[crzwdjk]

The thing is, Amsterdam in the 70s looked a lot like DC does today, with no protected bike lanes and cars parking all over the place. So change is possible, as evidenced by Amsterdam and Copenhagen, but any shift away from driving and cars requires better alternatives, including bikes but also including trains and buses and metros. And DC isn't doing to great with that last one.

[tptacek]

Did Amsterdam go from a 50/50 urban/suburban configuration to a 90/10 urban/suburban configuration? Or did it just do a better job of managing it's already 90/10 population?

[crzwdjk]

Amsterdam has plenty of suburbs, they just look different from US suburbs because of the different land-use and planning approach that they have in the Netherlands. Interestingly, Amsterdam actually does have urban freeways, though they run in a ring a couple miles out rather than right through the urban center. But they've also invested a lot in their train network and most people commute that way. I wish I had more to say about Dutch land use planning, but unfortunately I just don't know most of the details.

[rayiner]

> Amsterdam has plenty of suburbs, they just look different from US suburbs because of the different land-use and planning approach that they have in the Netherlands.

> But they've also invested a lot in their train network and most people commute that way.

Most people in say D.C. don't commute by train not because D.C. hasn't invested enough in it, but because the suburbs "look different." D.C., for example, has invested a ton in its train network. As I mentioned above, despite being a smaller city, D.C.'s subway has four times as many miles of track as Amsterdam's. But most people still commute by car, because D.C., like most U.S. cities, is only a small portion of its larger metro area. Washington, D.C. has under 700,000 people, but is just one part of a metro area of 5 million people. Amsterdam has over 850,000 people, and dominates its urban area of 1.6 million people.

That urban/suburban mix drives people to car use. Jobs in the D.C. metro area are scattered all over. For example, most of the technology jobs "in D.C." are actually in Virginia, e.g. Google is mainly in Reston, which is 25 miles outside the city. If you draw a 25-mile ring around Amsterdam, you'll mostly hit farmland. Around D.C., you're actually hitting many of the major population and economic centers in Virginia and Maryland.

The dispersed nature of the jobs makes building transit very hard. Reston has a train station. Many people opposed it, however, not because of "social disorder," but because it was a $6-billion project that wasn't useful to them. You see, the train really only goes to D.C. But not that many people go between Reston and D.C. Aside from a handful of yuppies who might want to live in D.C. and commute to Reston, people who work in Reston drive in from Ashburn or Great Falls, or one of the other nearby suburbs. There is no rail network that connects these places, nor would it be practical to build one.

Building cities around cars didn't just result in people who are conditioned to drive rather than take transit. It created patterns of housing and employment that make it really hard to build transit after the fact. Fairfax County, a suburban county to the west of D.C., has more residents and almost as many jobs as D.C. itself. But the rail system is designed to get people from Fairfax County into D.C.--it does nothing to get people to all the jobs located in Fairfax County.

Loudon County, still further west from D.C., has almost half of D.C.'s population. There is no rail in Loudon. Nor would extending rail from D.C. be all that useful. Only 10,000 people from Loudon commute to D.C. (and almost nobody does the reverse commute). Meanwhile,65,000 commute to Fairfax County. Another 31,000 commute to another county within 20-40 miles. Try convincing people in Loudon to spend the money to build rail into D.C. when it would only benefit 10% of the commuters.

[pen2l]

So what do you think the solution actually is?

I think the solution is a combination of: 1) further uber-ification, 2) further bike/walking lane improvement, 3) further investment into trains, despite the problems you speak of now

1) I think more people should become Uber drivers (if not Uber, gov't should make an Uber-like app). Not necessarily for the money (although it is nice), but because of the ecological reasons. One of the great Uber-driver features is: you can set direction to go home, and have Uber-riders that are only going along this direction. I live in Boston suburbs, my roundtrip commute to work is about 3 hours. Picking up strangers along the way without losing a lot of time, I save the environment a little bit (less cars on the road) and make the roads less clogged. This is the technological benefit... an app that can intelligently connect riders going the same path (the olden days of finding car-sharing buddies in Craigslist et al was too difficult.. and going around posting flyers at workplace asking who here has somewhat the same commute is too much of a hassle both logistically and socially).

2) I used to park my car at a parking garage and then use a bike for last 10% of the commute (because the last 10% of the commute was actually the part that cost the most time... in Brookline where traffic was hell). I stopped doing that, even though I would save a lot of time because it's really terrifying, I swear I genuinely believe I would have been dead if I had kept doing it for 2 years more. My colleague got in an accident only last week (when he was walking home from work in Winthrop)... he broke BOTH of his legs. Too many people I know are dying or getting seriously injured when biking/walking.

3) You bring up good points about investment in train/bus infrastructure not being worth it in various part of US. But most of Boston and its suburbs are getting more and more crowded... it is starting to build UP (lots of highrises everywhere being recently built) and built across. What I'm getting at is, the US is growing (or rather, at least the big cities are starting to have more concentrated and more dense population hot spots), it does make sense to start investing NOW for infrastructure that will last us decades to come.

[crzwdjk]

> I live in Boston suburbs, my roundtrip commute to work is about 3 hours. Picking up strangers along the way without losing a lot of time, I save the environment a little bit

The DC area has already has a system for doing just this and there is no app involved. It's called "slugging". Because there are HOV restrictions on some major highways requiring you to have 2 or 3 people in the car to use them, an informal market developed between drivers and riders meeting at suburban parking lots. There's no cash changing hands because the payoff for the driver is the ability to use the HOV lanes (or the HOV-only highway in the case of I-66) for a much faster commute.