| 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. |
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.