pushing for better transit
Eh, I’m still not sold on transit (for people). If you live in a well designed city, everything should be right there in front of you, no more than steps away. The need to move further than your feet (or wheelchair, if that’s your thing) can reasonably allow is a straight up urban planning failure.
I can buy into the idea that, given our existing urban planning failures, it is better than nothing. As a bandaid, sure. But in the context of looking to build the world in which we want to live, why settle for bandaids? Why not go straight to building cities properly, thereby having no need to move people around with external propulsion at all?
Those in the rural parts are a harder problem, but it seems you think the car is still their best option. So, when does transit become useful?
Is it the freight transit infrastructure you see as needing improvement? It is true that, even with the best laid plans, we are not in a place to give that up yet. As interesting as vertical farms are, the technology just isn’t there yet to supplant food grown in rural areas, never mind things like lumber and other commodities that aren’t usually found in cities.
But when it comes to people, concentrating them close together is kind of a city’s whole deal. Why then pretend it is a rural area that requires travel over long distances?
What if I have a friend on the other side of town and we are meeting up at a restaurant on their side of town? Or maybe there is a high speed rail connecting a few cities and now I can visit my parents the next city over by taking the train. Or maybe I didnt manage to find a job in the more walkable part of town (we cant fix cities over night) but the transit hub can connect me to my job. Or maybe I usually walk the 20 minutes but I injured my leg and its only 5 minutes of walking if I take the bus.
I think transit belongs within a well designed city and for intercity connections. Even with the best urban planning, some cities will just be too big to get everywhere in the city just by walking. Some people might be fine staying in their neighborhood but others will want to see other people, try different restaurants, shop different places.
I would add people who change jobs and households with more than one worker.
Nobody is going to move every time they change jobs.
Approximately nobody is going to live close enough to the workplace of everyone in the household who works.
Approximately nobody is going to live close enough to the workplace of everyone in the household who works.
Then who is going to be left to support the walkable economy? You need approximately every working person who lives within that community to be active in the walkable economy, else you will quickly find that services are no longer within walking distance.
Are you imagining that you’ll hop on the train to go work on the other side of town, while someone living on that side of town hops on the train to work in your neighbourhood? That is not a good reason for transit at all. That’s just silly.
