4 ms·

> 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 th

> 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.
- bluGill 7y ago
  That is a complex question with no one right answer. Transit isn't just a chauffeured limo ride for rich people to ride to their job downtown, while saying they are helping the environment. If that was the only reason for transit it should pay for itself (a small fare increase might be required). Transit is for the poor: those who can't afford a car, and have no prospect of getting a better job. These are a large number of such people, who really can't move up. Cheap transit means they can just afford rent and food thus meaning society doesn't have to do more to take care of them. Cheap is a matter of pride, it lets them think "I pay my full price for everything", while the real costs are hidden. Transit is for the disabled. Many of them are poor (see above) - but even the rich ones cannot drive for some reason. A transit system means they have a way to get around and thus causing more work for nurses and the like. It is cheaper to subsidize a bus to the hospital and an ambulance. Transit is to reduce load from the road network. A bus with just 3 riders is using less road than those riders in a car. thus cars should cheer the bus as it means less traffic for drivers to deal with. As traffic gets worse it is cheaper to shift drivers to transit than to build a road. Thus subsidies to transit can have the same effect as building another road at much less cost, making driving cheaper to everybody. Transit has strong network effects. One bus/train isn't useful for many people, as you add more lines and service times the transit system becomes more useful to everybody. However this requires expensive upfront investment to get to the level of service required for people to ride. This investment is hard to pay for. There is lag time between transit existing and people riding. Someone with a car won't bother to try the transit system even if they are the perfect candidate (a direct route from point a to point b that is faster than driving) they are so used to driving they won't look up the route right away. It can be years between opening a system and everybody who would ride actually riding. In the mean time the investment has to be paid for. Transit allows denser building, which in turn allows higher property taxes. Thus a transit system should be subsidized by the property near where it stops (400m in each direction or some number in that range) as the property owner is benefiting from the transit in the form of increased property values. Your city needs to fix the transit problems you noted. My city has very nice buses that I ride every day. This will require investment, but once it is paid for I think you will find like me that you will sell the car and use the bus to get around. Counting my taxes to pay for transit, and fares, I break even vs paying for fuel, maintenance, and insurance on my car (which was paid for years ago so I'm not counting costs to buy the car - in some years I will have to replace the car though and then I'm way behind)
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>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. Those roads are not anywhere that anyone was formerly commuting through though and were already well served by mass transit (they're basically underneath the intersection of all the main subway lines. The entire Boston area transit network (including road, light rail and heavy rail) is what you get when you write your master plan on a deck of cards, shuffle it and then flush it down the toilet. They should have stuck with their road and rail plans from the 1940s. 695 should exist (that would solve a lot of the commuter traffic east of I95) though they probably would have buried it by now like they did with the rest of the highway. Orange line should run all the way from 128 in the north to 128 in the south (where there would probably be massive park and rides). The North/South station connector should exist. Etc. etc. If they had just followed their own damn plan they could make the dense parts of Boston/Camb more pedestrian friendly and generally have more freedom to do "good urban transit" type things because you wouldn't have surface roads functioning as major arteries that you can't interrupt. Boston is an example of good urban transit only so far as it was lucky enough to be a big enough city back in the day when big projects got done that it consequently has a subway. The rest of the region is a dumpster fire of things that were supposed to interconnect but don't.

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.

bluGill 7y ago
That is a complex question with no one right answer. Transit isn't just a chauffeured limo ride for rich people to ride to their job downtown, while saying they are helping the environment. If that was the only reason for transit it should pay for itself (a small fare increase might be required). Transit is for the poor: those who can't afford a car, and have no prospect of getting a better job. These are a large number of such people, who really can't move up. Cheap transit means they can just afford rent and food thus meaning society doesn't have to do more to take care of them. Cheap is a matter of pride, it lets them think "I pay my full price for everything", while the real costs are hidden. Transit is for the disabled. Many of them are poor (see above) - but even the rich ones cannot drive for some reason. A transit system means they have a way to get around and thus causing more work for nurses and the like. It is cheaper to subsidize a bus to the hospital and an ambulance. Transit is to reduce load from the road network. A bus with just 3 riders is using less road than those riders in a car. thus cars should cheer the bus as it means less traffic for drivers to deal with. As traffic gets worse it is cheaper to shift drivers to transit than to build a road. Thus subsidies to transit can have the same effect as building another road at much less cost, making driving cheaper to everybody. Transit has strong network effects. One bus/train isn't useful for many people, as you add more lines and service times the transit system becomes more useful to everybody. However this requires expensive upfront investment to get to the level of service required for people to ride. This investment is hard to pay for. There is lag time between transit existing and people riding. Someone with a car won't bother to try the transit system even if they are the perfect candidate (a direct route from point a to point b that is faster than driving) they are so used to driving they won't look up the route right away. It can be years between opening a system and everybody who would ride actually riding. In the mean time the investment has to be paid for. Transit allows denser building, which in turn allows higher property taxes. Thus a transit system should be subsidized by the property near where it stops (400m in each direction or some number in that range) as the property owner is benefiting from the transit in the form of increased property values. Your city needs to fix the transit problems you noted. My city has very nice buses that I ride every day. This will require investment, but once it is paid for I think you will find like me that you will sell the car and use the bus to get around. Counting my taxes to pay for transit, and fares, I break even vs paying for fuel, maintenance, and insurance on my car (which was paid for years ago so I'm not counting costs to buy the car - in some years I will have to replace the car though and then I'm way behind)

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

>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. Those roads are not anywhere that anyone was formerly commuting through though and were already well served by mass transit (they're basically underneath the intersection of all the main subway lines. The entire Boston area transit network (including road, light rail and heavy rail) is what you get when you write your master plan on a deck of cards, shuffle it and then flush it down the toilet. They should have stuck with their road and rail plans from the 1940s. 695 should exist (that would solve a lot of the commuter traffic east of I95) though they probably would have buried it by now like they did with the rest of the highway. Orange line should run all the way from 128 in the north to 128 in the south (where there would probably be massive park and rides). The North/South station connector should exist. Etc. etc. If they had just followed their own damn plan they could make the dense parts of Boston/Camb more pedestrian friendly and generally have more freedom to do "good urban transit" type things because you wouldn't have surface roads functioning as major arteries that you can't interrupt. Boston is an example of good urban transit only so far as it was lucky enough to be a big enough city back in the day when big projects got done that it consequently has a subway. The rest of the region is a dumpster fire of things that were supposed to interconnect but don't.