it may be the last time the Cannonball Run record will ever be broken
pre covid record: 27h 25m, average speed 103mph
during covid record: 25h 39m, average speed 110mph
just looked this up because i never heard of it and uhh, good. what a stupid record. just illegally drive an average of 110 mph across the US. pointless, wasteful, and dangerous. dumb ass drivers, man.
These are public roads with other drivers on them. It's stupid dangerous. Imagine some unlucky family loses their lives because the driver lost control at 150.
I mean there’s race tracks for races and roads for commuting.
This is no different than the people with dirt bikes taking over city streets to do wheelies and stuff - there’s designated places for that
I travel for work, and happen to install/service some of the equipment used in COVID testing, which meant i flew A LOT during the pandemic: flying was *amazing*. Planes were half full, at best. Airports were a ghost town and you could get a seat at the bar of any joint in any airport anytime.
AND they would make you to-go beers in inconspicuous cups to take onboard and everyone knew but no one said shit. It was a glorious time except for the million+ dead and all
>you could get a seat at the bar of any joint in any airport anytime.
I had to fly during the weird COVID period where seating in the cafe areas, bars, and restaurants were all closed for "safety." So instead everyone got their food to go, crowded up at the gate seating, and tried to balance everything on their laps just inches away from everyone else.
I miss the no traffic, delivery or curb side service everywhere and everywhere was quiet. No lines. Going somewhere was so peaceful. Even going for walks to parks was quiet!
Unless you're one of those workers who depended on the patronage of those now working from home. Like baristas, waiters, and vendors in downtown businesses.
I don’t know about your metro area, but when places stated to open back up but office workers were still working from home it didn’t kill things. You really just lose the lunch service. People still get their coffee in the morning and go out to dinner or nightlife.
So you're saying someone gets up in the morning, gets dressed, drives downtown to get a coffee, then goes back home puts on sweat pants and relaxes until dinner, gets dressed again, goes to a downtown restaurant, and had dinner.
I'm saying I don't believe you. I know I didn't do any of that when I worked from home. I also know that when I did go to restaurants for dinner, they were mostly empty. In the early days, those that weren't limiting customers did not get my custom.
Yes they were empty during COVID lockdown but now that they’re open full send they’re do just fine here. A lot of people in DC still work from home and their coffee shops and restaurants are busy. Sure you won’t get the suburban commuters for a morning service anymore but you’re acting like people don’t live in the city. We very much do. Then those people from the burbs go in the evenings. We go to concerts, restaurants, comedy shows. But you’re right could just be my city. There is a lot of money flowing here.
DC is not the rest of the nation. Most people live on the edges of the city not in the city. If a coffee shop or restaurant is in the edges, yeah they might do alright.
Having said all that, I was talking mostly during the lockdown. Things have returned to close to normal in the past 2 years except downtown in most towns is still suffering.
I used to see a lot of people saying how much they preferred 4x10, which made me think they had nothing else to do during the week besides work and eat
After watching traffic enough, it almost feels like one lane only to stop people swooping between lanes and making people hit their brakes (causing the chain slowdowns) would be best.
Nah, having multi-lane highways is fine, to a point. That point is likely not more than a 6 lane highway (3 in any direction.)
The actual solution is having walkable cities with mixed residential buildings and robust public transportation. Which only happens after you realize that cars are the problem that need to be solved. America used to have European-style cities, but bulldozed it in the name of the car. It will suck to reverse course on this, but it's what NA needs to do if we want to actually fix the car problem.
The 5% on the road that are assholes cause 95% of the problems. If everyone just drove the same speed +/- 5mph and didn't merge like it's a movie car chase then we'd all be so much better off.
A single collision because of these fuckwits cost everyone backed up behind them like 100,000 total manhours. We've all collectively lost a dozen years worth of life because of a single selfish person.
Without watching the video. Yes it is fucking possible to fix it. Invest in fucking public transport. If it’s cheaper and faster to go by train subway etc many people won’t take the car and traffic eases.
Not that I’m arguing public transport isn’t a huge part of the issue in the US but I’m not sure it even solves the problem. Speaking just from a point of view of Seoul, South Korea. They have amazing metro system, and bus services with bus lanes not the mention the sidewalks are packed also because it’s pretty easy to just walk for things. But there is still a problem with traffic, along with jam packed metros and buses lol. I think this issue is just inevitable in major cities.
It’s a combination of better land use and transportation systems.
A combination of white flight, federally subsidized highways and roads, and exclusionary zoning meant that we developed with intentional distance between our housing and our jobs. This means people are having to travel much greater distances to get to their destinations. This makes walking and biking impossible and transit very difficult to operate at scale.
Thus our transportation system caters to car dependency which is horribly inefficient.
Cities by itself are weird bottlenecks and highly efficient money makers for the economy.
But traffic jams are also a thing of: everyone going to and from work at the same time. So I don't think a transport network should be designed to handle all of the peak load, it should be spread out..... and that will only happen if you do NOT fix all jams.
Let people pay more for trains, busses, cars during rush hour. That'll teach em.
It’s not just investment. No politician wants to be the one that’s responsible for using eminent domain to get all the land needed for a project that the public won’t see the benefit of for decades.
It’s been a long time since they’ve had to do large scale exercises of eminent domain to put in a road system. Anymore when they do it’s for it’s to extend an existing system or to connect existing systems. They are relatively small projects compared to putting an entire light rail system into already populated and built out areas.
If an area doesn’t have existing light rail routes, you need to build a hell of a lot of it before it starts being useful to anyone but a small handful of the population for very specific destinations.
I’ve been watching the trolley system here in San Diego expand over almost the past 30 years. There have been huge improvements to it as it expands but it’s still mostly useless to a large portion of the county because the lines don’t run close enough where most people live or where they need to go.
They just did a huge project to extend the system from downtown up to UCSD. Planning for that extension started in 1986. Construction just finished in 2021.
That system has been getting built for almost half a century at this point. It started out just connecting our downtown with the San Ysidro border crossing (with stops in between). I don’t know that most metro areas have two end points for a light rail system that are as big a bang for the buck that can be used to justify the initial creation of a system as we did.
Literally an HOA in LA in the early 90s said officially “The only people who will take the subway are the maids who work in the hotels” and he not only want admonished, but people rallied around it and helped block any light rail / subway to the west side of LA. Then in the 2010’s when the city actually forced their way to build an metro to Santa Monica, the same HOA blocked a bike path through their portion by hinting at brown criminals coming into their neighborhoods to steal their TVs. And they successfully blocked the bike path. Like these mfers think B&E’s happen and they take all the loot on bike?
This is the Cheviot Hills Home Owners association if anyone wants to read up on it and get mad.
They can go over or under in *most* cases.
Yes some may get EDed but for the future it is inevitable.
Our current system of car reliance is stupid and not scalable.
Unfortunately, going over or under is VERY expensive and public transit is often unpopular because the benefits aren't obvious unless you're someone who can ride it and save a lot of money.
The problem is easy to fix in theory, the practical issue is that most large urban areas in the U.S. are currently controlled by individuals who have bought into progressive policy pushed by NGOs that exist solely to leech money for an executive directors expense account, custom home and new luxury vehicle...
You can widen streets by increasing public easements on sale of property. Updating city code to make new construction conform to future development. Widening roads for bus lanes or widening sidewalks for protected bike lanes and pedestrian paths when enough property has been cycled through. It is possible to build around or move back historic landmarks and buildings in many areas. Even just widening portions of streets or sidewalks can be incredibly beneficial.
If a street cant be widened fully but only partially, protected curbside pull-out stops for buses can be created, medians to protect pedestrians can be built that do not interfere with the flow of traffic, additional parking for local business can be added.
There are fucking solutions, its just that the people pushing videos like these are ideologically opposed to them.
In Europe they use intelligent sensors and cameras to monitor traffic congestion to increase traffic flow. In the U.S. we predominately use timers to intentionally increase congestion. Progressive policy in cities actually promotes increased congestion, with concepts like traffic calming that comes from Europe. In Europe traffic calming is typically used to curb unsafe driving behavior in residential neighborhoods. In the U.S. traffic calming is used to generate fucktarded levels of congestion on primarily major thoroughfares. The way U.S. cities employ traffic calming actually makes residential neighborhoods less safe as traffic is rerouted through residential neighborhoods to escape its congestion. The congestion backs up onto the larger highways and interstates and fucks up inter city and inter state travel with people trying use it as a means to navigate the city.
These policies create extended travel times, emergency response times, increased pollution, increased consumer prices, increased turn over rate for business, increased cost of living....Its just absolute insanity.
Adding a lane to an interstate or a highway as population increases works, there is nothing wrong with that practice, the issue isnt with adding lanes its with the fucking city its either running though or adjacent to thats become an absolute clusterfuck.
We can build public transit a lot faster if we aren't as inefficient as the useless California officials who have gone over budget before they even placed a single rail.
It feels pointless in this country. There's highway that connects the regions 3 largest cities. It had a huge median in the middle of it that would have been absolutely perfect for two lines of rail. Nope, just going to widen the whole highway from 2 to 4 lanes instead. It needs expanded because so many people commute between the three cities.
Did this video mention how a single cargo ship managed to reduce the traffic on a bridge near Baltimore to *Zero*?
Because, if not, I don't really see how they're a believable source.
Also encouraging more telecommuting for jobs where that is possible. If we could get half the companies to show telecommuting 2 days a week, that's 20% less traffic for everyone!
I didn’t say 100% Homeoffice. But interesting. TIL that the word telecommuting is a thing. At least where I come from it’s all called Homeoffice. 1 day a week. 2 days. All week. It’s all home office. Just a different amount of Homeoffice.
And that’s exactly the problem of the us. There is way to much focus on individual transport because you guys are just used to it. It’s not a problem at all to be near other people for a sort amount of time of it’s way faster. Also as I am living in a city with proper public transport that is only the case during rush hour and pretty much anytime else it’s quite nice and quite because if a subway train comes every 3-4 min then there aren’t that many people per train.
Go look up videos of the new York subway and the poor people on it. Or videos of the cramped Japanese railways during rush hour. Does any of that look appealing to you? The only way public transportation would be viable is if the ticket prices were high enough to exclude most people.
You won’t believe it but I already visited New York and yes even if there is much to improve (somehow everything is old so I guess the investment into the system stopped at some point which shouldn’t happen) I would take the subway all day long before driving one meter in that city.
And I know videos of Tokyo and besides the rush hour traffic I don’t see a problem at all there. It’s clean and looks quite usable and I would also late it all day long before driving and searching for a parking space in that city. And I think you iced something up. The poor people are the ones that you need to get away from the streets. It needs to be really cheap. And why. Because there are way more poor people that rich ones. So if you build a subway only for rich people that won’t solve shit.
5$ per way is still quite expensive. Where I come from you pay 365€ per year/1€ per day (everybody has the yearly ticket if not it costs 5,80 per day or 2,40 one way) and we have one of the best public transport networks in the world. Also those things you mention are all results because the public transport is shit over there. A proper public transport system isn’t like the and I hope you can experience one in your life one day.
With 5$ per ride a system like that should easily be profitable. I guess there are just not enough people that buy into it because it’s terrible (your words not mine) so the city would have to step in and just improve it until the point where enough people want to use it so that it can become profitable and in the mean time it doesn’t matter. A city/state/country doesn’t have to be profitabel all the time. That’s also a huge issue of the us that pretty much everything has to perform like a private company. And if it’s really not possible then raise the income tax by 1% or tax anything else and it pays for it. Problem solved. It’s for the common good and that’s what taxes are for.
Faster is a huge problem in many places I’ve lived that have a functional enough mass transit system to try and use. And the difference in time is big enough to make mass transit not viable.
Than you didn’t live a a city with actually good public transport (not in the us). Where I live in Vienna it’s most of the time not even close and inside the city you are pretty much always faster with public transport/the subway.
Maybe, but here is an experience that comes to mins
As an example, I used to regularly travel between norther San Jose and San Francisco. It was a trip of about 72km which isn't terribly unusual in some areas. Ignoring travel time to the regional rail station, the trip on just that part of transit was about 105 minutes (a bit over an hour and a half). If I tried to take transit to the station, that would add another 30-40 minutes.
Even in the evenings when there was pretty heavy traffic, I could drive the distance in about 45 minutes.
The reason for traveling that far was to receive instruction in a hobby of mine at the time and San Francisco was the only place I could find good quality instructors. But that's a different story.
When I lived in DC, my situation was a bit different because the place where I worked was about 65KM or so outside the city (roughly straight line distance, not actual highway mines) and the nature of the location was one that was not served by transit at all. I used the Metro to go into the city to socialize so I didn't need to worry about parking, alcohol consumption, or a street design that could get confusing in some places. These trips were generally under 20km (again, straight line distance) and were 45 minutes to an hour.
My experiences in Atlanta were that they had no appreciable mass transit system at all. Definitely a city built around cars.
When I lived in the Philadelphia area, I wasn't using transit much for socializing. I did use it a few times to head into the city. Straight line distance would be about 37km. The train times were roughly an hour for the ride. I would also fly in to the area to visit family. If I took transit to get me 5-6km from where I was going, it would be about 90 minutes vs 45 by car.
A huge factor in why transit is so slow in the US are the number of stops that are made on these rather long routes. For example, that train ride from San Jose to San Francisco is 22 stops. For my example in Philadelphia, its 20 stops and a transfer.
Yeah, I don't think it would ever be faster. I live in DC and it takes me 15 minutes to drive to work. If I took public transit it would take over an hour.
I've had faster, or at least equal, before! Trains can bypass traffic altogether, it's a very big advantage when going to a downtown area. (I stopped paying for parking because I worked out that a bus ticket was cheaper and meant I spent the same amount of time, but I didn't have to be *driving*. But if there had been park and ride consistently available at a nearby station, it would definitely have been faster - the biggest thing keeping then in parity was a bad intersection by my house the bus went through.
Once traffic eases though people will switch back to cars. Cars are simply more convenient and comfortable than mass transit, except for all the other cars. So yea, we will always have traffic.
You don’t know what you’re talking about really. The plan to invest in public transport necessarily includes reducing lanes and forcing cars to slow down.
You’ve hopefully heard of the affect that no matter how many lanes you add to a highway, you will never solve traffic as more people will drive if traffic is lessened until it’s back to being horrible.
The inverse effect occurs as well. Reducing lanes makes traffic worse and forces people to switch to public transportation or biking. It’s really not a hard problem to solve.
And change zoning laws as well as improve the densification of residents and commercial areas.
You can't complain about traffic and lack of public transit then move out to the suburbs a half hour to hour away from where you work.
>Cars are simply more convenient and comfortable than mass transit, except for all the other cars.
Hahahahahahaha you proved yourself wrong within the same sentence. Cars are only more convenient because we designed cities to move as many cars as possible instead of as many people as possible. It's like a left handed person saying it's easier to just use their weaker hand for things, yeah of course that'd make sense in a world designed for right handed people. If you only enjoy driving when the roads are empty, then do you actually enjoy driving?
Driving around New York City would be great, except for all the tens of thousands of people trying to do the same thing. That’s the point. The infrastructure is actually car-centric, even in places like NYC. It’s the fact that only a tiny fraction of the population can actually avail of that infrastructure without it turning into gridlock that is the problem.
In comparison if you visit some old towns in Europe or Asia they are actually hostile to cars so cars can barely move faster than walking if they can fit in the roads at all. In that case most people will choose to walk and only those with ailments or need (like moving heavy things) will choose cars.
So you can’t just build more transit in places like the US, you have to change the entire way cities and suburbs are built.
They are essentially saying the same things. People take the most convenient form of transportation. Most of America only invested in one form of transportation. And they are worth living in, but they are miserable to get around in. It would be best if you had multiple ways of getting around. With that said, you should implement more “anti-car” policies for many reasons. They are murdering us at ridiculous rates. They create an immense amount of microplastic (which we still have no idea how that affects us). They are terrible for the environment, they need valuable storage space that could be used by more businesses, their exhaust also create negative outcomes. I am sure there is much more. But I am not invested enough to give it more thought. Taxing cars pigovian tax.
> Once traffic eases though people will switch back to cars.
This is the trick. As traffic starts to ease, you start deleting roads and parking to make better use of the space.
You have to be really out of touch or be overly paranoid if you think public transportation is full of crime. Just say you don’t like the sight of poorer people.
You’re more likely in danger of a car crash.
No. The solution is to build fucking proper public transport over there and you can look at Europe and Asia as an example that it does indeed work and that even if you don’t believe it professionals with suits and everything will ride it and that it’s not a cesspool at all if done right. Why the fuck is that so hard to understand for Americans. Is it such a hard concept that you can live in a city without needing a car at all?
I live in Houston. I can start at my house — in Houston — and drive, mostly at freeway speed and in roughly a line, for an hour and a half and still be in Houston.
Houston *sprawls*.
I went back to college a bit ago; it was 32 miles from my house. I looked into public transport as a backup: I could take the park-and-ride into downtown Houston, yes. But then I’d have to switch lines back out, then walk several blocks to switch to another line; average total transit time: two hours, each way. (Did I mention frequent 100 degree heat and terrible humidity?) Limited night options and through a not-so-great neighborhood. Or I could drive straight there for an hour’s drive in normal traffic.
I used to work 10 miles from work, but as they reduced headcount they had me driving to points all over town to pick up headcount. Then got a work-from-home job (woo!) but then they went under and my current job is now 42 miles from my house.
You’d have to practically bulldoze most US cities and start over from scratch to build “walking” cities. We’re a young country, with infrastructure mostly built around the car.
Maybe we believe them because we actually live there and realize the sheer enormity of the US and even certain cities. I live in a NA city that is ranked better than many EU and Asian public transit systems. It is still faster, or at worst equal to drive yourself, and it hasn't fixed traffic despite transit always being full.
Absolutely true but if you don’t start to change things it won’t get better. Building more and more lanes will not solve shit. But yes a new zoning law would also have tones to allow for mixed development and not just everything single family home suburbs which don’t work at all.
Ya seattle had/has terrible traffic infastructure and the lightrail going in has been painfully slow (mistakes/tunneling/voting/deciding etc) but every station has us slowly climbing out of a deep dark hole. Along with protected bike lanes and other features. I can now lightrail/bike to work without being on the road with cars. Ya its just (one less car) but with ebikes becoming/being a thing there are a lot of bikers here.
We're also *used* to this. It's a tough fix. A good chunk of ua commute a good distance to work because we live where it's cheap and work where the pay is good.
Yeah it basically a system with kinda good intentions of giving people more freedom (I know you guys like that) but essentially the system fucked itself over more and more until today where it’s super duper fucked and really hard to get out of.
The only way to "fix" traffic is to essentially provide reliable, safe, and prevalent public transportation. Light rail, buses, and full on trains. Not just for major arteries, but also for shorter journeys within city areas. Subways etc. One of the biggest downfalls of public transport in the US is the fact that the last 2-5 miles of the journey leaves a person needing a bike, car, or just being forced to walk for an hour or more.
As things go on the problem just gets worse and worse until the bandaid gets ripped off. Especially as more cities have been building out rather than up.
>One of the biggest downfalls of public transport in the US is the fact that the last 2-5 miles of the journey leaves a person needing a bike, car, or just being forced to walk for an hour or more.
You just explained obesity as well.
People not willing to bike, or walk..... while that would cover their exercise at the same time.... how efficient use of their time would that be?
So NO, you don't have to make sure people can reach their final destination. Here in the Netherlands the final stretch of public transit is usually made by bike or legs. That just makes sense.
So....MAYBE the US wants to invest in bike lanes.... E-bikes exist, and they go wicked fast. ;)
just one more lane bro. i promise bro just one more lane and it'll fix everything bro. bro. just one more lane. please just one more. one more lane and we can fix this whole problem bro. bro cmon just give me one more lane i promise bro. bro bro please i just need one more lane t
Ugh. My workplace switched leases from one building to another. They keep trying to get us excited about it and it's like...we don't care if there's a fucking serenity space that we're not allowed to visit on the clock anyways. I still have to spend an hour+ commuting 3 days a week. And in the new building, you want us to use a hotelling system... even though everyone comes in on the same 3 days (because that's mandated) and so there is no reason to not give everyone a permanent desk.
It is so fucking frustrating to sink extra 5 hours a week into driving to work and have my boss giving me shit because I'm tired, then be expected to go yay, woohoo for a building that means no real change whatsoever to me. Except that they might want us in FOUR days to justify the new lease. Fuck.
While that is a problem, the bigger issue is zoning laws. Many local government zoning laws make it impossible for residential and commercial zones to mix or be close to each other.
Public transport or this only gets worse everywhere. It’s basic economic principles at work.
We will run out of space to put new roads for cars before we ever see a day without traffic.
we could stop designing all of our cities to only be traversed via car or bus?
na, that doesnt benefit the auto and oil industry. what ever will they do if people dont have to drive places!?
Reddit has a hard on about complaining about adding lanes and cite induced demand, but don't even seem to understand what it means. Induced demand doesn't mean that adding a lane is always a terrible action because it increases traffic and congestion.
What induced demand means is that you have created a road that is overall faster so more people are going to use it. This pulls people off of competing highways or local neighborhood roads which will eventually lead to congestion. Adding another lane fixes the congestion but eventually you get into an issue where you have to build parallel highways to allow for proper exiting capacity for each road at each overpass. Doable, but it becomes expensive. What most cities do to compensate for this is expand highways one at a time and add a lane to each of their main thoroughfares over time.
City planners like this because it keeps traffic away from occupied spaces, recreational areas, businesses and schools that have a habit of hampering the flow of traffic. It also ends up freeing up these spaces for bus and public transportation to freely flow through. While it ends up being faster owning a car and traveling via the freeway, the city bus gets a boost from a faster commute through residential, commercial and industrial zones.
The main issue with traffic isn't really the infrastructure side of it. It has a lot to do with the "democratic" community zoning regulations and standards. Because while this isn't a problem unique to America.... it's certainly more common in America than anywhere else. If you go to most of Europe, everyone you really want is in your area. And with few exceptions you can travel to most parts of cities and survive within 10 minutes of your workplace.
From your other link:
> Historically, demand forecasts in urban transportation planning have been based on
exogenous variables such as land use, population, employment, and income.
Induced demand isn't a bad thing. It's just having main higher speed roads then using slower arterial roads.
The bigger problem is that rich people are generally the ones who get to decide where the roads go.
> The main issue with traffic isn't really the infrastructure side of it. It has a lot to do with the "democratic" community zoning regulations and standards.
My city ditched the zoning laws. That's not the problem. It's that developers are weasels and rich people are assholes.
>My city ditched the zoning laws. That's not the problem. It's that developers are weasels and rich people are assholes.
It's part of the problem. Relaxing zoning laws is a great idea but it's less than a half measure when HOA's can still object to what's being done with land they don't even own and when public transit sucks. And of course land use laws still matter.
Somewhat notoriously, some cities in Texas brag about not having zoning laws but their land use laws are insanely aggressive to the point that they loop around and accomplish the same thing.
>Induced demand isn't a bad thing. It's just having main higher speed roads then using slower arterial roads.
The problem is that in the US we make no attempt to distinguish between *roads* and *streets.* Roads connect destinations, streets are where people actually live and do things. Failing to establish basic standards for planning the two is where you get a stroad. Stroads are bad for everyone.
And yeah, the problem with induced demand is that frequently neighborhoods are destroyed to make way for high way expansion that then spends tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, to result in a net increase in freeway usage and increased travel times.
https://edmonton.citynews.ca/2023/10/24/edmonton-new-zoning-bylaw/
My friend has an overpass being built outside his bedroom window because rich people get to decide where roads and trains go and they don't want that stuff anywhere near them. All the zoning law changes do is make is so poor people have even less rights to stop aggressive developers.
I'm very much not a nimby and I like good planning but these guys are full of crap and they're costing us a lot of money building stuff that should be built differently. It's frustrating.
Okay, so we live pretty close to each other. Edmonton hasn't removed their zoning laws just allowed for broadly missing middle housing. They're turning corner lots into mixed commercial-residential but mostly not up-zoning. Developers want to build large residential units but they're not expanding any condo or large commercial developments. At most you're seeing a convenience store in every neighborhood and a skinny between house in every four homes.
Most of this does nothing to restrict the amount of travelling in the city. Unfortunately the idiots of the city have called the "15 Minute City" a conspiracy theory to restrict freedom of travel.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1dmlbaf/how_we_destroyed_hartford_connecticut/
I watched this video earlier. If you did an overhead look at Edmonton and Hartford, you'd see a lot of differences. Edmonton has way higher density and we have a ton of missing middle housing.
We have 1.5 million people here, they have about a million people there.
There is some similarities though. Both cities razed their historical cores to give way to cars and office buildings. A lot of cities did that and it absolutely destroyed walkability all across North America.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-s-plan-to-stop-sprawl-faces-pushback-from-developers-over-housing-affordability-1.7241110
Developers here are annoying. Since the 90s, they've had mad opportunities to create good communities but that doesn't make them quite as much money and they have no incentive to even care about good planning. For them, adding a sidewalk to make it easier to walk through neighborhoods is a loss because it's one less house they can build. Our older communities are better because they were designed with people in mind.
I think we have different perspectives on this because I've had to deal with zoning and you're kinda on the outside.
This is my [exhibit A](https://www.google.ca/maps/@53.544836,-113.4691498,3a,75y,247.01h,77.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sLfBZlxAbmVwrcs3uC0__CQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu). This is a lot I've looked at very closely over the years because my company did the demolition that built this wonderful 2 meter deep dangerous AF hole in the ground. There's a story with this property. The first company to buy it applied for permits and met all city standards. But the community looked at it and indicated that it violated the community standard, as in... it just didn't look like it fit in the neighborhood. And you can slide around through the neighborhood and see there's no real definitive look here, it's just a bunch of random building designs.
So what the developer did was hire one of the companies under our network to do the demo. And there's this hole there for the last 5 years that is 2 meters deep and un-developable. Proposals have all gone forth but nothing can be built there. Some of the proposals included a nine unit condo, a three house townhouse, a small shop, and two other building designs. All were opposed by the community.
This is three city lots that used to have The [Tree Frog Press](https://cityarchives.edmonton.ca/tree-frog-press-2) on it that used to house a small business and one family. But now not a single thing can be developed on this high value triple lot because of NIMBYs in the area. Developers WANT to build housing but there's so much community resistance about building anything at all. The developers mostly spend their time building in the newer southern part of the city because that's a place with no community pushback on any of this stuff.
"What induced demand means is that you have created a road that is overall faster so more people are going to use it."
I think when people talk about induced demand they are referring to people living further away and commuting further rather than an increase in efficiency. Yes people are using it more because it is faster like you said but things are not getting better because the increased road size means everything is a bit more spaced out and the number of people getting from their home to their work remains the same. I think this is an extreme example since there is a balance between cost and benefit but that's the point being made.
Hey that second paragraph sounds a lot like Los Angeles solution to traffic. Am I mistaken?
Edit : also can you source, from my understanding strong town is based off a municipal planners views and experience, which is the best information I have. This is not my career, seems like something you know more about?
[Here's](https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/induced_traffic_and_induced_demand_lee.pdf) a paper breaking it all down with entry level and more advanced level analysis.
I've noticed that when schools are closed, there's about 50% less traffic on the roads. It's time to make all school buses accordions and pack 400 kids into them so all these people don't have to drive in the morning.
To be honest. Traffic is mainly caused by everyone being too assed to merge properly give proper distance and not drive like idiots. You can't solve traffic until you take away the selfish and idiotic people from driving.
An example. During rush hour I like to give about a decent amount of space so I never have to hit my brakes. Usually about 10 or more car lengths. Usually my speed is about 20. This not only lets me cruise at a solid speed but prevents the accordian from happening behind me. But every single time. Someone flies around me at 40. Runs into the traffic ahead of me and slams on their brakes. It's their perception that they are going to make it there faster being up the ass of the line in front.
Plus Idk how many times I've seen people cut people off from merging because being one car length behind is just unacceptable for them. Not to mention speeding. Texting while driving and swerving in and out of lanes to get somewhere 30 seconds faster. This all contributes to the mess.
Don't get me wrong. Exits get backed up. On ramps get backed up. But half the time when traffic just magically stops. and then magically clears up. It's people being idiots.
It’s all about how many cars can move though the road per unit of time, this can be difficult to judge on a freeway, but if you know where the exact bottleneck is, keep your following time as tight as safely possible (notice i say time, NOT distance).
My commute is 55-60 mph 4-lane highways (2 in each direction with a chicken lane or divided) with stop lights, and a few of them are the main bottleneck lights. The selfish people are those not paying attention and leaving 6+ second between them and the car in front of them getting through the bottleneck light, while 3 other cars could’ve made it through the light, thus contributing to the backup.
Don’t get me wrong, coast up to red lights, keep safe spacing at high speeds, but while 10 car lengths are needed at 70 mph, it’s THE problem at 10 mph… when the 10 mph part is the bottle neck of the traffic (on a freeway, this would be at a merge point when traffic is starting to accelerate again, but people dgaf and keep going 10 mph and leave gobs of time between them and the car that accelerated long ago in front of them.
Example: 2 lanes, 1 car every 2 seconds per lane, is 3600 cars an hour and free flow. 2 lanes and 1 car per lane every 4 seconds is 1,800 cars per hour, the demand is 3,000 cars per hour, and within that hour your sitting in a theoretical traffic jam waiting for those 600 cars that accrued in front of you over the course of that last hour to clear before you can go.
TLDR: be smart, pay attention, and do your part to safely minimize your contribution to traffic.
The bigger problem is people coasting in the passing lane instead of using it for passing. If you're coasting in the left lane and then getting angry when people are trying to go around you, you're the problem. The worst is people in the left lane matching the speed of the person to their right. This forces the people behind to either get stuck or try to zoom around like you mention.
I mean I've never felt the urge to swing around traffic 2 lanes because someone's going the speed limit. That sounds like a personal issue for the people who are late or impatient. Don't get me wrong some people are idiots. But that's my point. People are idiots and cause issues.
Bad drivers do contribute to congestion, but cars inherently cause more congestion simply due to the space needed per person in a car. [See this example.](https://i.redd.it/78ayh26kx9oa1.jpg)
Building more roads just leads to more traffic. If cities spent as much on public transportation as much as they do on new roads, more people would use it because it would be better than driving.
We choose to lose at this point. Mass transit will always be voted down here. Your best bet for that sort of progress is to move somewhere else as not enough people care to vote for change to happen quickly enough.
We need road trains with dedicated lanes. I want to speed up, join a road train and then 10 of us just cruise along all linked and going the same speed, self driving while im sleeping/working, etc
That and better traffic control/lights
The reason why roads and bridge construction cost so much is for the following reasons: (1) In order to get Federal 50% match dollar for dollar you have to commit 20% of the budget to staff augmentation which do not contribute all to the project. (2) from engineering to construction multiple consultants and owners reps are involved that charge ‘raw hourly rate x 2.4 multiplier plus profit per hour. (3) Because projects are poorly designed with E&O the contractors always will have a claim for millions at the end of the job.
Don’t get me started on rail work in the USA. Compare the cost per mile in Europe vs. USA for dollar per mile?
If the option to walk 10 or so minutes to something that would transport me to my destination, or at least close to it, existed, that'd be great. And it's a great solution to cut down on congestion. With how vast and populated some urban areas in America are I just don't see that ever being feasible though. I've accepted that I'm gonna get the green weenie on my commute one way or the other at this point and embrace the suck.
Plus with how the weather has been this year, there's very little chance I'd be walking anywhere without it being a miserable experience anyway. First it was nearly constant rain, all day, every day for what seemed like months. There'd be one or two days here and there but not nearly enough that I'd wanna be outside for any length of time. Now that it's summer it's the heat. I'm as white as it gets without being albino. The sun is a deadly laser and we are not friends. The real feel/wet bulb temp or whatever you wanna call it is in the triple digits. I get red walking from the car to the house.
There's also the fact that my job has me all fuckin' over the place. I might have to transport people or materials, or drive 20 minutes to the nearest supplier. I work in construction management for a sub contractor so I'm rarely at the same place multiple days a week. Sometimes I have to leave hella early because the jobsite is 3 hours away, or I have a meeting at a specific time so I gotta try to plan that out and hope I don't end up waiting outside because I got there too early.
Ned Flanders looking motherfucker.
All of these channels that promote the whole 'cars bad' mentality are disingenuously lying to people. On the back end, it's an astroturfing campaign by developers to convince people that gentrifying low income communities is ok. They aren't altruistic fans of good urban planning. Developers, construction companies and probably politicians stand to make good cash by putting apartments and condos where poor people live.
Cars aren't bad things. Car dependence is a bad thing though.
Cars are really useful. They allow us the ability to travel long distances safely and comfortably. They also allow you the ability to haul stuff and carry people around. The hate against them is unfair in some cases and valid in others. Trucks are way too big. Cars cost way too much. Insurance is way too high. A lot of people simply can't afford it and need efficient public transit. At the same time, ever try going to a drive in on a bus? Cars allow a lot more freedom of mobility.
All I want is a small affordable truck. For me, I like having the ability to haul stuff. It's handy. I'm utilitarian. But, I also want an electric bike because they're amazingly useful. Get a little wagon. If you live in a decent area with local amenities, you can avoid driving and still get around fairly quick.
I assume you watched the video based on your first statement (lol), but I did not see or hear anything from this one that was particularly "cars are bad". In fact, he seems to acknowledge that cars are useful, needed, and wanted. His solutions at the end revolve around what you said: local design/planning that leads to local amenities such that the majority of people can avoid driving and still get around fairly quickly (bike, walk, bus, etc.)
This is the “all lives matters” stance. Gentrification is a problem. Adding density and transit increases land values which increases rents which push people out by increasing rents. This is a problem that I believe we agree needs to be solved. I have my own opinions on a solution, but that's out of scope for this post.
However, it's not just cost of rents that must be considered it also cost of car ownership vs cost of rents. For my personal experience my lifestyle improved greatly when moving to Brooklyn, I no longer needed my car, so I nno longer had to pay insurance, a monthly loan, gas, repairs (which was expensive because I couldn't afford a new car when I was young). That is not to mention all the socialexternalities that cars some with not the least of which is how often they kill us especially our youth. If you need me to list all of them I couldn't possibly. But sometime tomorrow I could give you data plus sources on the societal costs of car transit. That's not to say I believe cars shouldn't exist, its just I hard disagree that carBut there needs to be much more friction on driving vs other modes of transit. (that friction is a political solution and has a wide range of opinions and solutions )
The amount of traffic jams I've seen where its just one driver camping the left lane with 15 complacent drivers on their tail. People create their own traffic and then bitch about the road.
I actually know how to fix it but you guys won't like it. Starting in December 2024 we begin having a lottery for babies born. They will have their social security number start with either a number 1 2 or 3. If it is one they will drive a car. If it is a 2 they will drive a jet pack. If it is a 3 they will use a teleporter. So when they turn 16 they will be tested on whatever vehicle they were seleted for and they will NOT be allowed to use the other vehicles. (those appointed for cars can also use motorcycles and trucks. But can't fly planes and those who can use jet packs can use helicopterws an planes. None of them can drive boats except those who can use the teleporter)
Covid traffic was a high point in my lifetime
it may be the last time the Cannonball Run record will ever be broken pre covid record: 27h 25m, average speed 103mph during covid record: 25h 39m, average speed 110mph
The amount of prep and money the cannonball run takes to beat the record now makes it an impossible barrier to entry
Interesting
just looked this up because i never heard of it and uhh, good. what a stupid record. just illegally drive an average of 110 mph across the US. pointless, wasteful, and dangerous. dumb ass drivers, man.
Killjoy
These are public roads with other drivers on them. It's stupid dangerous. Imagine some unlucky family loses their lives because the driver lost control at 150.
*Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!*
I mean there’s race tracks for races and roads for commuting. This is no different than the people with dirt bikes taking over city streets to do wheelies and stuff - there’s designated places for that
They shoulda hired a better driver, I guess.
East bound and down (Alright wrong movie)
There'll be more pandemics, don't worry.
Yay! /s
I travel for work, and happen to install/service some of the equipment used in COVID testing, which meant i flew A LOT during the pandemic: flying was *amazing*. Planes were half full, at best. Airports were a ghost town and you could get a seat at the bar of any joint in any airport anytime. AND they would make you to-go beers in inconspicuous cups to take onboard and everyone knew but no one said shit. It was a glorious time except for the million+ dead and all
“Except” is pulling a lot of weight here lmao
>you could get a seat at the bar of any joint in any airport anytime. I had to fly during the weird COVID period where seating in the cafe areas, bars, and restaurants were all closed for "safety." So instead everyone got their food to go, crowded up at the gate seating, and tried to balance everything on their laps just inches away from everyone else.
Take me back
I seriously wish to go back to those day, sometimes, for the traffic.
I miss the no traffic, delivery or curb side service everywhere and everywhere was quiet. No lines. Going somewhere was so peaceful. Even going for walks to parks was quiet!
Thanos was right all along.
Yeah, just took a few million preventable deaths
The lack of traffic was great. Problem was there was nowhere to drive too as it was all closed.
I mean just having all workers who can work from home alone is a dream. It makes it better for those who can’t,
Unless you're one of those workers who depended on the patronage of those now working from home. Like baristas, waiters, and vendors in downtown businesses.
I don’t know about your metro area, but when places stated to open back up but office workers were still working from home it didn’t kill things. You really just lose the lunch service. People still get their coffee in the morning and go out to dinner or nightlife.
So you're saying someone gets up in the morning, gets dressed, drives downtown to get a coffee, then goes back home puts on sweat pants and relaxes until dinner, gets dressed again, goes to a downtown restaurant, and had dinner. I'm saying I don't believe you. I know I didn't do any of that when I worked from home. I also know that when I did go to restaurants for dinner, they were mostly empty. In the early days, those that weren't limiting customers did not get my custom.
Yes they were empty during COVID lockdown but now that they’re open full send they’re do just fine here. A lot of people in DC still work from home and their coffee shops and restaurants are busy. Sure you won’t get the suburban commuters for a morning service anymore but you’re acting like people don’t live in the city. We very much do. Then those people from the burbs go in the evenings. We go to concerts, restaurants, comedy shows. But you’re right could just be my city. There is a lot of money flowing here.
DC is not the rest of the nation. Most people live on the edges of the city not in the city. If a coffee shop or restaurant is in the edges, yeah they might do alright. Having said all that, I was talking mostly during the lockdown. Things have returned to close to normal in the past 2 years except downtown in most towns is still suffering.
Maybe some of those businesses should be located closer to where people live then US zoning is a mess
I had to drive to work, at the hospital, we weren’t closed!!
I moved across the US at peak lockdown. Good lord it was amazing.
COVID work from home air quality was amazing. Lame that everyone is trying to force return to office.
Covid traffic + Covid gas prices = good life.
Man i regularly day dream about it still. It was honestly the happiest I've ever been driving to work.
"we keep throwing cars and lanes at it but it just gets worse!!!"
We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!
4 day work week would be a good start
Fuck 4x10. 4x8 would be okay, but I think I'd prefer 5x7 or even 5x6
Well 5x7 or 5x6 won’t help traffic
They will if everybody starts at a different time.
You should look up the 100-80-100 model. No one is asking for 4x10!
I used to see a lot of people saying how much they preferred 4x10, which made me think they had nothing else to do during the week besides work and eat
i once heard it said that this like trying to lose weight by loosening your belt.
Just one more lane bro, please. I promise it will fix everything. Please bro. Please, just one lane. Please bro. Please. 😢
After watching traffic enough, it almost feels like one lane only to stop people swooping between lanes and making people hit their brakes (causing the chain slowdowns) would be best.
Nah, having multi-lane highways is fine, to a point. That point is likely not more than a 6 lane highway (3 in any direction.) The actual solution is having walkable cities with mixed residential buildings and robust public transportation. Which only happens after you realize that cars are the problem that need to be solved. America used to have European-style cities, but bulldozed it in the name of the car. It will suck to reverse course on this, but it's what NA needs to do if we want to actually fix the car problem.
Hear hear
The 5% on the road that are assholes cause 95% of the problems. If everyone just drove the same speed +/- 5mph and didn't merge like it's a movie car chase then we'd all be so much better off. A single collision because of these fuckwits cost everyone backed up behind them like 100,000 total manhours. We've all collectively lost a dozen years worth of life because of a single selfish person.
Should be throwing bricks instead, obviously.
Without watching the video. Yes it is fucking possible to fix it. Invest in fucking public transport. If it’s cheaper and faster to go by train subway etc many people won’t take the car and traffic eases.
Not that I’m arguing public transport isn’t a huge part of the issue in the US but I’m not sure it even solves the problem. Speaking just from a point of view of Seoul, South Korea. They have amazing metro system, and bus services with bus lanes not the mention the sidewalks are packed also because it’s pretty easy to just walk for things. But there is still a problem with traffic, along with jam packed metros and buses lol. I think this issue is just inevitable in major cities.
It’s a combination of better land use and transportation systems. A combination of white flight, federally subsidized highways and roads, and exclusionary zoning meant that we developed with intentional distance between our housing and our jobs. This means people are having to travel much greater distances to get to their destinations. This makes walking and biking impossible and transit very difficult to operate at scale. Thus our transportation system caters to car dependency which is horribly inefficient.
Cities by itself are weird bottlenecks and highly efficient money makers for the economy. But traffic jams are also a thing of: everyone going to and from work at the same time. So I don't think a transport network should be designed to handle all of the peak load, it should be spread out..... and that will only happen if you do NOT fix all jams. Let people pay more for trains, busses, cars during rush hour. That'll teach em.
It’s not just investment. No politician wants to be the one that’s responsible for using eminent domain to get all the land needed for a project that the public won’t see the benefit of for decades.
Like they do for roads?
It’s been a long time since they’ve had to do large scale exercises of eminent domain to put in a road system. Anymore when they do it’s for it’s to extend an existing system or to connect existing systems. They are relatively small projects compared to putting an entire light rail system into already populated and built out areas. If an area doesn’t have existing light rail routes, you need to build a hell of a lot of it before it starts being useful to anyone but a small handful of the population for very specific destinations. I’ve been watching the trolley system here in San Diego expand over almost the past 30 years. There have been huge improvements to it as it expands but it’s still mostly useless to a large portion of the county because the lines don’t run close enough where most people live or where they need to go. They just did a huge project to extend the system from downtown up to UCSD. Planning for that extension started in 1986. Construction just finished in 2021. That system has been getting built for almost half a century at this point. It started out just connecting our downtown with the San Ysidro border crossing (with stops in between). I don’t know that most metro areas have two end points for a light rail system that are as big a bang for the buck that can be used to justify the initial creation of a system as we did.
What he meant is no politician wants to be the one who says poors can get rides to non-poors neighborhoods. Think of the backyards! 🙏
Literally an HOA in LA in the early 90s said officially “The only people who will take the subway are the maids who work in the hotels” and he not only want admonished, but people rallied around it and helped block any light rail / subway to the west side of LA. Then in the 2010’s when the city actually forced their way to build an metro to Santa Monica, the same HOA blocked a bike path through their portion by hinting at brown criminals coming into their neighborhoods to steal their TVs. And they successfully blocked the bike path. Like these mfers think B&E’s happen and they take all the loot on bike? This is the Cheviot Hills Home Owners association if anyone wants to read up on it and get mad.
The roads are already there.
And what space are they going to be widened into?
Often existing shoulders or bike lanes.
They don't really do that for roads. They are already there or get added with new subdivisions.
They can go over or under in *most* cases. Yes some may get EDed but for the future it is inevitable. Our current system of car reliance is stupid and not scalable.
Unfortunately, going over or under is VERY expensive and public transit is often unpopular because the benefits aren't obvious unless you're someone who can ride it and save a lot of money.
The problem is easy to fix in theory, the practical issue is that most large urban areas in the U.S. are currently controlled by individuals who have bought into progressive policy pushed by NGOs that exist solely to leech money for an executive directors expense account, custom home and new luxury vehicle... You can widen streets by increasing public easements on sale of property. Updating city code to make new construction conform to future development. Widening roads for bus lanes or widening sidewalks for protected bike lanes and pedestrian paths when enough property has been cycled through. It is possible to build around or move back historic landmarks and buildings in many areas. Even just widening portions of streets or sidewalks can be incredibly beneficial. If a street cant be widened fully but only partially, protected curbside pull-out stops for buses can be created, medians to protect pedestrians can be built that do not interfere with the flow of traffic, additional parking for local business can be added. There are fucking solutions, its just that the people pushing videos like these are ideologically opposed to them. In Europe they use intelligent sensors and cameras to monitor traffic congestion to increase traffic flow. In the U.S. we predominately use timers to intentionally increase congestion. Progressive policy in cities actually promotes increased congestion, with concepts like traffic calming that comes from Europe. In Europe traffic calming is typically used to curb unsafe driving behavior in residential neighborhoods. In the U.S. traffic calming is used to generate fucktarded levels of congestion on primarily major thoroughfares. The way U.S. cities employ traffic calming actually makes residential neighborhoods less safe as traffic is rerouted through residential neighborhoods to escape its congestion. The congestion backs up onto the larger highways and interstates and fucks up inter city and inter state travel with people trying use it as a means to navigate the city. These policies create extended travel times, emergency response times, increased pollution, increased consumer prices, increased turn over rate for business, increased cost of living....Its just absolute insanity. Adding a lane to an interstate or a highway as population increases works, there is nothing wrong with that practice, the issue isnt with adding lanes its with the fucking city its either running though or adjacent to thats become an absolute clusterfuck.
We can build public transit a lot faster if we aren't as inefficient as the useless California officials who have gone over budget before they even placed a single rail.
It feels pointless in this country. There's highway that connects the regions 3 largest cities. It had a huge median in the middle of it that would have been absolutely perfect for two lines of rail. Nope, just going to widen the whole highway from 2 to 4 lanes instead. It needs expanded because so many people commute between the three cities.
Did this video mention how a single cargo ship managed to reduce the traffic on a bridge near Baltimore to *Zero*? Because, if not, I don't really see how they're a believable source.
Also encouraging more telecommuting for jobs where that is possible. If we could get half the companies to show telecommuting 2 days a week, that's 20% less traffic for everyone!
Since when do we call home office telecommuting or is that something different? But yes that’s true too.
I guess it's different if you work from home 100% of the time.
I didn’t say 100% Homeoffice. But interesting. TIL that the word telecommuting is a thing. At least where I come from it’s all called Homeoffice. 1 day a week. 2 days. All week. It’s all home office. Just a different amount of Homeoffice.
How are you going to fix crowed public transit? No one wants to be near other people.
And that’s exactly the problem of the us. There is way to much focus on individual transport because you guys are just used to it. It’s not a problem at all to be near other people for a sort amount of time of it’s way faster. Also as I am living in a city with proper public transport that is only the case during rush hour and pretty much anytime else it’s quite nice and quite because if a subway train comes every 3-4 min then there aren’t that many people per train.
Go look up videos of the new York subway and the poor people on it. Or videos of the cramped Japanese railways during rush hour. Does any of that look appealing to you? The only way public transportation would be viable is if the ticket prices were high enough to exclude most people.
You won’t believe it but I already visited New York and yes even if there is much to improve (somehow everything is old so I guess the investment into the system stopped at some point which shouldn’t happen) I would take the subway all day long before driving one meter in that city. And I know videos of Tokyo and besides the rush hour traffic I don’t see a problem at all there. It’s clean and looks quite usable and I would also late it all day long before driving and searching for a parking space in that city. And I think you iced something up. The poor people are the ones that you need to get away from the streets. It needs to be really cheap. And why. Because there are way more poor people that rich ones. So if you build a subway only for rich people that won’t solve shit.
If you go to Europe, or Japan, or Taiwan...where public transport is phenomenal. .. you'll find that traffic on the roads is still absolutely awful
Kinda but it’s not an issue because you would be stupid if you go by car when the public transport is cheaper and faster.
Look at fucking Amsterdam in 1980s vs today. It is 100% possible if there is a political will to do so.
Exactly but Americans don’t get that.
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Fr though, my little brother works a ten minute car ride from home but that same trip takes 90 minutes on a bus with two transfers.
5$ per way is still quite expensive. Where I come from you pay 365€ per year/1€ per day (everybody has the yearly ticket if not it costs 5,80 per day or 2,40 one way) and we have one of the best public transport networks in the world. Also those things you mention are all results because the public transport is shit over there. A proper public transport system isn’t like the and I hope you can experience one in your life one day.
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With 5$ per ride a system like that should easily be profitable. I guess there are just not enough people that buy into it because it’s terrible (your words not mine) so the city would have to step in and just improve it until the point where enough people want to use it so that it can become profitable and in the mean time it doesn’t matter. A city/state/country doesn’t have to be profitabel all the time. That’s also a huge issue of the us that pretty much everything has to perform like a private company. And if it’s really not possible then raise the income tax by 1% or tax anything else and it pays for it. Problem solved. It’s for the common good and that’s what taxes are for.
Faster is a huge problem in many places I’ve lived that have a functional enough mass transit system to try and use. And the difference in time is big enough to make mass transit not viable.
Than you didn’t live a a city with actually good public transport (not in the us). Where I live in Vienna it’s most of the time not even close and inside the city you are pretty much always faster with public transport/the subway.
Maybe, but here is an experience that comes to mins As an example, I used to regularly travel between norther San Jose and San Francisco. It was a trip of about 72km which isn't terribly unusual in some areas. Ignoring travel time to the regional rail station, the trip on just that part of transit was about 105 minutes (a bit over an hour and a half). If I tried to take transit to the station, that would add another 30-40 minutes. Even in the evenings when there was pretty heavy traffic, I could drive the distance in about 45 minutes. The reason for traveling that far was to receive instruction in a hobby of mine at the time and San Francisco was the only place I could find good quality instructors. But that's a different story. When I lived in DC, my situation was a bit different because the place where I worked was about 65KM or so outside the city (roughly straight line distance, not actual highway mines) and the nature of the location was one that was not served by transit at all. I used the Metro to go into the city to socialize so I didn't need to worry about parking, alcohol consumption, or a street design that could get confusing in some places. These trips were generally under 20km (again, straight line distance) and were 45 minutes to an hour. My experiences in Atlanta were that they had no appreciable mass transit system at all. Definitely a city built around cars. When I lived in the Philadelphia area, I wasn't using transit much for socializing. I did use it a few times to head into the city. Straight line distance would be about 37km. The train times were roughly an hour for the ride. I would also fly in to the area to visit family. If I took transit to get me 5-6km from where I was going, it would be about 90 minutes vs 45 by car. A huge factor in why transit is so slow in the US are the number of stops that are made on these rather long routes. For example, that train ride from San Jose to San Francisco is 22 stops. For my example in Philadelphia, its 20 stops and a transfer.
Yeah, I don't think it would ever be faster. I live in DC and it takes me 15 minutes to drive to work. If I took public transit it would take over an hour.
I've had faster, or at least equal, before! Trains can bypass traffic altogether, it's a very big advantage when going to a downtown area. (I stopped paying for parking because I worked out that a bus ticket was cheaper and meant I spent the same amount of time, but I didn't have to be *driving*. But if there had been park and ride consistently available at a nearby station, it would definitely have been faster - the biggest thing keeping then in parity was a bad intersection by my house the bus went through.
DC is one of the better transit cities I've lived in as well. Mass transit has a whole different set of inefficiencies to deal with.
Once traffic eases though people will switch back to cars. Cars are simply more convenient and comfortable than mass transit, except for all the other cars. So yea, we will always have traffic.
You don’t know what you’re talking about really. The plan to invest in public transport necessarily includes reducing lanes and forcing cars to slow down. You’ve hopefully heard of the affect that no matter how many lanes you add to a highway, you will never solve traffic as more people will drive if traffic is lessened until it’s back to being horrible. The inverse effect occurs as well. Reducing lanes makes traffic worse and forces people to switch to public transportation or biking. It’s really not a hard problem to solve.
That’s true, you can’t just increase transit options, you have to build infrastructure that’s conducive to walking and uncomfortable for cars.
And change zoning laws as well as improve the densification of residents and commercial areas. You can't complain about traffic and lack of public transit then move out to the suburbs a half hour to hour away from where you work.
Yeah that's why nobody takes the subway in New York or London.
Edit: I can't read
Yes it was sarcasm.
I am very smart
>Cars are simply more convenient and comfortable than mass transit, except for all the other cars. Hahahahahahaha you proved yourself wrong within the same sentence. Cars are only more convenient because we designed cities to move as many cars as possible instead of as many people as possible. It's like a left handed person saying it's easier to just use their weaker hand for things, yeah of course that'd make sense in a world designed for right handed people. If you only enjoy driving when the roads are empty, then do you actually enjoy driving?
Driving around New York City would be great, except for all the tens of thousands of people trying to do the same thing. That’s the point. The infrastructure is actually car-centric, even in places like NYC. It’s the fact that only a tiny fraction of the population can actually avail of that infrastructure without it turning into gridlock that is the problem. In comparison if you visit some old towns in Europe or Asia they are actually hostile to cars so cars can barely move faster than walking if they can fit in the roads at all. In that case most people will choose to walk and only those with ailments or need (like moving heavy things) will choose cars. So you can’t just build more transit in places like the US, you have to change the entire way cities and suburbs are built.
It's wild that you're getting downvoted for objectively true things
They are essentially saying the same things. People take the most convenient form of transportation. Most of America only invested in one form of transportation. And they are worth living in, but they are miserable to get around in. It would be best if you had multiple ways of getting around. With that said, you should implement more “anti-car” policies for many reasons. They are murdering us at ridiculous rates. They create an immense amount of microplastic (which we still have no idea how that affects us). They are terrible for the environment, they need valuable storage space that could be used by more businesses, their exhaust also create negative outcomes. I am sure there is much more. But I am not invested enough to give it more thought. Taxing cars pigovian tax.
I guess the short bus let you off early today.
> Once traffic eases though people will switch back to cars. This is the trick. As traffic starts to ease, you start deleting roads and parking to make better use of the space.
No
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Do you live in a city with public transportation? Because in Chicago that’s the bulk of who you will see on the train at 8 am
You have to be really out of touch or be overly paranoid if you think public transportation is full of crime. Just say you don’t like the sight of poorer people. You’re more likely in danger of a car crash.
Are you from the us? Then welcome to Europe and Asia. You are welcome.
So the solution to public transit in the US is to put it in Europe and Asia? Seems rather inconvenient.
No. The solution is to build fucking proper public transport over there and you can look at Europe and Asia as an example that it does indeed work and that even if you don’t believe it professionals with suits and everything will ride it and that it’s not a cesspool at all if done right. Why the fuck is that so hard to understand for Americans. Is it such a hard concept that you can live in a city without needing a car at all?
I live in Houston. I can start at my house — in Houston — and drive, mostly at freeway speed and in roughly a line, for an hour and a half and still be in Houston. Houston *sprawls*. I went back to college a bit ago; it was 32 miles from my house. I looked into public transport as a backup: I could take the park-and-ride into downtown Houston, yes. But then I’d have to switch lines back out, then walk several blocks to switch to another line; average total transit time: two hours, each way. (Did I mention frequent 100 degree heat and terrible humidity?) Limited night options and through a not-so-great neighborhood. Or I could drive straight there for an hour’s drive in normal traffic. I used to work 10 miles from work, but as they reduced headcount they had me driving to points all over town to pick up headcount. Then got a work-from-home job (woo!) but then they went under and my current job is now 42 miles from my house. You’d have to practically bulldoze most US cities and start over from scratch to build “walking” cities. We’re a young country, with infrastructure mostly built around the car.
That’s just all excuses the car industry told you guys and you believe them.
Maybe we believe them because we actually live there and realize the sheer enormity of the US and even certain cities. I live in a NA city that is ranked better than many EU and Asian public transit systems. It is still faster, or at worst equal to drive yourself, and it hasn't fixed traffic despite transit always being full.
Great retort. You really showed em.
Lmao not having a car is for poor people
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That is indeed what I said
Not easily done in suburbs let alone rural areas. Our infrastructure fucked us.
Some of the wealthiest nations in the history of the planet can surely add rail to suburbs, they don’t wanna spend the money is all
Absolutely true but if you don’t start to change things it won’t get better. Building more and more lanes will not solve shit. But yes a new zoning law would also have tones to allow for mixed development and not just everything single family home suburbs which don’t work at all.
Ya seattle had/has terrible traffic infastructure and the lightrail going in has been painfully slow (mistakes/tunneling/voting/deciding etc) but every station has us slowly climbing out of a deep dark hole. Along with protected bike lanes and other features. I can now lightrail/bike to work without being on the road with cars. Ya its just (one less car) but with ebikes becoming/being a thing there are a lot of bikers here.
We're also *used* to this. It's a tough fix. A good chunk of ua commute a good distance to work because we live where it's cheap and work where the pay is good.
Yeah it basically a system with kinda good intentions of giving people more freedom (I know you guys like that) but essentially the system fucked itself over more and more until today where it’s super duper fucked and really hard to get out of.
not to mention the lobbying efforts of the automobile industry and the oil and gas industry.
The only way to "fix" traffic is to essentially provide reliable, safe, and prevalent public transportation. Light rail, buses, and full on trains. Not just for major arteries, but also for shorter journeys within city areas. Subways etc. One of the biggest downfalls of public transport in the US is the fact that the last 2-5 miles of the journey leaves a person needing a bike, car, or just being forced to walk for an hour or more. As things go on the problem just gets worse and worse until the bandaid gets ripped off. Especially as more cities have been building out rather than up.
>One of the biggest downfalls of public transport in the US is the fact that the last 2-5 miles of the journey leaves a person needing a bike, car, or just being forced to walk for an hour or more. You just explained obesity as well. People not willing to bike, or walk..... while that would cover their exercise at the same time.... how efficient use of their time would that be? So NO, you don't have to make sure people can reach their final destination. Here in the Netherlands the final stretch of public transit is usually made by bike or legs. That just makes sense. So....MAYBE the US wants to invest in bike lanes.... E-bikes exist, and they go wicked fast. ;)
just one more lane bro. i promise bro just one more lane and it'll fix everything bro. bro. just one more lane. please just one more. one more lane and we can fix this whole problem bro. bro cmon just give me one more lane i promise bro. bro bro please i just need one more lane t
one more line bro!
99 percent of car based infrastructure projects stop just one more lane away from having zero traffic problems
As long as commercial real estate keeps demanding humans physically transfer themselves from suburbs to urban offices, no
Ugh. My workplace switched leases from one building to another. They keep trying to get us excited about it and it's like...we don't care if there's a fucking serenity space that we're not allowed to visit on the clock anyways. I still have to spend an hour+ commuting 3 days a week. And in the new building, you want us to use a hotelling system... even though everyone comes in on the same 3 days (because that's mandated) and so there is no reason to not give everyone a permanent desk. It is so fucking frustrating to sink extra 5 hours a week into driving to work and have my boss giving me shit because I'm tired, then be expected to go yay, woohoo for a building that means no real change whatsoever to me. Except that they might want us in FOUR days to justify the new lease. Fuck.
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I mean, I don't like it. But I roll over for it because I like *having* a house and work is important for that.
While that is a problem, the bigger issue is zoning laws. Many local government zoning laws make it impossible for residential and commercial zones to mix or be close to each other.
“You’re not in traffic, you are traffic” I forget where I heard that, but it seems almost relevant here.
Public transport or this only gets worse everywhere. It’s basic economic principles at work. We will run out of space to put new roads for cars before we ever see a day without traffic.
‘Adding lanes to cure traffic is like adding holes to your belt to cure obesity.’
we could stop designing all of our cities to only be traversed via car or bus? na, that doesnt benefit the auto and oil industry. what ever will they do if people dont have to drive places!?
Reddit has a hard on about complaining about adding lanes and cite induced demand, but don't even seem to understand what it means. Induced demand doesn't mean that adding a lane is always a terrible action because it increases traffic and congestion. What induced demand means is that you have created a road that is overall faster so more people are going to use it. This pulls people off of competing highways or local neighborhood roads which will eventually lead to congestion. Adding another lane fixes the congestion but eventually you get into an issue where you have to build parallel highways to allow for proper exiting capacity for each road at each overpass. Doable, but it becomes expensive. What most cities do to compensate for this is expand highways one at a time and add a lane to each of their main thoroughfares over time. City planners like this because it keeps traffic away from occupied spaces, recreational areas, businesses and schools that have a habit of hampering the flow of traffic. It also ends up freeing up these spaces for bus and public transportation to freely flow through. While it ends up being faster owning a car and traveling via the freeway, the city bus gets a boost from a faster commute through residential, commercial and industrial zones. The main issue with traffic isn't really the infrastructure side of it. It has a lot to do with the "democratic" community zoning regulations and standards. Because while this isn't a problem unique to America.... it's certainly more common in America than anywhere else. If you go to most of Europe, everyone you really want is in your area. And with few exceptions you can travel to most parts of cities and survive within 10 minutes of your workplace.
From your other link: > Historically, demand forecasts in urban transportation planning have been based on exogenous variables such as land use, population, employment, and income. Induced demand isn't a bad thing. It's just having main higher speed roads then using slower arterial roads. The bigger problem is that rich people are generally the ones who get to decide where the roads go. > The main issue with traffic isn't really the infrastructure side of it. It has a lot to do with the "democratic" community zoning regulations and standards. My city ditched the zoning laws. That's not the problem. It's that developers are weasels and rich people are assholes.
>My city ditched the zoning laws. That's not the problem. It's that developers are weasels and rich people are assholes. It's part of the problem. Relaxing zoning laws is a great idea but it's less than a half measure when HOA's can still object to what's being done with land they don't even own and when public transit sucks. And of course land use laws still matter. Somewhat notoriously, some cities in Texas brag about not having zoning laws but their land use laws are insanely aggressive to the point that they loop around and accomplish the same thing. >Induced demand isn't a bad thing. It's just having main higher speed roads then using slower arterial roads. The problem is that in the US we make no attempt to distinguish between *roads* and *streets.* Roads connect destinations, streets are where people actually live and do things. Failing to establish basic standards for planning the two is where you get a stroad. Stroads are bad for everyone. And yeah, the problem with induced demand is that frequently neighborhoods are destroyed to make way for high way expansion that then spends tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, to result in a net increase in freeway usage and increased travel times.
Your city has to have some sort of zoning laws. They can't just ditch them.
https://edmonton.citynews.ca/2023/10/24/edmonton-new-zoning-bylaw/ My friend has an overpass being built outside his bedroom window because rich people get to decide where roads and trains go and they don't want that stuff anywhere near them. All the zoning law changes do is make is so poor people have even less rights to stop aggressive developers. I'm very much not a nimby and I like good planning but these guys are full of crap and they're costing us a lot of money building stuff that should be built differently. It's frustrating.
Okay, so we live pretty close to each other. Edmonton hasn't removed their zoning laws just allowed for broadly missing middle housing. They're turning corner lots into mixed commercial-residential but mostly not up-zoning. Developers want to build large residential units but they're not expanding any condo or large commercial developments. At most you're seeing a convenience store in every neighborhood and a skinny between house in every four homes. Most of this does nothing to restrict the amount of travelling in the city. Unfortunately the idiots of the city have called the "15 Minute City" a conspiracy theory to restrict freedom of travel.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1dmlbaf/how_we_destroyed_hartford_connecticut/ I watched this video earlier. If you did an overhead look at Edmonton and Hartford, you'd see a lot of differences. Edmonton has way higher density and we have a ton of missing middle housing. We have 1.5 million people here, they have about a million people there. There is some similarities though. Both cities razed their historical cores to give way to cars and office buildings. A lot of cities did that and it absolutely destroyed walkability all across North America. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-s-plan-to-stop-sprawl-faces-pushback-from-developers-over-housing-affordability-1.7241110 Developers here are annoying. Since the 90s, they've had mad opportunities to create good communities but that doesn't make them quite as much money and they have no incentive to even care about good planning. For them, adding a sidewalk to make it easier to walk through neighborhoods is a loss because it's one less house they can build. Our older communities are better because they were designed with people in mind.
I think we have different perspectives on this because I've had to deal with zoning and you're kinda on the outside. This is my [exhibit A](https://www.google.ca/maps/@53.544836,-113.4691498,3a,75y,247.01h,77.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sLfBZlxAbmVwrcs3uC0__CQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu). This is a lot I've looked at very closely over the years because my company did the demolition that built this wonderful 2 meter deep dangerous AF hole in the ground. There's a story with this property. The first company to buy it applied for permits and met all city standards. But the community looked at it and indicated that it violated the community standard, as in... it just didn't look like it fit in the neighborhood. And you can slide around through the neighborhood and see there's no real definitive look here, it's just a bunch of random building designs. So what the developer did was hire one of the companies under our network to do the demo. And there's this hole there for the last 5 years that is 2 meters deep and un-developable. Proposals have all gone forth but nothing can be built there. Some of the proposals included a nine unit condo, a three house townhouse, a small shop, and two other building designs. All were opposed by the community. This is three city lots that used to have The [Tree Frog Press](https://cityarchives.edmonton.ca/tree-frog-press-2) on it that used to house a small business and one family. But now not a single thing can be developed on this high value triple lot because of NIMBYs in the area. Developers WANT to build housing but there's so much community resistance about building anything at all. The developers mostly spend their time building in the newer southern part of the city because that's a place with no community pushback on any of this stuff.
"What induced demand means is that you have created a road that is overall faster so more people are going to use it." I think when people talk about induced demand they are referring to people living further away and commuting further rather than an increase in efficiency. Yes people are using it more because it is faster like you said but things are not getting better because the increased road size means everything is a bit more spaced out and the number of people getting from their home to their work remains the same. I think this is an extreme example since there is a balance between cost and benefit but that's the point being made.
I have a hardon for moving people and not just cars. I dont give a fuck about induced whatever. Theres more than just cars and endless parking lots
Hey that second paragraph sounds a lot like Los Angeles solution to traffic. Am I mistaken? Edit : also can you source, from my understanding strong town is based off a municipal planners views and experience, which is the best information I have. This is not my career, seems like something you know more about?
[Here's](https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/induced_traffic_and_induced_demand_lee.pdf) a paper breaking it all down with entry level and more advanced level analysis.
Bless man. I appreciate it.
"Can we defeat the automobile industry?"
Maybe we can reverse population growth, that would help.
We are on our way. Declining birth rate isn’t slowing.
I've noticed that when schools are closed, there's about 50% less traffic on the roads. It's time to make all school buses accordions and pack 400 kids into them so all these people don't have to drive in the morning.
To be honest. Traffic is mainly caused by everyone being too assed to merge properly give proper distance and not drive like idiots. You can't solve traffic until you take away the selfish and idiotic people from driving. An example. During rush hour I like to give about a decent amount of space so I never have to hit my brakes. Usually about 10 or more car lengths. Usually my speed is about 20. This not only lets me cruise at a solid speed but prevents the accordian from happening behind me. But every single time. Someone flies around me at 40. Runs into the traffic ahead of me and slams on their brakes. It's their perception that they are going to make it there faster being up the ass of the line in front. Plus Idk how many times I've seen people cut people off from merging because being one car length behind is just unacceptable for them. Not to mention speeding. Texting while driving and swerving in and out of lanes to get somewhere 30 seconds faster. This all contributes to the mess. Don't get me wrong. Exits get backed up. On ramps get backed up. But half the time when traffic just magically stops. and then magically clears up. It's people being idiots.
It’s all about how many cars can move though the road per unit of time, this can be difficult to judge on a freeway, but if you know where the exact bottleneck is, keep your following time as tight as safely possible (notice i say time, NOT distance). My commute is 55-60 mph 4-lane highways (2 in each direction with a chicken lane or divided) with stop lights, and a few of them are the main bottleneck lights. The selfish people are those not paying attention and leaving 6+ second between them and the car in front of them getting through the bottleneck light, while 3 other cars could’ve made it through the light, thus contributing to the backup. Don’t get me wrong, coast up to red lights, keep safe spacing at high speeds, but while 10 car lengths are needed at 70 mph, it’s THE problem at 10 mph… when the 10 mph part is the bottle neck of the traffic (on a freeway, this would be at a merge point when traffic is starting to accelerate again, but people dgaf and keep going 10 mph and leave gobs of time between them and the car that accelerated long ago in front of them. Example: 2 lanes, 1 car every 2 seconds per lane, is 3600 cars an hour and free flow. 2 lanes and 1 car per lane every 4 seconds is 1,800 cars per hour, the demand is 3,000 cars per hour, and within that hour your sitting in a theoretical traffic jam waiting for those 600 cars that accrued in front of you over the course of that last hour to clear before you can go. TLDR: be smart, pay attention, and do your part to safely minimize your contribution to traffic.
The bigger problem is people coasting in the passing lane instead of using it for passing. If you're coasting in the left lane and then getting angry when people are trying to go around you, you're the problem. The worst is people in the left lane matching the speed of the person to their right. This forces the people behind to either get stuck or try to zoom around like you mention.
I mean I've never felt the urge to swing around traffic 2 lanes because someone's going the speed limit. That sounds like a personal issue for the people who are late or impatient. Don't get me wrong some people are idiots. But that's my point. People are idiots and cause issues.
Bad drivers do contribute to congestion, but cars inherently cause more congestion simply due to the space needed per person in a car. [See this example.](https://i.redd.it/78ayh26kx9oa1.jpg)
AI driving will fix this
Building more roads just leads to more traffic. If cities spent as much on public transportation as much as they do on new roads, more people would use it because it would be better than driving.
We choose to lose at this point. Mass transit will always be voted down here. Your best bet for that sort of progress is to move somewhere else as not enough people care to vote for change to happen quickly enough.
We need road trains with dedicated lanes. I want to speed up, join a road train and then 10 of us just cruise along all linked and going the same speed, self driving while im sleeping/working, etc That and better traffic control/lights
Just carry a brick around, when you wave hold your brick, works every time
The reason why roads and bridge construction cost so much is for the following reasons: (1) In order to get Federal 50% match dollar for dollar you have to commit 20% of the budget to staff augmentation which do not contribute all to the project. (2) from engineering to construction multiple consultants and owners reps are involved that charge ‘raw hourly rate x 2.4 multiplier plus profit per hour. (3) Because projects are poorly designed with E&O the contractors always will have a claim for millions at the end of the job. Don’t get me started on rail work in the USA. Compare the cost per mile in Europe vs. USA for dollar per mile?
[building more highways will never make traffic better](https://youtu.be/2z7o3sRxA5g?si=lkgGozTWGvEK0a3y)
One more lane bro. Please bro. I swear bro one more lane and we will solve it bro. We will solve traffic.
I would simply add more lanes.
Driving was so nice when COVID hit
Fixed! [https://www.reddit.com/r/motorcycles/comments/1dl9rnc/saving\_hours\_of\_time\_by\_lanesplitting\_in/](https://www.reddit.com/r/motorcycles/comments/1dl9rnc/saving_hours_of_time_by_lanesplitting_in/)
If the option to walk 10 or so minutes to something that would transport me to my destination, or at least close to it, existed, that'd be great. And it's a great solution to cut down on congestion. With how vast and populated some urban areas in America are I just don't see that ever being feasible though. I've accepted that I'm gonna get the green weenie on my commute one way or the other at this point and embrace the suck. Plus with how the weather has been this year, there's very little chance I'd be walking anywhere without it being a miserable experience anyway. First it was nearly constant rain, all day, every day for what seemed like months. There'd be one or two days here and there but not nearly enough that I'd wanna be outside for any length of time. Now that it's summer it's the heat. I'm as white as it gets without being albino. The sun is a deadly laser and we are not friends. The real feel/wet bulb temp or whatever you wanna call it is in the triple digits. I get red walking from the car to the house. There's also the fact that my job has me all fuckin' over the place. I might have to transport people or materials, or drive 20 minutes to the nearest supplier. I work in construction management for a sub contractor so I'm rarely at the same place multiple days a week. Sometimes I have to leave hella early because the jobsite is 3 hours away, or I have a meeting at a specific time so I gotta try to plan that out and hope I don't end up waiting outside because I got there too early.
Just one more lane bro
Ned Flanders looking motherfucker. All of these channels that promote the whole 'cars bad' mentality are disingenuously lying to people. On the back end, it's an astroturfing campaign by developers to convince people that gentrifying low income communities is ok. They aren't altruistic fans of good urban planning. Developers, construction companies and probably politicians stand to make good cash by putting apartments and condos where poor people live. Cars aren't bad things. Car dependence is a bad thing though. Cars are really useful. They allow us the ability to travel long distances safely and comfortably. They also allow you the ability to haul stuff and carry people around. The hate against them is unfair in some cases and valid in others. Trucks are way too big. Cars cost way too much. Insurance is way too high. A lot of people simply can't afford it and need efficient public transit. At the same time, ever try going to a drive in on a bus? Cars allow a lot more freedom of mobility. All I want is a small affordable truck. For me, I like having the ability to haul stuff. It's handy. I'm utilitarian. But, I also want an electric bike because they're amazingly useful. Get a little wagon. If you live in a decent area with local amenities, you can avoid driving and still get around fairly quick.
I assume you watched the video based on your first statement (lol), but I did not see or hear anything from this one that was particularly "cars are bad". In fact, he seems to acknowledge that cars are useful, needed, and wanted. His solutions at the end revolve around what you said: local design/planning that leads to local amenities such that the majority of people can avoid driving and still get around fairly quickly (bike, walk, bus, etc.)
This is the “all lives matters” stance. Gentrification is a problem. Adding density and transit increases land values which increases rents which push people out by increasing rents. This is a problem that I believe we agree needs to be solved. I have my own opinions on a solution, but that's out of scope for this post. However, it's not just cost of rents that must be considered it also cost of car ownership vs cost of rents. For my personal experience my lifestyle improved greatly when moving to Brooklyn, I no longer needed my car, so I nno longer had to pay insurance, a monthly loan, gas, repairs (which was expensive because I couldn't afford a new car when I was young). That is not to mention all the socialexternalities that cars some with not the least of which is how often they kill us especially our youth. If you need me to list all of them I couldn't possibly. But sometime tomorrow I could give you data plus sources on the societal costs of car transit. That's not to say I believe cars shouldn't exist, its just I hard disagree that carBut there needs to be much more friction on driving vs other modes of transit. (that friction is a political solution and has a wide range of opinions and solutions )
The amount of traffic jams I've seen where its just one driver camping the left lane with 15 complacent drivers on their tail. People create their own traffic and then bitch about the road.
I actually know how to fix it but you guys won't like it. Starting in December 2024 we begin having a lottery for babies born. They will have their social security number start with either a number 1 2 or 3. If it is one they will drive a car. If it is a 2 they will drive a jet pack. If it is a 3 they will use a teleporter. So when they turn 16 they will be tested on whatever vehicle they were seleted for and they will NOT be allowed to use the other vehicles. (those appointed for cars can also use motorcycles and trucks. But can't fly planes and those who can use jet packs can use helicopterws an planes. None of them can drive boats except those who can use the teleporter)
ok
yeah the idea won't be popular, infringes on people's ability to choose; it would become a little bit Orwellian.
Tldw. Which are the most effective weapons to use against unarmored personnel carriers?
Anyone have a tl;dw summary? Even on an increased speed, I can't stand how this guy talks
4 day work week, more public transit, trains. Would improve the economy and fix the traffic problems. The end
It’s extremely fixable — price it. Variable pricing by demand.
Too many people on this planet.
i think we're headed to an overall depopulation just beyond our lifetime. the depopulation won't be equal everywhere though.