Imagine if more money was put into mass transit. Bullet trains, underground subways. Imagine if every city had worked out a way to transport people where anyone living in a metro area was never more than five minutes away from a stop for mass transit. Imagine a world where there were so many various train routes going from city hub to city hub, there wouldn't even be a need for highways. Imagine if one's personal or commercial goods were moved from various tram-like / light rails along with cable cars that could be connected right to a drive way to a residence. Or, if we had anything interesting, we could use robotic pickups and dropoff of large materials to the locations of our choice. Imagine a world where automobiles were rare, and mainly used in rural areas that were extremely remote or for emergency purposes only. — schopenhauer1
Imagine if more money was put into mass transit. Bullet trains, underground subways. Imagine if every city had worked out a way to transport people where anyone living in a metro area was never more than five minutes away from a stop for mass transit. Imagine a world where there were so many various train routes going from city hub to city hub, there wouldn't even be a need for highways. Imagine if one's personal or commercial goods were moved from various tram-like / light rails along with cable cars that could be connected right to a drive way to a residence. — schopenhauer1
Are you aware of what you are saying here? Where do you live? — jgill
Imagine if more money was put into mass transit. Bullet trains, underground subways. Imagine if every city had worked out a way to transport people where anyone living in a metro area was never more than five minutes away from a stop for mass transit. Imagine a world where there were so many various train routes going from city hub to city hub, there wouldn't even be a need for highways. Imagine if one's personal or commercial goods were moved from various tram-like / light rails along with cable cars that could be connected right to a drive way to a residence. — schopenhauer1
Imagine all the unintended evils that would accompany such a thing — Leontiskos
This sounds so much better than having my car available anytime, and easily drivable to the Walmart about three miles away. Much better to wait for the neighborhood train. — jgill
You can have door to door transportation in a skyscraper IF you install elevators while you are building the tower. If you have to add elevators after the tall building is finished, elevator shafts and elevator systems become prohibitively expensive. Same thing for a city, to a large extent. One of the difficulties the met council's light rail system had was digging up all the infrastructure that was under the streets on which the light rail would run. It had to be either moved or upgraded so that it excavation wouldn't be needed in the intermediate future. Neither elevated rails nor burrowed tunnels get around all problems. — BC
The truth is, we missed the boat a century ago. We dismissed trains and we staked our future on autos, trucks and highways. Yes, it was a bad idea. — BC
At the end of the day if Trump gets elected it’s only the fault of the electorate. If trains don’t gain traction (pun intended), it starts with the consumer. — schopenhauer1
This sounds so much better than having my car available anytime, and easily drivable to the Walmart about three miles away. Much better to wait for the neighborhood train. — jgill
Damn. I get blamed for everything. — jgill
Just more frequent trains... In a perfect world, there’d be tons of train cars. — schopenhauer1
This sounds so much better than having my car available anytime, and easily drivable to the Walmart about three miles away. Much better to wait for the neighborhood train. — jgill
Cars represent a kind of freedom, but it has had its consequences, which aren't great either. As @BC well-stated:Damn. I get blamed for everything. — jgill
The truth is, we missed the boat a century ago. We dismissed trains and we staked our future on autos, trucks and highways. Yes, it was a bad idea. — BC
Yes, I understand the infrequency and inefficiency of today's public transit.Just for example, I live 3 miles from the University of Minnesota where I have worked and where I get medical and dental care. It takes me about 50 minutes to travel that distance on a bus (with good connections). It takes about an hour to walk. It takes about 20 minutes to bike. 50 minutes is too long for the distance, but there are no direct busses to the U from where I live. If a bus is missed, automatically add 12 to 30 minutes to the time. — BC
Taxes, banking, security, etc.? They apply to everything, not just cars. — Leontiskos
And I think the big elephant in the room is autonomy and subsidiarity. You have conceived of mobility as tied inextricably to the State within a centralized, top-down system. — Leontiskos
I'm trying. Hard to imagine a train track running down the road in front of my house. Would it stop at every house? Or make a reservation and the train will stop at your house. — jgill
...It's like we're groping in the dark for the concept of a bus. — Leontiskos
The kind of taxes, banking, and security that go to public transit, or even a private company is not the same as incurred when owning a car. — schopenhauer1
This is evil sounding to conservative politics, so go on trying to show the downsides... — schopenhauer1
In other words, I don't mind it being taken from a progressive tax base rather than personally from my bank account. — schopenhauer1
I don't mind fees to a private company to maintain it. Besides, do you think that "public" is really just "public"? It's always been public contracted to private with public and sometimes combined with private funds. Everyone gets their cut. You can have your Ayn Randian proprietors and shareholders ripping people off or the government getting their share, I guess. — schopenhauer1
The problem isn't merely economic, although the cost of trains is certainly prohibitive to private parties. The problem is that in order to go anywhere I am at the whim of your centralized thought-child. What you have in mind is centralized, government control of the mobility of the entire nation. — Leontiskos
I just think you overlook that roads are simply a hodgepodge version of the same thing. — schopenhauer1
But they're not, because roads are cheap enough to be built by private parties. — Leontiskos
His system wouldn't work by itself -- it would need too large a number of cars to handle peak traffic. For peak travel times, buses and trains would move large volumes of travelers. — BC
What makes Boston's system good, or even the Twin Cities' system good when it is good, is enough buses on a given route to offer frequent service, and then good interconnections with rail or other buses. Covid 19 fucked things up for transit systems across the country. Just now things are getting back to normal, but not quite up to 2019 levels.
Bus Rapid Transit lines run as frequently as every 8 minutes. which gives them good connectivity with other parts of the system. Some of the lines are 10 miles long or longer.
I have had a lot of negative experiences with buses over the last 50 years -- like long waits and slow travel times, or not knowing when in hell the bus was supposed to arrive. If you didn't have a printed schedule, you were sol. That has been solved by a text system for finding out when the next bus is scheduled to arrive. — BC
That is false.. depending on the country I guess. Most roads are funded by state, local, and federal taxes. — schopenhauer1
Roads always existed. Either trails for walking or leading livestock comfortably, cobblestones for carriages or other wheeled mediums, etc. — Outlander
That doesn't mean they can't be funded otherwise, or that they need to be of the quality you have in mind. Consider: — Leontiskos
A dirt road where I live handles pedestrians, bikers, horses, ATVs, carriages, motorcycles, cars, RV's, and buses. One time I even saw a Ferrari (on the paved road, admittedly)!
And when the cheaper system of roads breaks down because society hits a depression, it is still serviceable to a large extent. The quality of the roads diminishes at that point, but the transportation system doesn't collapse as it would with a rail system. — Leontiskos
Well, they are not, and that's not going away soon, anymore than my ideas are going to be adopted soon. — schopenhauer1
Well, then let me list you all the stuff from the OP that goes along with automobiles. — schopenhauer1
...I don't find much rigorous argumentation in the OP. It looks like a quick attempt to think up as many problems with cars as you can, and this is then followed by a quick plug for mass transit, John Lennon-style. Most of it has nothing specifically to do with cars. Pollution? The trains you are so fond of once ran on fossil fuels, and the cars you dislike now run on electricity (and there are all sorts of problems with electric vehicles too). [...] It is unprincipled to apply most of these things to cars and to nothing else. The other problem is that I see no attempt to understand the impact of cars as a whole, namely by juxtaposing the cons with the pros. — Leontiskos
A good YouTube channel that covers this stuff is NotJustBikes. — Jamal
(And talk about big government and liberty is really not relevant or helpful. It's worth noting that the car-centrism that began early to mid-twentieth century was partly the result of oversized influence from the borderline monopolistic car industry (partly also some misguided aspects of modernist architecture)) — Jamal
Imagine if every city had worked out a way to transport people where anyone living in a metro area was never more than five minutes away from a stop for mass transit. — schopenhauer1
the concept of making city networks look like living corals. The varying patterns of urban forms are inherently dictated by their road network; a complex, seemingly organic connection of links moving people across their city. Like branches of coral they have a pattern and a function, I chose to expose this pattern and manipulate it to become something far more conceptual. However, whilst being incredibly beautiful they are derived from various geo-spatial analysis of drive-times catchments making them somewhat informative as well. — Craig Taylor
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