4 ms·

Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities. One middle point I think might be more reachable is to build

Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities. One middle point I think might be more reachable is to build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals, so people can still drive to the terminal and then switch to bus. I live in a suburb on the Montreal island and this is the model the city is trying to build IMO.

loloquwowndueo 1y ago
Car infrastructure also takes a lot of money and time. Remember how long it took to reconfigure the Turcot Interchange - a few years later you still (already?) have bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours there anyway. Public transport gives much better ROI for more people - you don’t need the added expense of the car to benefit from it.
- mytailorisrich 1y ago
  > Public transport gives much better ROI for more people That's a bold claim without data.
  - loloquwowndueo 1y ago
    You seem to be implying the opposite, also without data. Now THAT is a bold claim.
  - ljf 1y ago
    Just did some very light googling - building out, repairing and developing new road infrastructure seems to have around 2:1 or 2.5:1 ROI - Public transport, active transport seems to have around 4:1 to 5:1 ROI.
    - mytailorisrich 1y ago
      Not sure what any of this means in relation to the comment I replied to. Keep in ming that public transport is built only on the busiest routes while roads are required (yes, actually required) everywhere. Edit to @loloquwowndueo below: I haven't been shown any data, not has my point been replied to. Please guys let's try to have a grown-up discussion.
      - loloquwowndueo 1y ago
        So when shown the data you asked for, you find a way to dismiss it. Brilliant :)
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  - fayten 1y ago
    This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg Noise pollution https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd Infrastructure strain https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm More on Infrastructure and Sprawl https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N Articles: https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:text=It's%20less%20expensive%20than%20owning,to%20take%20further%20climate%20action. https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_noise_pollution_awareness_for_human_health_and_environmental_impacts_a_comprehensive_review https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_n... https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban-sprawl https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban... Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
    - mytailorisrich 1y ago
      Thanks for this useful comment, too rare in this discussion unfortunately. One thing to bear in mind is that roads are required no matter what, so the question is one of size, really. In general public transport shines and is definitely worthwhile in dense urban environments where cars-only infrastructure could not cope or would be completely disproportionate. As density drops usefulness and viability drop, too. > In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars. Not sure that is the case in Europe. In Europe this tends to be driven by militant groups that want to ban cars for dogmatic reasons and they create real problems for people and businesses in the process. A pragmatic approach is indeed to have a good balance and to accept that cars are both wanted and useful, and needed in many cases.
- markus_zhang 1y ago
  But it's already being done. Now to propose new spending...it's really difficult judging from the financial status of major NA cities. (And take a look at the California railroad...)
forgotoldacc 1y ago
Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals and always, always giving jobs to the lowest bidding contractor. The lowest bidder is always the most expensive, and they always waste time far beyond schedule to burn more money, yet North America as a whole just won't learn from the past 70 years and keeps doing the same thing. I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years. And that's not even starting on their high speed rail system, which went from not existing to connecting basically every major city across the country within 20 years, and connecting the biggest cities within 10. Every construction site in America is endless thumb twiddling, guys holding signs, senseless traffic for sham work, and zero results after decades. One highway near me was under constant construction for one segment for 5 years and still didn't get finished. Every single day, it was the same construction vehicles parked in the same spots and some dudes holding signs while absolutely no progress was made. In Asia, it's a job that'd be done in a few days.
- orwin 1y ago
  It's because in the West, we decentralized and privatized too much. Interests at local/national/global level are divergent and misalign all the time, which makes everything take more time.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first. > I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years. Easy to do when you got the perfect combination: a lot of young single poor men that can be shuffled around the country because they got nothing tying them down to a specific place, combined with a lot of hard dollars from exports. And China has another incentive... the threat of gulag. When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged, and usually it's going to be someone from the CCP when someone higher-up thinks it's a good time to audit projects of the underlings to have some fall guys to take the usual "corruption" blame.
abraxas 1y ago
> Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities. Is this a joke? I grew up in Poland, a relatively poor country (and used to be a lot poorer) and in most cities it has public infrastructure that flagship North American cities can barely dream of. It's not a question of money but of societal priorities.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  The problem is, the Americans literally dug up a lot of the public transit infrastructure they had. Tramways and cable cars used to be widespread. You'd need to lay down all that track again.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    What's wrong with buses?
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      Compared with light railway/tram, they need more energy per km traveled due to friction and malleability losses in the tires, they emit fine dust from tires and brakes, and usually they pack significantly less people than a railcar so you need more vehicles and especially more drivers for a bus network. I'll admit though, a bus network is faster to set up and with mini-buses the size of a MB Sprinter van cheaper to operate even in challenged suburbian hellscapes.
    - skitter 1y ago
      They're great, compared to cars. But while they have a relatively fast and cheap setup, over the long term light rail and trams are a lot cheaper to run and can coexist with foot & bike traffic easier since the rails make them very predictable.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        I'd place serious concerns on the "coexist with bike traffic" thing though. Tram rails are a massive danger if you're running anything smaller than these "fatbike" wheels and have to cross them for whatever reason.
djrobstep 1y ago
> Public transit needs a lot of money and time Public transport is far, far more cost effective than car infrastructure. And that's just direct costs - not even including the cost of sprawl (which makes all other infrastructure more expensive), road deaths and injuries, noise, pollution, storage costs for vehicles, the health costs of inactivity and social isolation, etc etc. > build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals This is a terrible idea because the numbers simply do not stack up. A typical metro train can carry roughly 1000 people. A large car park might fill half of a single train. At a station with good frequency, a train will leave the station roughly every 5 minutes. A much better idea is to run good regular public transport to the station, build bike paths to the station and quality bike parking at the station, and build more housing at/near the station instead of a big parking lot.
- bluGill 1y ago
  Parking lots near stations make sense only at the farthest out place. They are for farmers coming into town for that big once a month trip, and hobby farmers driving from their "acrage" to their day job. The vast majority of people should be taking transit from their door to where they are going. Note that I said "place" not station - stations should be your highest demand places since they are so easy to get to. That real estate should be far too valuable to stores too waste on a parking lot. That parking lot should have a shuttle to the station, not be a station itself. Remember once somebody has got into a car they have paid most of the costs of having a car. They will always be asking why not drive all the way instead of stopping part way. Your goal should be every family sells a car because they don't need two (they still keep a "truck" for towing the boat or whatever they think they need it for, they just don't use it for most trips and don't need a backup vehicle)
jcranmer 1y ago
If you look at pictures of cities from the early 1900s, one of things you realize is that even small towns of only ~20k people managed to fairly reliably have a streetcar line or two in them. (Actually, a lot of these systems still exist, the streetcars have just been replaced with buses.) What happened to most NA cities is that they fully embraced the car by tearing down the city to make room for parking lots; there's a few cities where every other block in the city center is a surface parking lot. Combine this with systematic underinvestment in public transit (because it's seen as for people who are too poor to own a car), and you can see how we ended up where we did. The main obstacle to fixing this isn't really money, it's in getting people to accept public transit as something that could be a viable mode of transit for them. There are far too many people who think that public transit is inherently unsafe and that by riding it they are at extreme risk of getting shanked (which includes the current Secretary of Transportation).
- troyvit 1y ago
  I'll add that cities in the U.S. west, which did most of their growing after cars were invented, just don't have what it takes. At this point they're trying to find a way to squeeze bike lanes into roads that were never designed for them. They're trying to pay for public transit between metro centers that are 50 miles apart and separated by gulfs of nothingness. A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    > A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges. Actually that makes it easier, particularly if it is really nothing between as you can built high speed routes that are faster than cars, and put hubs out on the edges where people are. the reality though is it is rarely nothing inbetween. Most people are not going to the "hub", they are going to some other location and so you need an anywhere to anywhere system that doesn't require traveling to the central hub. Most transit systems assume you work downtown and wouldn't use transit for anything else so they optimize for getting to the hub making any other trip impossible instead of optimizing for closer trips but making getting to the hub annoying (I think this is the wrong compromise, but ...)

loloquwowndueo 1y ago

Car infrastructure also takes a lot of money and time. Remember how long it took to reconfigure the Turcot Interchange - a few years later you still (already?) have bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours there anyway. Public transport gives much better ROI for more people - you don’t need the added expense of the car to benefit from it.

mytailorisrich 1y ago
> Public transport gives much better ROI for more people That's a bold claim without data.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  You seem to be implying the opposite, also without data. Now THAT is a bold claim.
- ljf 1y ago
  Just did some very light googling - building out, repairing and developing new road infrastructure seems to have around 2:1 or 2.5:1 ROI - Public transport, active transport seems to have around 4:1 to 5:1 ROI.
  - mytailorisrich 1y ago
    Not sure what any of this means in relation to the comment I replied to. Keep in ming that public transport is built only on the busiest routes while roads are required (yes, actually required) everywhere. Edit to @loloquwowndueo below: I haven't been shown any data, not has my point been replied to. Please guys let's try to have a grown-up discussion.
    - loloquwowndueo 1y ago
      So when shown the data you asked for, you find a way to dismiss it. Brilliant :)
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- fayten 1y ago
  This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg Noise pollution https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd Infrastructure strain https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm More on Infrastructure and Sprawl https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N Articles: https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:text=It's%20less%20expensive%20than%20owning,to%20take%20further%20climate%20action. https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_noise_pollution_awareness_for_human_health_and_environmental_impacts_a_comprehensive_review https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_n... https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban-sprawl https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban... Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
  - mytailorisrich 1y ago
    Thanks for this useful comment, too rare in this discussion unfortunately. One thing to bear in mind is that roads are required no matter what, so the question is one of size, really. In general public transport shines and is definitely worthwhile in dense urban environments where cars-only infrastructure could not cope or would be completely disproportionate. As density drops usefulness and viability drop, too. > In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars. Not sure that is the case in Europe. In Europe this tends to be driven by militant groups that want to ban cars for dogmatic reasons and they create real problems for people and businesses in the process. A pragmatic approach is indeed to have a good balance and to accept that cars are both wanted and useful, and needed in many cases.
markus_zhang 1y ago
But it's already being done. Now to propose new spending...it's really difficult judging from the financial status of major NA cities. (And take a look at the California railroad...)

forgotoldacc 1y ago

Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals and always, always giving jobs to the lowest bidding contractor. The lowest bidder is always the most expensive, and they always waste time far beyond schedule to burn more money, yet North America as a whole just won't learn from the past 70 years and keeps doing the same thing. I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years. And that's not even starting on their high speed rail system, which went from not existing to connecting basically every major city across the country within 20 years, and connecting the biggest cities within 10. Every construction site in America is endless thumb twiddling, guys holding signs, senseless traffic for sham work, and zero results after decades. One highway near me was under constant construction for one segment for 5 years and still didn't get finished. Every single day, it was the same construction vehicles parked in the same spots and some dudes holding signs while absolutely no progress was made. In Asia, it's a job that'd be done in a few days.

orwin 1y ago
It's because in the West, we decentralized and privatized too much. Interests at local/national/global level are divergent and misalign all the time, which makes everything take more time.
mschuster91 1y ago
> Most of the time aspect comes from excessive regulations and approvals Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first. > I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years. Easy to do when you got the perfect combination: a lot of young single poor men that can be shuffled around the country because they got nothing tying them down to a specific place, combined with a lot of hard dollars from exports. And China has another incentive... the threat of gulag. When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged, and usually it's going to be someone from the CCP when someone higher-up thinks it's a good time to audit projects of the underlings to have some fall guys to take the usual "corruption" blame.

abraxas 1y ago

> Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities. Is this a joke? I grew up in Poland, a relatively poor country (and used to be a lot poorer) and in most cities it has public infrastructure that flagship North American cities can barely dream of. It's not a question of money but of societal priorities.

mschuster91 1y ago
The problem is, the Americans literally dug up a lot of the public transit infrastructure they had. Tramways and cable cars used to be widespread. You'd need to lay down all that track again.
- anonymars 1y ago
  What's wrong with buses?
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    Compared with light railway/tram, they need more energy per km traveled due to friction and malleability losses in the tires, they emit fine dust from tires and brakes, and usually they pack significantly less people than a railcar so you need more vehicles and especially more drivers for a bus network. I'll admit though, a bus network is faster to set up and with mini-buses the size of a MB Sprinter van cheaper to operate even in challenged suburbian hellscapes.
  - skitter 1y ago
    They're great, compared to cars. But while they have a relatively fast and cheap setup, over the long term light rail and trams are a lot cheaper to run and can coexist with foot & bike traffic easier since the rails make them very predictable.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      I'd place serious concerns on the "coexist with bike traffic" thing though. Tram rails are a massive danger if you're running anything smaller than these "fatbike" wheels and have to cross them for whatever reason.

djrobstep 1y ago

> Public transit needs a lot of money and time Public transport is far, far more cost effective than car infrastructure. And that's just direct costs - not even including the cost of sprawl (which makes all other infrastructure more expensive), road deaths and injuries, noise, pollution, storage costs for vehicles, the health costs of inactivity and social isolation, etc etc. > build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals This is a terrible idea because the numbers simply do not stack up. A typical metro train can carry roughly 1000 people. A large car park might fill half of a single train. At a station with good frequency, a train will leave the station roughly every 5 minutes. A much better idea is to run good regular public transport to the station, build bike paths to the station and quality bike parking at the station, and build more housing at/near the station instead of a big parking lot.

bluGill 1y ago
Parking lots near stations make sense only at the farthest out place. They are for farmers coming into town for that big once a month trip, and hobby farmers driving from their "acrage" to their day job. The vast majority of people should be taking transit from their door to where they are going. Note that I said "place" not station - stations should be your highest demand places since they are so easy to get to. That real estate should be far too valuable to stores too waste on a parking lot. That parking lot should have a shuttle to the station, not be a station itself. Remember once somebody has got into a car they have paid most of the costs of having a car. They will always be asking why not drive all the way instead of stopping part way. Your goal should be every family sells a car because they don't need two (they still keep a "truck" for towing the boat or whatever they think they need it for, they just don't use it for most trips and don't need a backup vehicle)

jcranmer 1y ago

If you look at pictures of cities from the early 1900s, one of things you realize is that even small towns of only ~20k people managed to fairly reliably have a streetcar line or two in them. (Actually, a lot of these systems still exist, the streetcars have just been replaced with buses.) What happened to most NA cities is that they fully embraced the car by tearing down the city to make room for parking lots; there's a few cities where every other block in the city center is a surface parking lot. Combine this with systematic underinvestment in public transit (because it's seen as for people who are too poor to own a car), and you can see how we ended up where we did. The main obstacle to fixing this isn't really money, it's in getting people to accept public transit as something that could be a viable mode of transit for them. There are far too many people who think that public transit is inherently unsafe and that by riding it they are at extreme risk of getting shanked (which includes the current Secretary of Transportation).

troyvit 1y ago
I'll add that cities in the U.S. west, which did most of their growing after cars were invented, just don't have what it takes. At this point they're trying to find a way to squeeze bike lanes into roads that were never designed for them. They're trying to pay for public transit between metro centers that are 50 miles apart and separated by gulfs of nothingness. A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges.
- bluGill 1y ago
  > A hub system is much harder to support when the center is so far from the edges. Actually that makes it easier, particularly if it is really nothing between as you can built high speed routes that are faster than cars, and put hubs out on the edges where people are. the reality though is it is rarely nothing inbetween. Most people are not going to the "hub", they are going to some other location and so you need an anywhere to anywhere system that doesn't require traveling to the central hub. Most transit systems assume you work downtown and wouldn't use transit for anything else so they optimize for getting to the hub making any other trip impossible instead of optimizing for closer trips but making getting to the hub annoying (I think this is the wrong compromise, but ...)