“Giving people more viable alternatives to driving means more people will choose not to drive, so there will be fewer cars on the road, reducing traffic for drivers.”
Concise, easy to understand, and accurate. I have used it at least a dozen times and it is remarkable how well it works.
Also—
“A bus is about twice as long as a car so it only needs to have four to six passengers on board to be more efficient than two cars.”
Im actually surprised how well I am able to get to the city from my village. If I drive 3km with my bike to the next village I am able to get to the city every 30 Minutes.
If I drive 20 miles I can pay $10 to park in a lot where my car is guaranteed to be broken into 3 times a year so I can pay $8 to take a bus for the last 3 miles. And it only adds 60 minutes to my commute each way, provided I catch the bus!
Not everyone lives in Europe where cities were located and developed prior to cars and where being outside for 10 minutes isn’t lethaly dangerous in the summers for a significant percentage of the population.
I know that there are big parts of the world(even in Germany) where public transport is absolutely shit.thazs why I said that I’m quite surprised about how well it works for me. It does add quite some time(45mins with the bus and about 20-25 Minutes with my car), butbit works well for me.
I think the big issue a lot of people don’t understand is that due to housing costs some daily commutes in America cover crazy distances across areas with no transit.
I put 35,000 miles (56,000 km) a year on my car.
What a lot of people also don’t understand is that automobile-oriented zoning and development is one of the major factors driving up housing costs. In a nutshell, you pay a lot of money for housing in exchange for the privilege of driving long distances to it.
The opposite is true in my case. The long drive is what keeps my life affordable. Rent in town would be quadruple the cost for 40% of the living space. The long drive decreases my cost per square foot by an order of magnitude.
And the zoning in town has zero parking requirements. I know all about it because I work in the development department.
I essentially get paid $30 an hour for my commute with the savings and have a much bigger house.
That’s great for you, as an individual, but the fact is that that same pattern of distance vs. affordability holds true all over the U.S. Actually, I mean distance vs. cost. Here where I live, housing gets cheaper further from the central city, but the economic and population growth is still pushing the cost up out of the affordable range even for the “cheap” stuff.
When I worked at the local grocery, I had a cheap apartment because of long tenure and luck. All of my co-workers, though, commuted in from outlying communities. Not only did they pay half of their income in rent, but then they had car expenses on top of it.
Land is more expensive in city. That’s reality whether or not cars exist. When the city removed parking requirements housing and real estate costs continued to rise at the same or greater rates, except now landlords could charge an additional $400 a month for a parking spot as well since it became a luxury instead of a right for their renters.
The reality is when you live somewhere as spaced out as the US, owning a car is a requirement unless you want to essentially return to a feudalist system where people have to stay within a few miles of their homes for their entire lives while giving all their money to the landlord.
Hahaha, that is an amazing bifurcation fallacy! Cars or feudalism. Amazing then that Americans settled a whole continent without cars.
That aside, the truism in real estate is that the three most important characteristics of a property are: location, location, and location. Land in cities is always more expensive because its value is very closely tied up with the things it’s close to. In that sense, auto-oriented development is a massive theft of value, because everything in cities has to be further apart than it otherwise would be, in order to accommodate wide streets, and parking spaces.
Less philosophically, “more expensive” is a scale, not an absolute condition. If all of that space currently devoted to speedy car travel in cities were instead available for people to live in, yes, the central city would be the highest demand, and the most expensive. But the spatial scale of cost would be very different. My grocery store co-workers would still live on the edges, but the edges could be only a mile or two away, not 15 miles away. That, and lots of cities wouldn’t be structurally insolvent due to all the infrastructure they need to pay for.
(That last bit is a sore point for me, as city is facing a $22 million budget deficit, and they’re considering cutting things like emergency services, or even the municipal pool. While the water utility shores up century-old pipes, we’re still subsidizing the parking utility.)
Okay, that’s a lot of travelling. I knew that you’re quite fucked in the states, but I didnt knew it was that Bad.
I’m a somewhat bad case even here.
The rent for a tiny 1br apartment in the city where I work starts around $2500/month. For $725/month I can rent a 3 bed/2 bath trailer house about 90 minutes away.
Even without accounting for the extra space, I’m essentially getting paid $30/hr for my commute with the savings, which more than offsets the extra miles and gas.
Cities in the USA also existed before cars. As Not Just Bikes said “cities weren’t built for the car… they were bulldozed for the car”
the cities with the worst infrastructre are the ones that predated cars then were forcefully ripped up and paved. my town museum has pictures of people on horses and old timey big wheel bikes going peacefully down what is now a 6 lane road with no bike lanes and a sidewalk on only one side.
And now imagine all the people who are physically incapable to ride a bike for 3km, and where the village with a bus every 30 minutes is a mere fantasy.
If you want I could drive from my Village. My local administration arranged a service where they have a car that drives you to bus stops to improve access to public transport, but I don’t want to book that, because you usually need to book it some time in advance.
I just learned the other day that 40% of the residents of my city (Madison, Wisconsin) can’t or don’t drive. Apparently, this is a bit greater than the U.S. ratio, but not by much. So you’ve just articulated a really good reason to abolish cars.
For people in the cities, no problem. Outside, abolishing cars before you even think of creating viable means of transport is putting the cart before the horse.
I’m certain that my grandfather’s mobility scooter from back in the 1980’s could have covered 6km in day (there and back). I looked up the specs now, and there are mobility scooters that can go 40 miles. So, the alternative already exists. If folks can’t ride a bicycle 3km, a mobility scooter will do just fine.