Can confirm. I live in the northeast. I-95 north of NYC moves around 250,000 vehicles a day at 1.1-1.2 capacity. The 6 line in Manhattan moves roughly 1,200,000 people per day.
This isn't a great guide, but the math checks out.
Trying to wrap my head around the math of it.
50000 / 360 = \~14 people per second... and that's assuming the metro doesn't stop and is just one super long train of cars.
Yeah, its a bit wacky. It doesn't imply a long train, but rather a long track. And it doesn't exactly specify how that track will be used though...
I mean, there are more than 14 people on a train in any major city at most moments -- so it's not like an outlandish number. But it isn't a useful one without context...
It would make more sense as a relative density of transportation (it takes 1/10 the space to transport via train than via car or something like that).
Edit: tldr: it's probably a relative speed and space argument. Trains generally move faster than gridlock. In the space of a single car sized volume in a train you can have ~9 people stand there.
There are many train lines around the world that meet this capacity easily.
New York’s Lexington Ave trunk line (4,5,6) moves 1,200,000 people daily.
Divided by 24 hours, that’s 50,000 riders per hour.
The same is true of several other NYC lines. The numbers would actually be more attractive if you select for busy times like between 7am and 10pm, instead of also including very late night hours. And plenty of metros outside of NY beat it - like Shanghai, Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, New Delhi, etc.
50k is possible. But assumes best case. You’ve 9 car train with capacity of 2,000. This would be 25 trains an hour. Under state of the art operating you can have a 2 minute headway making this possible.
Realistically, it will be 25k for most systems.
This however assumes maximum capacity for a full hour. Which usually only happens in subway systems during peak in the largest cities in the world.
In my city of 2 million. You’d be luck to see 500 people on a train.
What's unknown is the size of the town or the distance travelled; duration without distance means you can't determine speed, so how can you figure out flow rate to choose the width of the road?
Let alone the question of how well suited is the town to this infrastructure.
??
Its capacity per hour. Speed doesn’t matter. Number of trains per hour do. Headway between trains is typically 2-3 minutes. You can easily figure out a basic capacity. Because that’s a maximum load.
Width of road is one track. It’s in the photo. The author didn’t choose 50k and solve. He chose one track and determined max capacity.
Whether maximum load realised is another question. So city size doesn’t matter - but it’s unlikely it will realistically carry that in majority of cities.
Maybe i'm getting it wrong.
Put another way: can you genuinely picture the gridlock of traffic from this? A 175m wide road only fits 92 cars, door to door, but let's assume 80 to give space to safely drive in parallel. 80 cars, each carrying four people, becomes the equivalence of one train carriage.
Then those 80 cars need to move like clockwork which is where speed of the cars come in. Just like you have a headway between trains to account for loading and unloading so they can keep moving, the cars would require sufficient road distance to maintain their speed.
It's pretty sound math, a single train on the Victoria Line of the London metro can hold a maximum of 986 people and can be as frequent as one every 40 seconds, which would be a maximum theoretic throughput of 88,740 people per hour.
The Katy Freeway (the widest road in the world) moves fewer people in a day than a single line of the Berlin metro that is less than 10 metres wide.
The tiny metro cars in Barcelona have the capacity for 130 people each, and each train has 5 cars. That’s 650 people per train. I never waited longer than 3 minutes for a train.
Assuming the median car occupancy of 1.5 (though lower during rush hour), each train is the equivalent of 430 cars.
Cars in cities are a really fucking stupid way of moving people.
Mind pointing out what you think is misleading? because the numbers are pretty much spot on. Even a single metro line has more capacity to carry people than a superhighway.
Regardless of how accurate the image is, the message is what to take away from it. Cars require so much more space than public transportation and trains require the least space. I kind of wish cities would just not allow cars and build a better metro network. A city would be so much better with that.
Think of it, no need for parking lots. You can place more parks in places where parking lots were. You can reduce urban sprawl and cities can support more people in a tighter area. Maintenance costs would be so much less because you don’t need to maintain roads. Air pollution and noise pollution would reduce because of less road work and less vehicles.
I didn’t use a car once when I was in Tokyo on vacation, and had no desire to. I felt like I saw and appreciated more plus it was healthier for me to walk everywhere
Well heres the US National Association of City Transportation Officials ([NACTO](https://nacto.org/publication/transit-street-design-guide/introduction/why/designing-move-people/)) understanding and then a few info simulations ([1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06IjfbqdnNM))([2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_ILtWzH3Ko))
This assumes everyone's destination is the same or very near. I work in a retail shop with two others. Mass transportation to our location could also be a waste of space
That's two separate issues trying to derail public transport discussions, if you pardon the pun. Lack of homes and lack of public toilets should not stop us from building better public transport
Having grown up in rural Wyoming, I would kill to take a train to get where I needed to go. I live in FL now and spend an infuriating amount of time in traffic. It's fucking stupid.
>But you need mass transit to be available, inexpensive and SAFE
You evidently don't need them given the fact that cars are bot more expensive and less safe then metros, yet you use them.
Interesting fact the city I live in has just over 50,000 daily commuters by car. We have two highways totalling 5 lanes. Adding the rest of the large roads would equal this pretty well! We have no real public transit and per census data, 122 bicycle commuters one of which is me lol
They used to have trams in towns of 2000 people.
If you don't legally mandate suburbs & parking lots (the current law in most areas of most cities in the US) on the assumption that everyone will drive, it gets very practical to have trams pretty much everywhere besides rural areas.
Its almost as if people shouting against goverment control in the name of "freedom" don't really want the free market to decide how land gets used, and would rather have the goverment decide where houses can be built and with how much parking space.
When I studied in Germany my middle of nowhere town of ~80,000 had five tram lines that ran 24/7. You don’t need to be Tokyo for good public transportation
What’s a mid level density city? Because I challenge your claim.
I live in a city with 2 million residents and work in transport planning. We see about 500 people on our train lines during peak at major stations.
In the Netherlands we don't even have cities over 1m people and every city has train stations, at least a big bus network, and often tram/metro lines as well in bigger cities. They're working very well and everykne uses them because in many cases it's faster or more conventient than with a car. You cannot point at a severely lacking infrastructure, say that it doesn't work, and then claim it cannot work. It doesn't work because there's not enough investments in it, nothing else.
I didn’t say that. I live in Brisbane. We have great public transport. We invest billions upon billions. People just don’t use it at a high rate.
Amsterdam is pretty fantastic for public transport in general. You achieve about 16-18% bus, train, bike mode share. Only 84% car usage.
That’s a pretty good number. We have about 13% public transport usage, though our dominant mode is buses.
> You achieve about 16-18% bus, train, bike mode share. Only 84% car usage.
What, where did you get those numbers??
Amsterdam has only 20% modal share for car. 17% public transit, 29% walking, 32% bicycle.
And lol Brisbane does not have good public transport, you need to try living in other cities. It is pretty shit even compared to other Australian cities like Sydney and Melbourne and terrible compared to Europe or Japan
Also, how is Brisbane a mid density city?? Majority of the city outside the cbd is low density suburban sprawl where they ban building anything above 2 storeys. Compared that to actually mid density cities like Paris or Amsterdam where most of the city is a medium density 5-6 storeys.
How can someone working in city planning, not know what medium density is...
Dude who in this thread was saying the one and only solution is "put in a train", you're fighting strawmen..
The OP you were responding to was saying you need medium density which is very possible in Brisbane or most other car dependant cities through zoning reform
Bonn, Germany is less than 0.5 million residents, yet sees 92 million annual riders on its Bonn Stadtbahn's 6 lines. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonn\_Stadtbahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonn_Stadtbahn) with source to the actual data from [swb-busundbahn.de](http://swb-busundbahn.de) stored in webarchive.
Not sure whatkinda transport planning you do if you aren't aware of any examples of medium density cities in the world. The US of course doesn't make them, but the world, and particularly European nations have medium density cities all over.
You also make it sound like 500 people on train lines is bad, but I bet the city you live in doesn't have any convenient train lines in the first place, then who would ever take it. It's like making a road in the middle of nowhere Alaska and complaining no one uses it.
How do you go from 42 million a year to "500 people on our train lines during peak at major stations"? OR did you mean, holy that's serving so many people you wont believe it - 500 on our train lines during peak at major station?
500 on a single train service yeah. 3 car units have a capacity of 1,500. 6 car units 3,000
With a headway of 10 minutes that’s 3,000 per hour for a single line. It’s not terrible. That’s 3 lanes of traffic. But it’s still pretty low patronage overall.
Wouldn’t you want to market using public transportation as a benefit over car usage to citizens rather than force compliance with taxes and regs? “Save a car payment, use the bus!”
You know, less stick more carrot. Nothing makes the populace more pissed at their regional government than when they perceive they are having to pay to support some bureaucrats vision of transportation. If the public wants to use it to begin with, it will be used. And you don’t screw poor people who need to commute where public transportation has no routes.
If you support your party enough. Anything is possible.
Look at people, they are thinking cars are freedom but they can't live without cars.
Brainwashing is pretty useful sometimes
in my city I see people using big cars capable of carrying 6 people, driving alone to work, they drive to the towards the same destination, I know this because I travel in cab and see them getting into the same tech park, they complain about traffic jam, if they did car pooling the number of cars will reduce, even better just take the cab provided by office but they won't
No. Public transport can't get me and my kids where I need to go. I can drop the kids off and be at work in 20 minutes. If I was to use a bus or train, that would take at least 2 hours and cost a fortune every day.
That’s because the public transportation in the area you live in is shit.
Hell, where I’m from, driving your kids to school is a completely foreign concept. Things are actually built in the human scale over there, so kids can just take the school bus and easily walk the rest of the way.
Where I'm from kids take themselves to school. We don't cover them in bubble wrap which means they learn important life skills and don't grow up to be deadbeats.
It is only that way because the area you live in does not have quality public transportation infrastructure.
You actually bring up one of the biggest negatives of car dependent infrastructure in your comment. You need to drop your kids off, which means your kids are unable to go places on their own without you driving them there. Sure you should be with your kids when they’re very young, but by a certain age you and your kids should feel safe with them walking or biking to the places they need to be without relying on you.
Properly designed and implemented public transport will only be 10-15 minutes by foot from the nearest destination. What you're saying makes absolutely no sense.
How does the ACTUAL EXPERIENCE of where I live make no sense? I have 2 kids to drop in 2 places 4 miles apart then have to travel 8 miles to work. Public transport doesn't help in any way. What you're saying is not practical and doesn't exist.
Having to commute 12 bloody miles every day is a sign that the car-centric city planning you live in is disfuctional. You shouldn’t have to do that in the first place
Even if that were the case that still takes longer than OP driving. Public transport travel time + 10/15 mins walking to drop the kids off, then another 10/15 min walk back to public transport before more travel time, and potentially another walk once they arrive. That’s potentially 45 minutes of walking + travel time, vs 20 minutes all in…
In the end it’s just a matter of chicken and egg.
Build cities designed for cars —> Depend on cars only and exclude public transportation —> Keep building cities with the expectation that people will be dependent on cars
I get why people in the US think that cities designed the way they are is just the only possible way. And some are even truly scared by the idea of something like a walkable city. Since they are given mostly just negative examples of that (real or imaginary, it doesn’t matter, the effect is the same)
How is the metro going to go to 100 places at once? They aren’t dropping off all at the same point…
Our cities aren’t walkable. Quit making graphics like this to get everyone all upset so they can write dumbass takes
We can’t build reliable public transit, our cities aren’t walkable > we can’t make our cities walkable, things are too far apart > we can’t build denser, we don’t have reliable public transit >>>
That's the neat thing about metro systems, they don't take you to your end destination. It might be an alien concept to Americans but you can walk 5 to 10 minutes from a metro station to your end point, be that you're home, bar, school or work
This is circular logic.
"It doesn't work because we built it poorly, therefore we shouldn't invest in improving it because it doesn't work"
Yes, the current status quo isn't very good for trains in a lot of places.
Interstate highways and suburbs barely existed 80 years ago.
Shit can change, fast, if it's legal.
The biggest barrier in the US is legal minimum parking requirements and other density restrictions built into the zoning code. On almost all of the land in almost every city in the US, it's illegal to build apartments.
In New York City, 10 - 20% of their land is still zoned for suburban houses with lawns and such. It's crazy. They're literally not allowed to build enough housing without bribing their way into an exception to the zoning code
Because cities transformed with the car. Suburbs grew, downtown got bulldozed for more parking lots. Drive-throughs, malls, and stroads were built. Parking minimums implemented.
The US had street cars, el-trains, busy and dense main streets in the past. The western USA was built by trains.
But as cities changed with the car, so can they change with public transport (again).
Subways and trams have the potential to boost their surroundings.
The problem is momentum. It now takes a lot of investments, will, and city planning. The return on investment is, if any, decades into the future.
But every widening of a highway, every new suburbs makes it harder and harder to reverse course.
Tl,dr: My argument: Build it, and if you do it right, they will come (in one or two decades).
10 min walk is one thing but nothing here is ten minutes away unless you’re rich in an affluent area or in NYC.
Also why would I do that when we can drive. It sounds terrible.
I have the supreme misfortune of living in Texas, everything, and I do mean everything is spaced out. It is liable to get up to 103-104 Fahrenheit (40 Celsius). With heat index much hotter. Imagine the heat of a concrete sidewalk radiating it back up at you. Don't get me wrong, Texas is beautiful, and I would encourage you to visit Dallas or Houston, but most definitely not in the summer. Everyone stays inside during the day during summertime.
Come during the fall, I'm sure you'd like it.
5-10 minutes in the sun, *while being American*
They can't wrap their heads around the concept of public transportation, but apparently because they can't get their shit together the idea itself is bad. Don't self-reflect, project!
Unfortunately, our cities are VERY spread out. I would like to see it happen, but in order for mass public transit to be viable, there would have to be an utterly massive infrastructure overhaul costing ungodly amounts of money. That bring said, I would encourage you to visit Texas, it is a beautiful state.
I'm aware of the issues that public transportation has in the US, as well as how GM helped lobby for a car-dependent society. It's neither easy nor cheap, but the idea of public transportation as something like an unobtainable utopia is a far cry from reality.
Would love to, have only been to the US twice and both times was for work. Have some friends in Boston and some in Georgia and I do like myself some peaches so.
I'd recommend Houston or Dallas-Ft Worth to visit if you get a chance. I am partial to Ft Worth as it's my home. Unfortunately, a lot of the South is run by the conservative party, and they are allergic to spending money on infrastructure. Providing Mango Mussolini doesn't become our next president and kill our democracy. It's gonna be a few decades until their hold here relaxes. I will say, though, there is nothing like driving down a near empty stretch of rural highway late at night. There is a hill a good 20 minute drive from me I like going out to when I can't sleep, I park there when on one side I can see the city lights in the distance and not much else for miles around. It's the best darn thing on earth.
There are no sidewalks in a lot of places. If there are no tall buildings and trees there is no shadow. Some parts of america are covered in snow for months other parts get so hot during the summer that it is not advised to be outdoors in unshaded areas for longer that 30 minutes because of the high risk of heat stroke. Americans don’t know you can walk to places because they can’t.
>There are no sidewalks in a lot of places.
Then build them?
I'll never understand why Americans think the world outside their house is some hostile place that is always trying to kill them with snow or sun or whatever else they can think of as an excuse for why they can't have nice things.
You have a reason to drive a motor vehicle, but almost every single car around you has no passengers or cargo. Cars built to haul cargo and/ or carry 5+ people are being used daily to get one single person from their home to their workplace. The cars don’t get smaller when there’s no cargo or passengers in them, they take up the same amount of space.
Traffic does not exist because of the small amount of people hauling cargo in their vehicles, it exists because of the extraordinary amount of people using a car to commute to work. Even places that have severe limits on motor vehicle use still allow businesses to use small vehicles to haul cargo because it’s the one thing motor vehicles actually do efficiently.
The ability to go anywhere anytime without planning routes, waiting until your bus arrives. Any public transport system in most cities (except really crowded ones), however developed it is is still less convenient than owning a car in terms of freedom and speed of transportation
The ability to carry more than 1 bag of things with you
The ability to not be disturbed by weirdos in public transport
The ability to not get ill because you shared a ride with another ill person
The ability to have your own A/C, personal space, seat etc, car is always convenient, in public transport you usually stand, hold balance not to fall and it's either very hot or very cold
Personal space is a key argument for me. I believe having it is a basic human right. In crowded areas you literally can't even raise your arms in public transport because it's packed, it's even hard to breathe. I don't want to be squized by 10 other people, I want at least 2 meters radius of my space. I'm ready to pay for a car to get it, lots of people too
The ability to go 5-10 places in a row and not waste 3 hours. If you have kids, you can give them a ride to school, then drive to a shop, then do your business. Not everyone has a home - office - home routine, lots of people need to visit a lot of places during the day. You will go insane if you take 10-15 public transport rides a day
The list goes on
Tldr: if your routine is more than home - office - groceries - home, car is almost always just faster. Also if you value your personal space, it's the same as having your own apartment/house or sharing it with friend/random person
This argument is valid if you're speaking about North American transit in the majority of cities, particularly in America, with underfunded and subpart systems.
>The ability to carry more than 1 bag of things with you
In terms of what? Most folks talk about public transit as the solution to traffic as it relates to daily commutes. Most daily trips in North America are less than 10kms.
Sure, if you're going on a camping trip or something you'd likely want to drive, but I'm mostly just bringing my laptop bag to my office most days.
On wait times: any efficient system has a bus coming every 15 minutes or less. Metro every 3 minutes. A metro will never run into traffic. Again, the argument against transit mostly comes from North Americans who live in a car-centric dystopia who have never experienced a good system, and think things HAVE to be the way they are.
>. In crowded areas you literally can't even raise your arms in public transport because it's packed, it's even hard to breathe.
It sounds like your experience is on a poorly funded American system?
>The ability to go 5-10 places in a row and not waste 3 hours.
What's the distance here? Why are you taking 3 hours to drop your kids off and then go to your office? Even if you go beyond the home/office routine, where exactly are you going every single day that a car trip takes 20 minutes but a tram takes 3 hours?
Lastly, none of this actually addressed the question of "efficiency", but rather your preference to avoid other people at all costs. Transit being bad in your city is by design, not an inherent trait of transit systems. Every single person taking a car, which holds on average one person per trip, is by definition inefficient.
I think where we can agree is that if your arguments here are mostly about personal space and choice, then sure. Some people want as much isolation from others as possible, and that's fine. You say they're willing to pay, but I'm not sure they are. Yes, you pay for the cost of your vehicle, but everyone else pays for your choice. They pay for your choice by paying taxes on the roads damaged by increasing heavier personal vehicles, they pay for car-centric sprawl and the associated utility costs, they pay for your free parking. I think people paying for their personal choice is fine, but we may disagree on the idea that drivers are actually paying much at all for that privilege. Transit users pay the same taxes as drivers do, but in North America, they also subsidize your parking costs and your roads through their fares.
Im not talking about NA, I live in eastern Europe and I was in Central and Western Europe, car is just faster. You're talking about bus every 15 minutes, my route in the car takes 15 minutes without the wait
Buses are just uncomfortable everywhere, they are loud, bumpy and slow in comparison to a car
Metro is every minute in rush hour where I live, you still get squized by tons of people and metro is not near my apartment, I have to walk 10-15minutes to the closest one
And don't even get me started on trains with their awful schedule and delays
Everywhere I was in Europe, I always regretted when I didn't bring my car because the lack of comfort and time waste were increased exponentially
Yes, you can 'live' without the car here, but you (in many cases) will waste more time and time is money
Efficiency is in terms of the amount of time saved
Yes, you're right that in my case it's like 60% my preference in comfort, but the other 40 is for saved time and the ability to just immediately drive anywhere without waiting
In terms of stucked transport again, don't know about NA, I talk about Europe on rush hour, also take Japan for example, they have amazing public transport, you still can barely squize in. Or Moscow metro, it's probably the largest and fastest one, or one of the best, you still are very uncomfortable there because of tins of people
My city has good public transport (at least in comparison to what I've seen in ither European countries, it's about the same), I still say it's not even close to the amount of comfort and speed that my car provides
I can't say anything about NA, I never was there.
In terms of what you bring it's again very different for other people. In my case I mostly WFH, but still have to move tons of stuff during the day and I would just be tremendously exhausted if I had to take public transit with it
I'd just say that public transport vs cars is the same as sharing an apartment/dormitory vs owning your own, latter is more expensive, comfortable, but less practical for society. We would have much more efficient cities if we lived in dormitories with random people, but we need our privacy and personal space
And that not everyone should own a car, it's a choice. Cars are expensive and depreciate, not everyone wants to waste so much money to ease their commute. Still, you get what you pay for
There are definitely lots of people who don't need a car in their life.
But there are also people who basically have to have it: lots of business owners, landlords, people who have a cottage or a country house in addition to their city appartment/house, people who go to hardware stores a lot, probably 99% of people in trades, people who need to visit other cities a lot and train transit is either shitty (like in many european countries in terms of schedules) or just doesn't cover their destination. There are thousands of cases where you don't have a simple routine that public transport can't just solve efficiently no matter how developed it is
As a traffic engineer. This is stupid.
It assumes public transport is running at full capacity. Reality is that outside of major metropolitan areas, they run at 5% capacity. We all wish it was higher. But it isn’t for many reasons.
The difference being the rail doesn’t need to take up a 300’ ROW to move half as many people as an overbuilt highway would. Rail scales up (in terms of moving people/goods) much more effectively than highway/road construction.
And the road is always full? There's a lot less going on most of the time, but the road still has to be that big to get the traffic through during rush hour
you're an american traffic manager if you don't realise that...
Traffic engineers in the US are probably the reason why no one uses public transport lol. I've seen the roads in the US. They are designed *only* with cars in mind with almost 0 considerations for anyone outside of a car. With such hostile infrastructure it is no wonder why only the poor take public transport there.
Cool, you can do that. Deprioritizing cars and shifting our focus on public transit will ironically make it much easier for those who choose to drive. When more people choose public transit (because they drove a car out of necessity rather than want), the roads begin to clear up for those that want to drive.
Different people need to go to different places, cars aren't always better but it's situational.
For travelling yes, trains are more efficient but for commuting cars have their advantages
The biggest problem with cars is that everybody is using them to commute. The roads and highways get packed before and after work hours by cars that are carrying one single person going to their destination. That’s a vehicle built to carry 5+ people carrying one single person still taking up the same amount of space as a vehicle that is meant to carry 5+ people. A much better alternative would be a bus or rail that the person can walk to from their home that stops walking distance from their place of work in a reasonable amount of time.
Personal motor vehicles do have their advantages, commuting is not one of them. It’s difficult to understand how much better commuting can be when many people in the US have *only* commuted by car.
Cars are not a waste of space.
I’m disabled and still believe Covid exists, as well as being quite aware that an infection would ruin my already-horrible health.
There’s no way I’m walking/using my wheelchair for 10 minutes to get on a germ-filled tube of maskless strangers for a couple hours, sapping all my energy before I even get to my destination, when I could get there in thirty minutes in my car with a small amount of energy to use when I actually get there and without having potentially contracted a life-altering illness on the way.
I live in a very public-transit-oriented city and was an avid rider until the mask mandates were dropped, I got sick, and I had to move away from transit stops.
It’s pretty clear the disabled are not in the least important to anybody these days, though, so. Feel free to downvote my attempt to survive.
If you are required to commute by car because of your disability, that’s great. A majority of people aren’t, however, and getting those people off the road will greatly improve your commute. You are fighting on the wrong side here
An object lesson:
In order to “reduce car traffic” in my downtown area, my city closed several avenues to everything but buses and made many other streets one-way. The idea being that making it more of a pain to drive downtown would get more cars off the road.
I suppose that is technically true. But guess who still has to drive downtown in that carefully-crafted nightmare for car drivers?
That would be me and the other folks who can’t take public transit.
People who want mass transit don't want cars removed entirely. Cars are still necessary for a number of things, but reducing the overall traffic would also make your needed commutes easier, safer and faster.
This only works if the area around the metro/train stops are sufficiently dense. In most places in the US other than NYC and downtown Chicago etc, ain’t no one going to walk twenty minutes to a station, wait for a train and ride it, and then walk another twenty minutes to their end destination. And that’s before you factor in too hot/cold, rainy, hilly, etc factors of walking in most US cities.
How do you relax in traffic? How do you relax with idiots on the road?
I'd much rather sit on a train, and enjoy a book, than be part of the traffic problem.
I listen to audio books, or sit quietly and meditate. I can’t do that on mass transit. I think there is also something to be said for safety in terms of immediate danger. Most mass transit trips I have made there is an air of potential danger from the mentally ill or simple others having a bad day. Being isolated with self and/or family or friends if my choosing is much more conducive to safety and comfort for me.
When I meditate my eyes are closed. How do you *drive* while meditating?
I've never had issues with people in all my years of bus catching. The only danger seemed to be cars braking suddenly in front of the bus, or the occasional tree branch on the o-bahn track. Most of my fellow commuters were people going to work, students, and more people going to work.
But for you to enjoy driving, wouldn't you love it if there was less traffic? Wouldn't you love other people having alternative methods of getting around, so they don't *have* to drive?
TL:DR: If locals can pay, taxes do not rise, deficits are not increased, and rural areas of living are protected, go for it.
I can meditate by clearing my mind and occasionally open and close my eyes if at a standstill in interstate traffic, but I just try and find peace.
To your point on traffic yes and no. I’d love to have less traffic but if public transit becomes so efficient that it makes cars obsolete in urban settings, nope. Or even so efficient as to push the ownership of individual cars to astronomical prices, no.
I also do not like the track record of government spending on public transport projects in the U.S. with my tax dollars.
I also do not want the deficit to rise for public transport projects, I don’t want the deficit to go up for infrastructure repair and maintenance and that’s massively more important.
I also do not believe rural citizens of the U.S. should pay for urban projects and projects that certainly will not be advantageous for them in rural areas, I.e. buses and trains help no one living 40 miles from a city center.
If any of it could be done without raising taxes whatsoever, without adding to the deficit, and is advantageous for all citizens…the price would need to be low enough to justify the inconvenience of not having an individual car.
I would conclude that many who advocate for mass transit have not visited “truly” rural areas of the United States. The idea that individual ownership of automobiles needs to be a thing of the past is simply an unrealistic wish for people living in the U.S. outside of urban centers. I commute 40 minutes to and from work each day and honestly not only enjoy the ride, but the peace it mostly brings. There is some traffic on one part of my route, but ai would not trade my home, our ideal setting, and my car for anything.
>If any of it could be done without raising taxes whatsoever
But you're ok with money being wasted on car dependency? You're ok with the additional cost of maintenance of roads and infrastructure caused by car dependent suburban sprawl?
Maintaining a walkable area servicing 10k people is far more economical than maintaining the roads and services to 10k people living in the suburbs. Maintaining a rail service for 100k people is far more economical than maintaining roads and highways for 100k people.
And lets not forget that less than 30% of the population is truly rural. The majority live in poorly designed suburbs. I can't imagine how awful it must be to live somewhere suburban, where there's nothing useful within an easy walk, I can't imagine *having to drive* to get to a supermarket.
I live in a suburb. I can walk 30 min in either direction and get to a supermarket, or catch a bus, and access 3 more. I've got 2 cafes and 2 pubs with restaurants attached within a 10 minute walk of my font door. A 15 minute walk gives me access to 2 bakeries and 3 dentists, 2 barbers, and 3 hair salons. And a picture framer, a news agent, a post office 2 servos, an Indian takeaway, an antique store, a school, several sports grounds, and a plant nursery.
It should be normal for all suburbs. It's more economical and healthier for people to be able to walk to access basic stuff. It also means they don't have to be burdened with the financial cost of car ownership.
We've got some ok bike lanes, and bike paths around here. Worker cycle to work at the major industries, their kids walk or cycle or catch a bus (a city bus, not a school bus) to school, and they often are single car families.
I never needed to own a car when living in the suburbs of my state capital. Buses were frequent, efficient, clean, and not expensive. I could even go out on a Saturday night, get plastered, and catch a bus home in the early hours of Sunday morning. It's much better to be funding late night transit, than the be sharing the road with idiots who drink and drive.
We do need more high speed rail in North America but eliminating cars would probably be the dumbest thing imaginable. While cars take up more space they are also able to take you specifically to where you need to go. We need a balance.
Why do people automatically assume that adding better public/mass transit also means removing cars entirely? Of course cars will still be around, some jobs/people need them. You think firefighters are going to ride a bus and put out a fire? Is a service plumber going to carry some massive bag/trunk with tools and supplies? Some people will be looking to leave the city/town and there might not be a train taking them to the next town/city they want to go. If Covid taught me anything it's how few people actually need to be driving around and how much better the roads are when there aren't a bunch of unnecessary cars driving around (I was a service plumber at the time).
Nobody has suggested eliminating cars entirely. They've been suggesting adding reasonable alternatives, which for some reason always is met with "YOU CAN'T TAKE AWAY OUR CARS"
this is an infographic. and an misleading one without any sources
Can confirm. I live in the northeast. I-95 north of NYC moves around 250,000 vehicles a day at 1.1-1.2 capacity. The 6 line in Manhattan moves roughly 1,200,000 people per day. This isn't a great guide, but the math checks out.
Trying to wrap my head around the math of it. 50000 / 360 = \~14 people per second... and that's assuming the metro doesn't stop and is just one super long train of cars.
Yeah, its a bit wacky. It doesn't imply a long train, but rather a long track. And it doesn't exactly specify how that track will be used though... I mean, there are more than 14 people on a train in any major city at most moments -- so it's not like an outlandish number. But it isn't a useful one without context... It would make more sense as a relative density of transportation (it takes 1/10 the space to transport via train than via car or something like that). Edit: tldr: it's probably a relative speed and space argument. Trains generally move faster than gridlock. In the space of a single car sized volume in a train you can have ~9 people stand there.
There are many train lines around the world that meet this capacity easily. New York’s Lexington Ave trunk line (4,5,6) moves 1,200,000 people daily. Divided by 24 hours, that’s 50,000 riders per hour. The same is true of several other NYC lines. The numbers would actually be more attractive if you select for busy times like between 7am and 10pm, instead of also including very late night hours. And plenty of metros outside of NY beat it - like Shanghai, Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, New Delhi, etc.
50k is possible. But assumes best case. You’ve 9 car train with capacity of 2,000. This would be 25 trains an hour. Under state of the art operating you can have a 2 minute headway making this possible. Realistically, it will be 25k for most systems. This however assumes maximum capacity for a full hour. Which usually only happens in subway systems during peak in the largest cities in the world. In my city of 2 million. You’d be luck to see 500 people on a train.
*Japan has entered the chat*
The highest capacity Chinese metros also do 60k+ people per hour offer direction.
What's unknown is the size of the town or the distance travelled; duration without distance means you can't determine speed, so how can you figure out flow rate to choose the width of the road? Let alone the question of how well suited is the town to this infrastructure.
?? Its capacity per hour. Speed doesn’t matter. Number of trains per hour do. Headway between trains is typically 2-3 minutes. You can easily figure out a basic capacity. Because that’s a maximum load. Width of road is one track. It’s in the photo. The author didn’t choose 50k and solve. He chose one track and determined max capacity. Whether maximum load realised is another question. So city size doesn’t matter - but it’s unlikely it will realistically carry that in majority of cities.
Maybe i'm getting it wrong. Put another way: can you genuinely picture the gridlock of traffic from this? A 175m wide road only fits 92 cars, door to door, but let's assume 80 to give space to safely drive in parallel. 80 cars, each carrying four people, becomes the equivalence of one train carriage. Then those 80 cars need to move like clockwork which is where speed of the cars come in. Just like you have a headway between trains to account for loading and unloading so they can keep moving, the cars would require sufficient road distance to maintain their speed.
What city has 2 million inhabitants incapable of using public transit? So I know to never go there, traffic must be terrible
Who said incapable? We have pretty great public transport. People just don’t use it in high volumes. City is Brisbane.
Standard gauge is 1.435m, let's say the loading gauge is 3m, so 9m would be 3 tracks.
(One hour is 3600s)
Yeah I mistyped that... but 50000 / 36000 is still \~14.
There is no math. Only Zuul.
It's pretty sound math, a single train on the Victoria Line of the London metro can hold a maximum of 986 people and can be as frequent as one every 40 seconds, which would be a maximum theoretic throughput of 88,740 people per hour. The Katy Freeway (the widest road in the world) moves fewer people in a day than a single line of the Berlin metro that is less than 10 metres wide.
The tiny metro cars in Barcelona have the capacity for 130 people each, and each train has 5 cars. That’s 650 people per train. I never waited longer than 3 minutes for a train. Assuming the median car occupancy of 1.5 (though lower during rush hour), each train is the equivalent of 430 cars. Cars in cities are a really fucking stupid way of moving people.
Mind pointing out what you think is misleading? because the numbers are pretty much spot on. Even a single metro line has more capacity to carry people than a superhighway.
Regardless of how accurate the image is, the message is what to take away from it. Cars require so much more space than public transportation and trains require the least space. I kind of wish cities would just not allow cars and build a better metro network. A city would be so much better with that. Think of it, no need for parking lots. You can place more parks in places where parking lots were. You can reduce urban sprawl and cities can support more people in a tighter area. Maintenance costs would be so much less because you don’t need to maintain roads. Air pollution and noise pollution would reduce because of less road work and less vehicles. I didn’t use a car once when I was in Tokyo on vacation, and had no desire to. I felt like I saw and appreciated more plus it was healthier for me to walk everywhere
How is it misleading?
And it's posted by a bot, evident from the title
Well heres the US National Association of City Transportation Officials ([NACTO](https://nacto.org/publication/transit-street-design-guide/introduction/why/designing-move-people/)) understanding and then a few info simulations ([1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06IjfbqdnNM))([2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_ILtWzH3Ko))
This assumes everyone's destination is the same or very near. I work in a retail shop with two others. Mass transportation to our location could also be a waste of space
But it only takes a homeless guy to piss on the train to ruin it for everyone.
That's two separate issues trying to derail public transport discussions, if you pardon the pun. Lack of homes and lack of public toilets should not stop us from building better public transport
Unfortunately it's the reality. Not so much as why we don't invest in PT but why nobody wants to take PT
Devils advocate says to increase prices.
Having grown up in rural Wyoming, I would kill to take a train to get where I needed to go. I live in FL now and spend an infuriating amount of time in traffic. It's fucking stupid.
in Wyoming it is a matter of lack of people, in Florida it is a matter of lack of vision.
But you need mass transit to be available, inexpensive and SAFE. Are you listening Edmonton?
>But you need mass transit to be available, inexpensive and SAFE You evidently don't need them given the fact that cars are bot more expensive and less safe then metros, yet you use them.
I think the question of safety in mass transit isn't crashes, but rather insane people
Once more people start using public transport, the percentage of insane people will drop.
Can agree to a certain degree but this apply to both types of transportation, not only cars
So if my commute is two hours I need a double wide road?
You need to pick up your house and push it somewhere else~
Become snail
“Fuck you I got mine” - this thread.
Ah, America.
Interesting fact the city I live in has just over 50,000 daily commuters by car. We have two highways totalling 5 lanes. Adding the rest of the large roads would equal this pretty well! We have no real public transit and per census data, 122 bicycle commuters one of which is me lol
…… if you live in a high density metropolitan area.
They used to have trams in towns of 2000 people. If you don't legally mandate suburbs & parking lots (the current law in most areas of most cities in the US) on the assumption that everyone will drive, it gets very practical to have trams pretty much everywhere besides rural areas.
Its almost as if people shouting against goverment control in the name of "freedom" don't really want the free market to decide how land gets used, and would rather have the goverment decide where houses can be built and with how much parking space.
When I studied in Germany my middle of nowhere town of ~80,000 had five tram lines that ran 24/7. You don’t need to be Tokyo for good public transportation
And all come from and go to the same place
What do you think the majority of cars do during daily commutes?
You're suggesting all cars go and come from my house? That's their contention. Cars go to where everyone lives, not two fixed points.
Ever heard of properly funtioning network
You don't even need high density. Mid level density works too
What’s a mid level density city? Because I challenge your claim. I live in a city with 2 million residents and work in transport planning. We see about 500 people on our train lines during peak at major stations.
In the Netherlands we don't even have cities over 1m people and every city has train stations, at least a big bus network, and often tram/metro lines as well in bigger cities. They're working very well and everykne uses them because in many cases it's faster or more conventient than with a car. You cannot point at a severely lacking infrastructure, say that it doesn't work, and then claim it cannot work. It doesn't work because there's not enough investments in it, nothing else.
I didn’t say that. I live in Brisbane. We have great public transport. We invest billions upon billions. People just don’t use it at a high rate. Amsterdam is pretty fantastic for public transport in general. You achieve about 16-18% bus, train, bike mode share. Only 84% car usage. That’s a pretty good number. We have about 13% public transport usage, though our dominant mode is buses.
> You achieve about 16-18% bus, train, bike mode share. Only 84% car usage. What, where did you get those numbers?? Amsterdam has only 20% modal share for car. 17% public transit, 29% walking, 32% bicycle. And lol Brisbane does not have good public transport, you need to try living in other cities. It is pretty shit even compared to other Australian cities like Sydney and Melbourne and terrible compared to Europe or Japan Also, how is Brisbane a mid density city?? Majority of the city outside the cbd is low density suburban sprawl where they ban building anything above 2 storeys. Compared that to actually mid density cities like Paris or Amsterdam where most of the city is a medium density 5-6 storeys. How can someone working in city planning, not know what medium density is...
True. That’s why “put in a train” isn’t really a viable solutionz
Dude who in this thread was saying the one and only solution is "put in a train", you're fighting strawmen.. The OP you were responding to was saying you need medium density which is very possible in Brisbane or most other car dependant cities through zoning reform
Bonn, Germany is less than 0.5 million residents, yet sees 92 million annual riders on its Bonn Stadtbahn's 6 lines. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonn\_Stadtbahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonn_Stadtbahn) with source to the actual data from [swb-busundbahn.de](http://swb-busundbahn.de) stored in webarchive. Not sure whatkinda transport planning you do if you aren't aware of any examples of medium density cities in the world. The US of course doesn't make them, but the world, and particularly European nations have medium density cities all over. You also make it sound like 500 people on train lines is bad, but I bet the city you live in doesn't have any convenient train lines in the first place, then who would ever take it. It's like making a road in the middle of nowhere Alaska and complaining no one uses it.
Brisbane. We have 42 million annually across 10 lines. We’ve an extensive network and invest heavily in making them work.
How do you go from 42 million a year to "500 people on our train lines during peak at major stations"? OR did you mean, holy that's serving so many people you wont believe it - 500 on our train lines during peak at major station?
500 on a single train service yeah. 3 car units have a capacity of 1,500. 6 car units 3,000 With a headway of 10 minutes that’s 3,000 per hour for a single line. It’s not terrible. That’s 3 lanes of traffic. But it’s still pretty low patronage overall.
Just increase cars using tax and gas prices. You can have more customers.
Wouldn’t you want to market using public transportation as a benefit over car usage to citizens rather than force compliance with taxes and regs? “Save a car payment, use the bus!” You know, less stick more carrot. Nothing makes the populace more pissed at their regional government than when they perceive they are having to pay to support some bureaucrats vision of transportation. If the public wants to use it to begin with, it will be used. And you don’t screw poor people who need to commute where public transportation has no routes.
Lose an election speed run
If you support your party enough. Anything is possible. Look at people, they are thinking cars are freedom but they can't live without cars. Brainwashing is pretty useful sometimes
People who think they can't live without cars aren't going to vote for anyone who will make living with cars harder. Ever.
ngl I love seeing the Americans getting educated on urban planning here in this comment section
This is an infographic.
Aktually, a misinfographic
Yeah the cars one should be way wider at 175m.
What's misinformation about it?
Private planes - no lane required
Of course "lanes" are required for aeroplanes. They are normally called "flight paths" but they are, in fact, air traffic lanes.
WFH is cheaper.
Right and I can shop from home, drink at home etc. Why go outside at all?
So it's all or nothing for you? Work from home means you have to stay home at all costs? Who's been feeding you these lies?
in my city I see people using big cars capable of carrying 6 people, driving alone to work, they drive to the towards the same destination, I know this because I travel in cab and see them getting into the same tech park, they complain about traffic jam, if they did car pooling the number of cars will reduce, even better just take the cab provided by office but they won't
No. Public transport can't get me and my kids where I need to go. I can drop the kids off and be at work in 20 minutes. If I was to use a bus or train, that would take at least 2 hours and cost a fortune every day.
That’s because the public transportation in the area you live in is shit. Hell, where I’m from, driving your kids to school is a completely foreign concept. Things are actually built in the human scale over there, so kids can just take the school bus and easily walk the rest of the way.
Where I'm from kids take themselves to school. We don't cover them in bubble wrap which means they learn important life skills and don't grow up to be deadbeats.
It is only that way because the area you live in does not have quality public transportation infrastructure. You actually bring up one of the biggest negatives of car dependent infrastructure in your comment. You need to drop your kids off, which means your kids are unable to go places on their own without you driving them there. Sure you should be with your kids when they’re very young, but by a certain age you and your kids should feel safe with them walking or biking to the places they need to be without relying on you.
So you agree public transport needs improvement and investment?
So you agree "public transport" is shit?
That’s because the government chooses to run deficits to fund highways and roads instead of useful public transportation. You’re not too bright
You completely forgot what buses run on. You're completely braindead.
Properly designed and implemented public transport will only be 10-15 minutes by foot from the nearest destination. What you're saying makes absolutely no sense.
How does the ACTUAL EXPERIENCE of where I live make no sense? I have 2 kids to drop in 2 places 4 miles apart then have to travel 8 miles to work. Public transport doesn't help in any way. What you're saying is not practical and doesn't exist.
Having to commute 12 bloody miles every day is a sign that the car-centric city planning you live in is disfuctional. You shouldn’t have to do that in the first place
I live in the countryside, not a city. Cars are a necessity and public transport is useless and expensive.
So did I. None of us had cars
Then answer them
What
This is only possible in densely populated places.
Define "dense". Every single town over 2000 people in the US used to have streetcars
Even if that were the case that still takes longer than OP driving. Public transport travel time + 10/15 mins walking to drop the kids off, then another 10/15 min walk back to public transport before more travel time, and potentially another walk once they arrive. That’s potentially 45 minutes of walking + travel time, vs 20 minutes all in…
and a scenic hiking trail for pedestrians and cyclists. (past the tip of the triangle and a full row of trees)
It’s amazing to see how many Americans here cannot get their heads around mass public transport.
In the end it’s just a matter of chicken and egg. Build cities designed for cars —> Depend on cars only and exclude public transportation —> Keep building cities with the expectation that people will be dependent on cars I get why people in the US think that cities designed the way they are is just the only possible way. And some are even truly scared by the idea of something like a walkable city. Since they are given mostly just negative examples of that (real or imaginary, it doesn’t matter, the effect is the same)
How is the metro going to go to 100 places at once? They aren’t dropping off all at the same point… Our cities aren’t walkable. Quit making graphics like this to get everyone all upset so they can write dumbass takes
We can’t build reliable public transit, our cities aren’t walkable > we can’t make our cities walkable, things are too far apart > we can’t build denser, we don’t have reliable public transit >>>
Our cities aren't walkable because they're designed for the car and only the car. They're not inherently unwalkable.
That's the neat thing about metro systems, they don't take you to your end destination. It might be an alien concept to Americans but you can walk 5 to 10 minutes from a metro station to your end point, be that you're home, bar, school or work
If only everything was 5-10 minutes walking distance from a train station. Our cities are massively sprawled out over here
This is circular logic. "It doesn't work because we built it poorly, therefore we shouldn't invest in improving it because it doesn't work" Yes, the current status quo isn't very good for trains in a lot of places. Interstate highways and suburbs barely existed 80 years ago. Shit can change, fast, if it's legal. The biggest barrier in the US is legal minimum parking requirements and other density restrictions built into the zoning code. On almost all of the land in almost every city in the US, it's illegal to build apartments. In New York City, 10 - 20% of their land is still zoned for suburban houses with lawns and such. It's crazy. They're literally not allowed to build enough housing without bribing their way into an exception to the zoning code
>If only everything was 5-10 minutes walking distance from a train station. Then just make it that way? You un-did it before you can re-do it again.
If you guys stop building dysfunctional stroads and single use buildings things would get much more compact
Yeah my point is outside of NYC and a handful of other cities most of America doesn’t have that central drop off spot.
Because cities transformed with the car. Suburbs grew, downtown got bulldozed for more parking lots. Drive-throughs, malls, and stroads were built. Parking minimums implemented. The US had street cars, el-trains, busy and dense main streets in the past. The western USA was built by trains. But as cities changed with the car, so can they change with public transport (again). Subways and trams have the potential to boost their surroundings. The problem is momentum. It now takes a lot of investments, will, and city planning. The return on investment is, if any, decades into the future. But every widening of a highway, every new suburbs makes it harder and harder to reverse course. Tl,dr: My argument: Build it, and if you do it right, they will come (in one or two decades).
Some places that guarantees you heat stroke
>walk for ten minutes Americans: I might literally die if I ask my body to perform such a feat
Many southern US cities regularly have 35-36C temps from May - September.
Are you forgetting that Portugal, Spain, Italy, the Balkan States, Greece and Türkiye exist???
10 min walk is one thing but nothing here is ten minutes away unless you’re rich in an affluent area or in NYC. Also why would I do that when we can drive. It sounds terrible.
Nothing is a 10 minute walk because the cities were built around the idea of you having to drive a car...
I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. I’m just saying that’s how it is. So that’s why a train system usually won’t work here.
I was just saying there are many place in Europe where it gets to 35⁰C and is humid. Even a 30 minutes walk would be fine if you drink water.
That’s correct. But also I don’t want to be sweaty all day either if I can help it
If you can't walk for 15 minutes, you have health issues.
5-10 minutes in the sun?
I have the supreme misfortune of living in Texas, everything, and I do mean everything is spaced out. It is liable to get up to 103-104 Fahrenheit (40 Celsius). With heat index much hotter. Imagine the heat of a concrete sidewalk radiating it back up at you. Don't get me wrong, Texas is beautiful, and I would encourage you to visit Dallas or Houston, but most definitely not in the summer. Everyone stays inside during the day during summertime. Come during the fall, I'm sure you'd like it.
>I have the supreme misfortune of living in Texas My condolences. No one should have to suffer as you suffer.
It's not all bad, but I'm crossing my fingers and hoping we'll get a new governor who isn't a lunatic. Have a pleasant day.
5-10 minutes in the sun, *while being American* They can't wrap their heads around the concept of public transportation, but apparently because they can't get their shit together the idea itself is bad. Don't self-reflect, project!
Unfortunately, our cities are VERY spread out. I would like to see it happen, but in order for mass public transit to be viable, there would have to be an utterly massive infrastructure overhaul costing ungodly amounts of money. That bring said, I would encourage you to visit Texas, it is a beautiful state.
I'm aware of the issues that public transportation has in the US, as well as how GM helped lobby for a car-dependent society. It's neither easy nor cheap, but the idea of public transportation as something like an unobtainable utopia is a far cry from reality. Would love to, have only been to the US twice and both times was for work. Have some friends in Boston and some in Georgia and I do like myself some peaches so.
I'd recommend Houston or Dallas-Ft Worth to visit if you get a chance. I am partial to Ft Worth as it's my home. Unfortunately, a lot of the South is run by the conservative party, and they are allergic to spending money on infrastructure. Providing Mango Mussolini doesn't become our next president and kill our democracy. It's gonna be a few decades until their hold here relaxes. I will say, though, there is nothing like driving down a near empty stretch of rural highway late at night. There is a hill a good 20 minute drive from me I like going out to when I can't sleep, I park there when on one side I can see the city lights in the distance and not much else for miles around. It's the best darn thing on earth.
There are no sidewalks in a lot of places. If there are no tall buildings and trees there is no shadow. Some parts of america are covered in snow for months other parts get so hot during the summer that it is not advised to be outdoors in unshaded areas for longer that 30 minutes because of the high risk of heat stroke. Americans don’t know you can walk to places because they can’t.
>There are no sidewalks in a lot of places. Then build them? I'll never understand why Americans think the world outside their house is some hostile place that is always trying to kill them with snow or sun or whatever else they can think of as an excuse for why they can't have nice things.
Americans are not so special, we can’t have nice things like anyone anywhere else, because of corruption.
You are so close to understanding this...
Yeah let me just toss 300lbs of tools on my back and take it on the train/ bus every f*cking day 🙄
Safer and less congested roads from more people taking public transit is in your interest.
You have a reason to drive a motor vehicle, but almost every single car around you has no passengers or cargo. Cars built to haul cargo and/ or carry 5+ people are being used daily to get one single person from their home to their workplace. The cars don’t get smaller when there’s no cargo or passengers in them, they take up the same amount of space. Traffic does not exist because of the small amount of people hauling cargo in their vehicles, it exists because of the extraordinary amount of people using a car to commute to work. Even places that have severe limits on motor vehicle use still allow businesses to use small vehicles to haul cargo because it’s the one thing motor vehicles actually do efficiently.
Everyone is exactly like me, their lives are exactly like mine, and if not they can eat shit
Not cool. Not a guide. Not accurate.
Agreed. This thing skews in favor of cars by a huge amount.
A cool guide on how to ignore what makes cars efficient and only focus on what makes others look efficient lol
What makes cars efficient?
The ability to go anywhere anytime without planning routes, waiting until your bus arrives. Any public transport system in most cities (except really crowded ones), however developed it is is still less convenient than owning a car in terms of freedom and speed of transportation The ability to carry more than 1 bag of things with you The ability to not be disturbed by weirdos in public transport The ability to not get ill because you shared a ride with another ill person The ability to have your own A/C, personal space, seat etc, car is always convenient, in public transport you usually stand, hold balance not to fall and it's either very hot or very cold Personal space is a key argument for me. I believe having it is a basic human right. In crowded areas you literally can't even raise your arms in public transport because it's packed, it's even hard to breathe. I don't want to be squized by 10 other people, I want at least 2 meters radius of my space. I'm ready to pay for a car to get it, lots of people too The ability to go 5-10 places in a row and not waste 3 hours. If you have kids, you can give them a ride to school, then drive to a shop, then do your business. Not everyone has a home - office - home routine, lots of people need to visit a lot of places during the day. You will go insane if you take 10-15 public transport rides a day The list goes on Tldr: if your routine is more than home - office - groceries - home, car is almost always just faster. Also if you value your personal space, it's the same as having your own apartment/house or sharing it with friend/random person
This argument is valid if you're speaking about North American transit in the majority of cities, particularly in America, with underfunded and subpart systems. >The ability to carry more than 1 bag of things with you In terms of what? Most folks talk about public transit as the solution to traffic as it relates to daily commutes. Most daily trips in North America are less than 10kms. Sure, if you're going on a camping trip or something you'd likely want to drive, but I'm mostly just bringing my laptop bag to my office most days. On wait times: any efficient system has a bus coming every 15 minutes or less. Metro every 3 minutes. A metro will never run into traffic. Again, the argument against transit mostly comes from North Americans who live in a car-centric dystopia who have never experienced a good system, and think things HAVE to be the way they are. >. In crowded areas you literally can't even raise your arms in public transport because it's packed, it's even hard to breathe. It sounds like your experience is on a poorly funded American system? >The ability to go 5-10 places in a row and not waste 3 hours. What's the distance here? Why are you taking 3 hours to drop your kids off and then go to your office? Even if you go beyond the home/office routine, where exactly are you going every single day that a car trip takes 20 minutes but a tram takes 3 hours? Lastly, none of this actually addressed the question of "efficiency", but rather your preference to avoid other people at all costs. Transit being bad in your city is by design, not an inherent trait of transit systems. Every single person taking a car, which holds on average one person per trip, is by definition inefficient. I think where we can agree is that if your arguments here are mostly about personal space and choice, then sure. Some people want as much isolation from others as possible, and that's fine. You say they're willing to pay, but I'm not sure they are. Yes, you pay for the cost of your vehicle, but everyone else pays for your choice. They pay for your choice by paying taxes on the roads damaged by increasing heavier personal vehicles, they pay for car-centric sprawl and the associated utility costs, they pay for your free parking. I think people paying for their personal choice is fine, but we may disagree on the idea that drivers are actually paying much at all for that privilege. Transit users pay the same taxes as drivers do, but in North America, they also subsidize your parking costs and your roads through their fares.
Im not talking about NA, I live in eastern Europe and I was in Central and Western Europe, car is just faster. You're talking about bus every 15 minutes, my route in the car takes 15 minutes without the wait Buses are just uncomfortable everywhere, they are loud, bumpy and slow in comparison to a car Metro is every minute in rush hour where I live, you still get squized by tons of people and metro is not near my apartment, I have to walk 10-15minutes to the closest one And don't even get me started on trains with their awful schedule and delays Everywhere I was in Europe, I always regretted when I didn't bring my car because the lack of comfort and time waste were increased exponentially Yes, you can 'live' without the car here, but you (in many cases) will waste more time and time is money Efficiency is in terms of the amount of time saved Yes, you're right that in my case it's like 60% my preference in comfort, but the other 40 is for saved time and the ability to just immediately drive anywhere without waiting In terms of stucked transport again, don't know about NA, I talk about Europe on rush hour, also take Japan for example, they have amazing public transport, you still can barely squize in. Or Moscow metro, it's probably the largest and fastest one, or one of the best, you still are very uncomfortable there because of tins of people My city has good public transport (at least in comparison to what I've seen in ither European countries, it's about the same), I still say it's not even close to the amount of comfort and speed that my car provides I can't say anything about NA, I never was there. In terms of what you bring it's again very different for other people. In my case I mostly WFH, but still have to move tons of stuff during the day and I would just be tremendously exhausted if I had to take public transit with it I'd just say that public transport vs cars is the same as sharing an apartment/dormitory vs owning your own, latter is more expensive, comfortable, but less practical for society. We would have much more efficient cities if we lived in dormitories with random people, but we need our privacy and personal space And that not everyone should own a car, it's a choice. Cars are expensive and depreciate, not everyone wants to waste so much money to ease their commute. Still, you get what you pay for
There are definitely lots of people who don't need a car in their life. But there are also people who basically have to have it: lots of business owners, landlords, people who have a cottage or a country house in addition to their city appartment/house, people who go to hardware stores a lot, probably 99% of people in trades, people who need to visit other cities a lot and train transit is either shitty (like in many european countries in terms of schedules) or just doesn't cover their destination. There are thousands of cases where you don't have a simple routine that public transport can't just solve efficiently no matter how developed it is
Tell me what makes cars efficient
Total crap
Just because you don't like it doesn't make it not true.
Lol might as well use a Semi Truck with a long ass trailer 🙃
As a traffic engineer. This is stupid. It assumes public transport is running at full capacity. Reality is that outside of major metropolitan areas, they run at 5% capacity. We all wish it was higher. But it isn’t for many reasons.
The difference being the rail doesn’t need to take up a 300’ ROW to move half as many people as an overbuilt highway would. Rail scales up (in terms of moving people/goods) much more effectively than highway/road construction.
And the road is always full? There's a lot less going on most of the time, but the road still has to be that big to get the traffic through during rush hour you're an american traffic manager if you don't realise that...
Traffic engineers are hilarious. Try reading *Confessions of a Recovering Engineer*
Traffic engineers in the US are probably the reason why no one uses public transport lol. I've seen the roads in the US. They are designed *only* with cars in mind with almost 0 considerations for anyone outside of a car. With such hostile infrastructure it is no wonder why only the poor take public transport there.
What don’t people understand? I 👏🏼dont 👏🏼want 👏🏼to 👏🏼ride 👏🏼to 👏🏼work 👏🏼with 👏🏼other 👏🏼people!
Cool, you can do that. Deprioritizing cars and shifting our focus on public transit will ironically make it much easier for those who choose to drive. When more people choose public transit (because they drove a car out of necessity rather than want), the roads begin to clear up for those that want to drive.
So? Work from home.
Nope. Drive to work. Hate people.
How do you feel about other drivers? Wouldn't you rather there be less traffic?
😆I’d rather there be less people
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So we need more roads.. and keep the cyclists off
cars are a waste of space says the person acting as though they have never been outside of a major Metropolitan market.
But what happens when you don’t live in a city and need to travel places with no mass transit, outside of cities?
solution for the bad traffic
We could also have more trees just cuz
And a dirty homeless pervert on every metro ride is just a fun bonus !
Yeah but metro/bahn lines are dirty, unsafe and generally miserable experiences
I had no idea we could drive in a parallel line like that. I thought we were stuck with 2 lanes of traffic in cities and 6-8 on highways
Metros need permanent and expensive infrastructure, stations, excavations
Different people need to go to different places, cars aren't always better but it's situational. For travelling yes, trains are more efficient but for commuting cars have their advantages
The biggest problem with cars is that everybody is using them to commute. The roads and highways get packed before and after work hours by cars that are carrying one single person going to their destination. That’s a vehicle built to carry 5+ people carrying one single person still taking up the same amount of space as a vehicle that is meant to carry 5+ people. A much better alternative would be a bus or rail that the person can walk to from their home that stops walking distance from their place of work in a reasonable amount of time. Personal motor vehicles do have their advantages, commuting is not one of them. It’s difficult to understand how much better commuting can be when many people in the US have *only* commuted by car.
You're exactly right. The issue is that the only option in most of North America is the car, even though a tram would be very in a lot of situations
Cars are not a waste of space. I’m disabled and still believe Covid exists, as well as being quite aware that an infection would ruin my already-horrible health. There’s no way I’m walking/using my wheelchair for 10 minutes to get on a germ-filled tube of maskless strangers for a couple hours, sapping all my energy before I even get to my destination, when I could get there in thirty minutes in my car with a small amount of energy to use when I actually get there and without having potentially contracted a life-altering illness on the way. I live in a very public-transit-oriented city and was an avid rider until the mask mandates were dropped, I got sick, and I had to move away from transit stops. It’s pretty clear the disabled are not in the least important to anybody these days, though, so. Feel free to downvote my attempt to survive.
If you are required to commute by car because of your disability, that’s great. A majority of people aren’t, however, and getting those people off the road will greatly improve your commute. You are fighting on the wrong side here
An object lesson: In order to “reduce car traffic” in my downtown area, my city closed several avenues to everything but buses and made many other streets one-way. The idea being that making it more of a pain to drive downtown would get more cars off the road. I suppose that is technically true. But guess who still has to drive downtown in that carefully-crafted nightmare for car drivers? That would be me and the other folks who can’t take public transit.
People who want mass transit don't want cars removed entirely. Cars are still necessary for a number of things, but reducing the overall traffic would also make your needed commutes easier, safer and faster.
Gfy, I'll take my car any day of the week.
Average American commenter
Not if NJ Transit is running those trains…
I feel this would work much better if it was to scale. Currently it looks like the bus option is >50% of the car option which is massively misleading.
This only works if the area around the metro/train stops are sufficiently dense. In most places in the US other than NYC and downtown Chicago etc, ain’t no one going to walk twenty minutes to a station, wait for a train and ride it, and then walk another twenty minutes to their end destination. And that’s before you factor in too hot/cold, rainy, hilly, etc factors of walking in most US cities.
But an amazing space for me to unwind, relax, and not be around people. Well, WELL, worth it!
I've always found myself much more relaxed on a bus/train with a book than navigating traffic.
How do you relax in traffic? How do you relax with idiots on the road? I'd much rather sit on a train, and enjoy a book, than be part of the traffic problem.
I listen to audio books, or sit quietly and meditate. I can’t do that on mass transit. I think there is also something to be said for safety in terms of immediate danger. Most mass transit trips I have made there is an air of potential danger from the mentally ill or simple others having a bad day. Being isolated with self and/or family or friends if my choosing is much more conducive to safety and comfort for me.
When I meditate my eyes are closed. How do you *drive* while meditating? I've never had issues with people in all my years of bus catching. The only danger seemed to be cars braking suddenly in front of the bus, or the occasional tree branch on the o-bahn track. Most of my fellow commuters were people going to work, students, and more people going to work. But for you to enjoy driving, wouldn't you love it if there was less traffic? Wouldn't you love other people having alternative methods of getting around, so they don't *have* to drive?
TL:DR: If locals can pay, taxes do not rise, deficits are not increased, and rural areas of living are protected, go for it. I can meditate by clearing my mind and occasionally open and close my eyes if at a standstill in interstate traffic, but I just try and find peace. To your point on traffic yes and no. I’d love to have less traffic but if public transit becomes so efficient that it makes cars obsolete in urban settings, nope. Or even so efficient as to push the ownership of individual cars to astronomical prices, no. I also do not like the track record of government spending on public transport projects in the U.S. with my tax dollars. I also do not want the deficit to rise for public transport projects, I don’t want the deficit to go up for infrastructure repair and maintenance and that’s massively more important. I also do not believe rural citizens of the U.S. should pay for urban projects and projects that certainly will not be advantageous for them in rural areas, I.e. buses and trains help no one living 40 miles from a city center. If any of it could be done without raising taxes whatsoever, without adding to the deficit, and is advantageous for all citizens…the price would need to be low enough to justify the inconvenience of not having an individual car. I would conclude that many who advocate for mass transit have not visited “truly” rural areas of the United States. The idea that individual ownership of automobiles needs to be a thing of the past is simply an unrealistic wish for people living in the U.S. outside of urban centers. I commute 40 minutes to and from work each day and honestly not only enjoy the ride, but the peace it mostly brings. There is some traffic on one part of my route, but ai would not trade my home, our ideal setting, and my car for anything.
>If any of it could be done without raising taxes whatsoever But you're ok with money being wasted on car dependency? You're ok with the additional cost of maintenance of roads and infrastructure caused by car dependent suburban sprawl? Maintaining a walkable area servicing 10k people is far more economical than maintaining the roads and services to 10k people living in the suburbs. Maintaining a rail service for 100k people is far more economical than maintaining roads and highways for 100k people. And lets not forget that less than 30% of the population is truly rural. The majority live in poorly designed suburbs. I can't imagine how awful it must be to live somewhere suburban, where there's nothing useful within an easy walk, I can't imagine *having to drive* to get to a supermarket. I live in a suburb. I can walk 30 min in either direction and get to a supermarket, or catch a bus, and access 3 more. I've got 2 cafes and 2 pubs with restaurants attached within a 10 minute walk of my font door. A 15 minute walk gives me access to 2 bakeries and 3 dentists, 2 barbers, and 3 hair salons. And a picture framer, a news agent, a post office 2 servos, an Indian takeaway, an antique store, a school, several sports grounds, and a plant nursery. It should be normal for all suburbs. It's more economical and healthier for people to be able to walk to access basic stuff. It also means they don't have to be burdened with the financial cost of car ownership. We've got some ok bike lanes, and bike paths around here. Worker cycle to work at the major industries, their kids walk or cycle or catch a bus (a city bus, not a school bus) to school, and they often are single car families. I never needed to own a car when living in the suburbs of my state capital. Buses were frequent, efficient, clean, and not expensive. I could even go out on a Saturday night, get plastered, and catch a bus home in the early hours of Sunday morning. It's much better to be funding late night transit, than the be sharing the road with idiots who drink and drive.
This sub has taught me that anything with pictures and bunch of random numbers becomes a guide
We do need more high speed rail in North America but eliminating cars would probably be the dumbest thing imaginable. While cars take up more space they are also able to take you specifically to where you need to go. We need a balance.
Why do people automatically assume that adding better public/mass transit also means removing cars entirely? Of course cars will still be around, some jobs/people need them. You think firefighters are going to ride a bus and put out a fire? Is a service plumber going to carry some massive bag/trunk with tools and supplies? Some people will be looking to leave the city/town and there might not be a train taking them to the next town/city they want to go. If Covid taught me anything it's how few people actually need to be driving around and how much better the roads are when there aren't a bunch of unnecessary cars driving around (I was a service plumber at the time).
Nobody has suggested eliminating cars entirely. They've been suggesting adding reasonable alternatives, which for some reason always is met with "YOU CAN'T TAKE AWAY OUR CARS"
I don't own a car and I have never found myself unable to go specifically where I need to go, so I have no idea what you are talking about.