A lot of people are convinced that rail could never work in most U.S. cities because we have too much sprawl, but it's more complicated than that.Transit can serve *residential* sprawl perfectly fine. What it can't handle is *commercial* sprawl.
what do you meanit can handle commercial sprawl tooyou can have rail going straight into warehouses
>>2027608i think the argument is that with residental sprawl but no commercial sprawl, everyone's going to the same place to work, but with both, travel patterns are too diffused for rail to be economic
>>2027598>>2027610no it cant handle residential sprawl, its not necessarily the place youre going to work, but its the home youre coming from. with residential sprawl, housing isnt really located that close to subway stations because suburbs are more filled with houses than urban environemnts.
>>2027610This exactly, I live in northern CO and there's absolutely no way to make transit work here because everyone is living and working way too spread out. Transit here truly is just a rolling homeless shelter, because absolutely no one else has a use for it.
>>2027598it can't. no one is going to want to take public transit when there are minorities on the train/bus (which takes 3.5 times as long to get anywhere as driving) acting annoying and antisocial. the suburbs exist as a legal form of segregation. car dominance exists as a legal form of segregation
>>2027657Man that's not even it, more that if a bus even comes to your suburb there's a 90% chance you'll have to transfer at least once to get anywhere you actually want to go regularly (assuming a bus even goes there at all).
>>2027657cars dominated long before desegregation was forced by the federal government on American people
>>2027629>this nigga really never heard of commuter rail
>>2027651i dont really know about that. most employment here is centered either around historic downtowns or along road corridors which are both really easy to connect with rail or other transit. look at the max in fort collins for example, while the reduced frequency has really hurt ridership it still gets packed with normal people during rush hour
>Complaining about "sprawl" and "urban development."Transportation?
>>2027608>rail going straight into warehousesI love these with subways so much. I can access 3 different malls and several little shops while never even stepping outside. If the subway would only also be directly connected to a shared basement system I could go shopping in a bizzard in shirt and shorts. Or pyjamas.
>>2027674it came as a result of the great migration and really took off during the forced busing shit>>2027671a bus literally goes past my house and I still prefer to drive because its faster and there aren't any annoying faggots in my car like there are on the bus. people don't want to expand bus access because they don't want minorities in their area. you can literally find news stories about people opposing transit being added to their town to keep minorities out
mass transit doesnt work without high densitysimple as10.000sqft lawns with 2500sqft mcmansions need to go if you want public transit.
>>2027994>2500sqft mcmansionsIn that case virtually every large suburban home is a McMansion. You guys need to come up with new buzzwords
>>2027996this categorization is unimportant in this matter.my point is that if you want mass transit, you need to have enough people in a given area.if you want public transit to be useable, it needs to go frequently.where I live the city center has trams and metros going at every 120 seconds in rush hour.where I live in the edge of the city, train goes every 6 minutes.I would say if you do not have a train at every 10-15 minutes, it will be inconvenient to use.therefore you need enough commuters in the 0.5-1mile radius of the station to fill the trains every 10 minute or so.if you have 50 feet wide front laws, huge houses and 50 feet wide roads, thats just impossible.you will need apartmentsyou can have huge parks and wide streets, but then build tall buildings.if you have low enough density that street parking is easily achiveable, then the area is not suitable for public transit.
>>2027997A neighborhood of 50 foot wide plots is fairly dense in the US (too small for "huge" home) and only arterial roads are going to be 50 feet wide, that's 4-5 lanes. People live in suburbs because they prefer it to denser housing. Commuter park & ride facilities (for trains or buses) work in suburban locations, virtually no suburban residents want or expect a metro system.
no, it can never work. car culture is too ingrained into america. people will not give up their cars. you could have subways and buses that run directly from every single persons house to exactly where they are going, and they still would not do it. people do not want to give up the freedom a car gives them to then have to be on a public transporttion's schedule, and riding with undesirable people.it only has a chance in heavily dense cities. new york and san francisco are the two i know of where it is extensively used. even in an extremely dense area like los angeles, public transportation is unused because stuff is too spread out.
>>2027912>Along road corridorsSo the train is supposed to drive down the path of the road and stop occasionally like a bus?That sounds like a total downgrade from cars, and I'd bet most Americans would agree with me.
When will you people get it through your heads, you are the minority.Most Americans don't want public transit, the vast majority only use it when they are too poor to own a car or the urban density is so high it makes having a car a chore.The average well adjusted person has no use for public transit, there are simply too many downsides to it.
>>2027972AFAIK both the Toronto Path and Mtl Reso networks have hotels connected to the system so you could technically make your subzero pyjama'd excursions a reality
>>2027996and no one wants to live in fucking pods like you do because no one in the US wants to live near blacks. Literally all your seething is the result of the great migrations, brown vs board of ed, the subsequent forced busing laws and rosa parks
>>2027651park and rides are a thing. i dont live or work near the light rail but i use it to go into denver on weekends so i can avoid traffic. if office buildings were more the norm or intervals between buses were less than 30 minutes i could easily see it being the way people commute, either drive or ride to a station with plenty of parking and full bike cages and then go to work. unfortunately the rtd went with an optimistic price estimate on the ballot measure and ran out of money when it inevitably went over budget, as well as keeping the bus service shitty so its almost useless unless you live near a station.
>>2027598Adding nice park-and-ride stations in suburban areas can help rail work out as part of the larger ecosystems but the same rail advocates hate the idea and would rather see the parking lot replaced with "transit oriented development" instead (read: dense apartment complexes).
Based threadBut any kind of sprawl is retarded
>>2028276I agree, anything less dense than this should be levelled down.
>>2028276Now that it's been established that parking minimums are retarded and removing them results in economic prosperity, I wonder what the next big movement in urbanism policy will be.ADU policy has done well but we should add duplexes to that.
>>2028281bot
>>2027598How will you keep the the minorities from destroying it? Public rail inevitably gets turned into a toilet for blacks and mexicans.
>>2028304>Public rail inevitably gets turned into a toilet for blacks and mexicansno it doesn't. The real problem is schizos and drug addicts.
>>2027598isn't that the same train that derailed in 2003 and killed like 300 people?
>>2027972Montreal does this and it's a major tourist attraction. Locals don't actually use it that way, but you can in theory cover something like 5km of walking just by going from mall to mall through tunnels and maybe one or two random skyways or covered plazas.
>>2028281i honestly don't understand why developers are so afraid of above or below ground parking. I guess it's more expensive than just paving a lot but it would make the money back since people would actually go to any of those stores/malls more than once a week.
>>2028381Nice work replying to a bot.
>live in bay area ca>have to see these tech faggot autists making their gay faggot startup shit for gay faggot tech companies that do nothign for society>they make waymo, using unbelievable tech skills to have driverless cars act as taxis, driving around entire cities shuttling people around avoiding accidents and shit >they get billions of dollars in funding, get valued at something like 40-50 billion fucking dollars as a company>yet the region's subway system is facing a fiscal cliff, a massive deficit of hundreds of millions of dollars despite subsisides from the state, and may go out of business in a few years, and the system has plenty of issues even as basic as the fucking announcements on the trains from conductors not being loud enough for people to hearthis is why public transportaiton will NEVER succeed in america. it's supposed to be a public good, a public service, not be ultra profitable because its A PUBLIC SERVICE, but america doesnt care about public services. its a capitalist corporate dystopian hellscape that will only fund and support things that can make a massive profit for shareholders and venture capitalist scam faggots. its un fucking believable. a subway system thats been around for 50 years, that got even more destroyed after covid because the tech faggots stopped commuting via subway since they all work their useless jobs from home, and then these same tech faggots can raise billions and billions of dollars in private funding while the irreplaceable subway system falls into default.
>>2028412People don't want to use Bart because of crime in the trains and around many of the stations, but they don't want to support the police or vote for prosecutors who will crack down on antisocial behavior. It's hardly because of muh corporate hellscape, it's literally just the population getting the government it voted for.
>>2028414>muh "no one uses bart because of crime"thats a fucking lie and im tired of seeing people say that shit, you probably dont even ride bart or live in the are like most people who hate california. barts ridership has cratered since covid DIRECTLY because of tech faggots working their worthless jobs from home. i give bart a lot of credit becuase it has signfiicantly stepped up daily policing. before covid you rarely saw many police despite half a million a day ridership, now at like half that theres tons more police. they are putting in new faregates to try to keep scum out, they clean a lot more, theyve stepped up the amenities a lot. no one is going to come back to bart, it wouldnt matter if there wasnt a single homeless person or drug addict or criminal in the system and if you could eat dinner off the train floors. because no one wants to give up their cars here, no one wants that extra inconvencience. even before covid, people rarely rode on weekends, because people dont use it for leisure. bart was always a san francisco and work commute system an now work from home killed itbut thats all beside what my original point was. my original point was how these faggot tech companies can raise billions in venture capitalist funding like its nothing for transportation-related companies, and be valued at 50 billion fucking dollars for having self-driving cars acting as taxis for private travel around one city, but the extremely important, widespread, and great public good that is the bart subway system can be facing financial ruin and potentially being shut down because it doesnt have funding. because the corporate hellscape that is the "liberal" bay area wont fund anything that isnt some gay worthless faggot piece of shit tech company that can make money for its faggot shareholders.
>>2028419Yeah it was all those tech guys working from home that were going to do that whether covid happened or not. Had NOTHING to do with antisocial behavior and crime, lol.Trying to guilt people into riding a transit system known for crime isn't a winning strategy. And going on screeds about tech bros when you live in the #1 area for tech/startups in the world? The problem sounds like it's you not them
>>2028281>Now that it's been established that parking minimums are retarded and removing them results in economic prosperityNothing has been established lol, this is the usual circle-jerk of Reddit>find article/study that seems to suggest something they like>share and signal post until "seems to suggest" is "unquestionably does without room for argument">anyone who finds a problem with the article/study is obviously "biased", a "shill", or a "carbrain", and censored if possible>continue to be baffled at why reality doesn't seem to line up with their ideas
>>202844299.999% of p*rk*ng m*n*mums shit you read online is LITERALLY bots and paid shills. Back before I got sick of respawning on that hell site, I used to track the accounts that posted about parking minimums, not a single one of them posted anything resembling human content. A couple of them were actually crossposting porn spam and yimby spam because those are the two most lucrative spambot content categories. The best thing to do is not engage because you're just promoting their visibility.
>>2027863Does the commuter rail stop within my neighborhood? Otherwise I see no reason to use it over a car.
>>2028657Most commuter rail stations are a park&ride scheme which are basically a case of having your cake and eating it too: Still enjoying suburban living and owning a car whilst not having to deal with sitting in traffic/putting mileage on your car/spending money on gas if you live in a state or province where fuel is expensive/pissing off people like NJB who maintain that any kind of public transit scheme that even slightly benefits drivers is the work of the devil
