How could the US solve local public transport in their huge suburban neighbourhoods?
How could the US solve local public transport in their huge suburban neighbourhoods?
I mean in those areas where it just identical houses along a road in huge blocks.
How would you realisyicly solve it?
A mix of bike paths and bus routes
28I'm just going to take a moment to bitch even though no one asked.
Here in the US, can we stop just painting bike symbols on the shoulder of 55mph roads and call them "bike lanes"? No, what you're doing is making a suicide lane. Bike paths need to have bollards protecting them so you don't get casually manslaughtered by some idiot glancing down at their phone. As it stands, I refuse to use these criminally dangerous excuses for "bike paths". I know the internet hates when I say this, but I absolutely choose to bike on the sidewalk instead and just go in the grass for a minute if I encounter the rare pedestrian on the same sidewalk. I'm not going to risk my life in such a dumb way. We need to improve these.
17I'm the same. I bike where I feel safe, and that's as far away from cars as possible.
7I fear for my cycle loving wife everytime she rides. She only has a short portion riding on a 40mph road but that is obviously still extremely dangerous. Our infrastructure is quite lacking.
5
We have interurban trails here that connect suburbs to downtown and with the proliferation of e-bikes, there are so many people traveling that way now. I’m a little too far away to be connected to it but my hope is that the approach expands.
7That sounds awesome. I hope that approach spreads too
3
Bus stops on the main road(s), placed so everyone has a stop within a 15-20 minute walk.
Sort of agree with others suggesting getting rid of the neighborhoods in the first place, but sharing walls is hell. When the only way to speak confidentially in your own home is to whisper, it's impossible to wfh or have a telehealth appointment (or, worse, a teletherapy appointment).
2215-20 min is too far, if it is going to have any impact, the distance to the closest bus stop can't be any further from houses than 10 min.
13That sounds more like a old/cheap construction problem than a shared walls problem. I live in an apartment with solid concrete walls built in the 80s and I never hear my neighbours unless they are full-on screaming, which I've only heard happen once.
10The sound is bad enough but with properly constructed walls, it's not a problem.
I have other problems with shared walls. Your neighbors have cockroaches? Now you do too! Bedbugs? Yep those can come on in too. If you live in an apartment, then you bet the landlord will cheap out and not do as effective treatments. You think being clean and not keeping things in cardboard will stop them? Maybe temporarily but they're just waiting to come back out from the walls where they weren't treated. Joy!
The other thing is that if your neighbor smokes cigarettes inside, then you get some bonus secondhand smoke. If you have bad reactions even with allergy medications and HEPA filters, well I guess it's time for you to move or suffer. (You didn't want to use your PTO on anything not sick days right?)
Did your neighbors have a plumbing problem that they neglected? Congratulations on your new mold in your shared walls. (You wanted to call code enforcement on your landlord about this? Good luck, they won't enforce it.)
I'm sure there are real solutions to my above problems but my reality is that the only solution is to move when it's too much to bear. (Haven't lived in one place for more than 2 years because of it...)
5Even worse. I lived in an apartment that suffered water and smoke damage because my upstairs neighbor fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand. It could have been worse than just a fire really. We could have all lost everything or someone could have died.
2
As a Strong Towns article pointed out, solving the problem with cars is not the number of people that drive, but the number of people that drive × the average miles that each person drives.
We can reduce the number of miles that the average person drives without taking away anybody's car, and make transit more cost-effective by reducing the distance it has to go, by simply putting destinations closer together. Zap the exclusive residential zoning laws. Intermix cafés, shops, restaurants, doctors offices, community centers, and such, with the existing neighborhoods. These things are all quiet, and low-impact, barely noticeable among houses, if they don't need giant parking lots.
21Zoning laws are so bizarre. I remember encountering them for the first time many years ago trying to play SimCity and being confounded by what felt by wholly arbitrary game rules. They genuinely accomplish nothing at all, so why have them?
3It's not that they accomplish nothing at all, but what they accomplished was evil. From my studies and reading1, I think that zoning law started out with good intentions to keep noxious industry (tanneries, blacksmith shops, livestock, etc.) away from dwelling places. Like so many things in the United States, though, it quickly got co-opted for racism.2 The Supreme Court issued a decision barring housing discrimination, so the Federal, state, and local governments turned to zoning laws to keep Black people out of white neighborhoods by, e.g. mandating minimum lot sizes, and construction methods, that priced suburban houses out of reach for Black families. Nowadays, we have this pervasive myth that such restrictions were to foster a rural aesthetic, for environmental preservation, or the result of auto industry lobbying, and those probably contributed, but the root of it was segregation. This becomes clear when you learn about what happened when some Black families succeeded financially anyway, and tried to move into white neighborhoods, like the Cicero, IL race riot of 1951.
- Zoned in the USA by Sonia Hirt is a dry, but good read for a super-nerd, as it compares Euclidean zoning in the U.S. to land-use laws in Europe.
- The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein blew my mind with evidence of just how deliberate and explicit it was.
3
You apply the same concepts used for car traffic management to public transit. You have local access, collectors, arteries, and controlled access express/freeways. The frequency and speed of service goes up with each level, while number of access points decreases.
The problem with public transit arises when you expect it to be single modal- like most people in America, since they're used to single-modal cars.
Single modal public transit works when density is very high and you can expect services to be within pedestrian distances of half a mile or so of any public transit station (access point). But the lower density of American cities breaks those systems and makes them slow and unusable since the number of access points for pedestrian walking distance to most services needs to be insanely high, leaving the entire network underserved and underutilized. You have to artificially increase density by "funneling" larger areas into a smaller public transit network to make them work efficiently.Things like busses and trams work for collector/arterial tasks, while direct passenger rail works for the rapid point to point expressway.
What you need to do is then promote self driven transport on the lower neighborhood and collector levels, while supporting public transit at the artery/expressway levels. An ideal way for this in my mind would be promoting advanced bicycle/moped networks on the local access level that feed into collector roads, providing distances of 1-4miles traveled from a home to the first arterial bus or tramway. The busses that run on the arterial level would need to be redesigned to accommodate users bringing their bikes or mopeds with them to use on the other end of their journey, which really expands the reach of the network. They then have to transfer between types a limited number of times while in network.
As long as you can limit a journey to 2-3 mode transfers, and make those transfers as seamless ad possible, it can be made a lot more efficient and user friendly. Providing users the ability to retain advanced mobility (bikes/mopeds) on both ends of the public transport network also eliminates a lot of the range anxiety car-centric people may otherwise feel when getting on public transit.
I personally commute entirely by car but that's because it is a long, largely rural drive with no density to support any kind of public transit. My specific case is unusual though, and if I did live in a city, I would be okay with the above system for a majority of my commuting. I would still own a car for long or special trips, of course. I like it too much.
16Not certain what exactly you mean by "solve", but some solutions already exist like park and ride. I also think as ebikes become more popular they will also solve the "last mile" problem.
13I mean to bring these kinds of neighbourhoods into the mainstream parts of a public transport system.
1
Dedicated bus lanes can have multiple times the capacity in terms of moving people compared lanes that allow cars. Say you got a six lane road in the suburbs, convert the center lanes in each direction to dedicated bus lanes, then have a small median/curb separating the bus and car lanes on both sides. This will make buses faster than cars because of the lower congestion and incentive people to use them, making car congestion go down as well, because people who would otherwise drive are now on the bus.
City Nerd has a great channel focusing on stuff like this on YouTube and Nebula
11With the side benefit of providing a fast lane that emergency services can make great use of
7
Realistically, the easiest way is to rezone some of those areas to retail and office space, and to encourage high density construction.
Rezoning some of those buildings to low density retail and office space will reduce total traffic by allowing some people to have shorter commutes, instead of everyone jamming every highway out of town every day.
And as those buildings age and become more expensive, small sections of them can be knocked down and replaced with higher density buildings, as property values rise. Eventually the whole area with high and medium density, simply because that is what makes sense.
You can also establish commuter rail, where maybe there's only a couple of stops, but they all go to wherever the jobs are. That will help ease congestion while property values rise enough for higher density development to make sense.
11!micromobility@lemmy.world - just need to have infrastructure and enforcement that makes it safe to do stuff like ride a bike or scooter.
10I am not sure micro mobility is the sustainable answer to this problem, though I will admit that I tend to focus on macro mobility, like busses and trains.
Micro mobility is fine is you are interested in it, but it has a too narrow appeal to be any realistic solution.
It also has one of the same problem as a car, the need to drive it.
Meaning you allways have to budget your own fatigue just as you would a car.
1I disagree: Micromobility is the answer to a lot of problems but it's definitely not the answer to all problems.
Your fatigue doesn't necessarily have to be a factor either, you can ride an ebike, scooter, emoto, motorcycle, tuktuk, tiny car, evelo, monowheel, etc. There are a huge number of different types of transportation that require little to no effort to use and are not mentally and emotionally taxing like commuting in a car is (they are, I dare say, fun instead).
I'm not saying we ignore public transport, of course that's important but micromobility can and should be part of the solution too. For many people (myself included), it already is.
2
You could have a bus route along the major street, bus stops every kilometer and a bus coming every 20 minutes.
That'll take you to the city center or to a junction where you can jump on another bus taking you in a different direction.
Maybe make it cheap, and gasoline and taxes on cars more expensive so people are incentivised to use it.
9You don't need to make cars worse to have people use public transit. I visited Japan last year for a couple weeks and their train and bus infrastructure was so good I would have just taken the buss instead of a car if I had a car there. Google maps times were like a 3 minute difference between public transit and car times every single time I checked it. In cali it's at least double the time if not triple depending on where I'm at. Both of these were in the middle of Metropolitan areas. They just need to make public transic as good, cheap and clean as it is in japan. Not an easy task granted.
5Yeah, I kind of added that sarcastically. My view of the US is that it needs some capitalist nuance to it or people won't like it. It's not enough if it's better, or just cheaper for society.
In reality, I understand that people in rural areas need their car. And it's a hassle to do the shopping for a family of 5 without a car. Unless you can have that delivered...
I'm not sure if Japan is a good example for exactly this. As far as I know a parking spot in central Tokyo is more expensive than an apartment in other places of the world. And the city mandates that you have some parking spot or you can't have a car in the first place. I suppose it actually is very expensive to own a car there. However I don't know what they do outside of the cities or how they tax the cars and fuel. And there are cities in the US like NYC where they also don't have space available to own cars.
But public transit in Japan is awesome. They're on time, get you everywhere, are affordable and run every few minutes... The scenic train routes have cute mascots. Everything works. There are colored lines on the floor (in the big city) and you can get by without being able to read... And there are shops with nice japanese snacks just around the corner or within the station. I'd like to have all of that where I live.
3
also rezone to allow mixed use and tall buildings directly along the route. bring some density to the suburbs
2
Those neighborhoods only exist because of cars. Fix transit in the cities and stop subsidizing automobiles and those suburban tracts will empty out.
7Smaller (6 passenger) buses running autonomously. We're not there yet with the autonomy, but there's no reason to stick with one size of bus. Sure, keep big ones on major routes, but use smaller ones for small routes. Heck, make those routes on-demand.
6I'd say more like 15 passenger and security could be a bigger issue, but I completely agree with this.
Same general concept to replace large trains in metro systems. You just go to the nearest station and a single train car pulls up to pick you up and then takes you to any station in the system, with stops only when other passengers are getting off.
3That's called a 'jitney.'
They can follow a regular route, or make detours for door to door service.
Much better with an actual driver to provide safety and assist the low mobility passengers
3Yeah, ride hailing bus services should be more popular
2
That's just a taxi.
-1A taxi has a very expensive component - the driver. And a taxi doesn't pick up strangers on the way to your destination.
3
It kinda depends on what you mean by "solved". You could have a bus route stop at every person house. This would be expensive, frequency would be abysmal, and the routes would take forever and no one would use it.
This issue is that public transit thrives in areas with more density. Get rid of the density public transit ceases to exist.
A more realistic solution for most people would be to try and set up a bike network throughout the neighborhood. Biking, especially e-biking, is mode of transit that can be implemented almost anywhere in a city and have some big benefits to the citizens.
6I wonder if this might be a situation where autonomous vehicles could really solve a problem. Like if there were like 2 or 3 minivan size vehicles that you could summon to ferry you from your house to the nearest real bus stop. The vehicle would only have to go like 20 miles an hour to make it safe for pedestrians and be compellingly worthwhile to make people take the bus instead of drive
4In smaller mexican cities instead of huge busses they have smaller 10 person vehicles that run every 15ish minutes. Terrible for the environment cause it's more cars but better for public transit cause they're consistent and come more often.
3
Get rid of cars and their awful infrastructure and density can comfortably go up.
0
Depends if there is a city center people commute to. If so, park and ride lots, which means putting parking lots at an express bus or train station that goes from the suburb to the city center.
I think the problem, at least in the area I live in, is that people who live in those places want to drive to work. In their cars. And transportation is a county function, not city. So they starve the transportation budget, it's a vicious cycle.
Those house farms are a plague.
5Put a bus depot at the entrance, allow only bicycles inside each suburban loop or whatever.
But in the bigger picture, convince people that they don't want the suburban home. That's a really hard sell after a few generations of idealizing the identical homes in huge blocks just outside the city.
But once voters don't want to live there, rezone it to allow denser living or put a factory there to chase out the remaining homeowners or completely level it and farm the land... Or allow businesses to set up within the neighborhood so that everything is within walking/biking distance?
5suburban homes are already impossible to afford for young people. what we have to do is sell an alternative that's better and affordable and people will flock to it. something multifamily but where you have easy access to recreation/relaxation space, somewhere you can raise a family comfortably and where they kids likely have playmates close by unlike suburbullshit, modern amenities and good sound insulation between units. the edenicity guy has a compelling vision
3
Network of buses/trams and trains. Trains to get in and out of the neighborhood and connect to the city and other neighborhoods, and buses within communities to get around and to/from the train stations. Like a bus stop on every or every other block, then one or two train stations on every neighborhood.
4Yeah, this sounds decently realistic
1It's a reality in many countries already
1
Just a couple small buses with cheap fares. That way you can be anywhere in town quick and cheap. One of the places you could go is a train station? Or stop for bigger busses?
2It has to get approached from two different ways.
On the service side, it means implementing micro transit. These are on demand minibuses. It also means tying this more dense traffic.
On the demand side, it means densifying the community. It could be allowing Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU's) and redeveloping strip malls as high density housing.
2Automated light metro. build the same guideways all over. Trains that hold around 50 passengers, half with corgo bikes. Cookie cutter stations that are easy to factory prefab. Stations every mile on the existing grid. Automated means you run 24x7 with frequent service.
the important part: no station is more than 10 minutes ( 20 including you bike trip) to a central station where you can transfer to any many other trains including express toethe rest of the city. The central stations must all be in a zoned high density retail area so you can do your shoping there. there will be a lot of them scattered around the metro area.
the above will be expensive. However once bilt it would be cheaper than cars.
2Maglev tubes everywhere. We must start tunneling.
2No, just no.
You don't need maglev for local public transport, you don't even need them for high-speed long distance trains.
It is also way too expensive for a local system like this
4Mini maglev. Little tubes.
Here's the proof of concept. See how the tubes connect all the areas?
https://img-us.aosomcdn.com/thumbnail/100/n0/product/2022/07/28/Ye798a18243e76711.jpg
For real though, this sort of tunnel: https://emap-romulus-prod.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2014/06/Green-Lane-sewer-TBM-naming-competition_143111-1024x683.jpg
Just big enough to fit in and blast around.
1You're wrong. Maglev is the future.
-1
Ban cars is step 1. Then it will be easier to figure out
1Super block (smaller inner roads surrounded by main roads) I thinks buses at the end of the blocks as long as the inner roads arereasonabley short enough for wheel chairs to roll down from the middle down.
Bike lanes if its reasonably 10-15 minutes destination.
For nightmare suburbs (long winding roads, no side walks, no standard entry/exits) I feel like you have to have buses that go in the neighborhood. Bike lanes could still be viable here just depending. I am huge fan of the idea of bike lanes to schools for kids to reduce the burden on parents and the traffic associated.
Buses could be hybrid tram like too in some places (batteries on board, but also eltric lines to power and charge off of where they make sense).
1Monorail.
1Monorail!
2Monorails looks cool, but are quite inefficient for the most part.
1
They all own their cars and they want to use them.
My suggestion is car pooling.
Encourage (with money) every ride that has 2 or more people in 1 car.
Put an extra street toll on every ride where there is only 1 person in a car. Yes, even the pizza guy - be strict or let it all be.
1People moved to the suburbs to get away from the city. I say we bring the city to the suburbs.
-3Cars. Cars are great and electric ones don’t make road smog.
Each person being able to go wherever they want whenever they want is a good thing.
Whimsy is a sign of a society operating correctly.
-5Electric cars are still cars, and come with all of the negative externalities of ICE cars, but for the tailpipe emissions: Danger, noise, particulate pollution, social isolation, and infrastructure costs.
The last one is a big problem. Everybody wants to drive anywhere they want whenever they want, but they don't want to pay for it. Lots of people believe cockamamie stories about how politicians pocket all of their tax money instead of fixing the roads. But no, roads are stupid expensive, and paying for them is driving most cities into insolvency.
6They're still noisy, most of the sound while driving comes from the wheels, not the engine
1
The thing is, car drivers should support public transport as much as possible, public transport is the best way to reduce traffic, reducing traffic jams, and giving more freedom to both drivers and public transport users.
2
I wouldn't use public transport. People have generally chosen to use cars, and doing so makes sense for the development type.
If you definitely wanted to take the public transit route, busses are probably the most well-suited thing that could be deployed tomorrow.
The best near-future public-transit thing is probably a fleet of self-driving cars; that's well adapted to low-density housing, permits for transit to doorstep, and permits for a higher usage ratio than individually-owned vehicles.
-6
