The US needs to drop the contractor model and just directly staff labor for public works. If there is enough work going around to maintain a contracting company, then there’s therefore enough work to staff a public rail building division, and build out some standardized and therefore cheaper designs for this infrastructure.
For example: most car oriented American suburbs simply require a car for anything other than visiting a neighbor, whereas in a transit oriented city you might use transit to commute to work, but be able to walk to some local shops and services.
I think many people who are familiar only with car dependent lifestyles make the mistake of imagining a car-free lifestyle that involves replacing all of the car trips they make one-to-one with bus or train trips, which would indeed be really cumbersome, but isn’t really how things work (at least in my experience growing up in a rural small town in the US and having lived in a couple of European cities and NYC).
'Improving' car-oriented development has been observed to make things worse:
> It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if they shift investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox
Improving things for non-car users can actually make things better for drivers:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k
If you can't imagine how public transport can work in a big city, just try to visit a big city where it works (there are plenty outside the US). Seems more constructive to me than being extremely vocal about how you think it cannot exist.
* If you assume that public transport is only for those who can't afford driving, you basically guarantee that it's going to be bad. If you want good public transport, you must design it for the middle class.
* 15 minutes of walking is a very long distance to the nearest station. If you are in an area served by reasonable public transport, you should be able to reach the next station in at least one direction in that time.
At least in most cities. The one in NY has slow driving trains compared to any other cities I've seen.
With the train I need to transfer to another train. This could be a 10 minute wait at the platform before the train arrives, plus its an end of the line stop for this particular line so it will sit for another 5-10 mins while it changes operators. Then once it gets moving, another 15 mins since there are a few at grade crossings with this line and then a 10 min walk. I do it over driving because I can zone out half asleep in the mornings.
The transfering and frequencies are where transit enters a world of pain and these are expensive, complex issues to fix compared to an interchange ramp. Anytime I bring someone unfamiliar on the train, they basically swear off the system for good and moan why we didn’t just pay for the surging uber.
EU's metros are a bit dated compared to that, but still very useful.
In the NY one, I was sometimes thinking walking is about as fast if you add up the slow train speed with the waiting time. In SF, there is none?!
singapore: https://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltagov/en/getting_around/publ...
beijing: https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/beijing/beijing-...
Some grid patterns and some circles. Of course not truly everything is close to a station, but the stations tend to be at important points, and points of interest / desirable living locations will appear around the existing stations.
I just don't understand this whole argument of "A lot of car drivers today probably wont accept that". Sitting in non-moving traffic in a car is truly horrible, I mean it's absolutely the worst, there's nothing fun about it, you're standing still, wasting time, taking 30 minutes for something that can be biked in 10 minutes. When you can instead just walk a few minutes, sit in a train, walk a few more minutes, sit in another train, walk to destination, all in 20 minutes, and you can do stuff on your phone in the meantime.
Even if you love the car so much, having a subway will maybe make driving a car acceptably fun again, since more people taking subway means less cars on the road so a chance you can actually drive instead of stand still all the time.
It is fine to say that US has evolved for the individual car, and it's very hard to change. But I don't get why you say that it's the same everywhere else...
2. I don't know anyone that leaves their home for three separate trips on transit a day. Two tops, and usually it's just one. It's rare to leave the home three times in one day with a car if one of the trips is an eight hour workday. Usually people combine trips.
3. Again, walking is good. We should be walking. It's fantastic to have places to walk to. This isn't a bad thing or a chore.
And no, going to gym is not easier. It costs money, it is time consuming and it does not have the same effect as normal walking.
Is not this the problem with transit? Your traveling is so cumbersome that you seem to be restricting yourself to the bare minimum. Of course, you can also claim "that's a good thing!" but can you talk from the both sides of your mouth and claim that transit is faster and more convenient while also limiting your travel options?
> Take just three trips and your day just turned into a 22 and a half hour one only factoring the walk on the home side.
The exact same thing goes if you go to the same place with a car. But, first, you did not had that healthy factor of walking. Second, if you are tired, overworked, have troubles you need to think about or want to listen some educational tape, you are becoming hazard on road as a bonus.
Just look at 248 mi of track in NYC vs 17.4 in LA.
There's also the consideration that all those point to point journeys and parking at each end is a fairly inefficient way to enable a city's worth of people to move around. There's no way a city like NYC could exist at all if everyone relied on cars for transportation. A point-to-point personal car journey in NYC may in theory be faster than taking public transit, but it would be impossible for everyone to do that as the car transit times would trend towards infinity as everyone is stuck in traffic. And because of the increased density a non car-centric city allows, you can actually shrink public transit times too because things can be closer together and transit can run more often and have more routes. And the increased density also allows point to point personal transport other than cars to be practical, like walking or cycling.
The same with most big Chinese cities (smaller cities have taxis, so you still don’t need your own car). Tokyo’s system works ok as well, although I’m not sure if taxi would be faster since it is too expensive for me to try. The subway/loop lines are good enough to get places as quickly as I don’t think taking a taxi would save much time.
You’d be hard pressed to lay rail based transit so densely where everyone in the metro area has a 15 min walk to a station much less one going somewhere relevant for them. Simple bussing upgrades are much more realistic for us to see comprehensive transit in our lifetimes. Things like signal priority and a protected lane would go a long way for little cash and time. Too bad the bus is invisible to most people and politicians.
Unfortunately, in the US, we let a bunch of politicians who claim the government is bad at everything run the government. They have a vested interest in making sure it's not well run. For goodness sake, we had a president who said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." A sitting US president, who according to Wikipedia, is part of the government. We should have demanded his resignation then and there, and got someone who wasn't terrified of the organization he was a head of.
The most immediate solution to this is stop relying on contractors and let the government at every level build up public planning departments and a construction workforce that doesn't get let go when the project is finished.
This is how improving public transportation is actually one of the most effective ways to benefit drivers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
You said "most places, not just in the US", I suppose they were included?
GP said Boston.
actually there are snow plows, like everywhere else on earth where it snows.
Sidewalks and bike paths will take days to be down to pavement and some bike paths aren’t salted or plowed at all so become safe to use again when the snow naturally melts.
This is a choice, not an inevitability.
So does Finland. See "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Also "Why Winter Cities Need to Reconsider Car Dependence":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFkI3eglT1M
If things can be taken car of so cars can operate in winter there's no reason why they can't be for bicycles (as someone who lives in Toronto, Canada).
The standards of snow removal needed to permit 2 wheel vehicles to operate safely are quite a bit stricter than those for 4 wheelers.
Boston is great for recreational biking for part of the year, sure. There are lovely bike trails.
But it is not great for commuting on a bike, nearly ever. And definitely not during winter.
There is oodles of parking at the office (was built for commuters) and I already have to park the car near home. Eliminating a parking space on either end won’t move any of the existing buildings closer.
My e-bike is significantly cheaper to maintain than my car. It uses something like .7KWH for a full charge which handles over 30 miles. Thats less than 10 cents for a full charge at my rate. Other consumable goods like tires, chains, tubes, break pads are all similarly 10x-100x cheaper than their car counterpart. The only expensive wear item is the battery pack, which admittedly cost $550. I'd estimate my personal usage of the device to be around $0.05/mile.
It's cheaper to own both and maintain both if you are going to use both. Using simple linear math, the ebike will save you over $2000 in ongoing costs (initial price) within 3850 miles or 235 commutes. A pretty good ROI.
It's not like it's the natural state of things that 25% of the Atlanta city center is dedicated to parking so we just have to accept the downsides.
There's a reason everything is so spread out and so it's difficult to walk places or design efficient public transit, and it's the same reason driving and parking your car is the most efficient transportation method.