“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.”
If you buy a new couch, how do you get it to your door? A truck.
If someone has a great attack, what do you call for? An ambulance.
99% of the road infrastructure requirements we have with developers aren’t about minimum parking or sprawl, but about having minimum leave sizes and turning radius for fire trucks.
Even if personal vehicles weren’t a thing, we’d still need most of the road infrastructure we have to move goods and services and provide access for emergency vehicles. Adding parking spaces over subgrade detention where the weight of a building can’t be located anyway doesn’t significantly spread things out.
The chief generators of traffic here are the high cost of land in cities, the dangerous heat levels (people who aren’t in shape, children, and the elderly can be killed by a 15-minute walk in the summer), and the insane focus on in-person office work.
I had to come into the office a few times during the lockdown, and my commute was reduced by an hour each way. Most of the people working from home during that time should still be working from home today. It would solve the traffic and real estate issues by giving people the freedom to live where they want.
Saying “cars bad” and thinking that’s a solution screams of living in a fantasy world. Get a degree in planning them go work in an area where we have these problems and you’ll quickly learn that it can’t be solved by city planning.
We don’t spend decades working on these problems and then increase the lane count because we’re lazy. We do it because it’s the only thing we can do that alleviates any issues.
This to me comes across as reaching: It’s easy to design streets that are for people, but accommodate the occasional delivery vehicle, or ambulance. (A standard ambulance is only about 8 feet wide.) How often are people buying new couches or having heart attacks, anyway? We also don’t need most of the road infrastructure for transport of goods, and service vehicles. Every city street, county road, state highway, or Interstate highway that I’ve ever driven on, anywhere, has a vast majority of consisting of personal vehicles, with the exception of I-80/94 through Gary, Indiana. Freight-carrying trucks aren’t even allowed in the 3rd, left-most lane most of the time. Suburban streets are crazy wide; much wider than needed for freight delivery, or even the large units that fire officials insist upon. Smaller fire trucks exist, too, and are very effective where they are used. And, even if subgrade detention is the best solution in a particular situation, something like, say, a park can go on top, and offer much better infiltration than a parking lot. I know of stormwater vaults in large buildings, so they don’t necessarily preclude buildings on a site. In any case, how many parking lots have a detention basin underneath?
Lastly, you’re severely misrepresenting my point of view by comparing to wailing, “cars bad,” and thinking that’s a solution. No, I look to solutions that cities around the world (including my own, in some limited cases) have actually, successfully implemented. Adding lanes is the only politically viable solution sometimes, but it mostly just makes the problems worse in the long-run.