For certain trips like residential cluster A to residential cluster B. Add in a realistic scenario like commuting to work from your residential tower to a warehouse job in a low density light industrial zone and cars will be faster every time. I live in a place with supposedly world class public transportation and it still makes very little sense to take public transportation outside a few scenarios. Most realistic trips you're looking at 2-3 times the travel time you would have by car, even during rush hour.

Here's the thing: public transit does not function in a vacuum. You can't build public transit solely based on current traffic patterns, because the presence of good transport (say, a new rail line) will irrevocably alter traffic patterns.

This means that, if you build a new rail line, you pretty much have to (eg.) change zoning near stations. Is rezoning to allow denser housing "an instrument for various social policies"? Most likely yes, but it's also the sensible thing to do!

Congestion pricing is like trying to put out an oil fire by pouring water on it. And then charging the poor 15% of their paycheck for the water.

The primary reason there is congestion is that where people live and where people work are too far apart, i.e. there isn't enough housing near the jobs. Solve that and there is no congestion. Don't solve it and every other solution will be a new problem.

You can't get people to take a bus to a place the bus doesn't go, and you can't build mass transit from everywhere to everywhere across a thousand square miles of sprawl.

You can build multi-story housing near multi-story offices, and build both next to subway stations.

>> ... The US is a country where it's very difficult to live without a car, except in certain major cities.

In order to do this, we need to rethink how we design cities. Right now, unless, as you point out, you live in a major city, it just isn't well laid out for public transportation. No amount of retrofitting is going to help. City planners need to take public transportation into account when they issue new building permits, etc. They need to encourage business to build closer so people can use public transport. Here in the south, thought needs to be put into thunderstorms. We can have afternoon thunderstorms with 50MPH winds and deadly lightning pop up very quickly. You can't have people out waiting on public transport in that mess.

If we make transportation better, our cities can be less dense. So can't we make transportation better?

What causes congestion? Car traffic. Why does car traffic cause congestion? It's an inefficient use of roads. What are some alternatives?

1) Build more roads. Sure, except it's expensive, time consuming, and you quickly run out of land, and would have to build them one on top of another.

2) Fit more people into existing roads. How? Buses, trolleys, trains, subways, vans. Build out the mass transit to the suburban enclaves.

But all this supposes an urban center is also the only answer. What do people need to congregate in one place for? Usually to work in one place. But why work in one place?

Due to division of labor, most of us don't do things with multiple completely different people on multiple completely different subjects; we're just not that collaborative. But you may need to transport your work to another group in a company. At a bank, all this is paper; in a car manufacturing plant, this is car parts. The former is done digitally now, and the latter could be done, again, by increased transportation efficiency.

All the other things we use are already decentralized outside the city; schools, churches, supermarkets, health care, water, power, recreation. It's really just business, and the ability to work decentralized, that constricts where and how we live. Transportation will make it easier to decentralize. And we can start by giving up our cars.

The other aspect of work decentralization I've already seen at a rental car facility. A computerized kiosk displayed a remote worker on screen, who processed my driver's license, credit card and rental information and directed me to my rental car. It was surprisingly trouble-free and pleasant, and only one of us needed to be there.

Mass transit systems only really work in high density areas.

This is because the time taken to stop (pasengers on and off) then go is high. So the distance matters less than the number of stops.

To be appealing your nearest stop should be within a half mile or so of your house. If a bus can carry 60 people, and only one or two people get in and off at a time, then it takes say 30 stops to fill up, or empty. That makes overall travel speed really slow.

Contrast with a dense city - here big groups get on and off at every stop. So a bus needs fewer stops in a route, while being useful to lots of people.

Cars work in low-density areas because they typically "stop" only twice, once to load, once to unload.

So absolutely yes, we need better public transport, but that ideally means living and working in high density areas. (which for most(?) US people is undesirable.

This isn't quite right. There are many reasons people use public transit besides convenience (poverty, disability, inebriation). My home town is very spread out (1000 per square mile) and many of its buses run only every hour or two. This doesn't mean there are no riders, it just means that people who can drive do.

Density impacts the costs of operating transit and makes it more cost effective to provide higher quality transit. Higher quality transit means more people will use that transit.

> Nobody wants something which is worse than what they already have.

I want something better than what we have, which is walk-able city centers and less space wasted on mandatory parking. Just because driving has been subsidized for decades doesn't mean we can't stop subsidizing driving and shift that money to subsidizing mass transit instead.

I believe that in the long run, standards of living will somewhat equalize. I mean, there will be differences, but I hope those differences will be like the difference between San Francisco and Denver, not the differences between San Francisco and rural Vietnam.

[on transit]

>If this trend spreads across the nation (which would still require a concerted and extended effort), we could see a dramatic paradigm shift that allows both the upper middle class and the lower class to coexist in urban environments.

What I was trying to say is that I believe the problem isn't technical; we have the money and ability to create good transit systems. We need the will to create good transit systems. We need a reason for the politically powerful classes to want public transit in their backyards.

Actually you just said the solution. Let them buy all the exurb crap the want, but make driving hell in all the main destinations. Do that, and your transit investments will actually work.

Only spinless politicians that want to appease both sides make transit fail and let the car win.

We are not even close to having the densest US cities use public transit well. Sparely populated suburbs are a problem, for sure, and they may require cars for a while, but cities still have too many cars because of poor transit management.

While some public transport issues increases with density (harder to e.g. dig new tunnels), one of the major issues with public transport at scale is the cost of laying rails and digging tunnels, and amortising those costs over larger populations makes it far more affordable. Once you have the rails, density means you can offer far more frequent service, which makes a huge difference to users. Being able to just assume there'll always be a train within a minute or two is a huge deal to get people to actually use public transport. Density also works the other way and reduces the need in many cases, as well as drop delivery costs and give new options (e.g. I can get stuff from one of the local Amazon competitors couriered over in 2 hours) that first become cost effective when density is high enough to create big enough markets.

> (though there are artists' renditions, most of them dystopian)

That may be so, but density to an extent also creates opportunity. E.g. my local road takes up roughly 45,000 square metres. Of this, roughly 1/3 is gardens where each family in effect only gets use of a very small portion, leaving many of them largely unused. Another roughly 1/3 is pavement, front yards mostly used for bins etc., and the road. Near our local station, new highrises are going up that will house almost the same number of people on a couple of thousand square metres of space. That's a lot of space freed up.

In other words: The question is how far you want to go. If you slash space wasted on roads and wasted duplication, and increase heights, you can get massive increases in density almost everywhere and still end up with more desirable and practically usable space for most people to actually use for things other than transport that is only necessary due to the low density. If you go further than that, and take away all the green space etc., then yes, you get a dystopia.

But you don't need to go very far. E.g. where I live is relatively average density for London. Increase the density of the London metro area five times, and you could empty the entirety of the rest of the UK into London. If every road like mine was replaced with high rises, you'd be able to achieve that with ease and still be left with vast empty tracts of land for new parks (and allotments for those who actually use their gardens today). London makes up well below 1% of the land area of the UK.

I'm not suggesting it'd be a good idea to create a single megacity for the entire UK population. But achieving the density would free up huge amounts of land even if we set aside space for lots of big new parks. It'd also save vast amounts of energy used on transport by cutting distances for most travel.

Ah, but that's the trouble, right? If you only operate mass transit at the times and places where it's efficient, it doesn't serve the majority of people.

Trains are great for the people who want to travel between two train stations during peak hours, but then there is everybody else.

If you don't live and work adjacent to a train station then you can take a full and timely train during peak hours, but how do you get the rest of the way once the people get off the train and their paths diverge in twenty directions? Even if you do live and work near the train, if you work the late shift and leave between 2200 and 0500 you're waiting two hours for a train every night.

And if you start operating mostly-empty buses to cover the rest of the people then you're back to operating mostly-empty buses.

There is actually a solution to this but it has almost nothing to do with cars and everything to do with building more taller buildings near train stations.

Efficient mass transit requires high density. As long as there is sprawl there will be cars. So if you want less cars, have less sprawl.

Exactly. The focus on improving traffic should be on addressing WHY people feel compelled to drive long distances throughout the day. Are they going to work, shopping, entertainment, etc?

The closer you can bring things to where people live, the less need there would be to get in your car and drive long distances.

Public transportation is the most effective in cities that are the most diverse; i.e, not large blocks of residential surrounding large blocks of commercial.

Even where I live, a city of about 65k, there are residential districts that have >2,000 homes, 1 major shopping district, and two smaller shopping districts. Freeway exits are all at the three shopping districts, which causes all traffic to funnel from the freeway into a very small commercial area before spreading out into the residential neighborhoods. And visa-versa, if you want to get onto the freeway from your home, you get pushed into the same funnel before you can get to the freeway.

The city plan appears to be specifically designed to funnel 65,000 people through shopping districts no matter whether the people need to shop or are just trying to get out of the city (freeway).

Better transportation in outer burroughs will expand the supply of housing within a reasonable commute distance.

Ideas:

* Invest more in expanding public transportation. More express buses, local buses that run more frequently and on time.

* Deregulate private transportation (taxis, private buses).

* Incentivize commutes during off-peak hours.

* Encourage working remotely or flexible work schedules.

* Find ways to get tractor-trailers out of dense areas.

* Actually start enforcing double-parking and jaywalking laws (this one even pays for itself).

* Encourage business development away from already-congested areas

It's basically about the infrastructure cost and higher density actually helps a lot to reduce this cost and make the system more sustainable. Yes, theoretically you can have good infra without high density, but it will cost much more. There's a good reason why the most dense cities in the world (Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo) have the most advanced public transportation system. Even in the US, cities with an acceptable mass transit tend to have decent levels of density.

Why not? Cities were redesigned from 1940s-60s to be compatible with cars. It took an enormous amount of capital, but it was done because of the promise of a new technology.

Most of the infrastructure in suburbs currently under construction will be tear-downs in 30 years. The only redesign that needs to happen is letting current developments age out, removing restrictions on denser and multi-use architecture closer to the city center, and pricing utilities by effective utilization (suburbs use more utilities but don't pay more for them). Denser architecture and urbanization will naturally re-emerge because it is more economically competitive.

Mass transit can then be added in piecemeal, first with busses, then light rail and street cars, then underground trains.

Are you sure? I’ve never had that impression across years of transit, bus and rail, in Pittsburgh and Boston.

I think the biggest barrier is a chicken and egg problem: it’s hard to motivate transit expansion without dense housing and it’s hard to motivate denser housing except along existing transit corridors

And when there is critical mass. Public transit works in dense urban centers, because it's less worse than driving and parking. It doesn't work in smaller towns. There, it just becomes something that everybody pays for but a tiny minority of people ever use.

That's a somewhat of a circular dependency, though, because public transport requires a certain amount of density in order to be viable.