No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.
So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to cities on either ends of the line while still being a relatively accessible commute for anyone in between the cities.
And of course as great as that is, the rail line will be able to relatively trivially scale capacity by adding more trains to the same line at a rate far above massively expensive road expansion projects that cost comparable to the entire planned rail line.
So if you want to grow past a certain density you do have to start switching to rail and higher density does mean more business opportunities and generally greater options for prosperity for the populations in the area.
Is Texas "coming to terms" with it, though? Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be. If your goal is to have everyone work in downtown Dallas then yes, they suck. But you can just build offices and manufacturing facilities all around the state instead, avoiding the creation of single bottlenecks.
> has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use
TxDOT (government organization responsible for road maintenance) has a budget of $30B/year or about 10% of the total state's budget. Not that big of a deal for Texas.
That figure includes every single government-owned street, AFAIK. Total infrastructure costs are higher but don't seem that much higher than in Germany?
> Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be
I'm not convinced this is true. Because a train enables more density, it enables more places you can reach once on it. A car enables more geographical area, but there is a lot less things to do in that area, and those things to do are what matters. If you want to go camping miles from anyone else than a car will get you there, but if you want to do a city activity (restaurant, movies, live music, show, work) a train can get you to a much greater variety of those things.
Note that with both the real question is the network. A car where there are not roads won't get you anywhere. A car where there is one road doesn't get you far. Same for a train - I live in a city without a train and so obviously I can't get anywhere on it. I've been in cities with trains and I was able to get places on it - enough that I didn't need to have a car.
At this rate I would be surprised if the Texas HSR is complete before 2050. Texas has not come to terms with anything. I say that as a resident for the last 10 years.
> Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.
Before scaling people moving up so much, I'd question why encourage so much movement.
Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need. By eliminating the need for 95% of high-speed people moving (whether by car, train, bus, no matter), that problem becomes automatically solved. And we get a nicer life walking/biking to most places and when we need/want to drive farther, there's no congestion.
95% is way too high a target! I sometimes want to get supplies at the special Asian food store - there won't be one in my 95% neighborhood - nearly everybody has enough of their own special hobby/interests that they cannot live 95% in their neighborhood. Note that I only counted for me - in the real world most people are in a marriage like relationship, each of the pair has their own interests and different jobs.
What we should aim for is everybody is in walking distance of 5 restaurants, 1 grocery store, 1 general goods store, 1 library, 1 elementary school (but not higher level - after about 6th grade students benefit from larger schools where they can take classes different from their neighbors), 2 parks, 3 churches. Then put them in close walking distance of good public transit so they can do other things that they do in life all the time (Note in particular going to work every day is not in the above list for most!). You should of course debate exactly what should be on the list and exact numbers, but the above is a good starting point.
> nearly everybody has enough of their own special hobby/interests that they cannot live 95% in their neighborhood
Agreed. I did mistype what I was thinking though. Not 95% of destinations one might ever want, but my thought was 95% of trips. Nearly all my trips are routine, either to/from office (bikeable) or supermarkets (walkable), movies/library/restaurants/misc shops (all walkable), parks/sports (walkable), basic medical care (walkable).
I certainly have hobbies/needs I must to drive for, but those are fairly occasional trips. My thought is that if we as a society make it so that nearly all routine trips can be local (walk or bike) then the exception will be rare enough that we don't need more road capacity.
> Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need
The only way to achieve this is density. Urban areas.
When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible.
The problem is that you can make MUCH more money building huge homes than affordable housing. And people, being ultra-individualistic, believe they need the huge home as opposed to denser housing. So here we are.
> When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible.
What you call "not possible" is where I live, so clearly it is possible.
Trying to shoehorn all solutions into one and only one way of doing things turns people off and hinders progress.
Sure you can have dense urban areas that are walkable/cycleable. You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable. Instead of turning people away from a good cause by telling them they can't have the life they want, let's promote walkable/cycleable communities in all areas.
> You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable
You can, but not to the same degree. Because it's just a matter of distance and density.
If you have a store and you have to service, say, 1,000 people to make it profitable you might have a store every .5 miles in the city. Maybe that then translates to 5 miles in the suburb. Well... it's not very easy to walk 5 miles. It's trivial to walk .5 miles.
Stores are one example, but this really applies to literally everything. Besides things like parks, which don't need to turn a profit.
Sure, you can have walkable suburbs in that you can walk in the suburbs. But, to me, that's not what walkable means. Walkable means I should be able to do ALL of my tasks, whatever they may be, without a car. That's not possible in a suburb. I can't walk to the office, or the store, or the bank, or whatever. But it's very possible, and even trivial, in cities.
"Walkable" infrastructure only really matters if there's somewhere to walk to. Sure, it's nice having sidewalks that lead nowhere, but people won't turn to them like they would in Chicago.
> You can, but not to the same degree. Because it's just a matter of distance and density.
Agreed, but you don't actually need the same amount for the suburban demographic.
For example where my friend lived in Manhattan (and I spent most weekends) we could walk to tons and tons of bars, multiple clubs, music venues and such, in addition to stores for food/medicine/etc. The sheer volume of that can't be replicated in a suburb.
But.. it is also not needed. Ones moves to the suburb when being a bit older, less single and more parent. So I don't need to be able to walk to dozens of bars anymore.
> That's not possible in a suburb. I can't walk to the office, or the store, or the bank, or whatever.
Sure it's possible. Like I said in original comment, that's where I live, a walkable suburb. I can walk/bike to the office, two supermarkets, theater, daycare, middle school, movies, at least 3 banks, library, pharmacies, clothing stores, restaurants and many other specialty stores I'm not listing. Also a couple city parks and a state park. The only thing in short supply are bars (one brewery within walking distance) and music venues (one bar/restaurant/live music hall within walking distance). But given the older married parent demographic, that's plenty for me.
Induced Demand needs to DIE as a concept. It is a GOOD thing - if you build any infrastructure and people change their behavior because of it, that means your city wasn't meeting the needs of the people. The whole point of a city is all the things people can do in them - if you just want to stay you get out of the city: you can find cheap houses in Montana with nothing around that will meet your needs just was well. The rest of us live in/near a city because as romantic as the cabin sounds, we overall prefer all the options a city gives us.
Note that I didn't specify you should get ahead of induced demand, only that you should. Trains are much cheaper in the long run for most cities but it requires a large investment to make them useful.
I don’t think you understand how this concept works. Because commuting by car after increasing the road capacity gets easy again, and because it’s also the most co convenient and (for a brief moment) fastest way to commute from point A to B, people switch over from using other means and the roads get saturated again soon after. You cannot increase the capacity to accommodate everyone driving, and everyone absolutely would want to drive if possible. It has nothing to do with the city’s ability to deliver, it’s about human condition and our innate need to make lowest effort possible.
Also, this is such a wildly American take, from a European perspective. No one expects city to somehow make driving cars easy here, not anymore. Would also be wild from NYC or Chicago perspective. Having lived in NYC I would not replace Subway with a car in that large of a place. Even without traffic it would take too long to move about.
Good comment except for the first word. Obviously cars enable all sorts of movement and economic activity, so why not just admit it? The rest of your comment is just talking about how rail may do all those things to a greater extent than cars. You don’t need to deny benefits of cars, it doesn’t bolster your arguments. Better to just be honest and then extol the virtues of rail and other transportation methods.
I actually do stand by my assertion in this case. The reason is because unfortunately, after a certain scale, cars are actually actively harmful to growth.
That's why I brought up Texas in particular. Interstate 45 as an example is effectively at saturation. Even if you add new lanes to it, you only get marginal throughput benefits when you actually try to get between Dallas and Houston or commute to either city from the region between them. The same goes for I-10 out of Houston.
Texas has reached the point where car ownership is actually costing the state and local governments astronomical amounts of money for marginal amounts of congestion relief (that is then immediately saturated).
I don't deny that cars have a place in low density regions and I think they are great for specific uses or areas but generally I believe that cars hinder growth in any metro environment in the long term. Doubly so because car centric infrastructure is extremely hostile to anyone who doesn't use a car which makes transition at that density threshold extremely painful for everyone involved.
Of course a car does, but does that mean you should ignore all the benefits brought by bicycles? And if we go that far, should we overlook our own muscular locomotion? It all enables the same mobility after all.
Cycling at 110F ambient temperature can be outright hazardous (speaking of Texas).
Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.)
Also, cycling in a city, when you cycle for 2-3, maybe 5 miles, is fine. Cycling for 20 miles is pretty taxing and time-consuming, but in a low-density, car-oriented environment 20 miles correctly qualifies as "nearby".
> Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.)
1. Shower at home.
2. Have a change of clothes.
In the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work five days a week and never showered there (even though available). (And believe me: people I worked with would have told me if it was a problem. )
Sweating does not make you stinky. Sweat is not stinky. It is bacteria that causes the stinkiness. If your skin is (relatively) clean, there would not be any (food for) bacteria and you won't stink.
Also:
3. How much you sweat depends on your exertion level: take it easy and you don't sweat as much, at least in the morning when it's cooler. (I'm in Toronto, where summer afternoons are sometimes >30C, and I've cycled home in 35C weather; high-ish humidity too.)
> Sweating does not make you stinky. Sweat is not stinky. It is bacteria that causes the stinkiness. If your skin is (relatively) clean, there would not be any (food for) bacteria and you won't stink.
As much as I agree with your general point, this isn't strictly true.
For a sizable chunk of the population, sweat doesn't contain high concentration of compounds that when digested by bacteria produce body odor.
However, despite being a sizable population, people lucky enough to have this trait are in the minority. I don't know the actual percentage but among European populations it's as low as 2% and among east Asian populations it's as high as 50%. Either way less than half the population.
The rest of the population has variations of that trait and their sweat produces moderate to extreme amounts of amino acid based compounds that when digested by bacteria produces the VOCs that make up the infamous body odor smell.
So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to cities on either ends of the line while still being a relatively accessible commute for anyone in between the cities.
And of course as great as that is, the rail line will be able to relatively trivially scale capacity by adding more trains to the same line at a rate far above massively expensive road expansion projects that cost comparable to the entire planned rail line.
So if you want to grow past a certain density you do have to start switching to rail and higher density does mean more business opportunities and generally greater options for prosperity for the populations in the area.