Places that use private cars as public transport are just doing a super inefficient version of a bus. This service should be only used in rural areas due to there not being enough people for buses fdue to demand, but even still there won’t be enough people in rural areas to support them, there is where the right tool of owning a car would work due to the lack of transportation infrastructure. Currently we are trying too hard to use cars as a tool for every situation, there’s different jobs and different tools to do the jobs more efficiently.
@Adori@ray Agree. But most Euro cities that have excellent metro and bus services built their infrastructure decades ago.
Other than US cities like NY, Chicago, Boston, SFO and Wash DC, metro systems would cost a fortune and be built at a snail’s pace…look up Seattle light rail … an excellent system but has taken a long time to evolve, fund and build
@Adori@ray Even in many rural areas, this is not the best option.
First, in many towns, there often aren't any Uber drivers nearby, or the nearest driver is in another town and you're left to wait upwards of an hour for your ride to arrive.
Second, pairs of major cities and large metropolitan areas that are relatively close together should be connected by a railway line. Along with express services, these railways should have reasonably frequent all-stations services that serve the smaller towns along the way.
Third, there should be regular bus or coach services connecting multiple towns, and where available, feeding into these all-stations train services.
So if there's a train station in town A, there should be a feeder bus to nearby towns B, C, and D. This benefits rail passengers, who have more towns they can visit by public transport, and connects those towns to the rail network.
These inter-town bus services can make multiple stops in each town (for example at the local school, the local shops, and the local hospital),, providing both cross-town and inter-town services.
Fourth, with public transport, one service or route won't cover every pair of destinations—but a network can.
So say you have an east-west bus route connecting towns A, B, C, and D. You might have a second route that connects with that bus service at town C, and then runs north-south to connect it with towns E, F, G, and H.
The number of people travelling from town H to town D might be vanishingly small—zero on most days, no more than one or two on others. Certainly not enough to run a dedicated service from town D to town H.
Yet that trip can be provided for by the network, which draws its ridership from passengers who want to travel from any stop on either the north-south or east-west service, to any other stop on either service.
Fourth, with larger towns over 1000 people, an on-demand bus service that travels around town to designated stops is probably a better option. Again, this should feed into any railway stations of inter-town bus routes.
And finally, once your city reaches a population of around 10,000 or so, it should just have a regular bus service, and it should integrate with the broader bus and train network.
This is facts. Getting rid of cars without any functinal alternative is literally just fucking over poor people. I don’t give two fucks how much ride-sharing apps could be better than people owning cars, ubering to and from work and only on that loop is $300-500+ a week depending on where you live. I’d actually imagine Australian prices are probably worse.
I don’t think you read the article. The data shows that walking and cycling went up massively, as well as increasing public transport use. This is good, and the article as a whole politely makes points compatible with this comm.
Uber only paid 58 people, it’s cool but it’s not enough to create any of the changes you’re mentioning. The article can be polite, but I can still respond to their shitty point nts however I want
It’s a study. People are normally paid to participate in studies because otherwise no-one would bother doing them.
It’s not meant to change the city overnight, it’s a study to test how people’s behaviours change if they reduce the number of cars they own, which is what we want (ideally to zero, of course).
Electric motorcycles do not belong on bicycle and pedestrian paths. My biggest issue with ‘ebike’ users is they do not understand or care about trail etiquette.
High speed rapid transit. I want to be able to look out the window of the train and watch us go at least 3/2 the speed of the cars on the highway. Every day on my way to work.
I have an ebike, and I really want an electric scooter/bike once the range can be improved, currently they couldn’t get me to and from work (it’s a long commute)
Yeah, I get it. Private vehicles everywhere on the side of the street are an eyesore and take a ton of valuable public space. If at least e-scooters were as small as a car it wouldn’t be such a big deal to see them parked everywhere.
My biggest issue with scooters is that the sidewalks on most streets in North America are way too narrow to safely use them while others are walking, and we’re seriously lacking in dedicated bike lanes. Both of which are issues with the prioritization of car infrastructure over all else as opposed to problems with scooters themselves. Since scooters cannot safely run on the road but is still too fast for exclusively pedestrian paths. Where there are dedicated bike lanes in my city, scooters share them with bikes perfectly fine.
I feel like most roads where you’d ride a scooter the cars would be less of a problem if they followed the speed limit. Scooters should be able to go down 45mph roads just fine but there’s always some massive truck going 60.
Yeah, unfortunately speed limits don’t mean anything and studies show that drivers pretty much always drive as fast as they think they can regardless. The issue is that North America has stroads which are highly conducive to driving fast, damn near highway speeds. If we had the narrow, potentially tile or even cobblestone local streets that European and Asian cities have it would be less of a problem because those conditions directly promote lower speeds and more attentive driving.
I’ve heart NotJustBikes say similar things. I normally don’t favor control over everything but at this point I would be ok with cars having electronically controlled speed limiters to not exceed the speed limit of whatever road they’re on.
It’s really just created such an entitled, careless, and demanding mindset where bikes need to have speed limiters on them for safety but Fred can buy a 1200hp 3 ton weapon with no limiter.
It’s also not unheard of either. IIRC Japan had speed governors on their cars for a time, which limited them to their national highway speed of 100 km/h (which is still very fast to be fair).
I’m perfectly fine with there being interstates that go 85mph I just don’t want people driving so fast in dense areas with mixed traffic. If I could have people just not be assholes that would be great but I feel like driving the speed limit now is just reason for someone to get angry with you and want to drive you off the road.
I’d love to ride a bike everywhere I can but every road I would be riding would have traffic going over 45mph with massive vehicles who have drivers so impatient they’d rather run you off the road than share the road.
we need to infiltrate civil engineering standards boards and make protected bike lanes mandatory for all roads with 4 or more car lanes or speed limits over 25 mph. then they'll be the default everywhere because going against code will invite lawsuits
This is the kicker. They are a pretty good solution now, but they could be amazing.
At least in my country they need to hammer out a consistent set of rules and laws regarding their use. Last time I checked the vast majority of them are effectively illegal because under current laws they are too powerful to be considered an assisted pushbike, you cant register them as a roadgoing vehicle because they dont have indicators and brake lights and you cant ride them on the footpath because riding on the footpath is against the law.
Which puts them in that lovely legal space of “Does a cop want to fuck with me today?” Fortunately our police tend to be pretty cool on the subject because they know that technically taking it out of your house is illegal which is dumb.
I'm old enough to remember when the roads were fixed as routine maintenance, rather than using infrastructure money for a quick bodge just before an election.
My hometown in the US still does it like that! And they’re stunningly efficient. There was one time we had to go around an enormous detour because the biggest road in town was being redone in like a 2 mile stretch. They did the entire thing overnight in one giant marching construction worker swarm. A few towns over from us did something similar earlier this year but with their local stretch of highway. It was maybe a 15 mile redo all at once took just a few days (they did one lane traffic on one side than the other for that one, small highways). Compare that to where I’m at in Seattle right now Madison has been fucked for like 2 years and I swear none of the roads have actually been resurfaced it is just one construction patch after another when like a pipe needs fixed or something.
I hear it takes weeks to do properly. I’m not a road building expert, but there are many things that go into it, and stuff needs to cool of and consolidate.
To clarify the construction was all done overnight but it hardened/set up for a couple days after and they kept it blocked. Definitely wasn’t weeks though it was like 3 days for people to start driving on it.
Mentioned in the other response construction was overnight and they kept it blocked a couple days after to set up. Very short turnaround though. The only other times I’ve seen so many construction workers on one site is people building towers in Seattle so it was a little shocking to see in a town of 25k people. But also explained why sometimes I would be gone for a weekend and come back to new roads. One of the things is the roads there get obliterated quickly. The winters are somewhat harsh, it is a farming town so lots of big equipment chewing them up, and right on a main highway that people use to get into Washington. They have to be redone often and I think the area has just enough funding and experience to be on top of it.
Pretty sure they built the transcontinental railroad in the time it took my city to add one 2-3 mile auxiliary lane to the side of a road with 2 pre-existing lanes in the same direction and an existing hard shoulder.
Not only do they slash oil demand, but manufacturing and maintaining an ebike has a fraction of the environmental impact of an electric car. Also, you can do a lot of the maintenance yourself with cheap tools and a small amount of work space. Also also, makes my ass look good~🍑
Also, unironically, e-bikes are more fun than cars. You feel the acceleration much more on a bike than a car despite moving slower, and the breeze going by you feels pretty nice too.
Transit projects ALWAYS go over budget and over time. That’s just what happens.
But they are never regretted after they are built. Those expenses are only terrible to people as they are built but as soon as it’s done people can’t imagine how they lived before it. Transit projects always at least break even in the long run. They really are “if you build it they will come”
Also, you know what else goes comically over budget and over time? Car infrastructure projects! But when talking about highways it’s “an investment for the country’s mobility and ultimately its economy” yet with trains it’s “a pointless money sink that will never succeed due to this one very commonly experienced setback.”
(Full disclosure I’m not in the UK, I’m annoyed at him for the people there too, especially since their politicians’ attitudes toward high speed rail seem pretty similar to attitudes in Canada where I am.)
Ah Canada, where 50% of the population lives within the pretty narrow Québec City - Windsor Corridor and yet we don’t have any decent rail service, let alone anything high speed.
I live out in the Maritimes, so this isn’t even something I’d directly benifit from, but it’s one of the most frustrating policy failures in this country for me.
It might sound crazy, but a coast to coast high speed rail line could potentially be conceivable in Canada if we really went all in on rail. We only really have one or two major cities for each of the interior provinces and BC, so just draw a line connecting all of them. There’s not that much in the way outside those cities, and this corridor could connect to the Montreal-Quebéc corridor, and then further on toward the east coast where it again only has to connect a few major cities.
The biggest problem would be BC though, we have a ton of mountains over here which might require some serious tunneling.
Perhaps we could colocate it with the Trans Canada Highway corridor?
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