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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34872 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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The common thread between LA and NJ is there's just too damn much traffic.

If only there were other transportation methods that scaled better.

If only there were other transportation methods that scaled better.

Indeed, there are not. If you think NJ traffic is bad, NJ Transit brings whole new levels of bad.

Well except subways (or streetcars, or even buses if done well) which you have a great example of across the Hudson. NJ transit doesn't suck because transit is inherently bad (might I introduce you to Europe or Asia, mostly Asia). It sucks because Americans refuse to fund it properly and instead triple down on driving.

And then also hate driving, lmao

Also bike lanes (we're back baby) scale amazingly, they have significantly higher throughput for the area they occupy.

Well except subways (or streetcars, or even buses if done well) which you have a great example of across the Hudson.

Not really, no. The subways in Manhattan work because it's a long and skinny island with very high density. Once you're outside Manhattan there are large areas poorly served or unserved by the subways even in NYC.

London/Asian megacities do it well and they're not long skinny islands

It's doable, it's not easy, but it's doable

And it's definitely better than doing nothing and drowning in gridlock

I understand your complaints, I guess I don't really understand what your forward looking thoughts are?

If the status quo (gridlock, people hating driving/each other) sucks, why shoot down every potential solution to wallow in the status quo?

London/Asian megacities do it well and they're not long skinny islands

They don't do it well. They do it "well enough" for commuting, but you'll notice the streets are jammed with auto traffic. And Tokyo is famous for its terrible conditions on the commuter trains.

If the status quo (gridlock, people hating driving/each other) sucks, why shoot down every potential solution to wallow in the status quo?

I'm only shooting down solutions that don't work and can be expected to make things worse.

Just because London/Tokyo/whatever have traffic doesn't mean their trains suck. Imagine how much worse it would be without trains.

That actually kind of proves my point, the cities quite literally would not work without trains, because trains can scale, unlike road capacity.

I would very much like to hear your solution to how to transport large volumes of people in a relatively small area.

As fun as our verbal sparring has been, all you've done is shoot down every possible option as "nuh uh not good enough" without ever acknowledging that once you crest ~3 million people in an area, everyone taking a personal automobile fundamentally starts falling apart due to the limits of space-time.

So I say again my friend, what's your solution?

Just because London/Tokyo/whatever have traffic doesn't mean their trains suck. Imagine how much worse it would be without trains.

That's assuming the conclusion.

I would very much like to hear your solution to how to transport large volumes of people in a relatively small area.

My solution is to not put such large volumes of people in a small area. There's no good solution to transportation once you've jammed everyone together, they all suck.

Genuinely asking, how is that assuming the conclusion?

If Tokyo today has tons of traffic, and a quick Google says Tokyo has on average 9 million subway riders every day, then if there were not subways/trains then those 9 million people would need to get around some other way. And if the roads are already packed as you say, there definitely isn't room for them there.

I agree your solution (just have smaller cities) is actually a significantly more effective solution to traffic than anything else.

But isn't that kind of an is/ought problem (to be honest, not sure if I've used this correctly). You say: "we ought to have small cities, this will solve congestion" and that's, true, but we actually have big cities that need solutions now, and dispersing their populations isn't going to happen.

Also you'd probably need to re-align a lot of human society and economy to stop mega-cities from leveraging economies of scale and network effects to dominate smaller cities, because that keeps happening the world over basically since agriculture was invented.

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Americans will not do these things, and throwing money at it won't work any better than it does for public schools.

If you want Americans to suddenly start taking mass transit, build trains(not busses) going from commuterville to the downtowns everyone actually works in, boost ridership through heavy advertising as a premium for avoiding traffic, with tickets only sold as monthly passes, and fare evasion punished harshly.

This will not happen. Most Americans like driving, they like privacy in their own cars, and they aren't particularly price sensitive. Mass transit for traffic reduction suffers from the free rider problem and mass transit for cost reasons will never see widespread adoption in a country where even the very poor have cars.

Most Americans like driving

I mean aside from the fact long driving commutes demonstrably make people miserable.

And the fact this misery results in crazy cultural self-owns where people start blocking other people from entering lanes to the point you have to suddenly change lanes without signals (or fake them out with a signal so they speed up to block you so you can sneak behind them) to take the other people by suprise so you can change your lane.

build trains (not busses) going from commuterville to the downtowns everyone actually works in

You're forgetting that downtowns are dying. Prominent transit critic Randal "Antiplanner" O'Toole has proposed for several cities bus plans that have many small hubs rather than one big hub.

You can’t credibly sell that as a premium product to avoid traffic, though.

If you want Americans to suddenly start taking mass transit, build trains(not busses) going from commuterville to the downtowns everyone actually works in

Of course this requires that you have that hub and spoke system. Once you have a significant number of suburb to suburb commutes, you can't even do that.

So just build trains between the suburbs too. Make America Trains Again, we must RETVRN.

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