5 ms·

It would take me an hour and a half to get to work via mass transit vs the half hour it takes me now in a major city. It’s 9 miles. Mass transit just isn’t comp

It would take me an hour and a half to get to work via mass transit vs the half hour it takes me now in a major city. It’s 9 miles. Mass transit just isn’t compatible with most American cities.

AlotOfReading 3y ago
Just because your mass transit sucks doesn't mean some form of mass transit wouldn't work. Imagine a train doing that route every 5 minutes, for example. That's the reality in many cities around the world.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway4220 3y ago
“…And it never will be so let’s not bother trying” “…but investing in it now will yield dividends in the future”
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  LA is putting a lot of investment into mass transit in the run up to the Olympics, it’s just not going to work for my commute. Still worth doing.
hughesjj 3y ago
I think you totally missed the point of GP. Like, yes, that's exactly why we need to invest in better transit， because that experience you shared shouldn't happen.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  The mass transit experience in 1920 was better than in 2020 here, and those electric rail lines have long since been paved over.
renewiltord 3y ago
That's a good distance for an ebike if you feel like it. Maybe you're unlucky with route but otherwise might work! May even be faster because traffic free.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  I’m pretty sure I’d die on an e-bike in LA, there aren’t really any protected bike lanes on the route and everyone is on their phone. I do want to get an e-bike for our many trails and coastal bike paths. Any recommendations for something sub-$1000?
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    I like the Vanmoof X3 that we have. But the company is now supposedly in trouble. Yeah, I totally get you in LA. Here in SF it's much more achievable. LA is so much better suited to it weather and topology wise but the roadways are dangerous. I feel you!
qwerpy 3y ago
Even in one of the better cities for mass transit (Seattle) when I tried to ignore the worse P50 travel time, I experienced so many negatives that I'm probably never going to do transit again here. P90 travel time is much worse when buses don't show up (usually staffing issues or maintenance issues) or are full. Standing outside in the rain or cold when the buses are nowhere to be seen sucks. Standing for an hour in a crowded bus sucks. The occasional biohazard or violent incident on the bus or at the bus stop sucks. Point being, it's both the infrastructure and a small number of problematic people that make this untenable for most of us.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  Exactly. LA should be the perfect city for mass transit, heck it was in the 1920s and 30s. Unfortunately it just isn’t now and un-informed Europeans who haven’t even visited just can’t or won’t understand how ridiculous they sound when they say we should just put in mass transit. Show me on the map where we would put the lines without displacing thousands of people Europeans, I’ll wait.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Plenty of Europeans live in sprawly cities too. It's just a subset of upwardly mobile, single, and high earning Germans who say otherwise on social media. Try taking public transit in working class neighborhoods like Barkarby, Nyberg, Nieuw-West, or East London, Ealing-Southall, and Tottenham. It deteriorates to American level connectivity outside the affluent center. But they won't listen. They'll just bury their heads in the sand and when people who look like us bring it up they try to gaslight (edit: or downvote to oblivion). It's like talking to the Cambridge-Somerville-Brookline crowd - "Oh we support Sanders but we won't send our kids to the public schools that just so happen to have Somali, Eritrean, Arab, and El Salvadoran students" or the Palo Alto crowd - "Oh, we'd rather send our kids to Palo High instead of Gunn High because of 'pressure' and by the way make sure to roll up the windows in East Palo Alto" Ime, Western Europeans act the exact same if not worse (because of the gaslighting). At least the AfD, Front National, and the Brexit Party are upfront about what those people think about us.
userabchn 3y ago
Even in cities that currently have underground rail systems, I think public transport within cities is inefficient. So much time is wasted stopped at stations, and not going directly from your origin to your destination. If the tunnels were paved and road ramps to the surface added so that robotaxis could go down there to avoid the disruptions of the surface, so much time would be saved. Yes, autonomous driving is not good enough yet, but Waymo and the latest Tesla FSD version are undeniably not that far away, so I think cities should start planning for it now since it will likely be a reality within 15 years. It frustrates me that no one in my city's management seems to be thinking about it at all and are instead planning to restrict car access and invest billions in new rail systems that won't be ready until around the time they will be obsolete. They talk about the space used by cars compared to buses/trains without considering that most robotaxis will probably be tiny single occupant vehicles that aren't comparable to today's cars.
- Someone 3y ago
  Adding more lanes rarely, if ever, solves traffic jams for long. Why would adding those lanes underground be different? If the answer is “robotaxis”, why build expensive tunnels? Dedicating existing road lanes on the surface to robotaxis then should work, too, at much lower cost.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Yes, let us plan cities based on a speculative technology which may or may not ever exist. Similarly, we shouldn’t bother building electricity infrastructure now because we are reliability informed that practical fusion is 20 years away, just like it has been since 1950.

It would take me an hour and a half to get to work via mass transit vs the half hour it takes me now in a major city. It’s 9 miles. Mass transit just isn’t compatible with most American cities.

AlotOfReading 3y ago

Just because your mass transit sucks doesn't mean some form of mass transit wouldn't work. Imagine a train doing that route every 5 minutes, for example. That's the reality in many cities around the world.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

throwaway4220 3y ago

“…And it never will be so let’s not bother trying” “…but investing in it now will yield dividends in the future”

throwaway5959 3y ago
LA is putting a lot of investment into mass transit in the run up to the Olympics, it’s just not going to work for my commute. Still worth doing.

hughesjj 3y ago

I think you totally missed the point of GP. Like, yes, that's exactly why we need to invest in better transit， because that experience you shared shouldn't happen.

throwaway5959 3y ago
The mass transit experience in 1920 was better than in 2020 here, and those electric rail lines have long since been paved over.

renewiltord 3y ago

That's a good distance for an ebike if you feel like it. Maybe you're unlucky with route but otherwise might work! May even be faster because traffic free.

throwaway5959 3y ago
I’m pretty sure I’d die on an e-bike in LA, there aren’t really any protected bike lanes on the route and everyone is on their phone. I do want to get an e-bike for our many trails and coastal bike paths. Any recommendations for something sub-$1000?
- renewiltord 3y ago
  I like the Vanmoof X3 that we have. But the company is now supposedly in trouble. Yeah, I totally get you in LA. Here in SF it's much more achievable. LA is so much better suited to it weather and topology wise but the roadways are dangerous. I feel you!

qwerpy 3y ago

Even in one of the better cities for mass transit (Seattle) when I tried to ignore the worse P50 travel time, I experienced so many negatives that I'm probably never going to do transit again here. P90 travel time is much worse when buses don't show up (usually staffing issues or maintenance issues) or are full. Standing outside in the rain or cold when the buses are nowhere to be seen sucks. Standing for an hour in a crowded bus sucks. The occasional biohazard or violent incident on the bus or at the bus stop sucks. Point being, it's both the infrastructure and a small number of problematic people that make this untenable for most of us.

throwaway5959 3y ago
Exactly. LA should be the perfect city for mass transit, heck it was in the 1920s and 30s. Unfortunately it just isn’t now and un-informed Europeans who haven’t even visited just can’t or won’t understand how ridiculous they sound when they say we should just put in mass transit. Show me on the map where we would put the lines without displacing thousands of people Europeans, I’ll wait.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Plenty of Europeans live in sprawly cities too. It's just a subset of upwardly mobile, single, and high earning Germans who say otherwise on social media. Try taking public transit in working class neighborhoods like Barkarby, Nyberg, Nieuw-West, or East London, Ealing-Southall, and Tottenham. It deteriorates to American level connectivity outside the affluent center. But they won't listen. They'll just bury their heads in the sand and when people who look like us bring it up they try to gaslight (edit: or downvote to oblivion). It's like talking to the Cambridge-Somerville-Brookline crowd - "Oh we support Sanders but we won't send our kids to the public schools that just so happen to have Somali, Eritrean, Arab, and El Salvadoran students" or the Palo Alto crowd - "Oh, we'd rather send our kids to Palo High instead of Gunn High because of 'pressure' and by the way make sure to roll up the windows in East Palo Alto" Ime, Western Europeans act the exact same if not worse (because of the gaslighting). At least the AfD, Front National, and the Brexit Party are upfront about what those people think about us.

userabchn 3y ago

Even in cities that currently have underground rail systems, I think public transport within cities is inefficient. So much time is wasted stopped at stations, and not going directly from your origin to your destination. If the tunnels were paved and road ramps to the surface added so that robotaxis could go down there to avoid the disruptions of the surface, so much time would be saved. Yes, autonomous driving is not good enough yet, but Waymo and the latest Tesla FSD version are undeniably not that far away, so I think cities should start planning for it now since it will likely be a reality within 15 years. It frustrates me that no one in my city's management seems to be thinking about it at all and are instead planning to restrict car access and invest billions in new rail systems that won't be ready until around the time they will be obsolete. They talk about the space used by cars compared to buses/trains without considering that most robotaxis will probably be tiny single occupant vehicles that aren't comparable to today's cars.

Someone 3y ago
Adding more lanes rarely, if ever, solves traffic jams for long. Why would adding those lanes underground be different? If the answer is “robotaxis”, why build expensive tunnels? Dedicating existing road lanes on the surface to robotaxis then should work, too, at much lower cost.
rsynnott 3y ago
Yes, let us plan cities based on a speculative technology which may or may not ever exist. Similarly, we shouldn’t bother building electricity infrastructure now because we are reliability informed that practical fusion is 20 years away, just like it has been since 1950.