Public transit works best for young healthy people. If you have kids or move a little slowly due to health or old age, public transit is a straight up no-go. And certain jobs necessitate a car. You won't convince a salesman to carry a projector, screen, and a box of pamphlets on the bus and train.
And this says nothing of "comfort", which along with Time, is a rare commodity for working people. I'm not sitting on a rough seat crammed next to 5 other people for 2 hours. I'll take my car, with its 8-way adjustable seat, climate control and cup holders, thank-you-very-much. I'd rather sit and wait in traffic in my car than stand outside in the rain or snow waiting for a bus.
And on top of that, transit for me would be about $400/month. A car lease, insurance, and gas per month would be about $600. I will happily pay $200 more per month for the massively increased mobility and comfort that a car provides. The value proposition for public transit really sucks.
This is always so weird to me. These problems have already been pretty much solved in other countries, but the US always thinks it's a special snowflake. Public transport works pretty well for non-young healthy people in other countries.
This pattern is sadly typical of our political discourse. "I know that {socialized health care, gun bans, public transit, labor rights, paid pregnancy leave} work great in every other first-world country, but it Can't Work Here, because Reasons".
Amsterdam and other cities in the Netherlands are the some of the best examples of this. People look at the massive portion that bicycles take up in their split of transportation modes and think that it could never happen in their country or city for all sorts of reasons because Amsterdam is special and the Dutch are unique and special.
However if you can easily find pictures of Amsterdam in the 1970s where the streets look just as crammed with cars as any other city of that time. What happened is that people decided this wasn't working at all and they simply made a choice and they made a change to their spending priorities. Anyone can do this. All that is needed is the political will to make it a priority.
Regarding commuting via bicycle: it's not necessarily a problem with traffic, as more with weather. Also it's wrong to compare a single city, Amsterdam, with a bunch of American cities because of drastically different weather patterns in those cities.
Amsterdam has average temps (in F) from the mid 30's to the mid 60's[0]. That's prime bike weather. That's pretty much in line with San Francisco, which is a good city for biking. Even Manhattan and Brooklyn have reasonably overall pleasant weather for biking.
But compare SF to somewhere like Washington, DC, or Austin, TX. For 3-4 months of the year, DC feels like a swamp. Same with Austin. It's much more preferable to use public transit or drive than bike in that weather.
While the weather may be comparable, San Francisco is a very hilly city. I imagine that Amsterdam is relatively flat. In spite of its problematic, yet aesthetically pleasing topology, there is a strong culture of biking in SF.
Sure, the US climate is diverse, and it makes sense to use the appropriate transportation method for that climate. That doesn't negate the fact that "just keep using cars" is a bad idea.
This is a good point. Political will is vital.
However, I submit that in America, the design of the built environment as a system is profoundly broken. Basically we need to build our stuff closer together. Like feet apart instead of miles.
Credit where credit is due, I stole most of my ideas about this from [0]. It's a non-prestigious contrarian blog that's easy to mock, but he seems to be correct on the merits about cities.
The US and Canada are geographically huge. Take the problems the other countries solved and multiply it by 10. The climate here is also different. When was the last time a hurricane or tornado hit Europe? Or an ice storm? Or major snow storm? What about a heat wave over 100F?
Public transit is not resilient to these things. Our streetcars shut down in Toronto during heavy snowfall because they'll derail if the tracks aren't clear. Ice gets into the concrete supporting the tracks and they need to constantly be repaired because of that.
Asphalt roads are cheap and easy to maintain. Hell, you don't even need asphalt, cars are perfectly capable of driving on dirt or gravel. You can drive a car on shitty, broken asphalt, but you can't drive a train on broken tracks. There is a resiliency to road and cars that public transit just doesn't have.
When was the last time a hurricane or tornado hit Europe?
When's the last time you took the car to work rather than the bus because a hurricane hit your area? Last time you looked out the window, saw a tornado and said, "Looks like I'm driving to work today, honey, and not taking the bus."?
Ice storm? You better be a cardiologist needing to get to the hospital to do life-saving surgery if you're driving in that. Because the world doesn't need you in the office writing yet-another-javascript-framework that badly.
Heat wave? Okay, ya got me there. Take the air-conditioned car instead of the bicycle.
So your saying nobody every tries to go from one end of Europe to the other? OK. Sure. /sarcasm
They also have weather patterns that generally match ours. Sure, not tornadoes afaik, but that's not a huge chunk of damage to the US either. Public transit is resistant to those things. They have snow, ice, and other cold-weather issues over there as well and somehow seem to get along just fine.
And car's resiliency comes at an unsustainable cost. Not only is it environmentally unsustainable, it's not even population-density sustainable. Sure, there are big empty areas of land where it wouldn't make sense to put public transportation, just like in Europe. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the areas where it does make sense to implement it, just like in Europe.
None of these problems are really unique to the US.
But we're talking about Silicon Valley - which is smaller than most European cities. And cities there handle snowstorms and heat waves just fine (or just as well as American cities). For that matter - when was the last time a hurricane or a snowstorm hit the Bay area?
It's easy to marginalize other people's problems when you don't have them.
Even in an urban area with transit, most US cities have forced desegregation which means kids are scattered all over and economies built around cars. I could take public transit to work (30-40 minutes vs 10 in a car), but have to travel to the other side of the city to get to my kids school (15m by car, 60 by transit). Oh and even in an urban area, the nearest supermarket is a 20 minute walk.
My relatives in Europe walk 5 blocks to school, have decent local shopping options, etc.
Using a car in the US isn't that expensive, but offers a dramatic level of flexibility and freedom. I'm not limited to working in my city's central business district or forced to miss most of my kids school events.
I'm very aware that the US is structured that way, but it doesn't really change anything. We built this mess, and we're going to have to build ourselves out again someday. Sure, it sucks that we structured our cities incorrectly, but plugging our ears and hoping the problem goes away isn't going to fix it.
If anything it actually enables the disabled and older crowd to become more mobile in those other countries. A car is a burden, and I think we can all understand how terribly efficient of a solution they are.
If you have kids or move a little slowly due to health or old age, public transit is a straight up no-go.
All of the slow-moving elderly I see on the buses around Seattle would like to have a word with you.
I'll take my car, with its 8-way adjustable seat, climate control and cup holders, thank-you-very-much.
I tried it for a few weeks when I got tired of riding the bus. Jaguar S-Type, leather, walnut on the dash, about as nice as one's going to get.
I'd rather sit and wait in traffic in my car than stand outside in the rain or snow waiting for a bus.
To each their own. After two weeks of sitting on the 520 bridge staring at the bumper in front of me, I said "fuck this" and went back to the bus. You already said time was a "rare commodity" for working people, yet you'll sit in traffic while I sit on the bus making a bug fix or reading a book?
And on top of that, transit for me would be about $400/month.
Yoiks. $100 for me to ride the bus, versus $200-$300/month just for parking in downtown Seattle. That doesn't include gas or the $50K Jaguar. Again, though, for me it had nothing to do with money spent.
But we all have our limits. Currently I ride the motorcycle to work (a different destination from above), which allows HOV lane usage, which whittles my commute down to 30 minutes and I park in front of the building. And my ride to work is a motorcycle, which is a plus in my book. Versus 90 minutes on the bus, a transfer, and the bus doesn't drop me anywhere near the building.
The point is to provide options - sure, if your job requires a car/truck you're obviously not going to use public transit. If you're in poor physical health, you probably can't take standard public transit - though accessibility options often exist. If you travel with kids often you might be less inclined to take transit (though plenty of people with kids do anyways).
But if you're one of the hundreds of thousands of other people in a major metro who don't fall into those categories, you'd probably appreciate the option to not have to obtain a personal vehicle or use it exclusively for your commute, errands, a night on the town, etc.... and the best part is that for all the remaining people who do drive, every person who takes transit is one less person contributing to traffic congestion!
Transit options benefit everyone. Your comment reads like you don't support transit options because they don't suit your particular tastes - I suggest you instead consider advocating for transit to make life better for both yourself and your community, regardless of whether you personally use transit or not.
Options are great. However, many on HN take the stance that we should push people to public transit by eliminating parking and closing (some) streets to vehicle traffic because density leads to bus routes and bicycles are intimidated by cars. That's not an option so much as a mandatory shift.
I'd be fine making that shift if the public transit deployed today were actually good enough to be a like-for-like replacement of car ownership. It isn't unless you live in very expensive conveniently located neighborhoods.
Society should STOP accommodate individual lifestyle choices that are not in society's best interest.
You say:
> should push people to public transit by eliminating parking and closing (some) streets to vehicle traffic because density leads to bus routes and bicycles are intimidated by cars. That's not an option so much as a mandatory shift
I say society should stop giving away publicly owned real estate to the narrow segment of people who want to make driving their lifestyle choice.
I would prefer that the parking lots be replaced with something more economically valuable. For example,
What is the economic value of so much real estate devoted to machine storage? --- < $0 ( because it takes away from the economic value of surrounding businesses )
If someone wants to drive then they can pay for the privilege.
In the meantime, the rest of society should spend the money saved to make the automobile a museum curiosity.
We have cars and roads because they massively increase the land area within n minutes of a destination relative to demand, which is the only way most of us are able to live in a decent home and not spend our whole lives commuting.
You'll notice that affordability is emphatically not a feature of high-rise, parking-starved, conveniently located urban neighborhoods.
The economic value of parking is in the thousands of dollars per person per month not spent on rent to be within walking distance, and the free time not sacrificed to low-speed transportation.
The people who drive to those stores from ~20 miles around would not necessarily have any money left to spend once they are forced to find homes within 2 or 3, or no will to visit them once transit times from affordable neighborhoods increase from ~15 minutes by freeway to ~90 by bicycle.
Despite the environmental benefits, living within walking distance of downtown offices and amenities is the most ostentatious and fiscally wasteful choice modern humans seem to be proud of making.
What we need to STOP doing is humoring the notion that spending big on urban rent is somehow more virtuous than an equivalently priced vacation or designer handbag, and especially that public policy ought to increase the pressure to spend ever-increasing proportions of income on land value.
You want to kill cars, find a suitable replacement. Paying more for less housing, living with roommates, or multiplying commute times are not acceptable approaches. Bedroom communities around actually good (fast, frequent, reliable, comfortable) commuter rail systems are a lot more compelling. Getting the rent differential between city center and suburb down below the threshold of TCO on a basic car would help too.
> If you’re able to walk instead of drive to the store for a gallon of milk, you and your neighborhood home values may benefit from the exercise. A 2009 study sponsored by CEOs for Cities, a national consortium of civic and business leaders, found that homes in neighborhoods with good walkability are more valuable than similar homes in neighborhoods where residents have to drive to get to amenities.
> Walkability adds anywhere from $4,000 to $34,000 to home values, according to the study. The bigger, more urban the city (think San Francisco or Chicago), the bigger the boost in home prices walkability adds. Neighborhoods in cities with less dense populations like Tucson, Ariz., or Fresno, Calif., have the smallest boost in home prices from being walkable.
> The availability of public transportation also played a role. The higher home values tended to show up in walkable neighborhoods near good public transportation where people could live without an automobile.
> The higher home values tended to show up in walkable neighborhoods near good public transportation where people could live without an automobile.
You're making my argument for me. Housing costs a great deal more in walkable and transit-friendly areas. Equivalently, car-friendliness lowers housing costs.
I could drive a new BMW for less than it would take to upgrade from East Bay suburbia to an equivalent apartment within walking distance of my downtown SF office (~$2500/mo up to $4500/mo). But both of those choices would be equally and severely irresponsible from a personal finance perspective.
We should be running as far away as possible from policy intended to push people to spend even more on housing.
The car lets me live where housing is cheap(er), while still getting to work and accomplishing day-to-day tasks reasonably quickly. You propose to take that option away and force me to spend that extra $2000/mo, downgrade to a worse apartment, or spend more of my already-scarce free time commuting.
"Average" car costs are weighted upwards by new SUVs and luxury cars. It does not hurt very much to drive a boring reliable Japanese compact as a personal daily driver, everything beyond that is choice.
The economic value of surrounding businesses is increased because customers, employees, and suppliers are all able to be there. They have a place to park.
Two examples: The last time I was in San Francisco, I wanted to stop and eat. I drove around in ever-widening circles seeking a place to park, then gave up and drove away. That business lost out. On another day, across the bay in Freemont I think, I stopped at a place that had free parking right outside the door. They got my business.
You are surprised to learn that your particular experience is not the norm.
In fact studies have shown devoting vast expanses of land to parking is economically bad. See : Stroup "The high cost of Free parking" and the http://www.strongtowns.org/ .
Also refer to the New York City data about removing parking in order to create a more bike/ped friendly neighborhood.
Most patrons to a business live local to that business. Your example of being willing to drive all the way from San Francisco to Fremont demonstrates this point well. You are not the normal example.
Wrt the business that did not get your business.... they may not have even noticed because they had more than enough local patrons.
That was "On another day", probably about 10 days later.
On the day in San Francisco, I finally found a place to park in some super-rich residential area miles away from where I had started. At that point I parked, but only to rest and assess the situation. I think I then said "screw this" and went back to my hotel in South San Francisco. I probably ate cold food at the hotel, purchased from a supermarket.
On a different day in San Francisco, just a few years ago, I thought I'd try the public transportation. Silly me, that doesn't work either! I ended up walking from the bottom of the California line up to Russian Hill. Afterward, I tried to take a tram/streetcar thing. This being July 4, a day when public transportation is particularly sensible, they shut it down near the crowds who might want it. Of course! WTF SFO. I walked all the way back, then down into the subway station. I get on the train that runs south along the east side, I think the J train. This goes up to street level. It's dark and my cell phone battery is dying. Unlike the T in Boston since at least 1993, this train fails to have: a voice-over for the stops, an overhead text display for the stops, or big lighted signs at the stops. Boston had/has all that, but San Francisco has none of it even 2 decades later. Also, the train doesn't actually stop unless there is a person waiting, so you can't count stops to know where you are. It's GPS or screw you. I get off, walk too far to the "connecting" bus stop, and wait for the last bus. Oh, the sign didn't make it clear that you aren't supposed to wait at the bus shelter. The bus goes by on the other side of the street. So then walk several more miles, cut through Glenn Canyon in the dark, and finally back to the car parked at Turquoise Way.
Obviously, the car doesn't work, but neither does the public transportation. It seems I'm expected to hike up and down all those hills like it's 1849. My knees are too old for that, and my kids are too young for that.
> Public transit works best for young healthy people. If you have kids or move a little slowly due to health or old age, public transit is a straight up no-go.
Is this a joke? Car travel works for healthy people who are ~20–60 years old with a stable income.
For everyone else – children, teenagers, elderly people, the disabled, the poor, etc. – cars are terrible. The lack of other transportation options is perhaps the biggest reason that living in car-centric suburbs is hell for teenagers; they end up entirely dependent.
Go take a bus in a city and you’ll see a huge variety of people riding.
I don't blame you but this is a classic attitude from someone who has never experienced good transit, so assumes transit always sucks (and weirdly, then concludes we should not try to improve transit). This is like saying hamburgers are bad when you've only ever eaten them at McDonald's (and then mocking your friend who's trying to show you how to make a delicious hamburger from scratch by grinding up good cuts of meat).
> You won't convince a salesman to carry a projector, screen, and a box of pamphlets on the bus and train.
This would not be strange in Manhattan. You couldn't convince the salesman to waste his Time, which is a rare commodity for working people as you say, driving a car which would be slower than taking the subway.
> I'd rather sit and wait in traffic in my car than stand outside in the rain or snow waiting for a bus.
Subways avoid this problem. They're also expensive, but there's easier solutions -- bus and outdoor train shelters (which obviously protect from rain/snow) are sometimes heated in the northeast for this reason too.
Also, dealing with rain/snow is pretty easy and pleasant if you just dress right. The prevalance of cars in this country means many people never learn to dress right because they can get away with never spending more than 60 seconds outside, the brief space between the car and the building door.
> And on top of that, transit for me would be about $400/month.
Here it's $100 a month.
> I'm not sitting on a rough seat crammed next to 5 other people for 2 hours.
A lot of people find dealing with repetitive constant stop and go traffic but having a comfy seat to be a crappy tradeoff compared to having less space but freeing your mind to read, doze, whatever. There are crowded an uncrowded systems and lines.
Go try some good transit, then tell me what you think.
Age, gender, disability, and political outlook all affect your perception of safety. This in turn determines if "freeing your mind to read, doze, whatever" is possible, or if instead you keep a very firm grip on your belongings while eyeing every other passenger with suspicion. Lots of people simply don't feel safe in crowds or without a door they can lock.
I can imagine this is true for tourists but I'd be interested to hear actual commuters say something like this. The definite pattern here is that so many have never experienced good public transportation. I drive to work for my commute and I don't feel safe at all dealing with the drivers who will do anything to shave off seconds from their commute.
There are currently 6 crimes per every 100,000 miles on Muni (http://sfgov.org/scorecards/crimes-muni). If you commute 5 miles per day, that's 12,500 miles in a decade. I work near Civic Center, a dangerous area, so I assume it's probably 3x more dangerous than average so the equivalent of 37,000 miles. So each decade I ride transit, I'd be victim of over 2 police reported crimes.
Fair point. Counterpoint: If you commute by private car, how often can you expect to get into a wreck?
I know plenty of people who are terrified of driving in the same way some posters here are terrified of urban crime. It all comes down to what environments you're used to. If you're used to driving down a freeway, you'll routinize and minimize the risk of being in a collision. If you're used to city life, you'll routinize and minimize the risk of being mugged.
Also, once again, transit does not have to mean high crime. You're describing crappy transit systems. So let's improve those.
Nevertheless, we're still for some reason comparing to a terrible transit system, the SF Muni. As usual, if you compare car driving to a terrible transit system, you conclude transit sucks.
NYC's transit system used to have terrible crime rates decades ago, but is much safer than the SF Muni poster describes. Many transit systems outside of the US are even better.
For such people, transportation can't be good if it is public.
Never mind the fact that it is transportation. Being unprotected in a city is threatening. Walking counts. Sitting in a park counts.
Note that city and non-city have different political behavior. The people are different. Many people will simply never feel safe in a city environment. Private cars mitigate that somewhat.
I take my 2 year old daughter to preschool every day on mass transit in SF. And everyday I see a handful of parents in my bus doing the same. Some even have two kids.
Why do you say mass transit is a non starter for kids?
She loves it and I love the time with her and not worrying about parking, accidents, etc.
> Public transit works best for young healthy people. If you have kids or move a little slowly due to health or old age, public transit is a straight up no-go.
Do you seriously think every old person in e.g. New York City owns a car to get around? Have you ever been to New York City?
Cars also work better for healthy people than unhealthy people. My grandmother lost her license a while ago as her vision and reaction times (and, perhaps, judgment) faded. She might have benefited from access to strong public transport. As it is, her beautiful home in a lovely spot became something of a trap as it was too far from any amenities to be walkable.
ever been to europe? we've solved this in most big places, public transport is faster way to travel in any city centre, cheaper too (for daily commuters). sure, by principle it can't solve issue for people like you describe, but for 80-90% it does.
this would make roads much less clogged so those who really need (and pay for it) should go on their own. it's very real added value that helps environment, increases happiness, cuts times and so on. what (local) government should do is to motivate people/orgs with some monetary subsidies.
I think the point is that improving public transit would actually make the commute shorter. If public transit takes around the same amount of time as driving I'm sure lots more people would use it.
I'm coming from Boston where we have a solid subway system and I massively prefer using that over driving.
I mean sure, I would prefer to be in the back of my private car, but given the choice between the stress of driving, and the stress of reading somewhere crowded? I will pay extra to get the time reading, and I will deal with the crowds for a discount.
The monetary equation won't balance, if you are neutral on driving vs reading preferences, until we start requiring reasonable liability insurance minimums, and until I can get housing and my employer can get office space without paying for parking.
The true costs of driving in silicon valley are dominated by parking and by the unfunded liability inherent to the activity.
> Public transit works best for young healthy people.
So what if this is the case? Moving 20% of the moving population in 2% of the vehicle-volume almost quadruples the capacity for everyone else.
I don't buy your assertion in the large (most regions with effective pubic transport seem to move a roughly representative population of users -- including wealthy people). My point is that it could be true in the Bay Area (which is more spread out than your typical big city) but still not refute the need for mass transport.
I like taking the train and biking. i can do work on the train. As for rain, we need it. temperatures never get cold enough to be uncomfortable outside. most employers will pay for your public transit costs.
And this says nothing of "comfort", which along with Time, is a rare commodity for working people. I'm not sitting on a rough seat crammed next to 5 other people for 2 hours. I'll take my car, with its 8-way adjustable seat, climate control and cup holders, thank-you-very-much. I'd rather sit and wait in traffic in my car than stand outside in the rain or snow waiting for a bus.
And on top of that, transit for me would be about $400/month. A car lease, insurance, and gas per month would be about $600. I will happily pay $200 more per month for the massively increased mobility and comfort that a car provides. The value proposition for public transit really sucks.