1. Extensive support of public transport: metro, tram, dedicated bus routes (separate from car traffic), dedicated paths for bicycles.
2. ... maybe whatever is this ...
UPDATE: here's a good graph - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_transport#/media/File:P... , i.e. car traffic is often congested because of inherent low passenger bandwith. If google wants to manage traffic as internet routing - why then stick with outdated low bandwith ethernet cable?
People will generally choose whichever mode of transport is most convenient and cost-effective, based on how they rationally (or irrationally) weigh various factors. If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere.
The only way to shift people onto public transport is to make it more attractive than driving. That can be done by making driving less convenient or more expensive—through higher ownership, fuel, and parking costs, and by resisting attempts to eliminate congestion. And by making public transport better through greater frequency, reliability, coverage, and convenience.
> If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere.
Even with that unrealistically idealised scenario, if you had similarly idealised public transport (station within 5 minutes walk either end, trains every 5 minutes) I'd still choose the train much of the time. I could actually get something done on my laptop instead of having to concentrate on the road, plus I could get up for a stretch mid journey (without stopping). It would be different if I had a lot of luggage or was bringing the kids, though.
My point is that driving is not always inherently more attractive than public transport.
But that isn't an ideal scenario for public transit regardless of whether somebody tries to describe it that way. Very frequent stops ("station within 5 minutes walk") mean that your journey through the subway system will take a very, very long time. Driving can easily cut that time in half.
Conversely, traffic is so bad at peak hours that taking the train is faster than driving when it comes to getting home from downtown here in Chicago, even with frequent stops (and my line stops more often than most). Biking is basically always faster than driving+parking here unless you have reserved private parking on both ends or are going clear across town (8+ miles)
After writing that post, I started drafting an edit to acknowledge that clever marketing is another way to encourage greater use of public transport. In my mind I imagined a campaign highlighting the time people get back not having to drive through heavy traffic. The advertisement could say, "Give yourself more time to do the things you love," accompanied by a wholesome image of a smiling person reading a book on the train.
Then it occurred to me that nobody would actually be reading a book. They would be doom-scrolling Instagram or watching wingnut political propaganda on YouTube. I'm starting to wonder if people might be mentally better off behind the wheel...
That's the reason I prefer public transit. I normally bike everywhere, because I get to exercise, see the scenery and yell at people, but sometimes I like to just sit down and read a book.
Another benefit is being able to have a drink or go to multiple locations without worrying about bringing the car back somehow.
Driving has been subsidized and "made better" for so long that it feels natural. Forcing your private steel box through public spaces should be the most impractical and expensive thing to do, yet it's not.
You misunderstood my comment. Driving is made worse by the presence of other people driving. Government can partially mitigate it by spending taxpayer money on building more road infrastructure. Or for a fraction of the cost, making public transit better.
Driving is currently subsidized in a variety of ways that hide it's true costs. Almost any effort to make driving's perceived cost closer to the real cost, including externalities, is a good thing.
IMO, it's not so much "make driving worse" (ie actively make roads worse, etc).
Instead, it's actively make transit better be reallocating road funds... Add buses or light rail or dedicated/separated bike lanes instead of brainlessly adding traffic lanes. Every bike added to that bike lane is one less car (very roughly).
Additionally, tax car infrastructure appropriately. Free road-side parking is not an entitlement. Reduce parking minimums in redevelopment/new development and let the market determine the supply of spaces. A good example - it's increasingly common for apartments in DC to charge extra for a parking space.
Most of the above applies to urban areas as well as moderately dense suburban zones.
Large cities can take additional steps - no car zones (common in Italian towns), congestion pricing (London, NYC, and others already do this), and changes to road design to better accommodate pedestrians (plenty of YT videos about various plans to do this).
What makes driving worse is the presence of more cars. This can be partially mitigated by piling money into road infrastructure, but infrastructure is a band-aid on a problem created by more people choosing to drive.
What makes driving better is the presence of fewer cars. There's really only one way to reduce the number of cars on the road: build good alternatives to driving. If you love driving, you should be the strongest champion of public transport investment.
They keep driving how it is, and make other things better relatively. Reducing parking minimums doesn't remove existing parking, it prevents building more. Building bike lanes doesn't usually mean reducing car capacity. Adding more lanes to already huge highways doesn't actually improve driving, so redirecting that money to rail does not make driving worse, in fact it stands to make it better by getting more people off the road
Removing parking minimums doesn't even prevent more parking - it only lets the market balance supply/demand for parking. The current system in most of the US requires worst-case/max-demand parking lots, so the only time a shopping center's lot is full is a few peak hours on the weekend and Christmas season. The rest of the year, it's mostly empty.
And just to add my own recent anecdote... we visited southern Italy (Puglia) last month. Most of the towns have zero traffic* zones (ZTL zones) in the historic centers. In all of them, there were either ample metered street spots just outside the ZTL or small pay lots a short walk away. As far as I could tell, as a tourist, it worked well - the downtowns were vibrant with lots of foot traffic.
* ZTLs allow local traffic and handicapped transport within certain guidelines.
It's only really been buffed by the facts you don't have to pay for massive custom vehicles or drivers, and market dynamics (and the corresponding incredible features and amazing factory and transportation efficiencies) mean cars are extremely good value for money for a lot of people.
In other words: there's a profit motive, so people get something really good for their money.
Public transport is frequently a monopoly or semi-monopoly, and there is power available (the people running the public transport also get to set rules for drivers), and exercising power is much, much easier than competing in a market.
So you bought a car for a good price full of features, good for you. Now where are you going to drive the thing? Can you build your own road wherever you want to go? No, only the state can build roads? How could we allow such a monopoly over our lives.
Now you say there are rules to follow on these roads, with enforcement, meaning someone has power over you the entire time? Yikes.
Going over the patch notes, here's some buffs you might have missed:
Mandatory parking minimums, high speed limits, car lanes without bus lanes or bike lanes, tearing down neighborhoods to build interchanges and highways...
> If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere.
Cars don't even have tables; let alone toilets, dining areas, sleeping cabins, etc. Even those which do (e.g. RVs) would require a solo traveller to stop in order to use them.
How long do you spend on transit that most of those are necessary?
As for toilets, the new Caltrain cars, built by Stadler (from Switzerland, which has the best non-high speed rail train infrastructure in the world) were not going to include toilets at are - I don't believe they do in Switzerland - but were forced to add one by ADA regulations in the USA.
> If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere.
What kind of nonsense is this? People take public transport it's better than driving. You don't need to expend mental cycles focusing on the road, you can do something else while you're on the go: chat to friends, browse the internet, read a book, sleep, etc. Driving is dead time.
> People take public transport it's better than driving
Public transport is also much more expensive, particularly when you have more than one person in the vehicle, even with loads of tax added to car fuel, doesn't depart from your house or arrive at your destination, and means you can't take much stuff with you.
Driving is more expensive than public transport when you factor in the cost of the vehicle, maintenance, fuel, insurance, taxes, parking, etc.
If driving were more cheaper than public transport then nobody would use it. Yet, almost wherever you go in the world if you go to a station at 8am on a weekday it will be full of people.
> If driving were more cheaper than public transport then nobody would use it. Yet, almost wherever you go in the world if you go to a station at 8am on a weekday it will be full of people.
This logic is devastatingly simplistic. Think about the most obvious counter-example: people who have car sometimes take the train. Even after they've paid all those car fees, they'll take the train for £50 rather than drive for £8 in car fuel. Why?
It's because there isn't an objective tier list for vehicles. E.g. if I'm going through central London I'll use the Underground because London is so densely populated going by car isn't always feasible. But if you're going somewhere in London with a baby then you might well take the hit and drive, because you have a lot of stuff to bring with you, and the Underground is unpleasant and hot, which the baby will not appreciate.
I pay €63 per month for unlimited train rides across Germany. My car insurance used to cost more than that. Keeping my old Kangoo running cost me about €150 per month before fuel.
> People will generally choose whichever mode of transport is most convenient
ok that is one fourth of the conversation, or less.. sure, marketing and economic signals.. got it.
The historic rise of the personal auto versus all else was partly fueled by a social dynamic where "privelage is defined by the ability to remove yourself from the dirty and dangerous crowds of non-privelaged humans".. Autos have dramatically filled the transportation sector because clean and intelligent ME can ride next to foul dangerous person YOU without contact reliably.
Notice the profound growth of personal aircraft for the newly wealthy. Google upper-levels are famous for this. Personal aircraft are some of the most anti-ecological and anti-efficient modes of transport ever.. check out the stocks and sales figures.. huge growth in the last years.
America and others have successfully made ugly reality of social constructs into marketing talk and "rational decisions" but the reality is not fully described by those IMHO
Yep. In the future, only billionaires and politicians shall be allowed private travel. The common man shall be crammed into public transport where he can sweat, sneeze, touch, grab etc. the rest of the common man.
Forcing the public to abandon the comfort of private travel seems right out of the WEF playbook.
Current situation with prevalent "private travel", i.e. cars in USA (and probably "the west" overall??) IS due to corporate and political interests.
Car manufacturers, "big oil", road construction companies, politicians collecting taxes from cars (fuel sales, road use, cars themselves[0] and car parking), banks leasing money to buy and maintain cars, insurance, landlords owning car parks, etc.
They are very very interested that private car ownership wouldn't go away and are fighting it tooth and nail. You need to own multiple cars per household spend thousands on leasing, hundreds on parking, to just go to work and of course there's fuel.
Though somewhere like London, Paris or Tokyo - why would you want to do daily commute in a car? If you are a billionaire, driven by personal driver in your Bentley or Land Rover - sure, but otherwise metro is cheaper by an order of magnitude and I'd bet often times much faster too. In those places rich and heads of state take trams and metros.
I probably not need to remind you that "richest man" lobbied some failing projects to upsell his car sales, instead of allowing high speed rail to be developed.
[0] this of course depends from country to country and from state to state.
I think you underestimate just how much many people like their cars and enjoy driving. People generally spend far more on their vehicle than they really need to.
If I lived in London or Paris I wouldn't commute by car. But I don't live in a big city and, at this point in my life, I don't want to (although I'd love to have a little pied-a-terre for part time use). Instead, I live in the 'burbs of a pretty car-friendly city and life is good.
I think you vastly underestimate how much people like their cars. Sure there are corporate interests who benefit, but they don't force folks to change cars every 3 years or make big "crossovers" and SUVs the most popular car type in the US and, now, Europe[1].
Cars are just really convenient to have when you need them and folks will put up with all kind of costs and other inconveniences to own one.
I think it's really important to have robust and safe public transit so car use can be minimized when it's unnecessary, but I don't have illusions that this will lead to some kind of car-free utopia.
Also...allow people to work from home more. During the Covid pandemic, most white-collar employees work from home, and the commute and the traffic is usually not a big problem. But now more and more companies ask employees to go back to office, and traffic jam is becoming a headache again.
Yup... hours of commuting time just to sit in Zoom/Teams/Slack/whatever calls while in the office instead of at home makes no sense at all, and is bad for the environment (even if you use public transportation, not going to the office still emits less CO2 than going there). But because RTO is just a way of trying to get rid of employees without severance costs, these and other points will invariably fall on deaf ears...
> I think it would help with making companies handle that externality.
This is backwards, companies do not choose where employees live. Employees do. That they choose to live with long and unpleasant commutes (typically in exchange for more space, cheaper housing etc) is in general terms on them not the company. I'll allow that the rowback of wfh from a previously fully remote job is on the company - but certainly outside of that I have little agreement.
While true, there's (often, not always) an inverse correlation between location of work and cost of living. Few people can afford to live close to the office.
What would work (at least in my country, and in my head / from my armchair) is sattelite offices. I live in a neat suburb with an industrial estate with some office buildings, if my job opened a sattelite office there I would be much more inclined to go to the office.
But then, they would need to make sure that only people that live nearby go to that office. Given that a lot of teams are multidisciplinary, that would be difficult. Plus, the job would need to offer long-term stability, and only few jobs in software can promise stability for more than a year. If they want people to move close to work, it has to be both affordable and guaranteed stable for at least 5-10 years.
I looked into it once, there was an office for a software company across the street and I applied there. But the two offers they made were both lower than what I was earning at the time, to the point where I wouldn't be able to live there. And second, after the pandemic they closed the office and became a remote-first company.
We definitely need more metro, trams, bus routes, and bike paths. I especially want the latter because I bike to and from work every day. However, I have to wonder about the cost of these projects. In SF, we recently spent $346 million on the Van Ness Improvement Project, which added 2 miles of bus lanes. I just can't see how that's a good use of funds. If someone gave me $346 million and told me to improve society, I could think of many better options than adding two miles of bus lane. So a prerequisite to the whole idea seems to involve solving whatever is making these projects so expensive.
Highways are built at (relative) ease, no matter the cost. Data centers are infamously now being built at society expense (electricity and water capacity), sometimes literally in peoples backyards.
At the moment I don't have the receipts, but from anecdotes - it's all just political will.
There's a highway extension? Some properties are taken by eminent domain, some other NIMBYs are told to just suck it up.
Data center? Forget about it - foundations are being laid this moment (sometimes no matter the law)!
High speed rail? We must listen to every NIMBY on the proposed path, hence it will take 200 years to listen to all complaints and align opinions of the people impacted. Millions speant on "research, enviornmental impact and public opinion" - project stalls and is closed after 5 years.
NB: I am not from USA, I think this pattern fits many (especially western) countries. Successful projects (I repeat myself) are always based on political will, when rule/law framework is designed to make such projects easier and much cheaper.
NB2: Also as with anything - when you start building you get experience and expertese - the more you build the cheaper it gets. A lot of places havent built new train/metro/tram line in decades - hence all expertese must be built from scratch (from policies, to government clerks knowing how to deal with such projects, to construction businesses who never built rail in 50 years, etc.).
> Highways are built at (relative) ease, no matter the cost.
It's like that because it's a misconception that highways are built for passenger cars. They're built for freight and all kinds of business activities - regular people using them are just a bonus.
The majority of petroleum-based fuel, wear and tear on the highways and toll revenue comes from everything but passenger cars on highways.
Almost all of the new highway construction is for passenger cars. Yes, the interstate highways were built in part to facilitate intercity truck traffic, but the reason for building yet another beltway around, say, Houston isn't for trucks but for all of the passenger cars in the region that are congesting the roads.
The challenge that "developed" countries / cities have is that there's already a lot of existing (and aging) infrastructure around.
Meanwhile in other countries they build new cities from scratch, including infrastructure based on current-day knowledge of how these things pan out long term.
I think the US has the space and funds to do so. If they were to build a new city from scratch for the next 250 years, what would it look like?
This feels like an instance of America being unable to build things due to corruption.
Two miles of any lane shouldn't cost over a hundred million dollars per mile. Repainting a lane should be vastly less and even if they're building a new flyover just for buses it shouldn't cost that much. Something is happening there. It is not getting built in an effective way.
> However, I have to wonder about the cost of these projects.
A very good way to deal with this is to recognize that all infrastructure needs maintenance and periodic replacement. Once it is time to replace a road, that is when you change it to include bike paths, bus lanes and so on.
You need some foresight, planning, make new road designs part of law, and political will. Some countries have made this work very well.
If we had to stick to transportation-specific improvements, I would use the money to eliminate bus fare for a year. (muni generates about $100M in fare, so really it would be enough money to eliminate fare for ~3 years.)
Unlike subway fare, bus fare doesn't prevent n'er-do-wells from getting on the bus (they just ignore the fare and get on anyway), and it probably increases ridership and gets some people out of their cars, which reduces congestion (public benefit and therefore deserving of government subsidy).
Why not use the money to make bus service better? There is no city that can't effectively use many more buses. Bus riders all put service as their biggest problem over the cost.
Improving service is much better, but the relative scales here are crazy. She options are "completely eliminate cost" or "slightly improve service in one two-mile stretch". Granted, 10 million trips a year go through that two-mile stretch that was improved, but that's just a small fraction of all bus trips in SF.
It is more than that, but even still we should as that would help the people who ride their routes. In almost all cases this would bring in more riders who find the new service good enough that they can stop driving.
Where I live, I’d spend it on increasing parking availability at train stations, and/or run a lot more local buses that do a small (few kilometres) circuit around the station and ferry passengers to/from the station. Taking a bus to the station currently adds an unreasonable amount of time to the journey. It doesn’t matter how good trains are if I don’t live near a station and I can’t get there.
I would add to the top of that list - reducing the distance people travel. Less kilometers would be very effective. Don't spend hours a day in your car. If people wouldn't be traveling so much, especially for work, this whole problem would disappear.
The whole point of a city is all the destinations you can teach. Less km means you can go less places. No density isn't an answer, because some destinations are not dense, and even if they are we can cram more places in.
Air travel is the best way to go long distances, but some small islands are not easily accessible by plane. For those places, we have ferries.
In a similar vein, most places in a city can be accessed via density + transit. But cars are great for those non-dense destinations you describe, like wilderness areas or farms or whatever else.
There is a large gap between distances where flying makes S and and what you can walk. Even with an ebike the distance you can reach in a reasonable time is vastly less that a car for most trips.
The trouble with this graph is that it assumes the buses/trains are full. It obviously doesn't apply to a bus with one passenger on it, which takes up even more space than a car.
From which we can observe the problem. Alice is at home and wants to go to work. She travels along a low density street for a few miles, enters a congested thoroughfare for a few more miles, then travels along another low density street to her destination.
She can't take a bus at the endpoints because she would be the only one on it, but if she took a bus only on the congested thoroughfare then she'd end up on the far side of it without a vehicle to get the rest of the way to her destination.
To fix this the thing you need before mass transit (by several years) is zoning rules that allow higher density construction in a higher percentage of the land area where people live and work.
I've been traveling around in Europe without a car for several days now, including several fairly rural areas.
There's a distinctly American trope in play, that if the bus or train doesn't stop more or less exactly at your destination, then it's going to be totally useless. Except, you look at the rural European countryside, and there is still a fairly reliable--and well-used, certainly not "only one rider on the bus"--bus system. And this is in the countryside that is less densely populated than most American suburbs or exurbs. It is totally possible to make mass transit work, even in the car-oriented hellscape of most American cities.
The main thing that American public transit systems seem to be really allergic to is the concept of frequency--a high frequency transit system is generally necessary for usability, but your typical American transit system responds to a perennial funding crisis by cutting frequency, which tends to lead into a ridership death spiral--cutting frequency cuts ridership, loss of ridership leads to loss of funding, which they respond to by cutting frequency.
It's not a matter of stopping exactly at your destination. If people had to walk two blocks it would do them some good.
The problem is that in a low density area, both frequent service and infrequent service result in a low number of riders. You have a neighborhood with three dozen people in it who go to work and back once a day. If you run a bus there every 15 minutes for 12 hours a day, the average bus carries less than one passenger in each direction. If you only run one bus in the morning and one in the evening then in theory it would be 75% full but in practice then nobody takes it at all because the bus comes at 7:30AM but they have to go to work at 7AM or 8:30 so they all just drive instead.
> The trouble with this graph is that it assumes the buses/trains are full. It obviously doesn't apply to a bus with one passenger on it, which takes up even more space than a car.
IMHO it's a bit moot to delve into extremes. Average car occupancy is around 1.5 passengers. I'd bet that such number is far from average for average bus/train/tram/metro. I also probably won't make a mistake stating that "Average car" in USA is either a very big SUV or even bigger "truck" (which probably has a footprint as half of a bus). You also need to park your car somewhere at the destination.
I also thought that there will be reply like yours, though you answered your own problem:
> To fix this the thing you need before mass transit (by several years) is zoning rules that allow higher density construction in a higher percentage of the land area where people live and work.
Of course you don't want to build trams and all in low density (and low population) areas and my comment didn't apply for such case. You must have density as well as mixed use zones. I am not from USA and seemingly prevalent single use zoning[1] is very foreign to me. It all comes down to efficient urbant planning.
> You also need to park your car somewhere at the destination.
This is generally not the problem because most of the destinations aren't in the high-scarcity congestion area, people just have to go through it to get to their destination from their point of origin.
> Of course you don't want to build trams and all in low density (and low population) areas and my comment didn't apply for such case. You must have density as well as mixed use zones.
Which is the thing the US doesn't. Large percentages of land in the areas around many major cities -- some of them among the most congested -- is zoned exclusively for single family homes. There isn't enough density for mass transit to work and it's residential-only, so working within walking distance of those homes is essentially prohibited by law.
Which would be even worse, since existing mass transit is naturally concentrated in the places where it can operate with high capacity, and it thereby has a higher existing average than passenger cars. Lots of mostly full commuter trains, not a lot of 8-passenger SUVs that actually have 8 passengers.
When the the proposal is to add more mass transit, it would then have to go in the places it currently isn't, i.e. the places where it would have to operate at lower capacity. Which leads to the problem described.
Yes - when I read "both navigation users and non-users share the advantages of decongesting targeted segments", I wondered how long these advantages would last. It's widely accepted that less congestion will encourage people to travel by car more, which will soon eat up the gains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Definitions)
> It's widely accepted that less congestion will encourage people to travel by car more, which will soon eat up the gains
This is not only not widely accepted but extremely misleading. The nature of "induced demand" is really that congestion suppresses demand. Which behaves in an entirely different way than the name implies.
If demand was being induced then all attempts to relieve congestion would be permanently impossible, which is nonsense. There are empirically places with less traffic congestion. Whereas if demand is being suppressed then an apparent capacity shortfall in the amount of 0.5X may really be a shortfall of X. Adding 0.5X then doesn't work, because congestion will remain until you add X, with the suppressed demand filling back in to the extent that you satisfy it.
In order to relieve the congestion you have to add enough capacity to satisfy the demand that would exist in the absence of congestion, which is more than the amount that exists now, but not an infinite amount that unconditionally consumes all possible capacity or efficiency increases.
There's a related paradox - I don't remember the name - that the speed of traffic is determined by the speed of public transit. Cities with less car congestion probably have faster public transit.
That doesn't seem like a paradox at all. If you have more convenient public transit then more people use it. If more people use it then there is less traffic.
This is also why things like bus lanes are ridiculous. The theory is supposed to be that making the bus faster than cars will get more people to use it. But if that actually created a benefit that exceeds its cost, i.e. got more people to take the bus than the wasted capacity of not allowing cars to use that lane when a bus isn't, then it would reduce the traffic congestion that it inherently requires. It's a thing that can't even be part of the solution to the problem because any means of actually solving the problem would eliminate its mechanism of operation.
In a situation like this, induced demand could "easily" (on a technical, not a political sustainable level) be combated by shifting subsidies from car -> public transport. Induced demand won't be taken up as readily if there is a significant monetary penalty for it.
In many instances removing or repurposing lanes (road diet) decreases congestion much more effectively than just adding capacity.
Congestion occurs naturally regardless of capacity due to fluctuations in flow (jitter) more often than being over capacity (this is civil engineering 101). By repurposing lanes for dedicated turn lanes, bus lanes, bike lanes, and/or pedestrian walkways, you remove many of the triggers for jitter.
Synchronizing traffic (connected autodrive?) would do much more for removing congestion than just adding high over head capacity.
Induced demand is a real, observed phenomenon for both roads and public transport. However, because of density differences, it is generally easier to increase service frequency for public transport than to add lanes for low-density road traffic.
> If you believe that adding lanes doesn't reduce congestion, then you must also believe that adding transit doesn't reduce congestion.
The problem with road congestion is the number of personal vehicles inefficiently carrying 1-2 people while taking up a lot of space on the road.
In any situation where the roads would be clogged with personal vehicles an effective transit network will be carrying dozens or even hundreds of people per vehicle in vehicles that may not even be sharing the same lanes and thus can't contribute to road congestion.
1. Like others said - induced demand. You add one highway lane - more people will jump into cars to use it. You add tram/metro line instead - same people would like to use that instead of sitting in traffic jam, taking away traffic from the highway.
2. Continuing from first point - see linked graph in parent comment. Light rail has an order of magnitude capacity per lane compared to cars. For 20 lane highway you'll need 2 lines of light rail or 1 lane of "heavy rail" (as per graph). Insane difference!
I think most people get that non-car forms of transport is denser. The two main issues that stop people using it are:
1) Time: Taking a trip involving public transport is slower than a car. This is fixable in urban areas with some dedicated paths, modal filters, and very frequent schedules and that kind of thing but this takes up front resources.
2) Safety: It's not safe. Too much antisocial behaviour on public transport. Nobody wants to sit near loud or smelly people. In the worst case people get assaulted. Cyclists are more likely to get seriously hurt in a crash or have their vehicle stolen than cars. It's fixable but policing takes effort.
3) The demand paradox: "See public transport and bikes are unpopular" say the decision makers and don't put in the resources. The thing is the infra needs to be near 100% built for people to want to use it. It's no good if your cycle commute is 80% dedicated bike paths but 20% of it is riding next to trucks and parked cars opening their doors as most people would rather take a car. It's also no good if the trains run every 30mins, so on average your trip is 15min delayed. The politician would think "why would I double it if the trains are already under-utilised" but does not understand latent demand.
Assertions made without evidence can be disregarded without evidence, and your assertion does not match my personal experience. Public transit is dangerous, especially in cities like SF or Seattle.
It’s a safe bet that sndgndgndgndy isn’t referring to that metric, but to the (perceived) probability of getting shouted at, mugged, etc.
That, I have been told, is definitely a problem in the USA. I think that’s because they’ve painted themselves into a car-centric corner that it is very hard to get out of.
Outside of a handful of American cities, public transit is mostly used by the poor, which can include a lot of "undesirables", and many people used to their "quiet, safe" suburbs feel deeply uncomfortable around the poor in general. In some cities, public transit is used as a du-facto shelter system by the homeless.
It's funny when people see celebrities use the subway in NYC. It's just accepted by New Yorkers that the subway is usually the best way to get around Manhattan and getting mixed in with the entire socioeconomic spectrum is normal. But the crowds of people is also a kind of security blanket if something does happen.
> For this study, the Google Maps algorithm was modified to prefer alternative routes with similar travel times and segment types, effectively guiding trips away from the pre-selected congested segments
> Over a six month period, we adopted a city-wide switchback (also known as crossover) experimental design, alternating between this treatment and the control (unaltered) routing algorithm over consecutive days to appropriately measure the effect of this intervention
> Averaged across cities, we observe a median increase of around 2% in driving speeds on targeted segments, corresponding to a median decrease of 0.5% to 1.0% in fuel consumption rates
The cities were: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle.
I read the article and didn't see anywhere if they collaborated with city planners, or just ran this on their own. I get the techno-optimism of making traffic 'better' and also it may be concerning if trucks are being routed through neighborhoods where planners didn't build for it.
Medical/psychological experiments involving human subjects are mandated by federal law to run through a review board. Did that happen here? This isn't a medical experiment, but I don't think its nuts to feel like maybe there should have been some oversight.
Does this apply to Netflix, Amazon, Disneys, and many other streaming providers's "What to watch next? Recommended..." of sorts (or music/podcast streaming services)...
You're acting in bad faith attaching "every change" to what the parent said.
But this isn't that crazy? Most businesses require government approval for changes that have community effects... that's the entire point of government. Stuff like construction permits and regulation around structures, water usage, pollution, building architecture. Mining companies are required to assess environmental impacts. Companies making RF devices need to get confirmation on how the devices affect people and other devices.
And that's not even considering market share/monopoly status, which also regularly invites more scrutiny.
When the government proscribes discretionary permitting to those items you mentioned corruption and scarcity follow. It is exorbitantly expensive and difficult to build a house, a powerplant, or a mine in this country. For which we all currently pay for in cost of living.
I had a similar question and am generally curious if google has an internal IRB or equivalent for these studies. Given their outsized influence, there is a reasonable chance of uncoordinated interaction between their efforts and other ongoing studies. For a trivial example, consider interaction between google maps rerouting experiment near an event and localized uber surge pricing.
I think that's already very much a problem, and given that they constrained it to routes that didn't have a significantly different drive time the risk seems low.
This is also my experience. It would suggest routes that make no sense (to a local) in an attempt to “divert” away from traffic, which ends up costing more time and petrol anyway.
That's not what the parent is talking about. You're using the strawman of what appears to be occupancy zoning or something similar to argue that a techno fascists should have free reign to manipulate the mass movements of people within a city for their own purposes.
Generally you need to be pretty competent to get to the level of where these Google maps guys are.
To get to the competence level of a local traffic planner, you need to have stuck it out through a Civ E degree and maybe went through the motions at a firm for for 15 years before getting laid off and then wanting a "cruise control" job with the power you never would have achieved in private industry for the rest of your career.
You end up dealing with guys where you live or die based on the opinion of someone who hasn't bothered to learn anything new since 1991, and have no interest in breaking their "cruise control".
The south SF Bay Area cities of Los Gatos and Monte Sereno have persistent problems with traffic gridlock during summer weekends and holidays due to navigation apps routing drivers off of southbound SR-17 and onto surface streets. It gets so bad that residents literally can't get out of their own driveways and emergency response vehicles can't move.
There actually did used to be train service from San Jose to Santa Cruz but it was abandoned in 1940 due to high costs and lack of use. Rebuilding it would cost >$1B.
It can’t be helped. Roads are not only locally funded and the only thing allowing residents to free-ride on everyone else’s contribution to this commons is the information asymmetry. It’s similar to the fact that San Franciscans and Athertonians have “slow streets / no through streets” which allow a few to retain exclusive road use for themselves.
With increased information comes more efficient utilization and no doubt the free-riders will find that troubling since it’s no longer a free ride with the asymmetric effect where they can use my roads but I can’t use theirs.
In an ideal world, we would use our Fastraks to charge for marginal road use and a locality can recoup capital investments it made by charging appropriately for marginal use.
Do you not have shoulder lanes? I ask because I’ve lived places that don’t and I’ve always wondered if you just die if EMS doesn’t have a lane to get to you.
"just" is doing a lot of work there. Trains are a very (very) expensive way to move people between pre-determined places. We can do a lot better than this in 2026.
One of the things this type of intervention doesn't take into account is that different roads are built with different levels of hardiness based on the amount of traffic they are expected to receive.
For instance, a few years ago, a segment of I-495 in Delaware needed to be unexpectedly shut down for emergency repairs. Drivers were rerouted. But because of the increase in traffic on the less-hardy detour route, that route needed repairs and repaving soon afterward, much more quickly than it would have ordinarily required.
So yes, drivers can be better dispersed to ease congestion, but we also need to consider the secondary effects to the roadways themselves.
A random factoid that will always stick in my brain is that the damage a vehicle does to a road is proportional to the weight on an axel...to the fourth power. I suspect rerouting semis to the roadway is by far the greatest factor.
Another random fact is that Norman Mailer coined ‘factoid’ to refer to a fabrication presented as fact, but now means the opposite (as in, a fact presented as a fact, not a fact presented as fabrication).
So it’s now one of those words like ‘literally’ which can be its own antonym.
My pet peeve is people claiming "literally" is now being used to mean the opposite. It is never used that way. When people use "literally" in the weakened and figurative way, they are not using it to mean "figuratively". They are using it to mean "very much".
I'm actually a fan. It's an excellent exploration of sarcasm: what you literally say in a sarcastic tone might have a metaphorical meaning, or it might be a twice application of sarcasm that loops back to literal meaning, like in deadpan comedy.
Also, pedestrians and cyclists choose lesser traveled roads for safety. Granted you're talking huge roads but on a smaller scale, filling up neighborhood streets with commuter traffic is likely to provoke a backlash.
Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car
This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence.
The more your preferences or financial constraints come into play, the more you have to give up.
Most people settle in for driving because it allows them to pick from more job options than those that happen to be located near their house and more housing options than what happens to be near your job.
This didn’t matter as much 200 years ago when most people’s job options were limited to farming or something in service of farming.
It got much harder when the range of people’s jobs exploded and finding a company hiring in your specialty meant traveling some distance from home.
It gets even harder when there are two earners in a household trying to find two jobs.
> This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options,
Yup.
And even if you arent't picky. The amount of surface area you can cover scales quadratically with the distance you can commute (either by traveling longer, or by going faster). So as a first approximation, the amount of competition for your labour also goes up quadratically.
Job-hopping is one of the best ways to get better jobs. And it is a LOT easier if you can commute further.
> This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence.
Perhaps the problem is the lack of options for those people that want human-centric (versus car-centric) communities. Maybe if we let The Market™ decide, versus forcing low-density sprawl via zoning, more options would be available.
Right now, if you look on any real estate web site, you'll probably find walkable neighbourhoods have higher prices non-walkable ones: there is demand for them, but a fixed supply since they're not being made anymore, and so they get bid up. Perhaps if there were more of them, especially around commuter rail stations, it would help.
For example deed restrictions, where, when a sub-division is created, the use case of the lots can never be changed. See also "residential buffering ordinance", parking requirement ordinance, historic districts, etc.
Houston is not a free market for housing at all. They don’t have “zoning” because they call it “land use covenants” and “parking requirements” instead, and it ends up amounting to the same thing as “zoning” in other cities.
And the market doesn’t build the streets, sidewalks, or set up public transport routes.
I remember visiting my friend in an 400+ unit apartment complex in Houston. When I got up in the morning I was like “hey I’m going to walk down and get coffee.” My friend said to just Uber Eats it, I was like that’s insane. So I went down to the ground floor and found out there was literaly no way to walk to the coffee shop that was 0.1 miles away less than 30 minutes because of the absolute nightmare that is Huston streets and sidewalks.
Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)
If you design economic hubs properly, businesses can be located within reach of homes without the need for cars.
If you instead prioritize the need for, I don’t know, a monoculture lawn and separation from lower class people, then you’re choosing to build suburbs. Once a city has built enough suburbs, businesses become out of reach without the use of a car.
What if I want my own garden and not monoculture lawn? What if I want my children to be able to walk in nature near their home? Neither is possible in a densely built city where there are only apartments.
Then there are all the social problems, bad neighbours that become more common in densely built areas. I don't want to deal with that. Suburbs are popular because they provide a superior quality of life for many people.
Of course in an ideal world everyone would be allowed to do fully remote work if possible, and people like me could move to countryside.
They could have everything they want here in my neighborhood of Chicago: easy access to nature, room for a garden. Suburban Americans love to pretend that "cul de sac" and "Manhattan" are the only two types of place
> Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)
Most people do not want to live in dense cities in high rises.
The number of jobs which cannot be moved into dense city high rises is much higher than you’re thinking. It might seem that way if your world is office jobs and email jobs, but there’s much more to the world of work than that.
Dense cities also have very high turnover as people grow up and want families.
It’s not about having lawns and staying away from “lower class people”. This feels like a poor attempt to cast moral shade on people who choose not to live in a high rise.
Most people who live in dense cities don’t live in high rises…
It is very clear you have never lived in a well functioning city before, and just have no idea what you are talking about. Take the L and admit you just don’t have experience with it. North Americans often don’t because North American cities are extremely bad in this regard.
Absolutely. It’s just the very anti city people never ever seem to use excuses that are actually valid.
Like if “the things that brings me most joy in life require owning lots of land” or “I don’t like people and every day I have to be near them drains me”, those are really valid reasons and there are many more.
What that tells me is either they have a caricature of cities in their head, or (more likely) being anti city is an identity and not based on anything actually about cities per-say.
Since I've moved to my current home, I've had jobs in about 6 different towns and cities. I think for all of them I had colleagues that cycled to work and colleagues that drove for an hour or more.
All these jobs had homes and shops within walking distance. But they are not within walking distance of each other.
The explosion was also due to the car not only spreading low density housing out that would have been a tough sell previously, but also job sprawl to suburban and exurban greenfield.
There used to be natural agglomeration to central well connected nodes before the car. Many cities enacted height limits in the early 1900s with the specific aim to spread out development that was dense enough to make serving basic infrastructure, such as water, power, transit, and cleaning the mounting horseshit off the roads, increasingly expensive and difficult. Early real estate barons would buy marginal land and develop a streetcar line that ran into the job center, and sell plots off that line now that it finally had some utility in the form of a connection to jobs. Even if you worked in something specialized back then, chances are it was close to where most other people were working. Offices were downtown. Government buildings were downtown. Hospitals were downtown. Manufacturing was downtown. Ports and railheads were downtown. All of that snowballing enjoyed by cities exploded with the car.
I am liking the term “car brained” more and more for this type of attitude.
Have you ever heard of trains, busses, bikes? The options for transportation are not binary car or no car. Maybe in North America where they refuse to provide even crappy public transport in most cities it feels this way, but in the rest of the world they are smart enough to build trains and don’t have this problem.
The relative price of those cramped urban centers where this is true suggests that at least a few more people would choose this path if it were cheaper.
Tech companies can have more distributed offices and assign employees based on geography instead of teams, go back to WFH, pay employees enough to live close to their mega campuses, or pay out the ass into adding more lanes.
And the easiest way to do this is to lift restrictions on being able to build housing near workplaces (i.e. anywhere housing might reasonably and gainfully be built). Most traffic is caused by building restrictions.
It is difficult for me to admit I'm an idiot but when I was younger and living in an apartment, I loved the idea of a single family home. And now that I'm living in a single family home, I feel like I was wrong all along. Not that I want to go back to the apartment I was in before. Dear lord no but the idea of a mixed use building not too tall only like first floor with high ceilings for business or shops with two or at the most three floors above for residential units feels like the ideal sweet spot. Ideally with a lot of these close together to have everything I need within a walking distance but also a subway station within a walking distance if I need to go farther.
I wasted a decade trying to live in single family homes. Now at 40 my wife and I are living in a small city in a condo and couldn't be happier. Neither of us enjoyed the workload of managing a SFH. Dont force yourself to stay if you aren't happy, you'll wish you moved sooner (I do).
Do you have kids? I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people.
Most kids are only into playing in the yard for a couple years really. Before long they are preteens living in their room, probably seething at the fact they need a ride from a parent to hang out with any of their friends.
Apartments can also have stuff you could never afford that a kid would like, such as a massive pool (try pricing out a new build pool these days).
> I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people.
And families do it in NYC, and Hong Kong, and Germany, and Spain (AFAICT, 65%), and…
They manage, but it's not a good experience. The apartments are usually too small for families and the ones that are big enough are too expensive. This is solvable, but has not been solved.
Think about having to share a bedroom with your child, and when they're old enough to need their own one, putting up a partition wall and having each be less than half the size of a normal bedroom, very cramped. And you don't get a living room. (If you did have a living room, now it's your bedroom while the child gets the actual bedroom)
People also change and want different things at different parts of their life. Young and single - living in an apartment is amazing. Once someone is coupled up, has kids, and some animals, a SFH also looks much more appealing. Once the kids are gone, then an apartment/condo starts to look pretty attractive again.
A not top tall building doesn't have enough people to be mixed use. Cities often cheat their with several side streets of residential (it might be zoned mix use but it isn't) only for every street of mixed use. People on the non mixed use streets travel to the mixed use one.
Massive ongoing investment into roads. EV incentives that would pay for 3-4 ebikes outright. Big 3 bailout. Cash for clunkers. Impact fees from developers towards roads. As others said parking requirements. There is so much beyond that too.
> Road wear increases with the fourth power of axle weight iirc
That's not actually true, and the paper that describes the "fourth power" thing even says that right up front.
If you massively oversimplify the model so that you've got all vehicles fitted with infinitely hard bicycle tyres on a perfectly smooth surface, it kind of works out, but not quite.
Interesting! Nevertheless I believe it is true that bike and pedestrian paths are much cheaper to construct and maintain than roads for cars and trucks.
Most roads are not used for delivering goods, so if we'd just reduce private car use that would already be a great improvement. If you want to go even further, rail has a lot of potential left.
By providing free or cheap parking for people that don't live there. Urban land is extremely expensive and parking generally doesn't cost what it should, other land uses would provide a lot more revenue. Parking in US cities is greatly over provisioned to make life easy for suburbanites, destroying urban fabric.
Like everything else community construction responds to incentives. So we need to structurally incentivise short distance commute communities. Congestion pricing seems like a reasonable first step.
I’ve done that and those areas change over time. A town becomes more like a small city. A small city becomes more dense. Etc. Then all the urbanists move the goal posts and ask why you didn’t live somewhere else.
Just move to the rust belt. If you are going to move to a growing job market don’t be surprised when the job market grows and triggers demand for development.
God forbid society grows around you. How dare all those productive aspiring people build things near you. Did they not know you had exclusive right of refusal on nearby development?
This sounds simple, but many people are already living further away because they can’t afford to live downtown near where they work. Add kids into the equation, and many people who could live there without them are also forced out.
The most regressive tax imaginable is a flat fee for every person with no consideration of income. That is exactly the effect of requiring everyone to own a car.
It isn’t a flat fee per se, if only because wealthier people are too prideful. Rich man buys a 100k mercedes. Poor man buys that mercedes 15 or 20 years later for 3k. It still does what it did when it cost 100k.
B-b-bb-b-bbb-but then how will I have my 3 storey house with a 100 acre backyard, 2 pools, and 14 cars??? Don't you know it's LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to live without these basics?? What are you, a communist or something??????
>Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car
I dont even know what this would look like in practice. It feels like an inner city thing, lifestyle priced accordingly.
What Socialists/Communists/Liberals/Conservatives/Local and State Governments/Weird Internet Tech Bros all seem to forget is that people have different priorities, and you cant build 1 house that suits every priority.
I am house hunting at the moment, and houses optimised for walking to shops are at the low end, when what I need is a big yard for my kid to run around in and a shed for my blacksmithing tools (and ideally neighbors far enough away that they dont mind metal being banged on in the morning) while also being within reasonable driving distance of a few of the sites I work at.
The same things keeps happening every time I find myself stuck in traffic on the interstate. Out of nowhere, a popup appears in Google Maps: a faster route is available! 4 minutes faster! Unless either the passenger or the driver are fast enough to hit "No thanks", the change auto-applies, and Google now wants me to exit the interstate at the nearest exit and drive some random road I had no idea about, to rejoin the interstate a few miles ahead. Of course, a bunch of other vehicles in the same traffic jam got the same
notification, so that minor road now get a sizable fraction of the interstate traffic, all of which then struggles to merge back.
Seeing this again and again. We call it a "Google detour" in the family, and rarely agree to the change of the route.
Yes, I find it ironic that Google is recommending that people take varied routes, when it's their very app that often puts a bunch of people on an obscure, same route. Many times I've taken one of its shortcuts, only to see a bunch of cars in front of me and behind me taking the same shortcut, clearly not one people would normally take.
I've had this experience. 10 minutes in it hit me that we're all only here only because Google suggested so.
It was some kind of dirt road that almost never had this sort of traffic and you could see that from the faces of the locals, as we were passing them by at maybe twice walking speed.
It once made me exit the highway, using the nearly empty exit ramp, then do a U-turn on the surface street and get back using the lightly used entrance ramp. Wow, all that effort to move about 250m forward in traffic, saving me perhaps 30 seconds of time on my 3 hour drive. Very "over-optimized" software does bizarre stuff that no sane person would ever do.
If the original route was to continue on the current road, and the revised one is to come off, then you don't need to interact with the screen at all to reject it. Just continue driving, and the route will reset once you pass the exit.
I’ve just started taking surface roads out of Charlotte at peak hours because I know how to get around, and any route that’s part of Apple/Google maps defaults will invariably be clogged with everyone following their directions. Surface streets tend to be blissfully open these days.
So many god damn unprotected left turns on mapping software. Some of them illegal too like asking you to do it when a sign says no left turns during listed hours.
Same. This is why I switched to Apple Maps. Sometimes the Google detours would end in dangerous situations, like a left turn with no light across a major road. And it would be to save 2 minutes-ridiculous!
I've had Google try to route me across private property (an apartment complex parking lot) to avoid a signaled intersection and save a couple of minutes.
Me too. It’s infuriating and unsafe. I don’t drive often, but when I do it’s out of the city where I’m unfamiliar and need a map.
So I also stopped using Google Maps for driving.
Who at Google seriously believes that it’s good idea to 1) unpredictably change the route someone chose mid-drive, and 2) to distract them while driving with a pop up notification that must be interacted with just to maintain the route.
If I choose a route, I chose it for a reason. Don’t change it while I’m driving.
Congestion can be solved by charging more for driving. Even a modest amount would start affecting how much people drive. The money could be used for better roads and improving other transit options that aren't so space-inefficient. That said, this would likely be unpopular to implement until the effects were visible. See congestion pricing in NYC as an example.
I think the bigger thing this making public transport a real alternative to driving - I most American metros using public transport isn’t faster, can be inconvenient (no parking, multiple transfers, etc), comfortable safe.
I guess I’m saying yes you can make driving less attractive, but I think the better answer is to make public transport more attractive.
Won't that just unfairly displace the impact onto the economically disadvanteged as they are the least likely to have the flexibility in their schedule, inadvertently forcing more of the maintenance burden onto those who are int be least place to bear it?
You wouldn't just charge more for driving. You do it in combination with funding public transport, building safer cycling routes, and removing roadblocks from building cheap housing near PT hubs.
Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation. Make public transportation free to use. That would be far more impactful to the folks least able to bear an increase in driving fees.
In most of the US, people are forced to own cars because they don't have public transit available, or the available public transit is too infrequent, or there aren't dense enough routes. The reason behind this is funding.
Additionally, buses are less efficient because they need to sit in the same traffic as everyone else. Reduced traffic makes buses more efficient. Reducing car traffic is a win for basically everyone, and increasing public transit is additionally a win for basically everyone.
Car infrastructure is heavily subsidized, and congestion pricing is one way to make car owners pay for part of the cost. Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride, when car owners get to use the infrastructure for free?
> Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation.
Public transportation is often not viable for the car-centric design of many American communities. The above is necessarily to do, but development probably also needs to also change to pre-WW2 designs:
I disagree with that take generally. What is the difference between say a UK garden suburb and a new build suburb outside dallas? The commuter rail station really. UK suburbs are similarly labyrinthine. But actually, the dallas suburbs have great bones for a potential transit network. Even though the residential streets themselves look like they were laid out by wandering livestock just like they were in the UK, they have the great advantage of being rigidly bounded by generally 1x1 mile square, cardinal, arterial road networks which are very wide public right of ways. One could just lay a network of brt or lrt or heavy commuter rail on top of this space without even needing to acquire any property at all. And if the stations were say on each 1x1 mile intersecting node, everyone in the inner residential portion would theoretically only be a half mile or closer from their nearest transit stop, as the crow flies at least.
The only real issue is that these transit offerings are not being invested in at all. Not at the level of road expansion investment anyhow. Not that they wouldn't be possible to offer or that the built environment somehow precludes them.
We're talking about cities that would benefit from congestion pricing. If there's enough traffic to need congestion pricing, then it could immediately benefit from public transit.
I don't understand why folks always take this as an all or nothing thing. We don't need to redesign the suburbs. They're the ones causing the congestion, and they're also the ones benefiting from free roads. Taxing them to cover the their own externalities makes sense. If public transit is available and better than driving cars, the suburbs will either support them via redesign, or they'll pay the tax for the luxury of driving a car into a city they don't live in.
The US obviously loses out to places like Japan because you have the chicken and egg problem: to make money back you need enough people but for enough people to use public transport you need to invest in it.
> Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.
Which, ironically, often only covers something like 10% of the cost :)
Sure, I wouldn't expect fuel tax to cover everything. Local roads are quite useful to people who do not drive at all, and major roads and interstates are disproportionately worn by commercial vehicles that also benefit many people who do not drive private vehicles.
Indeed. After all, roads predate the car by thousands of years. But still, often roads are overbuilt and their potential capacity is never close to being reached. The bog standard suburban design we see in america for example is generally severely overbuilt. Plenty of arterials nowhere close to being used to their theoretical throughput limits. If your experience of suburbia is mostly american centric, if you look at say english suburbia where major roads only offer a single lane per direction you'd wonder how society there functions at all. But it does, because those single lane per direction have enough capacity to serve a generally denser version of suburbia than what we might see on the fringes of Dallas, where giant empty roads such as this (1; note how there are barely any cars in frame) are found on standardized 1 mile square grids out of routine more than anything really. Compare with (2) which feels much more right sized for the road demand in this generally denser suburban area on smaller lots with attached housing.
> In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?
Sure, but the budget for transit is also extremely tight, especially compared to car infrastructure.
If only 10% of the costs are covered, that's even more motivation to not charge fees at all, right? Why impose that burden? More people riding public transit means less cars on the road, and less traffic, which is good for everyone.
> charges a fuel tax to pay for roads
For the most part fuel taxes haven't increased to cover the costs of roads (it hasn't increased with inflation at all, federally), and they typically cover highways. Recently, a number of places have been looking at pausing or removing fuel taxes to reduce costs of fuel, due to the Iran war. Most states cover the cost of roads primarily through their general funds.
I've noticed that Google Maps has started sucking a lot lately, routing us onto routes that take 2-4 minutes longer when a faster route is clearly available or taking us on nonsensical detours, and I wonder if this experiment is a reason why.
There's a hidden cost to this, and that's trust in the mapping app. I've stopped using Google Navigation for routine trips where I know how to get to the destination. It used to be worth it for the traffic information, but now that there's a good chance that it'll take you on a slower route for reasons that may be beneficial to Google but detrimental to you, it's not worth it. My brother-in-law switched to Apple Maps for similar reasons: he's finding it simply gives better results nowadays.
I've noticed this too. It has gotten more frequent over last year or so. It will route me to narrow roads which I know for a fact will take me much longer.
I had the worst experience about 3 weeks ago, when I kept driving on very narrow and congested roads for almost 3 hours and the destination was showing still an hour away. If I had just taken the normal route, it would've taken me only 2 hours total. But Google thought let's make this guy drive around for 4 hours because fuck him.
Same. Though it's been happening for maybe a year? Or, at least since I learned where things actually are. I just can't trust the Google maps anymore! Many times I lost 10+ min because it took me through weird alley and then back to the main.
Traffic apps only know about congestion if someone running the app goes down the congested road. Because of this, I've always suspected that the apps, from time to time, will route someone down a route they haven't gathered data on in a while, just to collect the data, and even if the route is likely to be suboptimal.
>I've always suspected that the apps, from time to time, will route someone down a route they haven't gathered data on in a while, just to collect the data, and even if the route is likely to be suboptimal.
I can't say this actually happened for me. For straightforward routes with no congestion I never saw random alternate routes being proposed. That makes sense, given that it'd probably tip people off. If this is happening, they must only be doing in cases where there's congestion and the difference is marginal, eg. it's rush hour and the "optimal" route takes 30 minutes but the alternate takes 33 minutes. Moreover you don't really need any deliberate effort to see this effect. If nobody is traveling on a side road, the algorithm will probably revert to historical patterns, which might turn out to be overly optimistic in congestion scenarios (eg. there's nearby road repairs and other people are already using it as an alternate), thereby giving you the impression that you got screwed over by the app.
Doesn't have to be true. My state has public camera feeds for various highway stretches. Too low-detail to identify vehicles but easily enough to detect congestion.
I wonder this same thing when I’ve been routed completely asinine ways off interstates at night when traffic appears calm. I always have to play the game of “is there horrendous traffic ahead from night paving / accident, or am I being conscripted as a traffic sensor robot?”
I'm a car fan, so I'd rather reward drivers for optimal behaviors vs broad car-reductions. I'll probably turn out to be on the wrong side, but maybe we'll find a good compromise.
In my region of the world if someone creeps and leaves a wide gap between them and the next vehicle, eventually someone is bound to change lanes to occupy that space out of the perception that it somehow will help them get ahead in traffic.
They are looking at ways they can improve traffic that are actually in their control. They can change how they route traffic that is using their app, they can’t change public policy or driving choices. They are working with what they have.
Much as they have features for walk / bike / transit traffic, they could suggest step-by-step carpool instructions:
"1. meet with (other Google Map carpool user) X at location Y.
2. In one car, both of you drive to location Z."
Obviously, huge challenges here (is person X a serial killer, etc.) But Google can handle moonshots.
If we could copy the traffic laws of a country like Germany to the US, I think that would have the biggest + cheapest effect. I am OK with automated/elevated enforcement if it means stop & go traffic evaporates into free flowing conditions.
We should also take the idea from Finland where the traffic fines scale with each person's ability to pay. $100 for camping the passing lane or failing to maintain a reasonable following distance is not a big consequence for a lot of people. $100k covers the edges a lot better.
Just make sure not to fire half of your police forces. Finland has about 130 police officers per 100k people, America has 242 according to Wikipedia. Due to extreme lack of police resources, the enforcement of traffic laws is not good here. Mostly last century tech, like automatic traffic cameras in few fixed locations.
I wish there was more police presence to spot lane-camping and fine them in Germany, too many idiots do it and get away with it.
If I ran Google Maps, I'd ask to route stupid drivers away from my routes. The GPS and phone accelerometer should be able to tell us who they are -- "Oh you have Google Maps actively navigating, GPS says you're going 50mph, and the app in focus is WhatsApp and you're using the phone keyboard? Fuck off! Also we recorded 5 swerve events in the last 10 minutes, hard to stay on your lane when you're texting!"
It'd be unethical, but man it'd be magical...
There's custom software for Elon's Tesla, I wonder if the cloud-based navigation system also directs people away from his routes so he can have a ride on emptier roads...
Ticket everyone who deviates from the mean speed too much. You wanna stop at the end of the ramp instead of merge then fine, but it'll cost you the same as the guy who's going 100 in the same stretch.
>During “treatment” days, the modified routing guided all trips that encountered the pre-selected congested segments toward alternative routes with similar travel times.
Why would they specifically need to route people away from congested segments? Presumably if a segment gets congested enough, it'd be considered slower and therefore won't get picked in the first place?
Every actor acting rationally in their own interest can get to a worse equilibrium than if they were coordinated(in this case, to completely ignore the new edge). There are many other examples of this in game theory, you should look it up.
Because those roads are still maybe 30 seconds or 60 seconds faster on paper and critically they're the major roads with minimal intersections, which all apps prefer.
This doesn't seem to account for Jevons paradox: if driving is made faster and more convenient, then more people will drive more; which can lead to an overall increase in CO2 emissions, collisions, etc.
I'd imagine there would be a lag between the initial efficiency increase, and the subsequent usage increase; since drivers (current and potential) would have to actually notice the change and adjust for it (consciously or otherwise).
Isn't there a problem with rerouting that you push cars into community-roads that aren't supposed to be supporting commuting traffic?
Wasn't there some articles a few years ago about communities that filled wheelbarrows with phones connected to Waze and moved them slowly down the road, stop waze from routing cars through residential areas?
It's actually shocking they didn't do this before? Load balancing across multiple similar paths seems to be one of the first thing you would add once you hit some scale?
I love how they congratulate themselves on that article (Google being Google, they still think they are the smartest people in the room). But I'm waiting to see the second or third unknown order effects.
This will just result in cities making one way streets, blocking roads, or removing turns, because raw traffic throughput is rarely the only goal.
My city already has some signs and traffic signals trying to prevent making a left turn after 5PM, because of maps apps attempting to redirect highway traffic through, which added a substantial delay to the commutes of everyone who actually lived there. That later resulted in a city council meeting about the safety problem caused by people making illegal left turns.
(I'm not saying I'm the first or only person to think of it, but I did patent it, as well as the extra claim of compensating those people sent on the slower route).
Nice to hear Google is thinking about this. Was always of the belief that they SHOULD be considering things like scarcity in the various recommendations the apps in their offerings provide.
Also reminds me of that guy in Berlin who caused traffic jams on Google Maps by walking around with a wagon filled with phones:
Happy that research time is being put towards this, however a fuel use decrease of ~0.75% is a bit underwhelming for this particular endeavor, even when consumer cars/vans are 10% of CO2 emissions.
I doubt there would be any improvement. What we have seen is traffic is a constant. If you make make the road network higher capacity or faster, people just move further out or drive to further away stores.
People have an amount of time they will tolerate driving for, and adjust everything else around that.
I think it's a mistake to represent average speed increase instead of characterizing the speed increase as as hours of full, moderate, and low speed traffic per day.
Because an extra ??minutes a day of avoiding stop and go traffic is worth far more than the average speed increase it tells.
Next step? Maps Pro subscription 'blue' plan will guide you through the fastest routes, Maps Free users will be routed on the fast 'green' plan, but might ocasionally be diverted to other routes to 'balance' (free up blue routes') traffic under extreme congestion conditions.
So basically sending some people on worse routes for the sake of the “greater good”? I long suspected they did this and is not what I want. I don’t want to be forced to a worse outcome for myself just for the sake of the “greater good”. Taken to its logical extreme, lots of evil had been propagated because of the “greater good”.
When Google Maps routes me using a smaller secondary road instead of the main road that I would otherwise have used , I've always wondered whether that significantly changes the amount of traffic that smaller road sees. It's funny to consider that arbitrary black-box changes to the routing algorithm can have a noticeable effect to people that live there.
I'm pretty sure I submitted this idea to the internal "file a patent" drive they were doing like 15 years ago. It was rejected. I thought it was either stupid or too obvious and they were already doing it...
Well, duh. Grid design that allows traffic to diffuse is a secret superpower of American cities. Along with stroads that seamlessly blend local and arterial traffic.
One of unforgivable mistakes of Project Zero Vision is sabotage of stroads. If forced more traffic onto local streets, resulting in MORE pedestrian deaths.
Sure. Pedestrian deaths are above the 2015 levels in all the large West Coast cities that went full-on with the Zero Vision project. Numbers are for 2015 and 2025.
Seattle: 7/18
Portland: 11/20
LA: 130/150
SF is unchanged at 24 (they had a HUGE drop from 2024, luckily).
And no, the following excuses do not apply:
COVID - deaths started growing _before_ COVID.
Car size increase - cars did not increase significantly during this time.
This tracks with what's happened in my non-grid east coast city that adopted the same. Everyone has a path planner in their pocket that they mindlessly follow which takes them right around all the Vision Zero'd (TM) main roads and through everyone's neighborhood.
The assholes who sell the big plastic speed bumps they've had to put on the residential streets to slow down all the traffic they diverted onto them are making out like bandits though.
Why cant we have smart stop lights. Nothing more annoying than sitting on a street with nobody coming and a red light for some arbitrary time period that's totally incorrect for the time period I'm currently in
Most cities have some intelligence on their traffic lights, and they do have traffic sensors to know where cars are waiting.
You might not see any cars and are annoyed waiting at the light, but you don’t know what downstream things they are trying to control for. Maybe if they send you through the light, you are going to join some other traffic event that will cause an issue.
It could also just be suboptimal, but it very hard to know just from what you observe as an individal
If you drive the same route frequently you can definitely figure out which intersections/areas are improperly configured. There's a stretch of road I drive on several times a week where the speed limit was dropped from 40 to 30 a couple years ago, but the lights are all still timed for 40. If you speed you get a sea of green, but if you drive the new speed limit you end up stopping at half the lights.
I like XKCD but I don't really agree with the underlying premise of this one.
When I was in the Netherlands, one of the global gold standards in terms of urban planning and design, I noticed it wasn't only more pleasant as a pedestrian or cyclist, it was more pleasant as a driver as well. Lights were smart and did not sit on red forever if you were the only one waiting at an intersection.
This comic suggests there's some "invisible, massively complicated" mesh of signal interactions we can never possibly fathom, and therefore wasting precious hours over the course of our lives sitting at an intersection is the most optimal one.
The Dutch have figured this out, why can't North America?
Also, left turn lanes that are too short for the average number of cars wanting to turn left, and left turn signal cycles that are too short to clear the left turn lanes.
I've lived places where stop lights were all scheduled (unless someone was operating it manually), but most of the lights I experience operate dynamically based on sensors (typically in the road or cameras and ped buttons)
Seems like you're playing a dangerous game if your navigation app becomes known for optimizing for the collective good rather than individual fastest transit time-- people will trust your app less, and use a different, more "selfish" app.
For over a decade, I imagined that if I ever landed a job at Google, this would be my most significant project. It made me chuckle a bit when I read the announcement, they finally built it! confirming that my thoughts weren’t entirely delusional XD
cool, now can you stop randomly having my google maps app go dim and dark as I'm biking making it impossible for me to see what I'm supposed to do next?
100% remote unless absolutely required. Professions like doctors, cooks, massage therapists. This will clear 95% of traffic. Start with mandatory remote for all software jobs.
It's estimated that only 37% of jobs can be done remotely, while 72%-86% of US workers rely on cars for commuting.
The best solution involves creating a multitude of non-car transportation options, to allow workers to choose the most convenient mode of transport, maximizing potential non-car commuting. Bike/ebike, e-scooter, motorcycle/scooter, golf cart, bus, tram, subway, train, ferry.
I would occasionally go to the office toward the tail end of covid and traffic was essentially non existent. We were well past the big lockdowns and shuttered restaurants at that point but RTO hadn't kicked in. It wouldn't take much to drastically change the traffic landscape.
Traffic was lower after COVID because of how many people (who couldn't work remote) lost their jobs, an overall economic downturn affecting logistics chains, and people afraid of public transit. Not because everyone was blissfully working from home. It would indeed take a lot to change traffic (without causing significant economic harm)
37% is a huge amount though. Obviously fixing the problem would require many different solutions to come together, but that's an immense improvement that can be made with a mere law.
Remote work is worth pursuing, but there are less negative solutions to traffic (requiring everyone work remote would destroy local economies). Paris is an example of a better traffic solution. They simply got rid of cars from the city center; no need to reconfigure the economy, just take different transit to work.
The way to maximise traffic congestion would be to remove trucks off the road during peak times, banning trucks from the fast lane at all times, making it the social norm to toot someone in the fast lane so they move over.
I have a lot of difficulty thinking those changes alone would solve congestion. I’m especially thinking is ski traffic along I70 from Denver to the mountains. The issue is just volume of passenger vehicles, and there are no other realistic routes
Just drive anywhere with more than usual density in traffic and you’ll find trucks in the fast lane when they stop and start create gaps in the fast lane where no traffic can go. If you took out trucks altogether during peak hours you wouldn’t have these slow bubbles of traffic at the worst times..
Edit: let’s think of this from a pure scientific point of view - if you had 3 lanes and split traffic across them based on a range of speed - that would be the most optimised in terms of throughput for all lanes. Now, consider a reverse Amdahl's Law… what’s the worst thing you could do to make the fastest lane crawl which in effect kills total throughput across ALL lanes? Put a slow truck in it! Put a few, and you’ve just turned the lane giving you the highest throughput to most likely the slowest lane.
I just parked my car after another morning of commuting. Thought experiments alone in today’s traffic again confirmed my theory.
Contrary to this, if you only have two lanes available, and trucks aren't allowed to overtake, you'll eventually end up with a long train of trucks without any gaps, and it'll become impossible to merge onto the highway from an on-ramp.
One way is to stop the war on cars. I see many cities basically making driving purposely bad. Super low speed limits, speed bumps, unnecessary bike lanes, poorly timed traffic lights, no right turn on red, etc. It’s all the typical pro bike anti car stuff but it hurts traffic. They never measure travel times in a transparent way as they make these destructive changes.
No. The reason cities are working so hard to build these kinds of safety measures is that cars are horrendously dangerous for people walking and biking. The “war on cars” is a war for the safety and dignity of everyone outside of cars.
They aren’t dangerous. Road fatalities are still very low per mile driven and are falling over time. Cars are getting safer all the time with their sensors and intelligent features like automatic braking. The war on cars is an irrational safetyism campaign driven by selfish bicyclists more than anyone else. And the goal vision zero proposes makes no sense because it doesn’t account for the benefit of cars.
The only way to stop congestion is to get cars off the road.
Cars are the congestion. There is no other definition, and no other solution.
HOW you get cars off the road is worthy of debate. Pretending that there's a "war on cars" is not and never has been. Cars and their drivers have been subsidized for more than a century, never paying the full cost of the damage that they do to the environment, the roads, etc.
1. Car taxes / registrations should be based on weight and energy usage inefficiency and ratchet up quickly for personal vehicles that are larger than some sensible size based on pedestrian safety at no more than 30 kph. (Drivers of modern pickup trucks and SUVs cannot see pedestrians shorter than ~1.7m at ~5m, and the fact that their fronts are basically walls mean that those pedestrians are more likely to be killed on impact or bounced under the tires.)
2. There should absolutely be congestion pricing to enter downtown locations during the day or other times when vehicular traffic will be high. Yes, that means that most deliveries by transport truck would need to be staged into smaller vehicles and delivered to the businesses needing them, or delivered overnight.
3. Uber, Lyft, and Waymo are part of the problem and should be treated as such.
4. There should be more investment in public transit. Paid for by increased registrations and congestion pricing, preferentially. Fares should be reduced, ideally to free. More use of public transit makes it safer and incentivizes making it faster.
5. There should absolutely be more bike lanes in pretty much every city. It's called induced demand and once the infrastructure is safe, you will see increased usage by all sorts of alternative mobility users (but mini e-motorcycles should be licensed just like regular motorcycles and should not be using the mobility infrastructure).
6. Pedestrian and wheelchair users matter first and foremost over any other road user (bikes, scooters, cars, etc.).
We've had 50+ years of Robert Moses being proved wrong. It's time to design cities around people, not around cars. Call that a war on cars if you want, but it's not: it's a war for peoples' quality of life. Cars can be part of the solution, but they need to be treated like the problem they are first.
Wrong. Cars are high utility and should remain on roads. They increase quality of life by giving you a fast way to get to exactly where you want on your own schedule. And designing for cars IS designing for people, obviously. Who do you think is inside cars?
What is design for single passenger cars? Most cars can fit 5 people and roads also carry buses, ambulances, and trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
* Probably with the exception of coal and some mining materials.
So you agree that most cars are far larger and heavier than required? First search result for "average car occupancy"[1]:
> In 2022 the Average Number of Occupants Per Trip for Household Vehicles in the United States Was 1.5
This discrepancy is the reason for car pooling, ride-sharing, etc. (Note that Uber, Lyft, etc. are taxi services, not "ride sharing"; since the drivers themselves are not typically intending to travel the routes they drive)
> roads also carry buses
Yes, which is why cars should be removed from such roads, to avoid slowing down buses.
> ambulances
Emergency vehicles can drive in places where cars are forbidden (cycle paths, pedestrianised roads, etc.)
> trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
Again, you're undermining your own argument: the subsidies given to private car infrastructure are so large, that freight companies exploiting that infrastructure can end up more cost-effective than those which use rail; despite rail being more efficient not only in terms of fuel, but also in terms of labour (since so many trucks would be required to do the job of a single freight train, and each of those trucks require a separate driver). Also note that heavier vehicles degrade the road infrastructure disproportionately; which is even more reason to reduce the number of trucks as far as possible.
My quality of life is increased by having more bike lanes so that I can get around _faster_ and _healthier_ than having to use my car. I'm also able to get where I want and need to be on my own schedule by car, bike, public transit, and walking — which mode matters based on the needs of the destination.
I shop at Costco by bike most of the time. Once every couple of months there's enough that needs to be bought that I use the car.
I have a dental appointment tomorrow: I can walk or cycle there faster than I can drive and find parking. I have another appointment on Monday at a hospital and I'll cycle there far faster than I can take public transit _or_ private car, and I won't have to pay ~$15/hour for parking or park a kilometre away.
Get out of your North American car bubble and look at what Paris and the Netherlands have done: they have not banned private car ownership or use, but they have removed some of them from streets. Utrecht just opened a massive underground _bike parking garage_ but it's also one of the busiest cities in the Netherlands in terms of car traffic.
There is no war on cars; that's something that has been invented out of whole cloth. Those of us who agitate for improved _options_ simply want (1) cars to pay their full freight (they don't, not by a long shot); (2) safer roads for pedestrians, cyclists, and those who want alternative mobility options; (3) more public transit; and (3) fewer cars moving slower because that's the only way to alleviate traffic.
You're not in traffic: you are traffic.
Your claim that designing for cars is designing for people is risible. Designing for people first (that's the goal!) means larger sidewalks, more barriers so that distracted or angry drivers find it harder to find themselves on those sidewalks, and fewer cars with clear rules so that vulnerable road users have absolute priority over people in cars. The larger and faster your vehicle, the more responsibility you should have, both in terms of liability when you inevitably collide with an obstruction and in terms of what you pay to keep the roads and surrounding infrastructure maintained.
How we can reduce traffic congestion?
1. Extensive support of public transport: metro, tram, dedicated bus routes (separate from car traffic), dedicated paths for bicycles.
2. ... maybe whatever is this ...
UPDATE: here's a good graph - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_transport#/media/File:P... , i.e. car traffic is often congested because of inherent low passenger bandwith. If google wants to manage traffic as internet routing - why then stick with outdated low bandwith ethernet cable?
People will generally choose whichever mode of transport is most convenient and cost-effective, based on how they rationally (or irrationally) weigh various factors. If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere.
The only way to shift people onto public transport is to make it more attractive than driving. That can be done by making driving less convenient or more expensive—through higher ownership, fuel, and parking costs, and by resisting attempts to eliminate congestion. And by making public transport better through greater frequency, reliability, coverage, and convenience.
> If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere.
Even with that unrealistically idealised scenario, if you had similarly idealised public transport (station within 5 minutes walk either end, trains every 5 minutes) I'd still choose the train much of the time. I could actually get something done on my laptop instead of having to concentrate on the road, plus I could get up for a stretch mid journey (without stopping). It would be different if I had a lot of luggage or was bringing the kids, though.
My point is that driving is not always inherently more attractive than public transport.
> station within 5 minutes walk either end, trains every 5 minutes
Describes large parts of London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, etc
Sure. Also Shanghai.
But that isn't an ideal scenario for public transit regardless of whether somebody tries to describe it that way. Very frequent stops ("station within 5 minutes walk") mean that your journey through the subway system will take a very, very long time. Driving can easily cut that time in half.
Conversely, traffic is so bad at peak hours that taking the train is faster than driving when it comes to getting home from downtown here in Chicago, even with frequent stops (and my line stops more often than most). Biking is basically always faster than driving+parking here unless you have reserved private parking on both ends or are going clear across town (8+ miles)
And now we return to the idea of big tall buildings so that things are close together.
You're right; if only someone in Shanghai had thought of building skyscrapers.
Wait.
After writing that post, I started drafting an edit to acknowledge that clever marketing is another way to encourage greater use of public transport. In my mind I imagined a campaign highlighting the time people get back not having to drive through heavy traffic. The advertisement could say, "Give yourself more time to do the things you love," accompanied by a wholesome image of a smiling person reading a book on the train.
Then it occurred to me that nobody would actually be reading a book. They would be doom-scrolling Instagram or watching wingnut political propaganda on YouTube. I'm starting to wonder if people might be mentally better off behind the wheel...
Shortwave radio had a reputation for hosting political nut jobs before the internet existed. So are podcasts.
At least transit users don't get road rage.
That's the reason I prefer public transit. I normally bike everywhere, because I get to exercise, see the scenery and yell at people, but sometimes I like to just sit down and read a book.
Another benefit is being able to have a drink or go to multiple locations without worrying about bringing the car back somehow.
I may be doomscrolling on the train but i see plenty of other people read books
Making driving worse instead of making public transport better is such a public sector-brained take.
Driving has been subsidized and "made better" for so long that it feels natural. Forcing your private steel box through public spaces should be the most impractical and expensive thing to do, yet it's not.
You misunderstood my comment. Driving is made worse by the presence of other people driving. Government can partially mitigate it by spending taxpayer money on building more road infrastructure. Or for a fraction of the cost, making public transit better.
Let's make everything harder to use and cost more. It's for their own good!
Driving is currently subsidized in a variety of ways that hide it's true costs. Almost any effort to make driving's perceived cost closer to the real cost, including externalities, is a good thing.
IMO, it's not so much "make driving worse" (ie actively make roads worse, etc).
Instead, it's actively make transit better be reallocating road funds... Add buses or light rail or dedicated/separated bike lanes instead of brainlessly adding traffic lanes. Every bike added to that bike lane is one less car (very roughly).
Additionally, tax car infrastructure appropriately. Free road-side parking is not an entitlement. Reduce parking minimums in redevelopment/new development and let the market determine the supply of spaces. A good example - it's increasingly common for apartments in DC to charge extra for a parking space.
Most of the above applies to urban areas as well as moderately dense suburban zones.
Large cities can take additional steps - no car zones (common in Italian towns), congestion pricing (London, NYC, and others already do this), and changes to road design to better accommodate pedestrians (plenty of YT videos about various plans to do this).
You said it's not to make driving worse, but then listed multiple examples of making driving worse:
- reallocating road funds (away from driving and toward busses/rail/bikes)
- tax car infrastructure appropriately, presumably higher
- reduce parking minimums
Not that I'm against these, but they will surely make driving worse.
That is wrong on multiple dimensions.
What makes driving worse is the presence of more cars. This can be partially mitigated by piling money into road infrastructure, but infrastructure is a band-aid on a problem created by more people choosing to drive.
What makes driving better is the presence of fewer cars. There's really only one way to reduce the number of cars on the road: build good alternatives to driving. If you love driving, you should be the strongest champion of public transport investment.
They keep driving how it is, and make other things better relatively. Reducing parking minimums doesn't remove existing parking, it prevents building more. Building bike lanes doesn't usually mean reducing car capacity. Adding more lanes to already huge highways doesn't actually improve driving, so redirecting that money to rail does not make driving worse, in fact it stands to make it better by getting more people off the road
Removing parking minimums doesn't even prevent more parking - it only lets the market balance supply/demand for parking. The current system in most of the US requires worst-case/max-demand parking lots, so the only time a shopping center's lot is full is a few peak hours on the weekend and Christmas season. The rest of the year, it's mostly empty.
Here's a good summary of one case of a small town dealing with absurd parking regulations... https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017-11-22-how-parking-m...
And just to add my own recent anecdote... we visited southern Italy (Puglia) last month. Most of the towns have zero traffic* zones (ZTL zones) in the historic centers. In all of them, there were either ample metered street spots just outside the ZTL or small pay lots a short walk away. As far as I could tell, as a tourist, it worked well - the downtowns were vibrant with lots of foot traffic.
* ZTLs allow local traffic and handicapped transport within certain guidelines.
Sometimes you have to nerf something because it's been buffed too many times, beyond what's sustainable or reasonable
It's only really been buffed by the facts you don't have to pay for massive custom vehicles or drivers, and market dynamics (and the corresponding incredible features and amazing factory and transportation efficiencies) mean cars are extremely good value for money for a lot of people.
In other words: there's a profit motive, so people get something really good for their money.
Public transport is frequently a monopoly or semi-monopoly, and there is power available (the people running the public transport also get to set rules for drivers), and exercising power is much, much easier than competing in a market.
So you bought a car for a good price full of features, good for you. Now where are you going to drive the thing? Can you build your own road wherever you want to go? No, only the state can build roads? How could we allow such a monopoly over our lives.
Now you say there are rules to follow on these roads, with enforcement, meaning someone has power over you the entire time? Yikes.
Sorry, I'm not sure what point you're arguing against.
Going over the patch notes, here's some buffs you might have missed:
Mandatory parking minimums, high speed limits, car lanes without bus lanes or bike lanes, tearing down neighborhoods to build interchanges and highways...
> If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere.
Cars don't even have tables; let alone toilets, dining areas, sleeping cabins, etc. Even those which do (e.g. RVs) would require a solo traveller to stop in order to use them.
No thanks, I'll stick to the train.
How long do you spend on transit that most of those are necessary?
As for toilets, the new Caltrain cars, built by Stadler (from Switzerland, which has the best non-high speed rail train infrastructure in the world) were not going to include toilets at are - I don't believe they do in Switzerland - but were forced to add one by ADA regulations in the USA.
Increasing ownership and fuel costs is wrong, as it makes life more difficult also for people living in areas where public transport is not feasible.
Then surely you have no issue with increasing municipal taxes on drivers where there is public transit?
yes, lets make things harder for people in certain situations cause we know what's best for them.
> If every road were free of traffic, every destination had unlimited parking at the door, everyone already owned a car, and driving carried no direct or indirect costs, almost everyone would drive everywhere.
What kind of nonsense is this? People take public transport it's better than driving. You don't need to expend mental cycles focusing on the road, you can do something else while you're on the go: chat to friends, browse the internet, read a book, sleep, etc. Driving is dead time.
> People take public transport it's better than driving
Public transport is also much more expensive, particularly when you have more than one person in the vehicle, even with loads of tax added to car fuel, doesn't depart from your house or arrive at your destination, and means you can't take much stuff with you.
Driving is more expensive than public transport when you factor in the cost of the vehicle, maintenance, fuel, insurance, taxes, parking, etc.
If driving were more cheaper than public transport then nobody would use it. Yet, almost wherever you go in the world if you go to a station at 8am on a weekday it will be full of people.
> If driving were more cheaper than public transport then nobody would use it. Yet, almost wherever you go in the world if you go to a station at 8am on a weekday it will be full of people.
This logic is devastatingly simplistic. Think about the most obvious counter-example: people who have car sometimes take the train. Even after they've paid all those car fees, they'll take the train for £50 rather than drive for £8 in car fuel. Why?
It's because there isn't an objective tier list for vehicles. E.g. if I'm going through central London I'll use the Underground because London is so densely populated going by car isn't always feasible. But if you're going somewhere in London with a baby then you might well take the hit and drive, because you have a lot of stuff to bring with you, and the Underground is unpleasant and hot, which the baby will not appreciate.
I pay €63 per month for unlimited train rides across Germany. My car insurance used to cost more than that. Keeping my old Kangoo running cost me about €150 per month before fuel.
It's better in some use cases, but not all (e.g. traveling to the country)
> People will generally choose whichever mode of transport is most convenient
ok that is one fourth of the conversation, or less.. sure, marketing and economic signals.. got it.
The historic rise of the personal auto versus all else was partly fueled by a social dynamic where "privelage is defined by the ability to remove yourself from the dirty and dangerous crowds of non-privelaged humans".. Autos have dramatically filled the transportation sector because clean and intelligent ME can ride next to foul dangerous person YOU without contact reliably.
Notice the profound growth of personal aircraft for the newly wealthy. Google upper-levels are famous for this. Personal aircraft are some of the most anti-ecological and anti-efficient modes of transport ever.. check out the stocks and sales figures.. huge growth in the last years.
America and others have successfully made ugly reality of social constructs into marketing talk and "rational decisions" but the reality is not fully described by those IMHO
Yep. In the future, only billionaires and politicians shall be allowed private travel. The common man shall be crammed into public transport where he can sweat, sneeze, touch, grab etc. the rest of the common man.
Forcing the public to abandon the comfort of private travel seems right out of the WEF playbook.
Comfort? The hassle of parking a car makes the train the nicer option, all by itself!
What hassle? Most of the places where I drive my cars have abundant free parking.
waat?
Current situation with prevalent "private travel", i.e. cars in USA (and probably "the west" overall??) IS due to corporate and political interests.
Car manufacturers, "big oil", road construction companies, politicians collecting taxes from cars (fuel sales, road use, cars themselves[0] and car parking), banks leasing money to buy and maintain cars, insurance, landlords owning car parks, etc.
They are very very interested that private car ownership wouldn't go away and are fighting it tooth and nail. You need to own multiple cars per household spend thousands on leasing, hundreds on parking, to just go to work and of course there's fuel.
Though somewhere like London, Paris or Tokyo - why would you want to do daily commute in a car? If you are a billionaire, driven by personal driver in your Bentley or Land Rover - sure, but otherwise metro is cheaper by an order of magnitude and I'd bet often times much faster too. In those places rich and heads of state take trams and metros.
I probably not need to remind you that "richest man" lobbied some failing projects to upsell his car sales, instead of allowing high speed rail to be developed.
[0] this of course depends from country to country and from state to state.
I think you underestimate just how much many people like their cars and enjoy driving. People generally spend far more on their vehicle than they really need to.
If I lived in London or Paris I wouldn't commute by car. But I don't live in a big city and, at this point in my life, I don't want to (although I'd love to have a little pied-a-terre for part time use). Instead, I live in the 'burbs of a pretty car-friendly city and life is good.
I think you vastly underestimate how much people like their cars. Sure there are corporate interests who benefit, but they don't force folks to change cars every 3 years or make big "crossovers" and SUVs the most popular car type in the US and, now, Europe[1].
Cars are just really convenient to have when you need them and folks will put up with all kind of costs and other inconveniences to own one.
I think it's really important to have robust and safe public transit so car use can be minimized when it's unnecessary, but I don't have illusions that this will lead to some kind of car-free utopia.
[1] https://www.motor1.com/news/707655/suvs-more-popular-europe-...
Also...allow people to work from home more. During the Covid pandemic, most white-collar employees work from home, and the commute and the traffic is usually not a big problem. But now more and more companies ask employees to go back to office, and traffic jam is becoming a headache again.
Yup... hours of commuting time just to sit in Zoom/Teams/Slack/whatever calls while in the office instead of at home makes no sense at all, and is bad for the environment (even if you use public transportation, not going to the office still emits less CO2 than going there). But because RTO is just a way of trying to get rid of employees without severance costs, these and other points will invariably fall on deaf ears...
I wonder if a very small tax for RTO (perhaps with exemptions for manual jobs) would do the trick?
I think it would help with making companies handle that externality.
> I think it would help with making companies handle that externality.
This is backwards, companies do not choose where employees live. Employees do. That they choose to live with long and unpleasant commutes (typically in exchange for more space, cheaper housing etc) is in general terms on them not the company. I'll allow that the rowback of wfh from a previously fully remote job is on the company - but certainly outside of that I have little agreement.
While true, there's (often, not always) an inverse correlation between location of work and cost of living. Few people can afford to live close to the office.
What would work (at least in my country, and in my head / from my armchair) is sattelite offices. I live in a neat suburb with an industrial estate with some office buildings, if my job opened a sattelite office there I would be much more inclined to go to the office.
But then, they would need to make sure that only people that live nearby go to that office. Given that a lot of teams are multidisciplinary, that would be difficult. Plus, the job would need to offer long-term stability, and only few jobs in software can promise stability for more than a year. If they want people to move close to work, it has to be both affordable and guaranteed stable for at least 5-10 years.
I looked into it once, there was an office for a software company across the street and I applied there. But the two offers they made were both lower than what I was earning at the time, to the point where I wouldn't be able to live there. And second, after the pandemic they closed the office and became a remote-first company.
Companies as a collective also choose the geographical distributions of offices and housing and the price of each.
We definitely need more metro, trams, bus routes, and bike paths. I especially want the latter because I bike to and from work every day. However, I have to wonder about the cost of these projects. In SF, we recently spent $346 million on the Van Ness Improvement Project, which added 2 miles of bus lanes. I just can't see how that's a good use of funds. If someone gave me $346 million and told me to improve society, I could think of many better options than adding two miles of bus lane. So a prerequisite to the whole idea seems to involve solving whatever is making these projects so expensive.
One of the problems indeed.
Though IMHO it's just lack of political will.
Highways are built at (relative) ease, no matter the cost. Data centers are infamously now being built at society expense (electricity and water capacity), sometimes literally in peoples backyards.
At the moment I don't have the receipts, but from anecdotes - it's all just political will.
There's a highway extension? Some properties are taken by eminent domain, some other NIMBYs are told to just suck it up.
Data center? Forget about it - foundations are being laid this moment (sometimes no matter the law)!
High speed rail? We must listen to every NIMBY on the proposed path, hence it will take 200 years to listen to all complaints and align opinions of the people impacted. Millions speant on "research, enviornmental impact and public opinion" - project stalls and is closed after 5 years.
NB: I am not from USA, I think this pattern fits many (especially western) countries. Successful projects (I repeat myself) are always based on political will, when rule/law framework is designed to make such projects easier and much cheaper.
NB2: Also as with anything - when you start building you get experience and expertese - the more you build the cheaper it gets. A lot of places havent built new train/metro/tram line in decades - hence all expertese must be built from scratch (from policies, to government clerks knowing how to deal with such projects, to construction businesses who never built rail in 50 years, etc.).
> Highways are built at (relative) ease, no matter the cost.
It's like that because it's a misconception that highways are built for passenger cars. They're built for freight and all kinds of business activities - regular people using them are just a bonus.
The majority of petroleum-based fuel, wear and tear on the highways and toll revenue comes from everything but passenger cars on highways.
Almost all of the new highway construction is for passenger cars. Yes, the interstate highways were built in part to facilitate intercity truck traffic, but the reason for building yet another beltway around, say, Houston isn't for trucks but for all of the passenger cars in the region that are congesting the roads.
The challenge that "developed" countries / cities have is that there's already a lot of existing (and aging) infrastructure around.
Meanwhile in other countries they build new cities from scratch, including infrastructure based on current-day knowledge of how these things pan out long term.
I think the US has the space and funds to do so. If they were to build a new city from scratch for the next 250 years, what would it look like?
This feels like an instance of America being unable to build things due to corruption.
Two miles of any lane shouldn't cost over a hundred million dollars per mile. Repainting a lane should be vastly less and even if they're building a new flyover just for buses it shouldn't cost that much. Something is happening there. It is not getting built in an effective way.
Can almost guarantee that project involved much more that just bus lanes. I don't believe even California can spend that much on paint.
(And it did, the entire roadway, sewer, and water mains were replaced, traffic signals were replaced, etc: https://www.sfcta.org/projects/van-ness-improvement-project)
> However, I have to wonder about the cost of these projects.
A very good way to deal with this is to recognize that all infrastructure needs maintenance and periodic replacement. Once it is time to replace a road, that is when you change it to include bike paths, bus lanes and so on.
You need some foresight, planning, make new road designs part of law, and political will. Some countries have made this work very well.
Okay, how would you spend $346 million?
If we had to stick to transportation-specific improvements, I would use the money to eliminate bus fare for a year. (muni generates about $100M in fare, so really it would be enough money to eliminate fare for ~3 years.)
Unlike subway fare, bus fare doesn't prevent n'er-do-wells from getting on the bus (they just ignore the fare and get on anyway), and it probably increases ridership and gets some people out of their cars, which reduces congestion (public benefit and therefore deserving of government subsidy).
Why not use the money to make bus service better? There is no city that can't effectively use many more buses. Bus riders all put service as their biggest problem over the cost.
Improving service is much better, but the relative scales here are crazy. She options are "completely eliminate cost" or "slightly improve service in one two-mile stretch". Granted, 10 million trips a year go through that two-mile stretch that was improved, but that's just a small fraction of all bus trips in SF.
It is more than that, but even still we should as that would help the people who ride their routes. In almost all cases this would bring in more riders who find the new service good enough that they can stop driving.
Where I live, I’d spend it on increasing parking availability at train stations, and/or run a lot more local buses that do a small (few kilometres) circuit around the station and ferry passengers to/from the station. Taking a bus to the station currently adds an unreasonable amount of time to the journey. It doesn’t matter how good trains are if I don’t live near a station and I can’t get there.
I would add to the top of that list - reducing the distance people travel. Less kilometers would be very effective. Don't spend hours a day in your car. If people wouldn't be traveling so much, especially for work, this whole problem would disappear.
The whole point of a city is all the destinations you can teach. Less km means you can go less places. No density isn't an answer, because some destinations are not dense, and even if they are we can cram more places in.
Air travel is the best way to go long distances, but some small islands are not easily accessible by plane. For those places, we have ferries.
In a similar vein, most places in a city can be accessed via density + transit. But cars are great for those non-dense destinations you describe, like wilderness areas or farms or whatever else.
There is a large gap between distances where flying makes S and and what you can walk. Even with an ebike the distance you can reach in a reasonable time is vastly less that a car for most trips.
> here's a good graph
The trouble with this graph is that it assumes the buses/trains are full. It obviously doesn't apply to a bus with one passenger on it, which takes up even more space than a car.
From which we can observe the problem. Alice is at home and wants to go to work. She travels along a low density street for a few miles, enters a congested thoroughfare for a few more miles, then travels along another low density street to her destination.
She can't take a bus at the endpoints because she would be the only one on it, but if she took a bus only on the congested thoroughfare then she'd end up on the far side of it without a vehicle to get the rest of the way to her destination.
To fix this the thing you need before mass transit (by several years) is zoning rules that allow higher density construction in a higher percentage of the land area where people live and work.
I've been traveling around in Europe without a car for several days now, including several fairly rural areas.
There's a distinctly American trope in play, that if the bus or train doesn't stop more or less exactly at your destination, then it's going to be totally useless. Except, you look at the rural European countryside, and there is still a fairly reliable--and well-used, certainly not "only one rider on the bus"--bus system. And this is in the countryside that is less densely populated than most American suburbs or exurbs. It is totally possible to make mass transit work, even in the car-oriented hellscape of most American cities.
The main thing that American public transit systems seem to be really allergic to is the concept of frequency--a high frequency transit system is generally necessary for usability, but your typical American transit system responds to a perennial funding crisis by cutting frequency, which tends to lead into a ridership death spiral--cutting frequency cuts ridership, loss of ridership leads to loss of funding, which they respond to by cutting frequency.
It's not a matter of stopping exactly at your destination. If people had to walk two blocks it would do them some good.
The problem is that in a low density area, both frequent service and infrequent service result in a low number of riders. You have a neighborhood with three dozen people in it who go to work and back once a day. If you run a bus there every 15 minutes for 12 hours a day, the average bus carries less than one passenger in each direction. If you only run one bus in the morning and one in the evening then in theory it would be 75% full but in practice then nobody takes it at all because the bus comes at 7:30AM but they have to go to work at 7AM or 8:30 so they all just drive instead.
> The trouble with this graph is that it assumes the buses/trains are full. It obviously doesn't apply to a bus with one passenger on it, which takes up even more space than a car.
IMHO it's a bit moot to delve into extremes. Average car occupancy is around 1.5 passengers. I'd bet that such number is far from average for average bus/train/tram/metro. I also probably won't make a mistake stating that "Average car" in USA is either a very big SUV or even bigger "truck" (which probably has a footprint as half of a bus). You also need to park your car somewhere at the destination.
I also thought that there will be reply like yours, though you answered your own problem:
> To fix this the thing you need before mass transit (by several years) is zoning rules that allow higher density construction in a higher percentage of the land area where people live and work.
Of course you don't want to build trams and all in low density (and low population) areas and my comment didn't apply for such case. You must have density as well as mixed use zones. I am not from USA and seemingly prevalent single use zoning[1] is very foreign to me. It all comes down to efficient urbant planning.
[1] correct me if I am wrong on this.
> You also need to park your car somewhere at the destination.
This is generally not the problem because most of the destinations aren't in the high-scarcity congestion area, people just have to go through it to get to their destination from their point of origin.
> Of course you don't want to build trams and all in low density (and low population) areas and my comment didn't apply for such case. You must have density as well as mixed use zones.
Which is the thing the US doesn't. Large percentages of land in the areas around many major cities -- some of them among the most congested -- is zoned exclusively for single family homes. There isn't enough density for mass transit to work and it's residential-only, so working within walking distance of those homes is essentially prohibited by law.
I believe this is based on actual average usage, not by assuming the vehicles are full.
Which would be even worse, since existing mass transit is naturally concentrated in the places where it can operate with high capacity, and it thereby has a higher existing average than passenger cars. Lots of mostly full commuter trains, not a lot of 8-passenger SUVs that actually have 8 passengers.
When the the proposal is to add more mass transit, it would then have to go in the places it currently isn't, i.e. the places where it would have to operate at lower capacity. Which leads to the problem described.
Well, you can actually do both.
This costs no money to cities and can be rolled out without any political barriers. It will have a small effect.
Public and active transit costs money and requires political buy-in. It will have a large effect but takes time.
Yes - when I read "both navigation users and non-users share the advantages of decongesting targeted segments", I wondered how long these advantages would last. It's widely accepted that less congestion will encourage people to travel by car more, which will soon eat up the gains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Definitions)
> It's widely accepted that less congestion will encourage people to travel by car more, which will soon eat up the gains
This is not only not widely accepted but extremely misleading. The nature of "induced demand" is really that congestion suppresses demand. Which behaves in an entirely different way than the name implies.
If demand was being induced then all attempts to relieve congestion would be permanently impossible, which is nonsense. There are empirically places with less traffic congestion. Whereas if demand is being suppressed then an apparent capacity shortfall in the amount of 0.5X may really be a shortfall of X. Adding 0.5X then doesn't work, because congestion will remain until you add X, with the suppressed demand filling back in to the extent that you satisfy it.
In order to relieve the congestion you have to add enough capacity to satisfy the demand that would exist in the absence of congestion, which is more than the amount that exists now, but not an infinite amount that unconditionally consumes all possible capacity or efficiency increases.
There's a related paradox - I don't remember the name - that the speed of traffic is determined by the speed of public transit. Cities with less car congestion probably have faster public transit.
That doesn't seem like a paradox at all. If you have more convenient public transit then more people use it. If more people use it then there is less traffic.
This is also why things like bus lanes are ridiculous. The theory is supposed to be that making the bus faster than cars will get more people to use it. But if that actually created a benefit that exceeds its cost, i.e. got more people to take the bus than the wasted capacity of not allowing cars to use that lane when a bus isn't, then it would reduce the traffic congestion that it inherently requires. It's a thing that can't even be part of the solution to the problem because any means of actually solving the problem would eliminate its mechanism of operation.
It's a paradox because making car traffic faster doesn't make car traffic faster, but making metro trains faster makes car traffic faster.
Except that they both make car traffic faster, with the result that cities with slower trains on average have more car traffic.
In a situation like this, induced demand could "easily" (on a technical, not a political sustainable level) be combated by shifting subsidies from car -> public transport. Induced demand won't be taken up as readily if there is a significant monetary penalty for it.
If you believe that adding lanes doesn't reduce congestion, then you must also believe that adding transit doesn't reduce congestion.
In many instances removing or repurposing lanes (road diet) decreases congestion much more effectively than just adding capacity.
Congestion occurs naturally regardless of capacity due to fluctuations in flow (jitter) more often than being over capacity (this is civil engineering 101). By repurposing lanes for dedicated turn lanes, bus lanes, bike lanes, and/or pedestrian walkways, you remove many of the triggers for jitter.
Synchronizing traffic (connected autodrive?) would do much more for removing congestion than just adding high over head capacity.
https://highways.dot.gov/safety/other/road-diets/road-diet-c...
Induced demand is a real, observed phenomenon for both roads and public transport. However, because of density differences, it is generally easier to increase service frequency for public transport than to add lanes for low-density road traffic.
Empirically, this pattern is observed repeatedly.
> If you believe that adding lanes doesn't reduce congestion, then you must also believe that adding transit doesn't reduce congestion.
The problem with road congestion is the number of personal vehicles inefficiently carrying 1-2 people while taking up a lot of space on the road.
In any situation where the roads would be clogged with personal vehicles an effective transit network will be carrying dozens or even hundreds of people per vehicle in vehicles that may not even be sharing the same lanes and thus can't contribute to road congestion.
1. Like others said - induced demand. You add one highway lane - more people will jump into cars to use it. You add tram/metro line instead - same people would like to use that instead of sitting in traffic jam, taking away traffic from the highway.
2. Continuing from first point - see linked graph in parent comment. Light rail has an order of magnitude capacity per lane compared to cars. For 20 lane highway you'll need 2 lines of light rail or 1 lane of "heavy rail" (as per graph). Insane difference!
3. There's a reason "one more lane" is a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/one-more-lane-bro-one-more-la...
I think most people get that non-car forms of transport is denser. The two main issues that stop people using it are:
1) Time: Taking a trip involving public transport is slower than a car. This is fixable in urban areas with some dedicated paths, modal filters, and very frequent schedules and that kind of thing but this takes up front resources.
2) Safety: It's not safe. Too much antisocial behaviour on public transport. Nobody wants to sit near loud or smelly people. In the worst case people get assaulted. Cyclists are more likely to get seriously hurt in a crash or have their vehicle stolen than cars. It's fixable but policing takes effort.
3) The demand paradox: "See public transport and bikes are unpopular" say the decision makers and don't put in the resources. The thing is the infra needs to be near 100% built for people to want to use it. It's no good if your cycle commute is 80% dedicated bike paths but 20% of it is riding next to trucks and parked cars opening their doors as most people would rather take a car. It's also no good if the trains run every 30mins, so on average your trip is 15min delayed. The politician would think "why would I double it if the trains are already under-utilised" but does not understand latent demand.
You're completely wrong on safety. Driving is much much more dangerous than trains by orders of magnitude.
I know what you're getting at when you write safety, but I want to be clear that this is not the same thing as safety.
Assertions made without evidence can be disregarded without evidence, and your assertion does not match my personal experience. Public transit is dangerous, especially in cities like SF or Seattle.
Oh don’t worry there is plenty of evidence
Deaths per billion miles via
car: 7.3 Train: 0.43
From https://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8606195/train-safety-driving-c... but you can just google, there are tons of other studies.
It’s a safe bet that sndgndgndgndy isn’t referring to that metric, but to the (perceived) probability of getting shouted at, mugged, etc.
That, I have been told, is definitely a problem in the USA. I think that’s because they’ve painted themselves into a car-centric corner that it is very hard to get out of.
Outside of a handful of American cities, public transit is mostly used by the poor, which can include a lot of "undesirables", and many people used to their "quiet, safe" suburbs feel deeply uncomfortable around the poor in general. In some cities, public transit is used as a du-facto shelter system by the homeless.
It's funny when people see celebrities use the subway in NYC. It's just accepted by New Yorkers that the subway is usually the best way to get around Manhattan and getting mixed in with the entire socioeconomic spectrum is normal. But the crowds of people is also a kind of security blanket if something does happen.
Crime rates are actually lower on transit than in a car: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1077291X2...
The perception of crime and danger is strangely very inverted
I did mention “perceived” and also included shouting in my list because of that, but I could have been clearer.
Also, the set of people who feel unsafe by just having somebody who’s noticeably poor in their proximity definitely is not empty.
Staying in your bubble is way easier if you avoid public transport and walking on the street as much as possible.
Your data is for traffic accidents, not crimes. Public transit is dangerous because of crime.
> Public transit is dangerous because of crime
What was it you said? Assertions made without evidence?
Edit: I looked into it and crime rates are actually lower on transit than in cars. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1077291X2...
You need to examine your assumptions
[dead]
[dead]
Perceived safety is exactly what I meant. It's a marketing problem.
> For this study, the Google Maps algorithm was modified to prefer alternative routes with similar travel times and segment types, effectively guiding trips away from the pre-selected congested segments
> Over a six month period, we adopted a city-wide switchback (also known as crossover) experimental design, alternating between this treatment and the control (unaltered) routing algorithm over consecutive days to appropriately measure the effect of this intervention
> Averaged across cities, we observe a median increase of around 2% in driving speeds on targeted segments, corresponding to a median decrease of 0.5% to 1.0% in fuel consumption rates
The cities were: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle.
The data and code is also available (https://github.com/google-research/google-research/blob/mast...) from the paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00443-x).
Kudos Google! Nice to see this kind of work. That said, let's just build more trains?
I read the article and didn't see anywhere if they collaborated with city planners, or just ran this on their own. I get the techno-optimism of making traffic 'better' and also it may be concerning if trucks are being routed through neighborhoods where planners didn't build for it.
Do you think Google should get government sign-off on every change to its routing algorithm?
Medical/psychological experiments involving human subjects are mandated by federal law to run through a review board. Did that happen here? This isn't a medical experiment, but I don't think its nuts to feel like maybe there should have been some oversight.
I fear you may overestimate the median benefit of government oversight.
I fear you underestimate the malice of the average tech company
Does this apply to Netflix, Amazon, Disneys, and many other streaming providers's "What to watch next? Recommended..." of sorts (or music/podcast streaming services)...
Routing traffic affects not only the drivers using Google Maps, but also everyone around them IN REALTIME.
Netflix personalized recommendations affect only the individual, not those around them who are not using Netflix.
This is only true for experiments funded by the government. In this case the experiment was funded solely by Google.
IRB approval is required for human subject research funded by private parties, too; not just government. But only really in the medical field.
>But only really in the medical field.
Looking it up, the exception where it is required is specifically for clinical investigations regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.
You're acting in bad faith attaching "every change" to what the parent said.
But this isn't that crazy? Most businesses require government approval for changes that have community effects... that's the entire point of government. Stuff like construction permits and regulation around structures, water usage, pollution, building architecture. Mining companies are required to assess environmental impacts. Companies making RF devices need to get confirmation on how the devices affect people and other devices.
And that's not even considering market share/monopoly status, which also regularly invites more scrutiny.
Does the tempo matter?
Like compare changing live routing to publishing a paper map showing alternate routes.
In either case it seems to me that the vehicle operator should be most responsible for the impact of the route that they use.
When the government proscribes discretionary permitting to those items you mentioned corruption and scarcity follow. It is exorbitantly expensive and difficult to build a house, a powerplant, or a mine in this country. For which we all currently pay for in cost of living.
I had a similar question and am generally curious if google has an internal IRB or equivalent for these studies. Given their outsized influence, there is a reasonable chance of uncoordinated interaction between their efforts and other ongoing studies. For a trivial example, consider interaction between google maps rerouting experiment near an event and localized uber surge pricing.
I think that's already very much a problem, and given that they constrained it to routes that didn't have a significantly different drive time the risk seems low.
This is also my experience. It would suggest routes that make no sense (to a local) in an attempt to “divert” away from traffic, which ends up costing more time and petrol anyway.
City planners and zoning have been a disaster for US cities.
That's not what the parent is talking about. You're using the strawman of what appears to be occupancy zoning or something similar to argue that a techno fascists should have free reign to manipulate the mass movements of people within a city for their own purposes.
Generally you need to be pretty competent to get to the level of where these Google maps guys are.
To get to the competence level of a local traffic planner, you need to have stuck it out through a Civ E degree and maybe went through the motions at a firm for for 15 years before getting laid off and then wanting a "cruise control" job with the power you never would have achieved in private industry for the rest of your career.
You end up dealing with guys where you live or die based on the opinion of someone who hasn't bothered to learn anything new since 1991, and have no interest in breaking their "cruise control".
Still a strawmam somehow?
Found the European :)
The south SF Bay Area cities of Los Gatos and Monte Sereno have persistent problems with traffic gridlock during summer weekends and holidays due to navigation apps routing drivers off of southbound SR-17 and onto surface streets. It gets so bad that residents literally can't get out of their own driveways and emergency response vehicles can't move.
There actually did used to be train service from San Jose to Santa Cruz but it was abandoned in 1940 due to high costs and lack of use. Rebuilding it would cost >$1B.
https://www.goodtimes.sc/isnt-train-san-jose/
It can’t be helped. Roads are not only locally funded and the only thing allowing residents to free-ride on everyone else’s contribution to this commons is the information asymmetry. It’s similar to the fact that San Franciscans and Athertonians have “slow streets / no through streets” which allow a few to retain exclusive road use for themselves.
With increased information comes more efficient utilization and no doubt the free-riders will find that troubling since it’s no longer a free ride with the asymmetric effect where they can use my roads but I can’t use theirs.
In an ideal world, we would use our Fastraks to charge for marginal road use and a locality can recoup capital investments it made by charging appropriately for marginal use.
Do you not have shoulder lanes? I ask because I’ve lived places that don’t and I’ve always wondered if you just die if EMS doesn’t have a lane to get to you.
There are no shoulder lanes in residential and downtown areas.
> let's just build more trains?
"just" is doing a lot of work there. Trains are a very (very) expensive way to move people between pre-determined places. We can do a lot better than this in 2026.
Any examples?
One of the things this type of intervention doesn't take into account is that different roads are built with different levels of hardiness based on the amount of traffic they are expected to receive.
For instance, a few years ago, a segment of I-495 in Delaware needed to be unexpectedly shut down for emergency repairs. Drivers were rerouted. But because of the increase in traffic on the less-hardy detour route, that route needed repairs and repaving soon afterward, much more quickly than it would have ordinarily required.
So yes, drivers can be better dispersed to ease congestion, but we also need to consider the secondary effects to the roadways themselves.
A random factoid that will always stick in my brain is that the damage a vehicle does to a road is proportional to the weight on an axel...to the fourth power. I suspect rerouting semis to the roadway is by far the greatest factor.
Another random fact is that Norman Mailer coined ‘factoid’ to refer to a fabrication presented as fact, but now means the opposite (as in, a fact presented as a fact, not a fact presented as fabrication).
So it’s now one of those words like ‘literally’ which can be its own antonym.
My pet peeve is people claiming "literally" is now being used to mean the opposite. It is never used that way. When people use "literally" in the weakened and figurative way, they are not using it to mean "figuratively". They are using it to mean "very much".
It is often used that way, at least in Britain, e.g. "I'm literally dying" to indicate something being very funny
[dead]
I'm actually a fan. It's an excellent exploration of sarcasm: what you literally say in a sarcastic tone might have a metaphorical meaning, or it might be a twice application of sarcasm that loops back to literal meaning, like in deadpan comedy.
One factoid about Norman Mailer: he stabbed his wife.
I second guessed my usage, but decided it was a good way to communicate my lack of experience and confidence in the specifics.
It's a nice self-referential loop. The definition of factoid is, itself, a factoid.
Also, pedestrians and cyclists choose lesser traveled roads for safety. Granted you're talking huge roads but on a smaller scale, filling up neighborhood streets with commuter traffic is likely to provoke a backlash.
People just want to get to their next destination faster.
Long story short: More public transport sounds like a good idea to prevent more situations like you posted.
[dead]
Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car
This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence.
The more your preferences or financial constraints come into play, the more you have to give up.
Most people settle in for driving because it allows them to pick from more job options than those that happen to be located near their house and more housing options than what happens to be near your job.
This didn’t matter as much 200 years ago when most people’s job options were limited to farming or something in service of farming.
It got much harder when the range of people’s jobs exploded and finding a company hiring in your specialty meant traveling some distance from home.
It gets even harder when there are two earners in a household trying to find two jobs.
> This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options,
Yup.
And even if you arent't picky. The amount of surface area you can cover scales quadratically with the distance you can commute (either by traveling longer, or by going faster). So as a first approximation, the amount of competition for your labour also goes up quadratically.
Job-hopping is one of the best ways to get better jobs. And it is a LOT easier if you can commute further.
> This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence.
Perhaps the problem is the lack of options for those people that want human-centric (versus car-centric) communities. Maybe if we let The Market™ decide, versus forcing low-density sprawl via zoning, more options would be available.
Right now, if you look on any real estate web site, you'll probably find walkable neighbourhoods have higher prices non-walkable ones: there is demand for them, but a fixed supply since they're not being made anymore, and so they get bid up. Perhaps if there were more of them, especially around commuter rail stations, it would help.
We already tried that experiment. The result was Houston.
The City Beautiful channel goes over the restrictions that Houston has:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaU1UH_3B5k
For example deed restrictions, where, when a sub-division is created, the use case of the lots can never be changed. See also "residential buffering ordinance", parking requirement ordinance, historic districts, etc.
Houston is not a free market for housing at all. They don’t have “zoning” because they call it “land use covenants” and “parking requirements” instead, and it ends up amounting to the same thing as “zoning” in other cities.
And the market doesn’t build the streets, sidewalks, or set up public transport routes.
I remember visiting my friend in an 400+ unit apartment complex in Houston. When I got up in the morning I was like “hey I’m going to walk down and get coffee.” My friend said to just Uber Eats it, I was like that’s insane. So I went down to the ground floor and found out there was literaly no way to walk to the coffee shop that was 0.1 miles away less than 30 minutes because of the absolute nightmare that is Huston streets and sidewalks.
I don't think we can learn much about pedestrianisation from Texas.
This is like, a post-hoc rationalization.
Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)
If you design economic hubs properly, businesses can be located within reach of homes without the need for cars.
If you instead prioritize the need for, I don’t know, a monoculture lawn and separation from lower class people, then you’re choosing to build suburbs. Once a city has built enough suburbs, businesses become out of reach without the use of a car.
What if I want my own garden and not monoculture lawn? What if I want my children to be able to walk in nature near their home? Neither is possible in a densely built city where there are only apartments.
Then there are all the social problems, bad neighbours that become more common in densely built areas. I don't want to deal with that. Suburbs are popular because they provide a superior quality of life for many people.
Of course in an ideal world everyone would be allowed to do fully remote work if possible, and people like me could move to countryside.
You have a caricature picture of big cities. You have clearly never lived in a well functioning one, you may have to leave the USA to find any.
They could have everything they want here in my neighborhood of Chicago: easy access to nature, room for a garden. Suburban Americans love to pretend that "cul de sac" and "Manhattan" are the only two types of place
> Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)
Most people do not want to live in dense cities in high rises.
The number of jobs which cannot be moved into dense city high rises is much higher than you’re thinking. It might seem that way if your world is office jobs and email jobs, but there’s much more to the world of work than that.
Dense cities also have very high turnover as people grow up and want families.
It’s not about having lawns and staying away from “lower class people”. This feels like a poor attempt to cast moral shade on people who choose not to live in a high rise.
Most people who live in dense cities don’t live in high rises…
It is very clear you have never lived in a well functioning city before, and just have no idea what you are talking about. Take the L and admit you just don’t have experience with it. North Americans often don’t because North American cities are extremely bad in this regard.
I'm sure there are plenty of people, who, regardless of how well functioning a city is, don't want to live in one. Myself included.
Absolutely. It’s just the very anti city people never ever seem to use excuses that are actually valid.
Like if “the things that brings me most joy in life require owning lots of land” or “I don’t like people and every day I have to be near them drains me”, those are really valid reasons and there are many more.
What that tells me is either they have a caricature of cities in their head, or (more likely) being anti city is an identity and not based on anything actually about cities per-say.
Since I've moved to my current home, I've had jobs in about 6 different towns and cities. I think for all of them I had colleagues that cycled to work and colleagues that drove for an hour or more.
All these jobs had homes and shops within walking distance. But they are not within walking distance of each other.
The explosion was also due to the car not only spreading low density housing out that would have been a tough sell previously, but also job sprawl to suburban and exurban greenfield.
There used to be natural agglomeration to central well connected nodes before the car. Many cities enacted height limits in the early 1900s with the specific aim to spread out development that was dense enough to make serving basic infrastructure, such as water, power, transit, and cleaning the mounting horseshit off the roads, increasingly expensive and difficult. Early real estate barons would buy marginal land and develop a streetcar line that ran into the job center, and sell plots off that line now that it finally had some utility in the form of a connection to jobs. Even if you worked in something specialized back then, chances are it was close to where most other people were working. Offices were downtown. Government buildings were downtown. Hospitals were downtown. Manufacturing was downtown. Ports and railheads were downtown. All of that snowballing enjoyed by cities exploded with the car.
I am liking the term “car brained” more and more for this type of attitude.
Have you ever heard of trains, busses, bikes? The options for transportation are not binary car or no car. Maybe in North America where they refuse to provide even crappy public transport in most cities it feels this way, but in the rest of the world they are smart enough to build trains and don’t have this problem.
The relative price of those cramped urban centers where this is true suggests that at least a few more people would choose this path if it were cheaper.
Here is your easy solution:
Per employee tax = $0.20 * commute_miles * 2 * (commute_miles / 10)^2 * mandated_office_days_per_year * (1 + 2 * share_of_workforce_over_10_miles)^2
Tech companies can have more distributed offices and assign employees based on geography instead of teams, go back to WFH, pay employees enough to live close to their mega campuses, or pay out the ass into adding more lanes.
And the easiest way to do this is to lift restrictions on being able to build housing near workplaces (i.e. anywhere housing might reasonably and gainfully be built). Most traffic is caused by building restrictions.
If you don't have a community like that, then the best way is congestion pricing.
The best way is to change our communities, even if that takes time and money.
It is difficult for me to admit I'm an idiot but when I was younger and living in an apartment, I loved the idea of a single family home. And now that I'm living in a single family home, I feel like I was wrong all along. Not that I want to go back to the apartment I was in before. Dear lord no but the idea of a mixed use building not too tall only like first floor with high ceilings for business or shops with two or at the most three floors above for residential units feels like the ideal sweet spot. Ideally with a lot of these close together to have everything I need within a walking distance but also a subway station within a walking distance if I need to go farther.
I wasted a decade trying to live in single family homes. Now at 40 my wife and I are living in a small city in a condo and couldn't be happier. Neither of us enjoyed the workload of managing a SFH. Dont force yourself to stay if you aren't happy, you'll wish you moved sooner (I do).
Do you have kids? I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people.
Most kids are only into playing in the yard for a couple years really. Before long they are preteens living in their room, probably seething at the fact they need a ride from a parent to hang out with any of their friends.
Apartments can also have stuff you could never afford that a kid would like, such as a massive pool (try pricing out a new build pool these days).
Lmao what? Everything about this comment is nuts.
Community shared parks can serve the purpose that a SFH yard serves for kids, but you have to interact with other people and we can't have that.
> I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people.
And families do it in NYC, and Hong Kong, and Germany, and Spain (AFAICT, 65%), and…
They manage, but it's not a good experience. The apartments are usually too small for families and the ones that are big enough are too expensive. This is solvable, but has not been solved.
Think about having to share a bedroom with your child, and when they're old enough to need their own one, putting up a partition wall and having each be less than half the size of a normal bedroom, very cramped. And you don't get a living room. (If you did have a living room, now it's your bedroom while the child gets the actual bedroom)
People also change and want different things at different parts of their life. Young and single - living in an apartment is amazing. Once someone is coupled up, has kids, and some animals, a SFH also looks much more appealing. Once the kids are gone, then an apartment/condo starts to look pretty attractive again.
Never in my life has living in an apartment seemed appealing. But I suppose that depends on the apartments you can afford.
A not top tall building doesn't have enough people to be mixed use. Cities often cheat their with several side streets of residential (it might be zoned mix use but it isn't) only for every street of mixed use. People on the non mixed use streets travel to the mixed use one.
There is little hope for that as long as driving is heavily subsidized.
How is driving subsidized?
Massive ongoing investment into roads. EV incentives that would pay for 3-4 ebikes outright. Big 3 bailout. Cash for clunkers. Impact fees from developers towards roads. As others said parking requirements. There is so much beyond that too.
> Massive ongoing investment into roads
Okay, let's stop spending money on roads then.
How are you at riding your bike through mud? Pretty good? Got nice chunky tyres?
> How are you at riding your bike through mud? Pretty good? Got nice chunky tyres?
Bicyclists were the ones to first push for paved roads:
* https://www.history.com/articles/good-roads-movement-bicycli...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_American_Bicyclists#...
Road wear increases with the fourth power of axle weight iirc. Bike paths are orders of magnitude cheaper and need a lot less space.
> Road wear increases with the fourth power of axle weight iirc
That's not actually true, and the paper that describes the "fourth power" thing even says that right up front.
If you massively oversimplify the model so that you've got all vehicles fitted with infinitely hard bicycle tyres on a perfectly smooth surface, it kind of works out, but not quite.
Interesting! Nevertheless I believe it is true that bike and pedestrian paths are much cheaper to construct and maintain than roads for cars and trucks.
Probably.
How do you plan on getting food?
Most roads are not used for delivering goods, so if we'd just reduce private car use that would already be a great improvement. If you want to go even further, rail has a lot of potential left.
Interesting, can you give an example of why you think that?
How does food get to the shop at the end of your street?
By providing free or cheap parking for people that don't live there. Urban land is extremely expensive and parking generally doesn't cost what it should, other land uses would provide a lot more revenue. Parking in US cities is greatly over provisioned to make life easy for suburbanites, destroying urban fabric.
One example is the requirement to have parking spaces.
Like everything else community construction responds to incentives. So we need to structurally incentivise short distance commute communities. Congestion pricing seems like a reasonable first step.
What if you don't want to live in a dense community?
Well just live somewhere that is so lacking in density there is no congestion.
Or a small town that is surrounded by farms.
Just avoid suburban housing as far as the eye can see with a limited number of roads everyone gets funneled on to.
I’ve done that and those areas change over time. A town becomes more like a small city. A small city becomes more dense. Etc. Then all the urbanists move the goal posts and ask why you didn’t live somewhere else.
Just move to the rust belt. If you are going to move to a growing job market don’t be surprised when the job market grows and triggers demand for development.
You don't have to be surprised to disagree with it. What's the limiting principle here? Every city should grow to the size of Tokyo?
Very case dependent of course. There are loads of small towns that have stagnant or shrinking populations all across the US.
God forbid society grows around you. How dare all those productive aspiring people build things near you. Did they not know you had exclusive right of refusal on nearby development?
Landlords...productive...okay then.
Consider the following; the creation of the building is the productive part, not the rent seeking parasite afterwards.
Then you don't. But don't expect people who live in urban centers to cater to your needs when you don't live there.
This sounds simple, but many people are already living further away because they can’t afford to live downtown near where they work. Add kids into the equation, and many people who could live there without them are also forced out.
Congestion pricing is a regressive tax.
The most regressive tax imaginable is a flat fee for every person with no consideration of income. That is exactly the effect of requiring everyone to own a car.
It isn’t a flat fee per se, if only because wealthier people are too prideful. Rich man buys a 100k mercedes. Poor man buys that mercedes 15 or 20 years later for 3k. It still does what it did when it cost 100k.
It's a 3k tax, the other 97k wasn't part of the tax.
Used car prices are more like 10k now anyway. Used Mercedes, probably 40k.
I can tell you don’t check used car prices
That seems like an impossible task in today’s world of layoffs and needing to jump jobs to get pay raises.
You could live where you work and suddenly your next job is a 30 min drive away.
How could you ensure that enough companies existing within a 10 mile radius to provided varied employment to all the residents?
B-b-bb-b-bbb-but then how will I have my 3 storey house with a 100 acre backyard, 2 pools, and 14 cars??? Don't you know it's LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to live without these basics?? What are you, a communist or something??????
>Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car
I dont even know what this would look like in practice. It feels like an inner city thing, lifestyle priced accordingly.
What Socialists/Communists/Liberals/Conservatives/Local and State Governments/Weird Internet Tech Bros all seem to forget is that people have different priorities, and you cant build 1 house that suits every priority.
I am house hunting at the moment, and houses optimised for walking to shops are at the low end, when what I need is a big yard for my kid to run around in and a shed for my blacksmithing tools (and ideally neighbors far enough away that they dont mind metal being banged on in the morning) while also being within reasonable driving distance of a few of the sites I work at.
The same things keeps happening every time I find myself stuck in traffic on the interstate. Out of nowhere, a popup appears in Google Maps: a faster route is available! 4 minutes faster! Unless either the passenger or the driver are fast enough to hit "No thanks", the change auto-applies, and Google now wants me to exit the interstate at the nearest exit and drive some random road I had no idea about, to rejoin the interstate a few miles ahead. Of course, a bunch of other vehicles in the same traffic jam got the same notification, so that minor road now get a sizable fraction of the interstate traffic, all of which then struggles to merge back.
Seeing this again and again. We call it a "Google detour" in the family, and rarely agree to the change of the route.
Yes, I find it ironic that Google is recommending that people take varied routes, when it's their very app that often puts a bunch of people on an obscure, same route. Many times I've taken one of its shortcuts, only to see a bunch of cars in front of me and behind me taking the same shortcut, clearly not one people would normally take.
I've had this experience. 10 minutes in it hit me that we're all only here only because Google suggested so.
It was some kind of dirt road that almost never had this sort of traffic and you could see that from the faces of the locals, as we were passing them by at maybe twice walking speed.
It once made me exit the highway, using the nearly empty exit ramp, then do a U-turn on the surface street and get back using the lightly used entrance ramp. Wow, all that effort to move about 250m forward in traffic, saving me perhaps 30 seconds of time on my 3 hour drive. Very "over-optimized" software does bizarre stuff that no sane person would ever do.
Now they did the obvious thing and load balanced the alternative routes. Somebody could have done this long ago and got a promo.
If the original route was to continue on the current road, and the revised one is to come off, then you don't need to interact with the screen at all to reject it. Just continue driving, and the route will reset once you pass the exit.
I’ve just started taking surface roads out of Charlotte at peak hours because I know how to get around, and any route that’s part of Apple/Google maps defaults will invariably be clogged with everyone following their directions. Surface streets tend to be blissfully open these days.
So many god damn unprotected left turns on mapping software. Some of them illegal too like asking you to do it when a sign says no left turns during listed hours.
> The same things keeps happening every time I find myself stuck in traffic on the interstate.
Reminder: you are not in traffic, you are traffic. :)
Same. This is why I switched to Apple Maps. Sometimes the Google detours would end in dangerous situations, like a left turn with no light across a major road. And it would be to save 2 minutes-ridiculous!
Apple Maps does this too but the threshold seems to be higher - it's a lot less willing to do it.
I've had Google try to route me across private property (an apartment complex parking lot) to avoid a signaled intersection and save a couple of minutes.
Me too. It’s infuriating and unsafe. I don’t drive often, but when I do it’s out of the city where I’m unfamiliar and need a map.
So I also stopped using Google Maps for driving.
Who at Google seriously believes that it’s good idea to 1) unpredictably change the route someone chose mid-drive, and 2) to distract them while driving with a pop up notification that must be interacted with just to maintain the route.
If I choose a route, I chose it for a reason. Don’t change it while I’m driving.
Congestion can be solved by charging more for driving. Even a modest amount would start affecting how much people drive. The money could be used for better roads and improving other transit options that aren't so space-inefficient. That said, this would likely be unpopular to implement until the effects were visible. See congestion pricing in NYC as an example.
I think the bigger thing this making public transport a real alternative to driving - I most American metros using public transport isn’t faster, can be inconvenient (no parking, multiple transfers, etc), comfortable safe.
I guess I’m saying yes you can make driving less attractive, but I think the better answer is to make public transport more attractive.
Yeah I definitely need driving to be more expensive. That's a great idea!
Won't that just unfairly displace the impact onto the economically disadvanteged as they are the least likely to have the flexibility in their schedule, inadvertently forcing more of the maintenance burden onto those who are int be least place to bear it?
You wouldn't just charge more for driving. You do it in combination with funding public transport, building safer cycling routes, and removing roadblocks from building cheap housing near PT hubs.
Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation. Make public transportation free to use. That would be far more impactful to the folks least able to bear an increase in driving fees.
In most of the US, people are forced to own cars because they don't have public transit available, or the available public transit is too infrequent, or there aren't dense enough routes. The reason behind this is funding.
Additionally, buses are less efficient because they need to sit in the same traffic as everyone else. Reduced traffic makes buses more efficient. Reducing car traffic is a win for basically everyone, and increasing public transit is additionally a win for basically everyone.
Car infrastructure is heavily subsidized, and congestion pricing is one way to make car owners pay for part of the cost. Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride, when car owners get to use the infrastructure for free?
> Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation.
Public transportation is often not viable for the car-centric design of many American communities. The above is necessarily to do, but development probably also needs to also change to pre-WW2 designs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
See also Dutch suburbs:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nImFJ7KKjAo
I disagree with that take generally. What is the difference between say a UK garden suburb and a new build suburb outside dallas? The commuter rail station really. UK suburbs are similarly labyrinthine. But actually, the dallas suburbs have great bones for a potential transit network. Even though the residential streets themselves look like they were laid out by wandering livestock just like they were in the UK, they have the great advantage of being rigidly bounded by generally 1x1 mile square, cardinal, arterial road networks which are very wide public right of ways. One could just lay a network of brt or lrt or heavy commuter rail on top of this space without even needing to acquire any property at all. And if the stations were say on each 1x1 mile intersecting node, everyone in the inner residential portion would theoretically only be a half mile or closer from their nearest transit stop, as the crow flies at least.
The only real issue is that these transit offerings are not being invested in at all. Not at the level of road expansion investment anyhow. Not that they wouldn't be possible to offer or that the built environment somehow precludes them.
We're talking about cities that would benefit from congestion pricing. If there's enough traffic to need congestion pricing, then it could immediately benefit from public transit.
I don't understand why folks always take this as an all or nothing thing. We don't need to redesign the suburbs. They're the ones causing the congestion, and they're also the ones benefiting from free roads. Taxing them to cover the their own externalities makes sense. If public transit is available and better than driving cars, the suburbs will either support them via redesign, or they'll pay the tax for the luxury of driving a car into a city they don't live in.
> Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride
In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?
> car owners get to use the infrastructure for free
Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.
> In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?
Quite a few areas have their public transit fully funded by users and some even make a substantial profit. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio)
The US obviously loses out to places like Japan because you have the chicken and egg problem: to make money back you need enough people but for enough people to use public transport you need to invest in it.
> Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.
Which, ironically, often only covers something like 10% of the cost :)
Fuel tax doesn’t often cover everything. LA metro actually spends an appreciable fraction of its budget on highway and road expansion for example.
Sure, I wouldn't expect fuel tax to cover everything. Local roads are quite useful to people who do not drive at all, and major roads and interstates are disproportionately worn by commercial vehicles that also benefit many people who do not drive private vehicles.
Indeed. After all, roads predate the car by thousands of years. But still, often roads are overbuilt and their potential capacity is never close to being reached. The bog standard suburban design we see in america for example is generally severely overbuilt. Plenty of arterials nowhere close to being used to their theoretical throughput limits. If your experience of suburbia is mostly american centric, if you look at say english suburbia where major roads only offer a single lane per direction you'd wonder how society there functions at all. But it does, because those single lane per direction have enough capacity to serve a generally denser version of suburbia than what we might see on the fringes of Dallas, where giant empty roads such as this (1; note how there are barely any cars in frame) are found on standardized 1 mile square grids out of routine more than anything really. Compare with (2) which feels much more right sized for the road demand in this generally denser suburban area on smaller lots with attached housing.
1. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.1890836,-96.7504787,3a,75y,1...
2. https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3698269,-0.1403251,3a,89.7y,...
> In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?
Sure, but the budget for transit is also extremely tight, especially compared to car infrastructure.
If only 10% of the costs are covered, that's even more motivation to not charge fees at all, right? Why impose that burden? More people riding public transit means less cars on the road, and less traffic, which is good for everyone.
> charges a fuel tax to pay for roads
For the most part fuel taxes haven't increased to cover the costs of roads (it hasn't increased with inflation at all, federally), and they typically cover highways. Recently, a number of places have been looking at pausing or removing fuel taxes to reduce costs of fuel, due to the Iran war. Most states cover the cost of roads primarily through their general funds.
I've noticed that Google Maps has started sucking a lot lately, routing us onto routes that take 2-4 minutes longer when a faster route is clearly available or taking us on nonsensical detours, and I wonder if this experiment is a reason why.
There's a hidden cost to this, and that's trust in the mapping app. I've stopped using Google Navigation for routine trips where I know how to get to the destination. It used to be worth it for the traffic information, but now that there's a good chance that it'll take you on a slower route for reasons that may be beneficial to Google but detrimental to you, it's not worth it. My brother-in-law switched to Apple Maps for similar reasons: he's finding it simply gives better results nowadays.
I've noticed this too. It has gotten more frequent over last year or so. It will route me to narrow roads which I know for a fact will take me much longer.
I had the worst experience about 3 weeks ago, when I kept driving on very narrow and congested roads for almost 3 hours and the destination was showing still an hour away. If I had just taken the normal route, it would've taken me only 2 hours total. But Google thought let's make this guy drive around for 4 hours because fuck him.
Same. Though it's been happening for maybe a year? Or, at least since I learned where things actually are. I just can't trust the Google maps anymore! Many times I lost 10+ min because it took me through weird alley and then back to the main.
Traffic apps only know about congestion if someone running the app goes down the congested road. Because of this, I've always suspected that the apps, from time to time, will route someone down a route they haven't gathered data on in a while, just to collect the data, and even if the route is likely to be suboptimal.
>I've always suspected that the apps, from time to time, will route someone down a route they haven't gathered data on in a while, just to collect the data, and even if the route is likely to be suboptimal.
I can't say this actually happened for me. For straightforward routes with no congestion I never saw random alternate routes being proposed. That makes sense, given that it'd probably tip people off. If this is happening, they must only be doing in cases where there's congestion and the difference is marginal, eg. it's rush hour and the "optimal" route takes 30 minutes but the alternate takes 33 minutes. Moreover you don't really need any deliberate effort to see this effect. If nobody is traveling on a side road, the algorithm will probably revert to historical patterns, which might turn out to be overly optimistic in congestion scenarios (eg. there's nearby road repairs and other people are already using it as an alternate), thereby giving you the impression that you got screwed over by the app.
There's probably enough people taking wrong terms (such as me) to provide enough data. ;-)
Wrong term, indeed :)
This would sort of happen naturally if they routed as if roads with no data in the past N minutes/hours were at full speed.
Doesn't have to be true. My state has public camera feeds for various highway stretches. Too low-detail to identify vehicles but easily enough to detect congestion.
I wonder this same thing when I’ve been routed completely asinine ways off interstates at night when traffic appears calm. I always have to play the game of “is there horrendous traffic ahead from night paving / accident, or am I being conscripted as a traffic sensor robot?”
Government data sources can input real time data into Google Maps [1]. So, it's more likely than not that local police or state DoT is behind that.
[1] https://contentpartners.maps.google.com/
> running the app
At least for Apple, iPhones always report this data, not just when using Apple Maps
I'm a fan of Beaty's work from 1998. Nothing I've seen has been as easy to implement: leaving space in front of each car creates smooth motion.
https://trafficwaves.org/trafexp.html or easier at https://web.archive.org/web/20260114173129/https://trafficwa...
https://web.archive.org/web/20251214172912/http://trafficwav... has some nice visualizations.
MIT got more press when they "rediscovered" this in 2017:
https://people.csail.mit.edu/bkph/Traffic_Flow_Animation
I'm a car fan, so I'd rather reward drivers for optimal behaviors vs broad car-reductions. I'll probably turn out to be on the wrong side, but maybe we'll find a good compromise.
This is one of those things which would work beautifully if:
-Everyone's creep speed was the same.
-No one figured it would be more beneficial for them slip into that gap.
The whole idea is to let people slip in the gap. It's the very lack of gaps that causes the whole jam in the first place.
I think something was missed in translation here.
In my region of the world if someone creeps and leaves a wide gap between them and the next vehicle, eventually someone is bound to change lanes to occupy that space out of the perception that it somehow will help them get ahead in traffic.
"Hence, the efficient use of transportation networks is of paramount importance."
Perhaps some sort of carpooling profile? That would be a dramatically bigger improvement than, say, routing users through residential neighborhoods.
How would Google help with a carpooling profile?
They are looking at ways they can improve traffic that are actually in their control. They can change how they route traffic that is using their app, they can’t change public policy or driving choices. They are working with what they have.
Much as they have features for walk / bike / transit traffic, they could suggest step-by-step carpool instructions: "1. meet with (other Google Map carpool user) X at location Y. 2. In one car, both of you drive to location Z."
Obviously, huge challenges here (is person X a serial killer, etc.) But Google can handle moonshots.
> Obviously, huge challenges here
Social credit score? I've seen that Black Mirror episode.
Is this the comment for me to snarkily reinvent trains and trams and buses on?
All attempts to reimagine transport are train but worse, except for the occasional bike but worse.
Every now and then, an especially inventive inventor manages to do both at once. And that's how you get the Shweeb.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=7qNOtgrIjO4
If we could copy the traffic laws of a country like Germany to the US, I think that would have the biggest + cheapest effect. I am OK with automated/elevated enforcement if it means stop & go traffic evaporates into free flowing conditions.
We should also take the idea from Finland where the traffic fines scale with each person's ability to pay. $100 for camping the passing lane or failing to maintain a reasonable following distance is not a big consequence for a lot of people. $100k covers the edges a lot better.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...
Just make sure not to fire half of your police forces. Finland has about 130 police officers per 100k people, America has 242 according to Wikipedia. Due to extreme lack of police resources, the enforcement of traffic laws is not good here. Mostly last century tech, like automatic traffic cameras in few fixed locations.
I wish there was more police presence to spot lane-camping and fine them in Germany, too many idiots do it and get away with it.
If I ran Google Maps, I'd ask to route stupid drivers away from my routes. The GPS and phone accelerometer should be able to tell us who they are -- "Oh you have Google Maps actively navigating, GPS says you're going 50mph, and the app in focus is WhatsApp and you're using the phone keyboard? Fuck off! Also we recorded 5 swerve events in the last 10 minutes, hard to stay on your lane when you're texting!"
It'd be unethical, but man it'd be magical...
There's custom software for Elon's Tesla, I wonder if the cloud-based navigation system also directs people away from his routes so he can have a ride on emptier roads...
People hate patronizing systems in their cars already, not sure this would help
The idea is the system would just judge terrible drivers quietly, and then route them away from my route whenever I'm on the road.
Of course the first step of that is I have to gain control of Google Maps...
Terrible drivers cause traffic jams and accidents, who wouldn't want to be segregated away from them?
Ticket everyone who deviates from the mean speed too much. You wanna stop at the end of the ramp instead of merge then fine, but it'll cost you the same as the guy who's going 100 in the same stretch.
>During “treatment” days, the modified routing guided all trips that encountered the pre-selected congested segments toward alternative routes with similar travel times.
Why would they specifically need to route people away from congested segments? Presumably if a segment gets congested enough, it'd be considered slower and therefore won't get picked in the first place?
Probably many reasons but here’s one demo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
Every actor acting rationally in their own interest can get to a worse equilibrium than if they were coordinated(in this case, to completely ignore the new edge). There are many other examples of this in game theory, you should look it up.
Because those roads are still maybe 30 seconds or 60 seconds faster on paper and critically they're the major roads with minimal intersections, which all apps prefer.
Another question: they say road speeds increased, great. But that’s a different metric than average drive time. Curious if that also decreased.
The problem with cars isn't routing, its geometry. Cars cant be fixed. Build more trains and trams and busses and bike lanes already.
And enshrine remote working in law, so much of our commuting is utterly unnecessary.
Also, just saw this mention of a new book from Vaclav Smil: Speed, which delves into some of these topics.
https://vaclavsmil.com/book/speed-how-it-explains-the-world/
This doesn't seem to account for Jevons paradox: if driving is made faster and more convenient, then more people will drive more; which can lead to an overall increase in CO2 emissions, collisions, etc.
I'd imagine there would be a lag between the initial efficiency increase, and the subsequent usage increase; since drivers (current and potential) would have to actually notice the change and adjust for it (consciously or otherwise).
So much money spent to avoid the easiest answer: less cars (more public transport, more bicycle lanes, etc.)
Isn't there a problem with rerouting that you push cars into community-roads that aren't supposed to be supporting commuting traffic?
Wasn't there some articles a few years ago about communities that filled wheelbarrows with phones connected to Waze and moved them slowly down the road, stop waze from routing cars through residential areas?
It's actually shocking they didn't do this before? Load balancing across multiple similar paths seems to be one of the first thing you would add once you hit some scale?
I love how they congratulate themselves on that article (Google being Google, they still think they are the smartest people in the room). But I'm waiting to see the second or third unknown order effects.
I think we need some law that if you are above a certain scale you have to publish traffic data as a gtfs feed, ie basically apple and google have to.
This will just result in cities making one way streets, blocking roads, or removing turns, because raw traffic throughput is rarely the only goal.
My city already has some signs and traffic signals trying to prevent making a left turn after 5PM, because of maps apps attempting to redirect highway traffic through, which added a substantial delay to the commutes of everyone who actually lived there. That later resulted in a city council meeting about the safety problem caused by people making illegal left turns.
Hey I patented this idea about a decade ago:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170184409A1
(I'm not saying I'm the first or only person to think of it, but I did patent it, as well as the extra claim of compensating those people sent on the slower route).
did you build anything tangible with this idea?
nope, software patents are stupid
Interesting, I always just assumed they were already doing this.
Nice to hear Google is thinking about this. Was always of the belief that they SHOULD be considering things like scarcity in the various recommendations the apps in their offerings provide.
Also reminds me of that guy in Berlin who caused traffic jams on Google Maps by walking around with a wagon filled with phones:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/03/berlin-ar...
Happy that research time is being put towards this, however a fuel use decrease of ~0.75% is a bit underwhelming for this particular endeavor, even when consumer cars/vans are 10% of CO2 emissions.
I doubt there would be any improvement. What we have seen is traffic is a constant. If you make make the road network higher capacity or faster, people just move further out or drive to further away stores.
People have an amount of time they will tolerate driving for, and adjust everything else around that.
I think it's a mistake to represent average speed increase instead of characterizing the speed increase as as hours of full, moderate, and low speed traffic per day.
Because an extra ??minutes a day of avoiding stop and go traffic is worth far more than the average speed increase it tells.
Next step? Maps Pro subscription 'blue' plan will guide you through the fastest routes, Maps Free users will be routed on the fast 'green' plan, but might ocasionally be diverted to other routes to 'balance' (free up blue routes') traffic under extreme congestion conditions.
Yep, the virtual universal fast toll road option.
That's actually such a good idea I might have to apply to Y Combinator.
What is the minimum market share you need to make this work (a) assuming competition stays "neutral" and (b) assuming adversarial actions?
Presumably not something so simple as walkable cities?
Uhh but then what am I going to do with my 7 cars?
So basically sending some people on worse routes for the sake of the “greater good”? I long suspected they did this and is not what I want. I don’t want to be forced to a worse outcome for myself just for the sake of the “greater good”. Taken to its logical extreme, lots of evil had been propagated because of the “greater good”.
[dead]
I got an idea: let people work from home again.
When Google Maps routes me using a smaller secondary road instead of the main road that I would otherwise have used , I've always wondered whether that significantly changes the amount of traffic that smaller road sees. It's funny to consider that arbitrary black-box changes to the routing algorithm can have a noticeable effect to people that live there.
I'm pretty sure I submitted this idea to the internal "file a patent" drive they were doing like 15 years ago. It was rejected. I thought it was either stupid or too obvious and they were already doing it...
Well, duh. Grid design that allows traffic to diffuse is a secret superpower of American cities. Along with stroads that seamlessly blend local and arterial traffic.
One of unforgivable mistakes of Project Zero Vision is sabotage of stroads. If forced more traffic onto local streets, resulting in MORE pedestrian deaths.
Do you have stats to support your statement?
Sure. Pedestrian deaths are above the 2015 levels in all the large West Coast cities that went full-on with the Zero Vision project. Numbers are for 2015 and 2025.
Seattle: 7/18
Portland: 11/20
LA: 130/150
SF is unchanged at 24 (they had a HUGE drop from 2024, luckily).
And no, the following excuses do not apply:
COVID - deaths started growing _before_ COVID.
Car size increase - cars did not increase significantly during this time.
Population increase - ditto.
This tracks with what's happened in my non-grid east coast city that adopted the same. Everyone has a path planner in their pocket that they mindlessly follow which takes them right around all the Vision Zero'd (TM) main roads and through everyone's neighborhood.
The assholes who sell the big plastic speed bumps they've had to put on the residential streets to slow down all the traffic they diverted onto them are making out like bandits though.
[dead]
Pedestrian deaths are up all across the the US.
I can already see it - “For only $9.99/mo enjoy access to premium routings that that save an average of 15 minutes per trip!”
"The only solution to traffic is viable alternatives to driving." - NotJustBikes
Great, Google, you want to reduce traffic congestion? Give me the ability to say "Avoid left turns" in your Maps and Waze directions.
Until you support a feature that simple and obvious, I don't have a lot of interest in your input on this subject.
Well, Waze is Google
Do different people get different routes depending upon "dynamic pricing" type metrics?
Why cant we have smart stop lights. Nothing more annoying than sitting on a street with nobody coming and a red light for some arbitrary time period that's totally incorrect for the time period I'm currently in
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/277/
Most cities have some intelligence on their traffic lights, and they do have traffic sensors to know where cars are waiting.
You might not see any cars and are annoyed waiting at the light, but you don’t know what downstream things they are trying to control for. Maybe if they send you through the light, you are going to join some other traffic event that will cause an issue.
It could also just be suboptimal, but it very hard to know just from what you observe as an individal
If you drive the same route frequently you can definitely figure out which intersections/areas are improperly configured. There's a stretch of road I drive on several times a week where the speed limit was dropped from 40 to 30 a couple years ago, but the lights are all still timed for 40. If you speed you get a sea of green, but if you drive the new speed limit you end up stopping at half the lights.
I like XKCD but I don't really agree with the underlying premise of this one.
When I was in the Netherlands, one of the global gold standards in terms of urban planning and design, I noticed it wasn't only more pleasant as a pedestrian or cyclist, it was more pleasant as a driver as well. Lights were smart and did not sit on red forever if you were the only one waiting at an intersection.
This comic suggests there's some "invisible, massively complicated" mesh of signal interactions we can never possibly fathom, and therefore wasting precious hours over the course of our lives sitting at an intersection is the most optimal one.
The Dutch have figured this out, why can't North America?
I don't think the answer is as simple as "The Dutch have better traffic light engineers"
There are a ton of factors that go into traffic and traffic patterns. For one thing, I would be curious to see total traffic numbers.
Also, left turn lanes that are too short for the average number of cars wanting to turn left, and left turn signal cycles that are too short to clear the left turn lanes.
I agree.
Startup Proposal: Intelligent Traffic Signals
https://till.com/articles/smarttraffic
I've lived places where stop lights were all scheduled (unless someone was operating it manually), but most of the lights I experience operate dynamically based on sensors (typically in the road or cameras and ped buttons)
They exist. Your city needs to set it up. They can also switch to flashing red lights.
Most cities I've lived in have these in the US...
Seems like you're playing a dangerous game if your navigation app becomes known for optimizing for the collective good rather than individual fastest transit time-- people will trust your app less, and use a different, more "selfish" app.
Where isn't there traffic congestion?
How about not driving cars for every single journey? How about not having to go across the city for every errand?
There are solutions to congestion, but they're not technological.
I just want public transit that works, dammit.
The downside of these algorithms is they push traffic onto quiet side streets - using them as 'rat runs' to avoid the main thoroughfares.
This significantly worsens the lived experience of those on the side streets.
For over a decade, I imagined that if I ever landed a job at Google, this would be my most significant project. It made me chuckle a bit when I read the announcement, they finally built it! confirming that my thoughts weren’t entirely delusional XD
cool, now can you stop randomly having my google maps app go dim and dark as I'm biking making it impossible for me to see what I'm supposed to do next?
Not an exact solution, but you can set it so it tells you upcoming turns and directions. With that I haven't needed to look at the screen much
If they can do this with traffic, imagine what they’re doing with YouTube ads…
Welcome to the party google. At graphmasters we have been doing this with nunav for more than 13 years now.
rm -rf
[dead]
[dead]
TL;DR by controlling the route every car takes and traffic lights, we’d get a 2% reduction in traffic.
I don’t think this heralds and great change in transport policy.
[dead]
[flagged]
Eliminate illegal immigration.
100% remote unless absolutely required. Professions like doctors, cooks, massage therapists. This will clear 95% of traffic. Start with mandatory remote for all software jobs.
It's estimated that only 37% of jobs can be done remotely, while 72%-86% of US workers rely on cars for commuting.
The best solution involves creating a multitude of non-car transportation options, to allow workers to choose the most convenient mode of transport, maximizing potential non-car commuting. Bike/ebike, e-scooter, motorcycle/scooter, golf cart, bus, tram, subway, train, ferry.
I would occasionally go to the office toward the tail end of covid and traffic was essentially non existent. We were well past the big lockdowns and shuttered restaurants at that point but RTO hadn't kicked in. It wouldn't take much to drastically change the traffic landscape.
Traffic was lower after COVID because of how many people (who couldn't work remote) lost their jobs, an overall economic downturn affecting logistics chains, and people afraid of public transit. Not because everyone was blissfully working from home. It would indeed take a lot to change traffic (without causing significant economic harm)
37% is a huge amount though. Obviously fixing the problem would require many different solutions to come together, but that's an immense improvement that can be made with a mere law.
Remote work is worth pursuing, but there are less negative solutions to traffic (requiring everyone work remote would destroy local economies). Paris is an example of a better traffic solution. They simply got rid of cars from the city center; no need to reconfigure the economy, just take different transit to work.
The way to maximise traffic congestion would be to remove trucks off the road during peak times, banning trucks from the fast lane at all times, making it the social norm to toot someone in the fast lane so they move over.
I have a lot of difficulty thinking those changes alone would solve congestion. I’m especially thinking is ski traffic along I70 from Denver to the mountains. The issue is just volume of passenger vehicles, and there are no other realistic routes
Just drive anywhere with more than usual density in traffic and you’ll find trucks in the fast lane when they stop and start create gaps in the fast lane where no traffic can go. If you took out trucks altogether during peak hours you wouldn’t have these slow bubbles of traffic at the worst times..
Edit: let’s think of this from a pure scientific point of view - if you had 3 lanes and split traffic across them based on a range of speed - that would be the most optimised in terms of throughput for all lanes. Now, consider a reverse Amdahl's Law… what’s the worst thing you could do to make the fastest lane crawl which in effect kills total throughput across ALL lanes? Put a slow truck in it! Put a few, and you’ve just turned the lane giving you the highest throughput to most likely the slowest lane.
I just parked my car after another morning of commuting. Thought experiments alone in today’s traffic again confirmed my theory.
Contrary to this, if you only have two lanes available, and trucks aren't allowed to overtake, you'll eventually end up with a long train of trucks without any gaps, and it'll become impossible to merge onto the highway from an on-ramp.
One way is to stop the war on cars. I see many cities basically making driving purposely bad. Super low speed limits, speed bumps, unnecessary bike lanes, poorly timed traffic lights, no right turn on red, etc. It’s all the typical pro bike anti car stuff but it hurts traffic. They never measure travel times in a transparent way as they make these destructive changes.
No. The reason cities are working so hard to build these kinds of safety measures is that cars are horrendously dangerous for people walking and biking. The “war on cars” is a war for the safety and dignity of everyone outside of cars.
They aren’t dangerous. Road fatalities are still very low per mile driven and are falling over time. Cars are getting safer all the time with their sensors and intelligent features like automatic braking. The war on cars is an irrational safetyism campaign driven by selfish bicyclists more than anyone else. And the goal vision zero proposes makes no sense because it doesn’t account for the benefit of cars.
The only way to stop congestion is to get cars off the road.
Cars are the congestion. There is no other definition, and no other solution.
HOW you get cars off the road is worthy of debate. Pretending that there's a "war on cars" is not and never has been. Cars and their drivers have been subsidized for more than a century, never paying the full cost of the damage that they do to the environment, the roads, etc.
1. Car taxes / registrations should be based on weight and energy usage inefficiency and ratchet up quickly for personal vehicles that are larger than some sensible size based on pedestrian safety at no more than 30 kph. (Drivers of modern pickup trucks and SUVs cannot see pedestrians shorter than ~1.7m at ~5m, and the fact that their fronts are basically walls mean that those pedestrians are more likely to be killed on impact or bounced under the tires.)
2. There should absolutely be congestion pricing to enter downtown locations during the day or other times when vehicular traffic will be high. Yes, that means that most deliveries by transport truck would need to be staged into smaller vehicles and delivered to the businesses needing them, or delivered overnight.
3. Uber, Lyft, and Waymo are part of the problem and should be treated as such.
4. There should be more investment in public transit. Paid for by increased registrations and congestion pricing, preferentially. Fares should be reduced, ideally to free. More use of public transit makes it safer and incentivizes making it faster.
5. There should absolutely be more bike lanes in pretty much every city. It's called induced demand and once the infrastructure is safe, you will see increased usage by all sorts of alternative mobility users (but mini e-motorcycles should be licensed just like regular motorcycles and should not be using the mobility infrastructure).
6. Pedestrian and wheelchair users matter first and foremost over any other road user (bikes, scooters, cars, etc.).
We've had 50+ years of Robert Moses being proved wrong. It's time to design cities around people, not around cars. Call that a war on cars if you want, but it's not: it's a war for peoples' quality of life. Cars can be part of the solution, but they need to be treated like the problem they are first.
Wrong. Cars are high utility and should remain on roads. They increase quality of life by giving you a fast way to get to exactly where you want on your own schedule. And designing for cars IS designing for people, obviously. Who do you think is inside cars?
Designing for public transit and cycling benefits far more people than designing exclusively for single passenger cars.
Who do you think are on bikes and in buses?
> designing exclusively for single passenger cars
What is design for single passenger cars? Most cars can fit 5 people and roads also carry buses, ambulances, and trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
* Probably with the exception of coal and some mining materials.
> Most cars can fit 5 people
So you agree that most cars are far larger and heavier than required? First search result for "average car occupancy"[1]:
> In 2022 the Average Number of Occupants Per Trip for Household Vehicles in the United States Was 1.5
This discrepancy is the reason for car pooling, ride-sharing, etc. (Note that Uber, Lyft, etc. are taxi services, not "ride sharing"; since the drivers themselves are not typically intending to travel the routes they drive)
> roads also carry buses
Yes, which is why cars should be removed from such roads, to avoid slowing down buses.
> ambulances
Emergency vehicles can drive in places where cars are forbidden (cycle paths, pedestrianised roads, etc.)
> trucks that carry every single product* in the economy.
Again, you're undermining your own argument: the subsidies given to private car infrastructure are so large, that freight companies exploiting that infrastructure can end up more cost-effective than those which use rail; despite rail being more efficient not only in terms of fuel, but also in terms of labour (since so many trucks would be required to do the job of a single freight train, and each of those trucks require a separate driver). Also note that heavier vehicles degrade the road infrastructure disproportionately; which is even more reason to reduce the number of trucks as far as possible.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/cmei/vehicles/articles/fotw-1333-marc...
My quality of life is increased by having more bike lanes so that I can get around _faster_ and _healthier_ than having to use my car. I'm also able to get where I want and need to be on my own schedule by car, bike, public transit, and walking — which mode matters based on the needs of the destination.
I shop at Costco by bike most of the time. Once every couple of months there's enough that needs to be bought that I use the car.
I have a dental appointment tomorrow: I can walk or cycle there faster than I can drive and find parking. I have another appointment on Monday at a hospital and I'll cycle there far faster than I can take public transit _or_ private car, and I won't have to pay ~$15/hour for parking or park a kilometre away.
Get out of your North American car bubble and look at what Paris and the Netherlands have done: they have not banned private car ownership or use, but they have removed some of them from streets. Utrecht just opened a massive underground _bike parking garage_ but it's also one of the busiest cities in the Netherlands in terms of car traffic.
There is no war on cars; that's something that has been invented out of whole cloth. Those of us who agitate for improved _options_ simply want (1) cars to pay their full freight (they don't, not by a long shot); (2) safer roads for pedestrians, cyclists, and those who want alternative mobility options; (3) more public transit; and (3) fewer cars moving slower because that's the only way to alleviate traffic.
You're not in traffic: you are traffic.
Your claim that designing for cars is designing for people is risible. Designing for people first (that's the goal!) means larger sidewalks, more barriers so that distracted or angry drivers find it harder to find themselves on those sidewalks, and fewer cars with clear rules so that vulnerable road users have absolute priority over people in cars. The larger and faster your vehicle, the more responsibility you should have, both in terms of liability when you inevitably collide with an obstruction and in terms of what you pay to keep the roads and surrounding infrastructure maintained.
[dead]