ACCESS Magazine

It'd be nice to have emergency vehicles. But, don't build hanging parkways with good views, for the privileged, please. We've been there before - https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2003/putting-pleasure-back-drive… - with Robert Moses parkways, "bridges instead of tunnels" and the likes. And we've now learned - it's a mistake to put mass transportation system into the air. (Love flying, private pilot, airplanes, sailplanes, paragliders, had been flying half of my life. Yes, really cute bird. Yes, shiny. It's a mistake to put mass transportation system into the air. It is even worse to put a private road there.)

Tomorrow I'll drive to the jfk airport to pick up family. The freedom and convenience I get from it makes owning a car great You especially like it because most cities (including NYC w/ street parking in most boroughs) subsidize the cost of parking: http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/spring-2016/cutting-the-cost-of… The cost of free parking is high.

Forget about the environment! Being hit by an SUV instead of a mid-sized sedan increases your risk of death by over 50%, even if the SUV has no cargo in it and the driver is commuting, alone, to work. Choosing SUVs and trucks and other oversize vehicles that are bigger than your actual use case calls for also violently inflicts greater risk of death and injury upon other road users at no benefit to you. This is because doubling the weight of two cars in a collision does not make either driver safer; it's a zero sum game. (It's also because bigger vehicles reduce visibility for everyone else.) It also indirectly creates more congestion -- the vehicles have to fit on the road, slowing maneuvers at intersections and making it less feasible for jurisdictions to manage traffic by repainting N lane roads as N+M lane roads with narrower lanes. I'm all for getting a large vehicle if you actually use it to haul, but I get angry[1] whenever I see people driving around massive brand new pickup trucks with totally empty beds, two rows of seats, and all the luxury passenger-oriented option as a "lifestyle choice" because it "looks cool" to their buddies. It's essentially a sedan with a bunch of wasted weight and horsepower that fulfills the same goal a T-shirt reading "I'm a real man who needs a truck" would fulfill. Some…

Building private roads is (almost) illegal in most of the world, so you'll mostly see criminals do it. See also https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-1993/private-toll-roads-in-ameri… Financing roads from tolls is fairly straightforward.

SUVs are more dangerous to their drivers too, on average. https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-2002/suvs-really-safer-cars/

According to architects who know, it’s the price of mandatory parking, especially in MDUs, that drives up the cost of housing much more than the additional cost of adhering to more stringent building codes. See, e.g., https://www.accessmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/05/acce…

The person you keep replying to has not cherry-picked anything. They have merely selected the most conveniently available data source to quote. https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2007/horse-power-horsepower/ You can criticize their choice of sources, you can dig deeper and provide more comprehensive data, but going post after post admonishing them for cherry-picking data that is just gauche. They didn't pick the years!

The 2014 paper "Pounds that Kill" by Michael L. Anderson and Maximilian Auffhammer looked briefly at pedestrian deaths from vehicles, but focused more on multi vehicle collisions and estimated driver and passenger deaths in relation to vehicle weight. The OP estimates $100/yr external cost of light trucks to account for the increase in pedestrian deaths. This paper estimates a cost several times higher to additionally account for driver and passenger deaths. Summary article: https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-2014/pounds-kill/ Full paper: http://are.berkeley.edu/~mlanderson/pdf/anderson_auffhammer.pdf

There are already 100 million (!) electro scooters in use in China: https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-2010/electric-two-wheelers-china-p… This mega trend went mostly unnoticed in the West. Update: now 200mio (sorry for posting this the 4th time in two weeks, but it's a perfect fit and important)

If you want to get from a car based city to one with mass transit (most us cities). The only way to get the city dense enough is to remove parking requirements, and that only works if people can get by without a car. If the public option isn't good enough, then ride sharing can be a bridge until the public option is good enough. In LA the biggest difficulty facing new dense/affordable construction is the number car spaces required per apartment. http://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2014/parking-requirements-housing…

>The truth is... you can't fix congestion. In transportation theory, there's an element called induced demand: if travel time improves in a corridor, then that induces people to take extra trips, often returning it fairly quickly to the same level of congestion. That's not true though. Induced demand does soak up a lot of the increased capacity, but not all of it. Building more capacity does improve congestion (or at least make it less worse than it would have been had you not built more capacity); it's just that the benefit is a fraction of what you would have gotten had there been no increase in road usage. See for example https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2003/induced-travel-studies-indu…

Basically, the Shoup/SFPark system: https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-2013/sfpark-pricing-parking-demand…

There has been https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/commuting-takes-its-toll/ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-mentally-strong-people-dont-… https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/urban-survival/201501/commuting-t… https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-1992/commuter-stress/

>"To put it simply, the US worker gets a salary and buys a car, while the Chinese worker makes a deposit in a bank for a construction firm to borrow and build a railroad." Have you been to Beijing recently? I can assure you the Chinese worker is also buying a car. China has the highest automative sales of anywhere on the planet. Here is some data: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-08/china-wraps-up-26th… http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/motoring/2016-01/26/content_2325… http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2012/will-chinas-vehicle-p…

As per Federal government reports California has second worst quality of roads after DC. [1] Neither LA nor SF Bay area has any good roads. I think your are judging them by lower standards compared to population density, commute distance etc. It is barely sufficient. Just look at this [2] data. California's rate of building new roads is significantly lower, expenditure stagnant and quality is bad. This despite the higher gas taxes. The money clearly is going somewhere else. 1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/25/why-driving-on-… 2. http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-1993/why-california-stoppe…

Jaywalking was an invented term but it was not a new concept created as part of a conspiracy to steal the streets from pedestrians. Prior to the invention of the automobile, if a pedestrian walked onto a public street and was struck and killed by a vehicle, the pedestrian was 100% at fault unless the driver was negligent. Merely operating a vehicle in a normal manner was not negligence. It has been understood since the construction of Pompeii at the latest, that pedestrians belong on sidewalks and vehicles in the road. Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris was built in the 1600s with sidewalks. All of the oldest photos from the 1800s of major cities show a separation of vehicles and pedestrians. If you have access to a newspaper archive like I do you can run a search for jaywalking and sort by oldest result. Most of the pushback to jaywalking laws was because they required crossing at corners, not the middle of the street. People instinctively (wrongly) believed that crossing in the middle was safer. Statisticians know that corners are safer. Fun fact: you were more likely to die being run over by a horse in New York City prior to the invention of the automobile than you are to be struck and killed by an automobile today. Much MUCH more likely. >Horses killed in other, more direct ways as well. As difficult as it may be to believe given their low speeds, horse-drawn vehicles were far deadlier than their modern counterparts. In New York in 1900, 200 persons were…

On the density aspect, I was just reading: https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-2010/density-doesnt-tell-us-sprawl… I'd agree that having "evenly" spread low-medium density rather than "lumpy" density is part of the issue, but from what I remember observing in the parts of LA I've spent time in (mostly around Venice) is that the density seemed to definitely be high enough to support getting around without needing to rely on cars (whether via powered scooters, bicycles, walking or public transit), but the sheer amount of space dedicated to roads vs footpaths etc. and the general layout of the streets and distances between retail centres etc. seemed to make it clear the cars were the expected way everyone would get around, and hence that's exactly what everyone did (maybe it's changed somewhat since I was last there ~15 years ago?). Certainly it was hard to understand the lack of rail-based transit options (whether heavy or light rail).

This is not a NOMs problem but a complete breakdown in planning to provide adequate transportation. The apps only exacerbated the problem. The problem is that California stopped building freeways in 1975 and we don't have much in the way of public transportation. Therefore people end up driving at freeway speeds in neighborhoods with children and pets. An interesting example is highway 17 which is the only freeway between silicon valley and the beach. On a hot summer day the entire freeway is gridlocked. Beach goers believe they can get there faster if they drive through the streets of Los Gatos. This shuts down an entire town. There are plenty of stories about how we dismantled public transportation after WW2. I am not sure how true they are so I won't repeat them. One thing that is true is that eminent domain has become much more costly in California making it difficult to rebuild public transportation after we dismantled it. Here is an article on why we stopped building freeways: https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-1993/why-california-stopped-buildi…

> $12.6 billion: The amount Collin County says it needs to spend on new roads in the next 30 years. Why should we accept that roads should be that expensive? [1] is an article that provides a good overview of the rise in construction costs that eventually stalled new highway construction projects. One can imagine this trend in costs being reversed: in particular, 1) we should be able to reduce labor requirements through relaxation of work rules, 2) streamline community and environmental review to reduce administrative costs of construction, and 3) raise revenues with direct usage fees instead of relying on increasingly precarious fuel taxation, decreasing the amount of highway funding that needs to come from the general budget. I feel like a lot of people are too eager to declare that new roads are no longer feasible and that we should adapt society to the degraded transit infrastructure of the future, but this attitude is defeatist and will impose a burden that will fall on everyone in society. Roads are good. Transportation is good. We should be devoting our energies to making roads cheaper, not finding elaborate ways to justify inaction. [1] https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-1993/why-california-stopped-buildi…