this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Fuck Cars
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If you want people to abandon cars, make the alternatives better. Unfortunately I never see that happening, I only see attempts to make car travel worse. I hate public transport with a passion, because it is so bad. When I was commuting, it took an hour each way to go 13 miles, but if I tried to take public transport, it would have taken two hours each way, including 2 miles of walking on a state highway with no shoulder and no sidewalks. Would have had to take a bus to the light rail, and change trains at least once. This light rail shared the same road that cars use, so it was subject to all of the same traffic issues that cars suffered.
Due to induced demand and other factors, constricting automobile traffic improves public transit and makes getting around by transit and taking a car better in the long run.
Yes, in the short term it would seem negative (30 minutes by car vs. 2hr becomes 1hr vs. 2hr), but more people using transit would spur investment into transit. This would start with better allocation of bus routes to more directly go to desired destinations. In the medium term it would be making other areas easier to use alternatives such as walking and bike paths along state routes like the one you'd take. In the long term it would make good sense to invest in build commuter rail lines into and out of the city, which would be better funded by fares, private and government investment. All of this would reduce traffic from cars in the city as well, without needing to increase the roadway maintenance budget from having bigger roads.
The other thing is that if the light-rail road became pedestrian only, it would have right-of-way through the entire route and wouldn't have to wait for the cars. Pedestrians wouldn't block a moving LRV (or they would at their peril).
Designing for cars forces alternatives to become worse by physically shoving apart destinations in order to fit in parking lots and more lanes. Nobody wants to walk when they have to traverse shitty parking lots to get anywhere instead of nice places, after all.
The sort of argument you're making is fundamentally dishonest because it's based on the presumption that the status quo development pattern is somehow a level playing field when it is, in fact, very much unfairly catering to cars.
See also: The Arrogance of Space