Anons argue in comments
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Hi, a different commenter here. I love public transportation (time to sit and read! meet interesting people!) and dislike cars, but realistically we often have other considerations that city design alone wouldn't solve.
Now I WFH so that's cool. But the experience made me realize how complex is the problem of transportation and urban design. I mean, I agree with the fact that bikes are awesome and we need better public transportation in the US, though.
I am curious, how much time did it take to make those 18miles (28km?) by car? I have just checked in my city, that has really nice public transportation (Tallinn), and to cross essentially the whole city (~20km, a route that nobody does, so probably not very well connected) on Monday at 9am it takes 59m by public transport (2 buses) and 40m by car (it takes 30m generally, but traffic). 2-3h or 2/3 times that to do 50% more distance looks like public transportation is not that good, did you mean "good for US standards"?
Hah, good point. This was in Boston, where the MBTA rail system all connects downtown. So if you're just hopping on and off, or you only have 1 connection, things are great. Unfortunately the line didn't reach my job so I had to make a connection downtown, go to the end of the line, then catch a bus. The metro connections were pretty good but that bus was the killer; if the timing was wrong, I was waiting around up to half an hour. By car it was like 50-60 minutes during rush hour, half an hour if no traffic at all, so I ended up doing late rush hour and it was like 40 minutes.
For all that, I really liked the metro in Boston; it was great for just hopping on, hanging out downtown, then getting back without having to drive. But yeah, this is "relatively good", sounds like Tallinn has it better.
Yeah, I appreciate that it's complex, but in the US we prioritize cars instead of people.
A properly designed system will account for lots of transportation options. This means:
If you go to smaller towns, a car is your best bet. If you're going downtown, a train should be more efficient, and a car should be workable. If you live in or near a city, a bike should be sufficient.
We used to have one car because I could bike to work, but now we need too, and only because of the 2 days I commute to the office. And the worst part is that there's a train line near my house that I could totally take to work if they actually built the line they've been talking about for decades. But instead of building that line (connects to a larger system, including a stop at a major sports stadium), we expanded a highway (didn't fix traffic) and we're building a new highway (might help somewhat). Most of those cars are traveling along the proposed train route (it runs parallel to the highway), yet the highway gets priority.
I propose we rethink transit in terms of moving people instead of cars.
Yeah agreed it's an interesting problem bc it has so many components... unfortunately when we try to get one part of it implemented, people say: it's not going to solve the whole problem so why bother. I'm still learning about it and so are most people. But I think even the most truck-loving person has an older relative who can't drive any more, or maybe they themselves can't drive bc of a DUI or something, so there's always an opening for learning more.
Yup. Fortunately there are professions for solving these types of problems, so we need to stop demanding specific solutions and let them do their job.
It turns out adding more lanes often makes things worse, and the better solution is to replace cars with higher density transit, so your truck loving friend will likely be better off if we invest in transit instead of highways. I want to take transit to work instead of adding to traffic, but that currently takes 4x as long as driving (2-ish hours each way). You should absolutely be able to drive if you want, and the more practical other modes of transportation are, the less cars will be on the road since a lot of people would rather ride than drive.