I’m all for a significant reduction in vehicles commonly on the road. Apart from a monumental restructuring of the entirety of every major infrastructure in the United States, how would we go about effectively reducing the number of cars that are daily drivers?
Make public transit a viable alternative.
My commute is 45 minutes by car, over 2 hours by public transit. We need massive investment into public transportation. More buses, more trains.
And, I’ll get crucified by this I’m sure, but it’s true: bicycle infrastructure is nice but a far far secondary goal. When we prioritize cycling over buses and trains, all we’re doing is supporting upper middle class office workers and work-from-home recreational cyclists. It’s not a sea change. It doesn’t move the needle. Taking away a car lane to make a dedicated bus lane moves the needle. Taking away a car lane to make a bike lane does not, unless mass transit is already a viable option.
God if I wouldn’t kill to just be able to take a train like in Tokyo. The train times were usually 2 to 3 minutes apart from driving times on Google maps. Add the 10-15 minutes it’ll take you to walk out of your station to your job and I’m all for It. I need the extra walking anyways to stretch my legs.
When we prioritize cycling over buses and trains, all we’re doing is supporting upper middle class office workers and work-from-home recreational cyclists.
And the young, and the able.
Tell a 40 year old single mother that she needs to bike home.
…do your legs fall off once you’ve given birth or why is being a mother a factor?
Also, I’m pretty sure most 40 year olds are still able to bike perfectly fine. That’s the stereotypical age range for picking up jogging, right?
But they’re right, the priority is having a working tram/bus network, and having safe lanes for (e-)bikes as an extension of that system.
I can agree with this. If we moved to public transit through the utilization of railways and bus routes, would you say the cost of maintenance then moved to the Local and State governing bodies? One might conclude that roadwork costs would decrease positively with the reduction in traffic. There would also be higher maintenance costs, all offset by taxes.
What about the logistics of these operations?
The initial start-up costs?
The time?
The petty small suburban neighborhoods who claim buses increase homeless presence in their neighborhoods?
There would also need to be a fundamental cultural shift on the Professional level.
I know we don’t really have all the answers. I just want to make sure we are aware that moving this needle is more than dropping a couple magic bus lines down in each major city, and running a railroad from Point A to B. We do need less cars. I wish I could walk to work. All of this requires an almost mind-boggling amount of preparation and then work to even get started.
Gotta be realistic, otherwise we’ll never get anywhere.
It’s a lot of work, but it doesn’t really require new thinking. We can absolutely throw resources at the problem. More buses, more trains, faster, safer, more reliable, more more more.
Making jobs closer to people is absolutely a societal shift, but we don’t have to tackle that, at least not right away.
If we have a hundredfold increase in existing public transit schemes, we’re already most of the way there to breaking cars’ stranglehold on society. It’s a solved problem, in an engineering sense. We know how to do it. We just don’t know how to fund it…or to get the political will to do it.
When we prioritize cycling over buses and trains, all we’re doing is supporting upper middle class office workers and work-from-home recreational cyclists.
Eh? How?
The people that can actually bike around on the regular or aren’t already physically exhausted at the end of their work day.
The people that bike do it by choice because they can and they want to. Pushing more bikes in place of trains or buses would hurt the people who can’t.
But, like, I already have a car for my daily commute and whatnot. I can’t see a way that a bus or similar would be faster. So why would I even consider using public transport?
Busses/trams can hit 0 red lights and not get stuck in traffic if they have their own lanes and transit priority signals
You are only looking at it from your own perspective. There are plenty of people who hate driving and would rather sit on a train and read a book. If all these people would get off the road because they take public transit then there would be less people on the road. So you wouldn’t be stuck in traffic as often. Also people who don’t own a car or can’t drive need to get to places as well. A society should provide good transport for these people as well.
As a person with a car who has used the bus instead in certain situations:
Bus gets you there with no effort, you can read instead of driving, it’s safer, and you don’t have to pay for parking. When in college here it’s also free, and at every house I’ve lived in, there has been one bus that goes from said neighborhood (within a couple of blocks) directly to the college, so I never drove there because the bus was way more convenient.
Bus is an extra mode of transportation in a household with more drivers than cars. So I’ve taken the bus to work, sometimes for years, so that someone else in my household could use the car to go to their job, farther away in the other direction.
Some people should not or cannot drive. At every place I’ve worked there has been at least one guy (yes always a guy) whose license was revoked for DUI. So they had a car but couldn’t use it.
Cars also sometimes break down! Living near bus lines has saved me on occasion when my car was out of commission.
Car insurance here is crazy expensive, partly because everybody and their grandma is driving even if they ought not be. The world is not getting younger. You want to be on the road with a bunch of people who are not clear minded? Or you want them to have other options for getting around? One day that will be you, too.
Making public transport not absolute dogshit.
Like, I don’t even mean “We need to extend it way out into the boonies” kind of thing. Something as simple as “Public transport that isn’t so dogshit that the locals in major cities avoid it like the plague whenever possible” would go a long way towards reducing traffic congestion and car usage, even with suburbs and rural areas continuing to use cars excessively.
Every major US city should have a dense, high frequency grid of trams/subways within 3 miles of the city center. Then, a larger network of light rail/subways out another 3 miles for commuting and events traffic.
3-5 minute intervals is good enough, anything less frequent is meh. Over 15 is a joke.
The buses that run (surprisingly direct routes) to my kids’ workplaces and the one that runs by the youngest’s school here run ONCE per HOUR. I would be thrilled to have service every 15 minutes. They used to run every 15 and it worked for me when I was their age, so it’s gotten worse here not better, even as the population has doubled.
