I knew about the girl who died and her mother’s campaign but didn’t realise how central it was to Khan’s push for this. I also didn’t know his personal problems with asthma and pollution, or his additional security needs.
I’ve seen a lot of these campaigners around. They rolled through Epsom Town centre a few weeks ago and funnily enough, their vans completely blocked the crossing I was trying to use with my 4 year old on a very busy street making it very unsafe.
They’ve caused lots of annoyance with their constant horns, driving up local traffic unnecessarily and megaphones. I hear more hate for Just Stop Oil but can frankly say, they’ve never caused me personally any problems at all so funny isn’t it…
The bike lanes suck though. They are next to the street, instead of behind the parking and next to the sidewalk. As a result, on the main street in Hoboken (Washington street), there are always cars double parked in the bike lane during the day or drinking hours of the night, because parking in that city is horrendous. It’s common to see an entire block or two full of cars double parked in the bike lane, making it unusable. Also, they redid the bike lane with textured hexagonal bullshit so using any wheels smaller than e-scooter wheels (skateboard, roller skate) is just a super rough ride.
Great that he stopped pedestrian casualties, but he severely harmed personal non-car transit.
There’s no such thing as horrendous parking. There is only too many people showing up by car when they ought to be walking/biking/riding transit instead.
He still added bike lanes that weren’t there before no? How is that harming personal non-car transit? Maybe go to city council meetings and ask that double parking in bike lanes be enforced. I would certainly think the city wants to make money from fines.
Also how many people are riding around on rollerblades? The “hexagonal bullshit” makes the bike lanes distinct and noticeable increasing awareness and also gives tactile feedback if a driver starts driving on the bike lane. Yeah it sucks for skateboarders but the tradeoffs are worth it, especially because again, how many skateboarders are there really? Some municipalities don’t even allow skateboards in bike lanes because the drastic speed difference between them and bikes tends to cause issues.
Could the bike lanes be better? Absolutely, they could be actually protected bike lanes like you pointed out but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, they don’t “suck”. And 0 pedestrian deaths over the span of a few years is very very good.
PCPs replaced an approach called hire purchase (HP), where consumers opting for a car loan would make regular monthly payments until the loan was fully repaid, usually after three or four years. At the end, they would own the car outright. Under PCPs, consumers only pay back around half of the value of the vehicle. The rest of the value is reserved for a “balloon payment” at the end of the contract. The vast majority of consumers don’t make the balloon payment because they can’t afford it or don’t want to incur the expense. Instead, the vast majority swap their vehicle for a new one, and a new PCP deal.
I didn’t know that they have such a complex car debt bubble.
It means a lot are driving cars they can’t really afford.
Say you buy a car for £40k, finance it on PCP and you effectively make payments against a £20k loan. At the end of the agreement, you can buy the car for the remaining £20k, or hand the car back. Often the car will be worth £20k-£25k. Most dealerships will say ‘hey you can just take this new car’ and they get a £25k car for £20k. Dealerships make more sales of new cars and make more on the 2nd hand cars. Meanwhile those paying don’t actually own anything at the end and have continuous payments.
The only saving grace is if the car is worth less than the outstanding amount. If the car is worth £16k and you have £20k outstanding, you can just hand the car back and walk away. You aren’t obliged to buy the car or take out a new loan.
You can also pay off the finance yourself for the £20k, then sell that car on to get the £25k. But no one does because it’s not convenient like just taking a brand new shiny car.
“Culture” is probably an overstatement. Isn’t it just horrifying zoning laws that lead to sprawl and people didn’t have a choice as there is a lack of public transportation?
It sounds like you're saying they're livng in an effective dictatorship rather than a democracy.
They should be able to choose by the way they vote.
I dont reallly know much about how planning and public services works in the USA.
Im my country we have fluctuating quality of local and national public transport investment and maintenace, and one of the sources of variation is who they're voting in to power.
When they keep voting in individualistic self-serving leaders the public infrastructure gets shat on sometimes duismantled and snaked off outside of public control. The rare time they vote for politicians who support public infrastructure and the general public, then it improves,
however briefly.
So my country is probably average on public transport - by the sounds of things, it's generally better than most of the USA - I'd rather it be better. but I tend to accept the choices made by the electorate, saddening though it may be, this is what people want.
If i'm really that bothered about it then i have to stand for election myself.
I guess it might all come down to how free and fair the elections are and how easy it is to enter and get your manifesto heard by a fair number of people.
A lack of options isn’t really the same as a dictatorship. The day to day choices are sometimes hard to abstract into an intelligent vote every 2 or 4 years. The US suffers from a lack of trust in public institutions, so they aren’t given enough funding or the right leadership to take a step back, take a good look and make tough choices that goes against reactionary NIMBYs.
The sprawl may very well be part of the culture. I just don’t like to call everything a culture, including commuting. Commuting just seems a necessity and the choice of how and how far you commute is a function of infrastructure and land value. Sounds almost too boring to organize around, but it would be important to find a solution that works for everyone, instead of just single individuals.
For all I’ve read, the lack of public transportation in US cities (or the badly managed ones) is by design, influenced on politicians by the car industry lobby.
I guess it’s the same for zoning laws? I’ve no idea, and I’m probably not exactly true, as I’m stating a huge generalization. The US is so big and diverse that there may be places with good public infrastructure.
But in a broader sense, it seems that the car lobby played a big role in how cities were designed and run.
In Canada the resistance to change is fueled by “this is how we’ve always done it” which is false as Canada was founded before the car was made. There is also a conflict of interest to reduce dependance on roads as we have a decent auto manufacturing sector and many people rely on jobs related to roads and cars. With zoning there is hesitancy to change because many of our politicians are land lords using single family homes as rentable apartments and they know that their property values will drop if we start building real multi unit residences and affordable housing.
Our cities have been caught in this style of development for decades and to try to change it really goes against the current political grain. It takes a brave and determined politician to try for change and they will meet resistance from their colleagues and parts of their voter base the entire way.
Yes, I think to work well the Land zoning and transport planning need to be hand in hand.
(and ideally serve people rather than car companies).
A local bus service is more efficient the denser the population it serves.
Rural densities will struggle to support/ warrant frequent bus services.
Really dense areas will more easily support more frequent bus services / netwoks and even trains / grade separated or exclusive land use for public transport.
It's no suprise that super dense places like Japan, Singapore, and desely populated European , Chinese regions have more public transport.
Add New York City to that list for that matter. Presumably NYC benefited from achieving it's density before cars became too powerful politically..
Urban planning and public transport should absolutely go hand-in-hand.
But on to your other point.
The key factor for transport use isn't just population or density. It's also the proportion of the population that uses public transport. And places that have more frequent public transport will have a higher proportion of the population using it than places with low quality public transport.
Imagine a city with just 100,000 people. But the local bus service is exceptional, and half the population uses it. That's a base of 50,000 people.
Imagine a city of 500,000 people. The public transport network there is average, so just 10% of the population uses it. That's 50,000 people.
Now imagine a metropolitan area of 5,000,000 people. The public transport network there is poor and infrequent. Only 1% of the population uses it. That's 50,000 people.
Three cities, same absolute number of public transport users, different modal share.
If you run frequent services, every 10 minutes or better, and services connect so that it's a two- or three-seat journey to everywhere in your city, you will have a much higher ridership than if it's an hourly bus service. That's with the same population and density.
Frequent bus services (once every 10 minutes or more) can also act as a feeder into a higher rail, light rail, tram, or metro services. In suburban, rural, and seni-rural areas, that extends the reach of your rail network.
Yes, higher density around railway stations is the best option. But where there is a lot of low-density suburban sprawl, frequent feeder buses are a good option.
Somehow there’s always a “death spiral” for public transit, especially now as people commute less. But somehow… There never is for roads. We never seem to have enough roads. Funny that.
The car lobby thing is true for LA, but I’m not sure you can apply this to every city. What is evident, is that cities that existed before cars were invented or introduced are still more pedestrian friendly (see east coast cities or European ones for example) and the ones founded after are more grid like and car friendly.
Public transportation is only worth it if there is a high enough density of people (yeah, this sub may not like to hear it), so if you have huge sprawling suburbs it’s not obvious where to even put your bus/train stations. Usually it’s great to connect centers of some sort.
So yeah, if there had been more incentive to connect centers and dense clusters of population with each other, they may have planned according to that.
That’s certainly one cause, but culture is as well. The American dream of a quarter acre in the quiet leafy suburbs, easy commute to work by car on the freeway, has been a pervasive part of culture for a long time. It’s only recently that we’ve started appreciating the unsustainable reality of that idea.
I'm coming to the belief that sometime this is an overblown excuse. I'm sure it's not true everywhere, but I just visited a friend in a medium sized (well under 100k people) Florida city, and spent a day going around by bus and foot, and it was great. Buses were reliable, air-conditioned, cheap, and traveled all the main routes, running about 18h a day, but they were barely used. Still loads of 6 lane roads, paved everything, massive parking lots, and more SUVs than I could count.
Even if you have a car for some trips, people in this city could easily reduce their usage, but they've become far too reliant on car culture. A trip to the store, 15 min walk, hop in the car. A trip downtown, 10min walk and 30min bus ride, nope... Car.
If we want more public transport, we need to encourage people use what exists when they can.
Transit needs to be competitive with cars to really see a difference. In your own example a bus somehow takes 20 minutes longer to get downtown than walking there would, which is completely ridiculous but possible with how american transit is managed.
The transit needs to be nearly as fast and convenient as cars are. The city could take some of those 6 lane roads, dedicate a bus lane, and reduce the travel time of the bus by reducing time spent in traffic and prioritizing signals at intersections for the bus.
As for zoning, it is to blame because zoning prevents density and denisty helps support transit by increasing ridership in denser areas. If every building is limited to 1 or 2 stories and has a massive parking lot, it takes more space and everything gets farther away, increasing travel times for all transportation. This also increases the costs of road maintaince, sewer and water pipes, elecitricity delivery and is just pretty much one of the most ineffecient ways for a city to use space and resources.
All I know is that PalmTran in south east Florida became wildly unpredictable during the Great Recession due to suicide by train. Many many times it was shut down do to people offing themselves on the tracks.
I read a study long time ago, I can’t find it, it’s old, and I have not kept up with new publications so take all this with a huge grain of salt. The study found that not only does a public transit system need to be available and dependable, it needs a certain amount of people too. Once a critical number of commuters used public transit it passed a tipping point where even more people began to use it. The study concluded that people seeing people take public transit will increase the likelihood that they will choose public transit next time compared to people who saw deserted public transit. It’s a chicken and egg problem on top of everything else. Keep in mind I am not an expert and I am not current with the topic.
Until people develop a workable alternative, all this narrative does is annoy people who have no choice but to use cars.
When electric buses start making round trips from every main city to every suburb on a set reliable and convenience schedule, then you can start shaming people for having to drive a car.
I have to drive a car because my city is barely traversable otherwise. I hate it. So, I’ve been working with the city council and other committees to start building a modern transit system. It can be done, but it takes motivated people to make it happen.
I’m very curious about this. Did you go into this with some allies or were you able to drum up support by sharing stats and other city/country success stories? Was the council already amenable to the idea? Any resources you could share?
This could be an entire post on its own if you can spare some time to write about it and your experiences.
I’ve used a combination of coalition building, finding allies on the city council, and reaching out to neighborhood leaders.
Much of it has been reaching out to government officials, having conversations, and identifying where decision making is done within the various transit agencies.
So far, most of the resistance to actual progress is just kind of weird noise (complaints & general “I can’t see how having transit would help”) from misc citizens and realtors who don’t want to have changes to their development plans in the city, even if adding in the transit would make regions around it boom. The city council members are surprisingly responsive to even a small number of vocal people. I don’t think they hear from many coherent arguments in any given year. Showing up with data, an even reasonable idea of what can be done, and evidence that you’ve got a coalition of interested groups seems to get traction.
It also helps that we recently voted out a ton of conservative assholes and replaced them with a younger progressive city council. Yes, I worked on campaigns to help make that happen.
We’ve also been getting allies on various transit advisory committees, mostly citizen advisory committees. Then making sure there’s a similar message along with data that supports our goals.
We do also gather up other cities’ long term transit plan documents because they often have some great ideas and examples of what a city can build out given some interest in the public’s success.
I know that I’m also on track to be tapped to help write up materials for federal level proposals in the future. Grant writing isn’t much fun, but it’s how you get the money for a $100 mil project.
Yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty of material for a whole posting in its own right! This isn’t a simple problem to solve. It’s a combination of government systems, managing individual’s needs, reaching out to lots of groups, and a real vision to get people dedicated to. You’ve got to have something people really want to have the buy in for years of work to make it happen.
I mean antagonistic shaming can be awful, obviously. But getting people to care is important, and meeting people where they are sometimes requires making sure they know they should care.
Caring doesn’t mean feeling bad and guilty though. This is part of the toxicity that personal responsibility has created. Not everyone can be equally responsible for their individual contributions. But we can all be much more equal in how much we care about issues.
Something like the bus you describe won’t just appear out of no where. People have to want it, commit to it, consult in its design and then use it.
When electric buses start making round trips from every main city to every suburb on a set reliable and convenience schedule,
How fucked up is your city that this doesn’t already exist? That’s not a pipe dream, it’s the bare minimum. Your local government has failed, please go riot in the streets.
The alternative will not appear out of thin air. More people need to have a sense of the long-reaching consequences of car-dependent urban planning and that’s what propels them to vote for better planning in their cities.
Nothing is going to change without a shift in political leanings, and that’s what this sort of advocacy is doing.
That was hilarious! Thank you for calling out big corps on their fake solution which in fact is a monopoly nightmare! I love the innovative solutions offered by the host at the end.
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