Do you mean you literally drive into a city centre at rush hour, park there, and go into an office?
It blows my mind that people are even able to do that. It actually says something perversely positive about US roads and cities that it's possible!
I would not attempt to drive into the centre of a city in the UK for any reason at any time of day ever. You would not make it to your office before the day ended and when you got there you'd simply find there was no parking anyway and you'd have to go home again!
Commuting by car into central London would be foolish (I have a colleague that tried it once - it took him an hour and a half from the M25 to Kings Cross). However, there's a lot of cities in which it is feasible (if slow) and a lot of businesses close to the centre of cities which do have parking available (or you could just pay for private parking).
I sometimes drive through Central London in the evenings - it is slow, but it's not that slow. At certain times of day it's no slower than public transport (it really depends where you're going to and from).
Also? We’re not good at infrastructure spending, it’s not sexy enough. And many cities are having trouble just keeping people living/working there.
A very expensive 15-20 year project that may help with that can be a VERY hard sell.
And it’s only to build a few miles of something, so just a tiny piece of what’s needed.
Or you’re NYC and already have an existing subway. But instead of 10s of millions it needs HUNDREDS of millions (or more) to ‘fix’, minimum.
How do you think the national road network was built in the first place?
part of the justification for building it was national defense.
Remind me how much money is in NYC?
SV would have the best public transit on earth and wouldn’t have any homeless or housing problems.
They should. All that would be required is raising municipal taxes.
There’s nothing stopping Silicon Valley companies from migrating to other areas in California or even other states. I’m sure there are more than enough places that would be willing to throw out ridiculous tax advantages to lure big companies there.
The state is very enthusiastic about taking the money out of the city but not so interested in investing much back into any transportation infrastructure to support its' cash cow.
Norman Mailer once ran for Mayor of NYC and part of his platform was for NYC to secede from NY State:
'New York City would be split off from the rest of New York State, and achieve independent statehood as the 51st State of the U.S. The campaign sought to free the city from the control of "upstate legislators who don't care about the city but control our schools, police, housing, and money."'[1]
And perhaps more topical is that part of that platform was also to ban all cars from Manhattan except Taxis and buses. And this was in 1969 :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City:_the_51st_State
If you go to cities like Chicago or New York City, many people do use public transport. I did when I lived in Chicago, generally hated it, but it was cheaper and faster than driving downtown for work in that situation. To get anywhere else in the city or suburbs it would be faster and more convenient to drive.
Adding a bike lane or adjusting road speed to reduce car-pedestrian fatalities is enough to get city council members unelected the next cycle.
Car lobby, brainwashed citizens.
Just watch TV around an election. It's complete and total doublespeak and propaganda every few minutes.
That's what weekend cruising and trackdays are for.
Sitting in commuter traffic is to driving as being a passenger on a low-cost airline is to flying.
To think that you need:
- A 5000 pound machine to take a 200 pound human to work
- Workplace is 60 miles away
- On a road with many other rush hour drowsy 200 pound humans
- Said humans, then spend 30 mins and $30 for parking, in which the 5000 pound machine is just lying around empty
- All the above effort just to bring back the person from work in the evening and leave that car back on the street, lying around?
That doesn't sound insane to you? There's no reason for this for a rich country.
If you want proof that there are better, efficient and human friendly transportation systems, you need to visit HongKong and Singapore. (NYC doesn't count)
It's amazing how many people think this. There are metro areas in "the middle" with populations greater than European countries. And Texas, right in the middle, has a population that would put it at #10 in Europe.
#3 Chicago 9.5 million
#4 Dallas 7.4 million
#5 Houston 6.9 million
#14 Detroit 4.3 million
#16 Minneapolis 3.6 million
#19 Denver 2.9 million
#21 St Louis 2.8 million
The Chicago metro would be the 20th largest country in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
Look at Texas. 200 miles of between Houston and Dallas and Austin. This largely empty triangle itself is half the Texas population. But its barely 10% of the Texas area.
So yes. The US metros are isolated compared to Europe.
It doesn't explain the lack of transit inside the metros.
Metro population density is far more important.
Which absolutely does start to explain the lack of transit inside many of these metros: at the same time the rails were converted to mostly cargo only a lot of the suburban commuter lines were themselves "lost" to time or destroyed. It's utterly depressing to see the old passenger train maps in America and compare to what some of those passenger lines could be serving today if like Europe they'd been kept up/maintained.
A lot more of the suburbs in every American city than people realize were served by trolley and passenger train in their infancy that they grew around, and just because many of the lines have been "lost" over the years doesn't mean that their skeletons don't still show in the overall growth pattern. (Until you get into the entirely car-dependent exurbs and "suburbs of the suburbs", of course.)
America outsourced public transit to the lowest bidders, they got bored serving people directly and went with focusing solely on cargo, and people were too busy driving everywhere to notice what they lost.
That is because whites moved out and systematically starved the cities of a tax base and state funding for infrastructure projects that would benefit minorities.
That's a positive for public transport, you can cover more people cheaper because almost everyone live in big cities.
Even in New York's non-Manhattan boroughs, 35-75% drive.
South east was worse, at night is drive through the mall and grafalger square on the way home, took an hour or so. Again 2 hours in morning.
Not everyone is based in the centre of London. Not everyone works 9-5.
So are there any cars in the city and where do they park? Or is it mostly taxi cabs and city buses?
Since I live downtown, I'd prefer severely limiting parking. Call it a "parking maximum", reducing congestion at commute times, as parking costs would shoot way above a market price.
The fair solution is to have neither parking minimums nor maximums. Then parking is developed in proportion to expected demand, competing for space against offices and homes, neither subsidized nor penalized. Yes it would cost more than you prefer, and less than I prefer, but probably a fairer situation.
More likely it's just not profitable, because most people are only willing to spend so much money paying for parking, and often "downtown" land is quite expensive.
Sometimes it's a regulatory risk. If the local residents decide they don't want a parking structure, they won't offer you a fair market price to stop it; they'll just try and get city officials to deny or obstruct all the permits you need. (And a large construction project needs a lot of permits in most jurisdictions.)
Sometimes it's just prohibitively expensive to convert. In order to tear down a typical commercial building, you'd have to either buy out everyone's leases or wait for up to a decade for them to expire. This imposes a huge deadweight cost that wouldn't be there if enough parking had been built in the first place.
These statements are contradictory! Making business pay for their own results in on-street parking parking lots and minimum parking requirements. When you centrally plan parking you get parking garages.
> Only a handful of cities have remotely passable public transit systems.
> Only a tiny portion of most metro area populations can live in the zoned housing capacity of central business districts
They don't need parking. They need a solution to enable access to the downtown core. The solution you want is parking, because that's the status quo. Improving public transit is also a solution - It's not actually impossible to build.
Even when the density is there, the social mission of public transit agencies is to be a lifeline for the very poor. Improving service for professional commuters is at the bottom of their priority list. I can't even argue with that: the middle class can drive as an alternative, without bus service the destitute are just stuck.
The solution I want is unlimited construction of skyscrapers and travel mostly by foot and elevator. But if there's one thing our democracy is great at, it's preventing high rises. For the densities we have, our choices are cars or simply having commutes eat further into our already scarce free time. (No, public transit is not free time, as any vaguely useful train is crush-loaded standing room only).
I think basic profitability is probably the #1 and #2 answers.
Not everyone of course. The (often young) people would often prefer urban living. But your urban office building is going to be unattractive for anyone who needs to drive in.
Congestion charges are taxes, and therefore abominable; alternative transport is socialist, ditto.
Since conservatives control the majority of state governments, neither policy can make progress in the current environment.
So basically silicon valley which is one of the highest cost of living places these days and has terrible traffic?
I don't live there, but the hub (city) and spoke (suburb) model seems to scale much better than the point to point where jobs and homes are distributed everywhere like silicon valley and thus everyone has to drive.
I used to take a train, but it took 50-60 minutes, and any delay meant I missed a connection or transfer which then added even more time. As much as I want to do it and support it’s just not feasible.
Right, and that's a convenience and you pay extra for that. People renting downtown pay more for a smaller unit compared to units not in downtown.
Right. But in the future you won't be able to drive in. So move closer to work, I guess.
Without solving zoning, "move closer to work" is zero sum advice. All you can do is switch places with someone poorer than you.
I commutes into the relatively nearby city both by rail and car at one point. Wouldn’t have done it long term and probably wouldn’t again without buying a small property in the city for during the week.
Added: Companies will do whatever makes business sense. But potential employees who would find commuting into a city location a nightmare is a factor. As of course is new grads who insist on a location they can get to without a car.
Or perhaps we'd finally get our act together and build out functional mass transit, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
What are you basing this on?
So, in your case, you drive your car until you get to the outskirts of whatever large metropolitan area you are visiting, then take public transit.
When we lived in the UK, we frequently drove to a car park near the Hammersmith Station and then took the tube from there to central London.
My favorites were taking the Emery-Go-Round while I was living in Emeryville, and walking two miles each way every single day while I was living in Redwood City while listening to podcasts/audiobooks.
By the way some of the hardest commuting problems to solve are couples or people who otherwise really want to live together who have jobs at different parts of the Bay Area. They could be making a combined $400K but no amount of money will make their commute reasonable. I'm surprised telepresence robots like AnyBots haven't gained more traction.
Again, I totally understand the rationale behind it. It’s just frustrating for those of us who have no better options in the near future.