6 ms·

With respect to you as a person and your ideas presented, this is one of the most car-brained posts I've ever read. > it's way more efficient than building $10

With respect to you as a person and your ideas presented, this is one of the most car-brained posts I've ever read. > it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build. What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just underground now!) I don't think the average person realizes how little typical non-New York states spend on transit. Ohio's ratio on highways:public transit spending is approximately 8:1, and that includes federal public transit money. Oh yeah, and Ohio outspends all its bordering neighbors per-capita. I am here to tell you about this cutting-edge science-fiction technology that is cheap, efficient, highly flexible, and requires almost zero infrastructure investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus As a bonus, instead of funneling public money out of state to Waymo who then dumps into cars manufactured by Zeekr in China, the city bus actually employs local people! It's so fascinating that Arlington, Texas, a city with over 300,000 people in it, hasn't yet been able to master the deep intricacies and mystical technology of the bus. I've also noticed that you are talking about the impacts of transit and vehicles on real estate prices, e.g., a lack or excess of parking spaces. I think you can do something similar the other way around and investigate the real estate impact of permanent rapid transit stations being built. That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.

servo_sausage 3mo ago
Because a transit method that follows a fixed route, on a schedule, is inherently worse than an on demand one; unless you can separate the traffic.
- alooPotato 3mo ago
  I think we should let autonomous, shared EVs use bus lanes (just like how some cities let taxis use them). They are just so good for society.
- trymas 3mo ago
  But I don't get the Waymo "solution" in this thread. Genuinely and not trolling. Where I live we have non-autonomous car-sharing (that I barely use). Patterns are always the same in the morning all cars go from suburbs/"sleeping" districts to downtown. In the evening all cars go from downtown back to outskirts. My point is - I don't see any improvement by Waymo here apart from marginal efficiency gains. Every morning in city outskirts/suburbs at the same time a lot of people go downtown that refuse to ride-share (hence autonomous taxi, not a bus/tram/metro), every evening - the opposite happens. If 80% of white collar workers go to office at 9AM and rent all Waymos - then if I go from suburb at 9.30AM , there are no Waymos in my area, I will need to wait until they come back from downtown until 10-11AM. Where's the efficiency? Everyone is going to same locality at the same time and demand private chariot. Everybody needs to get a private Waymo - same as private car. With american car-brain being prelevant - I don't believe those suburbanites will gladly give away their private cars to Waymo subscription instead.
  - servo_sausage 3mo ago
    Because people are not nearly as rigid about a 9-5 as you are imagining in aggregate; enough people commute off hours to increase the number of round trips per car significantly. Even in an office, there are plenty of people doing a 10-6, or an 8-3 then the school run... That's before you consider that many people are not office workers only going between the burbs and the city...
    - trymas 3mo ago
      Fair and I concur. Though still, I wonder, what gains could be from such model (car sharing instead of cars or public transit)? As far as I understand this model must support (with some room) demand at peak. So how many times less cars would be on the road then? How many streets and parking areas could be returned to people as pedestrian/recreation areas. How would that compare with proper public transport setup in terms of land use, cost, environment impact. I don't think it would be that much, because I cannot imagine such car sharing model working in places like London, Tokyo or other big developed cities.
- bluGill 3mo ago
  This is false. A fixed route is predictable. You know when it will be there and can plan for it. Non fixed routes mean you cannot be sure when your ride will arrive and thus cannot be sure you will arrive on time. That makes the fixed route better than a flexible route. Sure the flexible route is faster in the best case. However it is unpredictable and people have deadlines of when they can arrive: a flexible route cannot meet those consistently enough.
  - Grombobulous 3mo ago
    Bus routes can be fixed in the sense that they can stay in place for decades. Even simple things like paint, signs, and shelters provide psychological permanence. Things like WalkScore show up on real estate listings as a value add.
    - bluGill 3mo ago
      You don't even need that. Just seeing the bus go by "all the time" provides permanence. Really it is better, I've seen plenty of paint/signs/shelters, but when I bothered to look the bus only came rarely. When I moved someplace where I saw buses all the time I realized I could use them even though there was no paint/sign/shelter close to where I got on.
missedthecue 3mo ago
the simple fact of the matter is the Waymo is a better public transport solution for Dallas than the bus. The bus doesn't work very well in endless cul-de-sac suburbia, and that's what the Dallas/Fort Worth area (and indeed most of America) is. Like, you have to understand that most of Dallas isn't even commuting into downtown Dallas every day to work. They are just commuting to other suburbs and then back to their suburb. If your public transport solution is step 1. nuke the place and start over, it's not really a solution.
- Teever 3mo ago
  What if the public transport solution involved policies like taxing the existing suburbs in a way that ensures a break-even on infrastructure upkeep and operating costs so that the people who live in them aren't unfairly pushing costs onto other people in society? We could go a step further and tax automobiles in such a way that they covers the negative externalizes that their use results in so that again, the users of them don't unfairly burden others with the cost of their choices? The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas as well as things like high speed rail to connect those regions allowing the people who chose to live in those areas an easier and cheaper day to day life as well as the access to distant cities and all the economic opportunity that this encourages both in the destinations and in the economic corridors that arise along them? Places like the US and Canada may be able to stave it off a bit longer because of relatively open immigration policies but the demographic collapse is coming. That means that cities are going to start fighting to attract a dwindling pool of people and cities with less debt, be it financial or infrastructure will fare better than those that have suffered under decades of perpetual growth mindset based policy making. Many suburbs are a rot on a city's finances and will inevitably need to be amputated. The sooner the better I say.
  - missedthecue 3mo ago
    From a municipal finance perspective, most Dallas-Fort Worth suburban municipalities are far and away outperforming urban Dallas (the City of Dallas proper). That's not opinion, you can see the finances as they are all public. Ask the LLM of your choice to make research easy. I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities where dense american urban centers are overflowing with revenues. The opposite is the case almost everywhere you look. Or that suburbs are only surviving by pushing costs unfairly onto cities. Most suburbs (in the case of Dallas being plano, irving, frisco, southlake/westlake) are self governing municipalities with their own school districts, police, city management, and credit ratings. Sometimes people say it's just that suburbs are new and have yet to pay the piper, but even in america's (and Dallas') oldest suburbs, many of which have replaced/renovated infra several times over at this point, they are indeed stronger financially than the urban centers they surround.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
CalRobert 3mo ago
I agree with you and hate car centric development, and yet, if this idea gets low or no parking housing built, it could be worth considering.
bwhiting2356 3mo ago
waymos don't remove lanes of traffic, they remove parked cars and parking infrastructure, which is still pretty huge. In many suburbs, parking is the real bottleneck not traffic.
- Grombobulous 3mo ago
  Taxis and rideshares are actually proven to make traffic worse. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/car-industry/uber-lyft-traffic-congestion-car-ownership-study/ https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/car-industry/uber-lyft-traffic...
- FromHoiPolloi 3mo ago
  They still have to park somewhere... And the service (Waymo or a future competitor) that has it's cars closer will win more customers or can charge higher fees for faster service. The parking infrastructure might move a bit. But it won't disappear. I'd wager it'll even increase.
anuptalwalkar 3mo ago
This is a simple conversation involving ‘what abouts’ and divert your attention to delay public transit build. In the end you waste long enough time to defend it to delay investments in affordable housing and public transit, both. You then funnel that money into road construction and fuel subsidies.
pid-1 3mo ago
You can even buy some paint and build dedicated bus lanes. Some alien technology shit.
infecto 3mo ago
If you have to say “with respect” don’t say it at all. You can share your ideas without calling names. A bus would simply never work. Busses, trains and other modes of group transport or hard or near impossible to get right in a sprawling suburban metro. It would be amazing if it was possible but folks are going to work in so many directions (there is not a single workplace hub) and after work they may be going to an entirely different location for dinner. I think it would be incredibly hard to get that problem right and you would still be fighting an uphill battle that people don’t like to take the public bus.
- Grombobulous 3mo ago
  Then why does public transit work in other countries with suburbs? Obligatory repost of this video about small towns and cities in the Netherlands being easily accessible by public transit and cycling: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg I will also point out that a large proportion of suburbs in the US are comparatively brand new developments. While we might not be able to retrofit existing developments, fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented.
  - infecto 3mo ago
    Transit going to where. That’s the problem, you could build a new development that is transit oriented but where is it going? The average person in Texas does not want to transfer busses. Your comparison to Netherlands is rough because you are talking about a country that has a fairly mild climate and older cities that generally have density and not much sprawl. I don’t comprehend these examples. Also those cities are incredibly tiny with probably a concentration of employment. Keep in mind the Netherlands is about 115 miles wide and maybe 180 north/south diagonally. That’s roughly the size of the Dallas metro area. Someone who lives in Arlington might commute to downtown Dallas, an office building in Plano or downtown Fort Worth. You multiply that by millions of people and it becomes a very hard problem that a typical city bus cannot handle. Now I do think there is probably opportunity for a Waymo like solution with 10 seats that could do driverless ride sharing but I don’t see how a city can build a bus system that works, people don’t want to take a bus unless it has zero transfers. The last mile problem is incredibly hard and places like Texas are hot. I asking through a strip mall parking lot is further than most of the cities in the Netherlands in that video.
lesuorac 3mo ago
> That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations. We did that though! It's just so much more profitable to sell of the real estate and then let the government run the rails at a loss. Ex. Penn Station's real estate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%80%931963)#Demolition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%... I suspect this will only work in the US if the "rail company" is actually public. - https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod - https://www.wmata.com/business/real-estate-and-development.html https://www.wmata.com/business/real-estate-and-development.h...
joquarky 3mo ago
Coppell (a suburb of Dallas) will not permit public transportation because the residents believe that it would bring in "undesirables". They also have a highly regarded school system... Turns out that is only the case as long as you don't have any special needs.

servo_sausage 3mo ago

Because a transit method that follows a fixed route, on a schedule, is inherently worse than an on demand one; unless you can separate the traffic.

alooPotato 3mo ago
I think we should let autonomous, shared EVs use bus lanes (just like how some cities let taxis use them). They are just so good for society.
trymas 3mo ago
But I don't get the Waymo "solution" in this thread. Genuinely and not trolling. Where I live we have non-autonomous car-sharing (that I barely use). Patterns are always the same in the morning all cars go from suburbs/"sleeping" districts to downtown. In the evening all cars go from downtown back to outskirts. My point is - I don't see any improvement by Waymo here apart from marginal efficiency gains. Every morning in city outskirts/suburbs at the same time a lot of people go downtown that refuse to ride-share (hence autonomous taxi, not a bus/tram/metro), every evening - the opposite happens. If 80% of white collar workers go to office at 9AM and rent all Waymos - then if I go from suburb at 9.30AM , there are no Waymos in my area, I will need to wait until they come back from downtown until 10-11AM. Where's the efficiency? Everyone is going to same locality at the same time and demand private chariot. Everybody needs to get a private Waymo - same as private car. With american car-brain being prelevant - I don't believe those suburbanites will gladly give away their private cars to Waymo subscription instead.
- servo_sausage 3mo ago
  Because people are not nearly as rigid about a 9-5 as you are imagining in aggregate; enough people commute off hours to increase the number of round trips per car significantly. Even in an office, there are plenty of people doing a 10-6, or an 8-3 then the school run... That's before you consider that many people are not office workers only going between the burbs and the city...
  - trymas 3mo ago
    Fair and I concur. Though still, I wonder, what gains could be from such model (car sharing instead of cars or public transit)? As far as I understand this model must support (with some room) demand at peak. So how many times less cars would be on the road then? How many streets and parking areas could be returned to people as pedestrian/recreation areas. How would that compare with proper public transport setup in terms of land use, cost, environment impact. I don't think it would be that much, because I cannot imagine such car sharing model working in places like London, Tokyo or other big developed cities.
bluGill 3mo ago
This is false. A fixed route is predictable. You know when it will be there and can plan for it. Non fixed routes mean you cannot be sure when your ride will arrive and thus cannot be sure you will arrive on time. That makes the fixed route better than a flexible route. Sure the flexible route is faster in the best case. However it is unpredictable and people have deadlines of when they can arrive: a flexible route cannot meet those consistently enough.
- Grombobulous 3mo ago
  Bus routes can be fixed in the sense that they can stay in place for decades. Even simple things like paint, signs, and shelters provide psychological permanence. Things like WalkScore show up on real estate listings as a value add.
  - bluGill 3mo ago
    You don't even need that. Just seeing the bus go by "all the time" provides permanence. Really it is better, I've seen plenty of paint/signs/shelters, but when I bothered to look the bus only came rarely. When I moved someplace where I saw buses all the time I realized I could use them even though there was no paint/sign/shelter close to where I got on.

missedthecue 3mo ago

the simple fact of the matter is the Waymo is a better public transport solution for Dallas than the bus. The bus doesn't work very well in endless cul-de-sac suburbia, and that's what the Dallas/Fort Worth area (and indeed most of America) is. Like, you have to understand that most of Dallas isn't even commuting into downtown Dallas every day to work. They are just commuting to other suburbs and then back to their suburb. If your public transport solution is step 1. nuke the place and start over, it's not really a solution.

Teever 3mo ago
What if the public transport solution involved policies like taxing the existing suburbs in a way that ensures a break-even on infrastructure upkeep and operating costs so that the people who live in them aren't unfairly pushing costs onto other people in society? We could go a step further and tax automobiles in such a way that they covers the negative externalizes that their use results in so that again, the users of them don't unfairly burden others with the cost of their choices? The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas as well as things like high speed rail to connect those regions allowing the people who chose to live in those areas an easier and cheaper day to day life as well as the access to distant cities and all the economic opportunity that this encourages both in the destinations and in the economic corridors that arise along them? Places like the US and Canada may be able to stave it off a bit longer because of relatively open immigration policies but the demographic collapse is coming. That means that cities are going to start fighting to attract a dwindling pool of people and cities with less debt, be it financial or infrastructure will fare better than those that have suffered under decades of perpetual growth mindset based policy making. Many suburbs are a rot on a city's finances and will inevitably need to be amputated. The sooner the better I say.
- missedthecue 3mo ago
  From a municipal finance perspective, most Dallas-Fort Worth suburban municipalities are far and away outperforming urban Dallas (the City of Dallas proper). That's not opinion, you can see the finances as they are all public. Ask the LLM of your choice to make research easy. I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities where dense american urban centers are overflowing with revenues. The opposite is the case almost everywhere you look. Or that suburbs are only surviving by pushing costs unfairly onto cities. Most suburbs (in the case of Dallas being plano, irving, frisco, southlake/westlake) are self governing municipalities with their own school districts, police, city management, and credit ratings. Sometimes people say it's just that suburbs are new and have yet to pay the piper, but even in america's (and Dallas') oldest suburbs, many of which have replaced/renovated infra several times over at this point, they are indeed stronger financially than the urban centers they surround.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

CalRobert 3mo ago

I agree with you and hate car centric development, and yet, if this idea gets low or no parking housing built, it could be worth considering.

bwhiting2356 3mo ago

waymos don't remove lanes of traffic, they remove parked cars and parking infrastructure, which is still pretty huge. In many suburbs, parking is the real bottleneck not traffic.

Grombobulous 3mo ago
Taxis and rideshares are actually proven to make traffic worse. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/car-industry/uber-lyft-traffic-congestion-car-ownership-study/ https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/car-industry/uber-lyft-traffic...
FromHoiPolloi 3mo ago
They still have to park somewhere... And the service (Waymo or a future competitor) that has it's cars closer will win more customers or can charge higher fees for faster service. The parking infrastructure might move a bit. But it won't disappear. I'd wager it'll even increase.

anuptalwalkar 3mo ago

This is a simple conversation involving ‘what abouts’ and divert your attention to delay public transit build. In the end you waste long enough time to defend it to delay investments in affordable housing and public transit, both. You then funnel that money into road construction and fuel subsidies.

pid-1 3mo ago

You can even buy some paint and build dedicated bus lanes. Some alien technology shit.

infecto 3mo ago

If you have to say “with respect” don’t say it at all. You can share your ideas without calling names. A bus would simply never work. Busses, trains and other modes of group transport or hard or near impossible to get right in a sprawling suburban metro. It would be amazing if it was possible but folks are going to work in so many directions (there is not a single workplace hub) and after work they may be going to an entirely different location for dinner. I think it would be incredibly hard to get that problem right and you would still be fighting an uphill battle that people don’t like to take the public bus.

Grombobulous 3mo ago
Then why does public transit work in other countries with suburbs? Obligatory repost of this video about small towns and cities in the Netherlands being easily accessible by public transit and cycling: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg I will also point out that a large proportion of suburbs in the US are comparatively brand new developments. While we might not be able to retrofit existing developments, fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented.
- infecto 3mo ago
  Transit going to where. That’s the problem, you could build a new development that is transit oriented but where is it going? The average person in Texas does not want to transfer busses. Your comparison to Netherlands is rough because you are talking about a country that has a fairly mild climate and older cities that generally have density and not much sprawl. I don’t comprehend these examples. Also those cities are incredibly tiny with probably a concentration of employment. Keep in mind the Netherlands is about 115 miles wide and maybe 180 north/south diagonally. That’s roughly the size of the Dallas metro area. Someone who lives in Arlington might commute to downtown Dallas, an office building in Plano or downtown Fort Worth. You multiply that by millions of people and it becomes a very hard problem that a typical city bus cannot handle. Now I do think there is probably opportunity for a Waymo like solution with 10 seats that could do driverless ride sharing but I don’t see how a city can build a bus system that works, people don’t want to take a bus unless it has zero transfers. The last mile problem is incredibly hard and places like Texas are hot. I asking through a strip mall parking lot is further than most of the cities in the Netherlands in that video.

lesuorac 3mo ago

> That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations. We did that though! It's just so much more profitable to sell of the real estate and then let the government run the rails at a loss. Ex. Penn Station's real estate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%80%931963)#Demolition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%... I suspect this will only work in the US if the "rail company" is actually public. - https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod - https://www.wmata.com/business/real-estate-and-development.html https://www.wmata.com/business/real-estate-and-development.h...

joquarky 3mo ago

Coppell (a suburb of Dallas) will not permit public transportation because the residents believe that it would bring in "undesirables". They also have a highly regarded school system... Turns out that is only the case as long as you don't have any special needs.