[nostromo]

Yeah, they're shifting the goal posts.

Here in city (Seattle) most people drive because transit tends to be spotty and slow for most people.

So, what's the solution? Make driving worse of course. Speedbumps everywhere. Change 4-lane roads to 2-lanes. Remove parking. Lower speed limits to absurd levels. Make through streets dead ends.

Transit still mostly sucks, but now driving sucks too. Success!

I love transit and want more of it, but the transit folks realized it's hard to compete with driving, so they've just given up entirely on making transit great. It's easier to ruin driving.

[dont__panic]

This is a really good point, but I also want to bring up a (small) counterargument:

I live in Denver, CO. Cars basically make it impossible to walk around most of the city, even in the more residential areas. Walking is an essential part of the public transit/non-car transportation experience because essentially everyone has to walk a few blocks from a bus stop, train station, bike rack, etc. to complete their trip on both ends. If walking those few blocks is unpleasant, unsafe, or impossible, people will (reasonably) prefer cars.

Unfortunately, car and pedestrian traffic are at odds in most cities. Situations that seem better for cars (turning lanes, right-on-red, faster speed limits, street parking) often make life hell for pedestrians who try to cross the road. Or make life very, very noisy for pedestrians who need to walk or live or work near those roads.

I agree wholeheartedly that we can't just make driving suck to encourage more people to walk or take public transit. But there are aspects of driving that need to be sacrificed to make public transit better. A great example: changing 4-lane roads to 2-lane roads -- if you can introduce a bike lane, bus lane, or both, those methods of transportation become significantly faster, safer, and better. Biking is basically a non-starter without lanes; busses can be so slow as to be not worth using when they get stuck in normal traffic. The same argument applies to parking removal -- instead of using an entire effective lane of traffic for parked cars, we can dedicate it to bikes or buses.

Lowering the speed limit reduces noise at street level, makes streets safer to cross for pedestrians, and allows bikes to peacefully coexist with cars in an environment where you don't need to go that fast anyway.

It would be interesting to hear what holds you back from using buses, walking, or bikes instead of your car to get around town. In Denver, the main issues I encounter are:

- bike theft

- literal crazy people shouting at me on buses/trains

- drivers who park/stop in crosswalks, or try to kill me on my bicycle

- the bus network is extremely slow to get around town

I think there's a fair argument that we should focus on solving these problems first, before we degrade car traffic. Bike theft is a really bike one in Seattle, too, iirc, and a huge blocker for folks trying to switch away from cars. But eventually you need to degrade car traffic to make public transit as good as it can be.

[JPKab]

I live just south of Superior outside of Denver. I lived in DC area for 10 years. For 6 of those years, I commuted on the bus to metro to work.

The DC metro deteriorated markedly, and has continued to. A lot of it is a combination of bad initial designs (lack of surplus tunnel capacity to ease maintenance) along with the aggressive, powerful, and corrupt WMATA employees union. (I was on a project to analyze WMATA's staffing issues, and within the first hour, my team identified that there was a huge incentive to understaff the maintenance/technician teams to allow existing employees to collect massive amounts of overtime. Many would simply hide and sleep during the time they claimed to be "working". Hiring more mechanics/techs was foot-dragged, because it reduced the overtime pay for the existing workers who would interview them.). 2 mechanics working normal hours cost the same as 1 mechanic pulling tons of overtime, but the gap in productivity is huge. The WMATA union doesn't care. The rudeness of the staff is pretty legendary amongst locals as well.

Anyway, all of that is a long winded and detailed way of saying that WMATA gradually became a significantly less reliable means of transportation. My brother was on a car that got stuck in a tunnel that started filling with smoke. He stopped riding. And the buses need the metro to be running well. Without that, the buses become far less reliable. It's a shit show. And it's deteriorated markedly since I last lived there.

[dont__panic]

Hope you're OK after the Marshall Fire -- "just south of Superior" sounds like a very, very good choice compared to "in Superior" these days.

Do you use public transit in the Denver area at all? I find myself biking to most places because the public transit routes don't really get me where I want to go, but a lot of folks I know in the area used to use the buses and light rail in the before times. Seems like it had a pretty good rep before covid.

[JPKab]

Yep, it was spooky. Between my house and the fire was nothing but an open expanse of tall grass prairie and route 128. Had a clear view of the fires, especially at night. We were under pre-evac orders in case the wind shifted. I had a few former colleagues who lost homes. I'm grateful that the loss of life was as low as it was.

Regarding public transit in Denver, I avoid it like the plague. If I'm by myself, I'm a lot more tolerant of it. But I can't take my kids to public places in downtown Denver anymore, including the transit. When my daughter was 4, I had her on my shoulders on Mother's Day while we walked the 16th Street Mall. As we approached the Capitol, a violent altercation occurred within 30 feet of between two chronic drug addicts. One of them had a hiking pole, and he started beating and stabbing the other one. My daughter was terrified. That's just one incident, there are far more like it.

It blows my mind how the current crop of homeless (unhoused, or whatever moronically Orweillian term has been created to signal pious, virtuous sensitivity to ingroup members) activists have pushed the utterly failed policies of San Francisco in other cities. They result is what you and I are complaining about: public spaces that are decidedly unwelcoming and unsafe to children, elderly, and women. The policies seem to do nothing but funnel money to the non-profits that employ the nutbag activists. They certainly don't accomplish anything else. It's the equivalent of the neighborhood cat lady who puts bowls of food out for strays claiming she's a wildlife rehabilitation specialist.

[ThrustVectoring]

Speed limits are far less important than the psychological design of the road - any given section will communicate what hazards are more or less likely, and drivers are very responsive to these cues.

As a concrete example, I grew up near Seattle and regularly drove on East Lake Sammamish Parkway. This road was built and designed to efficiently carry traffic between Redmond and Issaquah at a speed of 45 miles per hour. It has smooth gentle curves, good sightlines, few driveways and intersections, etc. Sometime in the 90s or 00s people built a ton of really expensive lakefront houses between the parkway and the lake, and the new homeowners got the city to lower the speed limit to 35 (presumably to make it easier to get onto the road)

People generally drive 45 on it anyways. It is a road that practically screams "45 mph is safe" at you, and 35 feels downright glacial. If you lowered the limit to 25 people would probably still regularly do 40 on it - you need some kind of traffic calming as park of a major overhaul of the road to get speeds that are safe for pedestrians there. (And even if you could do this, most households in Sammamish travel to or through either Redmond or Issaquah anyhow, so they need some thoroughfare to do so - at best you're overloading and overstressing the other roads in the network)

[dont__panic]

Oh, totally agreed. Denver commits this sin all over the place, too. Honestly, the only place in the US that doesn't commit this is Boston and some parts of New England... because the roads were designed for horses at 10mph max and pedestrians.

[azylman]

> Here in city (Seattle) most people drive because transit tends to be spotty and slow for most people...So, what's the solution? Make driving worse of course. Speedbumps everywhere. Change 4-lane roads to 2-lanes. Remove parking. Lower speed limits to absurd levels. Make through streets dead ends.

This is obviously not the solution that anyone is proposing. You're arguing in bad faith against a strawman. The solution to bad public transit is to make public transit better.

[smegsicle]

You mentioned that induced demand is bad; someone pointed out that induced demand is not bad, but actually evidence of increased efficiency; someone else elaborated that the contrapositive is equally insane- if induced demand through efficiency is bad, then reduced demand through inefficiency is good- along with an example of the implementation of what you are asserting noone is proposing.

Caution against the short-sighted pursuit of easily-quantifiable goals at the expense of actual value is not 'arguing in bad faith'.

[ufmace]

How is he arguing against a strawman? He's saying that's exactly what they actually did in his city.

[azylman]

> Here in city (Seattle) most people drive because transit tends to be spotty and slow for most people...So, what's the solution? Make driving worse of course. Speedbumps everywhere...Transit still mostly sucks, but now driving sucks too...the transit folks realized it's hard to compete with driving, so they've just given up entirely on making transit great. It's easier to ruin driving.

The claim was that they put up speed bumps (and other measures) _with the intent of_ making driving worse to encourage public transit. That's obviously false. Speed bumps get put up to discourage unsafe driving.

If, when forced to drive safely, people would rather take public transit, that's kind of scary, but also a good thing I guess to get unsafe drivers off the road? However, that's not what the claim was (and in reality is unlikely to be true, though I have no data to back that up).

[onecommentman]

Not precisely to discourage unsafe driving. Simply to slow vehicles for any one of several reasons, safety often being an important one. Traffic calming has other benefits, such as more livable residential neighborhoods, and less congested residential side streets, especially during rush hours.

That does have the result of increasing trip times by cars, and thus motivating use of public transit.

Guessing intent is a fool’s game, and can’t really be true or false per se. It does antagonize automobile drivers and, from their valid but particular perspective, makes their life worse in (what would seem to them) a gratuitous fashion. Americans don’t like arbitrary and capricious as a whole.

[asdff]

Go to /r/urbanplanning and you will find this creed of road dieting written in stone tablets by a thundering voice

[kaesar14]

> I love transit and want more of it, but the transit folks realized it's hard to compete with driving, so they've just given up entirely on making transit great. It's easier to ruin driving.

It's way more like the driving folks have absolutely ruined transit in almost every single city in the country.

[kmeisthax]

You can't make transit great if cars are also great, because the two are mutually exclusive.

For cars to be good you need lots of space for parking lots and highways. Otherwise, the car is getting you nowhere fast, and there won't be anywhere to park it when you get there. But that also means those parking lots and highways need space. In all but the densest urban metros, that space is two-dimensional, which means all that car infrastructure is spreading out all the buildings.

Transit needs the exact opposite to happen: buildings need to be close-together so that a single line can aggregate more demand, and riders have to walk less when they arrive at their destinations. This is actually how pretty much all cities used to be built, because cars didn't exist yet, so you had to give that space to pedestrian infrastructure. Not coincidentally, those are also the cities with the best transit, and the absolute worst to drive in. You can't have both cars and people sharing the same space.

[throwaway0a5e]

> You can't make transit great if cars are also great, because the two are mutually exclusive.

I disagree. Regardless of your preferred mode of transit, look at the hours just before and after peak. Roads flow smoothly. Trains run at tight intervals and aren't too crowded. It's great for everyone.

Peak demand time will always be a clusterfuck but with enough infrastructure (ignoring petty ideological bickering about which mode should have what market share) we can probably have a system that's pretty damn decent the other 22hr of the day.

[zip1234]

You realize speed bumps are not there to 'ruin driving'--they are mechanical means to stop drivers from speeding as signs are useless and as soon as people are past the cops they speed again.

[Noumenon72]

Let's say they're put there even though they ruin driving for regular people, because they will also stop the few speeders. I don't really speed, but I take a speed bump as a sign someone in the neighborhood is hostile to drivers.

[AnimalMuppet]

I lived in this neighborhood, on a dead-end street. They grew a new subdivision, and put the street through. Now we had people blowing through our neighborhood at non-neighborhood-driving speeds, trying to race between major roads faster than the major roads would take them.

We petitioned to put speed bumps in. Yes, we were hostile to the way at least some people were driving. But also note that we, the people who asked for the bumps, also drove there every day. We weren't hostile to drivers as a class. We were hostile to people trying to drive excessive speeds on suburban side streets.

[alistairSH]

Almost nobody would disagree that making both transit and driving awful is not a good solution.

The real solution is to make transit at least as good as driving (measured roughly by time to get from A-B). Not easy to do in some cities - Seattle has some unique geography to work around. But for someplace like Houston or Dallas? Making transit work shouldn't be that hard (other than the cost to build it out and getting people to agree it can work).

[VintageCool]

> I love transit and want more of it, but the transit folks realized it's hard to compete with driving, so they've just given up entirely on making transit great. It's easier to ruin driving.

Seattle just opened light rail from Northgate to the U-District to Downtown this year. We will also have light rail from Downtown Seattle to Bellevue opening next year, and light rail to Redmond the year after that.

And the opening of light rail from Downtown to Capitol Hill to Husky Stadium a few years ago drove some pretty big changes in transit in Seattle.

[robcohen]

> I love transit and want more of it, but the transit folks realized it's hard to compete with driving, so they've just given up entirely on making transit great. It's easier to ruin driving.

Wow. You just crystalized exactly what I felt was wrong with the argument that induced demand is bad. Thanks.

[crowbahr]

It's an entirely bad faith and shallow argument. You should probably reconsider what you're thinking is.

The goal of transit first infrastructure is to make the majority of trips unnecessary. You shouldn't be required to own a car to participate in American society.

This means we need to rezone our residential sprawl to allow for more frequent, smaller grocery stores. We need to increase the amount of mixed zoning, increase density, decrease the insane quantity of land dedicated solely to the movement and storage of privately owned heavy machinery (automobiles) and focus on easily accessible areas of bike & bus friendly infrastructure.

The Netherlands was fully capable of transitioning from a nation of car dependent choked cities to a bike first micromobility haven in 30 years. The only thing stopping the USA from doing the same is the enormous government subsidies paid to car owners to keep the roads paved.

If the federal government stopped taking 90% of the cost of every road in the US and you had to pay gas tax to support it all do you think you'd still be driving? Do you think you'd support billion dollar bridge extensions and lane additions when it means gas is an extra $5/gallon?

[twoodfin]

If the federal government stopped taking 90% of the cost of every road in the US and you had to pay gas tax to support it all do you think you'd still be driving? Do you think you'd support billion dollar bridge extensions and lane additions when it means gas is an extra $5/gallon?

The Federal Highway Trust Fund was fully funded by the gas tax and other user fees until 2008, all while a significant percentage of revenue was allocated not to roads but to mass transit. Congress has topped it up with general revenue since, but the gas tax hike required to eliminate that need would be measured in cents, not dollars.

[pbourke]

> The Netherlands was fully capable of transitioning from a nation of car dependent choked cities to a bike first micromobility haven in 30 years. The only thing stopping the USA from doing the same is the enormous government subsidies paid to car owners to keep the roads paved.

The Netherlands is smaller than New Jersey and has twice its population - its one of the most densely populated countries. Comparing it to the 3rd largest country on earth is risible.

[crowbahr]

The Netherlands cities are significantly smaller than American cities in terms of population.

NYC doesn't even have good bike infrastructure.

Every major city in America could transition to bike infrastructure and the quality of life would improve across the US. We don't have to cross the great plains on a bike: We're talking micromobility here. Who cares if they're smaller? We have enormous cities choked to death with cars.

Death to cars: cars bring death. Cities are for humans, not cars.

[seanmcdirmid]

> Here in city (Seattle) most people drive because transit tends to be spotty and slow for most people.

I don't drive and I live in Ballard. Driving has always sucked in Seattle since I can remember from the late 1970s. My dad, who lived in Seattle after coming back from Vietnam said the same thing.

[mikestew]

Transit still mostly sucks, but now driving sucks too.

And now bicycling and walking suck just a little less. That is a success.

[potta_coffee]

I've always hated driving around Seattle, but a few years ago I was bumming around for a few days in my Miata and it was a whole different experience. Having a tiny car that can go anywhere and park anywhere is awesome.

[bobthepanda]

The speeds were not reduced because the transit needed to put more people in.

The speeds were reduced because people keep dying when getting hit by speeding cars. And this problem has gotten worse with Americans shifting to SUVs and crossovers that hit humans higher up and toss them under the wheels.