
Solving for the Last Mile of Transportation - newy
https://medium.com/@derrickko/solving-for-the-last-mile-of-transportation-6ffbfec5542#.1eukt3e7g
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Arizhel
>... is a 30 minute trip for just a mile of travel. It didn’t matter whether I
rode a car, public transport, or walked.

How does it take 30 minutes to walk a mile, unless you're really slow and out
of shape, or taking your time (something you shouldn't be doing if you're
"commuting")? Any normal person should be able to walk 2.5-3 mph, which means
you should be able to walk a mile in 20-24 minutes.

>New York City has built over 1,000 miles in bike lanes... Barcelona has
implemented “superblocks” by closing off streets for use as community and
pedestrian areas. Copenhagen is planning to make its downtown core car-free
within a decade. In short, cities are prioritizing people over cars.

None of these cities are typical of any cities, especially ones here in
America. Copenhagen is the most bike-friendly city on the planet, and has been
for a long time, so it's no surprise they're aiming to be car-free downtown
soon. NYC is unique in the US for its density, but also importantly is that
mentions like this always focus on Manhattan, which is only a small part of
the overall city. I doubt there's a lot of progress in building bike lanes in
the Bronx or on Staten Island, or even in Queens.

The solution to this problem isn't more public transit, which simply does not
work in places with lower density (i.e. suburbs) and are too spread out for
pre-planned routes to work out well. The solution is Personal Rapid Transit
systems like SkyTran.

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prodigal_erik
A 20 minute mile doesn't include waiting for walk signals at pretty much every
intersection on the route, and the Manhattan distance between the Caltrain
station and his office might be larger.

~~~
Arizhel
Yeah, I'm just going on his statement that it was "one mile", which I take to
be the actual Manhattan distance, not the crow's distance. You have a good
point with the walk signals, but as someone who's spent a fair amount of time
walking many miles around Manhattan (but not SF, so I don't know about that),
I never spent much time waiting for walk signals. With the grid layout, it's
pretty easy to take a route that has you catching the walk signal almost all
the time in one direction, and then opportunistically cross the street or
change direction when you happen to catch a red light in that direction.

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grillvogel
this was pretty asinine and seems to mainly just be an advertisement for this
guy's vaporware company

