The problem is that throughput per lane of cars is very limited in comparison to everything else. A single car line can transport about 2000 persons per hour. A single bus lane about 9000, a single bike lane 14000 - if you dedicate the space to pedestrians, we’re at 19000 and light rail goes beyond that at 22000 and more. (See page 3, https://www.static.tu.berlin/fileadmin/www/10002265/News/Pre..., German only)
This means that a single bus lane has as much transport capacity as 4-5 car lanes. A single light rail track as much as 10 or more car lanes. It’s just physically impossible to fit all the lanes for cars. The correct answer to congestion is not to build a second lane. It is to add a bike lane and a bus lane, and if the bus lane is full - upgrade to tram.
(Corollary: this is also why bike lanes always look empty. A full bike line would be equivalent to seven lanes of cars. At an equivalent of 3 full lanes of cars, the bike lane is half-empty)
The problem is utilization: you can't get 9000 persons per hour via busing in most places, weighting by area. Fixed routing scales poorly compared to cars (or bikes which have their own drawbacks) trying to match many-to-many riders-to-destinations.
What's "most places?" This is a traffic flow that's achieved routinely in about every medium size european city. And the way population is distributed, most people live in comparatively dense population centers, across the world.
A medium US city has the commute time of 15 minutes. It's unachievable with transit in any scenario.
> And the way population is distributed, most people live in comparatively dense population centers, across the world.
Yeah. And it sucks. The distributed nature of the US cities gave people far more economic opportunities than in Europe. This resulted in faster economic growth (and still does).
> The problem is that throughput per lane of cars is very limited in comparison to everything else
Bullshit. You are a victim of propaganda.
In reality, a car lane can carry 2000 people per hour with an average car load. With mild car-pooling, it's easy to increase it to 6000 people per hour.
A bus in the US has an average load of just 18 people. So with 10 buses per hour, you get just 180 people per lane per hour. Even at peak loads (200 people per bus) and a bus every 2 minutes, you get 6000 people per lane per hour.
Transit sucks and will always suck. It's pure math. Transit slowly consumes lives and increases misery. All it's good for is to move people to "misery centrals" (downtowns) where pretty much nobody really wants/can live in comfort.
> In reality, a car lane can carry 2000 people per hour with an average car load. With mild car-pooling, it's easy to increase it to 6000 people per hour.
The average car occupancy in the US seems to be around 1.5. How would increasing that be easy? You would have to somehow convince the majority of the population to change their habits, that does not sound easy in any way.
> A bus in the US has an average load of just 18 people.
In the US, a country that has invested heavily into car infrastructure at the expense of public transport. All you're saying is the underfunded public transport in the US sucks. We all know this, but it has no relevance to public transport in general.
> Transit sucks and will always suck. It's pure math.
The simple math here is the number of cars goes up linearly as population increases, which is unsustainable. Meanwhile, public transport only gets more and more efficient.
2000 people per hour is really not that much. And reducing density will not buy you much - density itself doesn't mean anything. If you have a suburb with 50 000 people living there and an office park with 25 000 people working there (both not particularly high numbers), you get a traffic flow of 25 000 people moving both ways, during rush hour. That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the point.
What would buy you much is mixed neighborhoods (aka: the 15 minute city - everything you need for your daily life is within 15 minutes walking distance), because this will eliminate many trips. But mixed neighborhoods work better with higher density - because a supermarket in a low density place cannot be within 15 minutes walking distance.
Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?
> That's grossly simplifying things, but you should be able to get the point.
No, that's called "lying by omission". A person working in an office park doesn't live in one particular housing area assigned to it. So you get a distributed flow instead.
And it's also why transit sucks (sucked, and will always suck): it's unlikely that there's a direct fast transit route between your house and your job. And each connection adds around 10 minutes on average to the commute.
> Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?
Tax the dense office space like it's an industrial pollution.
I almost got into an accident today when a car swerved 4 lanes to the right because an absentminded driver wanted to take the exit at the last second. Like most attentive drivers, I don't like driving on public roads — it brings out the worst in us.
This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
Thankfully, robots will save us. I wouldn't be pushing for cars, if it were not for the existence of Waymo.
> This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
Yeah. They are waaaaay too good at allowing people to move, so urbanists wage an all-out war on them.
Transit has this inherent problem: it HAS to suck. You can't realistically build a fast public transit network allowing easy arbitrary point-to-point trips. It's just mathematically impossible. So transit does what it can only kinda-sorta do well: move people to Downtowns from dense living residential areas.
I don't hate cars. I own and drive a car, though I mostly take transit into SF to avoid the stress.
By geometry problem, what I mean is that an individual car just takes up far too much space (both while moving and while parked) to be compatible with even a moderately dense environment. You need some kind of rationing or metering.
The presence of cars alters the built world in a direction which favors more cars. There are more parking lots, which means less density, which means fewer people can choose to live closer to work, which means more cars, and so on. (Transit does the same in its own favor, of course. Transportation is quite fundamental.)
It is true that transit doesn't work as well with how post-war American suburbs are typically laid out. But it works quite well with the levels of density in pre-war "streetcar suburbs", like those built around the Key System in Oakland. I think the most reasonable solution for post-war suburbs is transit most of the way, and cars (robotic or otherwise) for the last mile.
> By geometry problem, what I mean is that an individual car just takes up far too much space
And? Buses also take a lot of space. A road footprint of a bus is equivalent to about 15-20 cars (because it has to stop often). It pays off when the bus is fully occupied, but outside of rush hours, cars are a more _efficient_ way to use the road space.
Cars force city designers to build in a people-oriented way, rather than optimize for bike lanes.
> The presence of cars alters the built world in a direction which favors more cars
Yes, and that's great. The world where people are free to move is so much better than Soviet-style arrangements where you have to live in your factory's provided units. With great transit, sure.
> It is true that transit doesn't work as well with how post-war American suburbs are typically laid out
It works nowhere. And yes, I lived in very dense areas (Amsterdam, NYC, Moscow).
Well, rush hour is what matters. As those of us who have worked on large distributed systems are aware, you have to provision for peak load. Peak load for cars is much, much worse than peak load for buses. Roads and parking lots are also relatively inflexible, unlike buses and trains where you can run more in one direction depending on time of day.
> Yes, and that's great. The world where people are free to move is so much better than Soviet-style arrangements where you have to live in your factory's provided units. With great transit, sure.
I appreciate the value in being able to move freely, but cars also constrain in many ways. They force more building to happen at the wildland-urban interface, to devastating effect as seen in the Palisades fire.
More importantly, current zoning and parking regulations make modern America very far from a free market. Not as far away as the Soviets were, but definitely nowhere close to reflecting people's true preferences once all benefits and costs are factored in. I doubt cars would be nearly as central in a market where single-family zoning was abolished and the full externalities of driving were captured.
This means that a single bus lane has as much transport capacity as 4-5 car lanes. A single light rail track as much as 10 or more car lanes. It’s just physically impossible to fit all the lanes for cars. The correct answer to congestion is not to build a second lane. It is to add a bike lane and a bus lane, and if the bus lane is full - upgrade to tram.
(Corollary: this is also why bike lanes always look empty. A full bike line would be equivalent to seven lanes of cars. At an equivalent of 3 full lanes of cars, the bike lane is half-empty)