How America Killed Transit

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by xzmattzx

I'm with BrownTown. Cars provide more mobility within a metropolitan area. You can go places where buses and light rail don't go, including right up to your house.

The exact opposite happens when you live in a dense urban environment. When you're tethered to a car it becomes a nuisance in a place like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo... Or in any city that has the characteristics of the quintessential city.

There are few things more frustrating in life than spending an hour trying to find a parking space in Manhattan. Even if you were to drive into Manhattan to spend a day, if you are smart you would just park your car use other alternatives if you plan to be mobile throughout the city during your visit.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Doady

Somehow I doubt that poverty is a bigger problem in Toronto compared to US cities.

Canada has lower incomes, higher car/gas prices, and limited auto infrastructure, so naturally has higher transit share. Also is a more urbanized country with worse congestion and fewer through-streets. Like 40% of the country lives in three cities. And driving doesn't make sense for a huge cohort of commuters. This is rarely true in the U.S. outside of a half-dozen cities.

And U.S. transit ridership plummeted during the era of integration, which has no equivalent in Canada. A huge proportion of Americans wion't take the bus under any circumstances because it's associated with "ghetto" blacks and poverty. In Canada most of the riders are immigrants, culturally comfortable with buses and don't have the same historical legacy.

Originally Posted by Doady

Don't act like USA became so car dependent because "the economy was booming and people used all that money to improve their lives" and Canada is just some third world country or something.

The U.S. was significantly wealthier in the postwar era and developed a massive road infrastructure, so, again, not surprising that U.S. is more auto-dependent.

Auto-dependency is not a "problem" in 95% of the U.S. There is no need to build rail, or even frequent bus service, in the Columbus and Tulsa. In such places auto ownership is like 95% and congestion is rare.

The issue in the U.S. is neglect of transit infrastructure in the few places where it makes sense. On this measure, Canada is much better. But honestly building rail in Nashville or Indy is throwing money down the drain.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

The exact opposite happens when you live in a dense urban environment. When you're tethered to a car it becomes a nuisance in a place like New York, London, Paris, Tokyo... Or in any city that has the characteristics of the quintessential city.

There are few things more frustrating in life than spending an hour trying to find a parking space in Manhattan. Even if you were to drive into Manhattan to spend a day, if you are smart you would just park your car use other alternatives if you plan to be mobile throughout the city during your visit.

Yes, but this is highly uncharacteristic of the U.S. In 99% of the U.S., the car is the easiest and most efficient travel mode.

[M II A II R II K]

The unfortunate byproduct of that is the endless seas of asphalt of meaningless wide roads, parking lots, monotonous box stores that look the same everywhere you see it.

[the urban politician]

Actually, I owned a car in Manhattan for an entire year. I had no problem finding street parking. I also learned to play the system—you keep your car parked at the same place, then move it for about 2 hours one day a week during street cleaning.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by M II A II R II K

The unfortunate byproduct of that is the endless seas of asphalt of meaningless wide roads, parking lots, monotonous box stores that look the same everywhere you see it.

Yep. I've traveled all over the country and I've never been in an autocentric environment that I thought was good or positive by any qualitative measure of urbanism.

Cars can certainly be useful in many situations, but when they're the only game in town, the town always sucks.

[BrownTown]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

First of all, the comments on land use. Density IS an end in and of itself regardless of the existing human density of a particular country or region. Not only does lower density increase the amount of energy (and other resources) required for people to move from place to place..

So, I have two issues with this.

1. You're right to a certain degree that lower density areas are less energy and resource efficient. But since when did we in the US care about that? Sort of the whole point of being rich is being able to use loads of resources to do whatever the heck you want with them. How many people ever make any sort of conscious effort to reduce their consumption? So far as I can tell most Americans consume every resource they can afford and a lot consume even MORE than they can afford and go into debt just to keep consuming more energy and resources.

2. I'm not sure I know the exact "optimal" height to improve efficiency, but it's well lower than every skyscraper this website is concerned with. As I'd hope we all know the cost to build higher goes up exponentially with height. Supertall skyscrapers are more of a symbol for waste and inefficiency than any suburb. Especially the supertall residential towers that people seem to most salivate over here that are 1000+ ft tall but have less people living in them at any given time than a 4 story apartment building out in the 'burbs. These towers are literally just tax dodges for foreign nationals or dick measuring contests for billionaires and yet I don't see many here deriding them. It's only when suburbs are brought up that we suddenly all start to care about efficiency.

Originally Posted by M II A II R II K

The unfortunate byproduct of that is the endless seas of asphalt of meaningless wide roads, parking lots, monotonous box stores that look the same everywhere you see it.

You can flip that around just as easily. How many of the skyscrapers being built today are just monotonous blue boxes? And try walking a mile through Manhattan without passing 5 Starbucks, 5 Dunkin Donuts and at least 1 McDonalds etc. I find it hard to believe anyone could find more "soul" in a place like NYC than in a suburb. It's literally one of NYC's hallmarks that everyone just ignores each other and is kind of an asshole. Contrast that to a Southern suburb where everyone says "hi" to each other and have a much more cheerful attitude.

But seriously, most of the anti-car posts here just boil down to, "cars don't meet me view of what a city should be like therefore I hate them". That's great and all, but it's not really an argument as to why we need to change things just because you personally don't like them. I'm sure we can find just as many people who would say we should bulldoze a few highways through Manhattan to speed their trips to the suburbs up.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Yes, but this is highly uncharacteristic of the U.S. In 99% of the U.S., the car is the easiest and most efficient travel mode.

But this is also a product of post-war transportation policy. It is ahistorical to say that urban America has always been this way. That's why there is a stark difference in the feel of cities that were significantly built out before 1950 vs ones built out mostly afterwards. All of the nation's 10 largest cities in 1940 had a rail based transit system with what we consider today to be high ridership.

I like to drive and agree that cars have good uses that mass transportation can't replicate. But the reverse is also just as much true: mass transportation has good uses that cars can't replicate.

[Doady]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Canada has lower incomes, higher car/gas prices, and limited auto infrastructure, so naturally has higher transit share. Also is a more urbanized country with worse congestion and fewer through-streets. Like 40% of the country lives in three cities. And driving doesn't make sense for a huge cohort of commuters. This is rarely true in the U.S. outside of a half-dozen cities.

And U.S. transit ridership plummeted during the era of integration, which has no equivalent in Canada. A huge proportion of Americans wion't take the bus under any circumstances because it's associated with "ghetto" blacks and poverty. In Canada most of the riders are immigrants, culturally comfortable with buses and don't have the same historical legacy.

So the high bus ridership in places like Halifax and Quebec City is because of immigrants? Mississauga has high bus ridership because limited auto infrastructure? Toronto has high bus ridership because of a discontinous street network? What does discontinuous streets have to do with improved bus service? You are just making excuses.

Originally Posted by Crawford

The U.S. was significantly wealthier in the postwar era and developed a massive road infrastructure, so, again, not surprising that U.S. is more auto-dependent.

I don't think you're going to convince anyone that the reason places like Laval and Mississauga have two times the bus ridership of Detroit is because of poverty and lack of road infrastructure.

Originally Posted by Crawford

Auto-dependency is not a "problem" in 95% of the U.S. There is no need to build rail, or even frequent bus service, in the Columbus and Tulsa. In such places auto ownership is like 95% and congestion is rare.

Motor Vehicle Registrations
U.S.A.: 250,023,326 (0.81 per capita)
Canada: 33,771,855 (0.96 per capita)

Transit isn't merely for non-car owners and alleviating congestion. And transit itself is affected by congestion. 65% of TTC ridership is on the surface on buses and streetcars, operating in mixed traffic, on the congested streets. How exactly does congestion help the bus-only system in Winnipeg? Again, excuses.

In terms of alleviating congestion, transit is not the only option, another is to build extremely low density like Columbus and Tulsa. If you lowering density is a better solution to congestion than upgrading the capacity of the transportation network, that's up to you, but maybe you can understand if some people have different ideas.

[BrownTown]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

But this is also a product of post-war transportation policy. It is ahistorical to say that urban America has always been this way. That's why there is a stark difference in the feel of cities that were significantly built out before 1950 vs ones built out mostly afterwards. All of the nation's 10 largest cities in 1940 had a rail based transit system with what we consider today to be high ridership.

I like to drive and agree that cars have good uses that mass transportation can't replicate. But the reverse is also just as much true: mass transportation has good uses that cars can't replicate.

Nobody had smartphones prior to 1940, but that doesn't mean any sort of policy made them ubiquitous, their usefulness did. The same is true for cars. They took over because they were more useful, not because anyone was out to kill transit.

[Buckeye Native 001]

Angelenos old enough to remember the streetcar system before and after GM bought it might dispute that...

[Doady]

I find it odd people come to a website called Skyscraper Page to argue against transit and high density. It seems like cognitive dissonance.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by BrownTown

So, I have two issues with this.

1. You're right to a certain degree that lower density areas are less energy and resource efficient. But since when did we in the US care about that? Sort of the whole point of being rich is being able to use loads of resources to do whatever the heck you want with them. How many people ever make any sort of conscious effort to reduce their consumption? So far as I can tell most Americans consume every resource they can afford and a lot consume even MORE than they can afford and go into debt just to keep consuming more energy and resources.

I don't really disagree. i mean, there's no disputing that there are a lot of things that people don't care about that they probably should. Not just for the benefit of others, but for their own long term interests. But I don't see a lot of the discussions around density and autocentrism as being issues of individual consumers bucking the system and making responsible choices on their own, but rather for large scale forces like government highway and road building and community zoning, planning, and tax structures to be set up in a way in that encourages more sustainable transportation and development patterns. Simply wagging a disapproving finger at individuals isn't going to do much.

Originally Posted by BrownTown

2. I'm not sure I know the exact "optimal" height to improve efficiency, but it's well lower than every skyscraper this website is concerned with. As I'd hope we all know the cost to build higher goes up exponentially with height. Supertall skyscrapers are more of a symbol for waste and inefficiency than any suburb. Especially the supertall residential towers that people seem to most salivate over here that are 1000+ ft tall but have less people living in them at any given time than a 4 story apartment building out in the 'burbs. These towers are literally just tax dodges for foreign nationals or dick measuring contests for billionaires and yet I don't see many here deriding them. It's only when suburbs are brought up that we suddenly all start to care about efficiency.

Yeah density definitely doesn't need to rely on skyscrapers. While highrises, due to their small footprint, are a good way of adding density to an established area without destroying what's already in place, I'm more interested in seeing density improvements in terms of 2000 sqft houses on 1200 sq ft lots rather than on 3500sqft lots and not having commercial land be 60% occupied by parking etc., simply because in most cities here in NA, far more of the built form loses efficiency due to this rather than due to being too tall. Also remember that the energy numbers for tall buildings are going to include transportation numbers such as energy to run elevators and utilities, when transportation would still be needed with lower buildings but would occur outside on the street and therefore not be included in the building's numbers.

Also, tall buildings can affect the overall urban dynamic since transit does very well when you have a large number of people coming to/from a common destination, so having a strong/dense downtown can help with that. Having a lot of stuff condensed into a small space can make that area an easy single point for people to access. When looking at highrises, you really need to consider the overall effect on a dynamic system rather than just the direct resource consumption of an individual building. What effect do they have have on travel patterns? How do they shape development in the area? Is it enabling a lot of development without demolishing a large numbers of lowrise, often historic, structures? In terms of the big picture, there's very little comparison.

[dc_denizen]

Even in New York City, subway ridership is well below its 1946 peak.

is this even true? and has this guy ever taken the 4/5/6 or 2/3 at 9:00 in the morning?

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by BrownTown

Nobody had smartphones prior to 1940, but that doesn't mean any sort of policy made them ubiquitous, their usefulness did. The same is true for cars. They took over because they were more useful, not because anyone was out to kill transit.

No and bad analogy. The federal government and state governments funded nearly all of the road development in the United States, and by comparison, has done almost nothing for mass transit.

For the most part, private industry built the private cellular networks that your cell phone operates on.

[dc_denizen]

Originally Posted by Doady

I find it odd people come to a website called Skyscraper Page to argue against transit and high density. It seems like cognitive dissonance.

Boston and DC's urban areas consist of cities, satellite towns and suburbs / exurbs of varying densities and urban characteristics.

LA, Vegas and Toronto consists of densely packed single family homes on a grid, connected by long arterial roads.

LA, Vegas and Toronto are denser than Boston and DC.



From an urbanist standpoint, one may prefer Boston and DC over Toronto, LA and Vegas despite their lower density.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

is this even true? and has this guy ever taken the 4/5/6 or 2/3 at 9:00 in the morning?

NYC Subway Ridership Reaches Its Highest Levels Since 1950

https://skift.com/2013/12/27/nyc-sub...ls-since-1950/

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by 10023

This is because you’re in America, and you’re an American.

Cars are useful to go to out of the way places, like villages and small towns. They’re necessary to go anywhere outside of a metro, basically. In the countryside, where once you would have had a horse, you now need a car.

But in Europe, between cities like Wilmington and Buffalo, there would probably be fast efficient train service (probably changing somewhere, but so what).

Yes, Europeans are so much more enlightened than Americans and are definitely not autocentric since cars only account for an insignificant 83% of all passenger-km using motorized ground transport in the mass transit paradise of EU-28 instead of 90+% percent in the auto-dominated hellhole of the US.

[Will O' Wisp]

All these articles about America's "lost streetcar heritage" really tend to mischaracterize the nature of public transit in the pre-auto era. Commuting via streetcar did not give the same experience as commuting via LRT does today, to say nothing of HRT in any era, and was in fact very comparable to modern bus service. Streetcars were primarily gas or diesel powered, single car systems with similar capacities to buses. They operated in mixed flow traffic alongside cars, carts, and pedestrians on relatively narrow streets that made dedicated right of way infeasible. Service was spotty even at the best of times, the cabs were cramped and often smelled of exhaust. Partially elevated and/or electrical systems reduced some of these issues at the cost of increased complaints over the way they blocked sunlight over public streets with massive viaducts or dozens of unsightly wires. From a user perspective a bus offered the exact same ridership experience with the added benefit of easier changes in routes due to differing demand, which explains why there wasn't a general public outcry when they replaced streetcars.

It's also worth noting that even in the 1930s streetcar companies were struggling, and only really lasted into the 1940 due to gasoline rationing during WW2. Private transit companies existed in an uncomfortable position where their prices were often regulated to be as low as possible as a public utility, their expenses were often high due to unionized workers' demands, and yet they were expected to fund themselves solely through private investment despite the low profits these two factors entailed. By the end of the 1940s most streetcar companies were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and already looking to save money with a switch to buses (which generally weren't covered by union agreements like a requirement to have two operators in every cab). In the infamous streetcar scandal everyone always talks about, GM wasn't prosecuted for destroying several successful streetcar companies they had acquired to sell more cars, they were prosecuted for buying up failing streetcar companies so that they could force them to buy GM buses instead of their competitors' like Ford or Blue Bird. It didn't particularly matter though, the bus companies still suffered from all the same problems as the streetcar ones did and had to be bought out by their local governments in the 1960s so they could be subsidized with taxpayer dollars, which has continued to this day.

None of this means that the dismantling of the streetcar networks was preordained, but it was the path of least resistance. Streetcars had always shared their ROW with mixed traffic, to eliminate cars along many of their routes would have been a huge expense. Their capacity was almost identical to buses and hardly lead to increased density, I live in a "streetcar suburb" right now and it's only marginally denser than a modern auto-centric one. And if the hadn't been dismantled, the streetcar companies would have almost assuredly still gone bankrupt in the 1960s like all the bus companies that replaced them did and likely would have required even larger subsidies from transit orgs today. So no, America didn't "kill" transit. America choose to build a system of freeways and highways to replace its inadequate transit system instead of dozens of London/NYC style metros because that option was far, far cheaper.

[BrownTown]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

No and bad analogy. The federal government and state governments funded nearly all of the road development in the United States, and by comparison, has done almost nothing for mass transit.

Who exactly do you think funds the construction of rail and bus lines if not the government?