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If only things actually worked this way:
Ignore the problem and maybe it will go away!
Maybe they should stop fixing potholes etc. so more people will take trains/subways.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/5887295/515656) | From: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) jwz
Wed, 18-May-2005 12:55 PM (UTC)
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You say that as if it wouldn't work!
I fully support the gov't redirecting my taxes to subsidize trains instead of fixing potholes.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/72003885/213436) | From: loic
Wed, 18-May-2005 1:00 PM (UTC)
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When my dad was a transport planner in the western australian department of transport he was heavilly in favour of increasing congestion. He summed up the reason as "to make people hate their cars". Needless to say the people in the department who came from a road construction background rather than a sustainable planning background didn't really buy the idea so now he's off writing climate change policy.
so now he's off writing climate change policy
I really really hope you were trying to be funny here.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/32993011/1443643) | From: 21cdb
Wed, 18-May-2005 1:14 PM (UTC)
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In Northern Virginia/DC, whose traffic is rapidly gaining on SF and LA, we have these insane ideas that get all sorts of idiotic funding - like adding more toll lanes (with overly complex sliding rates based on traffic conditions) down the middle of existing roads, whereas attempts to put a Metrorail station in Herndon,Reston or Tysons Corner (or any other place without one, but lots of people) met with bloody resistance.
Most people who live in suburbs are opposed to public transit for one of two reasons:
1) Inconvenience during construction. This is a reasonable excuse, but on the other hand, people will tolerate a little temporary inconvenience for things that suit their tastes, for example, widening the roads or creating better interchanges.
2) Intolerance. This is the evil whose name is rarely spoken but is well understood. Suburbanites are scared shitless that easy public transportation will bring "those kinds of people" to their neighboorhoods. (By "those" I mean poor black or Latino people.) Besides being racist and morally reprehensible, it's also totally illogical: they don't seem to mind having poor black or Latino people come to their houses to clean and cook for them, as long as they can afford a car. Also, cars aren't particularly expensive. Oh how easy it is to forget that you can buy a car for less than $25,000 through the Sunday paper classifieds!
So, uh, basically, as long as traffic isn't painful, more people will use the road until traffic is painful. So traffic will always be painful.
Well, that saves me from having to maintain that pesky optimism.
Next - beheadings as preventive brain tumor and migrane treatment.
The city I live in has an anti-growth government. Their motto is "We were here first, GO AWAY!". As such, they have not built any new roads even though our population growth is greater than that of Egypt.
It doesn't work. Our congestion is far worse than NOVA/DC. And that's saying a lot!
| From: jwz
Wed, 18-May-2005 1:31 PM (UTC)
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Are they building public transit, or just doing nothing?
| From: jwz
Wed, 18-May-2005 1:48 PM (UTC)
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I have not. Do you think that it would be improved by the addition of freeways and mini-malls?
The makers of SimCity considered that a "law of nature" when they first wrote the game 15 years ago.
DC went "out" as a result of the 1-2 punch of a building height limit downtown (nothing can grow taller than the dome of the capitol) combined with a massive increase in government contracting during the Reagan era bringing in tons of new jobs and office buildings that exploded in the suburbs where they could get tall. the real failure was that metro had already been designed as a hub-and-spoke system oriented to getting everybody downtown. when Tysons Corner, Skyline, Bethesda, Rockville, Arlington, et al all exploded up, metro was way underpowered to handle them.
the whole system completely failed to comprehend that people would actually travel from suburb to suburb for work rather than go into the city. until 1994, Fairfax County didn't have 1 single road moving north-south (around the city rather than to it) that was 4-lane or more for more than 3 miles in a row. every road had some region where it cut down to two lanes and traffic was horrendous. now every 2-lane road is going 4, every 4 is going 6, every 6 is getting overpasses and cloverleafs to get rid of the stoplights, and it still won't solve the problem.
anyways, i've ranted too much here as it is...
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/82598860/390844) | From: ammonoid
Wed, 18-May-2005 3:41 PM (UTC)
Re: this is "news"? | (Link)
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DC native here. It always seemed so asinine to me to take the metro all the way downtown, change lines, then take it all the way out of town just to get to wherever. Metro is now building more between-line connectors, I think, but they still don't have the equivalent of the London Undergrounds ring lines. They need that.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/28861217/5636007) | From: fgmr
Wed, 18-May-2005 1:50 PM (UTC)
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the bulldozing of every parking lot in the city I'm all for getting rid of on-street parking. You want to park near your house? That's what the garage is for. Convert that "in-law" back if your car is so damn important. Your building doesn't have a parking spot for you? Move, or park on the outskirts and bus in. I also think some roads should be pedestrian-only, perhaps with streetcars, and maybe bikes, if the riders play nice. Market to Church, and Mission in the mission, to name two. On the other hand, 280 should continue through to golden gate bridge. It's stupid to dump through traffic onto surface streets.
*What* garage? My cranky old apartment building doesn't have one, and I've never lived in a building in SF that had one. I'm not moving even farther away from pubtrans. But it would be nice if somebody could occasionally park near enough to pick my gimp ass up to drive me somewhere pubtrans won't take me - or because pubtrans on a wheelchair is a nightmare.
Right... you Sanfranciscans stay where you are; we San Jose burbs will stay where we are.
Every time I drive to your city, I find that there is nowhere to park anyway, so I get out a.s.a.p., and drive along hwy 1, and enjoy the views.
We'd probably use your public transportation, if there were such a thing, that would not take half a day to get to SF, and half a day to get back - about 100 miles roundtrip.
But, if everyone in San Francisco got rid of their cars and took public transportation, how would they all get up to Burning Man? BART doesn't go to Nevada! Oh noes!
/me lived without a car for a long time. Not living right in San Francisco, it got old, really quick.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/7017777/2834) | From: owen
Wed, 18-May-2005 2:23 PM (UTC)
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I live in Boston, and we're just about finished with the massive Big Dig highway construction project. I remember reading last year sometime an article about the project, including a quote from one of the planners who said something just like this. He said, "If you build it, they will come." This is interesting because one of the statistics that the Big Dig people like to throw around is that if we had not undergone this massive overhaul, by 2010 (or thereabouts) we would experience 20 hours a day (or thereabouts) of rush-hour standstill traffic. I've been lucky that my commutes for the last few years have always been opposite traffic, because I live IN the city and work in the suburbs.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/72515339/1523273) | From: stenz
Thu, 19-May-2005 5:32 AM (UTC)
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I lived in Cambridge for 5 years up until 2 years ago. Traffic in Boston was awful and I generally avoided it as much as possible (actually, while the traffic sucked, the general difficulty of navigating the streets to get where you wanted to go was the worst part).
After I left, they opened a few parts of the Big Dig (the bridge is open now, and many parts around the airport, if not all) and when I went back to visit I was blown away by how little traffic there was and how fast I could get to and from the airport from Cambridge.
That was the first year I was away.
I went back this year and oops, back to traffic standstills again.
Just as you say - they said this would happen too. When they started the project, they were planning for X amount of traffic - but the project has taken so long that by the time it is finishing, it is already going to be full.
Now I live in Bermuda and we have no space here and traffic is bad - on the good side, there is no space for new roads - so they can't add anything else. On the bad side, everyone keeps buying cars and avoids the ferries.
I drive a Vespa, which is somewhere between the two (I would ride a bike if my office had a shower).
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/68505097/18600) | From: vxo
Wed, 18-May-2005 8:38 PM (UTC)
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I've observed the same with Miami traffic, using a GPS. I'm guessing it was once a lot more, before the roads reached total saturation.
11 mph is the average speed at good hours of the day on surface streets; at rush hour, it can drop down as far as 0.5 mile per hour.
I'm glad I take public transit instead of driving at such times, for I can abandon the bus, trapped in gridlock, and walk to my destination about 5 times as fast.
The same idea applies to gasoline prices. Theoretically, the higher gas prices get, the better gas mileage people will demand. But it isn't a smooth slope. There's a plateu, with demand remaining flat until gas prices get up around $3-4 per gallon (in today's dollars), at which point, demand for better gas mileage/smaller cars shoots up.
The plateu phenomenon is the reason most cities don't subscribe to the view of the article's author. They don't see a change in people's behaviour (choosing public transport vs driving) until things get so bad that people literally don't have any choice but to use public transport. Since city planners don't usually let it get that bad, they will never see a demand for public transportation.
Inertia, kids.
London's congestion charge seems to have been a great success. One measure of the success is that buses now make significantly faster journeys, which should help tempt people away from cars and thus bring about a virtuous cycle. Our Ken is also in favour of high-rise central living spaces like the "shard of glass" tower in Southwark.
The next thing that London needs to get its transport sorted is inducements to introduce flexible working so the tubes and trains don't fill up at rush hour...
The only problem is increased ridership can lead to more delay per stop, and adding more buses per route increases congestion.
Ottawa has recently stopped sending many of its routes all the way downtown on the Transitway (a mostly separate bus road, reserved lanes on normal roads for parts of downtown) due to too much bus congestion. Now people have to transfer.
From: jhenrywaugh
Wed, 18-May-2005 4:42 PM (UTC)
Tried that in Phoenix | (Link)
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The "not build any freeways" no matter how many migrate here... ...it didn't work, people still came, and even when freeways started to get financed, they fill up faster than they can build them. Too bad they can't seem to lay down asphalt as quickly as developers can throw up tract housing plans.
It's not as bad as California yet, but if you California folks continue to flock here (along with the horde of Mexican migrants and midwestern transplants), it's going to be soon. Already I commute on the outer loop 101 and a 20-25 mile journey can take me over an hour even though it's all freeway. In the summer, on Fridays, cars backup for 10+ miles in parking lot fashion trying to get up north into the mountains, escaping the 110+ degree Phoenix valley heat.
Public transportation is not working because (a) stuff is so spreadout, one end of the metro area lies 50-60 miles from the other end (or more), (b) people don't congregate at central work areas like a downtown, work is more distributed all over which one might mistakenly conclude would ease the commute burden but it has not and (c) buses in this part of the country run every hour, not every 10 minutes like in other cities where lots of folks can get around on the bus.
Guess we'll be knotted up at least until someone mass markets a personal hovercraft vehicle...
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/9624370/1571) | From: evan
Wed, 18-May-2005 6:20 PM (UTC)
Re: Tried that in Phoenix | (Link)
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Phoenix is well-known for having the worst sprawl in the country. Easy road access leads to more roads leads to more sprawl; if your car was useless near and within the city, you'd have to live within the city to work there. Mass transit necessarily follows.
Don't dispute, telecommute! Heh. Okay, that was bad. Between St. Charles and St. Louis they added a new 6 lane(!) highway and bridge over the MO river. Except at either end it's impossible to get enough traffic to it to fill it. So it looks like a bit of a brain-dead idea right now. I'd have rather they spent the money for that adding to the rail system that goes between the airport and downtown.
Apparently they voted on it a couple years before I moved in. It was voted down, mostly because of fears that inner city punks would trash our beautiful sprawling hummer filled neighborhoods.
Did I say 6? I meant 12... 6 per side.
From: ianbicking
Wed, 18-May-2005 4:58 PM (UTC)
Productive transportation | (Link)
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This is a bit of a problem, though, for those people who do need to use transportation to do productive things, like move goods, get to work when it's really reasonable to commute, etc. Congestion is a real problem; it's not a solution to just let it get worse. But, as this guy says, it's also not a solution to increase capacity. We just have to find other solutions. E.g., tolls, which might reserve some capacity for those who find the roads sufficiently valuable. I think there's some potential in the free-market approach -- where goods and services (like road access) are priced according to their actual cost. As for public transit, I think too many advocates expect people to use crappy systems when the alternatives just become slightly more crappy. Maybe that'll happen, but that's also bad advocacy. We need smarter public transit, the current systems just suck incredibly -- they are slow, they don't scale, they have huge capital costs, they have little redundancy, they are unpleasant, and many are much worse environmentally than people realize -- 20 ton electric cars don't spew smoke, but that doesn't make them energy efficient. Expectations should be raised. I like the idea of PRT, personally.
The paradox of "more lanes increases traffic problems" has been understood for a long, long time.
Ironically, Robert Moses, a man insanely driven to build highways, was one of the first people to make the connection.
Moses oversaw an unprecedented build out of highways around New York City. By the early 1940s, though, he noticed that traffic was far worse after the highways were constructed. Simply put, larger highways encourage driving and encourage people to live farther from work, as has already been said. A fifteen year study done by UC Berkley showed that as freeway capacity was increased, traffic increased at an equal rate within a few years. If you google for "induced traffic," you'll see all sorts of interesting stuff.
I like your idea about bulldozing parking lots. One factor influencing the amount that people drive is the cost of parking; if parking is essentially free, demand for it actually increases by a great amount. Construction of additional roads and parking lots serves to reduce these driving-related costs, or to eliminate them entirely, increasing demand.
But I disagree with your last sentence. Cities growing outward are not necessarily unmanageable, though suburbs growing outward generally are.
Los Angeles is actually an interesting example of this. For many years, the outward expansion of the city was well served by a system of streetcars. It wasn't until General Motors systematically attacked rail systems in the late 1920s that LA showed the kind of unsupportable sprawl that so defines it today.
This does make some sort of sense. Here in Milwaukee, they are rebuilding the Marquette Interchange, which is a major traffic hub right downtown, where I43, I94, and I794 meet. Unfortunately, I still have to use it to get to and from work. This spring, they moved all of the southbound traffic to the northbound side of the north leg of I43, while they rip up the southbound side. So each side lost a lane. What's interesting about this is that congestion has actually improved since they did this, because people are learning better ways to get where they're going, or not taking the trip at all. And the people that have to go that way have improved traffic. Now, the plan for the interchange was actually thought out well, so when they're finished, the traffic should be improved considerably even with the earlier volume, so now I just have to wait 4 years for them to get done. ( http://www.mchange.org is cool)
I'd like to see the cost of parking tickets go up to where getting a handful of parking tickets each month is actually more expensive than monthly parking in a garage. (Especially for parking in bus zones, gimp spaces (if there are any in this town), and fire hydrants.) It's the damn commuters who are a large part of the problem. There's no reason they can't take BART from the wealthier suburbs (except in cases where they've kept BART out of their burb) like the peons do; but they're not given sufficient incentive to leave the damn Jag in the driveway.
Hmm. Maybe we need an increase of violence and theft from wealthy vehicles without residential parking permits. Hasn't worked all that well in SOMA, though.
Better 24-hour pubtrans that was safe and clean would be nice, too. But that's a crack dream.
Do you talk to anyone that takes BART or Caltrain from other places? You have to get there insanely early to get a parking space. There are problems on all ends of the system. VTA is a non-starter for getting to the BART stations, it is slower and less predictable than Muni, and that's saying a lot. I live on Nob Hill and work at 7th and Townsend, you'd think I could take a bus and get there faster than walking, but you'd be wrong.
Better 24-hour pubtrans that was safe and clean would be nice, too. But that's a crack dream.
AFAICT New York and Tokyo are the only true 24/7 cities. You can even see it in Google's internal statistics for IP hits, the traffic from those cities never stops. Incidentally public transit is much better in both.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/70477236/5548170) | From: nidea
Wed, 18-May-2005 9:07 PM (UTC)
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I'm with you. Gas at $10/gallon with public transport at $2/day too. Hmm, how about free delicous coffee on trains?
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/46492108/749625) | From: pdx6
Fri, 20-May-2005 9:08 PM (UTC)
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The RTC, Reno Transportation Commission, has seriously considered offering free coffee on buses to increase ridership.
Lucky you, SF cannot possibly grow out! (assuming we don't try more bay fill or that Japanese trick of building islands just to put an airport or the worlds tallest building on them)
The practical problem with killing all the parking lots, as I mentioned in another post, is that the Caltrain stations and BART stations are already over filled with cars, and the public transportation is even worse in the rest of the Bay Area so getting to them isn't easy otherwise. You have a systemic problem, you can't just address SF.
at first i thought it was areally dopey idea, but maybe if the city parking lots are bulldozed, parking ticket prices are raised and the parking lots at bart are still full, the resulting dissatisfaction on the part of people who own cars (and are more likely to have a bit of money, and therefore influence) would result in something being done about the public transit systems around the bay. kinda like the increased gas prices have contributed to a spike in interest in biodiesel and other alternative fuels. but maybe not...
I've long thought that the absolute best thing that could happen for ease of transportation in San Francisco would be the bulldozing of every parking lot in the city. Public transportation in this town won't improve until people demand it
You say this like San Fran has bad public transport. I visited from Sydney in March, and was amazed to find a city with both cheap fares, sensible ticketing systems, and also an amazing range of transport modes from which to choose from. Ours in comparison is expensive, flaky, and always depressing.
| From: evan
Fri, 26-Aug-2005 5:25 PM (UTC)
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that's especially amusing to me because the transit is worse in sf than most other major cites i've encountered (new york, portland, seattle).
"Sprawl" is the enviro-weenies' attempt to turn the American dream into a dirty word. Free clue, folks: The folks who live in NYC and SF and other crowded central cities LIKE it, and think it's just dandy to force everyone to live that way. Guess what? I, and lots of others, want no part of it.
Applying NYC transportation solutions to Houston (where I grew up) and Phoenix (see the comment above) won't work, no matter how much money you throw at mass transit. Many people want their own single-family dwelling with their own yard around all 4 sides, and they're not willing to move into an apartment in a densely urbanized city for lots more money. They won't be convinced to do so no matter how unattractive you make commuting.
So-called "smart growth" policies are nothing more than attempts to legislate away people's dreams. They're doomed to fail. Of course, that won't stop enviro-weenies, who see absolutely nothing wrong with coercing others into their utopian vision (although Manhattan is a dystopia to me), from trying...
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/59032042/661708) | From: denshi
Thu, 19-May-2005 8:01 AM (UTC)
your dreams suck | (Link)
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Pull your head out of your ass and look at the numbers sometime. Look at the costs of road construction and repair, land usage, loss of cropland, energy required for commuting; the financing bubble for the latest ring of suburban construction, and at the very least, the oil production curve.
No one is saying that Houston is going to magically turn into Hong Kong overnight -- or ever, even -- but the development patterns Americans have adopted since the 1950's can't continue forever. Density, and particularly, more socially and aesthetically pleasing density, is coming.
That only works if they actually fund transit.
Toronto city council is all hippie green freaks who hate roads, but for some bizarre reason don't give a nickel to the transit system either, so both stagnate.
I'm a hardcore car user and even I think converting most of those asphalt lots to a few multistory lots and the rest into green space would be better overall. But unless it becomes easier to get places on transit, why would I give up the car?
I can litereally walk to some places faster than taking transit. A 15 minute drive is an hour and a half on the bus. Just lame. | |
