JohnDThompson 

Cars are the preferred transportation in the USA because most of our cities have been designed to accommodate cars, and any other transportation options are secondary to that. Free, on-street parking represents a huge subsidy to automobile users that distorts transportation choices in favor of automobiles. Billions of dollars are spent building and maintaining inter-city and interstate motor vehicle infrastructure. Until the 1950s, the USA had a privately owned and operated passenger rail system that was the envy of the world. The ended with the development of the interstate highway system, funded by taxpayers. Municipal mass transit systems can address transportation needs when weather or physical limitations prevent non-motorized transport, at lower per-capita cost and producing less pollution and better energy efficiency than individual private motor vehicles.

Professor Donald Shoup published a thorough, readable analysis of this in his book "The High Cost of Free Parking."
https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Fre.../dp/193236496X

Maelochs

Genral who became president Eisenhower ordered the highways system because he saw the Autobahnen in Germany .... A way to move military equipment around the country very efficiently. With thoughts of foreign invasion more prevalent in the US than at any time sine the end of the War of 1812, the existing, meandering, vari-standard and often low-quality road network across the US was seen as a liability.

Of course, moving troops and even more so supplies and machinery via rail is more efficient, but the forces still need to get from rail heads to wherever they are needed strategically. Highways were cheaper than rail lines, served the dual purpose of abetting interstate commerce, and added as an adjunct to the (still-extant) rail freight system.

Intra-city mass transit is entirely unrelated. people see intra-city mass transit mostly as transit for the poor---riding busses and trains around a city is a go-to only in places like NYC where the subway and bus systems had long been developed and where growth was so explosive that surface roads could no longer meet the demand (no place to put roads without tearing down buildings, and buildings make money.) None of that had Anything to do with interstate Highway System. In fact, for cyclists, interstates are a boon because it offers drivers somewhere besides surface streets to have accidents. In many cities it is normal to jump on the highways to travel a few exits to avoid crosstown traffic .... and fewer cars on the smaller streets is a plus for bike commuters.

Also ... the commercial rail system is still strong and carries a lot of the freight we all consume every day, from coal and diesel for our power plants to food and produce, cars, machinery, all consumer goods .... However, rail lines are Not a good mix with cities---a mile-long freight train cannot make stops at every store to unload without shutting down dozens of roads. This is why trains are unloaded at rail hubs, and semis carry the freight to distribution centers where semis or smaller trucks generally service the densest parts of cities.

Passenger rail was indeed impacted by the interstate highway system .... but since trains of the day were no faster than cars, and upon reaching a destination most people would still need cars .....

As I see it---and I welcome other views---- many of our oldest cities were limited by being designed between horse-and-buggy and personal car eras. Streets were laid out, supporting infrastructure laid out, to facilitate he common modes of transport at the time .... with no one able to predict (apparently) and no government willing to fund, plans for a few decades later when the city would be five times as large and population-dense (and of course some did not grow at that pace, and might have gone bankrupt had they built with those expectations.)

The real problems came when cars also dominated suburban planning---when after WW II automakers and city planners and other industrial concerns decided to make the car a focus of suburbia. Suburbs often covered too much space and had too much population to design "walkable" zones ... it sounds romantic, with a corner market and everything ten minutes' walk away ... but in reality the economics don't scale down effectively----supplying those neighborhood stores is too expensive or there has to be less variety, and square footage can be used more efficiently with a bigger floor plan (think of all the individual refrig/ freezer sections, so it made more sense to have living areas (housing neighborhoods) surrounding commerce sectors.

This meant either a huge investment in probably underused mass transit (not every one was going to shop at the same time, so buses/trains would need to run very frequently, or people would feel their lives were constrained by transport options ... and the classic, "Drop the kids at school, run errands, pick the kids up, make dinner" cycle would be impossible with kids going to schools at different times and errands possibly spread out across a wide area. Or .... cars. In fact, wife takes husband to the train station and then comes home with the car was not unheard of ... and two cars became more common. The cost of buses/trains needed to service a variety of life styles was prohibitive, and most people still wanted or needed a car anyway, ...

And while we think of the two coasts, by and large, there are a lot of people living in places where ti is ten or twenty miles to a serious commerce center ... lot of Feed and Grain stores and tractor sales/services, but not a lot of clothing and food and small appliance stores. In those areas buses are hideously inefficient and light rail?


So yes, indeed, the major automakers and the urban/suburban planners and the petrochemical industry and a bunch of other rich-getting richer folks decided to build our nation around cars, much to their benefits ... but still cars were the most convenient all-around solution to the various transport issues in different areas. Again economies of scale made having each small community search for its own blend of transport options unaffordable.

Whatever. here we are now.

Ride a bike. if you can.

Alan K

True, but fortunately not every madness.

nomadmax 

In the USA, the car is king. OP, your time is better spent working on something where you can get results.

JohnDThompson 

But that's no longer the case. Most other developed nations, even China, fer cripes sake, have high speed rail systems that far exceed what automobiles are capable of doing.

Shouldn't be a showstopper. Taxis, Zip cars, Ubers, rentable bikes and scooters, etc. can fill that need. As can urban mass transit. E.g., when I visit my son in Seattle, I can get off the plane at Seatac, hop on light rail to the U-district, then take a bus to within a block of his house. I have my Orca card, just for that! If there was an Amtrak station closer than 80 miles away, I'd take the Empire Builder to Seattle (even better if it were a high speed rail route), hop on the light rail and a bus, as above.

Maelochs

Hand me that wall of text, please ....

Actually this is still not an issue because the issue of where trains can safely run at those speeds Is an issue.

High speed rail is great … but a train weighs a lot more than a car, and you cannot have trains busting through cities at 200 mph and doing mass destruction …. Also … please recall the context:

I was discussing WHY the Interstate Highway System was built and why rail wasn’t massively expanded. The fact that 75 years Later, some trains could indeed travel faster than cars, is totally irrelevant.

If you want to build high-speed rail Now, you had best have a lot of money. Japan doesn’t have much military spending at all, and Communist China can just order stuff done, pretty much. In the US, just buying the land alone to build brand-new high-speed rail is prohibitively expensive --- particularly since a lot of the transport budget goes into building and maintaining roads, which need to be there anyway.

There has been a high-speed train linking Orlando and Tampa Florida in talks for decades now …. And still Interstate 4, one of the worst highways imaginable because it is totally unable to handle the volume of bad drivers in Florida and coming to Florida to visit theme parks, is the only “high-speed” link …. The cost of building just 60 or so miles of rail, plus terminals, plus parking for the users, plus maintenance facilities, has stalled the project since it was first introduced.

One problem is, high-speed rail, like any rail system, need to carry a lot of passengers to be profitable …. And there isn’t enough traffic, apparently, going all the way from Orlando to Tampa or vice versa. A lot of traffic is people living between and around the two cities, going to work in the cities.

The other problem is …. The people would still need cars once they got where they were going as neither Tampa nor Orlando have robust public transport systems … and the people who would lay out money for high-speed rail tickets don’t want to stand at bus stops.

And again, what you say sounds reasonable … out of context.

First off, we were talking about 75 years ago when the Interstate Highway System was proposed and designed. Uber was not a thing … and as I mentioned, the way suburbs were laid out there would have had to have been tens of thousands of cabs … which would mostly have sat idle and then packed the roads at rush hour.

No business could see success with that model … so people had their own cars, which vastly increased their freedom, and nobody cared if they sat idle most of the day because they were not costing money when sitting idle. Cabbies have to make money throughout a shift. Husband driving to and from work in the nearest city, and housewives kids to school, then going shopping, are free.

Also, think about it—Uber only works because almost Everybody has a car. Of most people Didn’t have cars, no one would be an Uber driver … they couldn’t drive cars they didn’t have. Ubers are a replacement for fleets of taxis---which were going unused to a degree that a lot of areas don’t even have taxis, or only very small fleets …..

As for rental bikes and scooters, yeah … good luck selling that in Seattle, or in Michigan or Minnesota. Tell the housewife with two kids in tow who needs to do the week’s shopping to get six bags of groceries, and load it, and her two kids, onto a motorized skateboard and ride five miles in the rain to a bus station, then carry that load to a bus, and then to an Uber of another scooter …

I saw it a lot when I commuted … I could be car-free because I had no kids and shopped for one. A lot of single mothers had to take a kid to day-care, another one or two to school, then go to work, get out of work and get dinner and all the kids … and sometimes had to work a night job. No way to do that without personal transport.

Even Uber wouldn’t do it … too expensive. As for mass transit … the time schedules are too tight. I have ridden extensively on a few urban bus/subway/train lines, Chicago, Washington DC, Boston, places down south ….. there are never the right buses connecting at the right times to do multiple errands in a hurry. Even if the bus stop is right in front of day care, by the time you get the kid off the bus and into the building safely, the bus is gone and another won’t arrive for at least 15 minutes … and sometimes, depending on the schedule, for a lot longer.

Since driving time is approximately the same once a vehicle is in traffic … a three-stop trip might mean an added Ninety minutes to a journey which might only involve 30 minutes of driving. That extras 90 minutes is the difference between getting to work on time or not … or paying more to the day care fro keeping the staff overtime to keep your kid … or your kids hanging out around the scho0ol, bored and getting into trouble, because they have to wait so long for a ride.

I have some real-world experience with this stuff …..

Besides,a s I mentioned above if the issue is getting cars off the streets and turning street over to bikes … even if they are cabs and Ubers, they are still cars, and still need streets, add to that the delivery and service3 vehicles I mentioned earlier, and you can see the issue. Sorry, cars are pretty much a necessity.

Since this thread is about getting rid of cars and giving streets to bikes … and none of your points seem helpful …


Further: How lucky for you, that you can get a bus or train from the airport. Pretty much every airport in every country I have visited offered that …. But then what? Oh, Seattle has light rail which happens to meet your needs. Awesome. And there is a bus stop a block away … how lucky!

Thing is, most people don’t go to the airport. They go to the store, to work, shopping, do kid-transport …. Seattle … which did a lot of its expansion a lot later than a lot of other cities, and has always had more progressive government, has a system which is handy for you … but your needs are slight.

What if it were six blocks to a bus stop … and you had three big suitcases? Or three kids? Or groceries for a family of four or five? Six blocks hauling six or eight bags of groceries is a lot bigger deal than one block with one suitcase and a carry-on and no kids.

Also, light rail can be a good thing … but again it has to be part of a fully realized intermodal system. Light rail is great for visitors or for businessmen … a lot of cities have an Amtrak train which gets decent usage … but it is decent usage for a small percentage of people … mostly people traveling from suburbs to an office district. Those are mostly people who do Not need a car during the day, which is why they can Park-and-Ride. It works … for them.

However, a mass transit system has to work for the People Who Need It most, and those are usually the people with the lower incomes …. The people who usually stay closer to home, have lower-paying jobs, and cannot afford to have an hour added to every commute while waiting for the next bus and the next connecting bus.

The lack of transport prevents these people from taking full advantage of public transit …

I lived in a place about 10 minutes from a bus stop …. And the bus downtown from there came every 45 minutes, not a popular route … and the bus from downtown to the business district where I worked also ran every 45 minutes. I had to wait for an hour, often more, and when I got dropped off it was about a mile from the job site.

I could do it because I had no kids and didn’t care … I needed the job … but a lot of people would not have had access to that job or Any of the jobs in that job-saturated area, because they couldn’t spend hours waiting on a bus. Also, the bus didn’t run late at night so if I had night shifts I had to beg a ride or walk …. And since I was single, I would usually party some after work, and then do the two-and-a-half hour walk home as I sobered up. Obviously, that would not work for most people.

Thing is, low usage is the reason not to expand the bus service, but until bus service expands the people who would use it, can’t use it.

Also, people cannot simply relocate to where the jobs are because (as with people who commute to cities from suburbs) there is no affordable housing, and what is there, is no more convenient than in other places …. Also, people who work for lower hourly wages don’t tend to relocate for a job which is not particularly remunerative and not particularly stable. Further, kids in school cannot be moved around easily, and often the industrialized/ business areas don’t even have schools … or day-cares … because they are zoned commercial.

As I say, I have experience from the daily-user end of the system, not the guy who could afford an Uber, or can afford to wait for a bus, and who has a bus stop right where he needs to be. Nothing against you, but most people are not so lucky.

Finally … yes, a well-designed intermodal urban/suburban transit system is possible, at least in theory. However, it is not in demand … and it is not simple and would not be cheap. A further issue, is that the savings are often in reduced pollution and reduced traffic … and most people don’t really care about reduced pollution (look how hard it was to get people to do even the feeble amount of recycling they do today, and look at the ongoing trend to more single-use and more disposable products …. Great for business, because you sell them over and over, and terrible for all life …. Burt hey, Convenience!)

Also the people who benefit from less traffic are the ones who still drive … and since no one wants Not to drive …. Self-driving cars if they ever get them working will be a huge thing … because people Like and Want the freedom to travel whenever, wherever (and Uber is too expensive for multiple daily uses for most people---for people who also need to maintain and insure a car even if they don’t use it as much.)

The only places multi-modal systems really work is where cars are just ridiculously inconvenient—New York and DC come to mind---and even then only people who live in the city can get away with no car at all …. And the money which would go to a car goes to cabs, by and large. And people who can afford cabs don’t want to ride buses packed full of people who cannot afford cabs … so even there the system has a built-in limit. The train part works well, though … one can see businessmen riding the trains (subways) in sharp suits, carrying brief cases (particularly in DC) ….

Not only would our urban planing have to change, but our social mindset would have to change. Right now in most places a car is seen as a sign of status …. Because no matter how poor, getting a car, no matter how lame, is a huge boost over mass transit in most places. A car says “I am not a scrub, I am not a loser, I am a working member of society.” Even among poor people it is a status symbol (as well as a near-necessity.)

Based on my experience not a lot of lower-middle-class or upwards folk, want to fund mass transit, because none of them ever want to ride a bus with “those people” be that a racial or ethnic, or economic prejudice …. And who can blame them. Some housewife who has been in air conditioning for her entire adult life doesn’t want to get packed in with a bunch of construction workers who stink of sweat after doing hard labor in hot weather all day. Shoot, I don’t want to and I am one of them. Nobody wants some sweaty, dirty guy rubbing against them at every corner, and often when the busses or trains are full the AC cannot keep up ....

Plus that most of the better-off people don’t want to hear loud, often vulgar conversation, and a lot of them do carry a variety of prejudices …. And it is true, if you are going to have your purse or wallet snatched it will likely be by someone who looks and smells like those construction workers ….. Won’t be them, because they have jobs … but people without jobs ride busses too ….


Yeah … there is no easy answer.

The real answer is everyone needs to start thinking of others, stop hating and fearing, and realize we are all in the same boat and crapping in one end spreads crap on everyone … but that doesn’t seem to have happened yet.

There …. THAT ought to be enough to get the thread sent to A&S.

base2 

Blah blah blah. It won't happen because of self-fulfilling establishment proficies on every front.

$50,000 cars, with another $20,000 in finance charges +$7,000 in taxes plus $500 annual government permission tags that must be displayed on government issued identification plates every year, plus a requirement to obtain a $200 monthly corporate insurance company blessing. Not to mention the requirement to carry a government issued card displaying a government taken photograph that you paid the government to take for to even use the thing you bought...

You call cars freedom? Cars are obligation. Our entire system is designed to make public transport and bicycles difficult if not impossible. As you too, no doubt discovered. I proclaim it here: Every minute spent in a car is a tax upon every citizen that none of them opted in to because no other option to refuse is practical.

Stop being an apologist. The Seattle Link is one of the best in the country. The extensions are still being built and the latest projections already put it at insfficent capacity. Our BRT lines are stuffed full every commute hour. Our intra-city Express busses are so full they often can not accept new passengers and you have to wait for the next one. Clearly they work for a sizable portion of residents. The bike infrastructure to is being built. Bicycle commuters are a regular sight in all weather. They wouldn't be there if it wasn't practical for them.

You say it can not be done. You should step aside and let the people doing it, complete their work. All of your concerns about "those people" result from the current system being the last choice available among the desperate. People will do whatever is safest and most convenient. A robust and diverse transit ridership creates safe and convenient environment. The threat of "those people" is diluted to nothing more than background noise.

I feel sorry you live in such a dysfunctional place that the above screed makes sense to you. You could always move to a place that didn't suck.

Maelochs

I will just leave this here and assume we all understand that unless someone really meant it, it is one of the funniest things ever posted.

rsbob 

Not to mention the British government helping subsidize e-bike ownership.

indyfabz

Maelochs

I have done my very best to send it to the desert of A&S.

I have failed.

I can go no further.

DangerousDanR

Yep, Seattle, a model metro transit system...Sound Transit Reveals Big Cost Overrun for Federal Way Train Base

Oh, yeah... the last time I rode on a large city metro train was in Paris in 2019, just before COVID-19. I got mugged by a diverse group of youth. Unfortunately for them I picked one up and pinned him by the throat to the train car wall until I made sure that I still had my passport and wallet. The other three ran away as fast as they could.

base2 

Oh come on. A bus full of you and 50 office workers & 2 hooligans is safer than just yourself and the 2 hooligans. It's simple math. There is 100 extra eyeballs to see what the situation is. Therefore nothing threatening the public safety happens.

It's obvious which one of us actually rides the bus.

Maelochs

^ Actually this is not proven .... what happens is when a few riders get violent and start robbing, people rarely band together because no one wants to be the first to charge a trio solo. That is how a few teens on an NY subway car can rob everybody on the car.

Not saying theft is the biggest issue, but if you had spent much time in NYC, you would get warnings about being careful on the subway. Also ... yes, during rush hour the cars are all packed .... which makes them uncomfortable and inefficient (as you say people have to wait of the next train ... which is great unless your kids are waiting at day care or school, or if you have to get home to take care of the kids and make dinner before heading out your part-time job)) ..... but the rest of the day they are empty and costing, not making money. Subways, busses, and highways all suffer from this. if the system is built with ample capacity for maximum load, the costs are too high because max load happens so rarely. Therefore systems are built for moderate load ... and during rush hours the systems cannot cope. This leads people to seek alternatives, and negatively impacts users (I can get to the nearest major cities in about an hour if I travel late, late at night, and hour and a half in off-peak daytime, and two-and-a-half hours at rush hour.)

Some people cannot afford to commute for five hours a day .... most people cannot justify two or three hours' commute for low-paying jobs because it makes second jobs and child care impossible.

As I have stated, an intermodal mass-transit system is not impossible, but given the realities of municipal budgets, the uncertainty of growth, and the fact that even the best systems usually cannot meet the needs of much of the population .... Sorry urban/suburban transport is very much an unsolved problem.

DangerousDanR

This was exactly my experience. The group was pushing me towards the exit and not a single person tried to prevent it. And it was obvious what was happening.

The fact that they misjudged me and that I was much stronger than they expected gave me the opportunity to turn the tables on them.