You can also reduce the need to travel by increasing density, which LA is attempting in certain respects.
[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_arc...
People who oppose luxury apartment construction need to explain how they will prevent rich people from competing with poor people over existing housing and causing the prices to go up.
Yes, those kind of policies seem to be on the more reasonable spectrum to me, though I'd prefer having incentives instead of hard requirements. Of cause prices for luxury space would go up, but this doesn't seem like much of a problem for most residents.
You seem to see new luxury apartment as only option over currently existing housing. That might be the only realistic option when owners want to maximize profits, but for society it might be better to optimize other metrics, like people living there.
but once you dig the hole, it’s like building the same building but starting 30 feet (or whatever) lower in elevation (yes, that requires reinforcing the ground, more environmental review, etc., but still...)
> public will being the primary
> impediment to progress.
Most of American city-dwellers want to “have their cake and eat it too,” that is, they want to live in a major metro AND be able to easily drive and park everywhere they want to go.
Those two things (major population and easy driving) are mutually exclusive, because car oriented development doesn’t scale beyond rural / suburban size very well.
But so far I haven’t seen any public leaders or communities acknowledge that and start working on alternatives. Instead they play games like blaming Uber and Lyft and pretending that an extra tax on them will make any real difference, when in reality it’s political theater.
This may be true without implying any defense of something that is contrary to the public will.
The public can be totally awful and that doesn't mean people who have contempt for the public are any good.
After we acknowledge that “public will” is an impediment, we can then probe whether the problem is really so bad after all, what “public will” really means, whether it is self-contradictory, how strongly entrenched those interests/ideas are, whether there are ways of reframing the conversation to significantly sway public perception and action, and so on.
It might turn out that everyone loves griping about traffic congestion but isn’t really too bothered. Or that “public will” is just reflexive opposition to misunderstood alternatives conditioned by decades of deliberate propaganda. Or that “public will” is very weakly held and malleable if an alternative proposal does a charismatic marketing blitz. Or that the disparate powerful interest groups involved are in direct opposition and political progress working towards compromise is at a total impasse and impossible. Or ...
Not just that the public is generically “anti-progress”.
Roads are expensive and we don't have room to build anymore anyways. Without an effective way to increase capacity, something obviously has to give.
All that does is increase the cost of living.
Either people need to drive or they don't. People don't drive just for the fun of it anymore.
And if you succeed and do manage to reduce travel you also managed to reduce economic activity.
If you goal is to get people to switch, then you have to do it on the other end: Make the alternatives better than driving.
This isn't true. Some people live in places where it's possible to reduce their driving quite a lot, but when they decide to do that, it isn't as easy as simply choosing not to drive. Once they're motivated, they start to figure out opportunities to drive less. They start to figure out which other forms of transit are practical in their area, and they figure them out one by one. They start to figure out how they can adjust their habits to reduce driving. (Fewer, larger trips to the grocery store, for example.)
There are a lot of degrees of "not driving." You might bike to work in perfect weather at one level of motivation, and bike to work in the rain at a different level of motivation. One level of motivation might prompt you to make fewer, larger trips to the grocery store; at another level of motivation, when you run out of milk unexpectedly, you might walk five blocks to a corner store of driving ten minutes to the supermarket.
The only perspective from which it seems like a clean either/or is for people who haven't yet found a reason to try. People living in the same neighborhood with the same economic means can and do drive drastically different amounts depending on how motivated they are.
Charging tolls does not fix anything. All that does is enable those with money to have a slightly less stressful commute and add an empty lane to an otherwise crowded highway.
Unfortunate that the sprawl is so heavily subsidized. In a world where it wasn't, people would make different choices about where to live and work.
I totally agree with you that people are driving mostly because they have to, not for fun. However, retrofitting car-oriented development to be viable for non-car users is exceptionally difficult.
I can’t imagine any way of accomplishing that, unless we begin by acknowledging that cars won’t scale up any farther and that we have to redirect our efforts into things that will.
If you introduce congestion charges without also providing a functional public transit alternative you'll be voted out of office. Plain and simple.
Congestion charges worked in London, for example, because public transit is amazing there and people could stop driving without decreasing their quality of life. Yet it was still a source of much controversy in London at the time. What are people supposed to do in LA -- walk everywhere?
I agree, but public transit projects take years to complete, so in the interim you'd have very expensive driving and worse congestion than before (due to construction), which sounds like hell on earth. Would it be feasible to invest the costs up front and collect the payout later?
[0]: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/05/07/six-secrets-from-the-...
I did not quote, but I did address "Make the alternatives better than driving."
You have things completely backwards, first you want to make everyone miserable, then hopefully they'll fix things.
> retrofitting car-oriented development to be viable for non-car users is exceptionally difficult.
It's actually not about retrofitting, it's because cars are just that good. Nothing else comes close.
> unless we begin by acknowledging that cars won’t scale up any farther
They'll scale just fine if we space out our cities a bit more.
It's actually pretty self balancing, when we run out of road space, people spread out a bit more. So there's no scaling issues, there's plenty of space in the world.
I mean if your goal is to pack people in like livestock then it doesn't scale, but that's not something I want.
> and that we have to redirect our efforts into things that will.
Such as? So far nothing exists. And I'm not just saying that. I tried it. I exclusively used public transportation for 1.5 months, in a city that is world renounced for probably the best public transportation of anywhere. (There was literally nowhere you couldn't go with public transportation.)
It was horrible. I feel really bad for anyone who has to use public transportation.
That's the reality.
If you want change, change that first. You won't need to tax cars off the road, they'll leave on their own.
For cities that want people to be able to get around AND for the roads to be relatively uncontested, the only reasonable solution is to lower demand by raising the cost of driving - ie. significant congestion pricing (tolls) across the metro - and invest the proceeds into a vast increase in more space efficient transit options. Typically this means express bus and rail service, although the number of people who can cycle efficiently on a dedicated bike way is pretty impressive, and with the scooter revolution there are a lot of other personal mobility choices for people who are less physically able.
Traffic congestion is a problem of geometry and public will - with public will being the primary impediment to progress.