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Badger of Basra posted:Are any of the BRT projects in the US actual BRTs? Like with dedicated lanes and special stations? In Austin what was sold to us as BRT is a total joke - semidedicated lanes downtown and then they use normal lanes everywhere else. They run on the exact same routes as normal buses and are 3 or 4 minutes fast I think. The Institute for Transportation & Development Policy has a rigorous scoring system for grading BRT. They also have a brief BRT guide here, in case you don't find detailed scoring systems inherently interesting. This page is much more useful, since it has a map of every known BRT system in the world, and classifies each as meeting basic, bronze, silver, or gold standards for BRT. (The blue dots on the map represent BRT systems notable for exemplifying a particular element of BRT. You can actually click on these, unlike the other dots. Also, white is "basic" but barely-darker-than-white gray is "silver", confusingly. They should've made basic black or something.) Individual BRT lines are rated, which is why there are dense clusters of them in Central and South America. So to answer your question: the US has 3 basic BRTs, 4 bronze-standard BRTs, and one silver-standard BRT (that's the Cleveland Healthline). It has no gold BRTs. For that, you'll have to go to south of the border to Bogota, Columbia, where BRT was invented and there are five gold-standard BRT lines servicing that city alone. Badger of Basra posted:I wonder who came up with selling BRTs like this in the US. Is this something else I can blame on Richard Florida? Nobody came up with it. It's just American clusterfuck politics in general. BRT is sold as "like light rail, but cheaper", so you can get anti-rail-transit people to support it*, and transit advocates in the US are generally desperate enough to compromise. Of course, the usual crop of white baby-boomer NIMBYs appear to oppose any transit at all. Then when it comes time to actually dedicate entire road lanes to the BRT, car-lovers go "Whaaaaa? Take... a lane away? But muh freedom cars!  " Then anti-government-spending conservatives come spilling out, because they just can't fathom putting actual resources into what they view as last-resort poverty transit. "Spend money on a bus station?! It's just a bus station! Gubmint wastin yer money agin!  " The coup de grace, of course, are the sudden disappearance of the anti-rail transit people's support. For them, BRT is a red herring to distract transit advocates with. Their support was never genuine. Once they managed to stop the Great Rail Satan, they evaporated and recondensed back into NIMBYs, car-fuckers, and budget hawks. *I am not kidding, the fastest way to make a bunch of insincere BRT advocates materialize is mention "light rail" on a libertarian website.
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Apr 2, 2016 21:46
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mastershakeman posted:To be fair, removing a lane of cars to put in BRT seems incredibly short sighted. So far it's been tried once in Chicago and is about to go in on another major road, and exactly what you'd expect to happen does: the cars that all get forced into the other lane end up blocking the bus lane, whether waiting at turns or just in general. Enforcement needs to get upped bigtime but no one's going to want to come out in favor of more parking/traffic tickets. In the immediate term, yes. In the long term, traffic goes down (or stabilizes in a growing city) because BRT, by definition, is good enough to replace a substantial number of previously car-only trips along its designated route, thus getting more cars off the road. In fact, if you just want traffic to go down without having to spend money on improving alternative transit systems, one of the most effective ways is to remove lanes and replace them with nothing, because induced demand is a thing, and it's surprisingly easy to reverse. Dedicated lanes were successfully implemented in Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Eugene. If the problems you describe persist, then it's a Chicago issue, not a BRT issue. It's worked fine in most other places.
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Apr 3, 2016 23:12
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glowing-fish posted:Not mentioned in the OP, but something that I have some experience with: I'm bus-dependent in one of these cities. Albany, Oregon is a smaller more blue-collar suburb of the larger white-collar suburbs of Salem and Eugene. We have a bus system running from 6am to 6pm, and each stop gets visited only once an hour, with several gaps due to lunch breaks and the schedule shift when it splits from the single-line morning route to the two-line daytime route. Even the most minor errands eats three hours out of my day. We also have an inter-city bus loop that has a surprisingly large middle-class clientele (as in, "engineer at Hewlett-Packard" middle-class), but that's because it runs at the right times and goes to the right places (the university the next town over and the aforementioned HP campus). glowing-fish posted:The other thing about this is that the difference between a fully functioning urban transit system and a suburban transit system does not scale linearly with population. For example, Tri-Met has about 1.5 million people in its service area, and has one of North America's larger light rail systems. Across the river, C-Tran has around a third of that, and has a decent transit system. Salem, with a population of around 300,000, has a transit system that is barely workable for commuters. Yamhill County, with a population of 100,000, has a transit system that isn't designed for commuters. There is a logarithmic relationship between population and transit size. Albany's population is a little over 51,000, and when I last checked in 2014/15 our transit system's daily ridership was something like 350ish. Most of that is students going to the local community college, seniors, adults like me who can't afford a car, and a surprising number of teenagers.
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Apr 3, 2016 23:32
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glowing-fish posted:Also, there is no public transit between the Salem area and Albany. You can get a bus from Salem to Stayon, but not from Salem to Albany. You can take Amtrak or Greyhound, but that is not the same thing! (I am sure that the many people who are reading this thread to read about high speed rail in Chicago or New York are fascinated to learn about the bus from Salem to Stayton) And man does that suck. When I was still looking for work, I was heavily considering Salem, which would've opened up a lot more job opportunities for me. But with no cheap, regular public transit between Albany and Salem, I might as well have been applying for jobs in Seattle for the all good it'd do me. There is, of all things, apparently a regular shuttle between Corvallis and Portland, but that's because Corvallis has the closest big research university to the Silicon Forest, so there's enough of a trickle directly between the two cities to justify it. Why this doesn't exist for Salem and Albany, given the number of commuters between the cities, I have no idea. glowing-fish posted:That seems low, but checking numbers, I guess it checks out. I was incorrect! The latest report the Albany Transit System posted on their website is from 2011, and it reports that in 2009 (when Albany's population was a bit over 48,000) their average daily ridership was 314. Assuming it scaled with population growth, its current ridership is... 324  Even if we assume a generous boost from the recession, I doubt it's over 500 per day. Watch out Portland! Cower before our 0.9% public transit usage!
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Apr 4, 2016 00:25
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PT6A posted:The city of Edmonton just decided to cut service to the bone on routes where they were effectively subsidizing fares to the tune of $10/person, to increase capacity on routes that are overcrowded. Intuitively, it seems like a good idea to me, but I'm curious what people with more expertise think. Arguably, it could result in suburbanites having an even dimmer view of transit. Highly-regarded transit consultant Jarrett Walker would argue that if your transit systems goal is to actually maximize ridership, you concentrate on fewer high-frequency lines than low-frequency, spread-out lines. If anything, this should make transit more popular in Edmonton, as focused, high-frequency transit lines are actually useful. Contrast this with once-an-hour, barely-used lines maintained solely so the city can claim their transit network has lots of "coverage", which teaches riders that public transit is slow, inconvenient and not very useful. "Goes everywhere" is useless if hardly anyone wants to go most of those places anyways.
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Apr 12, 2016 07:24
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Cicero posted:This is also related to our terrible land use: it's relatively easy to get decent transit to further-out suburbs when you build densely. It's a lot harder if you sprawl out everywhere. There's an entire organization dedicated to going back to the sort of land-use pattern you described: Strong Towns. Apparently, pre-1950, U.S. towns followed a very European style of land-use. I could cite endless blog posts by them, but the short of it is: (a) American-style suburbia isn't financially sustainable. It's so low-density that each taxpayer is paying for an enormous amount of infrastructure—e.g. spreading out means many times more miles of roads, sewers, and water mains, paid for by fewer taxpayers per square mile, creating a double-whammy of more infrastructure chasing less money. (b) America has vastly overbuilt its road system, and cities can't afford to keep building more while maintaining their existing oversupply. Spending a trillion or so dollars to fix it all, like many transportation advocates are calling for, is equivalent to spending a trillion dollars keeping Florida's many fields of post-housing-bubble abandoned/half-finished suburban subdivisions in tip-top condition: it's just pissing money away on poo poo we never needed in the first place. (c) Fixing (a) and (b) is going to hurt. A lot. And it's not optional; America doesn't have $5 trillion to fix all of its infrastructure and the staggering economic growth (post-1950s suburbia) and staggering debt (post-1990s suburbia) needed to finance it all in the first place isn't coming back.
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Apr 13, 2016 04:51
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Cicero posted:And those people show up to the community meetings and get the developers and city planners to water down the plans, and pretty soon it's max 2 and a half story buildings next to the transit center The irony is you can hit over 10,000 people per square mile with only single-story apartments. Don't believe me? Behold, dense suburbia!  (Now despite being 1,660 square feet, the actual layout of these houses is loving terrible.  Good Lord, that's awful. I doubt that could comfortably house more than two people. A 40-by-40 foot square, which is still 1600 square feet, would allow for a much better layout and could comfortably house a family of four.) These houses, despite being single-family detached homes, achieve a density of 12 units per acre. Assuming a family of three resides in each house (achievable/comfortable only assuming my suggested not-poo poo house layout), that's 36 people per acre. There are 640 acres in a square mile, but about 50% of area in any given city is surface transit infrastructure and parks, so only half of that would be actual houses. 12 x 3 x 320 = 11,520 people/sq mi. Things get even more interesting if we scale up. Merge said single-family detached houses into rowhouses (and pool spaces between them into larger shared courtyards). Three stories is actually a pretty good height; it's the practical limit for a building without elevators, and it's also the sweet spot for cost—anything above four or so stories has sharply higher construction costs, which is something most housing advocates tend to forget. Boom, you just hit over 34,000 people per square mile. Even if you dedicate a quarter of the housing tract's area to parking, you'd still hit over 28,000 people. High-rises are for suckers. Curvature of Earth fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Apr 13, 2016 |
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Apr 13, 2016 08:27
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NAT-T Ice posted:Ah, yes, housing designed for baby boomer retirees in the urban paradise that is Dallas, TX is the blueprint for America's future cities. This, but unironically. (White) Baby Boomers are the wealthiest, most politically engaged cohort in America right now. If they retire in-place in suburbia, or move to other suburbia, you can kiss all dreams of a more urbanist American fabric goodbye for another couple decades, at least. If we can't sell them on anything slightly denser than their preferred suburban form, all our urbanist, pro-transit dreams are hosed and we literally have to wait for them to die. I'm slightly optimistic. For one, "granny dwellings"—small, mini-houses built in people's backyards—will become more popular. As Boomers age, more and more will find themselves needing a caretaker. Their children won't necessarily want to share they house with their own parents (or there may not be room for them), and senior care facilities are expensive. Backyard dwellings are a popular compromise. It won't matter if other suburbanites hate this sort of densification, people will build them and the law will catch up or adapt in the face of their popularity. (It'll help that the usual doom-and-gloom arguments NIMBYs wheel out won't work—these are literally existing residents' parents moving in.) This will be a small but not negligible step in loosening zoning rules and densifying existing suburban areas. Secondly, a whole bunch of Boomers are going to find themselves unable to drive over the next few decades. The AARP has already partnered with pro-transit groups because of this—they see the writing on the wall and they understand that things like lower speed limits and better bus service will make a huge difference for an aging population's safety and quality of life. Also, don't knock cities like Dallas. The fastest-growing cities are in the sunbelt. If you want to lay the foundations for an urban future, focus there. The transit fights in sleepy Portland are peanuts compared to the rapidly-growing hellscapes of Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix. And by god, they're trying to do transit. They're doing a poo poo job of it, mind you (Dallas has 90 miles of light rail. No transit-oriented development), but they're trying. Houston just managed one of the most innovative and useful transit service improvements in the country, and they've built and are expanding a light rail system. These cities are worth fighting for.
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Apr 13, 2016 19:49
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Popular Thug Drink posted:in my opinion we're already pretty screwed. street networks and land ownership/use, in the absence of cataclysmic events like land-erasing disasters or complete political revolution, tend to be locked in over long periods of time. a ton of virgin land was developed around american cities in the early 20th century for primarily automotive access. it would take sustained political and economic investment over many years to convert this fabric, one piece at a time, to something more pedestrian friendly, and given how we can't even commit to paying the necessary costs for automotive infrastructure... I'm a wee bit more optimistic. Or in this case, apocalyptic. Because as I posted earlier, that cataclysmic event is coming. Suburbia will die regardless of whether you or I do anything, and regardless of how hard suburbanites fight to preserve it. It's simply not financially sustainable. The 1950s/60s-era suburban infrastructure is already reaching its end-of-life, and there isn't the money to replace all of it. This will compound with each decade, until the steep costs of maintaining sewers, roads, and water lines past their intended lifespan forces cities to pick which subdivisions they allow to crumble and which they desperately try to save. This is America, so states will bail out the wealthier, whiter towns as long as they can, and local governments will abandon the brownest and poorest neighborhoods first, but min-maxing a failing system does nothing to change the fact that it's a failing system.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:55
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Popular Thug Drink posted:the whole of suburbia won't die. the suburbs are still gaining population. Irrelevant. That's like arguing that rising sea levels won't affect Miami because its population is growing. What people want doesn't matter if the fundamentals can't support it, anymore than the popularity of home ownership couldn't stop the housing bubble from collapsing. Popular Thug Drink posted:we're just going to let the suburbs die in the places where, coincidentally, we stick all the poor urbanites being displaced by gentrification That's not how it works. In my home state of Oregon, the Portland Metro area comprises about 47% of the state's population. The Salem metro area contains another 10% or so, and the Eugene metro area another 9%. Realistically, only Portland has the resiliency and tax base needed to prop up suburbs undergoing financial collapse, while Salem is the state's capital so it won't be allowed to die. So we're looking at about 40% of the population that lack the political and economic power to support themselves in the face of the oncoming financial cataclysm. This isn't small potatoes. This isn't a problem that can be dismissed with handwaving about minor population shuffles. This is one of Strong Towns' points: practically every town of every size in the U.S. has hitched their wagon to suburban paradigm. Most of the examples they bring up aren't New York City, or Philadelphia, or St. Louis. It's the over 16,000 towns with less than 10,000 residents. Those are the cities that are boned. (Reminder that America is only 80% "urbanized", and that's using a comically loose definition of "urban".)
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Apr 13, 2016 23:33
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computer parts posted:You seem to have a lot of assumptions that aren't well spelled out. For one, this: Sorry. You're right, what I meant by "comically loose" isn't clear or helpful. Checking Wikipedia, there's a pretty wide range of definitions of "urban areas"; the U.S. Census Bureau defines "urban areas" as census blocks with 1,000 people per square surrounded by blocks of 500 per square mile, while Japan has a minimum of 10,000 people per square mile, which is a hefty range for defining "urban". But these definitions aren't particularly helpful in any debate about urbanism. This is something most urbanists and anti-urbanists, ironically, can agree on. Anti-urbanists love to point out how America isn't "urbanized", but suburbanized, while I don't think a single self-proclaimed urbanist would look at my suburban town of Albany, Oregon and call it "urban". My point was that, even using a definition of "urban" that includes quintessentially rural towns like Sweet Home still means 20% of Americans aren't a part of any metro area, and barring direct state or federal intervention, won't be able to endure any major financial problems. computer parts posted:For another, you seem to be ignoring a lot of factors for cities' survival. Eugene, for example, has a major research institution which draws a lot of money and high paying jobs to the area. Similarly, that's why Corvallis (a city 1/3 the population of Eugene) is allowed to survive and thrive. A city's tax base would already account for these factors. Possessing a university, however prestigious, does not fix insolvency. I concede that Eugene and Corvallis are doing okay—for now. They both admit to needing a few extra million dollars per year to keep up with road maintenance, to name just one classic source of infrastructure liabilities ($6.7 million per year for Eugene and $2.7 million per year for Corvallis), but in proportion to their existing tax revenues the numbers aren't worrisome. But that's a big "for now", and if they followed the same pattern of development done by cities like Rockford, Illinois or Lafeyette, Louisiana, they'll definitely face major trouble down the road.
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Apr 14, 2016 02:10
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Oh God I'm turning into Cingulate.
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Apr 14, 2016 02:11
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mastershakeman posted:Outside of the east coast, I'm guessing they're all incredibly inefficient and unreliable. Buses get worse fuel economy/environmental impact than cars do when not running at peak times, but they absolutely do need to run 24 hours a day to provide access. However they seem to end up showing up only every 20-30 minutes, and heavy traffic makes them unusable. I can't speak for why BRT didn't work in Chicago. I can post pictures of the TransMilenio BRT, though. It's pretty spiffin'.  The TransMilenio BRT in Bogota, Colombia is about as far as you can push the concept of BRT.  The buses they use are gigantic. What you see here is a bi-articulated bus, capable of holding 260 passengers. They're pushing the size limit of what can feasibly fit on most roads. Here's a more distant shot of a BRT station:  You can see the bus lanes are grade-separated. (Well, sort of. There's a very obvious curb, at least.) Notice how the bus lanes expand from one lane per direction to two near the stations. This is specifically to allow buses to skip stations without getting stuck behind buses that aren't skipping a station. Stations are also in the middle of the road, so buses don't have to waste time pulling over to the curb, and are raised to match the buses' floor height, so handicapped riders can board without needing slow, expensive lifts. Like a subway, fares are paid before boarding, and passengers can enter or exit from any of the doors along the side. Good BRT also gives buses signal priority, so buses rarely hit red lights, though TransMilenio happens to lack that particular feature. They also run a shitload of buses. Buses can run tighter headways than the barreling tanks in subways—as low as 13 seconds in TransMileno. All these features combined allow TransMileno's BRT system to handle an average of 35,000 PPHPD (passengers per hour per direction, which is a standard way of measuring the throughput of a transit system). This is a massive number—light rail, by comparison, has a theoretical limit of somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 PPHPD (depending on who you ask) while subways have a theoretical limit of somewhere around 50,000 to 70,000 (again, depending on who you ask). Most light rail and subways only manage half those numbers in practice. As that paper I linked to above states, there are only specific circumstances where light rail is a better choice than BRT. (e.g. No space for four dedicated bus lanes, capacity demands of less than 20,000 PPHPD, and implicitly, possessing the bucketloads of money needed to build a good light rail system.) But cities are reluctant to build BRT because they see rail as inherently sexy and buses as icky. (Which is also the same reason American cities are trying to build mixed-traffic streetcars that are slower than buses—lovely rail systems still look cool and are an easier sell than a good bus system.) Curvature of Earth fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 01:50
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Popular Thug Drink posted:it's just cheaper to construct and operate. basically nobody builds their own corporate towers anymore in the us, tower construction has slowed down a lot and when they are constructed they're built by real estate firms who are looking to rent to various tenants. so if you want to be your own landlord a campus is really the only way to go Apple's new donut-campus costs $5 billion, which is more than the cost of the new World Trade Center in the middle of loving Manhattan. Tech company headquarters are built in suburbia because their founders/executives are born-and-bred suburbanites. For them, suburbia is the default. It has nothing do with cost and everything to do with uncritically embracing the system they're most familiar with.
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Apr 19, 2016 19:32
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I'd like to point out that knocking down buildings to replace them with parking lots was never about economics. The popularity of cars does nothing to change the fact that downtown, in any city—even the dumpiest, shittiest commercial area in the dumpiest, shittiest city—is, in terms of business and government finance, too valuable to turn into parking lots. Parking lots are literally economic deadweight. Cities that knocked down buildings for parking lots saw their per-acre tax revenue go down, not up, and commercial areas with less parking produce more revenue per acre than those with more. It is well-established at this point that parking minimums drive up the cost of rent. Businesses are not immune from these costs; every parking space is land they're paying for that isn't actively generating revenue. Smart businesses minimize their parking in order to help boost sales per store.* Massive swathes of downtown parking were not built because of economics, any more than the federal government spent $500 billion dollars to build the national highway system because of economics. President Eisenhower did not run the numbers on highways versus rail when he proposed building a national highway system. Robert Moses did not calculate the loss of tax revenue to cities when he planned to level whole neighborhoods for highways and determine that highways grew the economy enough to outweigh the loss. These were ideologically-driven choices, and specific policies were put in place to implement them. Government and business does not exist in a vacuum, with executives and legislators robotically crunching the numbers behind every decision. All choices have an ideological bent. Governments went all-in on car-centric infrastructure. So did businesses. *Yes, I am aware there are many ways Trader Joe's maximizes revenue compared to other stores. Small parking lots is one of them. Curvature of Earth fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Apr 25, 2016 |
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Apr 25, 2016 03:09
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Popular Thug Drink posted:none of this impacts individual landowners or businesses who decide what land use will generate the highest rents Parking minimums, other zoning rules, and the wide range of biases affecting what people think profitable businesses look and act like don't affect individual businesses? Also, businesses are not rational, by simple virtue of being made up of oh-so-irrational human beings. Curvature of Earth fucked around with this message at 09:25 on Apr 25, 2016 |
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Apr 25, 2016 09:19
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My Imaginary GF posted:White folk see slums. Know what I see? I see affordable housing in racially and economically diverse, integrated communities which have been torn down to appease the sensibilities of white suburbanites. Edit: this was a bad post. Curvature of Earth fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Apr 27, 2016 |
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Apr 26, 2016 21:06
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Something that always gets lost in discussions of how much cheaper suburban living is: many of the costs of suburban housing are hidden. For example, because owning a car is necessary to survive in most (American) suburbs, any realistic look at suburban living costs needs to incorporate that. According to the AAA, the median cost of owning a car in the United States is $8,700 (and that's down from 2014 thanks to declining gas prices). This is not chump change. A look at the costs of living in suburbia should include, not just the $250,000ish* total cost of a 30-year mortgage for an "affordable" house, but also the $250,000 or so you'll spend owning a car over that same period. In addition, maintenance costs are substantially higher than in an apartment. If you're buying an apartment, then you pay an HOA that defrays the costs of maintaining the building between all the residents (which are lower, per resident, than single-family houses). For a single-family detached home, you bear all the costs of maintenance. And don't forget the money spent on landscaping—many suburbs, either via HOA or actual law, have minimum standards for lawn care and household appearance. That's effectively another bill you're paying. And if you're renting an apartment, your rent usually includes some or all utilities, while SFH-owners/renters bear all those costs on top of the rent or mortgage payment. I'm going to give an actual, personal example, because I'm close to different people who live on these extremes of "affordability" and "expensive". My brother and his wife lived in Seattle until recently (they moved to Toronto last year). Their 2-bed, 2-bath apartment cost $1500/mo, and that included all utilities. They did not own a car. They used Car2go and Uber about once a week each, which adds another $100, and they had two monthly ORCA passes costing about $100 each. That's $1,800/mo for the city. My parents, meanwhile, live in the suburbs. Their mortgage is $700/mo, and utilities are another $270ish/mo, on average. The total cost of their cars are... variable. About $220 for insuring two cars, and an extra $20ish once you average out yearly maintenance and repair costs. Their cars' values are each depreciating at about $1,000 a year (judging from equivalent make and models, in good condition, currently on the used car market), which combined is about $170 per month.** That's $1,380/mo combined housing and transportation costs even before adding gas and car loans—which is the crux, really. When they were paying their car loans ($500ish/mo), that put them at $1,880 even before paying for gas, and they where paying more than if they'd lived in an expensive city. They use, by my estimation (I've seen their household budget spreadsheets and estimated based on what I know their cars' mpg are) about 160 gallons of gas a month. While both cars have been paid off for many years now, if gas costs anything more than about $2.63/gal, the savings from living in suburbia still completely disappear. Even with current gas prices (about $2.15 to 2.20 where I am), there's only a delta of $76. Now, I'm not going to mock this amount—your income is what it is, and if you can't afford an extra $76 a month, you can't afford it. This does make a difference. That being said, it's not a significantly big difference, and it wouldn't explain why the housing market orients itself almost entirely around single-family houses like it does now. *My parents bought a 4-bed/2-bath, newly-built house on the farthest edge of a suburban bedroom community in 2002. It was worth $125,000. Their mortgage payments are $700/mo, so that's $252,000 over the life of the 30-year mortgage. Also, I'm not kidding about the "farthest edge". It's a 20-minute drive to reach the nearest market, a 40-minute drive to reach anyplace of interest, and a 90-minute drive for my dad to get to work. My parents chose this trade-off; they went as cheap as they could go, short of moving into hicksville. They wanted to maximize the savings (stay in the cheap area, but take the high-paying job!), and ironically they're totally negating any savings thanks to his punishing commute. **A 15-year-old car is not worth the $20,000 you paid for it when it was new. It's worth maybe a third of that, at best. Both economics and business accounting care about this, because it represents an expense—an outflow of wealth—whether you acknowledge it or not. Curvature of Earth fucked around with this message at 02:14 on May 2, 2016 |
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May 2, 2016 02:11
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Popular Thug Drink posted:so are you just going to ignore that you implied i was racist because you didn't understand the historical context of my post That was a bad post, and a wrongful accusation made in very poor faith. I'm sorry. I figured you'd already set me to ignore and there was no point in apologizing. As you said, you actually are an expert on this subject. Meanwhile, I know just enough to have really stupid opinions (praised be my lord and savior Dunning-Kruger). But this is the internet, and I paid  to post my bad opinions about things I don't understand...Popular Thug Drink posted:there's really no way to generalize the comparative cost of suburbs across america given the massive amounts of suburban land surrounding each major metro and cost disparity within each metro let alone across metros 
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May 2, 2016 04:31
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Bus stop spacing can also vary within the same route. My hometown's bus Route 2 is spaced with nearly a mile between stops in the farthest east and farthest southeast parts of town, because those are far-flung suburbs that barely generate any riders. The same route has stops every fifth of a mile around the mall. That's two stops literally around the corner from each other. And this isn't a misleading weird loop or anything, it really does drive straight from one to the other. Curvature of Earth fucked around with this message at 08:56 on May 2, 2016 |
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May 2, 2016 08:37
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Bip Roberts posted:Every american system I've ever ridden on has the bus yell out every stop. Hell I lived above a bus stop in Chicago for a few years and the corner I lived on got seared into my brain with busses stopping at all hours loudly proclaiming the intersection. Nearby Corvallis, being a swanky-rear end college town, has buses with digital displays showing the upcoming stop, plus an automated voice announcing them. Albany, however, because I am cursed to a hell of my own choice, has only the driver yelling out the stops, and they only announce the major ones, and only if they feel like it. Our buses did have digital signs, but they were on the outside of the bus, and were meant to show the route number. Both buses had their signs break within a year of getting them (they now only display a solid field of pixels). It's been several years and they still aren't repaired. Drivers make do with a laminated "2" or "3" sign taped to a side window, that they swap out as necessary.
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May 2, 2016 08:44
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Communist Zombie posted:The transit agency didnt get permission to go through the parking lot? I used to ride a bus in Miami that would go through, and have stops in, a mall's parking lot. Later today I'll get a map of the route and stops, if it still uses them since it was several years ago. ...it literally never occurred to me that a bus could route through a parking lot. (Wooh small-town bus systems!)
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May 2, 2016 08:53
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Ardennes posted:This is why if you are thinking about staying in a location for thirty years, it often makes sense to build that equity and then take the tax write off. However, if you are constantly moving every 3-5 years, as many Americans do, it becomes more dicey especially since there are transaction costs to selling/buying houses and if you get caught in a bad market...there isn't much do it about it. My parents rented for a 20-year period because they were moving every couple years, thanks to the typical shuffling-around you get in a military career. After Dad retired into a succession of lovely jobs, they spent another six years angling for a way to finally buy a house of their own. (Dad started a very solid career as a state employee during that period, which is really what enabled them to do so.) I really do understand the idea of the American Dream being specifically a single-family detached home. My parents spent their adult lives scraping the bottom of middle-class life, and they built up owning a brand-new car and owning a brand-new house as a big, big deal in their minds—the culmination of years of hard work. And it is. I don't belittle that. I just don't have nearly the emotional attachment to it as they do, and I see how painfully isolated and bored they are living in their own town, versus how happy my brother is in the big city. My other brother and I also grew up gay and Jewish in a small-town suburb. My disability leaves me unable to safely drive a car. Suburbia is totally awesome if you fit into a specific ideal—or if you're determined to distort yourself to meet it—but it can be very unpleasant if you don't meet that ideal, or if you have any sort of special needs. Curvature of Earth fucked around with this message at 23:02 on May 2, 2016 |
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May 2, 2016 22:59
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Badger of Basra posted:A planning professor told me a lot of national retail chains still insist on big setbacks with huge parking lots because they want people to know they can park at their stores. Not sure if that's changing or not, but I do know some chains have started doing urban formats that don't fit the traditional big box look. It's signalling "cars welcome here" with oversupply. That's about it, really. Stores that can fill their parking lots even on the busiest days are the exception, not the rule. Strong Towns has a #BlackFridayparking series focusing on this.
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May 10, 2016 05:35
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PT6A posted:Trip report: buses that announce all stops, and accurate real-time trackers, make taking buses much less awful. God knows why these things continue to baffle Calgary Transit so much... It's not like A Coruña is some huge metropolis with a giant economy. The only real-time tracking my rinky-dink local bus system uses is you calling the transit department and them in turn calling the bus driver's work cell. It was the only way I could find out whether the bus skipped my stop or it was just really, really late the last time it snowed. (It skipped my stop and I was late to classes that day  )
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May 21, 2016 20:53
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Badger of Basra posted:Holy poo poo. How many bus lines are there where you live? Two, and they combine into one during the early morning and evening. The town next door is only slightly bigger population-wise but has nine bus lines, and is generally better in every way to my hometown's (e.g. free to use, automatic announcements for every stop, real-time tracking). To be fair, they're a classic college town, while we're a bargain-priced blue-collar suburb.
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May 21, 2016 23:04
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Cicero posted:Albany and Corvallis? Yeah.
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May 22, 2016 03:39
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Absurd Alhazred posted:That falls under "commuting", rather than having two primary residences? I always wonder about this. Do they stay in an extended-stay motel? Because even cheap motels are way expensive per diem compared to an apartment. That must be one hell of a high-paying job, or an impressively low cost-of-living that far from work to be able to afford it. (My dad did this for a couple months when he first got his first well-paying, long-term job after retiring from the military, though with a cheap apartment rather than a motel. But we knew it was only temporary, and we soon moved to join him.)
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May 26, 2016 07:59
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