I mean in those areas where it just identical houses along a road in huge blocks.
How would you realisyicly solve it?
A mix of bike paths and bus routes
I’m just going to take a moment to bitch even though no one asked.
Here in the US, can we stop just painting bike symbols on the shoulder of 55mph roads and call them “bike lanes”? No, what you’re doing is making a suicide lane. Bike paths need to have bollards protecting them so you don’t get casually manslaughtered by some idiot glancing down at their phone. As it stands, I refuse to use these criminally dangerous excuses for “bike paths”. I know the internet hates when I say this, but I absolutely choose to bike on the sidewalk instead and just go in the grass for a minute if I encounter the rare pedestrian on the same sidewalk. I’m not going to risk my life in such a dumb way. We need to improve these.
I’m the same. I bike where I feel safe, and that’s as far away from cars as possible.
I fear for my cycle loving wife everytime she rides. She only has a short portion riding on a 40mph road but that is obviously still extremely dangerous. Our infrastructure is quite lacking.
The bike lane has to be proper and safe, or it’s worse than nothing. It’s just a thing that officials can point to and say they did the thing, when in fact they did not do the thing.
Thanks man, I agree.
Sometimes the hive mind likes to downvote and ridicule me over it because “tHe sIDeWalK iS OnLY fOr pEDeStRiaNS”. Like no shit I get that. But I’m sorry but I’m not risking my life over something so needlessly dangerous.
We have interurban trails here that connect suburbs to downtown and with the proliferation of e-bikes, there are so many people traveling that way now. I’m a little too far away to be connected to it but my hope is that the approach expands.
That sounds awesome. I hope that approach spreads too
Bus stops on the main road(s), placed so everyone has a stop within a 15-20 minute walk.
Sort of agree with others suggesting getting rid of the neighborhoods in the first place, but sharing walls is hell. When the only way to speak confidentially in your own home is to whisper, it’s impossible to wfh or have a telehealth appointment (or, worse, a teletherapy appointment).
15-20 min is too far, if it is going to have any impact, the distance to the closest bus stop can’t be any further from houses than 10 min.
That sounds more like a old/cheap construction problem than a shared walls problem. I live in an apartment with solid concrete walls built in the 80s and I never hear my neighbours unless they are full-on screaming, which I’ve only heard happen once.
The sound is bad enough but with properly constructed walls, it’s not a problem.
I have other problems with shared walls. Your neighbors have cockroaches? Now you do too! Bedbugs? Yep those can come on in too. If you live in an apartment, then you bet the landlord will cheap out and not do as effective treatments. You think being clean and not keeping things in cardboard will stop them? Maybe temporarily but they’re just waiting to come back out from the walls where they weren’t treated. Joy!
The other thing is that if your neighbor smokes cigarettes inside, then you get some bonus secondhand smoke. If you have bad reactions even with allergy medications and HEPA filters, well I guess it’s time for you to move or suffer. (You didn’t want to use your PTO on anything not sick days right?)
Did your neighbors have a plumbing problem that they neglected? Congratulations on your new mold in your shared walls. (You wanted to call code enforcement on your landlord about this? Good luck, they won’t enforce it.)
I’m sure there are real solutions to my above problems but my reality is that the only solution is to move when it’s too much to bear. (Haven’t lived in one place for more than 2 years because of it…)
Even worse. I lived in an apartment that suffered water and smoke damage because my upstairs neighbor fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand. It could have been worse than just a fire really. We could have all lost everything or someone could have died.
Don’t build your houses out of cardboard then
I’m confused. When I lived in apartments, I never built them myself. Can you explain how one builds one’s apartment?
It’s the housing market in general, it’s too often cheap crap
As a Strong Towns article pointed out, solving the problem with cars is not the number of people that drive, but the number of people that drive × the average miles that each person drives.
We can reduce the number of miles that the average person drives without taking away anybody’s car, and make transit more cost-effective by reducing the distance it has to go, by simply putting destinations closer together. Zap the exclusive residential zoning laws. Intermix cafés, shops, restaurants, doctors offices, community centers, and such, with the existing neighborhoods. These things are all quiet, and low-impact, barely noticeable among houses, if they don’t need giant parking lots.
Zoning laws are so bizarre. I remember encountering them for the first time many years ago trying to play SimCity and being confounded by what felt by wholly arbitrary game rules. They genuinely accomplish nothing at all, so why have them?
It’s not that they accomplish nothing at all, but what they accomplished was evil. From my studies and reading1, I think that zoning law started out with good intentions to keep noxious industry (tanneries, blacksmith shops, livestock, etc.) away from dwelling places. Like so many things in the United States, though, it quickly got co-opted for racism.2 The Supreme Court issued a decision barring housing discrimination, so the Federal, state, and local governments turned to zoning laws to keep Black people out of white neighborhoods by, e.g. mandating minimum lot sizes, and construction methods, that priced suburban houses out of reach for Black families. Nowadays, we have this pervasive myth that such restrictions were to foster a rural aesthetic, for environmental preservation, or the result of auto industry lobbying, and those probably contributed, but the root of it was segregation. This becomes clear when you learn about what happened when some Black families succeeded financially anyway, and tried to move into white neighborhoods, like the Cicero, IL race riot of 1951.
- Zoned in the USA by Sonia Hirt is a dry, but good read for a super-nerd, as it compares Euclidean zoning in the U.S. to land-use laws in Europe.
- The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein blew my mind with evidence of just how deliberate and explicit it was.
You apply the same concepts used for car traffic management to public transit. You have local access, collectors, arteries, and controlled access express/freeways. The frequency and speed of service goes up with each level, while number of access points decreases.
The problem with public transit arises when you expect it to be single modal- like most people in America, since they’re used to single-modal cars.
Single modal public transit works when density is very high and you can expect services to be within pedestrian distances of half a mile or so of any public transit station (access point). But the lower density of American cities breaks those systems and makes them slow and unusable since the number of access points for pedestrian walking distance to most services needs to be insanely high, leaving the entire network underserved and underutilized. You have to artificially increase density by “funneling” larger areas into a smaller public transit network to make them work efficiently.Things like busses and trams work for collector/arterial tasks, while direct passenger rail works for the rapid point to point expressway.
What you need to do is then promote self driven transport on the lower neighborhood and collector levels, while supporting public transit at the artery/expressway levels. An ideal way for this in my mind would be promoting advanced bicycle/moped networks on the local access level that feed into collector roads, providing distances of 1-4miles traveled from a home to the first arterial bus or tramway. The busses that run on the arterial level would need to be redesigned to accommodate users bringing their bikes or mopeds with them to use on the other end of their journey, which really expands the reach of the network. They then have to transfer between types a limited number of times while in network.
As long as you can limit a journey to 2-3 mode transfers, and make those transfers as seamless ad possible, it can be made a lot more efficient and user friendly. Providing users the ability to retain advanced mobility (bikes/mopeds) on both ends of the public transport network also eliminates a lot of the range anxiety car-centric people may otherwise feel when getting on public transit.
I personally commute entirely by car but that’s because it is a long, largely rural drive with no density to support any kind of public transit. My specific case is unusual though, and if I did live in a city, I would be okay with the above system for a majority of my commuting. I would still own a car for long or special trips, of course. I like it too much.
Dedicated bus lanes can have multiple times the capacity in terms of moving people compared lanes that allow cars. Say you got a six lane road in the suburbs, convert the center lanes in each direction to dedicated bus lanes, then have a small median/curb separating the bus and car lanes on both sides. This will make buses faster than cars because of the lower congestion and incentive people to use them, making car congestion go down as well, because people who would otherwise drive are now on the bus.
City Nerd has a great channel focusing on stuff like this on YouTube and Nebula
With the side benefit of providing a fast lane that emergency services can make great use of
[email protected] - just need to have infrastructure and enforcement that makes it safe to do stuff like ride a bike or scooter.
I am not sure micro mobility is the sustainable answer to this problem, though I will admit that I tend to focus on macro mobility, like busses and trains.
Micro mobility is fine is you are interested in it, but it has a too narrow appeal to be any realistic solution.
It also has one of the same problem as a car, the need to drive it.
Meaning you allways have to budget your own fatigue just as you would a car.
I disagree: Micromobility is the answer to a lot of problems but it’s definitely not the answer to all problems.
Your fatigue doesn’t necessarily have to be a factor either, you can ride an ebike, scooter, emoto, motorcycle, tuktuk, tiny car, evelo, monowheel, etc. There are a huge number of different types of transportation that require little to no effort to use and are not mentally and emotionally taxing like commuting in a car is (they are, I dare say, fun instead).
I’m not saying we ignore public transport, of course that’s important but micromobility can and should be part of the solution too. For many people (myself included), it already is.
Oh yeah, that makes sense,
Realistically, the easiest way is to rezone some of those areas to retail and office space, and to encourage high density construction.
Rezoning some of those buildings to low density retail and office space will reduce total traffic by allowing some people to have shorter commutes, instead of everyone jamming every highway out of town every day.
And as those buildings age and become more expensive, small sections of them can be knocked down and replaced with higher density buildings, as property values rise. Eventually the whole area with high and medium density, simply because that is what makes sense.
You can also establish commuter rail, where maybe there’s only a couple of stops, but they all go to wherever the jobs are. That will help ease congestion while property values rise enough for higher density development to make sense.
You could have a bus route along the major street, bus stops every kilometer and a bus coming every 20 minutes.
That’ll take you to the city center or to a junction where you can jump on another bus taking you in a different direction.
Maybe make it cheap, and gasoline and taxes on cars more expensive so people are incentivised to use it.
You don’t need to make cars worse to have people use public transit. I visited Japan last year for a couple weeks and their train and bus infrastructure was so good I would have just taken the buss instead of a car if I had a car there. Google maps times were like a 3 minute difference between public transit and car times every single time I checked it. In cali it’s at least double the time if not triple depending on where I’m at. Both of these were in the middle of Metropolitan areas. They just need to make public transic as good, cheap and clean as it is in japan. Not an easy task granted.
Yeah, I kind of added that sarcastically. My view of the US is that it needs some capitalist nuance to it or people won’t like it. It’s not enough if it’s better, or just cheaper for society.
In reality, I understand that people in rural areas need their car. And it’s a hassle to do the shopping for a family of 5 without a car. Unless you can have that delivered…
I’m not sure if Japan is a good example for exactly this. As far as I know a parking spot in central Tokyo is more expensive than an apartment in other places of the world. And the city mandates that you have some parking spot or you can’t have a car in the first place. I suppose it actually is very expensive to own a car there. However I don’t know what they do outside of the cities or how they tax the cars and fuel. And there are cities in the US like NYC where they also don’t have space available to own cars.
But public transit in Japan is awesome. They’re on time, get you everywhere, are affordable and run every few minutes… The scenic train routes have cute mascots. Everything works. There are colored lines on the floor (in the big city) and you can get by without being able to read… And there are shops with nice japanese snacks just around the corner or within the station. I’d like to have all of that where I live.
It kinda depends on what you mean by “solved”. You could have a bus route stop at every person house. This would be expensive, frequency would be abysmal, and the routes would take forever and no one would use it.
This issue is that public transit thrives in areas with more density. Get rid of the density public transit ceases to exist.
A more realistic solution for most people would be to try and set up a bike network throughout the neighborhood. Biking, especially e-biking, is mode of transit that can be implemented almost anywhere in a city and have some big benefits to the citizens.
Get rid of cars and their awful infrastructure and density can comfortably go up.
Smaller (6 passenger) buses running autonomously. We’re not there yet with the autonomy, but there’s no reason to stick with one size of bus. Sure, keep big ones on major routes, but use smaller ones for small routes. Heck, make those routes on-demand.
I’d say more like 15 passenger and security could be a bigger issue, but I completely agree with this.
Same general concept to replace large trains in metro systems. You just go to the nearest station and a single train car pulls up to pick you up and then takes you to any station in the system, with stops only when other passengers are getting off.
That’s called a ‘jitney.’
They can follow a regular route, or make detours for door to door service.
Much better with an actual driver to provide safety and assist the low mobility passengers
Yeah, ride hailing bus services should be more popular
That’s just a taxi.
A taxi has a very expensive component - the driver. And a taxi doesn’t pick up strangers on the way to your destination.
Those neighborhoods only exist because of cars. Fix transit in the cities and stop subsidizing automobiles and those suburban tracts will empty out.
Depends if there is a city center people commute to. If so, park and ride lots, which means putting parking lots at an express bus or train station that goes from the suburb to the city center.
I think the problem, at least in the area I live in, is that people who live in those places want to drive to work. In their cars. And transportation is a county function, not city. So they starve the transportation budget, it’s a vicious cycle.
Those house farms are a plague.
Network of buses/trams and trains. Trains to get in and out of the neighborhood and connect to the city and other neighborhoods, and buses within communities to get around and to/from the train stations. Like a bus stop on every or every other block, then one or two train stations on every neighborhood.
Yeah, this sounds decently realistic
Put a bus depot at the entrance, allow only bicycles inside each suburban loop or whatever.
But in the bigger picture, convince people that they don’t want the suburban home. That’s a really hard sell after a few generations of idealizing the identical homes in huge blocks just outside the city.
But once voters don’t want to live there, rezone it to allow denser living or put a factory there to chase out the remaining homeowners or completely level it and farm the land… Or allow businesses to set up within the neighborhood so that everything is within walking/biking distance?
Maglev tubes everywhere. We must start tunneling.
No, just no.
You don’t need maglev for local public transport, you don’t even need them for high-speed long distance trains.
It is also way too expensive for a local system like this
Mini maglev. Little tubes.
Here’s the proof of concept. See how the tubes connect all the areas?
https://img-us.aosomcdn.com/thumbnail/100/n0/product/2022/07/28/Ye798a18243e76711.jpg
For real though, this sort of tunnel: https://emap-romulus-prod.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2014/06/Green-Lane-sewer-TBM-naming-competition_143111-1024x683.jpg
Just big enough to fit in and blast around.
Ok, let me go through what I believe is the realistic way putting in local public transport in the suburban neighbourhoods in the US.
You first need a good bus network, every house should be with in a 10 min walk of a bus stop.
The local government then buys a few houses and plots of land, and build a metro station on them and runs a normal boring metro system under ground to either an existing metro system, or start building a metro system.
If you really want maglev you can allways install it later when the tech is mature enough.
As for the size of the tunnels, the sewer TBM you posted is way too small, there would be no space to place signals or other supporting infrastructure, it also severely limits the future tech that can be used on the sytem.
Little maglev pods, man. One seater (stander? layer?). They can string together in a train or go off individually. Switching stations no wider than three or four lanes, underground. You plug in your destination and hop in. Tubes small enough that they can also extend above ground and integrate into other transport. Would probably make people too claustrophobic to ever catch on though. If the feds could be like "yeah it’s small, but we’ll dig a tunnel right to your road and you can blast around safely in basically a straight line to wherever you want to go in a tiny fraction of the time driving would take, it would catch on.
Yeah your idea works, too. The last mile is the hard part. I agree we need a ten minute walk to a bus to make them useful. In America I don’t know how that would be realistic for most places. I feel like most of America landwise, you’re lucky if its a ten minute walk to the next house. So unless the busses are going up and down every road, that means at a minimum need an ebike maybe, but more likely just a car.
In my maglev solution, which I am making up as I go along, the switching and intersections and other key infrastructure for my maglevs are in large, modular blocks that get buried in a giant rectangle hole, maybe the size of a kids football field, and then we build a park and station right on top of it. The tubes can then go basically anywhere, connecting the modular blocks together. The roads are antiquated. The future of travel is sub terranean. Hopefully we don’t also have to live down there.
PRT is an even worse idea, it has never worked outside of some special conditions.
What is bad about a normal metro system?
I think it should be expanded and invested with bus-only highways, more routes, more stops, in places where that makes sense.
I am having trouble articulating it. Something about game theory and how mass transit gets increasingly inefficient the closer it gets to an individual’s destination. And I just happen to think it’s that last connection that, if it could be done efficiently, would really change up mass transit in America. It’s fucked what happened to all the electric trolly ways and trams, and the railways, too. The rail trails everywhere are cool but now we have no trains. With my tubes, we get to keep the rail trails and can tube along right underneath them. I like PRT. And tubes.
While PRT is a fun concept to imagine, in reality it has a few of issues.
Low capacity, even if you were to run your pods together like trains, the capacity would still be far below that of even a bus, this is due to the limited seating in the pods and the required headway between the pods.
Security, a PRT pod is basically a movable locked room with a few seats in it, a young woman or child would be very vulnarable if they were alone with a sexual predator in the pod for a long ride. The dangers are not limited to women and children, but everyone is more vulnerable alone in a PRT pod with a stranger than on a bus with more strangers.
Manufacturer lock in, there are no general standards for PRT systems, meaning that any PRT system built will be locked in with a specific manufacturer, everything from track gauge and rail profile to signaling and control systems, to pods and security systems will need to be supplied by a single company, and it will be extremely hard to get another manufacturer to even agree to make replacements, let alone accomplish that. Busses and trains have standards to follow, but even if you have an odd track gauge or rail profile there are manufacturers who can deal with it, so you can get equipment from other manufacturers and be able to keep costs somewhat in check.
You’re wrong. Maglev is the future.
