They quoted a professor who had, according to the article, the most accurate model of NYC traffic given a large number of variables e.g. number of commuters, taxis, buses, subway frequency etc.
A key take away was the a taxi (or Uber/Lyft etc) is much WORSE for traffic than a commuter car. Commuters drive in, park, leave their car all day then leave.
Taxis are constantly circling and looking for fares. IIRC the impact of a taxi was several multiples of the impact of a commuter on daily gridlock.
Now, I love Uber/Lyft for all of the regular reasons e.g. allows people in under-served areas get transportation, senior citizens and the disabled with more access etc.
The traffic impact, however, seems pretty substantial.
Induced demand and congestion are complex. A taxi is probably better than a car, but neither cars or taxis have enough capacity to viably challenge congestion. You need mass transit that runs frequently and isn't stuck behind cars.
There's still congestion to deal with, but a bunch of people whose main work has no set hours who can go 'it's raining, time to taxi some people who don't want to walk or cycle today' synergises well with active transport and transit.
The question was why they stay on the road when they're not delivering someone. If the issue isn't lack of parking, what is it?
If they travel by taxi there's only one car on the road - but the taxi has to do a third trip, going back from the city to the suburbs between passengers. That trip is likely to be made without a passenger - because in the morning rush hour, far more people want to go in one direction than the other.
Of course, in some cases taxis may help reduce congestion - transporting people to and from train stations, and allowing people who usually cycle to transport bulky items, might enable more car-free living.
The commuter and residential parking doesn't free up for Uber drivers if it's not being used by its primary customers.
Disclosure: Extrapolating from how it works in my town.
Cities already have absolutely massive amounts of their real estate dedicated to parking. The answer to this problem is not and never will be “more of the stuff that’s causing the problem”.
There are actually places in Beijing to wait for assignments outside of major clogged ring roads and arterials. But it really depends on the design of your city.
Thus, though it’s true that the impact of taxis on traffic is significant, the alternative is much worse. People still need to get around.
I imagine a fleet of buses directed by sophisticated scheduling and navigation algorithms.
Users select a destination and pick up point, along with an arrival time. Discounts for ordering 1 day early to aid with scheduling. Pay extra to have the algorithm favor a shorter travel time for you.
System makes dynamic smart routes for buses to get people to where they want to go. Make it good at predicting arrival times so people can rely on it.
Seems like such an obvious next step for the whole uber/app-based-transport model. Not sure why nobody has tried it yet.
I would expect that anyone who has lived in a city with good, clean, affordable, basic, high quality mass transit looks on that privilege quite fondly. Compared to most (awful) systems in the US having once known such a system and now dealing with what much of the US has to offer will be either rage inducing or depressing (or both).
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/chariot-private-bus-startup... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_Transit
These sorts of casual dismissals assume that the underlying technological landscape doesn't change, and that all organizations execute identically on product. Neither assumption holds true.
The primary reason we use large buses rather than e.g. minivans is that it amortizes the cost of the driver over more people. If it weren't for that buses would be less efficient because they're very often not completely full and to be completely full in most cases requires a larger vehicle to travel more miles.
What you really want is, effectively, car pools. Someone was already going there and they just take on more passengers, so there is no separate driver you have to pay.
But Uber already has this. It's called "driver destinations." You tell it you're driving to work, it gives you passengers near you who want to go near there. You make some extra money on a trip you were making anyway and now your car has five people in it instead of one.
Is the problem just that people don't know this?
> The primary reason we use large buses rather than e.g. minivans is that it amortizes the cost of the driver over more people. If it weren't for that buses would be less efficient because they're very often not completely full and to be completely full in most cases requires a larger vehicle to travel more miles.
> What you really want is, effectively, car pools. Someone was already going there and they just take on more passengers, so there is no separate driver you have to pay.
> But Uber already has this. It's called "driver destinations." You tell it you're driving to work, it gives you passengers near you who want to go near there. You make some extra money on a trip you were making anyway and now your car has five people in it instead of one.
> Is the problem just that people don't know this?
The problem is also insurance. Namely, mine doesn't cover ride shares, and here in Canada at least, most don't (unless you pay extra).
That seems kinda fair? Commercial ride sharing implies more miles driven under different (or at least increased) motivations to get there fast, and regardless of profit motives having more people in the car increases potential payout if something happens. It naively seems like that's a plausible correct increase in cost.
Only if they're thinking one dimensionally.
Your theory is this guy is going to take on four extra passengers, so now he has to go pick them up and drop them off, which will cause him to drive e.g. 50% more miles.
But now those other four passengers don't have to drive themselves. You're not going from 100 miles to 150, you're going from 500 miles to 150. That's going to reduce the number of collisions and therefore insurance claims.
So from a policy perspective, you want people not to be charged extra for this, even before considering the reduction in congestion and pollution. You might even want to offer a discount.
The exception for a selfish insurer would be if all the other drivers are insured by some other insurance company. But if we're talking about a rule set by the government or followed by every insurer then that doesn't matter. Some of your driver's passengers will be on the other insurance company and vice versa so it's a wash.
But, there’s infrastructure to support it - parking & HOV lanes.
Having a bus take a known route through important routes that allow you get to a stop and board a bus within <10 minutes without even having to know what time it is is really important for people to start relying on the bus system.
With that, even if the public transport takes slightly longer, not having to actively drive (in traffic) and find parking makes it much better. Now you use the time to read/think/mindlessly scroll through your phone on your way, or even be a bit dizzy on the way back.
I think that adding buses is not enough to reduce car traffic. Probably car-oriented cities are already organized in a way that driving is "needed" often. Cities with public transport make walking amenable, often fun and relaxing.
I know you haven't thought deeply and this is just an internet forum post, but how do you address:
1) Many riders don't have smartphones
2) How do casual riders know which vehicle to get on?
3) If a profitable route is found, how do you prevent companies from cutting under each other, cost wise? If you think public transit is uncomfortable, can you imagine what it would be like if there was a profit incentive?
4) how do you regulate safety standards and driver training?
5) public transit can afford to be flexible and not collect fares sometimes. You think private for profit companies will let folks skip paying a fare?
Etc etc etc. There are many, many practical reasons why it's much less efficient and desirable to have a number of private companies fighting over a natural monopoly.
In Sweden, it's been privatized for quite a while (since the 1990s) with substantial cost savings and service improvements. See https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2010/03/03/in_socialist_s...
In your points you assume privatized = unregulated, but nothing in the modern world is unregulated. You also assume privatized = not publicly funded. In other words, all of your points are strawmen and don't apply to modern privatization efforts.
In fact even in states that have public transportation, what they do is typically create an authority which is a GSE -- government sponsored enterprise -- to run the infrastructure. The vast majority of port, rails, etc are run by GSEs. The difference between a GSE style approach and privatization is that the GSE is awarded a monopoly for all routes that never changes. That creates a lot of disincentives for good performance and cost efficiency.
The rationale of privatization is that you let private businesses bid for contracts for fixed periods of time -- rather than just awarding a permanent contract for all routes to the GSE.
> I know you haven't thought deeply and this is just an internet forum post, but how do you address:
Ouch. I'd suggest that you could think some more about this issue as well.
https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/samtrans-ondemand-...
[0] https://www.translink.ca/rider-guide/transit-accessibility/h...
The big downside of these systems is that you must reserve your route at least 30 minutes in advance, so the bus company can plan the most efficient route. I think they're mainly used by (and exist for) people who have no other options.
The whole of that part of WA is a shitshow where infrastructure has not kept up with demand. No, light rail and housing along such will make up for the greater shitshow.
I’ve been dealing with the area for over 20 years. The ferry system is also falling apart and that affects those that may take bridges instead of ferries.
The gridlock in that area impacts the ports and truckers, but their impact is small compared to the other things that make it a shit show. Seattle / WA driving habits don’t help matters either.
I applaud them for working to expand their light & heavy rail options, while also maintaining a (IMHO) decently effective bus system. But that obviously isn't enough. The reality is that people continue to choose single passenger vehicles and the government hasn't don't much to address it.
I understand the opposition to single passenger vehicles, but the failure to expand transit corridors when land was cheap will have lasting impacts on the ability to expand rail and mass transit networks as such expansion becomes impossible due to cost.
The reality is that, barring a major economic change(which, granted, may finally be here), people will continue to choose single passenger vehicles and not supplying the infrastructure for them means they are even less efficient while they sit in traffic.
Seattle has always been a boom (and bust town). I grew up their 20 years ago, and my dad lived in Seattle after his tour ended in Vietnam. The same things we complain about today, we were complaining about them in the 90s and dad was complaining about them in the late 60s.
The boom city nature of Seattle means that it goes through periods of lots of growth quickly enough.
> people will continue to choose single passenger vehicles and not supplying the infrastructure for them means they are even less efficient while they sit in traffic.
Building more freeways usually just attracts more demand. We will never build enough roads to satisfy single driver occupancy demand. The only way to win this is by moving people around more efficiently. If Transit can’t work in Seattle, the city is simply doomed and it’s growth will implode (another bust…it’s not like we haven’t had a few of those before).
You fix the added demand with zoning and a comprehensive regional growth strategy. Not building freeways to service the demand you've have for decades is just insane.
I don't think there has been a single new freeway added since I can remember(early 80s). There is still a huge reliance on surface streets and 2 lane roads to get to the bedroom communities on the outskirts. Not adding lanes to, say, hwy 18, hasn't done a damn thing to limit growth in the east side. It has turned the region into a giant clusterfuck around rush hour though.
Seattle is a boom town, it doesn’t just have a conventional boom or bust cycle. All west coast big cities (Vancouver BC, Portland, SF, LA, San Diego) have a similar rapid growth profile with similar problems. Note that none of these cities have been able to solve them adequately, and we ran out of space to build new freeways decades ago, so that solution is never happening, even if anyone thought it would solve the problem at all in the first place.
A city like SLC, which has room to add freeways along with republican run government to add them, hasn’t been able to fix its traffic problems either. In fact, they just get worse as the new freeways encourage more sprawl.
I think you need to combine realistic freeway growth with other growth limits to restrict sprawl or, you're right, you become SLC/PHX/etc.
I'm not sure I understand this point? For one, if anything there's a clear preference for cars as the default mode of transportation.
There are still many places in the region with only a single major north-south freeway. You can add all the lanes you want, but a single accident can take your 7 lanes of traffic out of commission. We need more transportation corridors to provide redundancy.
If Seattle never build another freeway, but keeps building trains and bus rapid transit we'll come out WAY ahead.
Building freeways gives you room for HOV lanes and busses, and even rail if you plan it right. Not building freeways is a demonstrably failed policy in the Sea-Tac region.
It's like how SF suspended the traditional criminal justice system before they had a working replacement. Sure, they'll get it right someday but in the meantime you just have to put up with a few decades of crime. But hey, one day it will be perfect and ideologically pure.
The famed light rail is supposed to reach Issaquah (from Seattle) in 2041. That's if everything goes according to plan.
Even when staying there, let’s say Woodinville or Kirkland. Driving to Bellevue or Redmond let alone Seattle sucks worse than those.
I feel that it is glossed over. Nobody talks about the larger effects of the traffic in US cities beyond: "You sit in the car longer for work.", not "your meat is expensive because traffic is bad."
Cities are always very hesitant to introduce measures to reduce demand on our roads. I wonder if it is intentional that nobody talks about this.
In this case even that’s not being done. The government is just not continuing to subsidize car-based transit via roads at an adequate level to keep up with demand for car usage.
I do think a big part of the problem is that you need a critical mass of public transit before people can really ditch their cars. The network needs to be able to reach far away and enable more than just commuting to a desk job in the city center. And it needs times to remain in that state for all the businesses to rebalance around the public transit network (ie less reliance on huge shopping centers and strip malls only accessible by car). As a result I think you probably get a bit of a U shaped cost:benefit curve wrt funding of transit infrastructure.
There is also, in the US at least, a strong argument to be made about Freedom of Movement. I don't know if it has ever been tried in court, but I would be interested to see the result of such a court case.
Though honestly, at the end of the day, there are large corporations making huge profits whose workers commute to their office every day, and they should be the ones footing the bill.
I think of my local situation in Portland, Oregon, where many people in Vancouver Washington commute to portland every day and do not pay a DIME for the road infrastructure they clog up.
There is an easier workaround. Just give people cash, and then hit it with marginal income tax.
>I think of my local situation in Portland, Oregon, where many people in Vancouver Washington commute to portland every day and do not pay a DIME for the road infrastructure they clog up.
From my understanding, OR collects income tax for any work performed in OR. This means residents of WA pay OR income taxes. Is this not considered "paying a DIME for the road infrastructure" (or otherwise costs of operating infrastructure in the state of Oregon?)
A commuter from WA to OR seems to be all gravy to OR. OR residents clog up OR roads just as much as WA residents do, but WA residents pay just as much OR state income tax as OR residents, but surely derive a less proportionate benefit from OR state income taxes.
That is only "easy" if you ignore the time spent by the low-income people to fill out government paperwork on a regular basis, and ignore the cost of the army of new bureaucrats that would be required to process it.
I'm a big fan of just giving people money. From another of my comments:
>> "UBI. Really. Just give people money. It generates more benefit than it costs. Look how well billionaires did when unemployment benefits were buffed up. Now imagine if they were taxed reasonably to capture some of that toward covering the cost. People still looked for work, but they could afford to hold out for better jobs."
I have often suspected that merely charging a toll for using a road creates records which could be subpoenaed. Now say you have a club that meets to discuss edgy topics concerning the government of the day. Do they want their travels to be recorded?
Now, this seems pretty quaint because around here, they use license-plate scans to reinforce the automated collection of tolls, and who knows what else is going on.
FWIW I'm on the same frequency with respect to the disproportionate impact that road pricing and road usage reduction measures have on people with low-paying jobs.
I always assumed truckers took mandatory breaks during rush hour. Here in Charlotte, traffic is minimal except during rush hour.
I agree traffic is oddly bad during the pandemic, but we have solutions, more transit, protected bike lanes, and apartments near light rail and buslines.
Progressives building trains that sit in traffic is very expensive virtue signalling as far as I am concerned.
Try not to dismiss ideas so quickly as "virtue signalling" without an understanding of what they accomplish
Cars vs. transit is a pure throughput issue. You will never, even with 14 lane highways, beat one grade separated transit line with how many people you can move per hour. Eventually you run out of land with roads and cars, with trains you effectively do not.
- Short, local travel where large scale transport services don’t make sense, and
- As a mediocre stop gap measure to make up for lacking infrastructure.
The idea that busses go on the highway in Seattle is appalling
Agree that you can move many more people on one set of rails than one highway, but it's not unlimited.
But our ruthlessly individual mindset here in the states blocks us from reaching many of these higher level goals.
1. We do not have the political power to ban the cars to clear the traffic until people already ride transit.
2. People will not ride in sufficient numbers unless it dodges traffic.
So yes, there is nothing materially wrong with surface-level transit, but we can't make that work until the cars are already gone...so we are stuck building more tunnels, viaducts, etc.
Light rail right like this fundamental is a salve, or yet another feel-good government service for the poor. But it doesn't help us change mass culture, nor can it easily be reformed into something that does.
Now, I should concede Pre-metro / Stadtbahn is not dead end, and allows for an incrementalist approach that is not just slapping band-aids. But you still need to put the urban core underground to have a beachhead, and to my knowledge only San Francisco of North American cities has a light rail that does that.
1. Do not know how other countries work. A lot of stuff seems far fetched until you learn about about the places where it already happens.
2. Don't know much history so essentialize the last 50 years as the way it always ways (similar to 1)
3. Believe in "monotonically of virtue": i.e. that various compromises and half-measures at least deliver half the value.
4. Lack a sense of a urgency, or have faith that "at the end of the day, American institutions are good will work it out".
5. Might be more "idealist than materialist".
Of the 3 stops where it isn't, it has it's own lane on a major thoroughfare and only chances an errant driver crossing an intersection.
Now for the Seattle Streetcars, those are a different story. For the most part, they have a dedicated lane so they breeze past traffic, but could get caught if traffic is especially bad.
Your description is apt for the South Lake Union Streetcar, though.
Within the densest part of Seattle they took over the underground tunnels which for years had been used as (electric) bus transit only tunnels with light rail.
Past the stadium in the south it's at grade.
After a brief tunnel under the major hill it is at grade through the gentrifying area south of Seattle.
It goes above grade near the airport.
There are expansions to the east and north that I haven't seen yet, and the expansion to the south hasn't yet reached a stage where I've seen sufficient details to answer.
It's grade separated pretty much all the way north to Northgate and beyond. (Which opened this year.) Northgate, Roosevelt, U District, UW, capitol Hill, all the downtown stops are all separated in tunnels/elevated rail.
It's at grade only in parts of SODO and South Seattle. The bulk is separated. Even when not, it takes priority at crossings and has it's own lanes that are rarely shared with cars.
I live in a NW Seattle neighborhood that doesn’t even have sidewalks that you could walk to get to the school if you wanted.
As a counterpoint- I take express bus 545 from Redmond to Seattle between 8 and 9am on weekdays, and there’s typically less than a half dozen people on the bus. I get from my home to the office in 30-40mins. The slowest part is the tiny stretch of I-5 with no bus lane.
I don’t think public transit has failed to keep up, it’s under-utilized, in part due to anxiety about COVID. These same routes were jam packed in 2019.
Public transit simply does not work if people have the option of cars. Public transit did not fail, society’s leaders (and hence society itself) optimized for individual cars. There is no possibility that both can coexist.
Public transit also requires dense living.
Once you make public transit be the most convenient, people will take public transit. At the point, public transit expands, typically with more frequent buses/trains on a route. And that makes it even more convenient, because you no longer need to plan ahead to catch the hourly bus.
And where does this leave drivers? Even better than they were at the start. Every bus on the road means that 50 fewer cars on the road. That reduces traffic congestion far more than any amount of counter-productive road expansions that ignore induced demand.
And public transit will never be convenient as long as human operators are needed because convenient public transit means a train or bus every 5 to 10 minutes at most, and that labor is extremely expensive.
And if you have to wait more than 5 minutes for public transit, especially in less than ideal weather, you are going to prefer a car. And once you have invested in a car, you are going to balk at the taxes need to provide public transit that has 5 minute intervals.
You also need Tokyo like density to make those rapid transit intervals make sense.
I learned to build in huge volatility for travel times, having a car was incomparably more convenient than relying on buses.
You clearly haven't used KC Metro. (Though like this thread is pointing out, not exactly their fault we don't give them dedicated lanes).
In comparison, the US as a whole has a violent crime rate of 369 per 100,000 per year (2019). Or about about an average of 271 years for you to be a victim of violent crime. NYC has a slightly higher violent crime rate of 404 per 100,000 (2020) and is fairly safe as far as US cities go.
In other words, the risk of violent crime rate by being a heavy user of public transit in the largest city of the USA is about the same as the overall violent crime rate of the USA as a whole.
Remove all COVID-era restrictions from schools, workplaces, and transport, and systems will go back to functioning normally.
Try different masks, different styles. There's several different patterns for masks and finding the right one for your face helps a lot.
That's not dehumanizing. It's the epitome of humanization. It's about civility, compassion, kindness, and overcoming cruel dispositions and rude habits to become or be made more humane.
Also, the park and rides are full too early, meaning people have to drive or get to work 1 hour or more early. Parking never kept up with all the new apartment buildings, the newer ones are multi levels, and are already mostly full.
Public transit has failed to keep up with demand, meaning more cars on the road.
Then the limited amount of highways, trucks are stuck in traffic for hours, sharing the road.
Uber and Lyft isnt a fix for less cars on the road.
Now compound that by the hundreds of issues along the supply chain, decades old port design, same methodology from the 1960s on loading/unloading at the ports, limited space at the ports/warehouses, day long waits for truckers at the port, inefficiency from start to finish.
Some ideas, Have the ports move containers to a farther location for pick up, during non traffic times, 9pm to 5am. Have the National guard build some new depots outside of town, hopefully along highways.
Optimize the ports, the containers are sitting too long in warehouses, and not enough cranes.
The solution shouldn't be "ticket truckers" who cant fix the core issues.