4 ms·

I know this is a topic that people in the U.S. tend to feel very strongly about, but there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when popul

I know this is a topic that people in the U.S. tend to feel very strongly about, but there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when population density exceeds a certain level. The issue is the space that's required by them and building more lanes doesn't really help due to induced demand (i.e. as more road space becomes available, more people choose to drive and the congestion ends up increasing). As Cory Doctorow puts it, "geometry hates cars". Unfortunately, the U.S. has gone all-in on car based infrastructure and that's a difficult thing to reverse. The best time to start improving public transport and active transport facilities is twenty years ago; the second best time to start is now.

bpodgursky 3y ago
> The issue is the space that's required by them and building more lanes doesn't really help due to induced demand No, you're measuring what you care about, not the actual goal. More lanes helps because now more people are able to get where they want to go! If you have 4 lanes, and 20,000 people can commute to work, and with 8 lanes, 40,000 people can commute to work, that's a huge win for the people who wanted to use the highway! Think about this honestly — if you doubled the capacity of a subway, and twice as many people took it so it was just as crowded, you'd be thrilled. You're going to be perpetually confused by infrastructure decisions if you measure a goal that nobody else is trying to solve for.
- regularjack 3y ago
  You'll end up with 20k more cars needing parking too.
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    This is too often forgotten.
  - indymike 3y ago
    You'll also end up with 20K happy voters.
- Spivak 3y ago
  And they apparently hated you for you spoke the truth. Like sure there's the "adding more lanes to one highway doesn't reduce congestion" thing but that's not a good faith reading of your point. If you increase the capacity of the road system however that's accomplished and more people use it that's a win. It's literally providing more value to people and acting as an economic multiplier. If you improve the bus system and more people use it that's also a win because it's providing more value to people. If your plan doesn't start with here's all the ways the roads provide value and why individuals and businesses overwhelmingly prefer them to current alternatives and how we're taking that as table stakes for our new system, then of course people are gonna push back. Just because you think a trade-off is worth it or some perceived downside is fine for you doesn't mean it will be true for everyone.
  - boveus 3y ago
    > If you increase the capacity of the road system however that's accomplished and more people use it that's a win. This ignores the cost/benefit of constructing more car infrastructure in heavily urbanized areas and the cost of owning a car for transportation. It ceases to be an economic multiplier when you compare it to cheaper alternatives. You are also painting car infrastructure as some sort of panacea, but it costs households a lot of money (almost 1/5th of their total income[1]) to use a car for transportation. Not only are cars expensive, but their expense is inversely correlated with income (poor people spend more money on cars). In the USA we spend much more on transportation than in EU countries[2]. From the standpoint of the average American family, car infrastructure is much costlier than the alternatives. 1. https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trends-Transportation-Spen/ida7-k95k/ https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trend... 2. https://www.itdp.org/2024/01/24/high-cost-transportation-united-states/ https://www.itdp.org/2024/01/24/high-cost-transportation-uni...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- boveus 3y ago
  > More lanes helps because now more people are able to get where they want to go! I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but no one wants to get to the 5 or 6 lane highway. They are using the highway to get to smaller 1-2 lane surface roads and parking areas with limited capacity. Eventually you will hit a bottleneck in surface roads or parking that you cannot improve easily or cheaply. The larger highways only serve to get people to the bottlenecks in the system faster.
- agentultra 3y ago
  It's a zero sum game. More lanes/roads for commuters means less land for other productive uses. And given the geometry and passenger density of cars (how many traffic jams are moving 1 person per X cubic feet/meters?) Adding another lane doesn't give you much for the amount of land it uses compared to alternatives. It's unfortunate that low-density areas and the highways they depend on are subsidized by more productive uses of land. It's a tragedy that the people benefiting from that subsidy feel entitled to it and prevent society from developing the land in more sustainable ways. Part of it is a chicken-and-egg problem though... even my city where I live is not immune. Those who live in less developed areas vote against public transportation solutions and stymie progress at every turn while voting for more roads/lanes. It appears rational: they can't get to the public transportation where they are since every amenity is incredibly far (due to cars and road infrastructure, wah wah). So who has to suffer more while we figure out the solution? From a larger ecological perspective, we need to reduce car infrastructure. It's a significant contributor to climate change, air pollution, and unnecessary deaths every year and there are ways to avoid a good deal of those problems (or at least reduce them).
bombcar 3y ago
But let's be fair, "induced demand" is just another way of saying "insufficient supply" because otherwise massive roads in the middle of nowhere would instantly fill with cars. The real question is "why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives"? Edited to change "problem" to "question" - problems are things like "we need to get people to work, etc" and "how do we reduce pollution" not "I saw too many cars".
- lee-rhapsody 3y ago
  >Why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives? In my experience as an American who prefers public transport but lives in the Midwest, where public transport is essentially nonexistent: people have a skewed view of public transport thanks to horror stories about NYC subways and whatnot. So even if public transport were available, many people wouldn't take it because it would mean being around other people.
  - xnx 3y ago
    How skewed is the perception? Riding transit isn't a death sentence, but it does suck: slow, unreliable, expensive, dirty/smelly/germy, and with the potential of being a victim of violent crime.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      It really depends on the city. Some places it's just fine, and pretty popular, some places it's a rolling bathroom and pretty popular - the problems are the ones where it is unpopular and a rolling bathroom; that's the hardest to expand - which means it is perpetually stuck in a dead zone where it can't be used because it can't be expanded because it can't be used. Meanwhile things like the San Diego Trolley has gone from 16 miles and 17 stops in 1981 to 47,000 people a weekday in 1996 and to almost 70 miles and 62 stations today, with ridership peaking at around 38 million a year in 2019 (and slowly recovering back up). (Some of the original cars are still riding, down in Mendoza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrotranvía_Mendoza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrotranvía_Mendoza ) Something to note: that is a very successful light transit line and the total track is about the same as some people's daily commute.
slingnow 3y ago
We are nowhere NEAR saturating our landmass with people. There are more and less desirable places to live in the country, but there's no shortage of raw space. Not to mention, this isn't zero sum. Our roads and bridges can be in desperate need of repair (they are) and we can also need better public transportation and rail.
- digbybk 3y ago
  Repair and widening are different things. When you say we're nowhere near saturating our landmass with people, are you thinking of the landmass of the entire country or the areas within an hour commute or less of a major population center? That's where the vast majority of people live, and that landmass is pretty saturated.
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  > We are nowhere NEAR saturating our landmass with people. That is true only if you think wall papering the earth from top to bottom with human settlement is acceptable and that the natural world has no value. In short, we have already used up all the landmass we responsibly should use for people. Now, infill.
  - slingnow 3y ago
    > In short, we have already used up all the landmass we responsibly should use for people This sure sounds a lot like a pure opinion. Do you have anything to back up this claim?
    - Pet_Ant 3y ago
      If the number of threatened animal species and fragmented biomes don't convince you, nothing I can say will. It's a fact that most of the natural world is threatened. That we shouldn't pave over paradise and put up a parking lot is a value statement that I cannot prove to you more than I cant that murder and rape are bad. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/ https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...
skybrian 3y ago
I know a lot of people hate cars, but you should remember that much of the US is rural, and by land area, it’s mostly not suitable for trains. We should remember that cities and the countryside are different and reject simplistic slogans (“geometry hates cars”) that imply that one form of transportation works best everywhere. We should have a mosaic of different systems that work together. The most successful form of public transit in low-density areas is the school bus. They work well for bringing kids to school. They require roads. We’re not going to switch to rail.
- eesmith 3y ago
  The geometry argument was not as simple as you suggest. There was a necessary precondition: "there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when population density exceeds a certain level". That's the opposite of implying that one form of transportation works best everywhere. FWIW, in some low density areas the most successful form of public transit is the ferry, which carries kids to school, people to work, food to the stores, and more.
  - theultdev 3y ago
    I'm very pro car and personal travel / liberty, but I will say living briefly in Sydney that the ferry is the ultimate form of public transportation, like a free tour. However weather does play a large role, and during peak hours the crowds are quite daunting. There's only very specific places where ferry is useful. You need multiple ports close to each other in calm water with high frequency traffic.
forrestthewoods 3y ago
Why is increased density better? Maybe it would be better for things to be more spread out and for people to have EV cars charged from clean nuclear energy? Dense cities are a different kind of time bomb. Replacing pipes and streets disrupts a lot more people and a lot of businesses for a shockingly long amount of time. Dense cities also happen to be significantly more expensive in practically every way. The cost of housing in particular. Feels like a corollary to induced demand on roads. Although it’s worth noting in both cases that induced demand means more people are receiving value and benefit! I dunno. I live in a city. It’s fine. But density doesn’t feel like a defacto good thing to me.
- tggy2 3y ago
  Spreading out is bad. It adds significant fiscal burden supporting essential services infrastructure such as water and sewerage, as you lose the economies of scale that more dense/compact cities have. Worse, spreading out only adds to induced demand when you have greater numbers of people commuting at the same time of day twice a day. Housing is a false equivalency in this equation, and there are other levers that need to be pulled to address construction costs, etc. Further, if you had better and reliable rapid transport links servicing spread out communities, it would negate the need to drive in many cases when commuting to economic hubs. But this requires a mindset shift. Overall, it's nuanced, and that complexity is why voters (and NIMBYs) are reticent to embrace how we need to be living for now, and not how we used to live.
  - forrestthewoods 3y ago
    > It adds significant fiscal burden supporting essential services infrastructure such as water and sewerage, as you lose the economies of scale that more dense/compact cities have. I grew up in rural America. It is not at all obvious to me that cities are more economic. If anything it’s the opposite. Doing any kind of infrastructure work is expensive, slow, and disruptive. > Housing is a false equivalency in this equation, and there are other levers that need to be pulled to address construction costs, etc. Maybe. Cost of housing is arguably our biggest and most important problem – and it’s increasingly wide spread. But at no point in recent history have dense cities had cheaper housing. Building tall is expensive.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Induced demand also applies to housing (i.e. as more housing becomes available, more people choose to live in the popular city, and housing prices keep increasing). But we should probably still keep building more housing (but with parking, that means traffic gets worse, so lots of public transit would work better in that case, even if the city is going to become expensive to live in).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  Yes, but "housing" can involve any number of different types of house. If everyone demanded spacious detached housing that had approximately four times the number of bedrooms per person, then there would be similar problems. That would be analogous to the typical car journey where there is space for four people and usually just one occupant. Also, housing requires space for where the house is located, but cars will require space (parking) both at the main residence and also at every possible destination.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    > If everyone demanded spacious detached housing that had approximately four times the number of bedrooms per person, then there would be similar problems. Even if you built that housing, let's say you are in Houston or some texan city with lots of space, it would fill up. Your traffic problems would be even worse of course. Luckily, a lot of cities are hemmed in by water/mountains, so the only way to build is up, but if you do build up (like in HK, which is a good example of a city that is hemmed in by water and mountains), your city doesn't necessarily get cheaper, you just get more people.
koolba 3y ago
> Unfortunately, the U.S. has gone all-in on car based infrastructure and that's a difficult thing to reverse. The USA has a fantastic organizational structure that allows changes like this to be experimented with in pockets of the country without a top down approach. If an approach can't be done at the city or State level, then it's not likely to get approved for spending at the Federal level as you add in more people who will never directly benefit from said system. In the USA, the city of New York is seen as having the most extensive mass transit system, in particular the subway system. Problem is that it has massive budgetary shortfalls and doubles as a de facto homeless shelter. People don't take the NYC subway because they want to, they take it because they have no other choice. If people want public transport to be a success in the USA, pick a city (any city!) and show that it can be done in a fiscally sustainable way with an end product that people actually want to use. Not just forced to use.
- matchbok 3y ago
  Well, it's an issue of double standards. Nobody expects highways to make money or break even. Suggesting that a road have tolls is the quickest way to lose. However, transit is put in another group, for some reason.
  - koolba 3y ago
    > Nobody expects highways to make money or break even. Suggesting that a road have tolls is the quickest way to lose. However, transit is put in another group, for some reason. The NY State Thruway, the tolled highway that crosses the entire state, is entirely self-funded by tolls: https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/2022/03/28/tolls-not-tax-dollars-pay-new-york-state-thruway-system/7166986001/ https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/2022/03/28/tolls-not-tax...
  - WheatMillington 3y ago
    >Nobody expects highways to make money or break even. Where I'm from, in New Zealand, roads are paid for from a budget that is funded primarily by fuel taxes and road user charges. So what you've said is not a universal truth.
giantg2 3y ago
"but there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when population density exceeds a certain level." And yet tha vast majority of the US is nowhere near that density. The most dense areas already have public transit. Could those areas use some additional funding? Probably. Are there other issues than just funding? Definitely. Is the title misleading and presenting a false dilemma? Yes, the US is investing in both, not just one or the other.
WheatMillington 3y ago
Why not increase quality of life by decreasing density? The United States is an unfathomably large land mass, there's plenty of space out there. With modern ways of working there's no need to live in human storage pods in big cities.
abeppu 3y ago
> there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when population density exceeds a certain level I think the other issue in the US is the opposite: below a certain density, it's hard for public transit to be effective. Once car-oriented development has sprawled out with suburbs and stroads, the distance between you and a transit-stop is gonna be higher, riders per mile of route will be lower, etc. And when housing prices push people to move further out from city centers (which is important not just for commuting to jobs but access to stores/schools/everything) the problem just gets worse.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  This is one of the issues with prioritising cars over all other forms of transport - they tend to crowd out any other form of transport or make them far less desirable due to the distances involved or the danger posed by drivers.
cameldrv 3y ago
The U.S. solution mostly is just not to have that level of population density. Most larger cities in Europe for example are old, laid out and built before the invention of the car. Before motorized transport, people mostly got places by walking. The point of a city is that you have lots of people that can all reach each other in a reasonable amount of time. If you have to walk, you have to get those people closer together. If you can drive, you can spread out more and still get reasonable travel times. A lot of big cities in the U.S. were mostly built out after the invention of the car, so they are built with cars in mind. The older ones mostly have semi-decent public transit available.
- rickydroll 3y ago
  I know the myth of European cities being more suited for walking but the reality is, it isn't. Even many's old city centers, it's one or two story buildings, tiny apartments, tiny expensive shops and has-beens preserve more for tourists than for living. I did see one exception. In Helsinki down by the harbor near the Estonian ferry, they are putting in 8-10 story apartment buildings. They are located on transit lines but does nothing but apartment buildings there. You have to take the tram to get to supermarket or medical facilities and the tram doesn't go that fast. It seems to me that effective public transit would require running a public transit vehicle (buses, trams) so that you never need to wait more than 15 minutes at any stop. Still would be horribly inefficient because you'd be doing lots of vehicle changes but at least you can get everywhere eventually.
sershe 3y ago
Why is induced demand bad? Induced demand means more people get to do more things! It's like you have a bunch of people at 1700 calories per day, and you are against growing more food cause there'd be induced demand for food - they'd just eat it all up, and ask for more.

bpodgursky 3y ago

> The issue is the space that's required by them and building more lanes doesn't really help due to induced demand No, you're measuring what you care about, not the actual goal. More lanes helps because now more people are able to get where they want to go! If you have 4 lanes, and 20,000 people can commute to work, and with 8 lanes, 40,000 people can commute to work, that's a huge win for the people who wanted to use the highway! Think about this honestly — if you doubled the capacity of a subway, and twice as many people took it so it was just as crowded, you'd be thrilled. You're going to be perpetually confused by infrastructure decisions if you measure a goal that nobody else is trying to solve for.

regularjack 3y ago
You'll end up with 20k more cars needing parking too.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  This is too often forgotten.
- indymike 3y ago
  You'll also end up with 20K happy voters.
Spivak 3y ago
And they apparently hated you for you spoke the truth. Like sure there's the "adding more lanes to one highway doesn't reduce congestion" thing but that's not a good faith reading of your point. If you increase the capacity of the road system however that's accomplished and more people use it that's a win. It's literally providing more value to people and acting as an economic multiplier. If you improve the bus system and more people use it that's also a win because it's providing more value to people. If your plan doesn't start with here's all the ways the roads provide value and why individuals and businesses overwhelmingly prefer them to current alternatives and how we're taking that as table stakes for our new system, then of course people are gonna push back. Just because you think a trade-off is worth it or some perceived downside is fine for you doesn't mean it will be true for everyone.
- boveus 3y ago
  > If you increase the capacity of the road system however that's accomplished and more people use it that's a win. This ignores the cost/benefit of constructing more car infrastructure in heavily urbanized areas and the cost of owning a car for transportation. It ceases to be an economic multiplier when you compare it to cheaper alternatives. You are also painting car infrastructure as some sort of panacea, but it costs households a lot of money (almost 1/5th of their total income[1]) to use a car for transportation. Not only are cars expensive, but their expense is inversely correlated with income (poor people spend more money on cars). In the USA we spend much more on transportation than in EU countries[2]. From the standpoint of the average American family, car infrastructure is much costlier than the alternatives. 1. https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trends-Transportation-Spen/ida7-k95k/ https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trend... 2. https://www.itdp.org/2024/01/24/high-cost-transportation-united-states/ https://www.itdp.org/2024/01/24/high-cost-transportation-uni...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
boveus 3y ago
> More lanes helps because now more people are able to get where they want to go! I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but no one wants to get to the 5 or 6 lane highway. They are using the highway to get to smaller 1-2 lane surface roads and parking areas with limited capacity. Eventually you will hit a bottleneck in surface roads or parking that you cannot improve easily or cheaply. The larger highways only serve to get people to the bottlenecks in the system faster.
agentultra 3y ago
It's a zero sum game. More lanes/roads for commuters means less land for other productive uses. And given the geometry and passenger density of cars (how many traffic jams are moving 1 person per X cubic feet/meters?) Adding another lane doesn't give you much for the amount of land it uses compared to alternatives. It's unfortunate that low-density areas and the highways they depend on are subsidized by more productive uses of land. It's a tragedy that the people benefiting from that subsidy feel entitled to it and prevent society from developing the land in more sustainable ways. Part of it is a chicken-and-egg problem though... even my city where I live is not immune. Those who live in less developed areas vote against public transportation solutions and stymie progress at every turn while voting for more roads/lanes. It appears rational: they can't get to the public transportation where they are since every amenity is incredibly far (due to cars and road infrastructure, wah wah). So who has to suffer more while we figure out the solution? From a larger ecological perspective, we need to reduce car infrastructure. It's a significant contributor to climate change, air pollution, and unnecessary deaths every year and there are ways to avoid a good deal of those problems (or at least reduce them).

bombcar 3y ago

But let's be fair, "induced demand" is just another way of saying "insufficient supply" because otherwise massive roads in the middle of nowhere would instantly fill with cars. The real question is "why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives"? Edited to change "problem" to "question" - problems are things like "we need to get people to work, etc" and "how do we reduce pollution" not "I saw too many cars".

lee-rhapsody 3y ago
>Why do people choose to drive when there are alternatives? In my experience as an American who prefers public transport but lives in the Midwest, where public transport is essentially nonexistent: people have a skewed view of public transport thanks to horror stories about NYC subways and whatnot. So even if public transport were available, many people wouldn't take it because it would mean being around other people.
- xnx 3y ago
  How skewed is the perception? Riding transit isn't a death sentence, but it does suck: slow, unreliable, expensive, dirty/smelly/germy, and with the potential of being a victim of violent crime.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It really depends on the city. Some places it's just fine, and pretty popular, some places it's a rolling bathroom and pretty popular - the problems are the ones where it is unpopular and a rolling bathroom; that's the hardest to expand - which means it is perpetually stuck in a dead zone where it can't be used because it can't be expanded because it can't be used. Meanwhile things like the San Diego Trolley has gone from 16 miles and 17 stops in 1981 to 47,000 people a weekday in 1996 and to almost 70 miles and 62 stations today, with ridership peaking at around 38 million a year in 2019 (and slowly recovering back up). (Some of the original cars are still riding, down in Mendoza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrotranvía_Mendoza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrotranvía_Mendoza ) Something to note: that is a very successful light transit line and the total track is about the same as some people's daily commute.

slingnow 3y ago

We are nowhere NEAR saturating our landmass with people. There are more and less desirable places to live in the country, but there's no shortage of raw space. Not to mention, this isn't zero sum. Our roads and bridges can be in desperate need of repair (they are) and we can also need better public transportation and rail.

digbybk 3y ago
Repair and widening are different things. When you say we're nowhere near saturating our landmass with people, are you thinking of the landmass of the entire country or the areas within an hour commute or less of a major population center? That's where the vast majority of people live, and that landmass is pretty saturated.
Pet_Ant 3y ago
> We are nowhere NEAR saturating our landmass with people. That is true only if you think wall papering the earth from top to bottom with human settlement is acceptable and that the natural world has no value. In short, we have already used up all the landmass we responsibly should use for people. Now, infill.
- slingnow 3y ago
  > In short, we have already used up all the landmass we responsibly should use for people This sure sounds a lot like a pure opinion. Do you have anything to back up this claim?
  - Pet_Ant 3y ago
    If the number of threatened animal species and fragmented biomes don't convince you, nothing I can say will. It's a fact that most of the natural world is threatened. That we shouldn't pave over paradise and put up a parking lot is a value statement that I cannot prove to you more than I cant that murder and rape are bad. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/ https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...

skybrian 3y ago

I know a lot of people hate cars, but you should remember that much of the US is rural, and by land area, it’s mostly not suitable for trains. We should remember that cities and the countryside are different and reject simplistic slogans (“geometry hates cars”) that imply that one form of transportation works best everywhere. We should have a mosaic of different systems that work together. The most successful form of public transit in low-density areas is the school bus. They work well for bringing kids to school. They require roads. We’re not going to switch to rail.

eesmith 3y ago
The geometry argument was not as simple as you suggest. There was a necessary precondition: "there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when population density exceeds a certain level". That's the opposite of implying that one form of transportation works best everywhere. FWIW, in some low density areas the most successful form of public transit is the ferry, which carries kids to school, people to work, food to the stores, and more.
- theultdev 3y ago
  I'm very pro car and personal travel / liberty, but I will say living briefly in Sydney that the ferry is the ultimate form of public transportation, like a free tour. However weather does play a large role, and during peak hours the crowds are quite daunting. There's only very specific places where ferry is useful. You need multiple ports close to each other in calm water with high frequency traffic.

forrestthewoods 3y ago

Why is increased density better? Maybe it would be better for things to be more spread out and for people to have EV cars charged from clean nuclear energy? Dense cities are a different kind of time bomb. Replacing pipes and streets disrupts a lot more people and a lot of businesses for a shockingly long amount of time. Dense cities also happen to be significantly more expensive in practically every way. The cost of housing in particular. Feels like a corollary to induced demand on roads. Although it’s worth noting in both cases that induced demand means more people are receiving value and benefit! I dunno. I live in a city. It’s fine. But density doesn’t feel like a defacto good thing to me.

tggy2 3y ago
Spreading out is bad. It adds significant fiscal burden supporting essential services infrastructure such as water and sewerage, as you lose the economies of scale that more dense/compact cities have. Worse, spreading out only adds to induced demand when you have greater numbers of people commuting at the same time of day twice a day. Housing is a false equivalency in this equation, and there are other levers that need to be pulled to address construction costs, etc. Further, if you had better and reliable rapid transport links servicing spread out communities, it would negate the need to drive in many cases when commuting to economic hubs. But this requires a mindset shift. Overall, it's nuanced, and that complexity is why voters (and NIMBYs) are reticent to embrace how we need to be living for now, and not how we used to live.
- forrestthewoods 3y ago
  > It adds significant fiscal burden supporting essential services infrastructure such as water and sewerage, as you lose the economies of scale that more dense/compact cities have. I grew up in rural America. It is not at all obvious to me that cities are more economic. If anything it’s the opposite. Doing any kind of infrastructure work is expensive, slow, and disruptive. > Housing is a false equivalency in this equation, and there are other levers that need to be pulled to address construction costs, etc. Maybe. Cost of housing is arguably our biggest and most important problem – and it’s increasingly wide spread. But at no point in recent history have dense cities had cheaper housing. Building tall is expensive.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

Induced demand also applies to housing (i.e. as more housing becomes available, more people choose to live in the popular city, and housing prices keep increasing). But we should probably still keep building more housing (but with parking, that means traffic gets worse, so lots of public transit would work better in that case, even if the city is going to become expensive to live in).

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
Yes, but "housing" can involve any number of different types of house. If everyone demanded spacious detached housing that had approximately four times the number of bedrooms per person, then there would be similar problems. That would be analogous to the typical car journey where there is space for four people and usually just one occupant. Also, housing requires space for where the house is located, but cars will require space (parking) both at the main residence and also at every possible destination.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > If everyone demanded spacious detached housing that had approximately four times the number of bedrooms per person, then there would be similar problems. Even if you built that housing, let's say you are in Houston or some texan city with lots of space, it would fill up. Your traffic problems would be even worse of course. Luckily, a lot of cities are hemmed in by water/mountains, so the only way to build is up, but if you do build up (like in HK, which is a good example of a city that is hemmed in by water and mountains), your city doesn't necessarily get cheaper, you just get more people.

koolba 3y ago

> Unfortunately, the U.S. has gone all-in on car based infrastructure and that's a difficult thing to reverse. The USA has a fantastic organizational structure that allows changes like this to be experimented with in pockets of the country without a top down approach. If an approach can't be done at the city or State level, then it's not likely to get approved for spending at the Federal level as you add in more people who will never directly benefit from said system. In the USA, the city of New York is seen as having the most extensive mass transit system, in particular the subway system. Problem is that it has massive budgetary shortfalls and doubles as a de facto homeless shelter. People don't take the NYC subway because they want to, they take it because they have no other choice. If people want public transport to be a success in the USA, pick a city (any city!) and show that it can be done in a fiscally sustainable way with an end product that people actually want to use. Not just forced to use.

matchbok 3y ago
Well, it's an issue of double standards. Nobody expects highways to make money or break even. Suggesting that a road have tolls is the quickest way to lose. However, transit is put in another group, for some reason.
- koolba 3y ago
  > Nobody expects highways to make money or break even. Suggesting that a road have tolls is the quickest way to lose. However, transit is put in another group, for some reason. The NY State Thruway, the tolled highway that crosses the entire state, is entirely self-funded by tolls: https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/2022/03/28/tolls-not-tax-dollars-pay-new-york-state-thruway-system/7166986001/ https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/2022/03/28/tolls-not-tax...
- WheatMillington 3y ago
  >Nobody expects highways to make money or break even. Where I'm from, in New Zealand, roads are paid for from a budget that is funded primarily by fuel taxes and road user charges. So what you've said is not a universal truth.

giantg2 3y ago

"but there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when population density exceeds a certain level." And yet tha vast majority of the US is nowhere near that density. The most dense areas already have public transit. Could those areas use some additional funding? Probably. Are there other issues than just funding? Definitely. Is the title misleading and presenting a false dilemma? Yes, the US is investing in both, not just one or the other.

WheatMillington 3y ago

Why not increase quality of life by decreasing density? The United States is an unfathomably large land mass, there's plenty of space out there. With modern ways of working there's no need to live in human storage pods in big cities.

abeppu 3y ago

> there's ultimately a limit to how effective personal cars can be when population density exceeds a certain level I think the other issue in the US is the opposite: below a certain density, it's hard for public transit to be effective. Once car-oriented development has sprawled out with suburbs and stroads, the distance between you and a transit-stop is gonna be higher, riders per mile of route will be lower, etc. And when housing prices push people to move further out from city centers (which is important not just for commuting to jobs but access to stores/schools/everything) the problem just gets worse.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
This is one of the issues with prioritising cars over all other forms of transport - they tend to crowd out any other form of transport or make them far less desirable due to the distances involved or the danger posed by drivers.

cameldrv 3y ago

The U.S. solution mostly is just not to have that level of population density. Most larger cities in Europe for example are old, laid out and built before the invention of the car. Before motorized transport, people mostly got places by walking. The point of a city is that you have lots of people that can all reach each other in a reasonable amount of time. If you have to walk, you have to get those people closer together. If you can drive, you can spread out more and still get reasonable travel times. A lot of big cities in the U.S. were mostly built out after the invention of the car, so they are built with cars in mind. The older ones mostly have semi-decent public transit available.

rickydroll 3y ago
I know the myth of European cities being more suited for walking but the reality is, it isn't. Even many's old city centers, it's one or two story buildings, tiny apartments, tiny expensive shops and has-beens preserve more for tourists than for living. I did see one exception. In Helsinki down by the harbor near the Estonian ferry, they are putting in 8-10 story apartment buildings. They are located on transit lines but does nothing but apartment buildings there. You have to take the tram to get to supermarket or medical facilities and the tram doesn't go that fast. It seems to me that effective public transit would require running a public transit vehicle (buses, trams) so that you never need to wait more than 15 minutes at any stop. Still would be horribly inefficient because you'd be doing lots of vehicle changes but at least you can get everywhere eventually.

sershe 3y ago

Why is induced demand bad? Induced demand means more people get to do more things! It's like you have a bunch of people at 1700 calories per day, and you are against growing more food cause there'd be induced demand for food - they'd just eat it all up, and ask for more.