This is a decent overview of my beef with modern transport planning and what my academic paper that I’m writing touches on. We need to base new roads on where people need them to get to places, not where traffic jams happen to be.
I was pleasantly shocked when I discovered that commercial real estate reports do not give you the demographics of the area x miles from the location. They give it to you x MINUTES from the location. Urban planning, when it comes to utilization, is driven by fifteen-minute isochronous maps - the area five minutes, ten minutes and fifteen minutes from the location is used to determine the appeal of any commercial property. Unfortunately those isochronous maps do not account for traffic. The fifteen-minute isochrone for my wife's workplace in LA extended clear into Malibu - but when the LA City Council put our neighborhood on a "road diet" (more bike lanes, safer parking) the twenty minute drive to her office (which was within the ten-minute isochrone) became ninety minutes. I think this is the hidden mechanism of the MOAR ROADS MOAR MOAR MOAR trap: in the middle of the goddamn night you can get halfway to the next state in fifteen minutes. If you stay at work until 8pm you can get home in 30 minutes but if you leave at 4:30 it'll be quarter of seven before you see your kids. Therefore the obvious thing to do is make it easier for everyone to leave at 4:30 without acknowledging that all you're doing is increasing the number of people who are going to be on the road with you. Another funny thing happened when we moved to Seattle: we were astonished by just how far you could get in a "normal" commute time. If we wanted to visit friends in Los Angeles we budgeted about an hour and fifteen minutes to go eight miles on a Sunday. From where we live in Seattle? An hour and fifteen gets you within shouting distance of the Canadian border. So clearly ZOMG you can get anywhere in Seattle in a "normal" amount of time, right? Naaah. What happens is your normal resets to "however long it takes you to get where you need to go." If you used to spend half an hour getting to the grocery store but now spend five minutes, a grocery store half an hour away becomes insanely inconvenient within two weeks. And let's be honest: if it used to take 20 minutes to get to work but now takes 40, it's the world that's changed, not you. And the only way to make things better is to change the world. Let's say you moved to Atlanta in 2010. How many more drivers are there on your commute?
I heard somewhere that if you remove 20% of the vehicles in peak hour, you'd eradicate something like two thirds of all traffic jams. Roads have always been designed to serve demand, which is a problem when your demand looks like this during any given day: There's been talks of introducing per-mile-driven taxes over here. The last time that was on the political table, it also included a 'peak-hour-tax'. I'm rooting for that idea to make its return.
Oh hells yeah, dude. 2008? With the economy in ruins and oil at $140/bbl? Every shit service sector job no longer paid for itself if you have to burn $30 in gas to make $45 for the day. A vast swath of the Inland Empire stayed the fuck home. Los Angeles was EMPTY. The air was clear. The roads were wide open. It was fucking amazing. The problem is that American cities evolved under the automobile, which means they're all about point-to-point. A hub/spoke paradigm simply doesn't suit vast swaths of American suburbia. And thus are we mired.
All of the time, I think about how stupid it is that we don't have staggered shifts. I know it's potentially disruptive for meetings, but many face-to-face meetings could be just as effective if they were teleconferences. Blue collar work is another entirely separate beast. I'm pretty spoiled, though. Work hasn't been an attendance grade for me since early 2015, but I've never worked as hard as I have since then. I have about two or three teleconferences each week, and then there's only one afternoon a week where I schedule all my meetings and actually have to be physically present somewhere. There are people I know who have a 1+ hour commute (one way!) entirely in a car. In Texas, it's actually a status symbol to move as far as possible from the urban center you work at, and then drive the largest truck that can fit in your garage. We had better be taxing the hell out of fossil fuels within a decade, because these idiots can't think beyond their wallet, and we're not developing a social stigma around carbon emissions nearly fast enough.
I highly disagree. As someone who can work whenever and wherever he wants, with only meetings to tether me to the office, I much prefer 30 minutes of in-person chat to a 30-minute call. I regularly go to the office longer than I need to or on days where I have no appointments there because random run-ins and quick brainstorm chats definitely have their value. Go read this if you haven't already. Students have free public transport over here, which has resulted in enormous growth in peak demands since that free card was introduced. So now many cities over here have staggered their rosters; school A starts at 8:30, and school B at 9:00 so that they don't all want the same 8:15 bus. Some cities reach out to their biggest employers. Half of all jobs in my city were either in higher ed or at the massive hospital, so the city got them to cooperate as well, staggering shifts and giving employees benefits for 'peak-avoidance'. It's hard to measure the impact of it all, but it's definitely a solution that works on a smaller scale.I know it's potentially disruptive for meetings, but many face-to-face meetings could be just as effective if they were teleconferences.
No, I will definitely concede that face-to-face interaction is an incredible thing, and I much prefer it to anything else. My problem is that what I'm working on is fairly narrow, and there isn't really anyone around my workplace doing the same thing. There are some other folks working on the same thing, but they're scattered all around the world. We meet up every couple of months for face-to-face researchin', and I feel pretty terrible about it, because airplane carbon emissions. I've said it before, but I think it's very important that we at least start trying to adopt VR teleconferencing. Ugh, that little bit of latency has already burned me, though.
Public transportation is more dense and consistent than driving a car. Even something as simple as a dedicated bus lane can move an order of magnitude more people during rush hour than a road full of cars, as this example from Los Angeles shows: https://twitter.com/metrolosangeles/status/1153807208229957632Therefore the obvious thing to do is make it easier for everyone to leave at 4:30 without acknowledging that all you're doing is increasing the number of people who are going to be on the road with you.
People ride the bus where it makes sense. They don't where it doesn't. Theoretically I could ride the bus to the grocery store. It'll cost me $1.75 each way. It's 4 and a half miles. And the last time I tried it I waited ten minutes, recognized the bus wasn't coming, started walking and was in sight of the store by the time I saw a bus. It was literally running 45 minutes late. As in, it's supposed to come by every 12 minutes and it didn't run at all. For 45 minutes. I can take LA Metro to work. I can walk a quarter mile, get on a different bus (that I hope isn't late), ride it two stops, get on one train, ride two stops, transfer through Union Station, get on another train, ride seventeen stops, get on a bus (that I hope isn't late), ride nine stops and then walk a quarter mile. It takes two and a half hours. Or, I can skip that first bus ride, walk two miles to the train, and then instead of getting on the last bus I can get on their "protected bus lane" (and hope it isn't late) and then ride it eight stops, get on another bus (and hope it isn't late) and then ride nine stops and walk a quarter mile. It takes three hours. I can Lyft. I go from "major freeway" to "major freeway" to "major road." Without traffic it's half an hour. With, it's an hour. Or I can bike. I effectively ride from "major road" to "major road" despite having a sixteen mile commute. Uphill, in a 100 degree headwind, with five (5!) detours, that ride takes me an hour and sixteen minutes. ST3 is gonna cost about 54 billion dollars. It's going to take light rail all the way from the airport (where it already is) up to the park'n'ride by my house 18 miles away. And once it's running, it'll get me to the airport in two and a half hours. I can drive it in 45 minutes. You're not wrong. Public transport is theoretically more dense and consistent than driving a car. But like every other sanctimonious mutherfucker that says "take the bus" my answer is "have you tried that lately?" Here's one of my local crazy people from the river. It rained a lot in January so they were all adrift and looking for shelter. She got on the third bus in the odyssey, got confused, started screaming for "MAMA!" and refused to sit down or get out of the way. So we all got to wait 45 minutes for Metro to dispatch another bus for us to get on. And watch as LAPD forceably removed her from the bus, screaming and terrified, only to shut the bus down where it sat as a "crime scene." Yeah. Those guys whose commute went from 20min to 40 are gonna eat this shit up.
The frustrating part is that it is possible. I quite enjoyed Calgary's bus system when I lived there. One bus every ten to fifteen minutes. Clean, modern, frequent, no crazies. My bus line was almost never exactly on time, but that is entirely because it had a turnaround time of something like six goddamn hours through cold suburban hell. It's probably because it's well-funded with oil money. Fundamentally, you need a city structure that benefits bundling rides to similar destinations, and with the absurdly polycentric nature of LA that's never going to be possible.
A friend visited Seattle lately. She was astonished when I told her Washington has no state income tax. "Why are your roads so much better? Surely your sales tax is higher?" No, lower. "How are you able to do it then? Vastly less graft and corruption. Unfortunately, graft and corruption are one of the principle aspects of mass transit in the United States. Seattle spent $125m expanding the monorail without breaking ground on anything.