Comment by JumpCrisscross
3 days ago
> Waymo and other taxi services are inherently bad for cyclists compared to increasing transit utilization
Anecdote: I take transit way more in San Francisco with Waymo. Because booking is deterministic (it says 20 minutes, it will be there in 20 minutes, even if it’s a short ride), I can connect with the loose network of city and regional rail systems in a way that was tedious with human drivers.
(I lived in New York for 10 years, and eagerly take the subway there.)
Which, again, is a band-aid to bad regional transit connectivity.
> a band-aid to bad regional transit connectivity
Maybe. American suburbs are already spread out. It doesn’t make sense to run subways to every corner the way we do in urban centers. Doing last mile with shared transport—versus cars which park idle for most of the day around train stations—makes sense.
Did I say we should run subways to every corner?
Here’s a nice video about how small suburbs and even farms don’t need to involve deep car dependence:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
Meanwhile, Arlington, Texas has over 200,000 people with no bus system.
And before you say “oh it’s Europe it’s old” I will point out that the Netherlands had a huge car dependency problem in the mid-century and deliberately moved away from it during/after the oil crisis.
You can see multiple single family home developments that would be right at home in a US suburb in this video. The author even reaches a rural farm without a car.
What about if American transit authorities just did basic stuff like work together and perform actual regional planning rather than working in silos and having conflicts with each other?
For example, there’s zero reason why NJ transit should be a different agency than NYC’s transit authority. They should be the same agency that works toward a comprehensive regional transit system focused on the metropolitan area rather than arbitrary state borders.
Instead, they’re forced to do things like sell $100 World Cup train tickets because they haven’t been empowered to reap the rewards of the economic development they enable.
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We live in the real would and have to work with what actually exists. I'd love it if my city had Tokyo's rail system, but it doesn't, and won't.
We actually don’t have to work with what exists. We actively chose and continue to choose what exists. Every day new land is developed that perpetuates these choices. Every day we decide to keep things the same or implement change.
Here’s a nice video about how rural towns can be configured to not be car dependent:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
You’ll notice that this isn’t some ancient European pre-automobile city stuff, you’ll see many single family home tract houses in the suburbs and small towns of the Netherlands that would be at home in any American suburb. The Netherlands did struggle with post-war car-oriented development that it has successfully pushed back against.
If you live in Arlington, Texas, you live in a city of over 200,000 people that doesn’t even have bus service.
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