this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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If you make driving easier than transit, more people will drive who previously took transit. The reverse is also true. One of these situations is more desirable for myriad reasons.
As well, additional demand can be created by convenience. People will make trips they otherwise never would have if it's easier to make them.
Communist transportation will never ever ever ever ever ever ever be easier than driving.
Because driving is "get in the car, go directly to destination"
Public transport adds walk to transport rally point, wait, follow a compromise route to accomodate other travellers with many stop, consider all the strangers gazing and judging you, arrive at not your destination, walk 5 to 20 mins to your actual destination. Plus you must carry any object on your person while navigating the terrain (good luck hauling 50lbs of groceries).
I am simply not interested in this nightmare, find a solution that isn't horrible.
And NOoo I don't want Musks robot taxis from the "you will own nothing" dystopia.
I prefer transit, unfortunately for me it wouldn’t be practical, maybe even before the half of our railway lines got removed.
The joke is on you. There are places where it already is easier than driving. What do such places have in common? There are so many people that having everyone drive is literally impossible to accommodate. You wouldn't drive in Manhattan, Tokyo, or Seoul. It literally makes absolutely no sense to. In these cities, public transit is faster and way more convenient.
Smaller cities can replicate this effect by just... not outrageously favouring car infrastructure like they do today in North America. That doesn't mean exclusively making driving worse, it means making public transit better at the same time with the freed up funding. And the freed up money is a lot, car infrastructure is super expensive. More routes with more stops at higher frequencies are made possible because of higher ridership, which increases convenience and makes it more likely you will get almost exactly from your origin to your destination.
But the American brain cannot conceive of this. "Communist transportation" fucking lmao. What if we made cities more liveable for humans, not for cars? Nah we can't do that that's communism.
The problem concentrating everyone like a pack of sardines, then you can't move or live anyway.
There wouldn't be a problem if the traffic wasn't all trying to go to the same place.
So you think we should decentralize cities. Make it so you don't need to go downtown for everything. Everything you need would be within 15 minutes of walking.
... A fifteen minute city perhaps.
Have you considered that within city, parking is a huge problem? Maybe in american suburb the parking space is big enough to fit housing for 100 families, but in the city they don't have such luxury.
Now just like what you said about the public transport, for driving it's get in the car, facing 20 min of traffic jam, waiting for traffic light, waiting for traffic light, waiting for another traffic light, reach your destination, find a parking, saw a spot, too bad because big dumb pickup truck double park because the parking spot is too small to fit that ego-sized vehicle, looking for another parking spot, finally found one but have to make 5 min walk to the shop. Now do the return trip.
It already is, finding a parking spot and then walking through a parking lot is a lot less convenient than walking from the tram stop to the store and it's roughly the same distance. I sold my car after moving to the city because public transit is so much more convenient.
By "directly to destination" did you mean the gigantic parking lot necessary to accommodate every car? You are going to walk anyway, the different is that you're walking in the most horrible hostile car centric space instead of one made for humans.
I live in the forest, we have no problem with parking. There is space everywhere. I don't mind a little mud on my tires and shoes, not everywhere has to be concrete
Given that we're talking about cities, your experience living in the forest is completely irrelevant.
City anti-car attitude will cause us a lot of pain. They will make car ownership painful to disincentivize it and we will just have to suck it up, if we fail to kill that movement.
And car-centric city design is causing a lot of pain right now and destroying the planet.
My car is electric, if tgat's a problem then I would instead recommend to make city cars not illegal. Personally I've always wanted a single seat car that weights as much as a motor cycle.
If there isn't parking, that mean the place is full. Go somewhere else. Or re-evaluate if you really need to go there, the answer is probably no.
As much as I personally disagree with you, given that all you're thinking about is your own benefit, and not any of the myriad of benefits to the city, the world, the people who can't afford cars, etc, I understand that your outlook is shared by the vast majority of Americans, and can't be ignored if we ever hope to have an effective public transport system.
We're going to need to somehow devise a system so convenient that it actually sounds attractive to the huge amount of people who spend 10%+ of their paycheck on car payments not because they have to, but because they want to.
I would love public transport that is actually better than a car. I can't imagine how that could happen. So what they will probably do is cripple car users until it is intolerable to use. Like make it cost more than your yearly salary just for the license and insurance, plus 10x the price of fuel with taxes.