
How America Killed Transit - kimsk112
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/08/how-america-killed-transit/568825/
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njarboe
Public roads are a public transit system. A very useful and productive one.
Before paved roads and trucks, many towns and farms were only served by a
single rail line. If competing water transportation was not available, the
private railroads would charge extremely high rates, extracting all excess
production of the area. The coming of public paved roads and trucks was
blessing.

Many roads are now past capacity much of the time, which makes them much less
useful, and many modern cities have been designed only for people in cars (is
there a word like bicyclist for a person in a car?) instead of people walking,
which is definitely a mistake. But the high speed, point to point, on demand,
variable cargo, transit system of public roads is a great thing. Deride and
shame it at your peril.

We need to improve the road system in many ways. Some possibilities are
congestion pricing, lots of tunnels, and public spaces people can walk to from
their homes, but to believe some externally controlled system for transit is
what we should shoot for as a society, I think, is mistaken.

~~~
adrianN
"Motorist" is commonly used for people in motor vehicles.

The problem with cars is that they use so much space. Not only while in
transit, but especially when parked. Look at how much prime real estate is
devoted to parking in typical American cities. That reduces density and makes
cars more important, a vicious circle. The most liveable cities are those
where little transport is needed because most things one wants to do are
within walking or cycling distance. Such city planning is at odds with car
centric designs.

~~~
njarboe
A single passenger vehicle could have a parking footprint about 1/10th of what
they currently have. My hope is that we could have electric bikes that are
like a mountain bike, can go in bike lanes (at slow speed) or on the street
but can go fast enough to take on a freeway.

~~~
lylecubed
There's no way to make ebikes safe at 70mph. Plus, quite a bit of the US is
under snow 4-6 months of the year.

~~~
njarboe
As safe as a smallish motor cycle? I would think so. But "safe"? The word
describes a feeling a person has, so unless you specify some kind of
measurable metric, like "50% of the population would feel safe using it" or
fatalities per mile would never be less than 3 times that of cars, using it is
just you personal feeling about things. Useful to you but not so useful to
people that don't know what safe means to you.

~~~
lylecubed
> As safe as a smallish motor cycle? I would think so.

No. Compare even a beefed up e-bike like the greyp to a smaller motorcycle
like a Suzuki DR-Z400 SM. The wheels, fork, frame, rear swingarm, geometry and
rake are all different. They need to be to handle freeway speeds safely. By
the time you've souped up an ebike to be as safe as a motorcycle at high
speed, you've converted it into a motorcycle. Those same changes make it less
nimble, and therefore less useful, as a mountain bike. I'm not sure I would
mix even small motorcycles in with bicycles on a public road.

> Useful to you but not so useful to people that don't know what safe means to
> you.

I'm an avid motorcyclist, but most people are not. They don't feel comfortable
going those speeds unless they have a cage lined with airbags around them. The
fatality statistics suggest they're not crazy for wanting such a thing.

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cryptonector
The public transit system used to be privately owned and operated. Then the
cities took over and kicked out the private sector. Now we have terrible
public transit.

Yes, even the subways in NYC were built and operated by private companies
(there were two, and they competed).

~~~
adrianN
Public transit, like most infrastructure, shouldn't be privatized imho. We
don't want infrastructure that serves only those who can pay. I'm perfectly
fine with a public transit system that needs subsidies. We heavily subsidize
cars by providing cheap or free parking in cities, why not public transport?

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dnautics
Singapore has privatized transit. Quality of service is exceptionally high and
it's one of the cheapest rail services in the world, precisely because the
economic pressure encourages the lines to favor QOS and volume.

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jmiserez
The MRT and LRT are owned by the Land Transport Authority, Ministry of
Transport, i.e. the government. What transit are you referring to?

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dnautics
Mrt was private until last year, so jury's out on where the quality goes.
Comfortdelgro runs three subway lines, IIRC.

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ebikelaw
Author doesn't put enough blame on the built environment. If you have urban
planning codes that require 2 parking spaces per dwelling and detached single-
family homes, the area will not be economically serviceable by transit (nor
will it be walkable). In much of America, car transportation is legally
mandatory.

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tropo
You can reach the "serviceable by transit" population density with that
requirement for "2 parking spaces per dwelling and detached single-family
homes".

Let's allow for a road that is legally 50 feet wide. Each house's share of
that is half, so 25 feet. (it is 12.5 feet pavement and 12.5 feet
curb/swale/sidewalk/etc.)

We need a 20x20 space for a normal cheap (no elevator) double garage. We want
this home legitimately "detached", so let's allow enough room for scaffolding
to stay within the property on both sides and the rear. That makes the lot 28
feet wide, and adding room for a staircase takes it to 32 feet wide. Including
the half-street, the lot is 49 feet deep. That means 1568 square feet for the
house.

At this size, there are 17780 homes per square mile. For comparison, we can
fit 841953 homes in San Francisco. We can't just have homes of course, but on
the other hand there will be more than 1 person per home. It happens that San
Francisco contains almost exactly that many people, 884363 as of 2017. San
Francisco also happens to be the second most densely populated large US city,
behind only New York.

It thus works fine, or at least as well as the second most dense large city in
the USA.

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cryptozeus
Bay area public transport is the worst. Forgot about quality, it does not even
reach everywhere. Bart is not even safe, I can’t believe I miss subway

~~~
CalRobert
"not even reach everywhere"

This is the fault of building where there isn't transit. Not the fault of
transit. Do we complain that municipal water doesn't go "everywhere" because
some people build wells?

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voidreaper
The length of the high speed rail system in the US leaves a lot to be desired.
Their HSR system doesn't even crack the top 10 [1].

[1] - [https://geoshen.com/posts/10-longest-high-speed-rail-
systems...](https://geoshen.com/posts/10-longest-high-speed-rail-systems-in-
the-world)

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WalterBright
In the Seattle area, the local government insists on ripping up the tracks to
create urban "trails".

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techsupporter
My armchair perspective of this is that rails-to-trails is a federally-
sanctioned move and adding transit use to those rails is both difficult and
politically hard.

It is difficult because leaving the rails as-is means small rail operators
like Ballard Terminal will insist on still being able to run one freight train
a week so that means transit has to compete for time slots and the operating
agency has to buy FRA mixed-use compatible train sets (expensive, slow, noisy)
or plead for a waiver like Denton’s DCTA got (not gonna happen in this
administration).

It is politically hard because, to pick on Kirkland, people get very cranky
about rail near neighborhoods and they insist that it brings “the wrong
people” and the idyllic pictures of fit people walking and jogging and cycling
with their kids along a leafy path...not that “terrible” transit that will
“destroy” quality of life.

So trails move on and transit has to fight some other time.

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WalterBright
> adding transit use to those rails is both difficult

I can't imagine how boring tunnels under Bellevue is easier.

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nine_k
Tunnels are invisible, so NIMBYism is less triggered?

It may be technically more involved, but politically much more palatable.

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partycoder
By having hundreds of thousands of 5+ seat vehicles with 1 person inside.

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gok
That comparison to Toronto is absurd. It’s a metro area with many times the
population and density of the other cities listed. And what the hell is this?

“Below is a set of maps that show the present-day network rail and bus lines
operating at least every 30 minutes, all day to midnight, seven days a week”

This effectively excludes every bus line, because there is no reason for bus
lines to run the same route all day long. This is one of the major advantages
of buses.

~~~
kgermino
>This effectively excludes every bus line, because there is no reason for bus
lines to run the same route all day long. This is one of the major advantages
of buses.

I can't think of a single bus line in my city that actually _changes it 's
route_ throughout the day. Sure there's some that don't go as far into the
suburbs after a certain time, but the part in the city would still qualify as
"all day" by that definition. And as a rider, I would hate to use a bus that
goes by one neighborhood in the morning and another in the afternoon. That's
what different route numbers are for, there's no reason to have the confusion.

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edaemon
GP doesn't mean that some bus lines change routes. In American cities most bus
routes stop running or run less frequently as it gets later in the day. This
article is excluding any that stop or become less frequent before midnight.

~~~
gok
And many bus routes run only at night

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RickJWagner
I'd think safety (or lack of the same) might be a factor too.

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IIAOPSW
cars kill ~3x as many people per year as gun crime _.

Public transit is orders of magnitude safer than personal transit.

_crime excludes suicide. total gun deaths per year is about the same as
vehicle deaths per year.

