I really like Dutch approach. Take away some space from cars in order to build biking infrastructure. I live second year in Netherlands and I love it.
Fivethirtyeight did a study in Minneapolis on bike lanes constructed earlier this decade and showed that bike lanes did increase congestion for 10 roads they looked at.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-t...
Anecdotally, the mid sized city I lived in added a bike lane experimentally on my commute to work. The lanes going into the city decreased from 4 to 3 and immediately increased the amount of congestion. It also slowed my commute anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes based upon what time I left.
And the sad thing was, nobody used the new bike lane. I never saw a single rider use those lanes during my morning commute.
https://bicycledutch.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/groningen07...
I was studying in Groningen and I can tell you this is a daily occurrence there, sometimes it's even worse since the photo is from a rainy day in winter :P .
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands
By 2012 cycling had grown tremendously in popularity. In Amsterdam alone, 490,000 cyclists took to the road to cycle 2 million kilometres every day, according to its city council statistics. This has caused some problems as, despite 35,000 kilometers of bicycle paths, the country's 18 million bicycles (1.3 per citizen old enough to ride) sometimes clog Dutch cities' busiest streets. This is being addressed by building even more bike lanes to tackle a problem many other cities in the world would envy — that of bicycle traffic congestion.
Also, it takes time to build biking culture. And as a side note, biking infrastructure in Groningen was build on anti-car sentiments. They wanted to get rid of cars from the city, not to relive car congestion. They did get rid of them especially from the center and the city is now lovely for pedestrians and cyclists. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...
Take for example this data in London, which was produced in response to a question from a member of the public having essentially the same bias as your statement "nobody uses this bike lane." In London some bike lanes have slightly increased travel times by car but cycling has increased more than 50%. The bike lane is five times more efficient at moving people than is the carriageway.
http://foi.tfl.gov.uk/FOI-1235-1718/20170317%20STB%20CSEW%20...
50% of anything near zero is still darn close to zero. But at the same token, a 5 minute increase for 1000 people is a loss of 5000 minutes.
> The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent.
False. A single bike sticks out like a sore thumb in traffic -- even if there's a bike lane. In this case, I was so pissed off at the increase of my commute I started to count bikes in the bike lane, and I saw exactly zero.
But that doesn’t matter - someone unilaterally changes something and everyone else is supposed to get with the program or find a hole to die in.
These days, I fly back and forth to work, so it makes little sense to use a bike.
> single bike sticks out like a sore thumb
Now it totally makes sense.
I’m all for bike lanes. And bicycle licenses. Can’t go up the 80 percentile hill in your town at 20 mph? You fail.
Bike lanes built one at a time, and not connected. So, if you happen to live and work along a single bike lane, great. If not, you're back in the car.
Lack of bicycle facilities at destinations. My office has a tiny, poorly constructed rack outdoors. I wouldn't trust it to hold my bicycle, even with a good lock. Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating, so showers at offices would be helpful.
In places where bicycle infrastructure is provided, it is well used. The first Reston Metro stop (Weihle Station) has a large, locked bike room with nice racks and a small workbench area. The station is located right off one of the regions main multi-use paths. That bike room is heavily utilized.
Sadly, the second Reston Metro station, Reston Town Center, doesn't provide any infrastructure at all. No bike storage, no parking, nothing. Not sure what the heck the county was thinking when planning this station.
That's probably the number one problem of bike lanes.
The second problem is that if you add a bike lane, you have to take something away. Usually it's parking or traffic lanes. And neither of those are super popular.
> Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating
Or there's snow on the ground 4 months out of the year, and makes it a real pain to commute on a bike. Or in several places, you have both. Chicago comes to mind.
Bike lanes are beneficial in urban areas, and that's pretty much it.
But when it comes to US, the bike lanes is the last thing when it comes to the kindergarten level of infrastructure planning. In my experience infrastructure in US was planned exclusively by NIMBYs...
And as others noted. A single bike line without connecting lanes will not change people's commute. Changing habit is also something that doesn't happen over a day or even a year. It might take 5 years for the effect to show.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/ride-ha...
But then... I haven't been to a city with a good motor vehicle infrastructure in a long time. Certainly none of the major US cities are designed well to handle even remotely appropriate levels of private motor vehicle use.
PS: I have a car in NYC. Use it for some cases, but would never drive daily in NYC.
Because 1) You're not allowed to build mixed-use areas thanks to NIMBYs
2) You're not allowed to build high or mid-density areas thanks to NIMBYs
3) You're not allowed to build real bike routes (the kind you'd let your 8 year old cycle to school alone on) because of NIMBYs
4) You could cycle the long distances needed on the road, but the US has made it legal to kill people with your car so long as you're sober, so this is dangerous.
Nobody's driving from NYC to LA for their morning commute. The size of the country is not relevant.
The size of the country is relevant; not everything is as dense as LA, NYC, SFC. Chicago being the 3rd largest metro area is also probably one of the least dense. I cannot reasonnnably bike from my home into the Loop. Between shit roads, bad neighborhoods and generally not wanting to die. Not to mention, it is infeasible at least 3 months of the year.
Also, your argument 4 is just wrong and FUD. It is no where legal to just hit a cyclist and kill them. Probably the slightest you will get is negligent vehicular manslaughter, if you are found to be at fault with no other extenuating circumstances. If you are not at fault, you might likely not face charges.
Obviously not dead, but I was the victim where a car ran a stop sign and T-boned while I was on a bike. The driver, who did stop and offer assistance, was ticketed (I think failure to yield right of way, failure to yield to avoid an accident), faced court, around $500 in fines and had to pay my medical costs (about $20k) amd to replace my bike (about $3500). His insurance took most of the brunt, but I was fully compensated for my losses.
No, the US accepts that traffic accidents happen, and absent irresponsible behavior like drunk driving, drivers should not be held responsible for accidents. When these accidents involve collisions between cars, they're usually simple fender-benders. When similar collisions happen between cars and bicycles, they often lead to serious injury or even death.
It's an extremely dangerous idea to have bicycles and cars travelling side by side in such close proximity with such narrow bicycle lanes. What we need is proper bike lanes with lane separators protecting them from traffic.
I can't go accidentally shooting people on the street and expect just a fine.
Generally people who kill others with their car get off fine, so long as they're sober. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...
On the other hand if a gun range built a pathway for people downrange right by the targets, you wouldn't be the one responsible if you accidently shoot someone. It would be the gun range's fault for creating such a dangerous setup in the first place.
Dramatic upzoning is only brought to the table when the NIMBYs are seen as weak enough that it might stand a chance.
Property taxes can pay for these updates once the additional housing is built, it's self-financing. (Of course this won't work in CA, due to Prop 13. But then again, it was a ballot initiative, and those crazy folks in California voted for it. It's all self-inflicted pain on their part.)
2) Expecting your groundskeeper to drive a century on top of his (or her) actual job is pretty sick and cruel too
3) I'm pleased you mention Southern California as it's a useful case study of how to turn a pleasant area in to a dystopian hellscape. I've lived in Westwood (near UCLA), Santa Monica, and most recently San Diego (South Park - a fairly upscale neighborhood).
I routinely attended meetings of the planning group for South Park, where the attendees, all of whom were homeowners aside from me (and elderly), opposed ANY new housing of ANY sort ANYWHERE. They were blunt about their reasoning - it might hurt their home values. Of course, keeping homes expensive is a great way to ensure your groundskeeper can't live near work.
They also hated bike lanes, because they thought it would affect parking. It's rather sickening they cared more about places for cars to sleep than for people to sleep.
https://www.sandiego.gov/planning/community/profiles/greater... if you care to go yourself. The area's taxpayers will even give you free parking welfare.
Thankfully I escaped SoCal (and the US), but not everyone (including, perhaps, your gardener) is able to do that.
Is it really so shocking to live that close to a gardener? What is outlandish about that?
I think it's not that people refuse to live next to a gardener, it's that the job of gardener does not allow for an income that someone could afford to live close by given the housing market. It might not be 50 miles, but there are areas of affluence where it would take awhile for a low-income person to reach. There are also areas of affluence right next to considerably run-down (but famous) areas, such as Hollywood. Then again, I'm not sure how much housing there is in the run-down portions.
It may have started as NIMBY, but I think natural market forces eventually reinforce it to the degree that NIMBY isn't necessarily the largest factor at play at this point.
Manila by comparison is 71,263/km2 in it’s core. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila
It's not dense relative to other types of metro areas, but I think it's probably fairly dense for single level housing in an industrialized nation.
My point wasn't to imply that Southern California was very densely housed, but that there may not be a huge amount of unutilized land left to build high density housing one, at least not enough to really change the dynamics. And once the conversation shifts from just what to build and where to also who to displace to build it, it's an much harder conversation.
I could be entirely wrong, I don't live in LA, but my impression every time I visit is that there's not a lot of unused land, even if the land that is used isn't used efficiently (population density wise). If that's true, it's not just a NIMBY situation (even if it might have traditionally been one), as it's also a "don't displace historical group X that's been living in this area for decades" situation (whether entirely accurate or not).
PS: It’s a question of underutilization, where it would be economically profitable to take each of these buildings down and replace them with more useful structures.
Therefore the riverfront should be low density huts forever I guess.
Out of respect for property rights though, please don't make it illegal for your neighbour to do this to their home should they choose.
Public transit is a bad joke too, the light rail in LA waits for cars to pass at intersections! I've never seen that in other metros, as rail always gets signal priority, but it is a great way to drive away riders...
I’m fully guilty of this myself too. But like all things it cannot keep growing indefinitely.
http://www.aei.org/publication/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...
Beyond that, the stats in that article are just plain bad because it ignores the fact that not everyone lives in a new house, but it still compares the average household size to ONLY new homes built in that year.
I would actually ignore the average household size. We already know that that that decreasing over time.
Note that I didn't intend my comment to be a personal attack on you. I'm merely trying to point out this trend. Apologies if I came off that way. But your case also highlights another fact that was rare back in the day -- using your house as an office is increasingly becoming viable or necessary for those doing remote work.
I didn't take it personally, but I also didn't quite know the best way to respond either. I probably didn't do the best job at it.
This is a catch 22 because the way our cities are designed in America makes them unaffordable. American zoning in most cities prohibits the kind of dense mixed use development that makes low cost housing near work possible. We need to reform the zoning code in most cities and improve bike safety, walkability and public transportation to make headway.
Mid-sized USA cities tend to have half decent transit around their urban core (often woefully under-served especially in cities that don't have either trains/subways or else dedicated right-of-way for buses, but none-the-less serviceable).
However, the thing that mid-sized cities almost uniformly lack in the US is any form of regional commuter rail.
It seems clear that commuter rail is not a silver bullet. Housing density is probably what we really need.
I have more trouble seeing where the 500 seat office for a global enterprise should go on my city block. it seems like that sort of space would lead to a dead feeling at night when everyone goes home and the space sits empty.
Turns out when you don't need to allocate space for 500 cars around a building, you can build it in a single city block and coexist with other types of buildings. And you even get a rooftop with a view as a bonus.
More people will die horrible deaths in their cars, more people will die walking and cycling, more people will die because their understandable fear of walking and cycling gives them a sedentary lifestyle, more people will die from cancer, lung disease, etc, more wildlife habitat will be destroyed, more sound and light pollution will destroy mental health and disturb wildlife, and the planet will boil a little bit sooner. But those are externalities and not borne by the person choosing to drive more.
But all of this is apparently just fine. Adults matter too of course, but it's striking that cars (drivers, really) are the thing that kills more kids than anything else, and yet people do. not. care. I'm astonished how much outrage there is over kids being killed by bullets but not those killed by cars. People in the US accept it as normal, though. When I pointed out I cared more about automotive violence than gun violence people would look at me like I had 3 heads. And then joke about running over cyclists.
On the bright side, it might encourage those who are able to emigrate somewhere nicer (Netherlands and the Nordics, basically), so I guess it's a gain to those countries.
Is that because affordable houses are worthless?
So, instead of solving the housing crisis, city planners do nothing on the matter, but go and ration transportation too, so people... well, gain nothing because they will be the same time in traffic.
Other than that I do not really understand your "astonishment": you've artificially constructed a personal axiom that has never applied to human society - namely that people should care equally about every casualty, regardless of circumstances or causes, or the impact of those causes on society as a whole - and are then surprised that others don't follow this model.
Where did I do that?
A thought experiment - how does your reaction to "cyclist on sidewalk kills child on bike" compare to "driver in street kills child on bike" ? I suggest they should be the same.
I understand we may simply have utterly and drastically different worldviews and priorities. This sort of thing is part of why I moved away from a profoundly hostile city.
Driving is dangerous, as are its byproducts. More driving kills more people.
However, real-world transport has a real cost: time (in addition to money for fuel/maintenance/insurance/etc.). If teleporting was cheap but took 3 hours for every trip, I'm not going to be having any kind of lunch in Tokyo unless I'm living there.
The weird thing is how much time Americans are willing to waste on a commute. So many of them think nothing of spending 1-2 hours in traffic, each way, every workday, just so they can have some big McMansion in the exurbs with a giant lawn they have to spend hours maintaining every weekend.
>Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value.
When people don't do anything with all those kms traveled than move farther out of the metro area and extend their commute, no, I don't really see the value to society there. Rather, I see that it has a real cost to society for people to waste their time and money on these things, rather than things that provide positive economic value to the society at large. Don't forget that more miles driven means more accidents, more traffic deaths and maimings, etc., all of which cost society. Plus all the pollution produced.
What other options provide good public schools, homes that are pleasant to be inside, and a clean/safe/well-functioning environment?
I hate sprawl and fast-casual architecture as much as the next guy, but it is the only thing that can grow at scale under our economic and political reality. Alternatives only exist because they were created in a different era, under different constraints. Their supply is fixed and dwindling. So of course we are going to see a large and growing segment of the population in the only kind of housing it's both legal and profitable to build.
Also, by the way, the median driving commute is closer to 25 minutes. Commuting 1-2 hours each way is something transit riders do; for drivers it's very rare.
Try traveling to Europe or Japan sometime. They have dense cities with nice homes, great public schools, and a clean and safe environment. Japan in particular has basically zero crime. Cities in Europe are walkable and bikeable, and it's commonplace to have residential units on top of commercial space so that people can easily walk to a nearby cafe or restaurant or grocery store. You see this in NYC too to an extent.
>I hate sprawl and fast-casual architecture as much as the next guy, but it is the only thing that can grow at scale under our economic and political reality.
Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Sprawl doesn't scale, that's the whole problem: you're just going to get worse commute times, more traffic congestion, etc. It isn't going to help, it's going to hurt.
>So of course we are going to see a large and growing segment of the population in the only kind of housing it's both legal and profitable to build.
Then you need to change the laws.
>Commuting 1-2 hours each way is something transit riders do; for drivers it's very rare.
Here in the DC area, it's extremely common.
Most people shop for housing where there job and family are; international migration is a big deal. Japan is very hard to immigrate to if you lack Japanese ancestry.
>Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity
>Then you need to change the laws.
Land use policy is made by a small, elite, politically active subset of incumbents. People looking for a place to live, and choosing the best of the available options for their circumstances, are not to blame for the abysmal nature of the available options. This is the whole problem. Market demand has little to no influence on what can be built. It's inappropriate to look down on people for moving to suburbia. The scorn is rightly placed with activists and politicians for crippling our cities so badly that suburbia manages to be better.
>Here in the DC area, it's extremely common.
The data say 32 minutes [0]. This is high compared to the national 25, but no, 1-2 hours is not the norm even there.
[0] https://wtop.com/traffic/2017/04/dc-area-has-2nd-longest-ave...
Cities at one time were far superior to non-cities in precisely those ways. It is not an inherent flaw of cities, just a problem with how we manage American cities.
Some studies have basically found that people chronically overvalue how happy a nice house will make them, and undervalue how unhappy a long commute will make them. I don't know if Americans are uniquely guilty of this, but humans are prone to lots of little errors like this.
Neither the 4 mile walk through congested, diesel-fumed London or the small, expensive flat with single glazed windows did make me happier.
I now live 30 miles outside London and take a 30 minute train to work. It is much cheaper, much more pleasant (I stand on the train most of the time) and I get to hear the birds and smell the fresh air when I wake up or go outside.
You're assigning beliefs to Americans that, in my experience, they don't have in any significant numbers.
And at that time, I knew people who commuted down to the Pentagon from Baltimore, so spending 2-3 hours on their commute, one-way.
When I lived in Brussels, Belgium from 1999 to 2006 and worked for a Dutch consulting company, there was a period of time where my commute was 1.5-2.0 hours one-way to go up to the company offices in Veldhoven, or to a customer site at Eindhoven.
Living here in Austin since 2006, during rush hour, any commute involving any of the major infrastructure (360, MoPac, I-35, etc...) is likely to take at least 30 minutes, if not an hour or more. When there isn't any traffic, that same commute might take just fifteen minutes.
When my brother-in-law lived and worked in the LA area many years ago, until he made a point of moving to an apartment that was ridiculously close to the office, he was frequently spending two or more hours on the road, one-way. And that's when traffic was reasonably good and there weren't major jams that turned into eighteen-plus hours on the road, one-way.
Just because you don't have a given type or amount of experience, doesn't mean that your experience is universal in this regard.
I certainly realize that my experience is not universal, but I do have multiple instances in my life where I saw those kinds of numbers on a regular basis. And I knew plenty of people at the time who had similar experiences to mine.
It hasn't changed, and if anything it's worse. The traffic on I-66 into town every morning looks like a parking lot, all so a bunch of people can live in McMansions in Manassas and Haymarket and Gainesville.
>And at that time, I knew people who commuted down to the Pentagon from Baltimore, so spending 2-3 hours on their commute, one-way.
Yep, I've met people who live in DC and commute to Baltimore (because they don't want to live in Baltimore...), and people who live in NoVA and commute to Annapolis.
This stuff is common here. You can see it in the massive traffic jams on I-66 and on the beltway every workday: those people aren't getting to work in 15-30 minutes in that traffic.
That would be a poor decision indeed. But more likely, in my experience, is that they live far from their work because there is no affordable housing near their work.
Also, maintaining roads is expensive. Once you build a new road it is politically unpopular to get rid of it. Who really benefits from the new road being built? The businesses that can afford to build a long the new highway and have a massive amount of parking around it. IE: Taco Bell, WalMart, etc. The people road construction businesses the government shovels money to. [1]
We have a CRUMBLING infrastructure in the US, and people are constantly complaining about potholes in major metropolitan areas. And the solution is build more roads? We cannot even maintain the ones we have!
[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/16/why-walkable-s... [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
Might be hard to get an answer given that most places didn’t build highways to Walmarts.
Either way, consumers tend to shop at their local Walmart regardless of the road to it. Consumers seem to consistently pick Walmart over overpriced local businesses nearly everywhere except for wealthy, dense cities where people can afford to avoid the unpleasantness of shopping the giant things with lower class people.
Trips do have value. When you sell something on Craigslist, the economic activity you are generating depends on the road network, and that transport event can be said to have value.
The epiphany that hit me though is that all the most valuable transport is already happening. Less valuable transport that isn't worth sitting in traffic for, is passed over.
This is key- it means that having roads is good, as it provides transport for those most valuable trips. However expanding the road adds only the less valuable trips. It's wicked diminishing returns- the road is more and more expensive to expand, and the trips/economic activity it adds are less and less valuable. The first two lanes were the cheapest to build and the most valuable to society, and every pair after that is worth less & less.
I mean, of course. If you pay for something with money, then someone else gets the money. If you pay for something with time, then that time is just gone.
>One thing this article leaves out is what the value of all this transport is. Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value.
A lot of the "value" winds up in making far-flung homes part of the housing market for people working at centers of employment. Suburbanization, basically.
It does, which is one reason why (in the United States, anyway), highways are paid for by the governments — to spur commerce.
In contrast, railroads (at least in the United States) still mostly have to pay for their infrastructure, which is one reason why passenger rail is in the shape it's in.
A lot of road capacity is needed, but a lot of it is also purely wasteful and entirely caused by social choice.
E.g., the parking lot for the store needs to hold the Black Friday parking demand ->
the store is now too far from the street to walk home with bags ->
everyone drives to the store and there is congestion ->
the street must be widened to accommodate the congestion -->
the street is now too wide to cross or walk along safely -->
everybody drives, etc.
The suburbs are now vastly overbuilt as a result. Nassau County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country yet has been fiscally monitored by New York State since 2000 because it cannot afford the lifecycle cost of infrastructure or services for such a low-density, sprawly environment. And this is despite very high property taxes, to the point where the population is starting to decline.
It reads like that county is a complete shit show and not necessarily indicative of the sustainability of low density.
This is actually part of the problem of the American model; larger entities are always willing to foot the bill, so why bother assessing the economic feasibility of a project?
I agree with your second point, especially as the feds only fund capital costs and state and local has to do maintenance, which they are awful at. The smart strategy is to fund minimum viable operations costs, let stuff crumble and get more capital $ to rebuild!
Of course we should carefully consider all the costs and externalities of road expansion before doing it. But it’s all too often presented as being completely pointless or having no redeeming features at all, so there’s no point in even considering it.
road users are insulated from actual costs, since road costs are both subsidized and pass through an intermediary (government, taxes).
since it's costly, inefficient, and politically unpalatable to directly create an efficient marketplace for roads themselves (by building a bunch of competing ones), economists urge regulators to create a market for road use and price in maintenance costs and externalities (pollution, things that Isinlor mentions): tolling, congestion pricing, gas taxes, etc.
if we correctly price road use and there is still great demand, it means we should build more roads. instead, the perverse logic currently employed is that insatiable demand should be a reason not to build roads because (it seems like) we'd never meet that demand.
Nitpicking this from a physical perspective, consuming this amount of travel fundamentally requires you to experience a certain amount of acceleration. I'm pretty sure that the itinerary you describe here would kill you, regardless of how cheap it was.
A six hour commute is unrealistic, but by my calculations a constant 1g of acceleration is enough to cover a round trip from Wellington, New Zealand to Tokyo and another from Wellington to Lisbon in under 90 minutes of daily commute.
I note that in reality, we don't ever travel with constant nonzero acceleration, but it's fair to ignore that under the explicit assumption that there are no costs involved.
Portugal isn't 'on the way' to New Zealand from Tokyo regardless of speed or timelines.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.576...
So, unless we get teleport watches... congestion is the "price," the thing that limits consumption. Economists would prefer the price to be price, being economists.
One thing this article leaves out is what the value of all this transport is. Maybe more roads don't solve congestion but they do produce more "goods," more Kms travelled. Presumably this has value.