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> What happens with most of these, is light rail goes to the city for a few surrounding suburbs with 50-100k people per town. To get to that train station every

> What happens with most of these, is light rail goes to the city for a few surrounding suburbs with 50-100k people per town. To get to that train station every morning, you need a car. No, you cannot have a bus circle the suburb for an hour to pick everyone up. If the suburb is designed to be walkable then the bus is not needed in the first place: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 Each individual community or neighbourhood can be fairly self-contained with regards to daily needs, and travel between them is done on rail or whatever. One could have all-day, frequent (e.g., every 5 minutes) service with trams (or buses) with-in an area, where you can travel with-in it, but also have connections to commuter rail to go to the Big City if the need arises: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_rail This is how things were generally built post-railway, pre-WW2. (Pre-railroad things were generally all walkable, but long distances being done on horses or boats.)

usernew 3y ago
I addressed this point. What you are proposing - replacing roads with rail and trams in a huge train grid of suburbs, costs an insane amount more than a road. You are talking about charging people 10x the property taxes they are paying now. Remember, suburbs do not have the density and hence tax revenue of cities. A highrise has 500 people in it paying for a little chunk of road in front of it. The same length of road in the suburbs is covered by 5 single family homes. But you say (buses!). Again, I addressed that. A bus, at a bus stop, is not something you are going to be able to do half of the time in suboptimal climates in half the country. Even in the 1/4 of the time with bad climate in the other half of the country, you still need to get around 25% of the time when you can't be waiting at the bus stop in 120 degree heat to get to work. And for that, you'll still need a car. So if you already have a car for that 25% of time, why then can't you just use it all the time? The walkable plans you reference completely ignores this issue, and pretends the climate is perfect every time you need to go somewhere. You don't need to design things to be walkable, if everyone already has a car for the times it's not "walkable" outside. Those olden days you dream of weren't as rosy as you think. People would show up to work freezing, wet, uncomfortable, and get sick from being in the freezing wind for a half hour "walking." They were also a lot less mobile, and going between places was a thing, not a multiple times a day part of life.

usernew 3y ago

I addressed this point. What you are proposing - replacing roads with rail and trams in a huge train grid of suburbs, costs an insane amount more than a road. You are talking about charging people 10x the property taxes they are paying now. Remember, suburbs do not have the density and hence tax revenue of cities. A highrise has 500 people in it paying for a little chunk of road in front of it. The same length of road in the suburbs is covered by 5 single family homes. But you say (buses!). Again, I addressed that. A bus, at a bus stop, is not something you are going to be able to do half of the time in suboptimal climates in half the country. Even in the 1/4 of the time with bad climate in the other half of the country, you still need to get around 25% of the time when you can't be waiting at the bus stop in 120 degree heat to get to work. And for that, you'll still need a car. So if you already have a car for that 25% of time, why then can't you just use it all the time? The walkable plans you reference completely ignores this issue, and pretends the climate is perfect every time you need to go somewhere. You don't need to design things to be walkable, if everyone already has a car for the times it's not "walkable" outside. Those olden days you dream of weren't as rosy as you think. People would show up to work freezing, wet, uncomfortable, and get sick from being in the freezing wind for a half hour "walking." They were also a lot less mobile, and going between places was a thing, not a multiple times a day part of life.