always be the last-mile problem. You can implement park-and-ride schemes with ample parking at transit stations, but then what do people do at the destination station? They're still 5-10 miles from their job, and they left their car at the station closest to their house (which still might have been a 5-10 mile drive, or more). If I can drive 60 minutes to go 20 miles door-to-door home-to-work (basically what my dad used to do from Ellicott City to Silver Spring every day), but it takes me 2+ hours to drive to transit, park, wait for transit, take transit, transfer to a bus, etc., then I'm probably just going to buckle down and drive. And of course that wasn't even an option for my dad since the Metro didn't go far enough north, but I imagine this scenario comes up a lot for people who live closer to DC. You even see this in the Bay Area, though the distances can be short enough for workarounds. Before electric scooters were the fad they are now, a friend of mine bought a 35mph folding one so he could ride to the 22nd St Caltrain in SF, take the train to Santa Clara, and ride his scooter from there to work, and stash it under his desk to charge. If he can catch the bullet train, the total commute can be a little over an hour and a half, which is at worst comparable to some of the drive times, and at best a bit shorter. (Ultimately, he still often drives for flexibility, but has to leave by 6am to avoid the worst of the morning traffic.) In SF itself, the issue is the abysmal slowness of the Muni buses. When I lived near Alamo Square, my commute was less than 3 miles, but could take 40 minutes by bus (even with home and work within a few blocks of bus stops), if I timed it perfectly and didn't have to wait 10 minutes for the bus. And that 40 minutes is effectively wasted; I can't sleep in another 40 minutes and expect to work on the bus because it's just not the right environment for that. Muni gives time scales that look like commuter rail, but over much shorter distances and with much less comfort than commuter rail. Also a kicker: I could do that walk in a little over 50 minutes.
- dsl 7y ago
  Freeways are mass transportation, it might not be the kind you like, but they are pretty effective at getting large numbers of people from origin to destination. The peak capacity of a mile of track will always be less than that of a mile of highway. But we don't have anywhere to put either because we refuse to build up and ruin a bunch of NIMBYs views.
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    > The peak capacity of a mile of track will always be less than that of a mile of highway. I'd be interested to hear why you think this.
  - melling 7y ago
    Where are you getting your numbers? Are you making them up? How many passenger cars can you get down a mile of highway per hour? I love freeways. It’s just that during rush hour (and holiday weekends), they’re extremely congested. We’ve got local lanes, express lanes, and Waze to help figure out which one to take. Roads don’t scale very well. Mass transit would more acceptable if we can increase the speed. China has low-medium speed maglevs, for example, that will travel 100-120 miles per hour. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-trains/index.html https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/china-driverless-maglev-t...
    - rayiner 7y ago
      To use some example numbers. VA7, which goes from the Dulles area where many DC-area data centers are located, through Reston where many tech companies' offices are located, to near DC, carries 50,000-100,000 vehicles per day, and is congested pretty much all day. The Metro Silver line, which follows roughly the same route, theoretically destroys that. An 8-car Metro train carries 1,400 people. With 8-minute headways, that's 7.5 trains per hour, 90 trains over a 12-hour commuting day, or 126,000 people. Except the actual ridership of the Silver Line is just about 17,000 people per day, and declining. Why? Because it's useless for most people. It takes you to DC at one end, and the airport at the other, and a few places that happen to be on the way. But most people who live in that area don't commute to DC. People take VA7 to go from say Sterling (where there is no metro station) to Tyson's Corner. They have to get in a car to use Metro anyway, and by the time they do that, it's faster to just drive to Tysons instead of getting on the Metro for the segment of the trip Metro covers. On the other side of DC, the Maryland suburbs are served by no fewer than 37.5 trains per hour (15 on the Green/Yellow, 15 on the Blue/Silver, and 7.5 on the Orange). That's 50,000 people per hour! But the cars are pretty much empty in Maryland, because few people commute into DC. In the height of irony, Metro is moving one of its main employment centers to Lanham Maryland, located on the terminus of the orange line. That means it's not actually commutable by Metro for most part. Folks who work for WMATA aren't living in DC and doing a reverse commute. They're living in Bowie or Largo or College Park or Hyattsville (the surrounding towns). Taking Metro would involve going all the way to DC, switching from the Green/Yellow or Blue/Silver to the Orange, then going back all the way.