The problem isn’t that bikes and buses aren’t manufactured. The problem is that infrastructure is based around cars. Cities aren’t “walking cities” or accessible. Roads and the building plan for everything screams “fuck people without cars”. So people have no choice but to get cars.
Yup,when I went to this suburb in Tennessee, I was baffled by how car dependant it was.
We spotted a Wal-Mart as we drove into a hotel to spend the night, it wasn’t far at all. We asked the desk clerk how to get to it. My mom wanted to go for a walk and since it wasn’t far, we decided to walk there. He pointed in a direction and said it was a mile away but the clerk wasn’t specific with the details.
So we walked that direction, and we walked a mile, but didn’t spot the Wal-Mart at all. Confused, we see some women drive to this building next to us and get out of their car and we ask them for directions to it. They said we had to go back the way we came, go down the road further, and take a turn. It’s straight from there. They said the Wal-Mart wasn’t accessible because of a bypass.
We thank them, turn, and start the walk. However, because the road was so windy, 1 mile was not one mile. We could see the Wal-Mart now but it felt like we weren’t getting any closer to it because we are going in basically a zigzag motion. Right, left, right, left… it’s a mile as the crow flies, but because of the way the road was set up, it took over 2 hours to walk. To make it worse, there is just acres of empty fields between us. But we can’t cut through the empty lots of absolutely nothing because of 10ft+ fencing with barb wire on top. If we could cut through we could have been there and back so quickly. There was nothing on this property, it wasn’t farm land. There was no buildings being constructed, nothing, just fields of empty, but mowed grass. The road we walked was so busy and there wasn’t even a sidewalk. I never seen anything so unfriendly to pedestrians before.
This place was 100% reliant on cars. Even the main town itself didn’t really have any sidewalks to speak of While walking in the main part of the town I only saw 2 businesses and they were blocks apart. Even just going to the store and getting a few small groceries looks to be a hassle without a car.
I had a similar issue with an airport. I had a flight delay and got stuck in Miami for a day, so I had to find an Uber at 2 AM. Ubers were about $60 from the airport, but I noticed if I walked about ten minutes over to a nearby hotel and got an Uber from there it would be about $20. I plugged the hotel into Google Maps, Google goes “Yeah sure, here’s the walking directions!”, and I start walking only to realize that it’s telling me to walk down the shoulder of an eight lane highway.
There was no safe, pedestrian way to leave the airport. Not even to a hotel less than a mile away.
Airports tend to be like that in the west, it was similar when I visited Mexico too. A taxi right outside the airport was a lot more expensive than the taxis across the street. The airport used to have a overhead walk way (which did suck to travel with luggage since it was quite a few steps), but I’m pretty sure they removed it since and the airport is on a major highway.
The airports in Montreal has a bunch of shuttles. Pretty much every nearby hotel runs a shuttle. But it’s not walkable there either.
Montréal has the 747 bus for now, soon™ to he replaced with the REM
This also means that cities are built for cars, not humans. It’s not human sized.
I’m absolutely terrified of crossing any road bigger than two lanes because of that. Whenever I would take a walk I would refuse to go to the neighborhood across the main street and would just stick to my own neighborhood. Even with a bike I don’t trust other drivers to give me the time to cross, I have no idea how people do it
This right here. Though my city has buses it’s inconvenient to all other traffic how they are structured. Literally having to go across 3 lanes to turn left within 100 feet of a 6 lane intersection from a stop on the side of the road in the right hand lane. I love my city. /S
Where are the sidewalks? Every other but maybe third but also forth occasionally house maybe? Fuck you walk in the street.
Btw why is every man hole in the way of a tire. City planning… Not here.
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Pretty sure there are no Americans in these communities. Unfortunately our entire country has been designed for cars and you would almost have to start from the ground up to make it work here. I’ve never had a job that wasn’t many many miles away from home with zero public transit options that run close to home or work. Most places I want to go outside of work is the same situation.
Because people like cars. They buy cars. More cars are made.
That’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. A lot of the modern preference for cars, can be traced back to marketing campaigns and legislations that butterfly effected the current cultural horniness for the automobile into existence.
You’ll find car enthusiasts everywhere, sure, but not everywhere is built for nothing but.
I love playing gran turismo, I love porsche, doesn’t mean I would buy a 1 ton car
Okay, but clearly you are the edge case. People like their own personal transport. Not particularly complicated.
What did you mean by one ton car?
I think they’re commenting about the size of cars as a reason they don’t like 'em. Sort of like saying “I manage a football team on Xbox but won’t go buy a $3.5 billion franchise.” The average car weighs about two tons though. At least according to the first Google result (avg car weighs a bit over 4k pounds).
Yeah it just seemed strangely phrased and like he was trying to say he would buy a small car, but almost any car is going to weigh over a ton.
It’s mainly just used to highlight something they find absurd about cars, which is a fair opinion about cars when considering the weight versus other modes of transportation. Obviously they can’t do everything a car can do, but it’s a fair consideration.
Instead of just discarding used and broken tires, we could use them to make roads. Puts less wear on the current tires on the cars and require less maintenance than asphalt does!
But no, the resources for doing that are being used elsewhere for worse reasons
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Choo Choo motherfucker
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I love public transport. I agree we should have more funding for it.
But the thing with cars is that the biggest cost is given to the one using it. (Buying, maintaining and fueling a car)
The infrastructure cost is quite low compared to the same amount of people using public transport.
It is kind of like building and maintaining train lines, without having to buy, maintain and power the trains riding on it.
The overall cost on society still comes out better. In fact, cheaper, especially in the long run.
But the thing with cars is that the biggest cost is given to the one using it. (Buying, maintaining and fueling a car)
About $12,000 per year per car.
The public bill is about $14,000 per household, or $9,000 per person. Regardless if they do, or can, drive
The infrastructure cost is quite low compared to the same amount of people using public transport.
France’s TGV costs €65,000 per km/year to maintain. That’s ~$43.5/mi/yr.
Obviously roads have a lot of variables, but for a network wide cost, the US Interstate costs $28,020 per mile per year.
The TVG has 35.7 million passenger km per year (~22.3 mi). And total infra maintenance is €32.5 millon (without rolling stock). So €0.91/km. With all non-cap costs it’s €3.47/km
I’m not sure how many passengers miles travelled / total miles the US Interstate has, but I’d wager it works out to less than TVG operating costs. Non cap costs here would include all the personal vehicles, their gas, and driver time cost.
I don’t accept your assumption without better data.
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I understand your sentiment, but the public absolutely pays for cars. Road construction and repair subsidies car ownership and is paid for by the government.
If you didn’t include the cost of the tracks in a light rail public transportation proposal you bet your ass there would be more built!
@Yondoza @anewbeginning Parking is a huge tax on everything. Parking minimums means that the government forces every business to build the cost of parking in to all their prices. Every house and apartment has the cost of parking added to it. In the case of a highrise apartment this can be an extra $50K on to the price of the apartment.
Governments could instead force businesses and housing developers to put that money toward public transport.
The forced cost of parking in the USA is more than the entire national debt.
I dunno, that cherry tree idea seems like a good one.
