7 ms·

You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by p

by novok 3y ago

You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Ex: The bus & light rail is bad and slow, so therefore it will always be bad everywhere. Americans haven't lived or even travelled to places in europe and asia with functional transit systems and do not realize what they are missing. Another common american assumption is: apartments are only for the poor, so they will always be made shitty with bad soundproofing when you can make them with good soundproofing as a standard and a good amount of square feet. Or metros are always dirty, dangerous and the gross homeless live there, while that is also a pure policy choice of america. I grew up in north america, lived in places with good metros and good apartments, and then moved to America. America doesn't know how bad they have it.

majormajor 3y ago
> You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!) In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.
- novok 3y ago
  In China right? You know they are the equivalent of people in LA who live so far away from their job and have 2 hour car commutes right?
  - majormajor 3y ago
    Not just in China. China is maybe the most interesting point of comparison with big cities in the US, though, since its cities are both much denser than most AND more sprawling than most. And I don't follow your second question. If the trains OR freeways are full of people who can't afford to live closer to their jobs and have hours-long commutes, isn't that bad? And if it can happen even with extensive public transit, what does that tell us about fundamental assumptions about "city should grow forever, number must always go up!"?
    - oceanplexian 3y ago
      China isn't even remotely comparable to the USA. The urban mega cities are a prop that the CCP puts on display for the world. There's a reason that China's GDP-per-capita lands somewhere between Kazakhstan and Cuba.I would know because I've been there. If you go to a random exurban part of China you're going to find people living in makeshift tin structures, a lack of running water, oxcarts used as serious transportation, and a society that is functionally in the 1930s. The CCP are masters of propaganda though, and flood Youtube and social media with influencers riding around on maglev trains and showing off new airports and architecture. Even on American Social Media, if you look for videos of "The Real China", or "Chinese Poverty" you'll get carefully curated propaganda that does not line up with what I saw first hand.
      - nradov 3y ago
        The SerpentZA YouTube channel is somewhat sensationalist, but it has good firsthand videos showing the real China from someone who lived there for years and is fluent in Mandarin. The reality is a lot darker than what most Westerners see. https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza
  - kurthr 3y ago
    China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan... I can break it down by city, but the idea that people don't commute more than an hour in any of these places is pretty laughable. HK is a bit better, because it's so small, but unless you're really wealthy or willing to live with your family in 100m2 even that is challenging. It's not that there aren't places to live (eg in Tokyo), but most people with a family and moderate incomes would rather live outside the city, and that means long commutes, standing during rush hours. I once had a commute longer than 15min in Silicon Valley and decided I'd never do it again.
- yitianjian 3y ago
  The traffic in a medium sized NA city like Atlanta or Dallas can be a lot better than it is now, and it's definitely not comparable to Shanghai, London or Tokyo.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    Do you have any examples in mind of 6-10M cities with stress-free comfortable commuting and affordable housing for all? Off the top of my head, but without a lot of first- or second-hand experience, Rome seems like the commute is probably a lot better than the larger cities, but my perception is that the affordability is pretty poor? Otherwise most of my experience is in larger or much smaller places. Something that I think often makes this discussion tough is that there are a LOT of well-known historical European cities that are at under-2M population that I don't think Americans typically realize are THAT much smaller than, say, an Atlanta. I think the challenges of serving a growing city of 5M+ are much harder than a well-established old city of 2M.
    - kiba 3y ago
      If you want stress free comfortable commuting, you're going to need to build an efficient way to move people. Cars are not really an option when it comes to moving people en mass. It's just too low capacity. Rome's metro system in particular is stymied by buried Roman artifacts and laws for archaeology. That's not really the worst thing, given that NYC subway construction cost are some of the highest in the world. That said, I saw what Atlanta looks like. Aside from down Atlanta, a lot of Atlanta is literally just low rise, even downright suburban sometime. It's a smaller city than people thought, given that only half a million people lives within its border proper, but nonetheless traffic is somehow a nightmare.
    - Retric 3y ago
      Internationally the statistics depend quite a bit on how the data is collected and aggregated, so do it's hard to international comparisons accurately. I will say using US definitions, commute times are very sticky around the 30 minute time period. Longer commutes and people have a large incentive to move closer, short ones and they don't generally bother. So in the US Tulusa Oklahoma population 400,000 (1M metro) has a 20 minute commute and NYC population 8,800,000 (20M metro) is 50% worse at 32 minutes average and ~100 cities between those extremes. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-automobiles__trashed/100-u-s-cities-ranked-by-commute-time/ https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-... Edit: This suggests allowing people to move easily move around the metro area would meaningfully lower the need for transportation infrastructure. I suspect NYC has issues with people living in rent controlled apartments having long commutes but being unwilling to leave their cheap apartment, but don't have data backing it up.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > In a smaller city it can work great! The best transit is generally thought to be in NYC.
  - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
    In the US? Very likely. And given the status of NYC and the US in the world, even that is embarrassing.
  - cpursley 3y ago
    NYC city transit is shameful vs. even places like Moscow. Americans have no freaking idea.
  - Empact 3y ago
    Fun fact: the vast majority of the NYC system was built between 1904 and 1940 when there were several competing subway companies. Since the subway companies were unified in 1940, essentially no new lines have been built. The NYC Subway is a relic from a foregone age, from a time when we built things and wasn’t mired in bureaucracy and carbrained thinking. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Subway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City...
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      They don't need many new lines, having already built them. They also haven't built many new bridges to Brooklyn in awhile nor midtown tunnels under the Hudson nor large parks in the center of Manhattan.
- mlsu 3y ago
  We only have 2 cities in the United States that even approach a "medium sized" Asian metro in population. Los Angeles and NYC. Only NYC has a usable public transit system. This is actually an argument for transit systems. Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises, with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong. They would be, if not for the car. There are people who commute daily from the suburbs of Stockton to the SF bay area.
  - nradov 3y ago
    Most people who currently live in San Francisco/San Jose don't particularly want to turn it into a global metropolis and don't give a damn about abstract concepts like "cultural relevance". Cultural elitists should have some humility and not presume that they know best. Another option would be to set policies that encourage greater economic development and job growth in Stockton so that residents aren't forced to commute long distances. There's nothing special about the SF Bay Area: it's just another place.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      The Los Angeles example pretty much proves that spinning out employment into multiple areas does not mean people will just move to the closest area to their job; it just adds another destination to the list of "places people drive an hour to." It is not really that people living in Stockton already are commuting into the Bay, but Bay Area workers are being displaced into Stockton. The Bay Area has added more jobs than housing for a while now.
      - mjevans 3y ago
        LA _could_ be much more like Tokyo if USA cared to make mass transit work. # Service accurate enough to set a clock by. # Service mesh that provides walk-able freedom. # Safety and cleanliness (both a culture and enforcement issue) Yes, there would need to be a slight increase in density as well as much more transit service; but that metro area could scale up were there enough water.
- avar 3y ago
  > you don't SIT on the train > at all in rush hour! The horror!
  - theendisney 3y ago
    Imagine the travelers all sitting in large cars and you have a good picture of how much space that consumes.
- fuzztester 3y ago
  >You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!) Tokyo (I heard) Mumbai
looofooo0 3y ago
With mixed zone neighbourhoods with 30.000+people/km² you get everything for daily needs in Walking distance and close by metro. There is also a 120 years old concept for such neighbourhoods. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockrandbebauung https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockrandbebauung Also can be done in today s time: https://youtu.be/XfonhlM6I7w?si=ZcnbH6lmNWuQ6oE9 https://youtu.be/XfonhlM6I7w?si=ZcnbH6lmNWuQ6oE9
chgs 3y ago
Is singapore properly designed? About 10 years ago I had a project and stayed in an apartment in haugong, a residential area about 6 miles from my office. Uber was the only realistic commute - about 15-20 minutes. Public transport was about an hour to do the journey.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
> America doesn't know how bad they have it. This may be changing. You see a growing awareness of the shabbiness of certain American norms in parts of so-called "populist" circles (left and right).
rayiner 3y ago
> In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. What’s a properly designed city? Even in Tokyo a car usually beats the train unless it’s an inter-regional trip. Im a huge Japan nerd and love their train system. But I just got back from carting three kids around Tokyo and daily life is just far easier in my American exurb. Do Americans have it bad? The median Parisian spends 69 minutes per day commuting: https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and-amsterdam-report-longest-commuting-times-among-eu-capitals-394279 https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and.... The median commute time in Dallas is under an hour round trip: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 (28 minutes one way). And the folks in Dallas live in huge houses compared to those in Paris.
- lapetitejort 3y ago
  I would rather sit in a train for 69 minutes than sit in a car for 45 minutes. In a car if my attention slips for a second I can kill myself and others. In a train if I fall asleep I may have to take another train.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsoweiners 3y ago
    Cool! You do you. I’d personally rather spend an hour in the car comfortably vs 20 minutes on public transportation where I’ve got a stranger sitting next to me, no privacy, and potentially no seat during rush hour commute times.
    - iamacyborg 3y ago
      Having to stand for 20 minutes is not such a bad deal if you’re in decent health. Hell it’s probably good for you if you spend most of your day sat at a desk.
bluGill 3y ago
Metro systems even in the best examples don't give easy anywhere to anywhere access. There are places you cannot access because there is no direct route and unlike a car there are no 'shortcuts' around going where the train goes.
- drekk 3y ago
  So you walk the last mile? Not accessible to everyone. Neither is accelerating a two ton slab of metal to move one person around from exactly point A to exactly point B (and now you need parking at both points, which adds to the sprawl issue)
cameldrv 3y ago
Metros are pretty slow. 20mph/30kph is about par, less if the stops are spaced closely, more if they're further apart. If you factor in time to walk to and from the metro, and time waiting for your train, you can almost always beat them with a bike. Here's a chart of a few systems [1]. Where the larger European cities do better is the density -- what you mostly care about in a city is how many people you can reach in a reasonable amount of time, say 30-60 minutes. In the Bay Area, I can, with my car, reach about 3 million people in 60 minutes, about the same as I could using transit in Berlin, which has an excellent metro system, and Berlin doesn't have to deal with the geographic barriers that the Bay Area does. I think that shared ride self driving cars have a lot of potential in both types of cities. They give you a lot of what's good about private cars (door to door, good average speed, comfort, some privacy), and a lot of what's good about metros (higher density on the road than private cars due to sharing and less need for parking) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_speed_of_various_metro_lines_around_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_sp...
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  I don't know that "less need for parking" has ever actually panned out. If the car is not parked somewhere, it is milling around waiting for a ride, which might actually be worse in terms of congestion.
  - cameldrv 3y ago
    Yes, you don't want empty AVs roaming around the streets. There probably needs to be some sort of government intervention to discourage this behavior. Here's what's possible though: 1. Shared ride AVs can deliver multiple people per trip to their jobs, and they can also make multiple trips in the morning, and multiple trips in the evening. Private cars generally take one person, have to sit in a parking spot all day, and then go home. 2. AVs can park relatively far from their destination. After they drop off their passenger, they can go somewhere else to park. 3. AVs, if they can coordinate or be remotely controlled by a parking lot, can park way more densely than normal cars. In a normal parking lot, maybe half of the space is aisles for cars to drive to and from the parking space. If cars could dynamically get out of the way, you would only need a small portion of the space empty. A very simple strategy would be for there to be only room for one aisle for a big parking lot, and all of the cars would just move forward or back to make the single aisle appear wherever it was needed. In all, this probably reduces the need for parking by maybe 6x relative to human driven cars.
CivBase 3y ago
> Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Whether this is true or not, what matters to me - a person living in the US - is that public transit in the US is a relatively poor experience compared with driving. Until that changes, I will keep driving and I will resist efforts that would force me to use public transit. I don't care if it's better elsewhere because I don't live there nor do I want to move there. I want our public transit to be good, but that simply isn't the case right now. Walkable cities with quality public transit and good community infrastructure sound great, but until they are a reality here I will have no interest in living in a dense urban location.
mortify 3y ago
I used to live in a major city in the US. My commute by public transit was 45 minutes and I lived close to a major hub. I now live outside of that city. I can drive into that same job in 60 minutes. Public transit from here is over 2 hours. Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.
- c0nfused 3y ago
  This is the fundamental problem. One an individual basis moving to a 8k square foot house in the suburbs is the thing to do. For the aggregate this means the mass transit gets worse, the traffic gets worse the emissions get worse, the tax base gets smaller. The solution is policy. Use public money to make that 2 hour transit shorter and everyone wins, not just those of us with cash

by novok 3y ago

majormajor 3y ago

> You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!) In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.

novok 3y ago
In China right? You know they are the equivalent of people in LA who live so far away from their job and have 2 hour car commutes right?
- majormajor 3y ago
  Not just in China. China is maybe the most interesting point of comparison with big cities in the US, though, since its cities are both much denser than most AND more sprawling than most. And I don't follow your second question. If the trains OR freeways are full of people who can't afford to live closer to their jobs and have hours-long commutes, isn't that bad? And if it can happen even with extensive public transit, what does that tell us about fundamental assumptions about "city should grow forever, number must always go up!"?
  - oceanplexian 3y ago
    China isn't even remotely comparable to the USA. The urban mega cities are a prop that the CCP puts on display for the world. There's a reason that China's GDP-per-capita lands somewhere between Kazakhstan and Cuba.I would know because I've been there. If you go to a random exurban part of China you're going to find people living in makeshift tin structures, a lack of running water, oxcarts used as serious transportation, and a society that is functionally in the 1930s. The CCP are masters of propaganda though, and flood Youtube and social media with influencers riding around on maglev trains and showing off new airports and architecture. Even on American Social Media, if you look for videos of "The Real China", or "Chinese Poverty" you'll get carefully curated propaganda that does not line up with what I saw first hand.
    - nradov 3y ago
      The SerpentZA YouTube channel is somewhat sensationalist, but it has good firsthand videos showing the real China from someone who lived there for years and is fluent in Mandarin. The reality is a lot darker than what most Westerners see. https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza
- kurthr 3y ago
  China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan... I can break it down by city, but the idea that people don't commute more than an hour in any of these places is pretty laughable. HK is a bit better, because it's so small, but unless you're really wealthy or willing to live with your family in 100m2 even that is challenging. It's not that there aren't places to live (eg in Tokyo), but most people with a family and moderate incomes would rather live outside the city, and that means long commutes, standing during rush hours. I once had a commute longer than 15min in Silicon Valley and decided I'd never do it again.
yitianjian 3y ago
The traffic in a medium sized NA city like Atlanta or Dallas can be a lot better than it is now, and it's definitely not comparable to Shanghai, London or Tokyo.
- majormajor 3y ago
  Do you have any examples in mind of 6-10M cities with stress-free comfortable commuting and affordable housing for all? Off the top of my head, but without a lot of first- or second-hand experience, Rome seems like the commute is probably a lot better than the larger cities, but my perception is that the affordability is pretty poor? Otherwise most of my experience is in larger or much smaller places. Something that I think often makes this discussion tough is that there are a LOT of well-known historical European cities that are at under-2M population that I don't think Americans typically realize are THAT much smaller than, say, an Atlanta. I think the challenges of serving a growing city of 5M+ are much harder than a well-established old city of 2M.
  - kiba 3y ago
    If you want stress free comfortable commuting, you're going to need to build an efficient way to move people. Cars are not really an option when it comes to moving people en mass. It's just too low capacity. Rome's metro system in particular is stymied by buried Roman artifacts and laws for archaeology. That's not really the worst thing, given that NYC subway construction cost are some of the highest in the world. That said, I saw what Atlanta looks like. Aside from down Atlanta, a lot of Atlanta is literally just low rise, even downright suburban sometime. It's a smaller city than people thought, given that only half a million people lives within its border proper, but nonetheless traffic is somehow a nightmare.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Internationally the statistics depend quite a bit on how the data is collected and aggregated, so do it's hard to international comparisons accurately. I will say using US definitions, commute times are very sticky around the 30 minute time period. Longer commutes and people have a large incentive to move closer, short ones and they don't generally bother. So in the US Tulusa Oklahoma population 400,000 (1M metro) has a 20 minute commute and NYC population 8,800,000 (20M metro) is 50% worse at 32 minutes average and ~100 cities between those extremes. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-automobiles__trashed/100-u-s-cities-ranked-by-commute-time/ https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-... Edit: This suggests allowing people to move easily move around the metro area would meaningfully lower the need for transportation infrastructure. I suspect NYC has issues with people living in rent controlled apartments having long commutes but being unwilling to leave their cheap apartment, but don't have data backing it up.
wolverine876 3y ago
> In a smaller city it can work great! The best transit is generally thought to be in NYC.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  In the US? Very likely. And given the status of NYC and the US in the world, even that is embarrassing.
- cpursley 3y ago
  NYC city transit is shameful vs. even places like Moscow. Americans have no freaking idea.
- Empact 3y ago
  Fun fact: the vast majority of the NYC system was built between 1904 and 1940 when there were several competing subway companies. Since the subway companies were unified in 1940, essentially no new lines have been built. The NYC Subway is a relic from a foregone age, from a time when we built things and wasn’t mired in bureaucracy and carbrained thinking. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Subway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City...
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    They don't need many new lines, having already built them. They also haven't built many new bridges to Brooklyn in awhile nor midtown tunnels under the Hudson nor large parks in the center of Manhattan.
mlsu 3y ago
We only have 2 cities in the United States that even approach a "medium sized" Asian metro in population. Los Angeles and NYC. Only NYC has a usable public transit system. This is actually an argument for transit systems. Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises, with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong. They would be, if not for the car. There are people who commute daily from the suburbs of Stockton to the SF bay area.
- nradov 3y ago
  Most people who currently live in San Francisco/San Jose don't particularly want to turn it into a global metropolis and don't give a damn about abstract concepts like "cultural relevance". Cultural elitists should have some humility and not presume that they know best. Another option would be to set policies that encourage greater economic development and job growth in Stockton so that residents aren't forced to commute long distances. There's nothing special about the SF Bay Area: it's just another place.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    The Los Angeles example pretty much proves that spinning out employment into multiple areas does not mean people will just move to the closest area to their job; it just adds another destination to the list of "places people drive an hour to." It is not really that people living in Stockton already are commuting into the Bay, but Bay Area workers are being displaced into Stockton. The Bay Area has added more jobs than housing for a while now.
    - mjevans 3y ago
      LA _could_ be much more like Tokyo if USA cared to make mass transit work. # Service accurate enough to set a clock by. # Service mesh that provides walk-able freedom. # Safety and cleanliness (both a culture and enforcement issue) Yes, there would need to be a slight increase in density as well as much more transit service; but that metro area could scale up were there enough water.
avar 3y ago
> you don't SIT on the train > at all in rush hour! The horror!
- theendisney 3y ago
  Imagine the travelers all sitting in large cars and you have a good picture of how much space that consumes.
fuzztester 3y ago
>You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!) Tokyo (I heard) Mumbai

looofooo0 3y ago

With mixed zone neighbourhoods with 30.000+people/km² you get everything for daily needs in Walking distance and close by metro. There is also a 120 years old concept for such neighbourhoods. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockrandbebauung https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockrandbebauung Also can be done in today s time: https://youtu.be/XfonhlM6I7w?si=ZcnbH6lmNWuQ6oE9 https://youtu.be/XfonhlM6I7w?si=ZcnbH6lmNWuQ6oE9

chgs 3y ago

Is singapore properly designed? About 10 years ago I had a project and stayed in an apartment in haugong, a residential area about 6 miles from my office. Uber was the only realistic commute - about 15-20 minutes. Public transport was about an hour to do the journey.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

> America doesn't know how bad they have it. This may be changing. You see a growing awareness of the shabbiness of certain American norms in parts of so-called "populist" circles (left and right).

rayiner 3y ago

> In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. What’s a properly designed city? Even in Tokyo a car usually beats the train unless it’s an inter-regional trip. Im a huge Japan nerd and love their train system. But I just got back from carting three kids around Tokyo and daily life is just far easier in my American exurb. Do Americans have it bad? The median Parisian spends 69 minutes per day commuting: https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and-amsterdam-report-longest-commuting-times-among-eu-capitals-394279 https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and.... The median commute time in Dallas is under an hour round trip: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 (28 minutes one way). And the folks in Dallas live in huge houses compared to those in Paris.

lapetitejort 3y ago
I would rather sit in a train for 69 minutes than sit in a car for 45 minutes. In a car if my attention slips for a second I can kill myself and others. In a train if I fall asleep I may have to take another train.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  Cool! You do you. I’d personally rather spend an hour in the car comfortably vs 20 minutes on public transportation where I’ve got a stranger sitting next to me, no privacy, and potentially no seat during rush hour commute times.
  - iamacyborg 3y ago
    Having to stand for 20 minutes is not such a bad deal if you’re in decent health. Hell it’s probably good for you if you spend most of your day sat at a desk.

bluGill 3y ago

Metro systems even in the best examples don't give easy anywhere to anywhere access. There are places you cannot access because there is no direct route and unlike a car there are no 'shortcuts' around going where the train goes.

drekk 3y ago
So you walk the last mile? Not accessible to everyone. Neither is accelerating a two ton slab of metal to move one person around from exactly point A to exactly point B (and now you need parking at both points, which adds to the sprawl issue)

cameldrv 3y ago

Metros are pretty slow. 20mph/30kph is about par, less if the stops are spaced closely, more if they're further apart. If you factor in time to walk to and from the metro, and time waiting for your train, you can almost always beat them with a bike. Here's a chart of a few systems [1]. Where the larger European cities do better is the density -- what you mostly care about in a city is how many people you can reach in a reasonable amount of time, say 30-60 minutes. In the Bay Area, I can, with my car, reach about 3 million people in 60 minutes, about the same as I could using transit in Berlin, which has an excellent metro system, and Berlin doesn't have to deal with the geographic barriers that the Bay Area does. I think that shared ride self driving cars have a lot of potential in both types of cities. They give you a lot of what's good about private cars (door to door, good average speed, comfort, some privacy), and a lot of what's good about metros (higher density on the road than private cars due to sharing and less need for parking) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_speed_of_various_metro_lines_around_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_sp...

bobthepanda 3y ago
I don't know that "less need for parking" has ever actually panned out. If the car is not parked somewhere, it is milling around waiting for a ride, which might actually be worse in terms of congestion.
- cameldrv 3y ago
  Yes, you don't want empty AVs roaming around the streets. There probably needs to be some sort of government intervention to discourage this behavior. Here's what's possible though: 1. Shared ride AVs can deliver multiple people per trip to their jobs, and they can also make multiple trips in the morning, and multiple trips in the evening. Private cars generally take one person, have to sit in a parking spot all day, and then go home. 2. AVs can park relatively far from their destination. After they drop off their passenger, they can go somewhere else to park. 3. AVs, if they can coordinate or be remotely controlled by a parking lot, can park way more densely than normal cars. In a normal parking lot, maybe half of the space is aisles for cars to drive to and from the parking space. If cars could dynamically get out of the way, you would only need a small portion of the space empty. A very simple strategy would be for there to be only room for one aisle for a big parking lot, and all of the cars would just move forward or back to make the single aisle appear wherever it was needed. In all, this probably reduces the need for parking by maybe 6x relative to human driven cars.

CivBase 3y ago

> Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Whether this is true or not, what matters to me - a person living in the US - is that public transit in the US is a relatively poor experience compared with driving. Until that changes, I will keep driving and I will resist efforts that would force me to use public transit. I don't care if it's better elsewhere because I don't live there nor do I want to move there. I want our public transit to be good, but that simply isn't the case right now. Walkable cities with quality public transit and good community infrastructure sound great, but until they are a reality here I will have no interest in living in a dense urban location.

mortify 3y ago

I used to live in a major city in the US. My commute by public transit was 45 minutes and I lived close to a major hub. I now live outside of that city. I can drive into that same job in 60 minutes. Public transit from here is over 2 hours. Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.

c0nfused 3y ago
This is the fundamental problem. One an individual basis moving to a 8k square foot house in the suburbs is the thing to do. For the aggregate this means the mass transit gets worse, the traffic gets worse the emissions get worse, the tax base gets smaller. The solution is policy. Use public money to make that 2 hour transit shorter and everyone wins, not just those of us with cash