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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,

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
      I kinda feel most Americans should be trying to walk more... but also if the schedules and stops were improved people would use it far more. I'd like to take a tram or bus I just don't want to spend an extra 40+/- mins getting there to arrive with no protection from the weather. I don't particularly like taxis much but at least they figure out where you need to go without too much effort, I do drive though way more then I taxi. Taxis are more rare trips for traveling in places I don't know or can't drive. I wish we had high speed trains where I lived in my capital city, just an easy way to travel to the major cities by train would make my day. I'd travel far more often if I could then. Trains to me are the best of all worlds.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Waymo's working in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with Austin coming soon. Maybe it'll take 10 years, but the technology's already here, just needs to get scaled up.
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    The proof of concept is already here, but the technology still needs too much human supervision to be cost-effective. If you want to make self-driving taxis cheap enough for most people to use daily, the prices have to be something like $2/trip.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      To recoup the billions of dollars they've invested in it, it might be a decade before we get down to $2/ride. As far as how much human supervision it takes, we don't actually know the costs of it, though the latency involved means it's not Actually, Indians remote piloting the vehicles with Playstation controllers.
- abecedarius 2y ago
  Also, robocars and mass transit are complements, or should be.
Gibbon1 2y ago
When it comes to transit I think the lol make driving sucky so people will support mass transit is inane because of the backlash potential. Much better to get ahead of the hose than always be trying to grab it's ass. You're not going to get boomers and GenX to take the bus. You probably could get younger generations to do that especially if there are options. Really there should be a high speed rail along the front range and subways in places like Denver. And zoning that prioritizes development that utilized that.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  If boomers want to continue driving, they can. Just make them pay for what they use. Work out the real market value for the space and charge for it.
  - sien 2y ago
    Yep. The same should be done for public transport. In the US Farebox Recovery Ratios of 20% or less are common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_... Only 58% of fuel tax in Australia is spent on any kind of transport including rail. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-21/fuel-excise-not-being-spent-on-roads-amid-calls-to-cut-tax/100920658 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-21/fuel-excise-not-being... Australians drive a similar amount to the US. From https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/11/13/how-trains-could-replace-planes-in-europe https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/11/13/how-trains-could... Yet only 8% of the distance travelled by land in the EU is by rail. Even in the most train-happy countries, Austria and the Netherlands, the figures are 13% and 11%. In those countries, more than 75% of land travel is done by car. So even in Europe and Australia where cars more than pay for their costs people still drive a lot. This is with all the effort put in to public transport in Europe.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      You can see about half of trips are by car in for example Germany: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1309333/germany-modal-split-of-passenger-transport/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1309333/germany-modal-sp... Public transit isn't all, just being denser so that biking and walking is more viable is also a big part to why European cities aren't concrete wastelands full of parking and roads. The normal way to go and buy groceries is to walk not drive.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rufus_foreman 2y ago
>> I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit Induced demand is a concept that anti-car people use, but I don't think it makes much sense. Imagine a library that only has a few copies of some best selling children's books. There's a very long queue to check out those books. Someone might argue that, "We should buy more copies of the best selling children's books". The induced demand argument in this case would be: "If we buy more copies of those books, the queue wont disappear, since it is so long, but also, if the queue gets shorter, we might have people who don't use the library because of the queue start using it. We would be no better off!". Of course in this analogy, we realize the fallacy. People are better off because more kids get to read books. Even if the queue stays the same length, we have more throughput, more kids get the benefit. Now if we translate that to cars, of course, we see the difference. People who write books like "Paved Paradise" or "The High Cost of Free Parking" hate cars. They really do. They hate the suburbs too. So when they see something that would enable people who don't currently drive cars to drive cars, or for people who live in urban areas to live in suburban areas, they're of course going to be against that. "Induced demand" is being used here by languagehacker, as it is used by other people who are opposed to private property, as some sort of technical term that supports their case. But that isn't true. By adding more copies of popular books to libraries, we want to induce demand. We want people to read the books, and we want people who don't currently use libraries to consider using them. The induced demand is not bad. We had a queue, it was too long, we shorten the queue, and by doing so some people who thought the queue was too long will no longer think that. This is good. What languagehacker is saying, by referring to induced demand, is that, in the opinion of languagehacker cars are bad. It is as simple as that. It sounds super-scientific when you use terms like "induced demand", but it is not, in fact, super-scientific. It's just a value judgement. To me, if you build a highway in an area that has high traffic congestion, and after you build the highway, it still has high traffic congestion, it means more people are getting where they want to be. It's called "induced demand". Induced demand is good. We should have more of it.
- hammock 2y ago
  > The induced demand argument in this case would be: "If we buy more copies of those books, the queue wont disappear, since it is so long, but also, if the queue gets shorter, we might have people who don't use the library because of the queue start using it. We would be no better off!". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#
gotoeleven 2y ago
[flagged]
- anon84873628 2y ago
  Wow, these are really bad takes. You think "culture war" explains it all? Nah, it's not that easy.
  - gotoeleven 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
    - lazyasciiart 2y ago
      That’s completely inapplicable to what they said.
      - gotoeleven 2y ago
        "Wow, these are really bad takes" is just name calling with no argument. I guess the comment is not technically ad hominem, just a more generic kind of irrelevant assertion. Edit: here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone
- geraldwhen 2y ago
  Ding ding ding. It’s a running meme that my downtown bus station is constantly an area of violent crime. Because it is.
joe_the_user 2y ago
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. How does demand for public transit produce it? I mean public calls for more transit have been loud for many years and US politicians have taken that as opportunity to tax more and produce garbage transit construction project that enrich their friends and fail to change the situation (see the "mystery" of the US not being able to build public transit).
- brailsafe 2y ago
  > How does demand for public transit produce it? Existing transit lines get pushed to their capacity, or reinvestment gradually helps snowball demand
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  Do you consider the DC Metro garbage and its recent Silver Line extension? People in seem quite pleased with their system.
  - joe_the_user 2y ago
    The DC Metro service, according to wikipedia, was effective transit service that has been trashed over the years by neglected - like BART. And like BART, it's hard single extension but is basically in terrible shape now. My point is that growing demand for mass transit hasn't translated into anything.
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      Is BART measurably worse than 10 or 20 years ago? I didn't see anything in the news.
      - rangestransform 2y ago
        bart is on the precipice of going bankrupt unless it can stick more fingers into taxpayers pockets
kjkjadksj 2y ago
A big issue with the market argument in converting car drivers to transit riders is the respective networks operate at different scales. Think of a little neighborhood with a bus line on a road; theres probably I’m not even sure call it 20x as many roads in that neighborhood that don’t have a bus line. There is so much more built out of the comprehensive road network everywhere than there is with transit. Cities are barely establishing their cardinal direction rail transit routes today. Even living in a place as densely railed as nyc most of those routes are extremely biased in the sort of commutes they best serve (in to manhattan for the most part). Since most cities can’t afford to ever build their rail networks as comprehensively as the existing road network in even a small city, we are left with bussing to build that comprehensive network. And what do you know, if you look up most cities bus networks they look pretty good and high coverage. So why don’t people take them? Its still worse than a car. A car is a direct bus on your own schedule, a bus route is a compromised route of average population and job density, might not help you get to where you are going especially for drives outside a fixed commute to a central business district. Scheduling and especially transfers can be fickle. As long as the coverage and convenience are so lopsided, people are going to take cars if they can afford it, even with a shiny new light rail line or whatever is attempted. I have yet to see a project like that attract wealthy ridership that can afford choice, transit rider median demographics are working class or even at the poverty line in a lot of metros. Even nyc subway ridership is 40k income on avg, bus ridership 28k. In the most expensive city in north america no less.
- ericmay 2y ago
  It’s hard to talk about the topic at very high level but for many American cities like Columbus where I live the answer lies at least partially converting surface parking lots in downtown areas into economically productive assets like housing or businesses which are also not extractive to the local economy. This density makes it easier to walk and bike as well. Many cities, including Columbus, are expanding bus rapid transit and other bus related activities which is laudable, but to your point, and which I agree and would frame it slightly differently, the bus is a strictly worse version of the car in these kinds of cities and so you need category changes to change habits (trams, bikes, walking). I think we need to focus our efforts on cities like Columbus, or others, which do have the population to support rail development and solve for that and not get too worried about solving everything everywhere all at once. Most state departments of highways and cars (they are not departments of transportation) simply don’t fund alternative means of transportation. Leadership from the top down needs to change its focus. The mantra should be the best, safest car is the one you never get in. Instead it’s “we need to preserve going from here to there in 20 minutes without traffic surprises” as if not being stuck in traffic is a Constitutional right. It’s bankrupting us and it’s bad for business and wellbeing.
detourdog 2y ago
The problem I have with reducing minimum parking is that in rural areas it doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t stop people in my rural town of 2,500 houses advocating for reducing parking requirements.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  Well, today's rural areas are tomorrow's suburbs. If you want to stop the rural areas from becoming a car slave suburban sprawl, then you need to do something differently than what we did in the past. It sounds like people in your town are forward thinking. Plus, if there is plenty of room then you'll still have parking, until that land becomes more valuable for something else.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    I consider it so forward thinking as to be unrealistic. I hear what you are saying but my town is more or less in accessible and a suburb to know where. We don't uber and taxi's after dark should be considered ahead of time. We have minimal mass transit system that essentially connects towns together. If we ever get train service from a metropolitan city I could see it. Currently I see the people demanding reduced parking requirements as echoing talking points they don't understand.
    - slyall 2y ago
      If your town has just has 2500 people then it should be 5-10 minutes walk/bike from anywhere to anywhere. No need for a car for most journeys.
      - detourdog 2y ago
        The area of the town is around 43 square miles. The houses are not near the grocery stores. New England towns used to be very neighborhood centric. Our town used to have 14 schools because everyone had to walk to school. Our schools have been centralized and now require busing. Walkability used to be a thing but no longer. Off street parking is convenient during snow removal.
j_m_b 2y ago
Transit likely wouldn't exist without heavy government subsidies. Even with them, it's a pretty terrible way to get around, at least in the US. The vehicles are dirty, even dangerous. There are frequent delays and rerouting. Transit is a huge target for government grift as well, from everything to projects that go way over budget and never get completed to outright scams. It's far from that panacea that it's made out to be. Maybe in Japan or Europe it's better. In the US, public transit has a far from stellar history.
- Eric_WVGG 2y ago
  Heck, they’re better in Russia. Marble, polished brash, chandeliers… and we’re talking the USSR period. Imagine telling your kid to mow the lawn, and he deliberately does a terrible job so you quit asking him to do it. That’s what legislators have been doing to US public services for fifty years. It’s the same thing with the post office, they are wretched by design.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Don’t forget our automobile infrastructure gets heavy government subsidies too. Gas taxes and fees aren’t nearly high enough to pay for all the roads and parking we have.
dyauspitr 2y ago
What’s so great about transit besides the environmental savings. Having to share space with other people, walk to the train station, put up with a train schedule, have no way to travel past some arbitrary time (midnight to 2am in most places), no way to transport large items or groceries, no way to go off the beaten path, having to live in densely populated cities with no room for any activities. I like the idea of having public transport but not at the expense of the incredible roadways we have.
- hkpack 2y ago
  > having to live in densely populated cities with no room for any activities. Depends on activities, I guess, but my experience is the opposite, densely populated areas has vastly more activities available within 20-30 minutes reach especially to parents with kids.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    Like what? There are a lot of toddler gyms, sports fields, art schools, music lessons, pools etc. in the suburbs. But you can’t easily woodwork, metalwork, garden, shoot guns, fish, kayak, hike trails, raise chickens/goats etc in the city. As someone that lived in Manhattan for many years as an adult all I could think of doing was restaurants, bars, broadway shows and walks in Central Park.
  - lotsoweiners 2y ago
    You may be missing the point that these activities can potentially be in your backyard if you don’t live in an apartment. My kids can swim or play privately in my backyard and I still have plenty of space for my gardening hobby, bbq-ing with extended family, various outdoor games, or just hanging out watching tv in the backyard. I’ve known people who have basketball, tennis, or pickle ball courts in their backyard. Outside of very specific museums or live music/sports venues I can’t think of any activity that is available in a dense city that isn’t in my suburban neighborhood.
jfoutz 2y ago
I think you might be missing a little part of, market vs free market. There are many opinions, of course. Subsidise what you want and tax what you don’t is pretty popular, based on what people actually do.
m463 2y ago
Is it possible that ALL infrastructure issues revolve around more people? If a place is nice, more people move there, and then the infrastructure is overburdened? but momentum just makes things end up bad in the end. What about finding ways to distribute the population more broadly, by say fighting return-to-office kinds of things? Maybe taxing dense populations somehow? On the other hand, does fighting all this like colorado is doing - does it make colorado less competitive?
- lukas099 2y ago
  This doesn’t make sense to me. The marginal increase in infrastructure costs for each new person is less than the tax revenue they generate. If anything we should tax low density, since more infrastructure is needed per person.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Exactly! The urban core takes in way more taxes per person than it costs for infrastructure, suburbia is the exact opposite. Urbanites are subsidizing the suburbs currently.
lumb63 2y ago
It seems to me that most people will not be willing to lower their standard of traveling to the extent required by public transit in most places in the US, even if travel by car becomes very difficult. The gap is simply too wide. I live in the Boston area and commute by car. My commute by car (despite the recent closure of a lane on the most heavily trafficked road on my commute, for no reason other than to not have it) is between 25 and 45 minutes. The fastest I can pull it off by public transit is an hour, with a long tail up to 1h20m or more in case of shutdowns, etc. I’d gladly take public transit if I could even meet my worst-case commute time consistently, but the worsening of my life by doubling my average commute time far outweighs the benefit of being a little greener and not having to pay attention to driving during my commute. In other areas of the economy we wouldn’t consider inducing demand for alternative remedies by making the way average person operates worse. It becomes quite dystopian in my opinion. For instance, one could argue that too many people are seeking healthcare rather than pursuing lifestyle changes to improve their health, due to the availability of healthcare, so we should shut down hospitals. Or one could argue that the presence of housing induces demand for housing and so we should stop building new houses while providing no additional place for people to live. That will just create homelessness and/or very expensive housing. Both of these solutions will lower demand, but in a quite painful way for many people. To me the solution which makes far more sense is to build improved public transit and people will naturally gravitate toward it, reducing demand for roads/cars, AND their quality of life will improve. For instance, if Boston expanded the MBTA with the long-sought-after urban ring project [1], my commute would reduce to perhaps 30-35 minutes by train. At that point it would be an absolute no brainer for me to switch all my commutes to public transit. This is a rare situation where almost everyone really can win. Easier, cheaper, faster, greener travel. I don’t see why people argue for an approach where the majority of people lose.
graemep 2y ago
In the UK where we do not have net subsidies for ICE cars (because of taxes on car ownership and fuel) and we do not have minimum parking requirements (AFAIK - there are certainly newish city centre blocks of flats with no parking at all) this does not seem to happen. We have a lot of policies and a rise in the expense of owning a car, but we have not had the required rise in investment in public transport (we need a lot more of it, and cheaper). The authorities seem to be quite happy with an outcome that means poor people will just have to travel a lot less. Do you think this will be greatly different in the US?
- chgs 2y ago
  The lack of parking leads to more demand for on street parking, which is delivered via the ballot box. Majority of housing developments have minimum parking stipulations, although in practice those aren’t really practically met (a garage is claimed as a space for example, or a drive which only fits one behind another), which leads to on road parking. With public transport there are two elements. The capital expenditure and the operational expenditure. Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?
  - blactuary 2y ago
    "Why should I pay for that?" crippling good policy is one of our biggest impediments in the US
    - lotsoweiners 2y ago
      Seems like democracy is working correctly in my opinion.
      - blactuary 2y ago
        No, this is not a democratic process. People are not voting on these things. A vocal minority with the time and ability to involve themselves in the process ruin things for everyone. It's readily apparent when it comes to things like building housing, and in this case funding transit. And more generally, everyone voting only in their narrow self-interest is not "democracy working correctly". As numerous people have pointed out above, we live in a society and not everything that society needs to function well will benefit each and every person. Democracy working correctly does not mean everyone saying "I oppose any public spending that does not directly accrue a benefit to me personally". That's a recipe for a broken society with a great deal of deal being left behind.
Tade0 2y ago
> 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. Almost everywhere it actually works, mass transit is heavily subsidised, with tickets covering only 20-30% of the operating expenses.
gnicholas 2y ago
I was going to read The High Cost of Free Parking, until I saw that it's 800 pages long. Did you read the whole thing, skim, or entirely skip parts? I am familiar with the general argument and feel like 800 pages is too much for a book on the subject (at least for my taste).
- languagehacker 2y ago
  I listened to the audiobook, and Paved Paradise covers most of the arguments made far more succinctly.
talldatethrow 2y ago
Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still. Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir. Even state camping spots are $40+ it seems in areas I know aren't full all the time. It costs like $20 in extra gas tax to drive to LA with your friends because California can't just set the income tax appropriately? I could go on and on. The income tax to me sounds pretty fair. But making a poor person living paycheck to paycheck come up with $40 to go to the lake with a cheap sailboat seems harsh to me (my dad and I used to go as a Kid. It was $5 then. And my dad made $20 an hour as a recent immigrant in construction). And don't start that people that use services should pay. My tax money goes to a lot of things I don't use or even agree with.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still. >Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir. If you can afford a sailboat, you're not "low income".
  - talldatethrow 2y ago
    A sailboat costs $500+ on Craigslist or Facebook marketplace. We had one when my mom was cleaning a convalescent home as her job, and commuting 35 miles one way to do it. My dad worked 55+ hours a week, and commuted 60 miles one way to do it. So unless you think my dad let my mom clean hospital floors and bathrooms while we weren't low income, I'd argue you can.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Are you talking about a real sailboat, or one of those tiny things that boy scouts use in small lakes that one person can easily pick up and carry?
      - throwaway48476 2y ago
        Who the heck would launch a "real sailboat" on a reservoir?

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
    I kinda feel most Americans should be trying to walk more... but also if the schedules and stops were improved people would use it far more. I'd like to take a tram or bus I just don't want to spend an extra 40+/- mins getting there to arrive with no protection from the weather. I don't particularly like taxis much but at least they figure out where you need to go without too much effort, I do drive though way more then I taxi. Taxis are more rare trips for traveling in places I don't know or can't drive. I wish we had high speed trains where I lived in my capital city, just an easy way to travel to the major cities by train would make my day. I'd travel far more often if I could then. Trains to me are the best of all worlds.
fragmede 2y ago
Waymo's working in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with Austin coming soon. Maybe it'll take 10 years, but the technology's already here, just needs to get scaled up.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  The proof of concept is already here, but the technology still needs too much human supervision to be cost-effective. If you want to make self-driving taxis cheap enough for most people to use daily, the prices have to be something like $2/trip.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    To recoup the billions of dollars they've invested in it, it might be a decade before we get down to $2/ride. As far as how much human supervision it takes, we don't actually know the costs of it, though the latency involved means it's not Actually, Indians remote piloting the vehicles with Playstation controllers.
abecedarius 2y ago
Also, robocars and mass transit are complements, or should be.

Gibbon1 2y ago

When it comes to transit I think the lol make driving sucky so people will support mass transit is inane because of the backlash potential. Much better to get ahead of the hose than always be trying to grab it's ass. You're not going to get boomers and GenX to take the bus. You probably could get younger generations to do that especially if there are options. Really there should be a high speed rail along the front range and subways in places like Denver. And zoning that prioritizes development that utilized that.

Gigachad 2y ago
If boomers want to continue driving, they can. Just make them pay for what they use. Work out the real market value for the space and charge for it.
- sien 2y ago
  Yep. The same should be done for public transport. In the US Farebox Recovery Ratios of 20% or less are common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_... Only 58% of fuel tax in Australia is spent on any kind of transport including rail. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-21/fuel-excise-not-being-spent-on-roads-amid-calls-to-cut-tax/100920658 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-21/fuel-excise-not-being... Australians drive a similar amount to the US. From https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/11/13/how-trains-could-replace-planes-in-europe https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/11/13/how-trains-could... Yet only 8% of the distance travelled by land in the EU is by rail. Even in the most train-happy countries, Austria and the Netherlands, the figures are 13% and 11%. In those countries, more than 75% of land travel is done by car. So even in Europe and Australia where cars more than pay for their costs people still drive a lot. This is with all the effort put in to public transport in Europe.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    You can see about half of trips are by car in for example Germany: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1309333/germany-modal-split-of-passenger-transport/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1309333/germany-modal-sp... Public transit isn't all, just being denser so that biking and walking is more viable is also a big part to why European cities aren't concrete wastelands full of parking and roads. The normal way to go and buy groceries is to walk not drive.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rufus_foreman 2y ago

>> I believe the argument would be that not creating induced demand will provide market effects to encourage the use of transit Induced demand is a concept that anti-car people use, but I don't think it makes much sense. Imagine a library that only has a few copies of some best selling children's books. There's a very long queue to check out those books. Someone might argue that, "We should buy more copies of the best selling children's books". The induced demand argument in this case would be: "If we buy more copies of those books, the queue wont disappear, since it is so long, but also, if the queue gets shorter, we might have people who don't use the library because of the queue start using it. We would be no better off!". Of course in this analogy, we realize the fallacy. People are better off because more kids get to read books. Even if the queue stays the same length, we have more throughput, more kids get the benefit. Now if we translate that to cars, of course, we see the difference. People who write books like "Paved Paradise" or "The High Cost of Free Parking" hate cars. They really do. They hate the suburbs too. So when they see something that would enable people who don't currently drive cars to drive cars, or for people who live in urban areas to live in suburban areas, they're of course going to be against that. "Induced demand" is being used here by languagehacker, as it is used by other people who are opposed to private property, as some sort of technical term that supports their case. But that isn't true. By adding more copies of popular books to libraries, we want to induce demand. We want people to read the books, and we want people who don't currently use libraries to consider using them. The induced demand is not bad. We had a queue, it was too long, we shorten the queue, and by doing so some people who thought the queue was too long will no longer think that. This is good. What languagehacker is saying, by referring to induced demand, is that, in the opinion of languagehacker cars are bad. It is as simple as that. It sounds super-scientific when you use terms like "induced demand", but it is not, in fact, super-scientific. It's just a value judgement. To me, if you build a highway in an area that has high traffic congestion, and after you build the highway, it still has high traffic congestion, it means more people are getting where they want to be. It's called "induced demand". Induced demand is good. We should have more of it.

hammock 2y ago
> The induced demand argument in this case would be: "If we buy more copies of those books, the queue wont disappear, since it is so long, but also, if the queue gets shorter, we might have people who don't use the library because of the queue start using it. We would be no better off!". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#

gotoeleven 2y ago

[flagged]

anon84873628 2y ago
Wow, these are really bad takes. You think "culture war" explains it all? Nah, it's not that easy.
- gotoeleven 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    That’s completely inapplicable to what they said.
    - gotoeleven 2y ago
      "Wow, these are really bad takes" is just name calling with no argument. I guess the comment is not technically ad hominem, just a more generic kind of irrelevant assertion. Edit: here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone
geraldwhen 2y ago
Ding ding ding. It’s a running meme that my downtown bus station is constantly an area of violent crime. Because it is.

joe_the_user 2y ago

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. How does demand for public transit produce it? I mean public calls for more transit have been loud for many years and US politicians have taken that as opportunity to tax more and produce garbage transit construction project that enrich their friends and fail to change the situation (see the "mystery" of the US not being able to build public transit).

brailsafe 2y ago
> How does demand for public transit produce it? Existing transit lines get pushed to their capacity, or reinvestment gradually helps snowball demand
throwaway2037 2y ago
Do you consider the DC Metro garbage and its recent Silver Line extension? People in seem quite pleased with their system.
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  The DC Metro service, according to wikipedia, was effective transit service that has been trashed over the years by neglected - like BART. And like BART, it's hard single extension but is basically in terrible shape now. My point is that growing demand for mass transit hasn't translated into anything.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    Is BART measurably worse than 10 or 20 years ago? I didn't see anything in the news.
    - rangestransform 2y ago
      bart is on the precipice of going bankrupt unless it can stick more fingers into taxpayers pockets

kjkjadksj 2y ago

A big issue with the market argument in converting car drivers to transit riders is the respective networks operate at different scales. Think of a little neighborhood with a bus line on a road; theres probably I’m not even sure call it 20x as many roads in that neighborhood that don’t have a bus line. There is so much more built out of the comprehensive road network everywhere than there is with transit. Cities are barely establishing their cardinal direction rail transit routes today. Even living in a place as densely railed as nyc most of those routes are extremely biased in the sort of commutes they best serve (in to manhattan for the most part). Since most cities can’t afford to ever build their rail networks as comprehensively as the existing road network in even a small city, we are left with bussing to build that comprehensive network. And what do you know, if you look up most cities bus networks they look pretty good and high coverage. So why don’t people take them? Its still worse than a car. A car is a direct bus on your own schedule, a bus route is a compromised route of average population and job density, might not help you get to where you are going especially for drives outside a fixed commute to a central business district. Scheduling and especially transfers can be fickle. As long as the coverage and convenience are so lopsided, people are going to take cars if they can afford it, even with a shiny new light rail line or whatever is attempted. I have yet to see a project like that attract wealthy ridership that can afford choice, transit rider median demographics are working class or even at the poverty line in a lot of metros. Even nyc subway ridership is 40k income on avg, bus ridership 28k. In the most expensive city in north america no less.

ericmay 2y ago
It’s hard to talk about the topic at very high level but for many American cities like Columbus where I live the answer lies at least partially converting surface parking lots in downtown areas into economically productive assets like housing or businesses which are also not extractive to the local economy. This density makes it easier to walk and bike as well. Many cities, including Columbus, are expanding bus rapid transit and other bus related activities which is laudable, but to your point, and which I agree and would frame it slightly differently, the bus is a strictly worse version of the car in these kinds of cities and so you need category changes to change habits (trams, bikes, walking). I think we need to focus our efforts on cities like Columbus, or others, which do have the population to support rail development and solve for that and not get too worried about solving everything everywhere all at once. Most state departments of highways and cars (they are not departments of transportation) simply don’t fund alternative means of transportation. Leadership from the top down needs to change its focus. The mantra should be the best, safest car is the one you never get in. Instead it’s “we need to preserve going from here to there in 20 minutes without traffic surprises” as if not being stuck in traffic is a Constitutional right. It’s bankrupting us and it’s bad for business and wellbeing.

detourdog 2y ago

The problem I have with reducing minimum parking is that in rural areas it doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t stop people in my rural town of 2,500 houses advocating for reducing parking requirements.

anon84873628 2y ago
Well, today's rural areas are tomorrow's suburbs. If you want to stop the rural areas from becoming a car slave suburban sprawl, then you need to do something differently than what we did in the past. It sounds like people in your town are forward thinking. Plus, if there is plenty of room then you'll still have parking, until that land becomes more valuable for something else.
- detourdog 2y ago
  I consider it so forward thinking as to be unrealistic. I hear what you are saying but my town is more or less in accessible and a suburb to know where. We don't uber and taxi's after dark should be considered ahead of time. We have minimal mass transit system that essentially connects towns together. If we ever get train service from a metropolitan city I could see it. Currently I see the people demanding reduced parking requirements as echoing talking points they don't understand.
  - slyall 2y ago
    If your town has just has 2500 people then it should be 5-10 minutes walk/bike from anywhere to anywhere. No need for a car for most journeys.
    - detourdog 2y ago
      The area of the town is around 43 square miles. The houses are not near the grocery stores. New England towns used to be very neighborhood centric. Our town used to have 14 schools because everyone had to walk to school. Our schools have been centralized and now require busing. Walkability used to be a thing but no longer. Off street parking is convenient during snow removal.

j_m_b 2y ago

Transit likely wouldn't exist without heavy government subsidies. Even with them, it's a pretty terrible way to get around, at least in the US. The vehicles are dirty, even dangerous. There are frequent delays and rerouting. Transit is a huge target for government grift as well, from everything to projects that go way over budget and never get completed to outright scams. It's far from that panacea that it's made out to be. Maybe in Japan or Europe it's better. In the US, public transit has a far from stellar history.

Eric_WVGG 2y ago
Heck, they’re better in Russia. Marble, polished brash, chandeliers… and we’re talking the USSR period. Imagine telling your kid to mow the lawn, and he deliberately does a terrible job so you quit asking him to do it. That’s what legislators have been doing to US public services for fifty years. It’s the same thing with the post office, they are wretched by design.
amanaplanacanal 2y ago
Don’t forget our automobile infrastructure gets heavy government subsidies too. Gas taxes and fees aren’t nearly high enough to pay for all the roads and parking we have.

dyauspitr 2y ago

What’s so great about transit besides the environmental savings. Having to share space with other people, walk to the train station, put up with a train schedule, have no way to travel past some arbitrary time (midnight to 2am in most places), no way to transport large items or groceries, no way to go off the beaten path, having to live in densely populated cities with no room for any activities. I like the idea of having public transport but not at the expense of the incredible roadways we have.

hkpack 2y ago
> having to live in densely populated cities with no room for any activities. Depends on activities, I guess, but my experience is the opposite, densely populated areas has vastly more activities available within 20-30 minutes reach especially to parents with kids.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Like what? There are a lot of toddler gyms, sports fields, art schools, music lessons, pools etc. in the suburbs. But you can’t easily woodwork, metalwork, garden, shoot guns, fish, kayak, hike trails, raise chickens/goats etc in the city. As someone that lived in Manhattan for many years as an adult all I could think of doing was restaurants, bars, broadway shows and walks in Central Park.
- lotsoweiners 2y ago
  You may be missing the point that these activities can potentially be in your backyard if you don’t live in an apartment. My kids can swim or play privately in my backyard and I still have plenty of space for my gardening hobby, bbq-ing with extended family, various outdoor games, or just hanging out watching tv in the backyard. I’ve known people who have basketball, tennis, or pickle ball courts in their backyard. Outside of very specific museums or live music/sports venues I can’t think of any activity that is available in a dense city that isn’t in my suburban neighborhood.

jfoutz 2y ago

I think you might be missing a little part of, market vs free market. There are many opinions, of course. Subsidise what you want and tax what you don’t is pretty popular, based on what people actually do.

m463 2y ago

Is it possible that ALL infrastructure issues revolve around more people? If a place is nice, more people move there, and then the infrastructure is overburdened? but momentum just makes things end up bad in the end. What about finding ways to distribute the population more broadly, by say fighting return-to-office kinds of things? Maybe taxing dense populations somehow? On the other hand, does fighting all this like colorado is doing - does it make colorado less competitive?

lukas099 2y ago
This doesn’t make sense to me. The marginal increase in infrastructure costs for each new person is less than the tax revenue they generate. If anything we should tax low density, since more infrastructure is needed per person.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Exactly! The urban core takes in way more taxes per person than it costs for infrastructure, suburbia is the exact opposite. Urbanites are subsidizing the suburbs currently.

lumb63 2y ago

It seems to me that most people will not be willing to lower their standard of traveling to the extent required by public transit in most places in the US, even if travel by car becomes very difficult. The gap is simply too wide. I live in the Boston area and commute by car. My commute by car (despite the recent closure of a lane on the most heavily trafficked road on my commute, for no reason other than to not have it) is between 25 and 45 minutes. The fastest I can pull it off by public transit is an hour, with a long tail up to 1h20m or more in case of shutdowns, etc. I’d gladly take public transit if I could even meet my worst-case commute time consistently, but the worsening of my life by doubling my average commute time far outweighs the benefit of being a little greener and not having to pay attention to driving during my commute. In other areas of the economy we wouldn’t consider inducing demand for alternative remedies by making the way average person operates worse. It becomes quite dystopian in my opinion. For instance, one could argue that too many people are seeking healthcare rather than pursuing lifestyle changes to improve their health, due to the availability of healthcare, so we should shut down hospitals. Or one could argue that the presence of housing induces demand for housing and so we should stop building new houses while providing no additional place for people to live. That will just create homelessness and/or very expensive housing. Both of these solutions will lower demand, but in a quite painful way for many people. To me the solution which makes far more sense is to build improved public transit and people will naturally gravitate toward it, reducing demand for roads/cars, AND their quality of life will improve. For instance, if Boston expanded the MBTA with the long-sought-after urban ring project [1], my commute would reduce to perhaps 30-35 minutes by train. At that point it would be an absolute no brainer for me to switch all my commutes to public transit. This is a rare situation where almost everyone really can win. Easier, cheaper, faster, greener travel. I don’t see why people argue for an approach where the majority of people lose.

graemep 2y ago

In the UK where we do not have net subsidies for ICE cars (because of taxes on car ownership and fuel) and we do not have minimum parking requirements (AFAIK - there are certainly newish city centre blocks of flats with no parking at all) this does not seem to happen. We have a lot of policies and a rise in the expense of owning a car, but we have not had the required rise in investment in public transport (we need a lot more of it, and cheaper). The authorities seem to be quite happy with an outcome that means poor people will just have to travel a lot less. Do you think this will be greatly different in the US?

chgs 2y ago
The lack of parking leads to more demand for on street parking, which is delivered via the ballot box. Majority of housing developments have minimum parking stipulations, although in practice those aren’t really practically met (a garage is claimed as a space for example, or a drive which only fits one behind another), which leads to on road parking. With public transport there are two elements. The capital expenditure and the operational expenditure. Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place?
- blactuary 2y ago
  "Why should I pay for that?" crippling good policy is one of our biggest impediments in the US
  - lotsoweiners 2y ago
    Seems like democracy is working correctly in my opinion.
    - blactuary 2y ago
      No, this is not a democratic process. People are not voting on these things. A vocal minority with the time and ability to involve themselves in the process ruin things for everyone. It's readily apparent when it comes to things like building housing, and in this case funding transit. And more generally, everyone voting only in their narrow self-interest is not "democracy working correctly". As numerous people have pointed out above, we live in a society and not everything that society needs to function well will benefit each and every person. Democracy working correctly does not mean everyone saying "I oppose any public spending that does not directly accrue a benefit to me personally". That's a recipe for a broken society with a great deal of deal being left behind.

Tade0 2y ago

> 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. Almost everywhere it actually works, mass transit is heavily subsidised, with tickets covering only 20-30% of the operating expenses.

gnicholas 2y ago

I was going to read The High Cost of Free Parking, until I saw that it's 800 pages long. Did you read the whole thing, skim, or entirely skip parts? I am familiar with the general argument and feel like 800 pages is too much for a book on the subject (at least for my taste).

languagehacker 2y ago
I listened to the audiobook, and Paved Paradise covers most of the arguments made far more succinctly.

talldatethrow 2y ago

Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still. Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir. Even state camping spots are $40+ it seems in areas I know aren't full all the time. It costs like $20 in extra gas tax to drive to LA with your friends because California can't just set the income tax appropriately? I could go on and on. The income tax to me sounds pretty fair. But making a poor person living paycheck to paycheck come up with $40 to go to the lake with a cheap sailboat seems harsh to me (my dad and I used to go as a Kid. It was $5 then. And my dad made $20 an hour as a recent immigrant in construction). And don't start that people that use services should pay. My tax money goes to a lot of things I don't use or even agree with.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>Things being free in public helps low income people live nice fulfilled lives still. >Now it costs $40 to launch a sailboat at my local reservoir. If you can afford a sailboat, you're not "low income".
- talldatethrow 2y ago
  A sailboat costs $500+ on Craigslist or Facebook marketplace. We had one when my mom was cleaning a convalescent home as her job, and commuting 35 miles one way to do it. My dad worked 55+ hours a week, and commuted 60 miles one way to do it. So unless you think my dad let my mom clean hospital floors and bathrooms while we weren't low income, I'd argue you can.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Are you talking about a real sailboat, or one of those tiny things that boy scouts use in small lakes that one person can easily pick up and carry?
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      Who the heck would launch a "real sailboat" on a reservoir?