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How Commute Culture Made American Cities Lifeless -- Yet There's Hope
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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Fuck Cars
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For all I’ve read, the lack of public transportation in US cities (or the badly managed ones) is by design, influenced on politicians by the car industry lobby.
I guess it’s the same for zoning laws? I’ve no idea, and I’m probably not exactly true, as I’m stating a huge generalization. The US is so big and diverse that there may be places with good public infrastructure.
But in a broader sense, it seems that the car lobby played a big role in how cities were designed and run.
Somehow there's always a "death spiral" for public transit, especially now as people commute less. But somehow... There never is for roads. We never seem to have enough roads. Funny that.
“I swear, it’s just one more road. One more and that’s it. Promise!” XDDDD
The car lobby thing is true for LA, but I'm not sure you can apply this to every city. What is evident, is that cities that existed before cars were invented or introduced are still more pedestrian friendly (see east coast cities or European ones for example) and the ones founded after are more grid like and car friendly.
Public transportation is only worth it if there is a high enough density of people (yeah, this sub may not like to hear it), so if you have huge sprawling suburbs it's not obvious where to even put your bus/train stations. Usually it's great to connect centers of some sort.
So yeah, if there had been more incentive to connect centers and dense clusters of population with each other, they may have planned according to that.
@P1r4nha @Dmian
"...... cities that existed before cars were invented or introduced are still more pedestrian friendly"
Every city in #PuertoRico is older than the car. Here we suffer a 66:100 car:people ratio. There are no walk-able cities, no public transportation, sidewalks are only parking spaces cars, car dealers own the banks and the politicians.
#fuckcars, they are killing us.
Yes, I think to work well the Land zoning and transport planning need to be hand in hand.
(and ideally serve people rather than car companies).
A local bus service is more efficient the denser the population it serves.
Rural densities will struggle to support/ warrant frequent bus services.
Really dense areas will more easily support more frequent bus services / netwoks and even trains / grade separated or exclusive land use for public transport.
It's no suprise that super dense places like Japan, Singapore, and desely populated European , Chinese regions have more public transport.
Add New York City to that list for that matter. Presumably NYC benefited from achieving it's density before cars became too powerful politically..
@oo1 @azimir @P1r4nha @Dmian
Urban planning and public transport should absolutely go hand-in-hand.
But on to your other point.
The key factor for transport use isn't just population or density. It's also the proportion of the population that uses public transport. And places that have more frequent public transport will have a higher proportion of the population using it than places with low quality public transport.
It's a point the late Paul Mees made in his book "A very public solution": https://www.mup.com.au/books/a-very-public-solution-paperback-softback (it's highly recommended reading if you have the chance.)
Imagine a city with just 100,000 people. But the local bus service is exceptional, and half the population uses it. That's a base of 50,000 people.
Imagine a city of 500,000 people. The public transport network there is average, so just 10% of the population uses it. That's 50,000 people.
Now imagine a metropolitan area of 5,000,000 people. The public transport network there is poor and infrequent. Only 1% of the population uses it. That's 50,000 people.
Three cities, same absolute number of public transport users, different modal share.
If you run frequent services, every 10 minutes or better, and services connect so that it's a two- or three-seat journey to everywhere in your city, you will have a much higher ridership than if it's an hourly bus service. That's with the same population and density.
Frequent bus services (once every 10 minutes or more) can also act as a feeder into a higher rail, light rail, tram, or metro services. In suburban, rural, and seni-rural areas, that extends the reach of your rail network.
Yes, higher density around railway stations is the best option. But where there is a lot of low-density suburban sprawl, frequent feeder buses are a good option.
In Canada the resistance to change is fueled by "this is how we've always done it" which is false as Canada was founded before the car was made. There is also a conflict of interest to reduce dependance on roads as we have a decent auto manufacturing sector and many people rely on jobs related to roads and cars. With zoning there is hesitancy to change because many of our politicians are land lords using single family homes as rentable apartments and they know that their property values will drop if we start building real multi unit residences and affordable housing.
Our cities have been caught in this style of development for decades and to try to change it really goes against the current political grain. It takes a brave and determined politician to try for change and they will meet resistance from their colleagues and parts of their voter base the entire way.