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mobby_6kl posted:So NL isn't significantly different from even Germany or France in terms of annual distance driven, or number of trips. All the bikes seemed to eliminate public transport usage lol. You say that like it's a bad thing? Public transit is very expensive while bike infra is cheap, both in terms of installation and upkeep. Biking also improves public health compared to other options. In a country like the Netherlands where all three infrastructures are in place, you can see how people naturally prefer bikes for short trips, public transit for medium to longer trips, and cars for when the other two are not practical. In most places in the world, people will e.g. be using cars despite not really affording them, because the other 2 infras don't exist (the U.S). Or, taking public transit for short trips because bike infra is terrible (parts of Europe).
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Oct 3, 2022 10:11
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No, it's not a bad thing, though usually bikes are sold as being great because they're replacing car trips. And I assume they still have to run the buses and trams and for people who can't bike or those medium-length trip, so how much is actually saved.
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Oct 3, 2022 10:35
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mobby_6kl posted:No, it's not a bad thing, though usually bikes are sold as being great because they're replacing car trips. And I assume they still have to run the buses and trams and for people who can't bike or those medium-length trip, so how much is actually saved. 1. I'm sure they still do replace car trips, but you probably can't draw firm conclusions about how much so from those statistics. They are not A/B experiments. You can only guess about causality. I still think "cars for when the other two are not practical" holds, and it implies that people who are able to bike will prefer that mode. Of course such a statement is not true for everyone, but the experience of the Netherlands seems to support making the assumption that there is a significant enough portion of the population where this holds. 2. You can probably guess what increased or reduced ridership on a bus or tram line means. That's right, you alter the timetable to accommodate the changed needs. (Also, for buses, the routes.) If, as a thought experiment, we open a new bike thoroughfare from suburb A to downtown, and the distance is "bikeable", you could consider having fewer services per hour on the tram if ridership declines. And guess what, you've just saved a lot on operating expenses!
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Oct 3, 2022 11:37
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You might also get more people on bikes when the weather is nice, while they might not fancy riding through wintry weather, instead taking public transport or driving by car.
Hollow Talk fucked around with this message at 09:01 on Oct 6, 2022 |
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Oct 3, 2022 11:56
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Of course, there's only so much we can infer from that data. Almost certainly some car trips were also substituted, but unless the Netherlands were way out compared to its peers, probably not that many. I couldn't find much data on per-capita public transport spending unfortunately, only this article below (it's usually combined with all transportation spending). Anyway, usually you can't cut down on frequency too much before it becomes useless, nobody's going to rely on a bus that's only scheduled once an hour. Or if more people take it when it's rainy, you have to run the same schedule on sunny days as well. I tried plopping down some routes in google maps, and usually most connections seem to be every 10-15 minutes, with some buses every 30 minutes. Pretty similar to other countries, but that's definitely not hard data. https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2011/08/provincial-expenditure-on-public-transport-doubled-since-2005
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Oct 4, 2022 19:16
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Lobsterpillar posted:Yeah certainly sounds like widening was a poorly thought through mistake. Honestly that's the sort of thing that cities should know is a mistake by now-all of those things are well known to lead to higher speeds. It'll be an expensive uphill battle to get speeds back down. Update on this... town council claims: * Everyone else is saying the striping is great and they love it * Traffic calming "has a lot of beliefs and not all of them work" * You can't solve speeding * Striping the speed limit onto the road helps * When they've issued tickets it's the people in the neighborhood that get caught Basically every word out of their mouth is a lie in general, so I'm not surprised they're equally unaware of accepted traffic calming methods.
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Oct 7, 2022 01:59
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devicenull posted:* When they've issued tickets it's the people in the neighborhood that get caught How would they even know this? Are the police sharing a dataset of all the tickets issued in a particular neighborhood to the council, which the council cross-references with residence data? I doubt they have time for that. More likely, they have an anecdote to back this up, such as a police officer made this claim once and nobody feels like checking. I mean, I don't really doubt it, because: On any street, traffic will consist of (visitors + residents + through traffic). In a residential neighborhood, through traffic will be close to 0. Residents will outnumber visitors, probably by a factor of 10 or more, just from the commuting traffic. (Someone back me up on this with actual data...) And based on that alone, most speeders will be residents, even in the relative frequency of speeding in each group might be a bit lower for residents. It doesn't really matter who is speeding though. That's the really stupid part of this statement. What matters is to calm traffic down, and traffic calming measures work equally on all categories of motorists. You're right, they just don't know what they are doing and should be replaced by competent traffic engineers.
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Oct 7, 2022 11:54
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So I had to go back to see what's the background there wasdevicenull posted:Their masterpiece is now complete We have the same poo poo nearby, about a mile long, wide-rear end road with no parking, trees, bike lanes, anything. A few years later someone got sufficiently mad so they tore up the streets every 100m or so to make these horrid speed bumps. They're deceptively tall and will easily cause normal ride height cars to scrape. 
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Oct 8, 2022 16:31
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mobby_6kl posted:So I had to go back to see what's the background there was 
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Oct 8, 2022 17:52
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mobby_6kl posted:So I had to go back to see what's the background there was This is a raised intersection https://nacto.org/publication/urban-street-design-guide/intersections/minor-intersections/raised-intersections/ Ideally the whole middle of the intersection would have a different treatment to make it more obvious
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Oct 8, 2022 18:09
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Fuschia tude posted:That's a... speed bump? It looks like a cobblestone crosswalk Yeah not technically a "speed bump", Devor is right of course. But just as annoying if not more so.
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Oct 8, 2022 19:32
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:How would they even know this? Are the police sharing a dataset of all the tickets issued in a particular neighborhood to the council, which the council cross-references with residence data? I doubt they have time for that. They obviously don't know - it's not like they're going to have these stats available seconds after I asked them the question on a live call. They later called us up and said they didn't stripe the middle of the road because it's all a passing zone (news to me and I think everyone else driving down the street). If we get them to do a dotted stripe, is that going to help at all? I imagine it'll push people towards the actual sides of the road instead of straight down the middle?
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Oct 11, 2022 23:42
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devicenull posted:They later called us up and said they didn't stripe the middle of the road because it's all a passing zone (news to me and I think everyone else driving down the street). If we get them to do a dotted stripe, is that going to help at all? I imagine it'll push people towards the actual sides of the road instead of straight down the middle? How wide is the street, from curb face to curb face? Parking on one or both sides? Post link to a google street view of a comparable street if you care to
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Oct 12, 2022 00:42
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Devor posted:How wide is the street, from curb face to curb face? Parking on one or both sides? Post link to a google street view of a comparable street if you care to 33 ft wide - parking is only allowed on one side (although that's not really enforced, so there's an occasional car on the other side). Not a ton of people park on the street, as you're also required to have a driveway and garage. This is a pretty typical example of what it looks like - https://goo.gl/maps/hxgLMu4J4xRq5D4k8
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Oct 12, 2022 23:27
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devicenull posted:33 ft wide - parking is only allowed on one side (although that's not really enforced, so there's an occasional car on the other side). Not a ton of people park on the street, as you're also required to have a driveway and garage. Huh, interesting that all the letterboxes are right up by the road. Is that typical for suburban US? Down here we have them all on the private property side of the footpath.
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Oct 12, 2022 23:58
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Lobsterpillar posted:Huh, interesting that all the letterboxes are right up by the road. Is that typical for suburban US? Down here we have them all on the private property side of the footpath. For the most part. The mail carrier has a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side so they can just drive down the road putting mail in people's boxes. It's better than walking, at least.
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Oct 13, 2022 00:07
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devicenull posted:33 ft wide - parking is only allowed on one side (although that's not really enforced, so there's an occasional car on the other side). Not a ton of people park on the street, as you're also required to have a driveway and garage. How's the one-side parking restriction implemented? Signed no-parking? Local ordinance? Neighbors just agreed not to park on one side? Just from looking at that street view, it's a very typical secondary/tertiary residential road. It's legal to park on either side - and when one side has a car parked, a double yellow down the middle does not leave room for cars to pass the parked cars. On a striped road with parking being legal on both sides, you would have 8' minimum for parking, 10 or 11' lanes, and a double yellow. So 36' minimum for parking both sides with centerline striping. If you formally disallowed parking on one side, you could do 11'-10'-8', but on such a low volume road it would be unusual. If the road is truly only one-side parking permitted, then the reason not to paint is because it costs money and there haven't been any accidents, and no one important enough is yelling in the ear of the guy in charge of that. If all the neighbors got together and put together a petition you might get them to put down some cheapo paint that will get faded in a couple years.
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Oct 13, 2022 02:02
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Devor posted:How's the one-side parking restriction implemented? Signed no-parking? Local ordinance? Neighbors just agreed not to park on one side? Signed no parking + an ordinance, but I've only ever seen it enforced once in the ~6 years it's been like this. I think we can get them to do a dotted yellow down the middle pretty easily, if that's going to make a difference (I think it would?)
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Oct 14, 2022 00:23
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devicenull posted:Signed no parking + an ordinance, but I've only ever seen it enforced once in the ~6 years it's been like this. I think we can get them to do a dotted yellow down the middle pretty easily, if that's going to make a difference (I think it would?) I mean... What sort of difference do you think it'll make? What are you trying to achieve here? What are the issues. just speed? Cyclist or pedestrian safety? Rat running? A centerline is just a delineation measure and will help by showing people where on the road to position their cars whole driving, which is only really going to result in benefits when that is specifically a problem (usually on much narrower roads) On the parking matter, imo it's not a big deal if people park both sides of the road, unless the road is mean to be a significant thoroughfare. Depends on the surrounding network
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Oct 14, 2022 01:42
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Lobsterpillar posted:I mean... What sort of difference do you think it'll make? What are you trying to achieve here? Everyone (including school buses!) goes about 45 down the road. It's marked as 25.
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Oct 14, 2022 02:03
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Plant roadside trees. Sell it as for the environment.
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Oct 14, 2022 06:15
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nielsm posted:Plant roadside trees. If you read further back, apparently they cut down the roadside trees. As a "traffic calming" measure.
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Oct 14, 2022 08:17
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Lead out in cuffs posted:If you read further back, apparently they cut down the roadside trees. As a "traffic calming" measure. Oh right. Yeah. Uh, put some big, heavy planter boxes, with reflective stuff on them, on the side of the road that permits on-street parking. It will help enforce parking happens on the correct side of the road, if passage near the curb is obstructed at regular intervals. They can also function as community gardens, strengthening the neighborhood community.
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Oct 14, 2022 09:33
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No real question, just lolCugel the Clever posted:Childrens' school crossing guard: "This recently widened road regularly sees sociopathic/negligent drivers roaring through. If common sense infrastructural improvements aren't made, one of them's going to murder a kid right in front of me."
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Oct 22, 2022 08:38
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Well if they want to be inhumane about it and just prioritize either throughput or speed, then the least they could do is to pay lip service and spend the money for a pedestrian bridge that nobody will use. (Because nobody uses those, even in Tokyo.) Well, if there's an actual crossing guard at school opening and closing, a lot of kids might actually use the bridge to avoid getting yelled at. Hm, I guess there might be a solution after all? Hippie Hedgehog fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Oct 22, 2022 |
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Oct 22, 2022 21:12
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:Well if they want to be inhumane about it and just prioritize either throughput or speed, then the least they could do is to pay lip service and spend the money for a pedestrian bridge that nobody will use. (Because nobody uses those, even in Tokyo.) I'd say probably half the kids used the pedestrian bridge near the middle school I went to. It was nice to have the option if there was a bunch of traffic you didn't want to wait for. I imagine elementary school kids would be more likely to use it because they're slower and less rebellious. High schoolers would probably use it less for the same reasons (you know, if they're a dork without a car).
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Oct 22, 2022 23:06
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cars.jpg https://twitter.com/the_transit_guy/status/1585617226794688512?s=61&t=n7RUTRQp-2HCwAkihf_tkA it blows my mind when I see how much of the land is used.
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Oct 27, 2022 18:26
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Proust Malone posted:cars.jpg this guy likes to stack viral numbers by making this post repeatedly but he's whiny and wrong parking lots in a downtown are a highest and best use in anticipation of further growth. a parking lot is much easier to redevelop than an existing structure. in the mid 20th century as a lot of american cities hollowed out due to suburban growth/white flight, a bunch of older low density commercial properties were torn down due to vacancy. they'll get redeveloped again if there's demand for it, since we're talking about kansas city, probably won't be for a while. people like to make this same point posting photos of downtown houston in the 1970s and, fifty years later, downtown houston is a lot denser now he also focuses on the immediate historical CBD of these towns which, for reasons, isn't really desirable anymore. cities built before cars often change shape after the introduction of cars, especially north american cities. mid tier regional cities like kansas city don't really need a centralized dense CBD, that tends to happen more in larger, nationally important cities. that screenshot is probably like 3% of kansas city in total, just one neighborhood of dozens. cities develop polycentrically now, insisting on some kind of von thunen style monocentrism is simply nostalgia for a glorious 19th century past that isn't coming back and arguably never existed buuuut it generates clicks among people who share this same longing for an imaginary past and that is a benefit in itself i guess. this isn't workable urban theory, its lifestyle branding for people who get mad that cars exist. "why don't we simply make everywhere as dense and walkable as brooklyn" without really examining how brooklyn came to exist or how land development even works in the united states Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Oct 27, 2022 |
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Oct 27, 2022 19:43
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as a follow up i want to make it clear i think cars are corrosive to good urbanism but you're not going to be able to get rid of them, ever, and it would be easier and more effective to ban private land ownership than it would be to ban private vehicle ownership blaming big roads for bringing more cars is just going halfway. no big roads doesn't mean no cars, it just means horrible choking traffic. we know this because before we had big roads, when we had cars, we had horrible choking traffic. if only we could roll the clock back to 1890 and have naturally occurring pedestrian oriented urbanism things would be splendid, but we live in a world of widespread car ownership, fierce enforcement of private land ownership, and a mostly free market based land development system, and those inputs lead to the urban landscape we see before us, regardless of how much we like or dislike it
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Oct 27, 2022 20:15
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"'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens"
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Oct 27, 2022 20:18
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You can in fact ban all cars from cities. Some already have! It really is that easy, you just ban them.
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Oct 27, 2022 20:21
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:You can in fact ban all cars from cities. Some already have! Same with seizing the means of production, you just seize them
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Oct 27, 2022 20:23
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:You can in fact ban all cars from cities. Some already have! you can ban cars from city centers sometimes but good luck getting rid of cars restoring walkability to american downtowns post deindustrialization and suburbanization is a long fought process and isn't viable in a lot of areas, as evidenced by going on seven decades of the free market not giving a poo poo about downtown kansas city. this is what happens when you rely on the free market to provide the built environment. makes for a great thing to fantasize about while soliciting more subscriptions for your substack or whatever Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Oct 27, 2022 |
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Oct 27, 2022 20:50
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Calling from the 19th century over in europe where cars haven't been introduced yet, lol your cities are poo poo. E: and the whole profession is a disgrace if its members are allowed to support that glorified strip mall 'city' on the basis of ~market forces, wasteland is easy to redevelop ~ Strategic Tea fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Oct 27, 2022 |
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Oct 27, 2022 20:52
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Strategic Tea posted:Calling from the 19th century over in europe where cars haven't been introduced yet, lol your cities and profession are poo poo *dies of dysentery* Ah, freedom
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Oct 27, 2022 20:55
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euros being in denial that car-centric sprawl exists even in enlightened evropa will never be not funnyStrategic Tea posted:E: and the whole profession is a disgrace if its members are allowed to support that glorified strip mall 'city' on the basis of ~market forces, wasteland is easy to redevelop ~ you know, i have a sneaking suspicion that you don't really know what you're talking about and are simply making kneejerk aesthetic criticisms because you feel called out by someone criticizing a thing you agreed with i agree with you that its bad! i just pointed out the tweet is whiny and wrong. if you also want to be whiny and wrong that is not my responsibility Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Oct 27, 2022 |
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Oct 27, 2022 20:55
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While we do need to develop more non-car infrastructure, when people come out hard with solutions that are just "bulldoze everything, build amsterdam", that's completely unviable. And if you did give local governments unlimited building power, some of them would end up making things like this instead.  That's a perspective on city parking lots I hadn't heard before, although it doesn't make it better for cities to be a sea of pavement.
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Oct 27, 2022 22:32
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SlothfulCobra posted:That's a perspective on city parking lots I hadn't heard before, although it doesn't make it better for cities to be a sea of pavement. it definitely does not make anything better, but it is an explanation for why this thing happens other than pointing a finger and saying "thing bad. me, i do thing good" like there's no viable solution to having a downtown filled with parking lots other than waiting for developers to come along and build on them. you can't nebulously claim zoning reform or rezoning will fix things, and there's no nimbys to complain about, and that rules out like 90% of twitter urbanist solutions right there
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Oct 27, 2022 22:46
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Isn’t the implicit statement just “If you make a really big road in a city, people will not want to live near it so it will make nearby areas unappealing for residential use?” I don’t know anything about KC, but I had assumed that was the basic argument, that it was like 91 in Hartford or the highway along the Embarcadero in San Francisco.
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Oct 27, 2022 23:18
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nrook posted:Isn’t the implicit statement just “If you make a really big road in a city, people will not want to live near it so it will make nearby areas unappealing for residential use?” I don’t know anything about KC, but I had assumed that was the basic argument, that it was like 91 in Hartford or the highway along the Embarcadero in San Francisco. i'd have to ask the tweet op exactly what their argument is but - i know from prior tweets and observation of twitter urbanist circles that this person is very much a "cars suck and i hate them and cities would be better if they were built around people and not cars". which is a totally fine and good opinion to have, it is an opinion i share 100%. personally i read "As the downtown loop in Kansas City turns 50 this year, let's not forget how it turned a vibrant neighborhood into a parking lot" as a frankly ahistorical take meant to be mad that cars create bad urbanism but without any actual insight behind the analysis, just a simple complaint matched with an eye catching image that kind of implies if we never built the big road or got rid of it somehow, this area would become a vibrant neighborhood again the united states was an early adopter of mass motor vehicle ownership, and this very much prompted early 20th century urban planners into a specific mindset re: the necessity to drive big roads through urban centers. the cars predate the roads, the roads did not bring the cars. it would be correct to argue the big road accelerated this depopulation, but suburbanization and bad car traffic predate the construction of the interstates by at least fifty years. now were these urban planners wrong to do this? we have to live in the long downstream consequence of those decisions, and it turns out those consequences suck pretty hard. but in the context of the time, trying to solve the problem they were trying to solve (horrible choking transit, crowded housing) it made sense, they just had to unilaterally tear down a bunch of neighborhoods and displace a lot of (poor, often non-white) people to do it i haven't looked specifically at the development of kansas city or anything, but i know a good bit about general trends in american urban development. it is pretty silly to claim that the road brought the cars which then necessitated parking lots for the cars. probably someone would attribute this to mandatory parking requirements in zoning regulations which is a problem but not the reason why many american cities were covered in parking lots from the years roughly 1950-2000. instead, cars allowed american downtowns to empty out as businesses and residents left for now more accessible, cheaper land in the suburbs. this emptying out meant that a lot of previously valuable land in downtowns was now not nearly as valuable, meaning that the structures on them were now less valuable, so it makes economic sense to tear down those buildings which don't have tenants anyway and instead build parking lots, which are pretty cheap to operate and can bring decent returns to the landowner - and when the value of the lot rises enough due to proximate development, its attractive to sell the lot for a high return, since the developer would prefer to get a large parcel of contiguous land without any expensive teardown costs associated with existing structures there's also a whole technical argument about how the concentration of government services in downtowns and the public subsidy of these lots to provide parking for government workers encourages the growth of said lots, but that's largely in parallel to the privately owned lot that is doing effectively the same thing - waiting around to be redeveloped so, what do we intend to do about it? buy the lots and build public housing on them? local governments are usually cash strapped and can't do anything as ambitious as this. replace the freeways with mass transit? same funding problem. for better or worse, the big road is there to stay. you're simply not getting rid of cars, they are too vital for modern society. with rare exceptions, every city on the planet is based around a transportation system reliant on personally owned motor vehicles. even in the netherlands, touted as the gold standard for sensible and healthy transportation, major cities still have about 1/3 automobile modal share ultimately i think the tweet is a causation/correlation error. its easy to blame big road because it happened when the devastation happened, but the devastation was going to happen anyway. mass vehicle ownership interacting with the underlying structure of who owns land and how land is allowed to be built on, is going to create a certain kind of built environment different from the built environment created in a predominantly pedestrian oriented modal share model. tldr the kansas city cbd was a lot more crowded when people had to walk everywhere, as people shifted to driving everywhere you don't really need to stay bound within a crowded city center. the fact that our generation of people have rediscovered and like living in crowded city centers is good and revitalizing! but that perspective often clashes with differing perspectives of the past, leading to some pretty weird takes about why things happened and how we got here, which then leads to further downstream weird takes about what to do about it or how to restore walkability to american cities its very, very expensive redevelopment built by for-profit entities who charge massive rents Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Oct 28, 2022 |
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Oct 27, 2022 23:58
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