Mass Transit

What about buses?

I think the idea of mass transit (regardless of which form is used) is good. Doing more (or even the same) with less is generally a good goal to have.

I don't think, however, that the solution to traffic problems is to add more lanes of highway/freeway. If there's an efficient way to better use the lanes you have, it's almost always preferrable than just adding more lanes.

As the network administrator for a public school district, we faced a similar problem with our Internet access. We have a single T1 line for Internet... it's all we can afford. People have been complaining how it's slow at various times of the day and that things we HAVE to use the Internet for... such as email, access to our web-based grading system, etc... have to work in a timely fashion and all the fluff... like students downloading stuff or listening to streaming music or chatting on various IM programs... had to be restricted and throttled. The solution to our problem isn't to add more bandwidth.. generating an increased yearly cost that will be consumed in record time. The solution is to prioritize our Internet traffic and discard the traffic that has no place in a school. We use a Packeteer to do it and it's worked very well.

That's certainly something that's possible in a school, but I don't really see how that would be applicable to a traffic system, particularly when you're talking about adults in a free society who should be able to choose their method of transportation as opposed to children in a school who have pretty limited freedoms. What are you going to do, stop cars and tell people just driving in to get a cheeseburger to go home?

We could attempt to change this by increasing tolls and gas taxes while reducing prices on mass transit...except we already do that. Perhaps people just prefer to drive than to take the subway.

Just because an idea is good in theory, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do in practice. For instance, maybe it's a good idea in theory to provide the public with exercise facilities. It would give poor people a place to work out, help reduce obesity, etc. But if no one goes to the public exercise facilities, then we've just wasted a bunch of taxpayer money, good idea or not.

Mark: Ok, so which people are you going to target to kick off the roads?

MW and Raina...

How quick you jump to conclusions...

My intent was not to indicate that my example was necessarily applicable to traffic congestion. My intent was to indicate that adding more lanes isn't a permanent or even an always-available solution to the problem.

It seems to me that the public needs to make up its mind on the issue (like everything else). If they're going to waste road space and don't want or won't use mass transit, then they're going to have traffic congestion.. no matter how many lanes there are. Pick what inconvenience you want, but don't expect not to be inconvenienced by either traffic congestion or taxes to pay for mass transit.

Mark: I don't see why adding capacity can't permanently solve the problem. When it gets crowded again, just add more capacity. Eventually the amount of usable surface area will reach an equilibrium with the surface area used for freeways, and congestion will stop increasing.

MW: That's not a given, though. Growth in traffic congestion won't magically stop when there's no more room for freeway expansion.

Adding freeway capacity is also not feasible in every major city.

Mark: As freeways expand, the land available for stuff other than freeways is reduced, thus reducing the number of places to go on the freeways. There's an equilibrium point. Every city has room, they just need to tear down "destinations" and build more freeways.

Sure they can tear down anything they want... but at what cost? Widening highways and freeways costs a lot and provides a very poor return on that investment; traffic congestion isn't really reduced... and in some cases more problems are created as a result.

Consider this article.

.. and this article.

Mark: Oh brother. Just look at the numbers. Mass transit is a joke, and the articles you linked to are just the set-ups.

At what cost to tear things down? Just factor it into the cost of construction. Widening highways is apparently a heck of a lot cheaper than building light rail. Privately owned toll roads make a profit, whereas all forms of mass transit lose money. Do the math.

MW: Let's get straight what I'm talking about and what I'm not:

1.) I'm not advocating light rail.

2.) Widening highways doesn't really solve the problem of traffic congestion. As the articles I linked to indicate, many times widening the highways generates, by itself, more traffic... enough to use up the added capacity... creating, over the long haul, worse travel times and larger ripple-effect delays from accidents and/or police traffic stops. A solution that creates either more problems or enlarges existing problems is not a good solution... no matter how relatively cheap it may be.

3.) Sprawl is a problem that is both created and exacerbated by widening highways. More highways encourage more people to live further and further away from where they work and shop. More people doing this suggests, to the short-sighted, that more highway lanes are needed... and so more are created which, in turn, create more sprawl.

The bottom line of what I'm saying is that the solution to traffic problems in our major cities isn't necessarily either adding lanes to highways or introducing expensive forms of mass transit.

Cities should.. and do.. focus more on smarter city planning and relatively cheap ways to get more out of the existing roads and highways they already have (buses, for example).

Mark: I'm in favor of stuff like more tow trucks for rapidly clearing accidents, if that would really be a useful thing (hard for me to judge intuitively). HOV lanes are generally a waste, from the studies I've read, but it's been a while since I've looked into it.

And yes, more freeways means people will drive farther, but I don't think sprawl is bad. I think we need to stay ahead of the curve and build freeways faster.

Although perhaps the congestion we have now, that people live with, is the equilibrium point, and that no matter what we do people will keep increasing usage until the transportation system is clogged. If that's the case, then it doesn't matter how we do it, we're doomed to congestion.

In a week I'll be moving closer to work... meaning that I won't have to drive to work in the summer, as I'll be within 3 miles or so of work. I'm looking forward to it. I, for one, don't want to have to drive to work. In many cases, driving to work is the only option people have.. and right there you have a major source of increased traffic and congestion. That's one of the problems with sprawl.

If cities were planned better, more freeways wouldn't necessarily be needed. In some cases, freeways should be removed. Milwaukee, Wisconsin... a city very close-to-home for me... increased the vitality of its dying downtown area by tearing down a freeway.

Mark: You are right on.

MW: Sprawl is the Devil Incarnate in urban planning. It is not only the result of an old ideal of cities based on cars but you see it now creates a need for freeways as a short-term solution that is clearly wasteful. Just because L.A., and Dallas, and Houston are all so screwed up already doesn't mean you should further delay fixing them by way of public transport, which, yes, has a high initial cost but pays for itself in the end. What would you get? Higher density living concentrated near the lines of public transport, communities where people can actually walk around and meet each other, efficiency. Before you begin your internal dialog - "...but the cost of public transport blah blah... subsidized by taxpayers blah blah.." - note that the costs people quote don't take into account the monetary value of the wear and tear on roads that you save by putting people on public transportation, or the human cost of occupying people with the headache of driving or negotiating traffic for two hours a day rather than with reading or sleeping. (I won't bring emissions and oil conservation since you freeway proponents seem so hell bent on polluting and not conserving just because you can.) Do you *like* spending hours every day driving? Or, as seems to be the case in centers of sprawl, in traffic?

How can I tell how wasteful cars and freeways are? (You can too.) Look at the cars on the freeways. 9 out of 10 of them are carrying one - ONE! - person - the driver. All these mammoth, nearly empty cars going in one direction, toward the city center. How much space would those same people take up on a commuter rail? Not very much.

Granted, I live in Boston, the ideal city. Parking in the city, upwards of twenty dollars a day, the cost of gas at what is it $2 a gallon now?, the cost of auto insurance all weigh pretty obviously in favor of public transport, which is the cheapest in the country. The commuter trains are packed, and people drive toward the city only as far as they need to to park (the lots at the various stops fill up quickly). Living in the city, you wouldn't even dream of driving to work. With a system like that in place, you don't have an ongoing need to build new, expensive freeways. And when you do occasionally need to update the roads, let's take the Big Dig, Boston's current highway project, for example, and look at the costs of that (was it $300 billion? the new highway bill they just passed) alongside rising gas prices (aren't they great?) it's hard to defend highways.

michelle: Of course I don't like spending hours on the freeway, that's why I want more lanes! As an East-coaster, it's probably hard for you to understand how Los Angeles is laid out. Mass transit seems to work pretty well on the East coast, for the people I talk to from there, but that doesn't mean it's the best solution for us out here. I'm not telling you to build freeways, am I? So don't try to tell me what's best for my city. And yes, Kennedy's recent highway bill for Boston is a travesty of waste.

Los Angeles isn't Boston or New York. It's laid out completely differently and very diffuse. Industry and homes are intermingled, and there's no "city center" to sprout rail lines from. In contrast to your "packed" commuter trains, the ones we've built in LA are almost always nearly empty.

We've got a lot more space out here than you do, and the best way to utilize it is with highways. If mass transit were more efficient, then there'd be at least some mass transit systems showing a profit, and there aren't. They're all hugely subsidized by taxes. In contrast, toll highways turn profits pretty quickly. It's simple math.

There's one side that the pro-road/highway people are forgetting about and that's people who cannot get a driver's license due to age, a disability or health problem. Trying to live without access to a car in most of the US ranges between impractical to essentially impossible. I should know since I cannot get a license due to my eyesight. Thus, my options where I currently live are limited to walking, bicycling, the bus system, or taxis. Taxis are expensive (about $2 a mile), unreliable, and one cannot plan around them because the time of its arrival cannot be guaranteed. Buses are ok, assuming you can find an affordable, clean, safe place to live near a route that will get you to work, stores, etc. Bicycling and walking are fine as well, assuming that you are in good physical health and need to get to places fairly close by. Even so, walking back and carrying purchased items from one or two miles away is a pain. Furthermore, since many times walking paths/bicycling paths and even sidewalks aren't available, bicyclers and walkers are usually stuck being next to or on the road to get somewhere, and roads (technically the people driving the cars on the road) are not very friendly to foot traffic/bicycle traffic. Another long term problem is that when you lose your job (which happens with alarming frequency to people nowadays) or want to go to another job in the same city, more often than not there is not a way to get to a new job from where you currently live, thus you have to try to find another place to live that will work out transportation-wise.

I do lots of walking and bus riding, though the bus routes aren't very convenient. When I'm commuting by foot or bicycle I get tired of breathing in car fumes, getting yelled at for no reason by people in cars, and almost getting run over by people that just have to make that right turn now even though I'm in the middle of crossing the road and have the right of way. And before anyone suggests ride-sharing or getting rides from friends, that's all well and good, but people are individualistic when it comes to traveling (as can be seen from the fact that most cars only have one person in them) and are usually too busy or far away to "work me in" for a ride, especially in a spread-out city like Charlotte. Thus, I'm all in favor for good urban planning and a well-thought out mass transit system. For those who don't think mass transit is worth investing in, I invite you all to give myself and everyone else who can't drive a ride to work, church, shopping, etc., since all those places usually exist off of the highways that you're in favor of.