this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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I'm all for a significant reduction in vehicles commonly on the road. Apart from a monumental restructuring of the entirety of every major infrastructure in the United States, how would we go about effectively reducing the number of cars that are daily drivers?
Making public transport not absolute dogshit.
Like, I don't even mean "We need to extend it way out into the boonies" kind of thing. Something as simple as "Public transport that isn't so dogshit that the locals in major cities avoid it like the plague whenever possible" would go a long way towards reducing traffic congestion and car usage, even with suburbs and rural areas continuing to use cars excessively.
Every major US city should have a dense, high frequency grid of trams/subways within 3 miles of the city center. Then, a larger network of light rail/subways out another 3 miles for commuting and events traffic.
3-5 minute intervals is good enough, anything less frequent is meh. Over 15 is a joke.
The buses that run (surprisingly direct routes) to my kids' workplaces and the one that runs by the youngest's school here run ONCE per HOUR. I would be thrilled to have service every 15 minutes. They used to run every 15 and it worked for me when I was their age, so it's gotten worse here not better, even as the population has doubled.
I think my closest bus stop is over 90 minutes between stops
Make public transit a viable alternative.
My commute is 45 minutes by car, over 2 hours by public transit. We need massive investment into public transportation. More buses, more trains.
And, I'll get crucified by this I'm sure, but it's true: bicycle infrastructure is nice but a far far secondary goal. When we prioritize cycling over buses and trains, all we're doing is supporting upper middle class office workers and work-from-home recreational cyclists. It's not a sea change. It doesn't move the needle. Taking away a car lane to make a dedicated bus lane moves the needle. Taking away a car lane to make a bike lane does not, unless mass transit is already a viable option.
Eh? How?
The people that can actually bike around on the regular or aren't already physically exhausted at the end of their work day.
The people that bike do it by choice because they can and they want to. Pushing more bikes in place of trains or buses would hurt the people who can't.
That's not my experience at all, working in restaurants where basically all my colleagues cycle to work, and in fact where I come from, a bike is often seen as a sign that you just can't afford a car (although simultaneously as a recreational thing like you've mentioned).
And the young, and the able.
Tell a 40 year old single mother that she needs to bike home.
...do your legs fall off once you've given birth or why is being a mother a factor?
Also, I'm pretty sure most 40 year olds are still able to bike perfectly fine. That's the stereotypical age range for picking up jogging, right?
But they're right, the priority is having a working tram/bus network, and having safe lanes for (e-)bikes as an extension of that system.
Nah, it's true. My walk to work is only possible because my oldest drops her sibling off at their school on the way to her school. If I had to make that loop it gets a lot more complicated, and even so it's the least complicated it's been since I had kids. There is a city bus to both schools, but the one that goes by the high school runs once an hour, the one to the college twice an hour but takes 2 hours, vs 15 minute drive. High school is an hour walk, not impossible and sometimes faster than waiting for the bus to arrive, but pretty bad with backpack and musical instrument, school bus system takes 1.5 hours.
The only reasonable answer here is car, until/unless the buses run on a reasonable frequency.
Picking up kids and doing errands with kids makes bicycling that much harder.
God if I wouldn't kill to just be able to take a train like in Tokyo. The train times were usually 2 to 3 minutes apart from driving times on Google maps. Add the 10-15 minutes it'll take you to walk out of your station to your job and I'm all for It. I need the extra walking anyways to stretch my legs.
But, like, I already have a car for my daily commute and whatnot. I can’t see a way that a bus or similar would be faster. So why would I even consider using public transport?
As a person with a car who has used the bus instead in certain situations:
Bus gets you there with no effort, you can read instead of driving, it's safer, and you don't have to pay for parking. When in college here it's also free, and at every house I've lived in, there has been one bus that goes from said neighborhood (within a couple of blocks) directly to the college, so I never drove there because the bus was way more convenient.
Bus is an extra mode of transportation in a household with more drivers than cars. So I've taken the bus to work, sometimes for years, so that someone else in my household could use the car to go to their job, farther away in the other direction.
Some people should not or cannot drive. At every place I've worked there has been at least one guy (yes always a guy) whose license was revoked for DUI. So they had a car but couldn't use it.
Cars also sometimes break down! Living near bus lines has saved me on occasion when my car was out of commission.
Car insurance here is crazy expensive, partly because everybody and their grandma is driving even if they ought not be. The world is not getting younger. You want to be on the road with a bunch of people who are not clear minded? Or you want them to have other options for getting around? One day that will be you, too.
You are only looking at it from your own perspective. There are plenty of people who hate driving and would rather sit on a train and read a book. If all these people would get off the road because they take public transit then there would be less people on the road. So you wouldn’t be stuck in traffic as often. Also people who don’t own a car or can’t drive need to get to places as well. A society should provide good transport for these people as well.
Busses/trams can hit 0 red lights and not get stuck in traffic if they have their own lanes and transit priority signals
But what if your specific commute isn't that congested and traffic is only a minor inconvenience?
Moreover, how do those things cover the other benefits of cars?
Direct line from home to office that runs on my schedule and can change route at any time I choose.
The ability to run a little late without missing the ride all together.
I don't have to share it with strangers.
I have significantly more space for transporting things.
There's no interconnecting travel. It's just front door to car, car to front door.
It doubles as a mobile locker, shelter, bench, and lunchroom. All private.
And I don't say all that to downplay the need for public transit, just that if the goal is to get more people on it, you're not going to convince them to give up their cars only to avoid traffic.
Genuinely, I'd rather sit in my car in traffic than lose all the other benefits of it with public transit.
I think you're pretty lucky if you've got an uncongested commute. For most places where people live a "driving" distance from work it generally gets pretty congested during rush hour.
For covering the benefits of a car, transit has some of its own benefits (mostly health benefits, but done right, travel time can be shorter), but I'll go through why losing the benefits you've listed don't worry me too much:
Direct line that can change route if necessary: my house and work are both close enough to transit stops that I essentially have a direct line from home to office. I'm not changing my route that often, but if I needed to get something on the way I'd rather just hop off and back on than have to find somewhere to park.
Ability to run late: I'll mostly agree with you here in some cases, but the key is frequency. Missing a train and having to wait an hour for the next one sucks, but I've never thought about "missing" a subway, the next one will be there in like 2 mins. If you have to look at a schedule for transit, it's doing a bad job. You should just show up and get whisked away in the next couple minutes when done right.
Strangers: fair, I don't mind much, but if an issue for you then it's an issue for you
Transporting things: The biggest thing I'm generally transporting is groceries, and I've never had a problem putting them on a bus (or more recently in my bike panniers, I was shocked at how much stuff you can fit in a pannier). But I also know a guy who brought a rowing machine home on transit, so if there's a will there's a way.
No interconnecting travel: I think this is only an issue if the connections are infrequent or badly timed. The same issue with "running late". When I hop off a subway and get on another line at the same station I barely even think about it. And I almost think of this one as a benefit, walking to and from stops and at transfers is free exercise. Take enough transit and you'll never have to use a treadmill in your life.
Multipurpose: I'll give you mobile locker, that's pretty nice (a bit expensive for my taste though). I think this goes back to the "stranger" point. I think shelters, benches, and lunch rooms should be public places. A public bench does a lot more good than a parking spot in my opinion.
While I agree there's no way to get everyone out of their cars and onto public transit (short of banning cars), the goal is just to make it a viable alternative. Even as someone who would just rather drive, if public transit is fast, frequent, and reliable enough, other people might be convinced which reduces traffic for you
One of the reasons I loved taking the train to work (yay, Portland MAX!) was that I didn't have to do the work to drive. I got on the train, snagged a seat (or stood on really busy days) and mentally punched out for 20 minutes. I could read a book, zone out, or make some notes on my thoughts.
At the end of the route, I'd hop off, walk two blocks and I was at a work. Reverse it to go home. It was a dream commute.
Driving Hwy 26 would have taken longer, and the sheer stress it caused was horrible. Always having to watch for someone deciding to dart lanes, merge badly, slow to a stop, shimmy forward, wait for a person to merge into the crawl. Commuting by car on any kind of busy road is horrible for your health.
That's valid for your area but it's very circumstantial.
I guess for some, but I've been driving in this kind of traffic for a decade, it doesn't phase me.
Personally I'd rather sit comfortably in my driver's chair for 40 minutes, listening to podcast or something in the privacy of my car, than stand in a crowded train for 20 minutes.
But a bus will also be stopping at other places that are not my destination.
True, but you'd probably be surprised at how often you're actually stopped or going very slowly because of traffic when driving, especially in cities. If you compare the driving and transit times between most subway stops on Google Maps, the subway (closest thing to signal priority on a bus in most places) is almost always quicker
In a city sure, but I reckon most car drivers are in suburban / rural areas.
Fully rural driving is absolutely going to be faster than any attempt at transit can be. But most suburbs were built so people could live there and drive into the nearest city for work, so even if the driver lives in a suburban area, the longest part of their drive will almost certainly be the city bit. So I would argue for both cities and suburbs, transit can be faster than diving if done well.
It doesn't have to be faster, just on a similar level. With a bus you don't have to worry about parking or other bad drivers, you can read a book or watch a show or get started on the day's work. That's worth a few extra minutes of travel time.
I can agree with this. If we moved to public transit through the utilization of railways and bus routes, would you say the cost of maintenance then moved to the Local and State governing bodies? One might conclude that roadwork costs would decrease positively with the reduction in traffic. There would also be higher maintenance costs, all offset by taxes.
What about the logistics of these operations?
The initial start-up costs?
The time?
The petty small suburban neighborhoods who claim buses increase homeless presence in their neighborhoods?
There would also need to be a fundamental cultural shift on the Professional level.
I know we don't really have all the answers. I just want to make sure we are aware that moving this needle is more than dropping a couple magic bus lines down in each major city, and running a railroad from Point A to B. We do need less cars. I wish I could walk to work. All of this requires an almost mind-boggling amount of preparation and then work to even get started.
Gotta be realistic, otherwise we'll never get anywhere.
It's a lot of work, but it doesn't really require new thinking. We can absolutely throw resources at the problem. More buses, more trains, faster, safer, more reliable, more more more.
Making jobs closer to people is absolutely a societal shift, but we don't have to tackle that, at least not right away.
If we have a hundredfold increase in existing public transit schemes, we're already most of the way there to breaking cars' stranglehold on society. It's a solved problem, in an engineering sense. We know how to do it. We just don't know how to fund it...or to get the political will to do it.