- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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To briefly detour the thread, it feels like America continues to have a real bias to rail for transporting folk. How would you go about overcoming that and other obstacles to make using it a reality?
If you feel up to it, do you think it would be possible to do something similar for trolley systems in certain cities?
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Apr 7, 2013 06:48
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May 20, 2024 14:36
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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That's a decent point to a degree, but if an emergency vehicle has lights and siren on, why does the light itself need to change? The only places I've seen it happen, it fucks up the entire intersection for a whole cycle, while the emergency vehicle could've passed safely through the intersection in 10 seconds otherwise? Not every intersection is preempted by emergency vehicles anyway, so it remains important that people slow down if they hear a siren when approaching an intersection. There's always going to be imperfect circumstances, but frankly I'd rather have a warning rather than having a dodgy situation where I have to consider blowing a yellow light in a fraction of a second as it changes. I can't speak about what it's like elsewhere, but in Havana drivers were certainly less likely to run a yellow based on the countdown rather than a quick switch to a yellow light -- now, this could've been because of the comparatively severe consequences of getting caught running a yellow light, or the lack of discretion given to drivers who do run a yellow light when they could clearly see the light was about to change, but either way I think it has value.
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Apr 11, 2013 17:17
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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Cichlidae, I moved from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh a few years and wanted to get your professional opinion on this.
Is Pittsburgh's infrastructure truly a hellish unfixable nightmare? If I look up some place to go around town, 20 miles might as well be a million. Between all the hosed up interchanges, merges, bridges, tunnels and horrible drivers, I find myself opting to let a native drive or staying home. I know the geography and city's history all contribute to the issues, but at this point, I don't see anything short if somehow starting over again fixing it. Pittsburgh has to be a massive case study in 'what not do with roads' right.
I know it's hometown bias after driving Cincy streets for so long, but I could anywhere in the greater metro area in 20 minutes or so. Is the secret the 275 loop in Cincinnati?
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Apr 15, 2013 06:17
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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Also to be fair for most american cities no amount of bike infra is going to fix things, everything is just too sprawlig and spread out. You could put an awesome dutch cycle path down every single major street in america and only see a small increase in cycling. Well you'd see a huge relative increase but it would be like 1% to 4% or something. American development just isn't suited to anything but cars, it's been purposefully built to be hard or impossible to adapt to any other "transport paradigm". So what do you do? Just give up? Well that's not an option either. The US is though seeing a huge rise in transit usage, it's really a new golden age for transit and cities in the US and that's with most places being horribly resistant to expanding transit (See: Vancouver WA). Put some actual heavy government push behind this and it will only get better. You won't be able to adapt or save most of the US's built-up land but you'll be able to create some pretty awesome urban enclaves full of transit and bikes. When fuel prices get worse and worse along with the economy there's going to potentially be a huge divide between the efficient productive cities and the sprawling suburbs and country where the jobs will dry up and people won't be able to afford to get around. I could see vast swaths of suburbs abandoned detroit style, becoming huge low-density ghettos. There will be no money to maintain the roads and highways in those areas, things will crumble.
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Mar 12, 2014 16:57
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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I'm not really familiar with the state of roads in the US, is it pretty bad outside of rich areas? I don't think I've ever driven a road locally that made me think "hmm this road could use some maintenance" and all the roads I drove on in europe were even better, the cobbles vibrate your car but they're always in perfect shape. No pot holes, no dangerous bridges and overpasses, no roads with their crumbling shoulders encroaching into the travel lanes.
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May 24, 2015 21:20
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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I'm staying in Escazu, a suburb of San Jose in Costa Rica and holy cow is it different from Dallas or other US cities. All roads in the town are nice and narrow with people walking everywhere, but there is a major lack any sidewalks or pedestrian protection; and cars never stop for people crossing the street. No one has a concept of space, people will literally get into any tiny space they can to pass. Also DART would cry if they ever saw how many people are waiting for multiple buses at 10:00 PM in San Jose.
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Jun 3, 2015 04:04
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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Pure anecdote, but I've been having a life-threatening near miss almost every time I'm on the road. 99% of the time it's a loving boomer checking his phone. They're just as addicted to checking facebook on the go as "millenials" but their slow fat fingers and poor reflexes make them even more dangerous. When ever I see people talking on their phones or pawing at something glowing on their lap it's always a boomer.
From an urban planning and demographics standpoint this has been a known problem for a long time. Car-centric sprawl may have served the boomers in their adulthood but those areas are nightmares for seniors. It's a huge ticking time bomb, not just for accident rates but simply seniors becoming prisoners in their own homes unless they can afford to move somewhere more walkable (expensive) or go into care (expensive). They won't be able to "age in place" and will be far from the services and support they need as seniors.
What can we do about distracted driving though, short of draconian penalties?
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Aug 20, 2015 00:28
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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This is more of a road surface question and less of traffic but road surface quality certainly impacts speed of traffic so here goes.
Brief backstory (and maybe answering my own question but I would like some validation): the whole Dallas area sits on top of about 30 feet deep worth of black gooey clay when it's wet, which sits on top of maybe half a mile of limestone. This black clay when it swells due to spring rains (or shrinks and cracks due to summer droughts) causes all the Mc Mansions and ranch style houses built on a slab foundation to have awful foundation issues. Houses built on any kind of slope slide down the slope over a period of years. It's bad. It's like building a house on top of jello pudding that moves on a slightly faster than geological timescale.
Anyways
In my neighborhood here just outside of downtown Dallas, at some point in the last they clearly paved the streets with beautiful concrete. Since then (more than 7 years ago) they paved over all of it with about 2" of asphalt. Most of this asphalt doesn't adhere very well to the concrete and it cracks, then chunks come off. Once a year or so they blob tar or a mixture of tar and ??? to keep it from flaking off worse. When it flakes off you can see the concrete underneath.
Periodically they grind off the asphalt, revealing the really nice concrete roads underneath.... and then pour more asphalt over top of it again. Which almost immediately begins to crack and flake again.
What the gently caress? I used to live in Plano, about 20 miles north (and 60 yeas after the neighborhood I currently live in was built) and they also have concrete roads, yet they're not covered in lovely asphalt. Their roads are great and have never been replaced, except when they wholesale cut out the worst sections and re-pour them, or when they redesign (widen) an intersection, etc. In all cases it's still new steel-reinforced concrete about 12-18" deep. This works great, wears awesome, due to the steel it almost never cracks and the only tar sealing is very minor. Not piling a bunch of lovely asphalt on top and long term maintenance (over 35 years anyways) seems to be near zero.
Why is Dallas frosting all their beautiful uncracked concrete roads with garbage asphalt that needs total replacement every 5 years? Why do they keep doing this? Is this some sort of different "2-part" road system, where the concrete is lower quality and just serves as a road base due to the poor quality (for roads) soil, and then the asphalt is supposed to be the wear surface?
You should the streets in poorer neighborhoods, they are even worse.
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Oct 14, 2015 01:12
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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How the hell does high density development increase traffic? I mean, there's dog whistle racism, but at least make some goddamn sense.
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Nov 23, 2015 01:37
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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Agreed.
However, it's also the responsibility of a pedestrian/biker/etc to wear reflective gear, put lights on their bike/person, and generally work to attain a state of high visibility. I can see "dude in a reflective vest with a flashing light on his bike/belt" from a half a mile away, even with oncoming traffic and headlights shining in my face. "Dude jogging on the inside edge of the shoulder wearing a blue tracksuit" is the guy who's gonna get hit.
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Dec 24, 2015 08:50
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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There often isn't a city in charge of anything. The "city" is the failing core of what was once an economically sustainable american city. That city is then surrounded by various towns and villages and unincorporated land that developers then buy up and build huge tracts of single family housing for cheap. The city doesn't get a say in what happens outside of its borders, and these outlying areas are excited to get anything. There's often a few one-time up front costs that go towards the local authorities and they're willing to chase after these development fees by literally not charging any taxes. You might think this is insane, what are a few one-time development fees vs long term tax income, how does the area pay for its self afterwards?? Those are questions the local authorities don't care about, they want their money (or just kickbacks and bribes) right now and someone else will deal with crazy problems like "upkeep"or "replacement" in the future. These developments create huge amounts of traffic which then clog up the roads of the city while paying no taxes towards the city, but the city authorities are scared shitless that if they don't make suburban commutes smooth and parking cheap and plentiful they'll loose business. "What if offices move out of the city to suburban office parks? Our retail is already hurting, if the drive into town isn't smooth they'll just go to a suburban mall!" So, they make sure tons of free parking and nice wide fast roads keep people happy, even if this turns their city into a debt ridden mess of car sewers and parking lots that's so unpleasant no one really wants to go there anymore.
This is when the city takes on a huge amount of debt to build a stadium or convention centre or something to "rejuvenate the city".
The whole process is like a wasting sickness or cancer and it's basically impossible to stop without a strong regional authority and plan and a concerted effort to reduce the private motoring modeshare with both carrots and sticks, so 100% politically and economically impossible in most all North American cities.
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Jan 1, 2016 08:38
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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30 miles, jesus. How long does each trip take? Is there no where closer you can move?
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Feb 19, 2016 22:56
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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I saw this today by the FHWA. Basically all pedestrian and bicyclist injuries and fatalities need to be counted now by state DOTs? Has this not been the case before?
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Mar 18, 2016 01:00
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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Here's where the math gets involved. I made an effortpost months ago about balancing safety vs. efficiency. If we only care about efficiency, we build infinitely wide roads with no speed limits. If we only care about safety, we lock people in their houses. In the real world, we strive to strike a balance, and the simple truth is that there is no one road layout that fits every situation. In a spread-out suburban area that's not accessible to pedestrians, there's no point to having a 20-foot-sidewalk and cramming a 40,000 ADT into two lanes. 99.99% of your traffic is going to be vehicular. With great bike and ped facilities, you might push that down to 99.90%. On the other hand, in an urban area with high density and a grid-based redundant street network, changing the road configuration might change it from 80% to 50% without too much hassle. It's all situation dependent.
Now for two pet peeves of mine:
First, pedestrians aren't the only group of travelers who have fatalities. A pedestrian life is not inherently worth more or less than someone on a motorcycle or driving a semitrailer or riding a horse. Right now, in the last year or two, fatality rates for motorists have been skyrocketing. I'm not sure about peds and bikes; latest data I saw showed a steady decrease, but that was just for one state. We have serious systemic safety concerns, and just throwing money at one group of users isn't going to make the system as a whole any safer. When you consider that there's limited funding available for this stuff (another chagrin of mine), you can probably understand why a DOT would rather spend $50,000 putting centerline rumble strips on 50 miles of a busy road and save a life or two every year than redoing the road network downtown for $10 million for a similar fatality reduction.
Second, the word "sustainable" is meaningless. Transportation is inherently unsustainable. Human life is inherently unsustainable. It's just an awful word all around. You can consider degrees of sustainability, I suppose, but saying one thing is sustainable and another is not is incorrect.
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I am putting this in a separate section because it's tangentially related but I have no idea whether it's true or not. Hopefully someone in the thread has done research on it and can share some real data. There is an assumption that any kind of self-propelled vehicle is going to be less environmentally friendly than walking or biking. But humans emit CO2 as well. I used to think that it was really stupid to consider the CO2 humans emit when under exertion, but someone said in another thread that bicyclists emit about 90g/km of CO2 above the normal human resting metabolic rate. This is compared to something like ~120g/km of CO2 for a passenger car. So if those numbers are correct, overall CO2 emissions would be lower if you carpooled than if you rode a bike. The poster didn't cite any numbers for walking or jogging, but they did mention that mass transit was much, much lower in CO2 emission. Two big assumptions here: one is that it only counts the fuel the car burns, not the resources used to make it or to build facilities for it. I guess if you bought your car used, that would be less of an issue. We'd also have to consider the bicyclist - if they're eating imported foie gras and drinking triple-distilled Tibetan spring water, those calories they're burning will have a much higher footprint than just the CO2 emitted through metabolism. The second big assumption is that the car is burning gasoline. Ironically, considering the power grid here in New England is mostly coal and oil, an electric car would produce more emissions than a gas-burning car. But in places with cleaner power grids, we could cut that 120 g/km significantly with electric vehicles.
I get the feeling you need a doctorate to make an informed decision about this stuff. Has anyone done a proper cradle-to-the-grave environmental impact analysis of the various modes of transportation?
Edit: Math
James The 1st fucked around with this message at 04:44 on May 19, 2016
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May 19, 2016 04:41
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May 20, 2024 14:36
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- James The 1st
- Feb 23, 2013
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The dockless bike share has also happened in Dallas, with 4 different companies. Of course with Dallas having next to absolutely nothing for bike infrastructure means it has been mess, although it is good to see people riding bikes now.
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Jan 3, 2018 01:58
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Apr 7, 2013 06:48
