the hyper-individualism in western countries doesn’t make “working together” as a country easier
I'd be careful with overgeneralizing that. Even though Latin American cultures also push for individualism to some extent, we do have tight-nit communities regardless because of the unified cultures that we have.
And also, the big population in China would never allow for a "car culture" in the firsr place, since there just isn't room for that many cars, public transit is a must for a densely populated country.
I’ve been to China plenty of times, I promise the car culture is alive and well.
And also, the big population in China would never allow for a “car culture” in the firsr place, since there just isn’t room for that many cars, public transit is a must for a densely populated country.
I've been to China as part of a company visit. They took us everywhere by car. Even what I would consider walking distance.
I did not see mass transit once. It's entirely possible that it was there, but they just didn't let us use it for some reason. Were scared that we'd kill ourselves there or something.
Yeah, I don't doubt it exists and probably is well used by the people living there. Just wanted to address the part of the comment saying "China would never allow for a “car culture” in the firsr place" because there sure was a car culture. It felt like an American city.
I'm also aware that Shenzen is different from the rest of China, and, well, that the rest of China is different from the other rest of China.
"China has good railways because China bad" is one hell of a bad take.
China isn't an autocracy any more than the US is, getting to vote which party gets to erode your rights and enact genocide on your behalf isn't democracy
Xi Jinping's third term is literally autocracy. President Cheeto would kill for that much power.
America as fucked up as we, are can bash our president and resist his power grabs as much as our oligarchy allows.
In China, you can't even post a whinnie the pooh cartoon because making an autocratic dictator look bad can't fly.
China doesn't have rapid shifts in infrastructure because China bad, it's because China has an autocratic dictatorship which allows for massive investment of resources without argument.
The US has massive investment of resources without argument too when it comes to the military industrial complex or to rescuing banks that have committed fraud, or to genocide Palestinians. The fact that it doesn't do so with basic infrastructure is because the oligarchs in the US don't want that, not because of a lack of oligarchs in power. They make it theatrical in congress, but look at the defense budged and the speed with which they approve multi-billion expenses that go into bombing kids in the middle east, suddenly the American democracy works expediently.
People talk about it and complain. there was and is debate on all those topics. You have lost in all the topics you are talking about, but it was fair and square.
A democracy would be voting for a party promising not to erode your rights and getting your rights not eroded. That's not what you get in the ol' US of A, anywhere in the west for that master
Still not as rich as the USA.
China's GDP is 17.79 trillion dollars compared to the USA's 27,36 trillion.
There's plenty of money to invest in public infrastructure, but no one wants to do it.
Yeah, just to add, per capita the difference is even starker. The low population density in the US makes it extremely costly to build a high-speed railway from east to west coast, but there is no good reason why there is no railway between LA-Bay Area-Sacremento, and a high-speed rail connection along the East Coast is a no brainer.
One of the most annoying things is cities that were designed pre-car being retrofitted for car, and then people acting like that's the city's fault for not making the city better for car, rather than the city's fault for not assessing their situation and emphasizing other methods of getting from place to place
Or similarily, the whole world being walkable before the incredibly recent invention of cars and yet people still act like there’s no way to be without a vehicle. Like, even when cars were first coming out cities were already dense and had public transit that was working fine and many still do today.
Or “my town is small that’s why everything is far apart” my friend you have fewer things than I do in the city, within walking distance, and need a car to get to them all like how does that make any sense?! Put that shit together into a nice little walkable village! I’m from a village like that and I’m from goddamn Ontario! It’s awesome!
I hate when people who live in some crap suburb cannot even imagine—not even imagine; simply see—that there are better ways of doing this shit.
So many cities in North America had electric trolleys going through dense neighborhoods. Most of them got ripped out and many neighborhoods knocked down to make room for highways rush hour parking lots.
I watched an interesting video recently about trolleys / trams.
Originally, the form of mass transit in cities was "omnibuses", which were horse-drawn carriages on wooden wheels with seats for many passengers. Horsecars, or horse-drawn trams, were an improvement on that. Because they used steel wheels on steel rails, they were much more efficient than wooden wheels on cobblestone streets. They required much less "horsepower" to run.
An American with the unlikely name of Mr. Train set up the first horsecars in England. What's crazy about this first tram system is that the rails were above the road surface, and at that time there was no permit system or anything, so he'd just been installing them wherever he thought there was good business. He was eventually arrested for "breaking and injuring" a road in London, which basically stopped his efforts. Can you imagine that? Some dude just came and put regular raised railway tracks on a road and started running horsecars along those tracks and nobody stopped him until more than a year later.
Eventually they settled on grooved rails so that the trams were less disruptive of other kinds of traffic (but they can still be really tricky for bicycles). They also switched from horse-drawn trams to steam-powered trams and then to a variety of things: fossil-fuel engines, cable cars, electric, etc.
Part of what killed the tram was the rise of the car, and the push by car companies to kill their competition. But, another part of what killed them was simply rubber tires. Remember that the original advantage of trams was the superiority of steel wheels on steel tracks vs. wooden wheels on cobblestone. Modern roads and modern tires also meant that the advantage of a tram was really diminished. That meant that a lot of places started replacing inflexible trams with more flexible diesel-powered (omni)buses.
But, of course, there's a hidden drawback that those people might not have considered. Trams use different kinds of wheels so they can get their own lanes, sometimes get their own bridges, sometimes even their own traffic lights. It's much easier to give them priority when there are shared lanes, because they're clearly a different kind of vehicle. When you switch from a tram to a bus, the bus is just another vehicle with rubber tires, so it gets caught in traffic in a way that trams didn't.
And, of course, if buses have to stop frequently to load and unload passengers and they get stuck in traffic, they're going to be much slower than cars, so it convinces people that public transit doesn't work and they need to have a car.
In the end, we don't necessarily need trams / trolleys / streetcars, we just need a public transit vehicle that has either dedicated lanes or priority over other traffic. Zurich, for instance, has trams, but it also has buses that get their own lanes, get their own traffic signals, and get priority over other traffic, so that drivers get out of their way or risk big fines.
Sometimes trams are the best solution. Rails means you can have multiple cabins in a row and not have to worry about how to steer around corners. With buses they can sometimes have one extra "trailer", the famous articulated (or better accordion) bus. But, one "trailer" is really the limit. Rails also means a predictable path, which means it's easier to make them fully electric, which generally makes them much quieter than a diesel bus. (That is, until they have to take a sharp turn).
In the end, I like trams, but trams aren't really necessary. What's necessary is rules that give priority to public transit vehicles. You tend to get that by default with trams, but you can do it with buses, mini-buses or even mini-vans.
The electric trams were bad, because they were never actually intended as transport - the electric companies just wanted an excuse to hook the neighbourhoods up to electricity, and electric trams were just their excuse for doing so. It wasn't cohesively designed, they didn't necessarily think it was better than cars.
Note that saying they were bad is not the same as saying they had to be bad - they were just poorly executed because they didn't give a shit.
Or “my town is small that’s why everything is far apart”
Everything is far apart because the streets are too wide. This dates back to the 1780s, it's actually older than cars, and it was what made people adopt cars in the first place - for instance, Manhattan already had its car-sized streets of their current size way, way before cars were invented.
In the long term, the problem is the street grid itself - squish everything closer together and everything will be nicer to walk to (because it's human-scale), closer to walk to in the first place, and cheaper to maintain.
Manhattan had car-sized streets, sure. But, they were used completely differently.
For example, vendors would come and park their carts on the side of the street, with the wares facing the middle of the street, and people would walk up and shop while standing in the street. There were a lot more people walking and standing in the streets. And, it was a lot more common (and a lot safer) just to walk out into a street, because a horse wouldn't typically run someone down, and when cars first came along they were very slow.
I don't really see super wide streets as being a problem. Especially in a place like Manhattan where there are huge skyscrapers, you want wide streets so buildings aren't in perpetual shadow. You just need to make sure to keep cars away, and to limit the speed of any remaining vehicles to something reasonable. Then the streets belong to pedestrians, as they should.
Yea, and when our neighbourhood’s main street(two way and street parking on either side) becomes pedestrian in the summer it’s awesome and full of patios. Large, lovely town squares have also existed for a long time, that’s zero excuse. You have to have more than just “human” scale, you also need to be able to handle a lot of people and a 5’ sidewalk, or maybe a 10’ street if you remove the car lanes’ width, just doesn’t cut it.
I’d like for where I lived in Denver to be simply walkable. Or safely bikable. I was living in a pretty urban area in SW Denver proper and my car was lost to a collision, so I started walking everywhere. Great area for that, theoretically - I was surrounded by Asian and Central American markets, convenience stores, liquor stores, dispensaries, local restaurants, all within about a mile. However, the major roads nearby were stroads. Crossing at crosswalks was much more dangerous than just wiring for cars to disperse and running across in the middle of the block.
Worse though, I was near a kinda fun hipster shopping and bar area, but there was this horrific freeway/highway/stroad exchange where you had to go across something like 6 roads and exit ramps. It was the most pedestrian unfriendly thing I’d ever seen, and coincidentally it divided a more affluent white section of town from the Hispanic area.
I think Denver is the least walkable city I've ever been in. Was there a few years back and was floored by how hard it was to get anywhere as a tourist without a ride share
Really depends on the part of town. It definitely wasn't built with pedestrian or bicycle access in mind when Denver expanded in the 60s-80s, but no city in the US was back then, really. If you're in a dense area like Cap Hill, it's great. Overall Denver is set up the same as most western cities, like LA, Phoenix, Albuquerque, but for the most part is better than those. If you want something really horrible try suburbs of Houston where they don't even have sidewalks.
I live in downtown Denver and haven’t driven in 12+ years, and rarely (maybe 4x a year) use rideshares. I’m not sure where your plans took you, but there are many of us living comfortably in Denver without a car.
I watched a few episodes of that recent show "Paradise," and as soon as I saw that they chose to make their giant bunker inside a mountain a fucking suburb with cars as the main form of transportation, I was like "fuck this..."
Then I remembered what time line we were on, and of course that's exactly something that the US government would do.
Could fit several times more people by building vertically, but instead fill it up with one-family homes with a quarter-acre backyard and swimming pool. Sounds about right.
“WHY SHOULD I BE PAYING TAXES FOR STUFF THAT I DONT USE”.
I'm on a citizen's advisory committee for a county's planning and development board... this can be answered rather easily in a way most posing the question haven't even considered. Approach the person like this:
"So, you'll never use this thing, you like driving, but I'll bet you don't like traffic... every single solitary person riding on that new bus/light rail line, cycling on those new bike lanes, and walking on those new sidewalks is another car you're not going to be stuck behind in traffic. You personally come out ahead in this as well!"
Usually, they've never considered that traffic calming and alternative transport modes actually IS infrastructure from which motorists benefit. It's true that private vehicles aren't efficient as a means of mass transit, but they are convenient... it's the convenience factor where you can get car-brained folks to have a change of heart. The more you can emphasize that these improvements to other modes can make driving even slightly more convenient, the more they'll get on board with spending on them. Remember, these folks are already used to telling each other "I don't mind all the construction, that extra lane on that highway is needed." Half the time, this line of reasoning gets them on board or, at the very least, to stop outright opposing improvements.
Why shouldn't people say that? We have a long list of other examples of bad transport investments, transport projects that cost for more than they will benefit society and so on. Show that this investment isn't a waste of money and I might be interested, but all I see is people who see transit as a way to shovel money their union and consultant donors. Clean up the our side of politics first.
Not having to drive myself to the hospital in a minor emergency where I'm alone would be nice, but even the friends and family discount at the local ambulance company is too expensive.
it's taken a few decades but seattle finally has really good light rail. every 10 minutes. you can get from the airport to the other side of the city for $4. it's not perfect, and doesn't go everywhere, but holy hell is it a giant upgrade for living in town.
Mmmmm. Grew up in Seattle, and finally having light rail is, of course, better than not having it.
But I've also lived in San Francisco, and I'm often frustrated by the unreliability and mismanagement of Seattle's system. Meltdown days seem about as common as non-meltdown days.
fo sho if you're going to compare it to bart, which is like, 50 years of concerted civil engineering to the last two decades here in Seattle, it's gonna fall short. Bart's an impressive outlier in commitment to the problem.
BART was pretty impressive too, but I was mostly thinking of San Francisco's Municipal Railway (Muni). It's about 110 years old, and ran eight routes, cable car and light rail, when I lived there in the '00s (they've added a few routes since then). I didn't have a car, and Muni took me everywhere inside the city, pretty reliably. Sure, you could count on a meltdown of the system every month or two, but Sound Transit is only 15 years old, too young to be as rickety and unreliable as it is. And it still flabbergasts me that no heads rolled over the bridge fiasco for the 2-line.
Not trying to be argumentative. Big fan of public transit. I live in Seattle and don't own a car. Sound Transit needs to be better, is all.
Maybe if they did then they'd actually remember there is more to Colorado than just Denver area, sincerely, someone who lives an hour and half south of Pueblo.
Safe and reliable self driving cars, affordable and accessible high speed public transit, a smart grid that can handle a nationwide shift to renewables... I want so many things. But my expectations have never been lower for what we'll actually get.
Reminder that transit will never take off unless there are written and unwritten rules of public decorum, and they are enforced. I live in New York and take the subway every day. There are obvious pros to doing so, which is why I do it, but you would have a hard time selling my experience to people not used to it. I regularly have to deal with shit you should never have to.
I've been to a bunch of places and probably taken a dozen different subways/metros, they are all way better behaved than here. East Asia is not even in the same ball park.
Who you vote for matters. Right not everyone votes for the democrats who want it this way and so that is what you get. You need to find/make a choice that cares about transit and vote for them. Good luck.
you see, if the City does that then it's the city's responsibility to maintain, both the infrastructure for transportation and the transportation itself. With cars, they only do infrastructure
Sure, but you need some of that car infrastructure for trash collection, deliveries and such. In small towns that double duties for everything at no extra cost. Until you have a good network investments in public transit are bad as so few will ride that it isn't worth having at all - then suddenly you have a good network and people start riding.
I want people to understand that everybody's needs aren't the same as their own (and not just say they do before screaming something that proves they don't).
I liked the metro rail until recently, when I caught the flu 3 consecutive times when using it.
If not wanting to be in a crowded space where - 30% of people are coughing around, not even caring to use a hanky to cover, while people having smoked so much, before entering, that even the cabin ventilators being at full blast, are not able to mitigate the stink - is considered anti-social, then yes, I am anti-social.
Face masks costing $2+ are wasted in a matter of 30 minutes, being filled with stink from cigarettes, if you are unlucky enough to get in the wrong cabin at the wrong time.
I'm still pro public transit though.
On the road, you will find smokers on the roadside, smokers in cars, smokers on bikes and cycles, all making it harder for one to get to work on their bicycle, without having to breathe that stuff.
It is to the point that I cannot consider going out cycling for leisure, because any fun I might get from an hour of cycling can be destroyed by a few seconds of choosing the wrong route.
Where do you live that it's full of smokers? Smoking hasn't been allowed indoors in NYC for years. I guess other places haven't caught up.
I think the people smoking and coughing in public are more anti-social. It kind of bothers me that we're generally too polite to do anything about people being a nuisance in public. I don't want, like, vigilante murder of smokers, but if something happened to remind the guy smoking in the subway station that rules are agreements, and if they're going to break the rules maybe someone's going to break their face, I wouldn't be that upset.
Maybe I was too unclear. Smoking indoors in public areas has long been prohibited.
Problem is, just because someone stopped smoking a minute ago, doesn't mean the stuff in their lungs and clothes will not dissipate. This is easily noticeable when:
The room is closed, with closed loop ACs instead of HVACs in the name of ventilation. Over time, even the insides of the AC adsorb the vapours, making it stay.
When there is enough of people full of the stuff from cigarettes in close quarters, it becomes the same as secondary smoking even if there is good ventilation.
If they get to smoke on the staircase(which is also a closed area), right next to the door of the closed area, the poison gas is not going to follow laws of humans and stay away from the room.
ah, I see. NYC has some laws about how close you can be to the entrance while smoking, but as you say the lingering effects can still be a problem.
I don't really have a lot of sympathy for smokers. It's a known bad habit. Quitting sucks but that's the debt the smoker took on. Don't want everyone else to pay that. (Though I would support public programs to help people quit)
To me it's weird that you don't know how to feel about an idea until you figure out which side of some issue it implies. Seems like rational thought should work the other way around. Maybe that's just me.
Your original post was vague and could be read as pro-public transit (some can't drive and need it ) or anti public transit (some people need private transit because they can't get on a bus or whatever). Or maybe uselessly neither? I really don't know what you were trying to contribute.
I was trying to contribute that it's okay if one size doesn't fit all. Different people have different needs. Being pro something doesn't necessarily mean you're anti some other thing. It's not a binary world, in case you haven't noticed. The compulsion to think that way hurts discourse. I'm pro public transit and also pro private transit, because they're both useful in different ways.
Also I don't know what "pro private transit" means to you. Do you mean more space dedicated to cars over people? Often people want "more parking" and "more lanes", and those things don't solve the problems they're facing, and are bad ideas.
You have to take more of the ideas out of your head and put them into the words you write if you want other people to follow you.
During rush hour my city's transit comes every 15 minutes, 7.5 minutes on the shared line. I only used it for commuting. On the weekend I saw the train leaving and didn't worry but had to wait a while 30 minutes. Which sucked.
A train/bus every 30 minutes is fine for work - most people can plan their work day around that, so long as the schedule is reasonably consistent. However when going doing anything else there is too much risk that you will have to wait 29 minutes when you finish whatever it was you came to do and that is not acceptable to most people.
That's great. If you are in the US it isn't going to happen at a meaningful scale. Best we can do is larger scale self driving mini busses for public transport and single user self driving vehicles for expediancies. Use existing infrastructure but work to eliminate human driving (save that for track driving for pleasure) and enforce heavy pedestrian priorities so foot traffic and bicycling becomes easier and safer.
I've heard this said a lot, and I'm not necessarily doubting its true, but what's the reason behind the richest country in the world not being able to build good public transport? Large countries like China yave good public transport, and the continent of Europe has great trains- is it just the USA's size combined with its lack of public infrastructure in general?
unless the trains could use the existing land building the rail would be extremely costly due in part to the slowness of emminent domain and the us actually having functional property rights that make it hard to take land from people (those that can afford lawyers). coupled with the large number of citys with populations under 100,000 buses are generally going to work better here.
I'd rather direct progress in a meaningful direction. My attitude isn't breaking trains coming to the US. Autonomous vehicles are way behind where they should be for meaningful progress and fear and misunderstanding is the only real obstacle there.
It might happen. Manhattan just introduced congestion charges and it apparently made a big difference.
And places that we now think of as bike and public transit focused cities in Europe were very car-centric in the 70s. I don't know why or how they changed, but they did.
I want something that takes me straight to my destination so my hurting ass self doesn't have to walk far. Driven by me so I won't get motion sickness. With a trunk so I can put a bunch of crap in there and not have to carry it all the way back while walking and riding a goddamn train.
Oh, right, I want cars. Anything else is short-sighted and ableist. I'm sure you're going to hate me and mod me down and silence me and all sorts of crap for this viewpoint, but holy fuck, how do you not understand that this is a perfectly valid view? If you're special and can walk and carry tons of shit, good on you, I'm so proud of you. Many are not. And when you destroy the ability to drive and park somewhere in your urban "utopias" because they cater to your special ass, it screws US over.
They take up space because HUMANS TAKE UP SPACE. You tend to think of cars as automatons. This is your fucking fascist bent, right here. You dehumanize cars as something horrible and anti-human when it's human beings who drive them and benefit from them. Gives them FREEDOM. ACCESS. RIGHTS.
Just because you look at a small section of healthy 70+ year olds doesn't invalidate my point. "Look at these happy brown hair blue eyed white people, they're not being oppressed in Nazi Germany! What are you complaining about?"
Wait, but both can coexist. This post is only hoping to abolish the "cars as default" mentality as it says. And it's not even a utopian dream when many places have both options readily available and well-furnished. I think you're going off without need there. But honestly, valid points. Some people do need personal vehicles and it's good to aim for a comprehensive view of transportation.
You're right, not building society around your preferences and convenience is literal fascism and anybody who care about safety or the environment is just fundamentally evil. The cruelty is the point.
It is literal fascism. When you are intolerant towards a group of people, what else is that? Get in line with your fascist friends in the White House and oppress us all, or start realizing how fucking horrible you are and fix your attitude.
My attitude? Hating oppression isn't a bad thing. Look up the paradox of tolerance. You anti-car, pro-walking shitlords are opressing people with disabilities and other issues. And no, unlike some people claim, it's not about "coexistence". It's about TAKING OVER PUBLIC SPACES WITH YOUR ANTI-CAR PLANS.
You're just as bad as people like the Orange Turd and Elon Stark. Get over it and start realizing that what you're doing is, plain and simple, ableist. You're being intolerant. Plain and simple. If you are fine with being intolerant, get in line with the rest of the fascists and stop pretending.
Developed high speed rail since 2008 in China vs the US:
I'd be careful with overgeneralizing that. Even though Latin American cultures also push for individualism to some extent, we do have tight-nit communities regardless because of the unified cultures that we have.
I’ve been to China plenty of times, I promise the car culture is alive and well.
We had nice things before.
Got a not potato copy? Or context?
Extent of railway development from 1860 through 1870 to 1890
the story of streetcars in the US is similarly depressing; in the 1900s most large cities had trolly systems.
the automobile companies fixed that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Gah, America as an empire is past its prime. Look what we had!!!
I've been to China as part of a company visit. They took us everywhere by car. Even what I would consider walking distance.
I did not see mass transit once. It's entirely possible that it was there, but they just didn't let us use it for some reason. Were scared that we'd kill ourselves there or something.
Shenzen.
Yeah, I don't doubt it exists and probably is well used by the people living there. Just wanted to address the part of the comment saying "China would never allow for a “car culture” in the firsr place" because there sure was a car culture. It felt like an American city.
I'm also aware that Shenzen is different from the rest of China, and, well, that the rest of China is different from the other rest of China.
"China has good railways because China bad" is one hell of a bad take.
China isn't an autocracy any more than the US is, getting to vote which party gets to erode your rights and enact genocide on your behalf isn't democracy
Xi Jinping's third term is literally autocracy. President Cheeto would kill for that much power.
America as fucked up as we, are can bash our president and resist his power grabs as much as our oligarchy allows.
In China, you can't even post a whinnie the pooh cartoon because making an autocratic dictator look bad can't fly.
China doesn't have rapid shifts in infrastructure because China bad, it's because China has an autocratic dictatorship which allows for massive investment of resources without argument.
The US has massive investment of resources without argument too when it comes to the military industrial complex or to rescuing banks that have committed fraud, or to genocide Palestinians. The fact that it doesn't do so with basic infrastructure is because the oligarchs in the US don't want that, not because of a lack of oligarchs in power. They make it theatrical in congress, but look at the defense budged and the speed with which they approve multi-billion expenses that go into bombing kids in the middle east, suddenly the American democracy works expediently.
People talk about it and complain. there was and is debate on all those topics. You have lost in all the topics you are talking about, but it was fair and square.
A democracy would be voting for a party promising not to erode your rights and getting your rights not eroded. That's not what you get in the ol' US of A, anywhere in the west for that master
Yeah that's what happens when all your manufacturing is outsourced there. China is insanely insanely rich now
Still not as rich as the USA.
China's GDP is 17.79 trillion dollars compared to the USA's 27,36 trillion.
There's plenty of money to invest in public infrastructure, but no one wants to do it.
Yeah, just to add, per capita the difference is even starker. The low population density in the US makes it extremely costly to build a high-speed railway from east to west coast, but there is no good reason why there is no railway between LA-Bay Area-Sacremento, and a high-speed rail connection along the East Coast is a no brainer.
USA is very wealthy. It's always a choice what to invest in.
One of the most annoying things is cities that were designed pre-car being retrofitted for car, and then people acting like that's the city's fault for not making the city better for car, rather than the city's fault for not assessing their situation and emphasizing other methods of getting from place to place
Or similarily, the whole world being walkable before the incredibly recent invention of cars and yet people still act like there’s no way to be without a vehicle. Like, even when cars were first coming out cities were already dense and had public transit that was working fine and many still do today.
Or “my town is small that’s why everything is far apart” my friend you have fewer things than I do in the city, within walking distance, and need a car to get to them all like how does that make any sense?! Put that shit together into a nice little walkable village! I’m from a village like that and I’m from goddamn Ontario! It’s awesome!
I hate when people who live in some crap suburb cannot even imagine—not even imagine; simply see—that there are better ways of doing this shit.
So many cities in North America had electric trolleys going through dense neighborhoods. Most of them got ripped out and many neighborhoods knocked down to make room for
highwaysrush hour parking lots.I watched an interesting video recently about trolleys / trams.
Originally, the form of mass transit in cities was "omnibuses", which were horse-drawn carriages on wooden wheels with seats for many passengers. Horsecars, or horse-drawn trams, were an improvement on that. Because they used steel wheels on steel rails, they were much more efficient than wooden wheels on cobblestone streets. They required much less "horsepower" to run.
An American with the unlikely name of Mr. Train set up the first horsecars in England. What's crazy about this first tram system is that the rails were above the road surface, and at that time there was no permit system or anything, so he'd just been installing them wherever he thought there was good business. He was eventually arrested for "breaking and injuring" a road in London, which basically stopped his efforts. Can you imagine that? Some dude just came and put regular raised railway tracks on a road and started running horsecars along those tracks and nobody stopped him until more than a year later.
Eventually they settled on grooved rails so that the trams were less disruptive of other kinds of traffic (but they can still be really tricky for bicycles). They also switched from horse-drawn trams to steam-powered trams and then to a variety of things: fossil-fuel engines, cable cars, electric, etc.
Part of what killed the tram was the rise of the car, and the push by car companies to kill their competition. But, another part of what killed them was simply rubber tires. Remember that the original advantage of trams was the superiority of steel wheels on steel tracks vs. wooden wheels on cobblestone. Modern roads and modern tires also meant that the advantage of a tram was really diminished. That meant that a lot of places started replacing inflexible trams with more flexible diesel-powered (omni)buses.
But, of course, there's a hidden drawback that those people might not have considered. Trams use different kinds of wheels so they can get their own lanes, sometimes get their own bridges, sometimes even their own traffic lights. It's much easier to give them priority when there are shared lanes, because they're clearly a different kind of vehicle. When you switch from a tram to a bus, the bus is just another vehicle with rubber tires, so it gets caught in traffic in a way that trams didn't.
And, of course, if buses have to stop frequently to load and unload passengers and they get stuck in traffic, they're going to be much slower than cars, so it convinces people that public transit doesn't work and they need to have a car.
In the end, we don't necessarily need trams / trolleys / streetcars, we just need a public transit vehicle that has either dedicated lanes or priority over other traffic. Zurich, for instance, has trams, but it also has buses that get their own lanes, get their own traffic signals, and get priority over other traffic, so that drivers get out of their way or risk big fines.
Sometimes trams are the best solution. Rails means you can have multiple cabins in a row and not have to worry about how to steer around corners. With buses they can sometimes have one extra "trailer", the famous articulated (or better accordion) bus. But, one "trailer" is really the limit. Rails also means a predictable path, which means it's easier to make them fully electric, which generally makes them much quieter than a diesel bus. (That is, until they have to take a sharp turn).
In the end, I like trams, but trams aren't really necessary. What's necessary is rules that give priority to public transit vehicles. You tend to get that by default with trams, but you can do it with buses, mini-buses or even mini-vans.
Dense neighborhoods that were often similar density to suburbs.
The electric trams were bad, because they were never actually intended as transport - the electric companies just wanted an excuse to hook the neighbourhoods up to electricity, and electric trams were just their excuse for doing so. It wasn't cohesively designed, they didn't necessarily think it was better than cars.
Note that saying they were bad is not the same as saying they had to be bad - they were just poorly executed because they didn't give a shit.
Everything is far apart because the streets are too wide. This dates back to the 1780s, it's actually older than cars, and it was what made people adopt cars in the first place - for instance, Manhattan already had its car-sized streets of their current size way, way before cars were invented.
In the long term, the problem is the street grid itself - squish everything closer together and everything will be nicer to walk to (because it's human-scale), closer to walk to in the first place, and cheaper to maintain.
Manhattan had car-sized streets, sure. But, they were used completely differently.
For example, vendors would come and park their carts on the side of the street, with the wares facing the middle of the street, and people would walk up and shop while standing in the street. There were a lot more people walking and standing in the streets. And, it was a lot more common (and a lot safer) just to walk out into a street, because a horse wouldn't typically run someone down, and when cars first came along they were very slow.
I don't really see super wide streets as being a problem. Especially in a place like Manhattan where there are huge skyscrapers, you want wide streets so buildings aren't in perpetual shadow. You just need to make sure to keep cars away, and to limit the speed of any remaining vehicles to something reasonable. Then the streets belong to pedestrians, as they should.
Yea, and when our neighbourhood’s main street(two way and street parking on either side) becomes pedestrian in the summer it’s awesome and full of patios. Large, lovely town squares have also existed for a long time, that’s zero excuse. You have to have more than just “human” scale, you also need to be able to handle a lot of people and a 5’ sidewalk, or maybe a 10’ street if you remove the car lanes’ width, just doesn’t cut it.
One more lane! /S
wHy Is ThErE nEvEr EnOuGh StReEt PaRkInG
In NL cities where not car focussed then some became more car focussed, we saw that that was wrong and started changing back.
I’d like for where I lived in Denver to be simply walkable. Or safely bikable. I was living in a pretty urban area in SW Denver proper and my car was lost to a collision, so I started walking everywhere. Great area for that, theoretically - I was surrounded by Asian and Central American markets, convenience stores, liquor stores, dispensaries, local restaurants, all within about a mile. However, the major roads nearby were stroads. Crossing at crosswalks was much more dangerous than just wiring for cars to disperse and running across in the middle of the block.
Worse though, I was near a kinda fun hipster shopping and bar area, but there was this horrific freeway/highway/stroad exchange where you had to go across something like 6 roads and exit ramps. It was the most pedestrian unfriendly thing I’d ever seen, and coincidentally it divided a more affluent white section of town from the Hispanic area.
"Coincidentally"
I think Denver is the least walkable city I've ever been in. Was there a few years back and was floored by how hard it was to get anywhere as a tourist without a ride share
Really depends on the part of town. It definitely wasn't built with pedestrian or bicycle access in mind when Denver expanded in the 60s-80s, but no city in the US was back then, really. If you're in a dense area like Cap Hill, it's great. Overall Denver is set up the same as most western cities, like LA, Phoenix, Albuquerque, but for the most part is better than those. If you want something really horrible try suburbs of Houston where they don't even have sidewalks.
I live in downtown Denver and haven’t driven in 12+ years, and rarely (maybe 4x a year) use rideshares. I’m not sure where your plans took you, but there are many of us living comfortably in Denver without a car.
For anyone who really likes driving:
Fully agree and the US public transportation system is fucking pathetic.
What is "the US public transportation system"?
some cities have amtrak and it's expensive. there's also the private public transit system of greyhound, megabus, and the chinatown express network
I watched a few episodes of that recent show "Paradise," and as soon as I saw that they chose to make their giant bunker inside a mountain a fucking suburb with cars as the main form of transportation, I was like "fuck this..."
Then I remembered what time line we were on, and of course that's exactly something that the US government would do.
Could fit several times more people by building vertically, but instead fill it up with one-family homes with a quarter-acre backyard and swimming pool. Sounds about right.
Wouldn’t it be nice if this was people attitude and not “WHY SHOULD I BE PAYING TAXES FOR STUFF THAT I DONT USE”.
I'm on a citizen's advisory committee for a county's planning and development board... this can be answered rather easily in a way most posing the question haven't even considered. Approach the person like this: "So, you'll never use this thing, you like driving, but I'll bet you don't like traffic... every single solitary person riding on that new bus/light rail line, cycling on those new bike lanes, and walking on those new sidewalks is another car you're not going to be stuck behind in traffic. You personally come out ahead in this as well!"
Usually, they've never considered that traffic calming and alternative transport modes actually IS infrastructure from which motorists benefit. It's true that private vehicles aren't efficient as a means of mass transit, but they are convenient... it's the convenience factor where you can get car-brained folks to have a change of heart. The more you can emphasize that these improvements to other modes can make driving even slightly more convenient, the more they'll get on board with spending on them. Remember, these folks are already used to telling each other "I don't mind all the construction, that extra lane on that highway is needed." Half the time, this line of reasoning gets them on board or, at the very least, to stop outright opposing improvements.
America, the land of "i got mine"
Why shouldn't people say that? We have a long list of other examples of bad transport investments, transport projects that cost for more than they will benefit society and so on. Show that this investment isn't a waste of money and I might be interested, but all I see is people who see transit as a way to shovel money their union and consultant donors. Clean up the our side of politics first.
I mean I can want two things.
Not having to drive myself to the hospital in a minor emergency where I'm alone would be nice, but even the friends and family discount at the local ambulance company is too expensive.
Maybe, you know, get universal healthcare instead of people relying on self driving cars for their emergency trips to the hospital?
Lmao never saw that, it's great
But I think the solution to that is more accessible health care, not self driving cars
Sorry, best we can do is shitty robotaxis and electric cars that lock you inside when they explode.
.
it's taken a few decades but seattle finally has really good light rail. every 10 minutes. you can get from the airport to the other side of the city for $4. it's not perfect, and doesn't go everywhere, but holy hell is it a giant upgrade for living in town.
Mmmmm. Grew up in Seattle, and finally having light rail is, of course, better than not having it.
But I've also lived in San Francisco, and I'm often frustrated by the unreliability and mismanagement of Seattle's system. Meltdown days seem about as common as non-meltdown days.
fo sho if you're going to compare it to bart, which is like, 50 years of concerted civil engineering to the last two decades here in Seattle, it's gonna fall short. Bart's an impressive outlier in commitment to the problem.
BART was pretty impressive too, but I was mostly thinking of San Francisco's Municipal Railway (Muni). It's about 110 years old, and ran eight routes, cable car and light rail, when I lived there in the '00s (they've added a few routes since then). I didn't have a car, and Muni took me everywhere inside the city, pretty reliably. Sure, you could count on a meltdown of the system every month or two, but Sound Transit is only 15 years old, too young to be as rickety and unreliable as it is. And it still flabbergasts me that no heads rolled over the bridge fiasco for the 2-line.
Not trying to be argumentative. Big fan of public transit. I live in Seattle and don't own a car. Sound Transit needs to be better, is all.
muni is hella awesome too, it's a great example of how not kneecapping things in the early 1900s changes the equation.
I wish ST was better, but I have limited expectations moving here from a red state.
Please Colorado ffs connect our major cities.
If Colorado expands public transit, it would be too OP. /j
Maybe if they did then they'd actually remember there is more to Colorado than just Denver area, sincerely, someone who lives an hour and half south of Pueblo.
I still want self driving cars
Safe and reliable self driving cars, affordable and accessible high speed public transit, a smart grid that can handle a nationwide shift to renewables... I want so many things. But my expectations have never been lower for what we'll actually get.
Reminder that transit will never take off unless there are written and unwritten rules of public decorum, and they are enforced. I live in New York and take the subway every day. There are obvious pros to doing so, which is why I do it, but you would have a hard time selling my experience to people not used to it. I regularly have to deal with shit you should never have to.
I've been to a bunch of places and probably taken a dozen different subways/metros, they are all way better behaved than here. East Asia is not even in the same ball park.
Who you vote for matters. Right not everyone votes for the democrats who want it this way and so that is what you get. You need to find/make a choice that cares about transit and vote for them. Good luck.
You are going to get cities that allow oligarchs to extract as much money as possible from you. That's what you are going to get.
The US had voted against having this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island#Transportation
Cool I can ride a bike to buy fudge. Now get to Mackinac without a car. Whomp whomp.
I'm interested in how you might get there with a car.
Drive car from your shitbox house. Park car take ferry, (that's a boat) ta-da.
That sounds like getting there with a boat.
you see, if the City does that then it's the city's responsibility to maintain, both the infrastructure for transportation and the transportation itself. With cars, they only do infrastructure
car infrastructure is more expensive than public transportation
Sure, but you need some of that car infrastructure for trash collection, deliveries and such. In small towns that double duties for everything at no extra cost. Until you have a good network investments in public transit are bad as so few will ride that it isn't worth having at all - then suddenly you have a good network and people start riding.
Agreed, traffic suck whether it jam or not
I want people to understand that everybody's needs aren't the same as their own (and not just say they do before screaming something that proves they don't).
I don't know if that means you're pro or anti public transit.
Some people act like "I don't want to be around other people" is a "need".
I don't think a society should especially cater to the most anti social members, especially if that hurts most people.
I liked the metro rail until recently, when I caught the flu 3 consecutive times when using it.
If not wanting to be in a crowded space where - 30% of people are coughing around, not even caring to use a hanky to cover, while people having smoked so much, before entering, that even the cabin ventilators being at full blast, are not able to mitigate the stink - is considered anti-social, then yes, I am anti-social.
Face masks costing $2+ are wasted in a matter of 30 minutes, being filled with stink from cigarettes, if you are unlucky enough to get in the wrong cabin at the wrong time.
I'm still pro public transit though.
On the road, you will find smokers on the roadside, smokers in cars, smokers on bikes and cycles, all making it harder for one to get to work on their bicycle, without having to breathe that stuff.
It is to the point that I cannot consider going out cycling for leisure, because any fun I might get from an hour of cycling can be destroyed by a few seconds of choosing the wrong route.
Where do you live that it's full of smokers? Smoking hasn't been allowed indoors in NYC for years. I guess other places haven't caught up.
I think the people smoking and coughing in public are more anti-social. It kind of bothers me that we're generally too polite to do anything about people being a nuisance in public. I don't want, like, vigilante murder of smokers, but if something happened to remind the guy smoking in the subway station that rules are agreements, and if they're going to break the rules maybe someone's going to break their face, I wouldn't be that upset.
Maybe I was too unclear. Smoking indoors in public areas has long been prohibited.
Problem is, just because someone stopped smoking a minute ago, doesn't mean the stuff in their lungs and clothes will not dissipate. This is easily noticeable when:
If they get to smoke on the staircase(which is also a closed area), right next to the door of the closed area, the poison gas is not going to follow laws of humans and stay away from the room.
ah, I see. NYC has some laws about how close you can be to the entrance while smoking, but as you say the lingering effects can still be a problem.
I don't really have a lot of sympathy for smokers. It's a known bad habit. Quitting sucks but that's the debt the smoker took on. Don't want everyone else to pay that. (Though I would support public programs to help people quit)
I think one important part is to make it socially unacceptable.
But that's hard to do in a place where the majority of people are happy/fine with it.
To me it's weird that you don't know how to feel about an idea until you figure out which side of some issue it implies. Seems like rational thought should work the other way around. Maybe that's just me.
Your original post was vague and could be read as pro-public transit (some can't drive and need it ) or anti public transit (some people need private transit because they can't get on a bus or whatever). Or maybe uselessly neither? I really don't know what you were trying to contribute.
"Rational thought" doesn't really enter into it.
I was trying to contribute that it's okay if one size doesn't fit all. Different people have different needs. Being pro something doesn't necessarily mean you're anti some other thing. It's not a binary world, in case you haven't noticed. The compulsion to think that way hurts discourse. I'm pro public transit and also pro private transit, because they're both useful in different ways.
Sometimes things are mutually exclusive.
Also I don't know what "pro private transit" means to you. Do you mean more space dedicated to cars over people? Often people want "more parking" and "more lanes", and those things don't solve the problems they're facing, and are bad ideas.
You have to take more of the ideas out of your head and put them into the words you write if you want other people to follow you.
You've excelled in your efforts at not making a point.
Their point is clear and I can repeat it. Try disagreeing without being rude, please.
E: Also, happy cake day!
I can't disagree or agree with vague aspirations against another posters weirdness and rationality, though the smugness is certainly disagreeable.
Oooooooo hit delete instead of edit.... Oooooo frustration!
Woooo yeahhhh!
During rush hour my city's transit comes every 15 minutes, 7.5 minutes on the shared line. I only used it for commuting. On the weekend I saw the train leaving and didn't worry but had to wait a while 30 minutes. Which sucked.
A train/bus every 30 minutes is fine for work - most people can plan their work day around that, so long as the schedule is reasonably consistent. However when going doing anything else there is too much risk that you will have to wait 29 minutes when you finish whatever it was you came to do and that is not acceptable to most people.
Same same.
If you make public transportation safe and efficient, even reliable, people won't need cars.
I'd rather sit on a train or a bus and read, rather than drive on the same roads with the crazy liberals and conservatives.
Oh wait, I'd be stuck inside metal tube with them instead. I better stay home then. Damn.
Can we get free chocolate bars with the tickets too.
You don't want self driving cars because you like trains.
I don't want self driving cars because I like driving.
We are not the same.
transit options don't prevent you from driving. how is this an argument against, if anything it'd make congestion better for you.
Yeah I know. I’m on your side
That's great. If you are in the US it isn't going to happen at a meaningful scale. Best we can do is larger scale self driving mini busses for public transport and single user self driving vehicles for expediancies. Use existing infrastructure but work to eliminate human driving (save that for track driving for pleasure) and enforce heavy pedestrian priorities so foot traffic and bicycling becomes easier and safer.
I've heard this said a lot, and I'm not necessarily doubting its true, but what's the reason behind the richest country in the world not being able to build good public transport? Large countries like China yave good public transport, and the continent of Europe has great trains- is it just the USA's size combined with its lack of public infrastructure in general?
All the wealth is concentrated in the hands of selfish pricks who don't give a shit. Why advocate for high speed rail when you have a private jet?
Also making people waste time in traffic is probably good for the ownership class. You're not organizing if you're stuck in your car.
Low taxes so nothing goes to infrastructure
unless the trains could use the existing land building the rail would be extremely costly due in part to the slowness of emminent domain and the us actually having functional property rights that make it hard to take land from people (those that can afford lawyers). coupled with the large number of citys with populations under 100,000 buses are generally going to work better here.
It's the fact that our cities were built around cars. Kinda bad timing really.
Many european cities were too, after they got leveled in ww2. Changing that is possible, but it requires actually starting.
Your defeatism mindset is a large part of why it's not happening right now. Stop posting this shit so that progress can actually be made.
I'd rather direct progress in a meaningful direction. My attitude isn't breaking trains coming to the US. Autonomous vehicles are way behind where they should be for meaningful progress and fear and misunderstanding is the only real obstacle there.
It might happen. Manhattan just introduced congestion charges and it apparently made a big difference.
And places that we now think of as bike and public transit focused cities in Europe were very car-centric in the 70s. I don't know why or how they changed, but they did.
I want something that takes me straight to my destination so my hurting ass self doesn't have to walk far. Driven by me so I won't get motion sickness. With a trunk so I can put a bunch of crap in there and not have to carry it all the way back while walking and riding a goddamn train.
Oh, right, I want cars. Anything else is short-sighted and ableist. I'm sure you're going to hate me and mod me down and silence me and all sorts of crap for this viewpoint, but holy fuck, how do you not understand that this is a perfectly valid view? If you're special and can walk and carry tons of shit, good on you, I'm so proud of you. Many are not. And when you destroy the ability to drive and park somewhere in your urban "utopias" because they cater to your special ass, it screws US over.
They take up space because HUMANS TAKE UP SPACE. You tend to think of cars as automatons. This is your fucking fascist bent, right here. You dehumanize cars as something horrible and anti-human when it's human beings who drive them and benefit from them. Gives them FREEDOM. ACCESS. RIGHTS.
Just because you look at a small section of healthy 70+ year olds doesn't invalidate my point. "Look at these happy brown hair blue eyed white people, they're not being oppressed in Nazi Germany! What are you complaining about?"
Fascists.
Wait, but both can coexist. This post is only hoping to abolish the "cars as default" mentality as it says. And it's not even a utopian dream when many places have both options readily available and well-furnished. I think you're going off without need there. But honestly, valid points. Some people do need personal vehicles and it's good to aim for a comprehensive view of transportation.
You're right, not building society around your preferences and convenience is literal fascism and anybody who care about safety or the environment is just fundamentally evil. The cruelty is the point.
It is literal fascism. When you are intolerant towards a group of people, what else is that? Get in line with your fascist friends in the White House and oppress us all, or start realizing how fucking horrible you are and fix your attitude.
You sound like a Republican caricature of a progressive right now. Fascism is when other people don't give me exactly what I want.
Nah it's your attitude that will be hated and "modded down".
My attitude? Hating oppression isn't a bad thing. Look up the paradox of tolerance. You anti-car, pro-walking shitlords are opressing people with disabilities and other issues. And no, unlike some people claim, it's not about "coexistence". It's about TAKING OVER PUBLIC SPACES WITH YOUR ANTI-CAR PLANS.
You're just as bad as people like the Orange Turd and Elon Stark. Get over it and start realizing that what you're doing is, plain and simple, ableist. You're being intolerant. Plain and simple. If you are fine with being intolerant, get in line with the rest of the fascists and stop pretending.
I'm conflicted. This hilarious if it's trolling, but I don't want to laugh at somebody who's legitimately mentally ill.