[evomassiny]

a couple of reasons:

* cars destroy cities, they take huge chunks of the public space,

* air pollution,

* noise pollution,

* safety,

* fast floods favored by impermeable soil covers,

* social inequalities (not having a car make you less capable in a car centric environment),

* climate change

[antasvara]

Many of these are car-specific. Is there a reason you can't use buses on those roads, instead of building train tracks?

Buses use existing infrastructure, cost less than the train itself, are generally good when electric, require significantly less engineering to implement, cut down on noise and air pollution if they replace car drivers, etc.

Safety may or may not be as big a concern with buses; this article [0] seems to indicate Tha bus travel is as safe (if not safer) than train and car travel. That doesn't seem intuitive to me, but it's not a stretch to assume that bus travel isn't significantly less safe than train. This could even be improved with dedicated bus lanes.

Fast floods are definitely a concern, but I'm not qualified to say for certain how large the issue is.

[0] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/19/heres-how-much-safer-...

[evomassiny]

This is a valid point, I don't know of any "bus only" highway but it could a good alternative.

[panick21_]

There is literally a whole transit system called Bus Rapid Tranist 'BRT' that is exactly that sort of thing. And in the real world it isn't better or cheaper.

[panick21_]

You know what, trains in most of the world also use existing infrastructure. The US had a very nice train infrastructure. So maybe the whole logic with 'lets not rip out infrastructure' should have been applied earlier.

Yes buses are good. Specially trolley buses. And you could built a country based all around trolley buses.

But the reality is, buses are actually operationally more expensive then trams or trains. Roads are more expensive long term. And the whole thing will be a lot less cost or space efficient.

As soon as you have sufficient scale, buses become impractical.

I live in a city of 70k people, we have electric double bend buses. These are huge 140+ people buses. And the are very often full.

People how don't live in a society based around public transport don't seem to understand what happens when you want to move a whole society, rather then disinfranchised poor people.

And just from a user-experience perspective, tram and trains are just so much better. Traveling threw the city, I rather spend a couple more minutes and take a tram route. Trams are just so much better and more comfortable.

We have routes in Zürich Switzerland, that only 1M people, where you have S-Bahn trains that are double stack and 12+ wagons long. They come every 5-10 minutes. And pretty much all of them are full during peak hours. Go to Zürich rush hour during those hours and just observe the amount of people, and then start to attempted to do it all with buses. And that's a small city, we aren't talking about Paris or Tokio.

> This could even be improved with dedicated bus lanes.

The running joke in the tranist community goes like this.

We could make buses better by using electric trolley buses rather then disel.

We could make buses better by giving buses a dedicated bus lane.

We could make dedicated bus lanes better by having steel rails rather then asphalt.

We could make buses better by having steel wheels as well.

Congratulations, you just invented a train.

Truly ask yourself, what do you want in your city, this:

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/MG6KEA/tram-in-amsterdam-MG6KEA.jp...

or

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Linha_Ve...

For a while the idea of 'Bus Rapid Tranist' was promised as some sort of solution. But real world shows this simply isn't the case. As soon as you actually have a successful BRT lane, you instantly start to think about that it would be far better as a tram line.

Yes, dedicated bus lanes are great, use the extra lanes you have and your existing bus fleet and try to improve the system as much as possible. But once you are serous and you have some users, build a tram or a subway.

P.S: Plastic wheels are also a big source of emission that you don't want to have in a city.

[zolbrek]

*cars destroy cities

Interesting take, can you give an example of a nice city destroyed by cars?

[evomassiny]

Houston comes to mind, it has a very low walkbility index (see https://pedestriansfirst.itdp.org/).

[CamperBob2]

People are free to leave at any time, yet the city has a population of almost 2.3 million. Not bad for a "destroyed" city.

[panick21_]

The reality is, people want walk-able neighborhoods. In fact, the places where they exists, they are so horrendously expensive that people can't afford to live there. There are so few of those places that the demand/supply is just crazy. So even if there was a good walk-able neighborhood most people couldn't afford it.

The Texas DoT isn't about transportation, its basically about highway building (and often right threw neighborhoods). 60 years of infrastructure investment in on thing lead to more of that thing.

There are about 160 car accidents a day in Houston alone. The amount of cost society gets from that is huge.

[evomassiny]

Population count is just one of many metrics when evaluating the "niceness" of a place. Maybe "destroyed" is not the best way of describing the effect of car dependency (my english is not that good) but a city that doesn't value walking sounds like hell to me.

[undersuit]

Most US cities require parking to be built when you build a new location. You know what my city doesn't require? A safe connection between the required city side walk through the required parking lot to the business.