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It seemed to me to be the argument that the OP of this thread was making. NIMBYism means keeping people he doesn't like out of his neighborhood, which sounds good. That's why I said what I did--if public services are subsidized out of general tax funds, because they provide benefits to everyone, then that contradicts the use of government policy to serve particular citizens at the expense of others. But it sounds like you and they are making different arguments.
What do you mean? The subsidies are what make them expensive. Different parties pay for it and make spending decisions, which means that the normal incentive to spend less isn't there.
It's pretty inefficient for any sort of populated area. A 3-lane highway has less capacity (in terms of people per hour) than a single light rail track. Houston's Katy Freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, and it's still congested. I agree that in sufficiently sparse areas, transit becomes inefficient. But in the US, we have cities with hundreds of thousands, or in some cases millions, of people, with borderline non-existent transit.
Ok. That might be right, and I think I've seen this basic claim before, but I don't have time to check it all now. I think what happened is that the parish's actual spending is too low to pay for all the costs, and what they should have been spending was higher. In any event, the amount given still seems to be quite a lot for only the local taxes for an area with below-average income.
I think we're still talking past each other. My point was that these situations are similar in the sense of imposing negative externalities on others.
I think we agree, but my claim is that in practice it's not common enough to revoke a license (which doesn't even stop a lot of people) because it's seen as such a severe punishment. It shouldn't stop the courts from imposing it, but it should. If you drive dangerously and kill someone, you should just be in prison.
Traffic calming is certainly not a panacea, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it. Not having ever driven drunk, I couldn't guess at whether it would be effective in that particular case.
As for negligence: Can you say that this argument is wrong? (I find this example fitting, given your link above--this is an example, completely typical in cities, of making pedestrians less safe to protect drivers who, most likely, made some sort of error).
It's not isolated. Tax all the externalities (noise, congestion, pollution, danger, etc.) and let the market sort it out, sure. I think the externalities are much larger for cars than for almost any other mode of transit, and if we did that, cars would be much more expensive. But what we're currently doing doesn't make sense.
That's probably the case. I admit that I'm very sympathetic to people who don't want to live near unpleasant or disruptive behavior, though. But maybe it's fine for them to live there if their externalities are taxed somehow?
Okay, this makes more sense than the assertion that they are over-consumed. Which was in contrast to the many tales of Americans actively refusing medical treatment because they'd rather die than pay the medical bills.
Yes, if your only metric is capacity, then a single light rail track wins hands-down over a 3-lane highway. However, there are usually other factors people consider in efficiency, such as the amount of people who actually use it, plus other harder-to-quantify factors like the fact that people using the highway can get off and on at any on/off-ramp, and can thus easily make journeys with a wide variety of starts, destinations, and stops, whereas people with the light rail must get on or off at specific stations, and the more stations you add, the slower the light rail becomes, and this limits the amount of starts and destinations people can get to.
I judge each project on a case-by-case basis; I personally wouldn't make generalized statements like saying a mode is inefficient "for any sort of populated area", and in the real world urban planners consider more factors than just capacity.
As for your claim that the Katy freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, is this actually true? The most lanes I could find at any point were 6 lanes each direction. I'm not counting ramps or tollways here, and I don't count frontage roads either since they have stoplights, bikes, and sidewalks, and freeway lane counts elsewhere don't include any parallel roads either. As for the congestion today, that can easily be explained by the fact that Houston is one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the US, and when the expansion was completed in 2011, congestion was definitely reduced, only to slowly be undone by the growing population. I think it makes intuitive sense that any significant population growth or density would put a strain on the transportation system; compare this to the trains in Mumbai which are packed full of people, because so many people live there in such a small area.
What, like Tulsa, Oklahoma (pop. 413,066)? There are plenty of buses there and they're pretty empty. And not for a lack of trying; the city keeps running the empty buses under the assumption that if they're there, people will use them, when that's clearly not the case.
I'm a bit confused by the pictures he showed. The pole seems to be mounted on a concrete bollard two or three feet above the ground, so I don't see how it follows that if a car veers off the road and hits it, the pole will shear away, when the car would just be stopped by the bollard.
But even assuming that the pole and shear are mounted at ground level, I guess the argument is not-even-wrong? I don't think it necessarily makes drivers safer, though. If the pole breaks away, then that will bring down traffic lights onto the ground with it, which can crash onto drivers on the roadway below. In fact if the driver isn't stopped by the pole then there's also the possibility that they will continue and crash into other vehicles too, if they're approaching from a side road heading towards another side road. If they're approaching from the middle of the intersection, then the pedestrian would be injured anyway (and maybe even pinned against the pole if it didn't break away).
So the narrative that traffic engineers have gross negligence for the regard of pedestrians in favor of drivers is completely unwarranted.
There is over-consumption, because it's subsidized, which is why it's expensive. The case where it isn't subsidized then become ruinous.
Transit becomes very flexible when you add in multiple forms of transportation, such as a walk or cycle near the station. Roads have plenty of their own issues, and will also slow down and/or run much below theoretical maximum capacity, for example due to lights, congestion, and crashes. In the cases where transit exists but is unused, it's usually because the city is designed to prioritize cars and so transit runs rarely, buses don't have their own right of way, it doesn't go lots of places, etc. Yes, there are reasons to have cars. But they're only necessary (edit: this should say, "only necessary for every trip") because of the specific way in which North American cities have been (re-) built since the end of WW2.
Who are "real world urban planners"? In much of North America, they consider car capacity and congestion, and basically no other factors. I stand by the statement that cars are, as a general rule, inefficient for populated areas, because they take up so much space.
This is the description I found:
I think however you count it, it's already a lot of capacity, and yet it's still congested, even though Houston is, as you point out, growing, with space for lots more people. Increasing capacity will temporarily improve congestion, but unless maximum demand is capped, it will never last. A combination of induced demand and population growth will put strain on any system if it can't adapt, but transit gives you much much more room to carry people. I mentioned light rail, but a full underground subway line can carry dozens of times more people than a lane of car traffic. It's also standard for transit to have the ability to implement congestion pricing, which is rare on roads.
That's barely more than the population of Zurich, which has a ton of great transit options which get used by lots of people. I agree that simply running buses in an area that's not designed for it is unlikely to generate much ridership. There are several issues here. One is land use, where transit is often surrounded by parking and empty lots, on the expectation that people will drive to the station, rather than stores and homes. Another is inconsistency. If there's 1 bus or train every hour and it's always late, people won't bother trying to use it. Running more frequent service encourages ridership, and Zurich is probably running dozens of times more trains, trams, and buses than Tulsa, but they're still full. A third is traffic priority--in many cities outside the US, bus-only lanes are common, so buses can avoid congestion. Transit also often gets priority at intersections. These things make it faster than driving in traffic, even with stops to pick up and drop off passengers.
Breakaway infrastructure is substantially safer for drivers who hit in than a solid post or pole in the same location: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RCErGL2WIto
Any combination of events/circumstances is possible, but breakaway poles are beneficial to the driver in the most likely situation and so represent a net benefit. That's why they're very common.
I think the point of the argument is that engineers know that cars regularly drive into the area that pedestrians wait at high speed, but haven't done anything for the pedestrians, and in fact encourage them to stand in this exact spot.
I agree that for people living and working within walking/cycling distance near stations (or have their other destinations near them), transit will work fine for them. (In fact there's a lot more of these places near transit than internet urbanists would have you believe.) I wouldn't describe this as flexible, though; they are pretty much limited to those places unless they take a car. I also agree that any form of transportation may not reach their theoretical maximum capacity, which is why I compare actual observed numbers of usage and don't rely solely on arguments like "there could be much more usage if we just bit the bullet and built more". I'm not inherently against transit, I just think they should be built where they make sense to be built.
The same planners who have built many transit systems in North America. If they really only cared about cars, why would they bother building transit? Then again, I do see this weird take sometimes (from people like Not Just Bikes) where certain transit systems are described as "car-centric infrastructure", even though that makes no sense.
I'd be more sympathetic to the space argument if I didn't see people rail against multi-level parking garages (which take up much less surface space) even when they're underground (like Not Just Bikes hated when in Amsterdam they removed surface parking spaces and replaced them with a new underground parking garage). It's also just as possible for transit to take up as much space (like a rail station 40 tracks wide on the surface). As @ZorbaTHut has pointed out in the past, there's plenty of ways the surface space taken up by cars can be reduced. If an urban planner decides to have a giant sprawling surface parking lot instead of an underground garage, sure, yell at them, but I don't think they inherently must take up so much space, nor is the amount of space taken up inherent to any form of transportation.
I'd like to know where you got that description, because I can't find it myself. In any case, you can go on Google Maps and count the number of lanes yourself.
Is this really the case? Tulsa's bus routes look like they're surrounded by plenty of stores and homes. You might have to walk or cycle a bit more than in Zurich but it's doable. I did a quick perusal on Google Maps but I don't buy this narrative that transit in North America always just happens to be built around nothing and nowhere by incompetent city planners.
I don't think they're running more in Zurich just based off the notion that ridership will just get better if they invest more and ignore how much ridership currently exists. I think they do it because at some point in the past they found that their existing capacity could not satisfy the existing level of demand at that time. Which leads me to the fact that Tulsa is considerably less dense than Zurich, hence why they have very low ridership.
If there's a North American city that initially had very low ridership (like Tulsa does now) but managed to generate tons of ridership by simply brute-forcing the amount of service they provided, I'd love to know about it.
I hear this claim all the time that transit is faster than driving in countries outside the US, but is it actually true? If you do some Google Map tests like @ZorbaTHut did, it really doesn't seem like it.
Also compare this video from Singapore, a country that heavily restricts driving and it makes it prohibitively expensive for many people (understandably so since it's a tiny island nation). In the video, driving is faster (though then of course the argument becomes "well it's nicer to be able to sleep or use your phone and not have to pay attention"). Maybe they restricted cars too much and now driving, if you can afford it, is too good compared to a country that doesn't restrict driving so heavily.
Where is the proof that they know that this happens, and this breakaway pole isn't just a standard design that's used for any sort of pole anywhere? That's the impression I got doing a quick search for "breakaway traffic light pole" with articles like this. Again, I wouldn't assume malice here, and I would attribute this to ignorance before jumping to conclusions and attributing it to malice.
Sure, but this goes back to my point about land use. Cities with extensive transit + infrastructure for other modes of transit are also typically laid out so that you can get to a lot of places via those modes. The transit isn't a handful of lines, it covers the whole city, and places you need to go tend to be much closer.
NJB seemed ambivalent about replacing surface lots with double the number of underground parking spaces, not "railing against."
Cars do take up more space, I'm not sure how this is controversial. A parked car takes up several hundred square feet, and one on the highway takes up several thousand once safe following distance is accounted for. If you look at the downtowns of even cities with over half a million people there's an enormous amount of space dedicated to parking.
I quoted it from https://charlesandcharles.co.uk/f/take-a-look-at-the-katy-freeway-in-texas
There might be "some stuff" but it's much less than there should be. Why do you think that there's so low ridership in Tulsa?
I never said that merely increasing frequency will cause the buses to all be full. But the combination of fewer things near transit, low frequency, buses being stuck in traffic, etc. all contribute. It's not a population problem--it's a design problem.
I know that Zorba made these claims, but it's pretty laughably weak evidence in my opinion. Is there any reason to believe that Google Maps is sufficiently accurate for all modes? I'm very skeptical, as in my experience maps doesn't handle varying congestion very well. Same with traffic lights.
It's possible that Singapore in particular has gone off the other direction, but there are good reasons to believe it's unlikely, and she mentions that she's driving in at *noon. Hardly rush hour. In any event, the person being interviewed prefers transit even with the longer time spent. Time spent driving is almost pure loss, while you can actually do things on the train.
If all of the people on those trains drove instead, how long do you think driving would take?
Know that what happens? Know that pedestrians stand next to the button they have to push in order to cross? I'm confused by your question.
That's... basically what negligence is?
Ambivalent is still the wrong reaction to have. Surface space is valuable, so he should be happy that the space is removed, and that the underground spaces were built (else where would the cars parked on the surface go?).
And if NJB is a bad example, look at CityNerd's video on why he thinks parking garages are bad then.
My point was that the amount of surface space taken up can be reduced, by e.g. building multilevel parking garages or double-decker freeways. And it's often the surface space that is most primary and valuable here. My secondary point was that any form of transportation can be argued to take up more space by looking at instances of it that have been implemented poorly, e.g. a railyard that's 40 tracks wide.
The image on that page isn't even of the Katy freeway. It might be in China or someplace else but it might not even exist in reality. It seems to be right that there's 6 lanes in each direction but I'm still not sure what it means by "eight feeder lanes" (frontage roads?) and "six managed lanes" (I'm completely at a loss here). I wouldn't trust anything on that page without verifying with other sources.
Because there's barely any demand for it. I'd imagine that if they aren't using the bus, then people are using the car instead, or getting rides from others.
I don't know what your experience is, but Google Maps does pretty well at estimating longer times if you are viewing a route during rush hour. If there's congestion at that point in time, it will definitely show it. I don't have the link on hand but there's a thing one guy did in Germany where he dragged a bunch of phones in a wheelbarrow down the road to make it seem like the road was hugely congested, coloring it red on Google Maps.
In any case, I think Zorba's point was to use numbers favorable to both transit and driving, and show that driving still wins, thus explaining why some people prefer to use cars. Of course other people may prefer to use transit regardless, and that's fine too. I don't know the exact numbers of people who prefer to drive versus use transit but I'd imagine in North America the number of transit preferrers is lower than the number in Europe. Most people don't consciously think about the costs and benefits of driving versus transit and have restrictions (like needing to be at work on time at a specific time) that simply make driving favorable to them. The Singaporean woman commuting in to work at noon doesn't sound like she has any of those restrictions.
In Singapore, extremely long because it's a tiny island nation with probably not much capacity to handle it (I haven't checked though). This isn't necessarily true for other places, however.
My point was that if you have a standard policy to use a specific pole design everywhere, then it's a mistake to ascribe intent or knowledge to engineers that simply isn't there. That's also partially why I pointed out that the pole was mounted on a concrete bollard in the pictures Charles Marohn showed - it seems to just be a standard thing rather than them knowingly recognizing that pedestrians stand there, and then simply not caring about them.
There's also a kind of Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics thing going on here - if the engineers didn't use the breakaway pole, then things would be worse for everyone, but Charles Marohn wouldn't be on stage talking about how engineers have gross negligence for the safety of people. So again, I don't want to accuse engineers of negligence here. I feel like if they were sued for this (as he advocates elsewhere) then they simply wouldn't use the breakaway pole design, which I guess wouldn't be a negative (or a positive) for pedestrians but would just make drivers worse off for no reason.
The people who owned them could no longer have a car, or perhaps store it somewhere outside the city, so it's less likely to be driven around what is clearly a walkable area.
You can do those things, although they quickly become much more expensive, and still occupy a lot of space. A double-decker highway 3 lanes wide on either side still carries maybe 18,000 people per hour per direction. Because of parking requirements, apartments and offices in downtowns will often be built on top of several stories of parking, which of course makes the actual usable space more expensive
The same source says:
Do you have a preferred source?
Ok, but why?
I'm aware that Maps indicates traffic, it just usually isn't sufficiently accurate for me to believe that it can actually tell you what's faster on a regular basis. I don't know if it holds up across countries, etc. I've definitely spent enough time in and around NYC to know for a fact that taking the train can be much faster than driving for many trips.
In any event, NJB has also made videos about how nice driving in the Netherlands is compared to other countries. Part of that is due to how many people take transit instead. These comparisons are not "favorable to driving" in the sense that you can extrapolate the results to a place where everyone drives.
The use of "standards" just sounds like a way to prevent anyone from having to take responsibility for bad decisions. I don't think that a bunch of engineers thought, "man, fuck pedestrians, let's try to get them killed." But any of them could have realized, when they were designing a walk signal with the knowledge that it would be hit by a car. This isn't a question of doing something, without fixing all of the problems everywhere, because you have limited resources or narrow expertise. Designing infrastructure is their whole job.
They could, but I'd imagine that it's a lot less reasonable to ask them to just do that rather than simply providing them a parking space elsewhere. I'm not well-versed in Netherlands politics but I'd imagine that the Green Party wouldn't have won the election on a platform to remove 10,000 surface parking spaces if it didn't have reasonable compromises like giving the car owners another place to park their cars.
Yes. And then you can use the freed-up space to go crazy with transit, protected bike lanes, pedestrian-only streets, removing street parking, etc. We're not just building more expensive infrastructure for no reason, we're doing it because we recognize that the opportunity cost of having the infrastructure spread out horizontally is far costlier. I agree that de facto parking minimums are dumb, though, and should be removed while letting the free market sort out the number of parking spaces.
You can just look at Google Maps' satellite view and/or street view and count for yourself. If not, then look at PolitiFact, which says it's 13 lanes at its widest not counting frontage roads (which reasonably lines up with the 6 lanes per direction I see on Google Maps). It seems like the "26 lanes" myth is repeated everywhere you look when you do an internet search though, probably just one of those things that spread quickly without anyone fact-checking them.
Because the city is simply less dense. And yes, it's possible for the city to be built denser, but density has various advantages and disadvantages, and the residents should have a say in this regard.
Based on the NJB video, it does in fact seem like they are just net reducing the number of parking spaces in the city.
Why not count the frontage roads? I don't know your level of familiarity with them, but almost all of the frontage roads I drove on in Texas were basically highways themselves, with high speed limits and wide lanes. There were lights, but generally very apart, so if the main highway was uncongested you were better off on it, but if it were even mildly congested you could go just as fast on the frontage road. If the claim is "Houston still has congestion despite having X lanes" than the frontage roads should absolutely count towards X.
Sure! Through the free market, which gives all of them a say, rather than top-down planning, which lets a majority control everything.
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Am I misunderstanding something here but that just seems like a wild overexaggeration? As far as I'm aware the average car does not take up even 100sqft, never mind several hundred. A large parking space is about 160sqft...
A reasonably sized sedan might only be something like 7 x 16 feet, but parking spaces take up more area than that, and the car is using all of that space. Based on my googling, a space in the US can be upwards of 10 x 24 feet = 240 square feet total. It's often less, although 160 is not particularly large.
Under the Intl. Zoning Code (not necessarily widely adopted, but still a reasonable indicator of common US practice), a normal perpendicular space is 9 ft × 20 ft (180 ft²), while a parallel space is 8 ft × 22 ft (176 ft²) and a "compact" perpendicular space is 8 ft × 18 ft (144 ft²).
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I'd bet they're counting the parking space and also all the infrastructure required to get to the parking space. I could believe "several hundred" in that context.
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