Foot, bike, and transit don’t have to be quickest to be the best or most convenient overall way to get around. If you were freed of the burden of having to own a car in the first place, in fact, any of them would be better by default. Your contention that people will always choose to drive unless another mode is faster is plainly refuted by basically every major first world city outside of North America. You apparently view those cities as “forcing” people not to drive (by having built environments that predate cars by hundreds of years and aren’t designed to accommodate them, or by passing on the costs of driving to the actual drivers, or by whatever other means, though for most people the answer is really just by making it feasible for them not to even have a car), but designing a city so that “you can jump in a vehicle and take any road to get to your destination” is as much a policy choice as closing a section of the city to cars. There is no neutral here, every policy choice “forces” people into decisions they might not make under a different set of circumstances (I suspect most Amsterdammers would buy a car if they lived in Houston). Most people in KC (and throughout the US) are forced into cars thanks to decades of policy choices favoring automobility and denigrating all other modes. And for what? What exactly makes the car “super efficient”? Just the speed with which you can (theoretically) get from point A to point B (provided your journey is fully contained within a place built to accommodate it)? That seems like an exceptionally narrow view of “efficiency” that ignores both the externalities that your car journey imposes on society at large (e.g., a bus carrying 20 people is far more energy efficient that 20 cars carrying lone individuals) and its opportunity costs to you (e.g., if you take public transit, you can focus on some other task during your commute time instead of driving; if you bike, you can skip the gym).beautyfromashes wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 11:27 pm Foot, bike and public transit will never be the quickest except in one condition….gridlock, and that’s only when there’s an off-street subway-type option. Even then, waiting for train, transferring once or twice and walking to your destination is almost always slower. The idea that you can jump in a vehicle and take any road to get to your destination is super efficient, when time is your main factor. Even your European model of rapidly limiting traffic shows that the only way to slow car growth is to force it. So, you have to force dense build construction causing the gridlock that pushes people towards transit. This is basically the goal of road diets. You create gridlock to push people to alternatives. But, many times you don’t have to diet to get the increased traffic you desire. Hence, the expample of Brookside. Increased traffic also causes slower speeds because the spaces between are less causing more caution. Solves the driving speed danger and less expensive than totally redoing miles of a road.
I don’t want to create gridlock. It’s not my goal to increase traffic. I want exactly the opposite of that, fewer cars on the road. I don’t know that I believe gridlock breeds “more caution.” Drivers don’t slow down in gridlock because they are behaving more carefully around other cars, they slow down in gridlock because they have no other choice. And although it’s true that gridlock does slow cars down, it doesn’t address (and in fact exacerbates) their other issues, like noise and pollution. The aggregate cost of, say, additional cases of asthma (to choose just one thing caused by car traffic) is certainly less visible than the cost of re-engineering the road, but I’m not sure it is cheaper. And in the end, I’m not really clear on what the advantages of more traffic over redesign are actually meant to be, except for this specious guess that it’s cheaper, and maybe a vague opposition to “forcing” people to act against what is presumed to be their basic nature.
In America, I would guess that all transit is subsidized. But this isn’t a binary “subsidy? Y/N” question. Transit receives basic subsidies sufficient to keep it operating, but not necessarily operating at a level that makes it viable for people to rely on day to day in lieu of a car. Cars receive subsidies that actually induce people to use them, in the form of “free” roads, abundant parking, cheap gas, etc. People are also induced to drive by the pathetic state of transit and the hostility of our roads and built environment to biking and walking.What transit isn’t subsidized though? I suppose if financial concerns were the primary focus, walking and biking would the clear winner. They also allow anywhere travel though, in most cases, would take more time and would be less accessible to the elderly or those with physical difficulties and are more difficult in bad weather.
Cars are not necessarily better for the elderly or for people with disabilities either. These vulnerable populations are the people who benefit most from robust and accessible public transit (and, for whatever it’s worth, when I lived in the Netherlands I saw elderly people biking in rain and snow all the time). That obviously doesn’t really exist in KC at this point, or in most American cities, but clogging the streets with more traffic doesn’t help them either. And in a city like KC, where transit exclusively comprises buses and an at-grade streetcar, traffic isn’t exactly a recipe for better transit (in the case of Brookside specifically, the streetcar could have its own ROW, but that isn’t happening any time soon).
