Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
Hope that bus is going to 69 very separate locations some of which are at least 20 miles from the closest urban area and in opposite directions to accommodate those who cannot afford or don’t want to live in a city.
What you are dong there is actually an argument against the other side of the issue. Exclusively Residential zoning plans are what create the situation you are referring to and they also account for the constant risk of bankruptcy of car centric cities. Dense, multi-use zoning allows for the creation of transit corridors where a single bus stop can serve several hundred people within a 5 minute walk, instead of serving just a handful of people within a 20 minute walk (the problem you are complaining about).
Valid and I had not considered that.
However, this post is in “fuck cars” not “fuck poor zoning laws.” The solutions and complaints I see in this thread have NOTHING to do with remapping the way cities work, which would be necessary to even be able to consider saying “fuck cars” for the vast majority of suburban / rural residents.
The comments here seem entirely fixated on “solving” a symptom of a much larger problem by creating several more problems for other people because it would be more convenient for them.
And while your solution is nice for those in the city I ask again, what if someone lives 20 or 30 miles (not 20 mins walking) away because they can buy a 3 bedroom house in a neighboring city or unincorporated rural area for the price of renting a small studio apartment in the city, and have a nicer view.
They are both the same single problem. Remember that fuck cars is not about the hate of cars solely, but about the car centric infrastructure and its externalities on society. “Fuck cars” as a phrase is just the succinct summary of a largely complex and multifaceted social issue.
Thank you that’s a helpful explanation. I found (find) the name of the group misleading if that’s the case, though I understand group names are supposed to be catchy.
How is it misleading? It’s right there in the community description. It’s been this way ever since the time it was an advocacy community on reddit obsessed with the not just bikes YouTube channel. There are some issues that always come inextricably integrated, abortion and contraception, school shootings and gun laws, police violence and racism, and car centric culture and zoning laws. Without cars we don’t have the need for a slew of laws meant exclusively to accommodate cars. Overly wide streets, exclusive residential zoning, mandatory parking space, to name but a few. Sorry the community isn’t called fuckdetachedsinglefamilyhomes but it just wasn’t that catchy.
This person has never lived anywhere close to an actual small American town and has no idea how small towns are structured.
deleted by creator
“Here’s a solution”
“That solution doesn’t work for A LOT of people”
“Well you don’t think it’ll work for valid reasons you must not want anything to work ever”
Mass transit is how you create large population centers. A big reason small towns collapse stems from the degradation of their incredibly expensive per-mile asphalt system collapsing under the weight of heavy trucks and eighteen wheelers. The cost of maintaining the road infrastructure cripples the municipal budget.
Commercial Rail takes that weight off the back of the local community. And busing allows for denser housing closer to the center of town, which saves money on everything from municipal plumbing to trash pickup to public schooling to health care delivery.
Historically, small towns have relied on centrally located city services to both fuel local commerce and keep cost of living down. The death of a small town’s city center is typically the prelude to the collapse of the township on the whole. That’s a fact people who actually live in these towns are keenly aware of. But it is routinely overlooked by big city suburbanites who think everyone in the family owning a $40k personal vehicle is normal and taking the bus or the bicycle into town is something rural communities are totally unfamiliar with.
I’m not a big city suburbanite nor can I afford a $40,000 car.
I’m not sure what small towns are collapsing under the weight of roads, though I’m sure its a problem for some.
Our biggest financial issue is an unnecessarily bloated police force. The state maintains the major roads here and many smaller roads are private, dirt, maintained by an HOA, etc. Though yes, some areas have some potholes, though not nearly as bad as those in large cities I visit like Memphis or Louisville.
Also small cities, within the town center are perfectly walkable and small enough that we don’t really need a bus. But to get to that walkable area, you need a car.
If you and your buddies want to invest and run a train though every small town in the US, I’m all for it.
However,
Some of use don’t want large population centers or we’d live in the city and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
A 2015 study by the Cornell Local Roads Program found that the annual cost of managing a mile of road in a handful of New York towns and cities varied from $4,429 to $10,440. Meanwhile, a 2016 analysis of Washington State’s county roads came up with a range of $1,528 to $23,651.
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Telling townships to maintain large, far flung asphalt road networks is demanding the impossible.
In biggest municipalities that’s true. But then the largest time sink for police is… traffic enforcement.
Much of the rail infrastructure already exists, although cities have been cannibalizing it to expand the highway capacity for decades. Show me a small town in America that’s older than 50 years and I’ll show you the rail line that runs through it.
But getting permission to actually use it? That’s not a money problem. It’s a politics problem.
Come to think of it, the town in from had a train, as did most of the neighboring towns.
That is until they ripped all of them up to make bike paths. Florida Rails to Trails I think it was called. And they did a half-assed job in a lot of places, just ripping up the rails and then not really providing or maintaining the “trail” part.
Texas has a similar program, although the trails through Houston are at least decent enough to bike on.
But I’m more thinking of the plan for the Houston Blue Line, which was defunded under Tom DeLay back in 1994. A commercial line running from Katy to downtown was literally just sitting there unused, and Shelia Jackson Lee had an earmark to turn it into a passenger rail system. It passed through half a dozen smaller communities west of the city and would have drastically reduced congestion into the bigger shopping districts.
After the federal funds were stripped, the city tried to go at it alone, under a succession of Dem mayors. But just as Bill White was getting ready to sign off on the overhaul, Governor Rick Perry claimed the track as part of a state-backed toll road extension. The entire line was torn out practically overnight, to be transformed into the Westpark Tollway at enormous state and federal expense over the next five years. It became one of the most expensive-per-mile toll roads in the country when it was finished - around $15 to $20 (surge pricing!) travel less than five miles and still managed to lose money for the private operator, who had to be bailed out by the state a decade later.
Now both the Westpark toll road and the even bigger, more expensive I-10 “managed lanes” have private commercial bus programs to bring people into downtown from the suburbs. That’s the closest we’re allowed to have to mass transit in my city. But if you ask why, you’ll get an earful about how its unfair to rural folks for anyone else to use a vehicle that holds more than six people. You’ll even get this explanation while sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic behind a six car pile-up at the 59/610 interchange.
Wait, me or OP?