Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
Walking: Can’t cover large distances quickly. Not sure why that’s even included in this?
Bus: Pollution source whether it carries passengers or not. No service in rural areas. 1 crash = 69 people injured. Pathogen hotbox. You can’t smash in one.
Bicycle: 1 thunderstorm = misery. Limited range and can’t travel on motorways/freeways.
Car: Only pollutes when you use it. Goes anywhere you want 24/7/365. You can definitely smash in one. Carries big things like a trolley full of groceries or IKEA furniture.
E-Cars etc.: All the benefits of the car plus no pollution. Huge smugness boost.
I’m not against having a car for when I need it. I’m against pretty much requiring it to be a functional adult to do just about anything without public transit becoming my new hobby.
Work: 20min drive, 1h 20min transit, 2h bike
Groceries: 10min drive, 45min transit
This includes a bunch of walking to/from stops and half the time spent waiting since my city’s public transit hub/spoke model is designed for airplanes requiring you to bounce between hubs.
There also isn’t consistency. A favorable route might only come once every few hours. If one hop is running late, it can wreck the whole route.
My work route is pretty direct but it takes 12min walking, 0-20min waiting for a bus to my local hub, 0-40min waiting for the right train, and another 15min walking to the office. If they got those wait times down to like 10-20min total, I’d be more inclined to use it. Right now “something” comes every 20min, but sometimes the routes alternate so your route may come every 40min instead of 20min.
adventures in missing the point and faulty comparisons.
Also, cars are extremely wasteful when not in use. They have to be parked somewhere and that’s space not used productively.
A car pollutes as its materials are mined from the ground and smelted into metals. A car pollutes when oils are refined for its various plastics and lubricants. A car pollutes when it is retired to a scrap yard to sit leaking oil until it is crushed and recyled (polluting through that process too).
Walking: a great form of transportation for short distances. However too much modern infrastructure gets in the way of walking. We should be able to walk more places than we do, even just from one store to the next. I did live in a city carlessly for a while and the combination of transit and walking was much more convenient than cars, most of the time
Bus: if you don’t mind the audience ….
