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In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

• ein0p 2y ago
  The great thing about all this is, when the pendulum inevitably swings back 15-20 years from now, we’re going to get a 20 lane highways.
  • Hello71 2y ago
    the Katy Freeway already has 26 lanes since 16 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_10_in_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_10_in_Texas
    • ein0p 2y ago
      Based, but insufficient.
• gscott 2y ago
  Reasonable if you are moving to using flying cars.
• tomohawk 2y ago
  They did that in northern Virginia. For decade after decade, they refused to build highways, and after a few million people moved there, it was no longer possible to build or expand what they have without immense expense. The traffic congestion is constant thare.
  • kjkjadksj 2y ago
    I felt like congestion is nonexistent the few times i am there. Maybe I am used to real congestion like in nyc though. All those parkways and fast roads are basically highways anyhow. People go 60-70mph on them and some have full on freeway style interchanges. Theres probably what a couple dozen at least in nova alone? Way more when you factor dc and maryland. Crazy highway lane density per capita if the metrics actually considered these highways. West coast has nothing like that honestly. Big old arterial stop light grid no fast stopless cuts through every ravine.
• rr808 2y ago
  Back in the real world the most popular, fastest growing states are all Republican, have little mass transport and cars everywhere.
• Zamicol 2y ago
  As someone who lives in Colorado I avoid Denver because of its traffic. Denver isn't the only city on I-25. Forget Denver, I-25 is increasingly more congested because the population and trade in Colorado is increasing. Politicians myopically prioritizing Denver while forgetting Colorado are colloquially referred to by locals as the "State of Denver".
• seadan83 2y ago
  I kinda hate that this topic almost always devolves into similar arguments about what exactly is induced demand. Despite that, these conversation threads did give me a new perspective on induced demand that I feel is worth sharing. That new perspective - I would now say that induced demand relates the efficiency of how well a resource is used to the cost of using that resource. If cost of use is high, then the resource is used more efficiently, and the inverse is also true. An example, if going to the grocery store takes a literal minute, then buying one item at a time per trip is very viable. OTOH, if that travel time takes one hour, then a person is likely going to avoid that trip, and when they do make it - they'll buy two weeks of groceries at a time and be very careful not to forget anything. In the latter case, the number of items transported per unit distance increases, usage efficiency goes up. If the cost goes down, then the number of people for whom it is economical to use that resource inefficiently will increase. That's induced demand.
  • bobthepanda 2y ago
    Induced demand gets thrown around a lot, without understanding why it is invoked. Inducing demand can often be good. We build things so that we can use or sell them. A railroad should induce new trips just as a highway should. The problem with highway expansion in 2024 in the US is that each new mile of highway gets ever increasingly more expensive and hard to build and produces diminishing returns, at high cost to the neighborhoods that will be bulldozed and divided. And these high costs are sucking the money away from not only the development of alternative modes which could be good backup options, but also the maintenance of the current network. It is not unheard of for a single highway interchange to now cost nearly $2B+: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_Interchange https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_Interchange
    • seadan83 2y ago
      > Inducing demand can often be good. I would quibble here, it depends. Another example I am thinking of is toilet paper during the pandemic when it was in short supply. At that time, when we were counting squares of toilet paper and predicting when you were going to run out, people used their toilet paper very efficiently. When it is plentiful, suddenly you don't care about using every last bit as efficiently as possible. In my previous example in the parent post, everyone is still making it to the grocery store and/or work, but it's a question of how efficient people are incentivized to be when making those trips. When it comes to highways, I'm guessing that it's more the case that inefficient/unnecessary trips become more economical than typically enabling people to make a given trip at all. I know a lot of people are pretty lazy about planning their trips, I'm guessing there are a lot more of those people than those that cannot go to a city because it requires 45 minutes instead of 30. Just my guess there though, and certainly that is context dependent. I like your points regarding efficiency of cost for expansion as well. Though, my point is more that induced demand is the minimum efficiency of a resource someone is willing to incur for it to be worth the cost of using that resource. That latter part, is a bit independent of the cost of building that resource in the first place, though that construction cost is still an important thing to consider.
• throwitaway222 2y ago
  Pipe sizes are 3d, so as you go from 1" to 2" to 3" to 4" the amount of throughput skyrockets. Roads are flat, not stacked, so you're just somewhat linearly increasing throughput. It might be a bit more since the leftmost lanes can go increasingly faster, but it's nothing like pipes. So it makes sense to try to think of other ways to handle it... that being said, does having 50 more buses actually reduce anything, 100 more? Trains. In many cases people will continue to not want to share their space with someone with boobs hanging out, pee all over the seats, weed smell 24/7. Hmm, so I guess we're just in a stalemate at this point.
  • bobthepanda 2y ago
    Buses and trains are more space efficient than cars because 1. People can stand in them, increasing vehicle density and 2. A smaller proportion of the vehicle is dedicated to the engine, fuel tank, etc. There’s also bicycles, e-bikes and such which have higher density as well. Most American trips are not actually that far.
    • 201984 2y ago
      However, busses and trains usually only run every 10-20 minutes compared to a road which is going constantly. I can easily see cars on roads having higher throughput.
      • ColonelPhantom 2y ago
        It is very easy to scale them as demand increases. There is a train to the next city over where I live in the Netherlands (both around 150k) around 10x per hour on weekdays. And that's on a single, dual track with a mix of 3 direct (intercity) trains and 2 slow trains that have 3 stops inbetween. The intercity trains, when in a maximum length 6+6 car configuration of 2-floor trains, can carry over 1200 (sitting!) passengers. That's as much as a single lane of road can carry in half an hour with average car occupancy (low). So running such a train every 15 minutes should give a similar capacity to a free-flowing road with 2 lanes, while needing less room for infrastructure. Plus people mostly go to the station by foot, bike or bus rather than car, which is also nice capacity-wise and pollution-wise.
• osigurdson 2y ago
  De-growth, reduced freedom. This is the only kind of "innovation" that governments can deliver.
• anamax 2y ago
  "Induced demand" is a fallacy that planners love because it lets them do what they want. Demand isn't created. It becomes visible when it looks like it might be satisfied, but that's a very different thing.
• ConanRus 2y ago
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• mrangle 2y ago
  Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant if any experience taking the bus. I took the urban bus to and from school for years: at least 1.5 hours each way. Often two, with at least one transfer. Outside of the city center, reliance on buses is a massive poverty tax in terms of reduced quality of life. Remove these bourgeoise policymakers and their unilateral fake goals. Work on real transportation improvements for the people, not to meet the myopic expectations of the ivory tower. That means making transportation maximally fast and low cost. That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation. No one who actually cares about society will be working to make it mirror the patterns of poverty. Disagreement with that premise should always be held in high suspicion.
  • mtalantikite 2y ago
    As someone who has never had a license and admittedly doesn’t know much about car costs, aren’t they expensive? Like how much is a car payment plus insurance every month? And then gas and maintenance? It seems like requiring car ownership to survive is also not great. But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local public transit.
    • FredPret 2y ago
      I also took transit for 1.5 hours each way when I moved to Toronto, Canada. My monthly transit cost + Ubers was around $400-1000 (I had to take two systems and frequently took Ubers when the bus was cancelled or delayed). My first car cost about $750 all-in, not counting equity in the car. My commute dropped from 3 hours to less than 1 hour, even in the notorious Toronto traffic. Suddenly I could go to Costco, and my grocery bill dropped by half, from around $800 to around $400. I got a good deal both buying and selling, and on the subsequent car, so my true cost was less than the monthly payment. Public transit makes sense in very dense areas. Everywhere else it’s an expensive boondoggle and the working class is better off driving old clunkers than the damn bus.
    • dogbait 2y ago
• Shopnow247 2y ago
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• Shopnow247 2y ago
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• anon291 2y ago
  I'm personally okay with this in principle but I rarely see it accompanied by a policy to build anything else. If you tell me they're going to invest in trains and actual transit, I'm totally in, but I've not heard anything. I mean this. I ride transit multiple times a week. I love the experience but it requires actual investment and many cities don't do that. In general, most government in America seems unable to actually build anything. I don't think we should applaud that they're now also choosing not to build highways.
• rkagerer 2y ago
  The article cites health effects due to local emissions. Does anyone else think the timing of this anti-thoroughfare attitude is ironic given that electric cars are gaining traction?
• softsound 2y ago
  I wish bus stops where I live weren't so hostile to the user, no one wants to sit on metal in 100 degree weather, especially with no shade. Also if the buses came sooner then every 30 mins I would consider them more often but if it takes me 30 mins to walk to a stop where I sweat in the sun with no shade and the bus left early before I arrived I might end up waiting an hour hoping it arrives. So then I have to leave extra early and it's too much effort especially when I have a car.
• Tempest1981 2y ago
  Reminded me of the Embarcadero Freeway in SF, which was torn down in 1991 after being damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-story-of-the-embarcadero-freeway.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-story-of-the-embarca... "The city adapted to the new traffic network with few problems"
• ricardobeat 2y ago
  > more than half of $1.2 trillion enabled by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 will be spent on highway expansion and resurfacing. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but that sounds like enough to build a China-like countrywide rail network. Spending it on resurfacing asphalt would be criminal.
  • zbrozek 2y ago
    Not in this country. It might get you through the first round of environmental studies for such a network though. Remember that the SF to LA rail line is up over $135B and still has many years of cost growth ahead of it before completion.
• someguydave 2y ago
  Shoshana Lew is the daughter of Jack Lew, President Obama’s Chief of Staff.
• balderdash 2y ago
  Anyone interest in the subject of traffic - I’d highly recommend the book: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us by Tom Vanderbilt Pretty eye opening entry point on the subject
• speedylight 2y ago
  I totally understand why people hate public transit, I relied on it for years before I got my license/car. I happen to live in a state where public transportation happens to be very good on paper, but in practice is actually a hellish, miserable experience; Buses are constantly running late, they’re usually filled with sketchy people (homeless, drug addicts, etc) who make you feel uneasy and in some cases is actually unsafe (such as some having a drug induced episode, this happens a lot more common than you might think.) In the end I told myself I don’t have to go through all that crap, so I got myself car and it very quickly dawned on me that this was indeed the correct decision and I should’ve done it years ago. The laundry list of positive changes outweighed any negatives associated with owning a car. Only way I’m giving it up now is if we manage to invent portable teleportation devices.
  • unethical_ban 2y ago
    I like vehicles and motorcycles and, barring some transformative life experience, could not imagine going more than an "extended vacation in NYC" without a car in the United States. But I also love good public transit, and think it's a huge competitive advantage for 2nd tier cities in the US. As remote work becomes a norm for the middle class, transit will be one of the main ways cities can lure people. I agree that public safety is critical and that cities must take transit safety and cleanliness seriously. (And for that matter, take public safety in general more seriously - my city of San Antonio doesn't seem to take action on crime unless police are able to get there while it's in progress or if it's high-profile.)
• lizknope 2y ago
  I wish governments would incentivize working from home. We've already seen that this can be done effectively for a huge percentage of the population. In 2019 I was spending about $250 on gasoline a month. In 2020 with mandatory work from home that dropped to about $50 a month. When I did go out there was no traffic which lead to even less fuel wasted. Instead we have politicians and business leaders pushing for people to return to the office. I work in a huge office park with huge parking lots. That is so much land that could be used for apartments, condos, single family homes, or anything more useful than half empty offices that very few want to go to.
• throwaway48476 2y ago
  The people pushing these solutions have decided it's too hard to make public transit compelling so they will have to make car driving worse. Which is a net negative for everyone.
• ocschwar 2y ago
  Massachusetts has not widened highways inside of 128 for 50 years now. And I am so grateful for that.
  • kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Are you forgetting about the big dig?
    • ocschwar 2y ago
      It did not widen the highway.
  • light_hue_1 2y ago
    We're actually going in reverse. In the next 2 years a horrible little spur of elevated highway that cuts through Somerville (McGrath) is getting demolished and replaced with a nice boulevard. That whole area is just blighted at the moment. It's going to become some of the nicest housing with parks and shops.
    • ocschwar 2y ago
      The statute of limitations on traffic offenses is brief, so I'll fess up that I've biked across the whole length a couple times. Got some Darwin Award honorable mentions doing it.
      • light_hue_1 2y ago
        I cycle in the area but I value my life too much for that! Happy travels.
  • micromacrofoot 2y ago
    Boston has successfully moved one highway underground (the big dig) and shot down an extension of I-95 (there are parks and a train route where it was planned now). The city is much better for it.
• aqme28 2y ago
  > If every car on the road were battery-powered and those batteries were charged entirely by renewable energy, transportation emissions would be close to zero. This is entirely false. I'm surprised to see it in the NYTimes. They're only 0 when you factor out the cost of building the car and maintaining the highway, and those are still pretty high
  • standardUser 2y ago
    > They're only 0 when you factor out the cost of building the car and maintaining the highway, and those are still pretty high Breaking: construction and manufacturing require energy and materials, film at 11!
  • nyokodo 2y ago
    > They're only 0 when you factor out the cost of building the car and maintaining the highway And manufacturing the renewable electricity generation infrastructure isn’t zero emissions either.
  • gh02t 2y ago
    It's not false, it's misleading. Emissions are from exhaust only according to the EPA https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/smog-vehicle-emissions https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/smog-vehicle-emissions . Greenhouse gas and pollutants from building the vehicles and roads get lumped into another category. There is a valid reason for this, in that that's the main thing the EPA regulates with respect to vehicles, but it also lets people make misleading statements like this one.
  • wonder_er 2y ago
    also people who care about EVs tend to forget about tire wear and brake dust. Both are emitted in huge quantities, esp. tire microplastics, by EVs.
    • rangestransform 2y ago
      Yeah but I can just buy a Tesla with hepa filters so I’m not breathing it in
• throwaway22032 2y ago
  "Induced demand" as a reason not to do something is illogical. The Green Revolution increasing crop yields induced demand for humans. Metro systems existing and building new lines induce demand, in some cases resulting in overcrowding. Building housing and offices induce demand in a location. There is nothing wrong with improving a thing so that more people are able to do that thing. I can understand concern about emissions without necessarily agreeing. But induced demand is simply a good thing - you are allowing more people to realise their desires.
  • ocschwar 2y ago
    That depends on who you're talking to. If you're talking to people out in the periphery who want their towns to grow, induced demand is not a problem. But for someone in an inner ring suburb, induced demand means that if the interstate near my house is widened, I don't get an easier commute. I just get more pollution and more noise and the same traffic misery as before.
  • notatoad 2y ago
    >But induced demand is simply a good thing - you are allowing more people to realise their desires. projects usually have a goal. especially multi-billion-dollar transportation projects. if the goal of the project aligns with the behaviour it is inducing, then induced demand is good. if the goal of the project (according to the people making decisions about funding it) contradicts the behaviour it induces, then induced demand is a bad thing and it's not going to get funded. for a highway project, the goal isn't usually to allow more people to drive cars. it's to reduce congestion, improve safety, or to improve the flow of commercial vehicles through a corridor. the demand that more lanes induces is contrary to that goal, which is why the induced demand is a reason not to do it.
  • drivers99 2y ago
    That’s kind of a straw man argument because the original argument isn’t “it induces demand therefore it’s bad.” Induced demand is the explanation for why building more lanes (which costs money, especially if you include future replacement costs) doesn’t actually fix traffic, except temporarily. It also increases VMT (vehicle miles travelled) which has its own externalities (pollution, deaths, etc.) but that’s almost a separate matter, but helps explain why encouraging more driving and car based urban design (everything spread far apart, unproductive land use in the form of parking lots) isn’t a great idea either.
• someguydave 2y ago
  I am skeptical that all the tradeoffs are being considered here, it sounds like a recipe for permanent bad traffic justified with dubious moralizing. By the way, she is the daughter of Jack Lew who was President Obama’a Chief of Staff.
  • standardUser 2y ago
    And who are you the daughter of, since these facts are clearly of paramount significance?
    • someguydave 2y ago
      Sometimes people on the left are concerned about nepo babies and the outsized influence of the wealthy and powerful, sometimes people on the left are not concerned.
  • toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Bad traffic will expand to fill the road you give it (induced demand). You destroy demand instead. https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ https://www.nber.org/papers/w15376 https://www.nber.org/papers/w15376
    • tonynator 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • someguydave 2y ago
      You want to hurt people by costing their time in order to teach them to desire your morals?
      • toomuchtodo 2y ago
        Physical systems don't care about your feelings. Live somewhere that ignores science and is financially irresponsible with infra dollars if that is your MO. We're not going to spend to build roads forever because people are ignorant and selfish, we can't even pay for the road infra we have today. And some folks are demanding more? Absolutely silly. "I'm not happy they're not building roads we cannot afford and will end up congested again, won't you think about my happiness!" Bringing morality into an economic, fluid dynamics, and behavioral argument is not helpful, and the private car entitlement (which is demonstrably unaffordable and unfunded long term) is wild. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/ https://infrastructurereportcard.org/ https://pirg.org/articles/america-cant-handle-more-highways-lets-fix-what-we-have-instead/ https://pirg.org/articles/america-cant-handle-more-highways-... https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/04/13/we-could-never-afford-americas-highways-even-before-covid-19 https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/04/13/we-could-never-afford... https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/road-funding-vehicle-miles-traveled-tax/ https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/road-funding-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/business/energy-environment/support-for-gas-tax-increase-still-nil-despite-falling-prices.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/business/energy-environme...
• infecto 2y ago
  Sounds like the Bay Area. We don't like cars but we refuse to build comprehensive transit. To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen. Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life was while living in the Bay Area with the massive traffic jams.
  • akira2501 2y ago
    > Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life How did you quantify this? Or this a purely anecdotal observation?
    • throwup238 2y ago
      Not the OP but air quality monitors that measure particulates at different sizes? It's a pretty standard way of measuring air quality. There's a map of official California monitors: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/applications/air-monitoring-sites-interactive-map https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/applications/air-monitoring-sites-int...
      • akira2501 2y ago
        Yes, I'm aware of how one would do it, I am questioning whether that was actually done in this case or not. Further, I would question, what other places outside of your commute have you measured air pollution? They offered it as a data point. I think it's fine form to question it.
        • galago 2y ago
          The EPA Air Quality Index isn't everything, but it is a standard value displayed in a phone weather app. I'll notice in times and places when I suspect its bad. If you live outside a city in place without forest fires or other environmental issues you might not notice its there. Some people with respiratory issues monitor this stuff constantly.
          • 2y ago
• duxup 2y ago
  I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like. I can imagine this easily being responded to negatively in the end and the political response is to give in and the pendulum swings wildly in the other direction. In the end these are policy decisions that can change and I can imagine this backfiring long term in some ways.
  • seadan83 2y ago
    The Colorado example is about no longer giving out carrots rather than using any type of stick. Tolls and higher taxes would be examples of sticks. > clogging the roads The roads already be clogged and adding more lanes is not likely to unclog them. Single occupancy vehicles at the end of the day are not a solution for moving hundreds of thousands of people around - there's an intrinsic scaling problem that can't be solved by building infinite roads. It's kinda like trying to get high speed internet by adding more & more 56k modems.
  • mdorazio 2y ago
    How do you propose doing that, though? Mass transit almost everywhere runs at a significant loss already and if we're talking buses then there's a significant driver shortage. In the US the distances and routes required outside of dense urban centers also pretty much necessitate a huge increase in transit time compared to driving, making the whole thing a bad value for people who can afford a car.
    • ocschwar 2y ago
      > How do you propose doing that, though? Thankfully, Massachusetts has shown how to do that. The governor has to make a public statement that he will not allow any more eminent domain takings for highways on his watch (and issue executive orders to that effect.) After that, the people complaining about traffic have to come up with their own ideas, and if road widening (with eminent domain confiscations) are off the table, even the most car-headed idiot out there has no choice but start talking about transit.
• kobieps 2y ago
  Some pretty solid skepticism all around in the comments.
  • burutthrow1234 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • rangestransform 2y ago
      Bloomberg took the subway in nyc to work, not to bear a cross for the environment but because it was fast If a city doesn’t have nyc tier public transit first, it has itself only to blame
• ambyra 2y ago
  It would be nice if they brought back train service from Denver to Ft. Collins and Laramie. In Europe you can go so many places with just a bicycle and a train ticket.
  • IncreasePosts 2y ago
    It's in the works, currently scheduled for 2050, if we are lucky.
    • medellin 2y ago
      Hahahahaha. Unless we have a major change in direction we aren’t getting crap.
• wonder_er 2y ago
  [flagged]
• gizajob 2y ago
  *to not build them
• BurningFrog 2y ago
  California, always leading the way, has boldly built almost nothing for 5 decades!
  • jseliger 2y ago
    LA has actually built a lot of subway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Rail# and much more than NYC or Chicago during the same period.
    • kjkjadksj 2y ago
      The entire network so far is only about 30 years old
  • thebigman433 2y ago
    I get its supposed to be a funny joke, but CA has some of the biggest transit projects in the country going on currently. CAHSR is wildly expensive, but its still being built, and will far and away be the best rail corridor in the country when its done. LA has been building a decent amount of transit for how hard it is to get anything done there. SF already has a fairly robust and solid transit network, and there have been some great maintenance projects done in the last 10 years to keep it going. Its only current major issue (imo) is the frequency, which still isnt the worst ever. MUNI is also getting new signaling to improve frequency, and a massive underground train station is going to get built at Salesforce (finally making use of a great transit hub). BART is a great system with some much needed improvements happening currently, including new fare gates and all new signaling. They also just finished upgrading to the new fleet of cars, and came in under budget! CalTrain is also rolling out their brand new electrified system in September, with hugely upgraded frequencies, that will make transit up/down the peninsula much better. It isnt a ton when compared to other countries that build much more efficiently, but its still more than anywhere else in the country.
    • colingoodman 2y ago
      Los Angeles is indeed building a lot of public transit. As is the nature of any of these projects, especially in California, it will be many years (decades) before much of it is complete. But it's happening nonetheless. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-10-26/los-angeles-is-on-a-subway-building-tear-will-riders-follow https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-10-26/los-angel...
• languagehacker 2y ago
  I just read Paved Paradise as well as The High Cost of Free Parking. This seems like the current gradual trend towards reversing the hidden subsidy for drivers, first by giving them less affordances at remarkably low prices or for free. A few folks in the comments have mentioned a couple of times that it doesn't make sense to make a policy like this without supporting transit. I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit, which would then create greater demand for improved transit. Similarly for housing, the well substantiated claim from modern urban planners is that we've been prioritizing housing for cars well beyond housing for people, and the best solution for that is to overturn minimum parking requirements and unbundle the cost of parking from the cost of housing. Personally, I still find these opinions somewhat counterintuitive. The weirdest part about it is that it all posits that the solution to a centralized planning problem is market solutions, and it's coming from people you'd expect to have the opposite opinion. However, what we've had in terms of transportation clearly doesn't work for people and for the environment, and the last 20 years of "Shoupism" has shown some serious promise in terms of reversing the trend.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    One solution would be a large fleet of cheap electric self-driving taxis. With current pace of AI development, that could be just 10-20 years away.
    • gonzo41 2y ago
      or you know, trains and trams and busses.
      • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
        Those have fixed stops and schedules, so you need to walk up to the stop and wait for the next arrival. Taxis are more flexible in both space and time.
        • softsound 2y ago
• rpcope1 2y ago
  Widening I-25 probably won't do any good (didn't do much good last time we did that), but we keep talking about light rail all the way as far north as Fort Collins, and nothing ever happens other than RTD making money earmarked for new light rail disappear into the aether.
  • peapicker 2y ago
    Since I moved here in the mid 1990’s we now have added light rail to Golden, down to Lincoln on I-25, all the way up I225, and I70 from downtown to the airport. Not exactly nothing. Rail to Loveland/Ft Collins would be a great addition.
    • soared 2y ago
      The airport lightrail is incredible, but the Golden one is useless unless you're going to court. Great example of politics getting in the way, since the lightrail only serves the government building which is miles away and very uphill from downtown Golden where people live and work.
    • rpcope1 2y ago
      Sure, maybe a little more trackage around Denver, but don't you remember all the controversy how the space and money to run light rail along 36 went away and we wound up with just a new express lane in its place? Maybe Jared will actually get something done and they'll run light rail in tandem with the BNSF line from Denver all the way north, but I'm still really skeptical because I've heard "it's just 3-4 years out, we have a plan" for at least 15 years now.
      • peapicker 2y ago
        Even tho I’ve heard nothing, light rail from 9mile to downtown Parker would be another great nice to have. It is slow.
• throwaway22032 2y ago
  As someone who loves trains and buses and planes, I wish that people who pushed public transport would actually engage with the reasons why people don't want to use it rather than just making alternatives worse. There are three main issues that need to be solved for even me, a train lover, to prioritise using them. 1) Undesirables need to be removed. I don't want to deal with beggars or other general hoodlums. Transport police need to be aggressive with stamping out these behaviours. If I have to interact with these people I won't do it. 2) It needs to be clean and comfortable. My car has air conditioning. If I have to feel sweaty and worry about touching surfaces I'm just not going to do it. 3) I like a good walk, and there are also real limitations to scaling here, so I'm less rigid on this, but it does need to go roughly to where I want to go and it needs to be frequent. If I'm out in the rain for fifteen minutes waiting for a bus I'm just not going to do it, I could already be halfway there by car. I don't think these are insurmountable, Japan does pretty well, but in the absence of that, the stick just isn't going to work. If travel times via car doubled, I'd probably just do less and then eventually move out of the city. edit: I can't reply about libraries due to rate limiting. Libraries are a great example of how public transport _could_ work! I love libraries! The British Library is truly public. Anyone can go, anyone can enter the reading rooms. It is a lovely environment to read or work in, as they have strict rules. It is peaceful and pleasant because of the way that it's set up. It's also a great example of how the many can come together to do more than the few. Almost no-one is able to create a home environment with that sort of atmosphere, and by sharing it we all get more. I would love it if public transport were like the experience of using a good library.
  • prmoustache 2y ago
    Aren't your "indesirables" waiting at the traffic light as well in your part of the world?
    • tonynator 2y ago
      [flagged]
  • walthamstow 2y ago
    If 'undesirables' are part of your local area, then they'll be on the public transport. The clue is in the name. The reason Japan doesn't have them on the trains is not because the guards have removed them, it's because they weren't there to begin with.
• mitchbob 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/2024.05.31-101848/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/headway/highways-colorado-transportation.html https://archive.ph/2024.05.31-101848/https://www.nytimes.com...