> And when we have another 200 million Americans, we just make the roads wider again?
Yes! The takeaway from the OECD report is that we didn't build proper mass transportation 50 years ago, and we still have among the shortest commutes in the OECD. Over the next 50 years the population will grow even less, as the population growth rate now is half of what it was in the 50s and 60s.
(We're having this debate in Maryland now. People are upset that Hogan wants to widen the highways instead of building transit in the counties near D.C. They invoke the same rationale--we'll just have to widen the roads again in 50 years. Except they ignore that population growth in the area has slowed dramatically. Montgomery County tripled in population between 1960 and 2010, but is expected to grow just another 15% by 2045. Prince George's County grew by a factor of 4.5, but will grow only another 10% by 2045.)
Widening roads will not fix the problem. There is still a fixed number of road capacity in urban cores, which will inevitably lead to huge problems. Highway-widening is short-sighted.
You need to solve the right problem. For example in Maryland, the problem is not getting people into the “urban core” (i.e. DC). There is actually a surplus of rail capacity from Maryland into DC. You’ve got six separate rail lines going from the Maryland suburbs into DC (two regional rail, four metro).
The problem we have in Maryland is moving people from suburban population centers to suburban job centers. People commute from Bowie to College Park, or Frederick to Bethesda, or Waldorf to Alexandria. Indeed, none of the highways being widened (270, 495, and 295) even go near the urban core. 270 and 295 bring people from the outer suburbs to 495, which passes through the inner suburbs.
You couldn’t build a rail line that would solve that problem. I mean you could, it would just cost a ton. Widening 270 and 495 is going to cost about $100 million per mile (or $6.4 billion if you did the entire beltway). The silver line serves just 17,000 riders per day. The beltway serves ten times that in the bush portions.
The problem in less dense areas will always be the last-mile problem. You can implement park-and-ride schemes with ample parking at transit stations, but then what do people do at the destination station? They're still 5-10 miles from their job, and they left their car at the station closest to their house (which still might have been a 5-10 mile drive, or more).
If I can drive 60 minutes to go 20 miles door-to-door home-to-work (basically what my dad used to do from Ellicott City to Silver Spring every day), but it takes me 2+ hours to drive to transit, park, wait for transit, take transit, transfer to a bus, etc., then I'm probably just going to buckle down and drive. And of course that wasn't even an option for my dad since the Metro didn't go far enough north, but I imagine this scenario comes up a lot for people who live closer to DC.
You even see this in the Bay Area, though the distances can be short enough for workarounds. Before electric scooters were the fad they are now, a friend of mine bought a 35mph folding one so he could ride to the 22nd St Caltrain in SF, take the train to Santa Clara, and ride his scooter from there to work, and stash it under his desk to charge. If he can catch the bullet train, the total commute can be a little over an hour and a half, which is at worst comparable to some of the drive times, and at best a bit shorter. (Ultimately, he still often drives for flexibility, but has to leave by 6am to avoid the worst of the morning traffic.)
In SF itself, the issue is the abysmal slowness of the Muni buses. When I lived near Alamo Square, my commute was less than 3 miles, but could take 40 minutes by bus (even with home and work within a few blocks of bus stops), if I timed it perfectly and didn't have to wait 10 minutes for the bus. And that 40 minutes is effectively wasted; I can't sleep in another 40 minutes and expect to work on the bus because it's just not the right environment for that. Muni gives time scales that look like commuter rail, but over much shorter distances and with much less comfort than commuter rail. Also a kicker: I could do that walk in a little over 50 minutes.
Then what do you do at the other end? Say you work at Apple as an administrative person. You can’t afford to live in Cupertino. So you drive from Fremont. The new BART extension will go from Warm Springs to Sunnyvale. Let’s say you extend it a bit further to Cupertino. So you drive to Warm Springs. Then park. Then you get off in Cupertino. Then what? There is no place you can put a station in Cupertino that even puts you walking distance to both Apple campuses, much less the other job centers in the city.
This is the problem all across the country. Most of the jobs in our metro areas are in the suburbs. Which means you’re talking about commutes that start and end in a car dependent area. There might be a reasonable rail route for a large part of the way, but you’d need to drive at both ends.
In addition to transporting people within an urban core itself, transit systems historically supported a hub and spoke model where people living in the suburbs took a train into their downtown job at the bank, ad agency, etc.
With relatively few exceptions, transit doesn't work terribly well for either travel from a suburban home to a suburban office park or, for that matter, out to the office park from a city apartment.
Where there are real clusters of offices in suburban locations, you can set up shuttles from train stations. But it's generally hard to service jobs that aren't either in the city or right next to a rail station.
Yes! The takeaway from the OECD report is that we didn't build proper mass transportation 50 years ago, and we still have among the shortest commutes in the OECD. Over the next 50 years the population will grow even less, as the population growth rate now is half of what it was in the 50s and 60s.
(We're having this debate in Maryland now. People are upset that Hogan wants to widen the highways instead of building transit in the counties near D.C. They invoke the same rationale--we'll just have to widen the roads again in 50 years. Except they ignore that population growth in the area has slowed dramatically. Montgomery County tripled in population between 1960 and 2010, but is expected to grow just another 15% by 2045. Prince George's County grew by a factor of 4.5, but will grow only another 10% by 2045.)