“Giving people more viable alternatives to driving means more people will choose not to drive, so there will be fewer cars on the road, reducing traffic for drivers.”
Concise, easy to understand, and accurate. I have used it at least a dozen times and it is remarkable how well it works.
Also—
“A bus is about twice as long as a car so it only needs to have four to six passengers on board to be more efficient than two cars.”
This to me comes across as reaching: It’s easy to design streets that are for people, but accommodate the occasional delivery vehicle, or ambulance. (A standard ambulance is only about 8 feet wide.) How often are people buying new couches or having heart attacks, anyway? We also don’t need most of the road infrastructure for transport of goods, and service vehicles. Every city street, county road, state highway, or Interstate highway that I’ve ever driven on, anywhere, has a vast majority of consisting of personal vehicles, with the exception of I-80/94 through Gary, Indiana. Freight-carrying trucks aren’t even allowed in the 3rd, left-most lane most of the time. Suburban streets are crazy wide; much wider than needed for freight delivery, or even the large units that fire officials insist upon. Smaller fire trucks exist, too, and are very effective where they are used. And, even if subgrade detention is the best solution in a particular situation, something like, say, a park can go on top, and offer much better infiltration than a parking lot. I know of stormwater vaults in large buildings, so they don’t necessarily preclude buildings on a site. In any case, how many parking lots have a detention basin underneath?
Lastly, you’re severely misrepresenting my point of view by comparing to wailing, “cars bad,” and thinking that’s a solution. No, I look to solutions that cities around the world (including my own, in some limited cases) have actually, successfully implemented. Adding lanes is the only politically viable solution sometimes, but it mostly just makes the problems worse in the long-run.
Suburban streets are literally designed around firetrucks. We make them design around allowing firetrucks to reach all houses without having to back out of the neighborhood. That’s why cul-de-sacs exist 90% of the time. They’re firetruck turnarounds.
The developers don’t*why to do this. They want 16ft roads with people folding their mirrors to pass each other so they can cram in more 1500 square foot houses they sell for a million dollars.
They also want zero green space, but we require impervious cover. Specifically, we limit IC to 25% because we’re in a recharge area for an aquifer. We also require water quality treatment of that 25%.
That’s generally what’s under a lot of the roads here. They do rooftop rainwater collection and storm drains that are piped to underground storage that discharges slowly to a retention pond through a jellyfish filtration system.
We allow the grass to treat water naturally where we can and put the storage under the pavement.