Long-distance passenger rail doesn't work in the US. We know it doesn't because we used to have it and when the horseless carriage was invented it fucking murdered it with great efficiency. But urban light rail? Well...
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Replying to @planefag @Chiakipus and
... the incompetence is so fucking thick and fast with all the municipalities who've attempted it that I honestly can't tell if it's simply unworkable in our cities as built, or if incompetents have just fucked it up at every single goddamned turn, it's that big a mess.
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Replying to @planefag @Chiakipus and
Little bit of both. In Detroit, retrofitting mass transit onto the mile roads can never happen because of the 10-15 minute walks to the mile roads, and there aren't half-mile infills. However... best practices exist for a reason, and we don't do any of that.
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Replying to @poiThePoi @planefag and
The basic problem is that transportation is a 3-way tradeoff between: * Speed * Distance between stops * Capacity. Roads get a 7 on the speed, a 10 on the stops, and a 2 on the capacity.
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Replying to @poiThePoi @planefag and
Urban transit done right is 3, 7, 10. Suburban transit done well is 5, 5, 4. Inter-city transit is 8, 1, 3 by design. And since everything is slow and also MUST carry a ton of people, that requires density (which then let you have lower headways) and short distances.
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Replying to @poiThePoi @planefag and
And suburban transit at any reasonable cost per rider will never get you to every door, so you'd better be planning where you give up on TOD and build a giant parking lot. /And also where you stick the carshares in the other direction.
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Replying to @poiThePoi @planefag and
suburban transit doesn't get every rider to their door in Japan, either, and yet...
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Replying to @380kmh @poiThePoi and
Their cities are built for this, though. Look at Tokyo, how it's kind of a massive network of self-contained neighborhoods, with each few blocks having its own drugstore, etc. For me, it's a 5 mile drive minimum to the closest drugstore, and it's considered really close.
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We have a fundamental challenge in that we have cities laid out with a nice usable grid-like road system but just too many fucking people for "everyone has a car" to work. And nobody likes taxis. Busses work pretty well, but can't match subway capacities.
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And why don't we have more subways? Just look at how fucking many *decades* it took NYC to open that new subway station they just opened. One budgeting and political clusterfuck after another. God I hate cities
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given that these problems seem specific to american cities, maybe your problem is with americans more than with cities
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Replying to @380kmh @poiThePoi and
That is a leading theory of mine, yes
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