6 ms·

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 s

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.
  - Teever 3mo ago
    I think you're sort of missing my point. After decades of ignored negative externalities from unchecked suburban growth and car-culture are coming to an end. As populations decline and temperatures increase places like Dallas and the wealthy suburbs around it that you mention will have less and less relevance. There isn't going to be a future where the citizens of suburban Dallas are enjoying Starbucks coffee in single-serving cups delivered to them in Waymo vehicles. It isn't viable to just paper over unsustainable nature of these places with self driving cars and ignore urban environments and mass public transit as the comment that started this thread suggested. The only places that are going to survive what is coming are ones that are dense, well managed, and sustainable.
    - galangalalgol 3mo ago
      The climate part is certainly an issue for dfw, but the superiority of dense urban areas from a financial or ecological standpoint isn't backed by data. Buses were better for fuel efficiency, but now the bus and robotaxi are both ev, the robotaxi has a smaller impact ecologically due to microplastics scaling with axle weight ^4 and financially because road wear scales with axle weight ^3. If buses and trash trucks didn't drive on streets they would last virtually forever the way they are built now. While the glorious excesses of the last 75yrs are definitely going away, the suburbs may very well not. Urban cores might instead rot in infrastructure until only the highways between them with low density adjacent settlements remain.
    - wj 3mo ago
      What is the timeline you expect for this?
    - DeathArrow 3mo ago
      What about the problems negative externalities from unchecked crowding and bus culture? Like overcrowding, sky high prices for housing, very high prices for everything, broken infrastructure that is to expensive to fix and over capacity?
  - airza 3mo ago
    The finances of these metros rarely incorporate road costs; their accounting does not require them to incorporate the future liability for infrastructure maintenance and so everything looks good until they need to redo the roads.
- DeathArrow 3mo ago
  >so that the people who live in them aren't unfairly pushing costs onto other people in society >The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas So you still want to tax some people to subsidize other people. Why?
yreg 3mo ago
Why is a bus not fit for endless culdesac suburbia where people are commuting between the suburbs instead of to the downtown? I really don't get it. Pretty much everywhere outside of US buses work no matter the city layout. Just add some stops and run some buses.
- missedthecue 3mo ago
  because you can't fill the buses! 1. Cul-de-sacs and surburbia lack through-streets. So it forces heavy long buses to navigate winding narrow loops. This makes your routing complex and slow. 2. When commuters travel suburb-to-suburb instead of hub-and-spoke downtown, origin-destination pairs are too scattered to support fixed routes with meaningful frequency. 3. Low passenger volume per mile makes fixed-route bus operations financially unsustainable. 4. Disconnected street networks and long setbacks force residents to drive just to reach a bus stop. Like seriously pull up google maps. There are a million suburbs in the greater DFW area where you need to walk 15 minutes just to get out of your neighborhood to the nearest main road where a bus stop would be placed. When it's a thirty minute round trip of walking, (not to mention what the walking situation looks like at your destination), and you throw in stopping at every bus stop on the route, every commute takes several hours instead of 20-30 minutes driving.
  - yreg 3mo ago
    1. I promise you that a bus can get through winding narrow loops just fine. All medieval old towns are like that. 2. You either create loops or hubs where people transfer. The hub can be just a regular bus stop where lines meet. 3. Looking up the density of Dallas suburbs I can tell you that buses can work well in far less dense places. 4. The math doesn't add up, if you can get somewhere by car in 20 - 30mins driving then even with 15 minute walk on either side the bus will take you there in less than 'hours'. And walking 15 minutes to the bus stop is not the end of the world. There would also be plenty of people living/working closer to the stop. From your original comment I got the idea that you think buses need to be these massive heavy vehicles, but that's not really the case either. I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats. I don't think they were actually much bigger than american pickups. But I think a regular bus would work alright.
FromHoiPolloi 3mo ago
No, it's not. It's a car for hire. Problems created by car-dependency will not be solved by adding more/cheaper cars.
soco 3mo ago
"If I had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse." Henry Ford, about the resistance to a paradigm change.
- jeltz 3mo ago
  So you are pro-bus? Because Waymo is the faster horse for someone in Dallas while a working public transit would be the paradigm shift.
  - bluGill 2mo ago
    For the average person in Dallas the car they already own is faster than waymo: it is sitting in their driveway where they left it (or in the parking spot where they left it - while cars are stolen that is rare enough to ignore). They don't need to summon it and wait for it to show up - which saves a lot of time. Those who drive used cars (which is most people) the car is cheaper than waymo as well. My impression is Waymo is used as taxi replacements: people who normally take transit but there is one trip that it won't work for; or travelers who don't live there and don't want to rent a car; or people who plan to drink. They make perfect sense to anyone in Dallas for these reasons. However nobody is planning on giving up their own car and it doesn't make sense for them to do that. Working transit would be a paradigm shift of course.
cucumber3732842 3mo ago
> (and indeed most of America) Cookie cutter developments where each street is a culdesac or horseshoe with it's own HOA is the only economically sane way to any serious volume of detached single or multi unit detached housing development thanks to federal environmental regulation. Who screeches bloody murder at even the mere hint of making some adjustments there? Why nearly the same people who complain about the current copypasta suburban sprawl paradigm of course.
- irowe 3mo ago
  Can you explain how environmental regulations induce that housing style? I struggle to see the connection
  - cucumber3732842 3mo ago
    Basically every rule that tries to piecemeal outlaw the concrete jungle (muh setbacks, muh maximum impermeable area percentage, and so on) winds up introducing sprawl because you wind up wasting site plan space on whatever it is in your context.
    - staticman2 2mo ago
      I'm pretty sure you are confusing your state's zoning laws with federal environmental regulations.
fireflash38 3mo ago
I find it a rather offensive that the suburbs don't have walking/bike path cut-throughs. They're cheap. They can cut down on non-car travel by a ton. They're just damn nice.
- allturtles 3mo ago
  Some do. It all comes down to whether the local government cares/thinks about this when setting up ordinances and approving PUDs. I was also appalled when I moved from a place that did this to one that didn't. There were so many obvious opportunities to improve connectivity with a few hundred square feet of easement.
toasty228 3mo ago
They made it work in hong kong with buses/minibuses... it can work everywhere, as long as you try it a tiny bit. But no let's send billions to private company to add more 2500+ kg of metal that displace a single 70kg meatbag, such a waste of resources and energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus
- infecto 3mo ago
  Is it not simply a density problem? HK is a very different beast or any other major dense urban area. Dallas is a sprawling with an urban communities and office buildings.
- gilbetron 3mo ago
  Hong Kong is around 5x the density of Dallas.
  - toasty228 2mo ago
    So what? One day the excuse is "it's too small", the next "it's too dense", the next "it's too large", meanwhile the 200 hab village next to mine in Poland has better bus coverage than the uni I attended in Los Angeles
FromHoiPolloi 2mo ago
You don't have to nuke anything. Every street is fixed/rebuild from time to time (30-40 years). The steps to follow are: 1) Allow mixed use zones. 2) Update the specs how the roads/streets are supposed to look like. After that, grab a pint and watch how your neighborhood transforms.

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.
- Teever 3mo ago
  I think you're sort of missing my point. After decades of ignored negative externalities from unchecked suburban growth and car-culture are coming to an end. As populations decline and temperatures increase places like Dallas and the wealthy suburbs around it that you mention will have less and less relevance. There isn't going to be a future where the citizens of suburban Dallas are enjoying Starbucks coffee in single-serving cups delivered to them in Waymo vehicles. It isn't viable to just paper over unsustainable nature of these places with self driving cars and ignore urban environments and mass public transit as the comment that started this thread suggested. The only places that are going to survive what is coming are ones that are dense, well managed, and sustainable.
  - galangalalgol 3mo ago
    The climate part is certainly an issue for dfw, but the superiority of dense urban areas from a financial or ecological standpoint isn't backed by data. Buses were better for fuel efficiency, but now the bus and robotaxi are both ev, the robotaxi has a smaller impact ecologically due to microplastics scaling with axle weight ^4 and financially because road wear scales with axle weight ^3. If buses and trash trucks didn't drive on streets they would last virtually forever the way they are built now. While the glorious excesses of the last 75yrs are definitely going away, the suburbs may very well not. Urban cores might instead rot in infrastructure until only the highways between them with low density adjacent settlements remain.
  - wj 3mo ago
    What is the timeline you expect for this?
  - DeathArrow 3mo ago
    What about the problems negative externalities from unchecked crowding and bus culture? Like overcrowding, sky high prices for housing, very high prices for everything, broken infrastructure that is to expensive to fix and over capacity?
- airza 3mo ago
  The finances of these metros rarely incorporate road costs; their accounting does not require them to incorporate the future liability for infrastructure maintenance and so everything looks good until they need to redo the roads.
DeathArrow 3mo ago
>so that the people who live in them aren't unfairly pushing costs onto other people in society >The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas So you still want to tax some people to subsidize other people. Why?

yreg 3mo ago

Why is a bus not fit for endless culdesac suburbia where people are commuting between the suburbs instead of to the downtown? I really don't get it. Pretty much everywhere outside of US buses work no matter the city layout. Just add some stops and run some buses.

missedthecue 3mo ago
because you can't fill the buses! 1. Cul-de-sacs and surburbia lack through-streets. So it forces heavy long buses to navigate winding narrow loops. This makes your routing complex and slow. 2. When commuters travel suburb-to-suburb instead of hub-and-spoke downtown, origin-destination pairs are too scattered to support fixed routes with meaningful frequency. 3. Low passenger volume per mile makes fixed-route bus operations financially unsustainable. 4. Disconnected street networks and long setbacks force residents to drive just to reach a bus stop. Like seriously pull up google maps. There are a million suburbs in the greater DFW area where you need to walk 15 minutes just to get out of your neighborhood to the nearest main road where a bus stop would be placed. When it's a thirty minute round trip of walking, (not to mention what the walking situation looks like at your destination), and you throw in stopping at every bus stop on the route, every commute takes several hours instead of 20-30 minutes driving.
- yreg 3mo ago
  1. I promise you that a bus can get through winding narrow loops just fine. All medieval old towns are like that. 2. You either create loops or hubs where people transfer. The hub can be just a regular bus stop where lines meet. 3. Looking up the density of Dallas suburbs I can tell you that buses can work well in far less dense places. 4. The math doesn't add up, if you can get somewhere by car in 20 - 30mins driving then even with 15 minute walk on either side the bus will take you there in less than 'hours'. And walking 15 minutes to the bus stop is not the end of the world. There would also be plenty of people living/working closer to the stop. From your original comment I got the idea that you think buses need to be these massive heavy vehicles, but that's not really the case either. I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats. I don't think they were actually much bigger than american pickups. But I think a regular bus would work alright.

FromHoiPolloi 3mo ago

No, it's not. It's a car for hire. Problems created by car-dependency will not be solved by adding more/cheaper cars.

soco 3mo ago

"If I had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse." Henry Ford, about the resistance to a paradigm change.

jeltz 3mo ago
So you are pro-bus? Because Waymo is the faster horse for someone in Dallas while a working public transit would be the paradigm shift.
- bluGill 2mo ago
  For the average person in Dallas the car they already own is faster than waymo: it is sitting in their driveway where they left it (or in the parking spot where they left it - while cars are stolen that is rare enough to ignore). They don't need to summon it and wait for it to show up - which saves a lot of time. Those who drive used cars (which is most people) the car is cheaper than waymo as well. My impression is Waymo is used as taxi replacements: people who normally take transit but there is one trip that it won't work for; or travelers who don't live there and don't want to rent a car; or people who plan to drink. They make perfect sense to anyone in Dallas for these reasons. However nobody is planning on giving up their own car and it doesn't make sense for them to do that. Working transit would be a paradigm shift of course.

cucumber3732842 3mo ago

> (and indeed most of America) Cookie cutter developments where each street is a culdesac or horseshoe with it's own HOA is the only economically sane way to any serious volume of detached single or multi unit detached housing development thanks to federal environmental regulation. Who screeches bloody murder at even the mere hint of making some adjustments there? Why nearly the same people who complain about the current copypasta suburban sprawl paradigm of course.

irowe 3mo ago
Can you explain how environmental regulations induce that housing style? I struggle to see the connection
- cucumber3732842 3mo ago
  Basically every rule that tries to piecemeal outlaw the concrete jungle (muh setbacks, muh maximum impermeable area percentage, and so on) winds up introducing sprawl because you wind up wasting site plan space on whatever it is in your context.
  - staticman2 2mo ago
    I'm pretty sure you are confusing your state's zoning laws with federal environmental regulations.

fireflash38 3mo ago

I find it a rather offensive that the suburbs don't have walking/bike path cut-throughs. They're cheap. They can cut down on non-car travel by a ton. They're just damn nice.

allturtles 3mo ago
Some do. It all comes down to whether the local government cares/thinks about this when setting up ordinances and approving PUDs. I was also appalled when I moved from a place that did this to one that didn't. There were so many obvious opportunities to improve connectivity with a few hundred square feet of easement.

toasty228 3mo ago

They made it work in hong kong with buses/minibuses... it can work everywhere, as long as you try it a tiny bit. But no let's send billions to private company to add more 2500+ kg of metal that displace a single 70kg meatbag, such a waste of resources and energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus

infecto 3mo ago
Is it not simply a density problem? HK is a very different beast or any other major dense urban area. Dallas is a sprawling with an urban communities and office buildings.
gilbetron 3mo ago
Hong Kong is around 5x the density of Dallas.
- toasty228 2mo ago
  So what? One day the excuse is "it's too small", the next "it's too dense", the next "it's too large", meanwhile the 200 hab village next to mine in Poland has better bus coverage than the uni I attended in Los Angeles

FromHoiPolloi 2mo ago

You don't have to nuke anything. Every street is fixed/rebuild from time to time (30-40 years). The steps to follow are: 1) Allow mixed use zones. 2) Update the specs how the roads/streets are supposed to look like. After that, grab a pint and watch how your neighborhood transforms.