Byronotron

I actually agree - but all the pictures show idyllic, car-free streets, w/o enough MT infrastructure in evidence (if that's even possible) to carry the people.

The pictures all look like post-holocaust images of empty cities.

The article implies that with good MT, there's no need for cars - I don't think that's proven, or even terribly likely. Certainly you could just ban cars from a city, but then there'd be even huger crowds of (probably crabby) pedestrians everywhere, and I'm not sure that it wouldn't still take an hour to get across town.

-Kle.

Klebert L. Hall

How high does the water have to get to turn the North County Coastal Canyons into North County Coastal Fjords? I guess kayaking through Fjords wouldn't be mass transit.

Freddie Freelance

Public transport's purpose isn't to get rid of gridlock, it's to make it irrelevant. The main road that runs from my neighbourhood to my office, in London, is chock-a-block every morning. And, as i'm zooming beneath it on the tube, it has no impact on me whatsoever. Dedicated bus lanes have the same effect on the surface (at least in theory!).

Retrofitting PT to a sprawling city like LA is incredibly hard, though. Cities that have grown up with an effective PT network, like London or New York, tend to have suburbs which are composed of fingers of housing aligned with the railway routes; that means you can have the same density of housing, but still be within a useful distance of a station. Where the sprawl is homogenous, as in LA, that's impossible to achieve, at least inside a generation. I believe those cities also tend to be lower density, which also doesn't help.

I think parkway stations (i think you call them park and ride in the US) are good here, though. If you can swap an hour's drive on a congested motorway into town for a fifteen minute drive along local roads to a railway station, and a fifteen minute high-speed train trip into town, you're going to do it, and that reduces the amount of car use, pollution, congestion, etc. It's a hugely popular model in the commuter belt around London: many stations have huge car parks which are packed solid after the morning commute.

twic

eyeballpupil

kablammo

But the answer why (other than some roads get fed money too, which is less true for public transit) is that since the car is private property in action, the fact that it's built upon a bed of taxation enough to make a socialist blush is ignored.

Slatz_Grobnik

Can't wait to see all the crazy crap happening in / falling out of these things.

Simon Piper

[www.monorails.org]

"Hey, we'll build this for you for a percentage of the fares, you don't have to put any money up front."

"No thanks... We're building a SUBWAY!"

Freddie Freelance

Can anyone point to a city with such awesome mass transit that there aren't cars on the streets, and there aren't traffic problems?

The two best MT systems in the US (NYC and Boston) are in cities that still have terrible traffic. London traffic is awful, as it is in Moscow and Paris.

I have nothing against mass transit. I wish the old InterUrban trolley system still existed in SE New England, it would be cool. Cities really ought to have effective mass transit systems, they're helpful.

I see no evidence that they can do more than supplement the private vehicle, however - at least, not w/o making the majority of people miserable.

Klebert L. Hall

I don't know if you're being funny or not. (Sarcasm doesn't translate well sometimes.)

In case you're serious, let's look at the mortgage meltdown. Increased risks can mean increased profits but more often and more likely it means increased losses. Banks who wanted deregulation are the first in lines to get bailed out by OUR tax dollars. Yep, our free market at work.

Next on the dole, the free market of mortgage industry. Home builders just blackmailed Congress for a $4 thousand million (or billion) tax cut for profits made years ago. The homebuilders association said that there were stopping all campaign contributions unless they got the legislation they wanted. And they got it. A free market says "what?"

And today Sallie Mae has just asked for money.

That's funny: why would student loans - backed buy the government even NEED to go through a private corporation? What the hell kinda free market is that when a private corporation can sell loans backed by the US gov't. i.e. with absolutely NO RISK - and then, when they don't make enough money, cry poverty and demand to sell those loans BACK to the government!!!

Come to think of it: why would the United States government PAY TO BORROW IT'S OWN MONEY from a private corporation? (The Federal Reserve is no more "federal" than Federal Express.)

Who do I have to fuck to get that job? Like I said, "Free market? My ass!"

nygenxer

Roads (interstates, state highways and county and city roads) are all built and paid for by taxpayers that aren't necessarily using them. Gas taxes cover significantly less than what is spent to build and maintain roads ... about half comes from property and other taxes.

Sihanouk-s-Poodle

This stuff isn't real..?

[wanders away, scratching head...]

ideaman2020

Evil Tortie's Mom

Annalee Newitz

It looks like those "aerial gondolas" are at just about the perfect height to both take off a pedestrian's head and make egress really difficult...

ideaman2020

beejay

Where do people come up with this stuff? What does corrupt and bought of politicians have to do with free market theory? Nowhere in free market theory is there a chapter on "buying off politicians". OK, so move away from the free market. Oops! The coprrupt politicians are still there! D'oh!

The_Real_Quiet_Desperation

bjarmson

YouandWhoseArmy

I live 100 miles north of Seattle. There's a rail station 15 minutes from my house. Theoretically I could commute into Seattle by rail... except that the train runs one southbound trip (departs 9:30AM, arrives 11:30AM) and one northbound trip (departs 6PM, arrives 8PM) per day. And it's $28 round-trip. That's just sad.

mechagrue

regis

eris404

And that element of need, that's the kicker. No public transit advocate - okay, no sane public transit advocate - is looking for the extremes you are. But for the majority of people, a car should be a luxury, rather than a necessity. And I don't mean like fur coat level luxury, I mean nicety.

Appropriately, the reason it's not in large part is the exact reason why you think the roads would die in perfect public transit world: no one wants to pay for it. Convincing the public will to support something (let's just assume that mass transit can't [or shouldn't] be self-sufficient) that's some sort of general benefit to everyone takes a lot of political will. People have blamed car companies or politicians, but it's a lot simpler than that. It's hard to get people to pay up for something where the benefits might be slight or indirect and the cost is very obvious.

But I'm willing to write this off to inescapable lifestyle schisms. I'd sooner saw my face off than live 20 miles from the city center. (200? Sure. Not 20). I like the fact I don't have to drive anywhere, or, push comes to shove, can acquire temporary cars. I make sacrifices so I don't have to live the way in which you describe. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that other people need to do the same.

Slatz_Grobnik

And that Melbourne photo could be taken now (apart from the ye olde tram there) It's the corner of Collins and Swanston, and Swanston is closed to cars I believe.

But what would I know, I live in London.. so I'll shutup

NotPop

I have a developer, Lyle Lanley, all lined up to build us a monorail!

He sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook.. and by gum it put them on the map!

Braff Wayne

But can you imagine traveling from Dallas to Austin in 45 minutes vs. the 3.5 hrs it takes now?

van_line

Just a rant. You all know that in our society, in order to support ourselves and our economy public transportation won't work for every situation. Use it where it does. Don't use it where it doesn't. When I take the family to Disney World, we stay at the resorts and use the Disney Transports to go everywhere. The vehicle stays in the parking lot for the entire time. But that only works because the locations don't change and Disney is set up to handle the packages you don't want to carry.

Distances between homes and work places have changed radically in the last 100 years. Most people don't live downtown (uptown if you are a snob) with easy access to a public transportation device. Business requires much different hours than a regulated transportation schedule can handle. There is not enough money or manpower in the world to move everyone back into a footprint that would allow public transporation take everyone where they 'needed' to go. When the roads are shut down, will you wait on the bus to get to the hospital? Oh, I suppose ambulances would have special right of way to use the roads, but roads that only had ambulances and police cars on them would fall into disrepair real fast. After all, who's going to vote for money to spend on a road they can't use?

Take a look at the pictures above. Where are the drop off points for the people on the monorail? How many people fit in the boat? The only ones that might work a little are the cablecars and electric trains, where they stop and start block by block, and even then, they would be very limited in getting a 'suburbanite' to his work location without multiple transfers. Now (as I saw someone else point out) instead of my commute being 25 minutes (18.5 miles), it jumps to 1.5 to 2 hours, each way. What!?! I am not sitting in a bus for 3 to 4 hours every day. How lame is that. Productivity goes to hell! My family becomes the people I visit just as they are finishing dinner. Then I have to sleep, because in the mornings I have to be up and gone before the sun rises.

For you who think this works, put your money where your keyboard is. Move out about 20 miles from your city center. Get rid of, or don't buy a vehicle. Now, go and public transport it. Come back in 18 to 24 months and let us know how that went.

(Before you say, no, you do it, I have, for almost 2 years when I lived near D.C. It doesn't work. It takes too much out of your life, your 'well being' to run the Public Transportation Marathon every frigging day if you can't afford to live downtown. ($500,000 minimum to live downtown here for about 800 square feet of monolithic ant farm compression living).

So put a transporter (Star Trek style) or a Willy 'Freaking' Wonka Magic Elevator in my house and I'll get off the road in my 'Petrol' burning, congestionmobile. (I'll drive electric when they are affordable, safe, and able to move at least 500 miles in one day with an overnight charge that makes it fully capable of doing the same the next day, on and on for 100,000 miles before I have to change the batteries. (Don't want to fill up the landfills with batteries, now do we?)

Did you really read all this? Maybe you do have time for the bus. :) I don't, I am too busy typing.

Freebadeebadingdong

Unless you're the DC Metro, where after forty you're still nowhere near sufficient, or useful enough to eliminate sprawl.

As I commented a few weeks ago in a similar thread-- NO public transportation system will ever work in a city that was not designed organically with public transportation in mind. Even the best grafted-on systems-- like the Metro-- still must be built to accomodate a city that evolved with cars (the aforementioned park-and-ride problems, sprawl, the simple fact that you can't serve everyone).

Everyone has dreams of turning their cities into New York or London. Guess what? The subways were there before the cars. Had the cars come first, the sprawl would have followed, and we wouldn't even have those "successful" examples.

As long as the automobile is around-- and count me as one of the fans-- mass transit will never completely replace it, or even effectively augment it.

Daveinva

And at each tower, waiver of liability forms.

tpete

We had a thing called "Metro Moves" a few years ago, that would have moved our bus system from something that had downtown as a hub to more of a mesh (making it more usable), and setting the groundwork for light rail. However, it got voted down, because they believed more lanes was the answer.

In discussing the Seattle Monorail, a commentator indicated that it takes 30 years for a public transportation system to develop and be useful and self-sufficient. It really needs subsidies until then. Unfortunately, the people who vote to kick it off will likely not be significant users of such a system, at least not during their time in the workforce.

MrGuilt

Monorail, Monorail, Monorail!

danielhcarroll

Many of us have something closer to a 20-mile / 40-minute commute. Those are the people for whom alternatives clearly need to be made available.

@bjarmson: That's the other problem with transit in general: if more people drive longer distances, it means more cars must occupy the same stretch of road. Imagine a 60 mile stretch of road, where every car on it drove the full 60 miles. It gets congested. But, if each of those cars only drove 10-20 miles and then got off, you can have the same number of cars on that 60 mile stretch of road without the congestion.

Sprawl is a huge problem in the transit issue.

Now, bearing the aforementioned in mind, that's why I'd love to believe a lot of what this post is about, but I think that it conveniently ignores the issue of demand. The overall demand for people to get from point A to point B has dramatically increased in the past century. All of these systems would struggle just as much to keep up with demand as the roadways do. Go find photos of rail systems in London, New York, or Tokyo at rush hour, and you'll see what I mean.

Maybe things would be different if they were built to use all mass-transit from the get-go, but even if it solved the problems posed by the automobile as the 20th century wore on, a completely different set of problems would arise...

Which to me... would make a great sci-fi.

BtownDesignGuy

Ravac

muteboy

But then I've been an early and vocal proponent of more horses in San Francisco. The Animal Rights nuts will hate it, but hey (pun intended), America has more horses today than the world has ever seen in history.

Jackson West

well, that and the freakshows who ride the bus when i get out of work late at night.

methinks that geography and urban sprawl are the biggest b*tches that make park-and-ride solutions unavoidable. in los angeles, if the city were confined by the mountains and the ocean, mass transit could be a door-to-door solution. but with the workforce spread throughout the local valleys, park-and-ride is unavoidable.

in most cases, i suspect transit hubs aren't the cause of sprawl, poor city planning is. sticking with los angeles as the example, mass transit was only an afterthought for decades. then sprawl happened, and the only solution was park-and-ride transit hubs. when downtown started filling up, they didn't build a commuter rail station in the san fernando valley. they built single-driver freeways that wouldn't support the eventual crowds and would make transit hubs a necessity.

the moral of this long story is that i need to move.

dave the wet sprocket

Instead of solving the problems of traffic and pollution, you're just pushing them further out from the urban center. Worse, you're just encouraging sprawl in a one-car-ride radius around suburban rail stations.

Mass transit has to completely eliminate the need for a car in order to be effective. It doesn't count if you still have to drive just to get to the mass transit hub.

Discrete-Daniel

That's the sad part, many suburbs would benefit greatly from a mass transit system going through their town, but they don't want to pay for it. But they buy huge houses further and further from cities (because they're cheaper), only pay giant taxes for street infrastructure, etc. only to later complain about traffic when their suburb overdevelops.

ARP

[farm1.static.flickr.com]

How about the space-pod looking Portland Aerial Tram? Granted it does exist, but it would be cool if they built new lines, fanning out across the city.

rogerg

Annalee Newitz

Pretty sure the Market Canal would just be full of speedboats and barges by now.

Evil Tortie's Mom

I was speaking of those who seem to think driving is a god-given American right and particularly politicians of this slant. Just had a primary election where the local guy running for a county supervisor position spouted this kind of knee-jerk, anti-mass transit nonsense. He won over the woman who favored money for light rail

We don't have much choice but driving in most areas. But I remember when I lived in Chicago in 79/80. The El and bus system were the way to get around. A monthly pass meant you could ride as much as you wanted for a very reasonable fee. Unfortunately many urban areas switched over to cars post WWII and tore out what transit systems they had. Gridlock ensued. It may be headed the other way now that gas prices are climbing almost daily.

bjarmson

Annalee Newitz

Annalee Newitz

Byronotron

@bjarmson: It's easy to blame drivers. The truth is, its a combination of politicians and their constituents. It requires long term thinking and deciding that you don't need a house that's 2X the size of your parents house for the same number of kids (It's true the average size house has doubled in the last 50 or so years).

ARP

I wouldn't mind seeing something similar in more cities.

Kaiser-Machead's Chips Ahoy!

I have a 20 mile / 20 minute commute, 1 way each morning and evening. Mass transit stops 1.5 miles from my house. It takes 3 transfers and 1.25 hours to get to the edge of the Air Force base on which I work. There is a base bus that I can take, but it's faster to walk the .75 miles from the gate to the building in which I work. The last time the mass transit picks up at the base is 6pm. If I miss that, I'm screwed.

There are about 2 months out of the year during which that mess would almost be bearable. The rest would be snow, rain and oppressive heat.

I want a more fuel efficient car, but I can't afford one yet. I'm open to carpooling, but no takers yet.

So I'm a petrolhead. I'm evil. I'm screwing the planet by working (for the DoD no less) and paying 50% of my income in taxes.

Does calling me names help this situation?

Bah. I'd go cling to my guns (if I had any) or my church (if I wasn't an atheist).

hakubak

bjarmson

They also used to have special "Funeral" cars that would take caskets and mourners to Colma as well.

Funny enough , they knocked out the streetcars on geary because BART was going to go to the ocean, and it was decided that having 2 lines was duplication of service. Anyone see BART headed out to Sutro Baths anytime recently?

njudah

Anyway, moving on! I think the Eastern Freeway here in Melbourne was intended to have a train line running up the centre of it, but that unfortunately never happened either. Still, they made room for it, so it may still happen in some fortunate future.

van

I'd rather see better urban planning (build safe/secure housing close to safe/secure workplaces and safe/secure malls) and more telecommuting.

To a degree, this problem is solving itself. People are voting with their feet. They're moving away from places with high traffic AND places where mass transit is all but required.

hakubak

Gus Mastrapa

Luana Arrrr

A relative of mine worked for the transit authority. They'd have dumped the trolleys years ago, but in a twisted way, the useless crapwagons pay for the rest of the transit system. Seems the Federal Govt pays Dayton for keeping the inefficient rolling vacant echo chambers going. Without that money, all the buses would stop.

hakubak

"Free market" my ass.

nygenxer

gods-n-clods

Looks like Judge Doom won after all.

ManchuCandidate

Grey_Area

Grey_Area

Annalee Newitz

Annalee Newitz

Grey_Area

And yes, they are slow, but if the rails hadn't been pulled up way back when, we'd have modernised them instead of just switching to cars, no?

aspiringexpatriate

there are better alternatives.

capntim