One more lane, bro
Everybody in this photo could fit in like 4 buses
Always remember LLMs are trained to sound correct to the human mind, not be correct.
For a small segment of the trip. The problem with public transportation is that all these people are going to different locations and a bus being more efficient for 50% of the travel doesn’t really help you for the other 50%
The problem is not with public transportation, the problem is that the area surrounding this highway was designed so that more cars and more lanes were the only possible solution.
Cars create problems that only cars can solve.
Edit: and to add more context: those 50 different locations are all separated by massive mandatory parking lots which make them miles apart from each other when they could likely all be contained in the same building in front of a single bus stop.
Unless there’s another bus for the other 50% of the travel. The point of a public transportation system is to be just that - a system. To get from anywhere to anywhere else.
Where I live this will cause what would be a 15 minute car ride into 1.5 hours of hopping on different busses and then walking 1/2 mile to your destination on either end. I don’t have a problem with effective public transportation but outside of major population centers like Manhattan, I haven’t seen one that really works all that well here in the US.
As someone who has lived alone for eight years using only public transport in an area with excellent public transport, I can tell you that you are both right and wrong.
You are right in that if there is just one bus line, then it would only serve a small subset of people in this photo.
But if you only make one bus line then the public transport system is doomed to fail.
A good public transport system will have multiple lines converging to the same interchange, and in the opposite direction it will have multiple lines departing the same interchange, following the same route and branching off when needed, this way you have added capacity and redundancy at the start of the line, and it gets reduced as the need is reduced.
Then add lines that are circles in higher density areas, this means that no matter the direction all passengers can get on all departures, you csn also quickly add capacity by adding busses that goes in alternating directions.
All of this means that travellers can define their own route along different bus, train, tram, metro and ferry lines.
Public transport is not ment to be point to point, it builds a framework where people decide what parts the want to use.
Cars are just more precise in space and time. In a car you go from your origin to your destination, within lot-to-door distance, and you go exactly when you want to.
With public transportation, you travel a block or two to enter the system, arrive a block or two from your destination, and you can only leave at certain intervals.
At my last job the commute was:
10 minute walk to the bus, 50 minutes on the bus, walk across parking lot to office.
The same commute by car was 15 minutes.
So what?
Living in a city with actually good public transit, it is used to achieve exactly that. To get any one passenger from any one point within the metropolitan area, to any other. To work for everyone, even though every single person is starting from a different point, and going to a different destination.
It doesn’t matter where you’re going or from where. There is a public transit stop nearby at both ends.
The fuck do you mean “a small segment of the trip”? I share this city with a stupid number of other humans, only a small number of which I go to work with every day, yet a significant portion of of the entire city population travels to work, entertainment and shopping, using the exact same transit network.
Your trip may overlap with a varying number of entirely different individuals along each segment of the route, and at each end it might just be you walking a few dozen meters… But come on! The fact that it adds up is beyond obvious!
Your argument is only valid for mass transit, that isn’t actually mass transit.
And as density goes up (read less roads and carparks), the overlaps INCREASE and the whole thing gets more efficient.
There is a train station in Tokyo, that serves the same number of people every day, as there are citizens in my entire country.
Can you even imagine what a highway interchange that could serve 5 million people within 24 hours would look like? No, because it’s a physical impossibility.
The only reason the number can get so high, is because transit systems consolidate travellers even when they aren’t going to the same places.
I think I may have been to that train station.
I walked through a place that, at first, I thought was a regular metro station. But then it just kept opening up more and more, into more and more spaces. It was like a mall. I guess it was like an airport terminal. Businesses all over.
When I finally left it, I thought I was underground and then turned a corner and there was open daylight, no door, not even a wall just like the opening of a huge cave.
95% of Londoners are 400m or less from a bus stop. The bus service suits everyone for any journey. And then we have trains and the tube. There’s never a need for a car no matter where and when you go.
London wasn’t developed after the automobile. Houston’s metroplex covers a much larger area with a much smaller population, which makes London’s solutions much less practical.
The closest bus stop to someone in Alvin or Bellville may be 20 miles away, and they’ll have to change busses 7 times to get where they’re going.
That’s cool that Londoners all live so close to each other and have a city built around public transportation. Unfortunately as someone who lives in Texas a car really us practically mandatory. Our Urban sprawl is large and it’s not something that can or will be easily fixed even over multiple lifetimes. To give an idea of what it is like over here, the nearest grocery store is a little over 3 miles (~5 km) away from where I live. There is no bus route within a 2 mile (~3km) area of me that provides transportation to that area.
The public transportation we do have is lacking in availability, accessibility, and coverage. and while there are ongoing efforts to update it. These updates primarily apply to the inner parts of the large cities and rarely cover the urban living areas where people actually live at. And these living areas are frequently very far away from where public transportation is available.
The main problem is that Texas cities are just too expansive in size for public transportation to currently be effective. This isn’t even factoring in how long commutes would take to be for some people even if they where somehow magically available tomorrow.
For example, many of my co-workers on my overnight shift live far enough away that commuting to work in a car during the dead of night on an empty highway road where they drive 75+ mph ( 120+kph) still takes them an hour or more to arrive to work daily. This is consider a common and even somewhat normal commute time and distance in Texas. If they had to take public transportation they would be looking at an over 2+ hour commute everyday at best. So that is not really a viable option for them.
Im really happy that Europeans have more dense cities and don’t have to deal with the same problems we have. But it honestly gets tiring hearing everyone say public transportation be the solution for everything in Texas. Yes it would very much help and efforts are being made. But due to how Texas cities where laid out and planned with urban sprawl in mind multiple decades ago before even my grandfather was able to give input. We can no longer have public transportation be a viable option for a large segment of the people who live here.
What Texas needs is both public transport AND better highway road planning, for example more exits and on ramps, more alternative routes to free up congestion on major feeder arteries. Not more lanes on the same congested routes, off ramps, feeders, etc.
Sorry for the rant, I just fucking hate the traffic here and it’s causes have become my mini soapbox of annoyance
That’s why frequency is one of the most important factors for public transportation.
All of that, for a traffic jam. Imagine turning 4 lanes in a train track carrying 500 person every 5 min in both directions and one lane in a bike lane. It’s still 20 lanes for car, but you suddenly have decent public transport which would be safer and faster than that gigantic traffic jam
Or just a decent bus system. You could replace 50 cars on that highway with a single bus.
It’s always first and last leg in Texas that kills this stuff.
The only affordable housing is far enough outside the city that you basically have to own a car because there’s not enough density to have bus stops.
And going to a park park and ride following by waiting on the bus adds another 30-40 minutes to the commute and gets your car broken into 3 times a year, so nobody uses them.
The real solution is to mandate allowing remote work for positions where it is a viable option.
I commute 4 hours a day for a job where I log into a computer and do all my work online. If people like me were allowed to work remote we’d have more time with our families, traffic would be reduced, and housing closer the city would get cheaper for those who DO need to work in-person.
THAT’S MY AMERICA 🇺🇸 🦅🔥🔥🔥 ONE MORE LANE DOESN’T FIX IT MY A$$ LOOK AT THIS AND TELL ME IT ISN’T WORKING 🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🔥🔥🔥🦅🦅
Anything but a fucking train…
