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Block roads and build better public transport. Just because it's difficult and will require some pain in the short term, it doesn't mean we should do - and the

• mises 7y ago
  But public transport is simply not as good for now; ramming it down people's throats is not a solution. It is crowded, unclean, slow, and noisy. I have to listen to some one else blaring his music, or some fat guy taking two seats. Or some smelly guy who can't be bothered to shower. I suddenly have to plan my schedule around my transportation, rather than my transportation around my schedule. Maybe we should focus on making it a better option. Also, why would you block existing roads? That's a ridiculous proposition. There's a difference between building something better and just forcing every one onto something worse. The market is stronger and smarter than any government, and will try as hard as it can to circumvent any thing you pass. Why not have the invisible hand do your work for you? Make it a better option, and people will use it.
  • arethuza 7y ago
    Depends where you are I guess - I rather like taking the train into Edinburgh. It's occasionally a bit crowded going home in the evening but 99% of the time getting a seat isn't a problem and my fellow commuters seem a decent bunch and it is faster and cheaper than driving (and I have a decent fairly new car). Edit: Out of interest, looking at your username is it not possible that you have an ideological objection to public transport?
  • helen___keller 7y ago
    > Maybe we should focus on making it a better option. I think everybody agrees with this until it comes time to talk taxes and then everyone with a car says they're happy with their commutes and they don't want to pay for somebody else to take a train, don't want a whole lane for a bus, and so on. So instead you get some meaningless token effort and everybody goes on driving Making driving "worse" (or at least refusing to invest to make it better) gives transit a competitive advantage. Optimizing for personal cars gives cars a competitive advantage, which is the story of the 20th century > Also, why would you block existing roads? That's a ridiculous proposition. It's not even remotely controversial when I've seen it done, like downtown streets in Boston made pedestrian only. The vast majority of people (who are on foot) love it.
    • Kaiyou 7y ago
      Speaking of being happy with their commute. I'm very happy and I'm walking to work everday. Maybe you should rethink the need for cars/trains in the first place? Because I sure am not using trains in my daily life and don't own a car.
      • mantas 7y ago
        Other part of the equation is being be happy with living location. Walking to work is nice, but if that means you've to pay fuckton for a tiny apartment in concrete jungle.. Some people will be happy, some people would be more misery than dealing with long commute.
        • Kaiyou 7y ago
          I live in a nice place with a park in front of my door.
      • vonmoltke 7y ago
        I don't want to move every time I change jobs. I thought no most people share my preference.
        • Kaiyou 7y ago
          Why do you need to change jobs so often?
    • briandear 7y ago
      Why can’t the people that want transit be the ones that pay for it? If public transit were in high demand, it would seem like it shouldn’t be charging a subsidized fare. Making driving worse does give transit a competitive advantage. However, if transit were so desirable, why would it need to win by simply making everything suck more? That’s not a very strong vote for transit. Transit should win because it’s better, not because we have made all the other options suck more. I suppose we could have snipers shooting at freeway cars if we wanted to increase subway ridership right? However, that doesn’t make the subway intrinsically better. It just means you have a lot more people unhappy. I don’t understand why people are willing to make the largest number of people unhappy in order to achieve some transit utopian fantasy. The whole debate sounds like Marxism: let’s make everyone’s life suck equally. We don’t actually want anyone to enjoy their car because then they wouldn’t want to take our shitty bus. If your bus wasn’t so shitty (I am in the Bay Area, so I mean that both literally and figuratively,) then maybe people might want to ride your bus. My company has some private bus shuttles that are spectacular. When possible, I prefer to ride those shuttles despite having a great car and an easy drive. But riding the city bus? Heck no! I would need a hepatitis booster shot as well as having to ride in dirty, uncomfortable surroundings with crazy people. Not to mention waiting at a bus stop with those same sorts of people — and stopping every two blocks for someone to get on or off.
  • PorterDuff 7y ago
    I'd say that it isn't just a matter of comfort, but also one of personal security. I'd be far more apt to take a local train in Tokyo or Switzerland than I would BART.
  • dasKrokodil 7y ago
    > The market is stronger and smarter than any government If that is the case, the parking minimums should indeed be abolished, because they are mandated by the government, no?
  • sachdevap 7y ago
    > The market is stronger and smarter than any government Then let the market decide how much people should pay for the socialized parking that citizens provide for car owners benefit.
  • ticmasta 7y ago
    >> It is crowded, unclean, slow, and noisy. in North America it's also expensive and heavily subsidized by those who don't use it. With no judgement, both of these aspects go directly against the capatalist American zeitgeist
    • vonmoltke 7y ago
      Expensive to run. A big reason North American systems are so heavily subsidized is that they are really cheap to ride. Very few flat-rate systems have good (>=60%) farebox recovery, yet the majority of NA systems are flat-rate. It's something of chicken-and-egg thing, though. It's hard to charge reasonable prices when a system is inconvenient, but it's hard to build a convenient system without demonstrable demand.
      • treis 7y ago
        >It's something of chicken-and-egg thing, though. It's hard to charge reasonable prices when a system is inconvenient, but it's hard to build a convenient system without demonstrable demand. Uber/Lyft have done it with their pool/line service. IMHO, the problem is the focus on major infrastructure over less grand services that people actually will use. My city is talking about spending billions to extend commuter rail. Yet when I looked at going to a place in the city center 5 miles away it was 23 minutes by car and an hour and 20 minutes by public transport. I literally could have run there faster than taking the bus. I did the math and for the system as a whole it comes out to be about ten bucks a ride. It would be cheaper and better for everyone if they just subsidized line/pool.
      • magduf 7y ago
        >Expensive to run. A big reason North American systems are so heavily subsidized is that they are really cheap to ride. Huh? Here in DC, the subway fares are rather high compared to the fares I payed in Germany and Japan. Germany was downright cheap, with multi-day all-you-can-ride passes available for what it costs me to take 3 rides on the DC Metro. The NYC MTA isn't very inexpensive either, though I think it's still cheaper than DC's. But for the money, it's a far, far worse user experience than the systems in Germany and Japan.
• deleted 7y ago
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• ahoy 7y ago
  I'm on board with sweeping changes, but most US cities aren't built densely enough to take advantage of public transit even if we do build it. It's not just a matter of building more transit (which we should be doing!). We have to move people back into urban cores and out of sparsely populated suburbs.
  • helen___keller 7y ago
    Ironically many people already want this (as reflected by housing prices), but can't afford to do so
  • levythe 7y ago
    Japan, the golden child of public transportation, serves suburban areas as well as urban cores. I am not convinced it's altogether an issue of population density. It seems more a cultural issue. In America, public transportation is seen as being for people who can't afford a car. In Japan, it's just part of how you get places.
    • JoeAltmaier 7y ago
      Well, affording a car in Japan is also very expensive. The cars not so much; the inspections, taxes and parking very much expensive. So maybe Japan is just the place where almost nobody can afford a car? Thus, the same as the US.
    • lmm 7y ago
      Fix our attitude to car parking and the rest will follow. In Japan there's no street parking, thus narrow streets and no need for sidewalks, saving even more space for actual stuff. If you want to own a car, it's your responsibility to pay for space to keep it in (and you're not even allowed to buy one without showing that you've got a space), you don't get to just dump it in some public space.
      • briandear 7y ago
        Most Americans have driveways and many have garages. It’s a pretty small minority that park their cars on the street. And most city street parking is certainly not free.
• kube-system 7y ago
  I have a hunch that any authority who blocks roads in LA to prevent traffic from flowing won’t have much of a successful career in politics.
• jandrewrogers 7y ago
  I live in the city without a car but what you are suggesting is literally infeasible for most of the US, it goes far beyond "short term pain". There is no viable way to build usable, economical public transport for vast, low-density suburban sprawl. Blocking roads does not solve this obvious problem. The topology of most US infrastructure is designed in such a way that this conversion is not possible without demolishing and rebuilding thousands of square kilometers of existing infrastructure. That is a very expensive proposition. Even if all new construction and city growth is optimized for not needing a car, and a significant fraction of it is, that doesn't change the reality that 300 million people live in areas where a car is an absolute and largely irreplaceable necessity because the existing infrastructure requires it.
  • grecy 7y ago
    Take the however-many billions of dollars each city is currently spending to build new (or bigger) freeways. Spend that same money on buses instead. Instead of millions of cars that carry 1 person to a max of 5, lets have thousands of buses that carry ~40-80 people. In the years to come when there are less vehicles on the road, we can start closing roads, like Paris does (or did). Or, you know, do absolutely nothing. Improve nothing. Move forward with nothing. Complain about everything, and every idea to improve stuff.
    • goostavos 7y ago
      When the "ideas to improve stuff" stop being hopelessly naive, the critiques will surely lessen.
      • grecy 7y ago
        Let's hear your idea then. There are an awful lot of people nay-saying ideas to make stuff better and extraordinarily few people coming up with ideas to make stuff better. What do you think will be the outcome of that?
        • lawnchair_larry 7y ago
• toast0 7y ago
  > Block roads and build better public transport. If you make the city unlivable in the meantime, that should help with affordable housing as people with means go elsewhere. Sure, drop parking minimums in/near density/transit access. Let the market decide where you can sell residences without parking; although, building a multi unit building without parking in a neighborhood with street parking isn't really appropriate. Public transport in the LA area is a pretty tough issue -- you've got a ton of people who often live far from where they work, and households with multiple workers rarely have the workers anywhere near each other. It's very hard to have public transit that has the speeds needed for long commutes while also maintaining the flexibility for the varied commutes that are common in the area. That said, almost all of the transit that gets built does get used, to the surprise of everyone -- so the answer for LA is probably just keep building transit until ridership saturates, and make small changes in zoning policy along the way.
• ufmace 7y ago
  It's not possible without essentially destroying the entire city and rebuilding it with more dense buildings. Public transit would be intolerably bad, because the parking lots are too big. The buildings are too far apart, and too far from the roads. You would have to have stops so frequent that it would take too long to get anywhere that was far away, and you would still be dropped off a significant walk from any building.