I understand your disdain for communism Captain. But some of us have been equally dismayed at capitalism. It isn’t all “build a better mouse trap” like its sold to be. Just a few examples from my hi-tech career.
In the '90s a company called Austek Microsystems had a cache controller chip for Intel 386DX systems that, frankly, blew the doors off the 385 chip. It was indeed a better mouse trap. Intel fought this chip by making it very difficult for anyone to order a 386DX unless bundled with a 385. When our tech built the evaluation boards (we did a run of 40) he simply ordered the bundle, threw away the 385 chips, and there you go. But real computer builders cannot do that. Too expensive.
Microsoft Excel was never better than 123. Word was never better than Word Perfect. Microsoft got around this with bundling.
Digital Research wrote and sold DR-DOS, but Microsoft would put intentional errors into their software products that, if run on DR-DOS, would fail in odd but subtle ways.
We’ve seen recent threads here about what Big Oil knew about climate change and purposefully hid from us for decades.
You seem to be thinking that those of us who are complaining about what is wrong with capitalism want communism instead. You are constantly arguing a straw man here. We don’t want communism. We want capitalism fixed. Why is that hard for you to see?
You missed the reports a few years ago, when protestors were put in a cage, a so-called “free speech zone” a couple miles away from the person or thing they were protesting about? Other protestors were met by a phalanx of police in riot gear, because they were protesting the “wrong” thing.
True - but the U.S. has been a laggard in public transportation since long before folks like Sean Hannity were arguing against it.
Part of that does indeed represent cultural/political choices, but a big part of it is geographic. We have a very low population density as a country. Outside of the obvious exceptions, our cities also tend to have low population densities. Outside of the northeast, our major cities are also very far from each other - the distance from New York to Chicago, for example, is farther than you can get anywhere from the largest metro in any major European country. We also have a smaller share of our population in our single largest metro (7%) than most other nations (average of about 16% in the Euro area) - New York is a major city, but it doesn’t dominate the national population distribution the way cities like Tokyo or Paris or even Toronto do.
All those things make transit more expensive, and less efficient, than it is in nations that have high population densities and short trip lengths.
Hannity is a symptom. Metro Detroit covers four counties. A lot of people live in the suburban counties, and commute to Detroit, or to other cities in the burbs. Three of the counties have been trying, for years, to establish a unified mass transit system.
Two years ago, the counties were in agreement, but the proposal was blocked by the (L&Ses) in Lansing. The majority of the (L&Ses) who blocked the proposal do not represent the counties involved in the proposal.
You are mistaken! For one I realized a long time ago that humans are not angels. I also agree that each one of us should look out for number one. What I disagree is the tone of the protest, it’s not constructive. It’s like road rage. It gets precisely the reaction it is getting from me. I come from a family of business people, mainly small business people and I would say that on balance capitalism has produced more good than harm which is not to say it’s perfect but a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
If you want pleasant responses, post pleasant protests.
Before the tech bubble burst Austin was trying to change the employer landscape to make public transportation workable. They did this by trying to lure big employers downtown, so that a system could be created out to the burbs to get workers back and forth. Intel bit at the apple and started to build a new building. It got to the steel beams phase before the bubble put a halt to any new development. The site was sold off a year or two later. Austin, like most American cities, is not built to make public transportation work.
What is it like commuting between Detroit and the burbs? This man made the news a few years ago for his commute. He lives in Detroit, because he can’t afford to live in the burbs, but he works in Rochester Hills. His old car broke down, but he can’t afford to get it repaired. So, he uses city buses, and feet. He walks a mile or so from his house to a bus stop in Detroit. Rides the bus to the city of Troy. Then walks seven miles, to get a city bus that gets him to work. The report overstates some things, it’s 10 miles of walking each way, not 21, and the car that broke down was an 88. He had not been making the walk since 88. But the bottom line was he left his house at 8am to get to work for his shift at 2pm.
After he made the news, someone started a go fund me account, and a Ford dealer stepped up, and they gave him a new car, because that is the only reasonable way he can get to work.
Not sure what an “L&S” is, but the above isn’t surprising. But while political philosophy and cultural attitudes certainly affect outcomes like this, the fundamental geographic and demographic characteristics of these areas make it much less likely that transit can get approved.
Detroit is a pretty big metro area. But it’s also very spread out. They’ve got basically the same population density as Dallas/Fort Worth (about 2.8K per square mile over the metro). Which isn’t very dense. They’re more spread out than DFW - a smaller portion of the metro lives in Detroit proper than in Dallas proper.
It’s hard for transit, even rubber tire networks like bus services, to compete with private automobiles as an efficient and cost-effective transportation method in these types of lower-density areas.
I’m in Orange County, CA. Our population density is right around 4k per sq mi. Just slightly more dense overall. But we also have perhaps 1/4 of the geographic area that is even more dense. Don’t know the numbers there, but that part of the county has a workable (but definitely not great) bus service. It also helps that it’s basically a grid layout, with major streets every 1/2 mile. Most of those streets have busses running along them, back and forth. So getting from one place on the grid to another is often a matter of taking two busses - one for the north/south portion of the trip and one for the east/west portion. Theoretically, you can get anywhere on that grid with roughly a 1/4 mile walk on each end.
Of course, in practice, there aren’t enough busses. And with the frequent stops, it takes a long time, especially compared to a car. I used the busses from time to time to get from home to office (usually when the car was getting worked on). What was a 15-20 minute commute in my car became an hour using busses. The wait between busses at the transfer was frequently 20 minutes or more. And the line that goes closest to my house has a long route and a short route. The short route ends about 3/4 of a mile from my house. If that was the next bus to come along at the transfer, the wait for the long route was usually longer than the time it took me to make the walk. While that’s not a big problem for me, for someone with a more limited ability to walk, it adds some significant time to the commute.
My long winded point is that the density of Detroit and DFW seems to be on the edge of supporting at least a rudimentary transit system. And transit systems seem to be a bit of a “build it and they will come” type of venture. You have to start with a bit of faith that people will use them if they are there. (Plus some surveys that at least show the population is open to, and hopefully supportive of, the idea.)
–Peter
PS - L&S is shorthand for Leaders and Statesmen, which should be read with the most cynical tone you can muster
I don’t think “build it and they will come” necessarily holds. To gain riders, transit needs to provide a transportation mode that’s useful and valuable compared to alternatives. It’s very easy to invest in transit that doesn’t do that well, or does it only for a very small number of riders. There are lots of other policy reasons to invest in transit besides maximizing ridership, of course. But if you’re looking to get people to ride, “they will come” to transit resources only if the transit resources are useful to them.
It’s just harder to make transit useful for lots of people in places that aren’t particularly dense. It just costs more to provide the service, both in terms of amount of area covered and in terms of frequency. The shift to Work From Home makes the problem worse, since central business district jobs were typically the easiest to service with transit and were the ones where transit offered the largest material benefits compared with driving.
Yes, it is a bit of oversimplification. But when a transit system exists, over time businesses will start to locate closer to the system to access a larger pool of potential employees. And people will start to move closer to the system because doing so can be beneficial to them, as you point out. Both bring more riders. That isn’t sufficient to start a system, but it does help support it in the longer term.
I guess I’m saying there is a bit of a feedback loop between the existence of a transit system and population density. The system itself encourages population density to increase, and that increase in density makes the system more valuable. The trick for planners is to find that balancing point where there is sufficient density to make transit possible, but not wait so long that density makes it too expensive to build the system.
Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, when the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART) was proposed, it included a line up to the North Bay, across the Golden Gate Bridge, all the way up to Cloverdale. But the NIMBYs in Marin Countly killed that link, kept it off for nearly 30 years…
Eventually, the voters approved a new rail link, using the nearly gone tracks from the prior proposal, Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit, or our SMART train, from Just above Santa Rosa to Larkspur, so far. It had to overcome the same old NIMBYs of old, but it’s going well, has more to go to complete the last miles to Cloverdale, and for now to get into SF, the Ferry at Larkspur is as good as it gets…
One day, it really should connect to the BART system, open it all up to travel, growth… But it took, so many years of work to get it passed, funded… Covid, slowed its growth, but they are coming back…
Sketch is from the 1957 BART proposal… Its beauty was that it would have ringed the whole Bay Area, but we’re stilll missing that GG crossing…
Only if the transit system actually does provide access to a larger pool of potential employees. If people don’t find the system useful and valuable compared to alternatives, then being close to the transit system doesn’t provide much advantage to the employers. If most people are going to drive to work, the employers might prefer to be in an auto-accessible location rather than transit.
I guess, though one problem with feedback loops is that they can run both ways. For example, if businesses stop bringing workers into the downtown, the system gets less beneficial for residents - so they stop locating close to the system. Which makes the system less attractive to employers, so they stop locating close to the system. Which is what may be happening with Work From Home, which is decimating transit systems across the country (though with service cuts rather than people moving away).
I heard that decades back Los Angeles had a great public transport system. The city gov decided to sell it to private investors. A consortium of Ford, Firestone and Shell bought it. And then purposefully ran it into the ground.
Density can be measured a few ways: by residents, jobs and housing. The corridors have between five and 10 residents per acre within a half-mile on either side of each route, according to 2015 figures cited by Let’s Move Nashville, the official city transit plan. The same areas also have between 12 and 54 employees per acre. Most of the census tracts along the corridors had fewer than seven residential dwellings per acre in 2010, the most recent year with available data…
Federal Transit Authority guides to transit development planning say that light rail and rapid bus systems are best suited for areas with a minimum housing density between 12 and 25 residential units per acre.
Nashville’s corridors fall below those ranges, but their employment density makes up for some of the difference. A 2010 study by UC Berkeley researchers found the average light rail system in an average city requires approximately 56 jobs and persons per acre — sometimes referred to as “activity density” — to be cost effective. They assumed an average rail system would cost $50 million per mile to build.
Nashville’s activity density ranged from 17 to 52 along each of its five proposed light rail corridors in 2015, according to the city’s plan. Also, planners estimate the rail system would cost more than $120 million per mile.
I was in SF last summer, and we used the BART from the airport. Was impressed by the ease of use, the speed, and of course the cost compared to uber/lyft.
Went into Marin county for sightseeing, took the Sausalito ferry across, cool boat ride,went close by Alcatraz. A friend from high school picked us up, so didn’t have to worry about transportation, very scenic area. Between the weather and the scenery, I now understand why real estate is soooooo expensive in Marin county.
Compared to Michigan, the BART is head and shoulders better than what passes for public transportation here.
Yes, of course. And the builders are still building communities that their customers desire.
And many people do choose to live in those kinds of places, and public transit works reasonably well there. And TaaS (Transportation as a Service) is, and will be, more popular in those places.
