It really fucking sucks that the auto industry lobbied the US government so goddamn hard in the 30’s - 70’s and got so much of this country built on car centric infrastructure while also systemically dismantling countless forms of public transit nationwide too. Most major cities and metropolitan areas used to have a pretty comprehensive streetcar system, yet where are they now? That’s right, manufacturers like GM bought majority stakes in those companies and then had their infrastructure dismantled all in the name of “progress.”
As far as I’m aware, the only city in the western world that truly kept its pre-automobile streetcar network was Melbourne, Australia. A result is it today has the largest tram network of any city in the world.
It hurts my soul to imagine how basically every city in North America had similar networks, but they were almost completely annihilated, save for small fragments in a small handful of cities.
Technically Australia is east of the international date line so it’s not even really the western world.
I did a bicycle+light rail for a year and it took me about 2x the time to get everywhere I needed to go, but I could do it in a car centric city. You can’t expect rural folks to have access to public transportation though. Suburbs are a stretch too in some areas.
Why can’t we expect rural areas to have some form of mass transit? Having at least a bus system that services a rural area absolutely should be the expectation.
Because a bus that serves a town of 500 people will come once an hour, at most. Also, many people can’t walk far to/from the one bus stop. Busses do not solve a problem in small towns, because there is no traffic and plenty of parking.
Switzerland has rail that serves small towns and it’s pretty frequent: https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc
@KevonLooney@lemm.ee, @Blamemeta@lemmy.world, @bob_wiley@lemmy.world
It seems that you’re all only thinking about servicing just the small town itself, and not a larger bus line that services multiple smaller towns to get them to a larger city area and back, or to each other.
The usefulness is not in traversing the rural town. It’s to get the fuck out of one.
Your town underinvested in transit because everyone has a car, and they sprawled the architecture because everyone has a car. People got by in rural areas with trains just fine before cars were invented
Having grown up in a rural area, here’s what I think the solution would look like.
- streetcars within towns
- Roads dedicated to cars that pass next to towns, and moving the bulk of parking to a ramp just within the town limits
- “Frequent” (think once every hour) bus stops from town to town
- A train hub for the local area to desirable areas like cities
It’s all a bit chicken-and-egg. The more people that use a public transport network, the more economic it becomes to put on more frequent services and additional routes. A town of 100k people is more than enough to sustain a pretty comprehensive public transport network, if most of them are using it. But obviously if most people don’t use it, those that do are stuck with whatever can be made to work.
I live in a much larger city and this is true. I can drive my car to work in about 12-15 mins or it would take roughly 1.5-2 hours to walk or take a bus. When traffic was low due to Covid I nearly bought an e-bike because I could get to work in about 30 mins. If I tried that now I would certainly be hit by a car in a month or less.
Because at that point you’re just running buses for individuals at best, but mostly running empty. You’d have to stop at every house… It would create more emissions that it saves.
Ideally, you would be running a train instead of a bus. The train stops in the middle of town, which is a thriving mixed use area of medium density residences, corner stores, and restaurants. Everyone can walk to the train station.
Now I can only speak for the US, but most major cities have ring roads or some sort of bypass that would be perfect for a hub and spoke sort of setup alongside them. Maybe it’s just the fact that the university I went to famously has a light rail system and the concept is just embedded in me, but I’d imagine the uptake of a park and ride approach with stations out in the burbs (certainly not all of them, but laid out so that you don’t need to go more than a burb or two over to reach a station) would be high enough to be worth it. Putting in some shops at the stations like an airport foodcourt would help offset building costs and whatnot to a degree over time as well. Then you could tie the hubs into other major cities in the state and you’ve got yourself a compelling transit system, doubly so if those cities have subways.
A benefit of starting with a park-and-ride setup is, if you have good protected bike lanes and secure bike parking, you can encourage a lot of bike and ebike trips to the transit hubs. If every suburb isn’t too far from a transit hub, that makes a compelling case for bikes and ebikes as first- and last-mile solutions for a lot of people. Maybe not everyone, and maybe not overnight, but definitely for a lot of people. And any improvement is still improvement.
I understand what it means, but “last mile” is a really funny term because walking a mile is apparently inconceivable to the average american
You know, the bike wrinkle is something I hadn’t even considered. That’s an awesome point and all the more reason why we need to build a better transit system.
that’s a problem with the city and not with public transit. there are many cities where public transit is safe, it always depends on the general safety of the city
There was a woman who would beg for money on the last stretch of my commute home. Either she was on the bus or she must have been coming back from the other end of the line.
Every now and then she would start shrieking. Once she started she just… Didn’t stop. She would walk the length of the bus shrieking directly in people’s faces. This happened about a dozen times before I just started getting off the bus if I saw her. I would rather walk 30 minutes then have to put up with her.
I’m my country the transit system won’t ban anyone because it is considered excessive punishment for the extremely poor.
As a result, transit just sucks for everyone.
Behavior that is anti-social should be unacceptable. We’re so afraid of placing limits on anyone that the most unstable/unwell place limits on the rest of us.
In the case of the woman I mentioned, she’s also a victim. There’s no proper support for her. She needs help too.
That’s illegal in Denmark, i have seen people do this kind of things sometimes and everytime they are kicked off the transport at next stop. And then they jump on at the next transport and kicked off again, this behavior have forced the public transport in the big cities to have guards on board the trains all the times.
Honestly, these days I feel like it’s hard to claim that driving is “safer”. It feels safer enclosed in your metal box, except for all the other high speed low-intelligence high-rage boxes driving around near you.
I can also respect the frustration of finding crazies on public transit, and won’t try to spin that as a positive - but to me, it speaks towards visibility of the world around you, and willingness to exist in it and change society when it’s broken. It’s like the lords in their manors that “cannot fathom consorting with all that plebeian filth”.
I’m biased. I’m a tall guy, and I’ve had an incident having to stare down a homeless guy that was spewing Asian hate to a poor Korean guy on the train. I’ll keep taking those trains, claim them for the reasonable people.
Yes, but context matters. Nobody is taking a train up the street to get groceries. And using a car (or a huge ass truck) for that is often overkill.
Bikes FTW!
I’m struggling with this average vs potential. If I stand on a 3.5m wide sidewalk on average I’m going to see 15,000 people pass me by? And there is no room for potential improvement as the sidewalks are completely full on average? And how are we figuring cars can potentially be improved by 33%? Are all cars 3/4ths full already?
I’m very pro public transit, I’m just unclear what is being shown in this chart.
They’re showing capacity, i.e., a 3.5m sidewalk can move about 15k people per direction per hour. I’m guessing there’s leeway for cars depending on intersection types/design, speed, etc., whereas there is much less variation in average speed for pedestrians.
Average should be a measured real world quantity. A max theoretical value should never be average unless it’s literally always at the max… on average.
The wording on the chart isn’t the best, but I’m presuming they mean average capacity, not average ridership, because every city and every system will have its own factors that can impact the specific capacity of their transit modes. E.g., one system may have double-decker suburban rail vs another’s single-decker, or one system may have articulated buses vs another’s non-articulated. These differences would result in differing capacities, but the purpose of the chart is to show a ballpark number for what the typical capacity of a 3.5m corridor of each type would be, based on averaging system capacities in presumably many different cities.
![[image] Cars are an incredibly inefficient way to move people(lemmy.world)](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a55ce0e0-9740-4207-9d5f-64bc68231a3d.jpeg){kind=link}