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.
@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.
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
Switzerland has rail that serves small towns and it’s pretty frequent: https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does “BRT double lane” refer to one 3.5m lane out of two, both together transporting 86k/hour due to leapfrogging efficiencies, or to both lanes together at 7m total? I think it’s important to maintain consistency with the 3.5m theme!
I would guess the former, as a single bus line usually doesn’t run a constant stream of buses nor express routes, but leapfrogging could allow you to run multiple bus lines along the same corridor, allowing for kinda ludicrous capacities.
Based on this data, the minimum headway and maximum current vehicle capacities, the theoretical maximum throughput measured in passengers per hour per direction (PPHPD) for a single traffic lane is some 150,000 passengers per hour (250 passengers per vehicle, one vehicle every 6 seconds). In real world conditions BRT Rio (de Janeiro, BRS Presidente Vargas) with 65.000 PPHPD holds the record, TransMilenio Bogotá and Metrobus Istanbul perform 49,000 – 45,000 PPHPD, most other busy systems operating in the 15,000 to 25,000 range.
Oh wow, I could believe that now! Tried looking up pics of Rio and Bogotá BRT to see if they are two-lane or one-lane. Some pics look as if it’s 2-lane:
But it seems that’s only around stations, the lanes merge into 1 later:
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.
People don’t drive cars because they think they’re efficient in absolute numbers. They drive cars, because cars are way more comfortable and faster than anything else in everyday life.
Yeah I wish we had a lot more public transit in the USA but a lot of these arguments do not compare convenience in any way. Most of those rail options are in no way more convenient. Especially for long distance. I took a train long distance once; or was almost as bad as flying in terms of schedule. Being able to come and go on my schedule is one of the biggest bonuses of driving.
That said, fuck cars lol
The only thing I wish is that we had more accessible and safe single-seat vehicles. I bring 3 empty seats with me to work every day. I would be more than happy to have a cheap, efficient single seat vehicle for commuting if it was safe. I’m not going to ride a motorcycle 25 miles each way every day in the Florida heat and rain. I’m certainly not going to share the road with the maniacs we have here on a motorcycle.
Smart Cars and the like are closer to this, but roads and parking spaces aren’t really designed to take advantage of their comparatively smaller size (eg you can’t drive them side by side down the road).
To be fair, Europe is sort of like this given how small their roads are
I’m certainly not going to share the road with the maniacs we have here on a motorcycle.
In other words, it isn’t that biking or motorcycling or walking or whatever isn’t safe, it’s that the presence of cars makes everything unsafe (including the cars themselves).
Similarly, bike lanes etc. are car infrastructure, not bike infrastructure, because in the absence of cars cyclists would have no problems using the normal lanes. (Remember that the next time some dipshit complains about spending on bike lanes or cyclists not paying their “fair share.”)
Pretty much every argument drivers have against other transportation modes is rooted in projection.
Yup. I’d love to ditch my car but it would mean my 20 minute commute would take an hour longer each direction. And this is in (around) Helsinki, Finland, where public transport is really rather good.
Ain’t nothing comfortable about being in an environment where one wrong move will end your life
Not to mention how every time you drive a km, you kill a statistical fraction of a person. How do people do that fucking calculus? How many micromorts are you willing to inflict on others just to get some OJ from the store? People DON’T do the fucking calculus, that’s how. They just push it from their minds, like they have been conditioned to by the religion of the automobile ever since birth.
Where is the plane?
![[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}
