Author Topic: Why isn't public transit free?  (Read 9331 times)

clifp

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Re: Why isn't public transit free?
« Reply #150 on: October 19, 2022, 05:51:15 AM »
getting 22% of all trips done by bike, and 3/4 of the people bike at least some of the time is impressive.  Still, the 1/2 empty part of me says well thats 78% of trips are done by car
No. It means 78% of trips are not done by bike.
Most people have foot. And there is public transit (duh, have you looked at the thread title?).

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Road surfaces expand in the summer and contract in winter, and the movement cause cracks, potholes etc, reducing usage saves very little money.
Strangely that does happen a lot less for bike paths. So maybe it has to do with
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I've noticed that MMM has a large number of bicycle enthusiasts.  I think I understand why, Pete, is/was a big bike proponent.
That may be, but maybe it's also because the bike is by far the most superior mode of transportation, especially now with ebikes.

My impression was that Finnish city was pretty small, and had no mass transit, other than possible buses. Feel free to post a link showing me differently/
 Traffic is almost always defined as a vehicle (which could be a car, bike, motorcycle, or rickshaw) so 22% doesn't include walking.  Does walking next door to give your neighbor mail delivered to your address count as a trip, how about walking in the mall from the drug store to the food court?
Do you have a source for lower maintenance on bike paths?

I agree that E-bikes are promising. Certainly for countries like India and China, other developing countries they make a lot more sense than cars.
However, there are many dimensions to measuring transportation.  Safety as measured by deaths/injuries per person miles is important. The lines are blurry between a bike, e-bike, moped, and motorcycle. I have yet to see a good breakdown of safety data so I'm hesitant to say e-bikes are superior.
In addition, there is the utility function. An e-bike is great for going to school, or the park, or work for many people. Not very good for grocery shopping for a family for a week, and completely unsuitable for dropping your kids of at school, or taking your elderly parent to a doctor's appointment.


chemistk

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Re: Why isn't public transit free?
« Reply #151 on: October 19, 2022, 05:58:03 AM »
I dislike the notion that self-driving cars are going to be the salve for North American roads.

It's such an easy cop-out to allow our infrastructure to remain exactly how it is. No need to change zoning laws, undertake major transit projects, or incentivize people to alter their habits - just tell them "you don't need to own a car, just subscribe to whatever self driving service fits your needs the best".

I also don't buy that it's just around the corner, either. Sure in some very stable climate cities we're starting to see its use tick up but until self driving cars can safely navigate a city like Chicago or NYC, it's never going to be much of a thing culturally. And exactly because of that point, adoption will languish because if you ever need to travel outside the fleet's operational radius, you might be back to needing a vehicle of your own.

That's not even mentioning the chicken-and-egg problem of liability and dangerous situations. No manufacturer wants to be culpable when its vehicle causes a death, nor do the occupants, nor does the deceased's estate. And when the vehicle has to make the choice between killing a pedestrian or killing its occupant, again no manufacturer wants that liability and neither should us occupants accept those ToS when we enter the vehicle.

Pretending the above is a non-issue, which it isn't, in most cold-weather cities extra infrastructure is going to be needed to accommodate autonomous vehicles - roads will need to be repaved or redesigned, and ideally there will be sensors and cameras across the densest blocks of any cities the vehicles are operating in. And in reworking the infrastructure you might as well just forget the self driving car BS and put in bus-only lanes and streetcars/trams because at least those will be accessible to all and have been proven to be safe and effective when they run on routes and frequencies that match their use.

It's easy to get behind the idea of self driving cars in cities because in your own personal vehicle you can be sheltered from the rest of society and yet feel as though you're making a difference by not owning a vehicle of your own.
« Last Edit: October 19, 2022, 06:24:25 AM by chemistk »

LennStar

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Re: Why isn't public transit free?
« Reply #152 on: October 19, 2022, 06:22:41 AM »
Traffic is almost always defined as a vehicle (which could be a car, bike, motorcycle, or rickshaw) so 22% doesn't include walking.
Probably only America makes such statistics, everywhere else if you talk about mode of transport it's foot, bike, car, public transit as the 4 basic categories. Wallking is always included in the statistics because (except 'merica I guess) that is always a big share, generally second after cars.

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Do you have a source for lower maintenance on bike paths?
Not on hand, and of course the problem lies in what you measure. If you measure a bike lane in the US that starts and ends on a highway, and count cost per mile driven...
Same goes for bulding a bike lane btw. Depending how you measure and what the circumstances you are somewhere between 20 and 200 (and if you really search you can find even mroe extreme numbers) times that car infrastructure costs more than bike infrastructure.

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Safety as measured by deaths/injuries per person miles is important
Infrastructure. The Netherlands became a bike country beause too many children were killed by cars. It's easy to build an evironment where it's safer to bike than it is today in the US to drive a car. Especially if you compare to a stroad.

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In addition, there is the utility function. An e-bike is great for going to school, or the park, or work for many people. Not very good for grocery shopping for a family for a week, and completely unsuitable for dropping your kids of at school, or taking your elderly parent to a doctor's appointment.
Bullshit.
Just go to Youtube and type in "mamafiets" (or moederfiets) and "backfiets"

Or just watch the appropriate video by NJB, if you are lazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA

GuitarStv

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Re: Why isn't public transit free?
« Reply #153 on: October 19, 2022, 07:10:11 AM »
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In addition, there is the utility function. An e-bike is great for going to school, or the park, or work for many people. Not very good for grocery shopping for a family for a week, and completely unsuitable for dropping your kids of at school, or taking your elderly parent to a doctor's appointment.
Bullshit.
Just go to Youtube and type in "mamafiets" (or moederfiets) and "backfiets"

Or just watch the appropriate video by NJB, if you are lazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA

There isn't a need to buy a fancy wheelbarrow bike.  Your typical cheapo bike trailer works great for even large grocery runs, and means that you can still have a fun non-mutant/horrible handling bike for the rest of the time you're not grocery shopping.


Just Joe

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Re: Why isn't public transit free?
« Reply #154 on: October 19, 2022, 07:41:31 AM »
[qIn addition, there is the utility function. An e-bike is great for going to school, or the park, or work for many people. Not very good for grocery shopping for a family for a week, and completely unsuitable for dropping your kids of at school, or taking your elderly parent to a doctor's appointment.

Have I got a video for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA

To use a bike your routines have to adapt. Instead of hauling home $200 worth of groceries, you do smaller trips a couple or three times per week. It helps if your grocery store is not a super shopping center that requires a 1/2 mile walk to the milk cooler and that is surrounded by 40 acres of parking lot. We live in a smaller town where shopping is an easy component of our carpool (DW and I). We do a big weekly trip and then follow that up with a mid-week trip to grab whatever else we need. A little extra time (20 minutes) and no extra gas b/c the Aldi grocery store is along our route home. I sometimes do this trip on my bike and I have plenty of space in my panniers for the small trip - and then I do 8-10 miles home through hilly country. Traffic is getting worse as the town grows so even my preferred quieter route (I have a couple alternatives) is getting a little sketchy.

Along with all these special accommodations we are discussing for autonomous traffic - I'd like to see a simple traffic separated spoke and hub bike path from town towards everyone's house so we could walk or ride their bike to town if they wanted. For some reason 10 miles of golf cart path is an impossibility here while smaller supposedly less wealthy parts of the word manage many more miles plus they follow that up with good maintenance and they clear the snow for their riders.

Edit: I see that LennStar beat me to it.
« Last Edit: October 19, 2022, 07:46:49 AM by Just Joe »

Just Joe

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Re: Why isn't public transit free?
« Reply #155 on: October 19, 2022, 07:48:21 AM »
There isn't a need to buy a fancy wheelbarrow bike.  Your typical cheapo bike trailer works great for even large grocery runs, and means that you can still have a fun non-mutant/horrible handling bike for the rest of the time you're not grocery shopping.

True. However, doesn't everyone have a couple bikes? ;)

I have an ebike, my old Schwinn roadbike (now "gravel bike"), and a Trek mtn bike.

GuitarStv

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Re: Why isn't public transit free?
« Reply #156 on: October 19, 2022, 07:56:29 AM »
There isn't a need to buy a fancy wheelbarrow bike.  Your typical cheapo bike trailer works great for even large grocery runs, and means that you can still have a fun non-mutant/horrible handling bike for the rest of the time you're not grocery shopping.

True. However, doesn't everyone have a couple bikes? ;)

I have an ebike, my old Schwinn roadbike (now "gravel bike"), and a Trek mtn bike.

I've got two bikes - a steel frame touring bike, and an aluminum frame touring bike.  And I only have the two of them because cycling in the winter here through the salt and slush just destroys components.  The aluminum bike only gets outfitted with cheap stuff that can be replaced every couple years.

If not for winter riding, I'd be quite happy with my one bike for everything.

FINate

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Re: Why isn't public transit free?
« Reply #157 on: October 19, 2022, 09:43:17 AM »
In my lifetime, I've seen serious researchers say that computer wouldn't ever be able to understand speech, translate speech, or beat humans at go or poker.  We would never see Dick Tracy like watches that we could talk to in our lifetime.  People would never adjust to doing business by video conferencing.  AI has consistently been disappointing for 30 years, until suddenly it wasn't. I took an AI course, in 1980, and the pinnacle of AI was telling a robot (via a keyboard) to stack the orange block on the blue block.  The stuff we do routinely with Hey Siri, or Hey Google, is absolutely incomprehensible. If you ever tried to dock two spaceship, in a game you know how hard it is.  It drove Gemini astronauts nuts, but a SpaceX Dragon capsule does it routinely.

My Tesla is a better driver in rush hour than I'm now, in another 10 years I think that will be true all time. (I'm getting older and my drive is not getting better). In 20 years better than most everyone all of the time.

To be clear, I think autonomous vehicles will eventually become reality, but not "in the next few years" as is often claimed. In 10 years I expect it will be commonplace to find robo-taxis in many urban areas for certain curated routes. Then we may have true full self driving in 20 years -- as in, they can drive everywhere a human can and handle every edge case safely. But it may be more like 30 years before this happens. A "maybe" 20-30 years in the future is not a good foundation for policy decisions, such as putting off investment in public transit in the hopes that self-driving cars will be a silver bullet.

Tech companies are deeply invested in selling us a vision of a self-driving future in which they need to maintain the status quo of car-centric transportation to get a return on investment. So yeah, I remain skeptical.

PDXTabs

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Re: Why isn't public transit free?
« Reply #158 on: October 19, 2022, 10:04:06 AM »
There isn't a need to buy a fancy wheelbarrow bike.  Your typical cheapo bike trailer works great for even large grocery runs, and means that you can still have a fun non-mutant/horrible handling bike for the rest of the time you're not grocery shopping.

True. However, doesn't everyone have a couple bikes? ;)

I have an ebike, my old Schwinn roadbike (now "gravel bike"), and a Trek mtn bike.

I've got two bikes - a steel frame touring bike, and an aluminum frame touring bike.  And I only have the two of them because cycling in the winter here through the salt and slush just destroys components.  The aluminum bike only gets outfitted with cheap stuff that can be replaced every couple years.

If not for winter riding, I'd be quite happy with my one bike for everything.

I used to have one, now I have two (one summer, one winter). But I noticed that it's really nice to have a spare. If I'm working on one I can ride the other. One day I might have more.

chemistk

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Re: Why isn't public transit free?
« Reply #159 on: October 19, 2022, 10:07:33 AM »
Tech companies are deeply invested in selling us a vision of a self-driving future in which they need to maintain the status quo of car-centric transportation to get a return on investment. So yeah, I remain skeptical.

Very important observation - when we see any media coverage of the tech industry, it's almost always PR of some kind to try and influence public policy and public perception around certain topics. They will gladly sell you a future where mass transit isn't a great idea if they can't figure out a good way to profit from it.

mm1970

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Re: Why isn't public transit free?
« Reply #160 on: October 19, 2022, 10:16:55 AM »
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In addition, there is the utility function. An e-bike is great for going to school, or the park, or work for many people. Not very good for grocery shopping for a family for a week, and completely unsuitable for dropping your kids of at school, or taking your elderly parent to a doctor's appointment.

Tell me you haven't read most of MMM without telling me you haven't read most of MMM.

(Lots of people around here drop their kids off at school on regular bikes, and that's gotten even more common with recent adoption of E-bikes.)

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I have a 24 year old Schwinn hybrid with slicks, and not all the gears work.  We also have a fancy new E-bike (shared).  So, family of 4, 5 bikes.  We have been slowly increasing our cycling over the last month or two.  DS16 bikes from school to work during the week (not every day, working on increasing the # of days), and DH and I are working on building up biking to work again, to a couple of days per week (using the shared E-bike and one car).
« Last Edit: October 19, 2022, 10:20:32 AM by mm1970 »