I find the focus on congestion within the transport space to be perplexing. I'm guessing it is to do with the visibility of congestion. Waze recently did a survey and identified the Netherlands as the best place to drive (https://www.waze.com/driverindex).
The Netherlands is also the only western country with a negative obesity trend expected to hit 8% by 2030, currently at 10% vs the UK's 25%. The USA I believe is getting close to 36%.
We can try and blame our diets, however our built environment is creating a public health crisis of inoordinate scale. The car is very much to blame for this.
The car and car sharing is not the answer to traffic. Creating segregated end to end cycle networks with good junctions enabling people to choose to ride up to 5 miles to school/work is absolutely critical to avert this public health crisis.
Diet definitely has a bigger impact than exercise, but isn't there still a correlation between more urban areas and lower obesity even when controlling for poverty?
There may be other factors to urban, non-car-based living besides the extra physical activity that encourages lower weight. It's maybe as simple as without a car you can't go to Costco and stock up on huge sacks of unhealthy foods in one go -- beats me, I'd be interested to learn more.
On my phone so I can't find the right metastudy but yes, there is an inverse correlation between urban lifestyles and obesity rates but it's a tenuous one. In cities like Atlanta, St. Louis, Montgomery, and San Antonio the difference in obesity rates from rural and suburban areas in the same state is almost nonexistent but Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York see much lower rates in obesity. (within city limits, their metropolitan areas are a while different animal).
I have a feeling that it's mostly due to a hybrid peer pressure/economic effect. When you're in a group of friends and the majority want to go to a healthier restaurant or everyone in your neighborhood goes to the local mom and pop grocery store instead of Safeway, it becomes a self reinforcing pressure to eat healthy. More healthy restaurants will open and more small grocery stores will be built to serve individual neighborhoods while market share is slowly taken from unhealthy restaurants and chain groceries. Eventually, a significant portion of people who would otherwise have trouble controlling their weight stick with the healthier diet out of inertia or convenience.
I also saw a study (although not a very conclusive one) that suggested that discrimination could play a part. A higher cost of living in cities means that a lot more jobs that can support the lifestyle have a physical appearance component to them. Salespeople in high end boutiques, consultants, etc are economically more viable in denser areas and if clients or employers discriminate based on looks, there will be fewer job opportunities for the obese, making it harder for them to live in urban areas.
Do you know if there's a study that breaks this down by population density instead? My intuition (having lived for 6 years without a car in Atlanta) is that obesity levels aren't going to be significantly different in a sprawling, low-density city like Atlanta, where everyone drives, but in a dense, walkable, and public-transit friendly city like NYC you will see a difference.
Not off the top of my head but there are plenty of such studies. That still wouldn't give a clear picture because Los Angeles is also a low density car centric city but because it's in California, healthy eating is culturally more prevalent and fresh food is easier to come by.
All the factors matter, and obesity definitely has a social component.
The jobs not only have a physical appearance component, the performance expectations and constant competition may mean you need more endurance. I'm not fat, and I'm not ripped, but I sure as hell feel a major performance boost in my own work when I eating healthy and exercising daily vs when (years ago) I was sitting inside all day drinking soda. I can't imagine how I would feel or perform if I had kept that up post-30.
Chain restaurants share commonality with big box retail. In a major city taking a client to Applebees much less Mcdonalds isn't going to cut it. In some cases rent may be too high to even support their business model, replaced instead by small shops and food trucks and larger restaurants at higher price points.
If the car was less important, the parking lot didn't matter, and people walked, would everything collapse in to more centralized walking cores? If so, would they serve anything healthy, or are the big cities an outlier because of the wealth and performance pressure?
Agreed in simple terms - cutting on high calorie food specifically sugar is better than exercising for body weight. However what if the environment (one conducive to riding bikes) causes us to make better dietary decision. In this case the focus should be on the environment.
This is correct in absolute terms. OP refers to relative rates of obesity based on variable cultural/jurisdictional attitudes towards cycling vs. cars.
I'm just going to point at the Netherlands their obesity rate of 10%. They have designed in an hour or more of exercise per day into just getting around. In the UK some cities have stats where people are known to just do 20 minutes of walking exercise per year.
> In the UK some cities have stats where people are known to just do 20 minutes of walking exercise per year.
No way that's correct unless the U.K. has cities full of bedridden people. 20 minutes of walking is 3.3 seconds per day. You need a catheter or a wheelchair to walk that little.
I did qualify it as exercise. In other words, somebody deliberately 'going for a walk to exercise'. It would be interesting to know how many people do no form of exercise.
You also claim that the Dutch "have designed in an hour or more of exercise per day into just getting around." You're using two entirely different measures so your comparison is useless. If only "deliberate" walking exercise counts, then there are probably lots of Dutch getting no exercise.
I think at some point you are going to have to accept the fact that no, cars are not going to go away in the US. You can crow all you want about how much better mass transportation is but you're arguing for the benefit of society to the detriment to the individual, something that will never fly in the American ethos.
Biven that all the near-term technological improvements like AR systems, electric/non-internal-combustion engines and size coming down (Smart Car and equivalents have been gaining traction in the US for some time), combined with the basic geography of most of the US outside of cities, combined with the politics, combined with things like national security (why we built the international highway system in the first place), all predict a future where no, rail lines stuffed with humans who then take rideshares to their final destination are not going to be our reality.
I'll also tack on that progressives' constant attempts to belittle car owners does a very poor job convincing anyone that mass transit should be or even can be our future. When you sneeringly tell, say, a middle-aged mother who has relied on cars her whole life and continues to rely on cars now, that she's just made arbitrary choices to need a car and she could eliminate the need for one easily, she's going to laugh at you, as she should. Unless you want to expand the definition of "choice" to be "anything that is not an involuntary biological function" it's just naively facile to say something like that, but these threads are full of people ready and able to tell their fellow Americans how they should live. That's just not going to effect any change at all.
People are downvoting you, but I see this as a very valid argument. When you live within an environment where the only realistic choice is to run your own car then you are correct.
So you design a world where the car is necessary, you gut public transport, making a car more necessary, and use road design to make walking practically impossible.
Then you get angry at progressives.
Highways engineers, town planners, and policy makers are directly responsible for your reliance on the car through the encouragement of urban sprawl.
You're largely correct, but it is also true that the car ownership centric choices made on infrastructure and city growth turned out not to work so well either.
The best near to mid term developments probably involve cars still being quite central to many Americans lifestyle, while simultaneously becoming a bit more expensive and less convenient (e.g. less subsidized infrastructure, less central to urban planning). Simultaneously (some?) urban centers can become significantly less reliant on car ownership. Everyone can (and should) make their own choices, but we can work on having those choices less distorted by the policy objectives that have emphasized car (and for that matter home) ownership over other alternatives.
> you're arguing for the benefit of society to the detriment to the individual
Isn't that just a marketing challenge? Seems like going carless can be presented as a benefit, with many pros over cons, if the infrastructure begins to get built out.
With driverless smart-cars (which, I know, might be as much of an impossible nerdgasm pipe dream as flying cars):
* You no longer have to pay for insurance on a car that spends 90% of its time idle in your garage, nor gas, nor maintenance - except for the fees built into "hiring" the car, which is directly proportional to your use of it.
* No more car payments, either. No longer are you taking an instant 25% hit as soon as you drive a 2017 Hyundai Sombrero or whatever off the lot.
* For a lot of people, losing their car is financially crippling. If you wreck your car that you depend on driving to work in, most times insurance doesn't pay out enough to replace it with an equivalent car. Often, it doesn't pay out enough to replace it with any car.
* Tired of figuring out who in your four-driver family gets to use the car this weekend? Now your husband, Tiffany and Timmy can all get to their football game, football game, and football game on Saturday.
* Tired of spending three hours a day chauffeuring your kids to school and extra-curricular activities? Not anymore.
The bicycle infrastructure that is mentioned in the parent comment would go a lot further to helping many Americans towards a more active lifestyle (and do so in a fairly cost-effective way). Combining ridesharing with mass transit isn't changing the fact that someone would be sitting down for an hour or more of their day that they could have spent moving under their own power. The change that the parent comment is advocating for would aim to get people off their butts and using their legs.
I love the cycling idea, but for big chunks of the US it couldn't work. I live in Austin and ride my bicycle to work whenever I can, however my office has showers. Without showers here, I'd never do it (and would hope that nobody else would either).
Frankly though, the obesity problem is almost entirely about diet. More exercise would be great, but wouldn't address the actual problem.
Yeah, people tend to overlook the role climate plays in these comparisons. There's an enormous difference in cycling's viability as a primary means of transportation in a place like the Netherlands where average high temperatures rarely exceed 75, as opposed to Texas where a typical summer will have a prolonged period of temps in the 90s and multiple 100+ days.
The average high temperature in Amsterdam's warmest two months is 70F.[0]
Austin's average high temp is warmer than that for every month except December, January and February. In the warmest months, the average highs are 96 and 97. [1]
Heat isn't the only issue. From Wikipedia for the Netherlands:
Ice days (maximum temperature below 0 °C (32 °F)) usually occur from December until February, with the occasional rare ice day prior to or after that period. Freezing days (minimum temperature below 0 °C (32 °F)) occur much more often, usually ranging from mid-November to late March, but not rarely measured as early as mid-October and as late as mid-May.
I live in Montreal. I bike 9/12 months, and just take public transit / car sharing services in the winter months, or when I need it. I assume the Dutch do the same. I also lived in Austin for 6 months until July, and I found that the weather was pretty uniformly bikable because the heat was dry, though yeah, having showers at the office can be necessary if you live far away. It almost never rained, though. That's a big plus for biking.
Like most lifestyle issues, it's mostly just a matter of getting used to it.
From my perspective, the worst months in Austin (July and August) could be doable with a shower at work. Without one--totally unthinkable unless your job involves outdoor labor. I biked daily for 3 years when I lived in Boston but there's just no equivalent to putting on a big jacket for heat/sweat.
Look at the dew point (which far better comparison than humidity because it doesn't fluctuate with temperature). Here are the August daily averages for Austin[0] and Toronto[1].
Toronto's dew point range (~53-63) has a max that is right around our minimum (Austin range: ~63 - 72).
Also keep in mind that, Toronto's daily high temps in August (~77F) are right around Austin's lows (~76), with our highs reaching around ~97F.
I'm going to suggest that you may be misremembering how humid it felt - in my opinion there's no way to bike any reasonable distance for the majority of July and August (and often June and September as well) without showing up a sweaty mess. At least I haven't figured out how to do it--even though I bike commute regularly from October - May.
Bike paths and roads are diligently cleared/salted in the Netherlands. So many people rely on bike paths to get to work or their train that I doubt ride sharing or taxis could handle the load.
The train is a big deal. Judging from comments I've read on web forums (granted, a pretty noisy and biased data source), most Dutch with longer commutes will combine cycling and public transit. In contrast, an American with a (say) 10 mile commute, must choose between cycling and driving. Those who do commute by bike in the US are dealing with more extreme weather and longer average distances, with little or no bike infrastructure.
If everyone cycling in the netherlands would take public transport or drive when it's cold/snows/rains the roads would be in constant gridlock and public transit would collapse.
During the winter, I ride a bike with studded tires. It makes a huge difference -- even black ice is navigable with care. Knobbly ice is actually worse because it pushes the bike around.
I live in Madison WI, and was curious about how it compares to Amsterdam for weather: About 15F hotter and 15F colder, give or take, also with more day-to-day variation.
Winter cycling is definitely its own beast -- not just weather but also darkness and the attack of road salt on the bike. I've got a dedicated winter bike that comes out when the salt trucks come out.
Much as I love riding throughout the year, I don't even mention it when I'm encouraging people to commute by bike. For anybody who's on the fence, getting them to try riding once per week during good weather is a great start.
I also live in Austin. I moved downtown and got rid of my car 1.5 years ago. I bike everywhere, including work every day (3 miles) and I don't have the sweats and showers problem. Unless you bike to work in the middle of the afternoon, it's not going to be above 90F. Also, it's not a race, you can take a slower relaxing pace, kind of like fast walking. If that's still an issue it's like saying you can't go outside because you are going to sweat. Maybe there is something I just don't get, but I've never had the sweats or needed a shower. If every time some one has a drip of sweat they have to shower there would be showers in every restroom. I've gotten sweaty eating too much or too many spicy foods.
I personally find the focus on diet to be unproductive. When I'm exercising well (meaning not too much, but e.g. enough to peg my Apple Watch), I simply tend to eat healthier. When I'm not, I tend to eat less healthy.
It's not just about habit ... my taste fluctuates with how healthy I have permitted myself to be (movement, breathing and strenuous exercise). For example, salad tastes better / cookies don't taste as good.
While the physics of weight loss certainly supports diet over exercise, let's also consider the overall effect of our sedative culture. I believe it contributes greatly to the modern afflictions of anxiety and depression. That our bodies crave more physical activity, as the legacy movement is in our biology, only recently shut out in the last couple hundred years (or less).
When you think about how much someone eats, it helps to think about why. The exercise could help on more than one front.
I live in LA and I have to drive to work because there's just not simply a viable alternative to where I have to commute to (West Adams area to West Hollywood.) The bike lanes across LA are spotty at best and there's a good chance you're going to get hit/brushed by a car because the closer you get to Beverly Hills/West Hollywood, the more impatient/asshole-ish drivers become.
LA is trying to solve this right now with better public transportation, but even then the line that runs into Beverly Hills/West Hollywood requires me to take I think a train and a bus before I can even get to it (also it's not complete for another 4 years, I think.)
There are a number of issues with this. One, Los Angeles is VERY sprawling; people are traveling from every direction to every other direction, there are no easy routes you can make that will cut very much traffic. You would need to turn a LOT of streets into one-ways with bike lanes.
Two, the traffic density and management is crazy here. So many traffic lights and stop and go traffic. Major streets are constantly crossing other major streets, which require long stops at lights while the other major street moves through. Riding a bike in the area is especially hard, because you are constantly having to come to a complete stop, wait for 3 minutes, and start again.
This. It's also really, really annoying that all the lights on an entire stretch of a street cycle at the same time. It really fucks up traffic. To make it even worse, people often try and race to the other side even on yellows and block up the intersection, which makes traffic even worse.
I didn't realize it was such a huge problem until I moved to Los Angeles a few weeks ago. We did a bang up job finding an apartment with grocery stores, restaurants and parks within walking distance. Unfortunately, the red light situation makes it somewhat difficult to get to these amenities.
LA needs to do a better job of balancing pedestrian and motorist interests. With more and more people abandoning or at least de-emphasizing cars, I hope and expect this balancing act to happen sooner rather than later.
I see it happening in different parts of LA. Santa Monica and West Hollywood are starting to adopt the "rent-a-bike" system that I've seen in NYC and Denver. They're also starting to set up more bike parking areas to be more bike friendly. I don't know how well it will work out in the long-run, but I do really hope to see more bike lanes in LA to encourage bike commuting.
The 217 bus would be perfect if it had a stop in between its San Vicente and Santa Monica stop. It would probably be another mile walk from there.
It ultimately does come down to convenience. :( Commuting by bus/Expo line means easily adding another 30 minutes to my commute if I happen to hit all the correct times at once.
I'm not sure if you're already aware of this, but NYC has also been aggressively building out cycling infrastructure since the Bloomberg administration. So your point is not unknown to policy makers:
NYC's problem is also distance. Depending on where you're coming from biking could take 1.5-2hrs each way. I enjoy it but the problem is with extreme rising housing costs people are pushed further and further.
Though to be honest, a SAFE biking lane system would be a much welcome gift in NYC. Currently in certain areas I have to work doubly hard to not get killed daily.
Yup and without protected bike lanes you only get those people 'brave enough' to venture out. To get people on situp and beg bikes (or ebikes) riding in normal clothes, you have to have visible end-to-end safe lanes.
Look at London. They removed two traffic lanes, installed wide cycle lanes and now move 5% more people through the space. 70% of traffci through Blackfriars is people cycling, mostly in day to day clothing.
I wouldn't say that NYC is uniformly perfect for biking throughout the year. The summer is very hot and humid, effectively requiring you to shower before going to work. The winter is cold, and the roads and frequently covered in snow and/or ice.
Both of these problems can be worked around, but they are daunting for anyone who's not already fairly dedicated; a newbie isn't going to ride to his law office in 95 degree weather, or through slush.
(And that's just the weather; I'm not taking into account the crappy car traffic through most of Manhattan, or the huge valley around 125th street, or the fact that going across the Brooklyn Bridge is incredibly annoying whenever pedestrians are present, etc.)
Digging through [0] (and matching my experience), NYC appears to average summer highs of mid-80s and winter lows in the 20's There are plenty of days outside of those ranges in Feb and August, but there are a solid 6 months/year of reliably comfortable cycling weather.
As to your footnote, both of your geographic problems are avoidable by knowing the city better. Both the Hudson River Greenway (low) and Riverside Drive (high) provide very convenient ways to avoid the 125th St Valley on the west side, and St Nicholas Ave does the same on the east.
Further, what self-respecting (and sane) cyclist would take the Brooklyn Bridge when the Manhattan bridge is __right__ there and in every way nicer to ride on?
In most cycling-oriented countries, those kinds of distances would be dealt with by better bike parking at the train stations. "2-fare zones" in NYC are still generally within a quick bike ride of a sub-1-hour subway ride to all of Manhattan.
Which is really a function of rent control. NYC heavily subsidizes a retired population while discouraging ultra high density development. Further, after changing jobs it's often better not to move.
So, you sacrifice density on people who don't have a economic incentive for living in the city, discourage short commutes, and discourages increasing density.
In NYC rent control refers to a program that freezes rents. It is all but gone, with less than 2% of rental units still in the program. Rent stabilization is a much bigger program that limits rent increases. That program has about 45% of rental units in it. Though it is worth noting that in many parts of the outer boros the market rent is less than the legally mandated rent stabilized rent, and so rent stabilization doesn't end up meaning much.
While I think eliminating rent stabilization would help, it isn't a magic bullet. What's really needed is more units. As compared to many other cities NYC is decent about greenlighting new units, but they can do better.
First, they need to reign in an out of control landmark process. Individual buildings are one thing, but when they start designating entire neighborhoods it is a problem. Second, there's some significant upzoning that can still happen. Related to the first point, it is one thing to preserve the character of parts of Greenwich Village that are quite nice, and another to preserve the character of the east village. The character of the east village is ugly dense housing. You can best honor that legacy by building modern ugly dense housing instead of "preserving" century plus old ugly dense housing. Third, the housing lottery is a affordable housing theater (a la security theater). It is a waste of everyone's time. Fourth, the city and state should not be putting their thumbs on the scale in negotiations between construction unions and developers. Construction unions have quite enough bargaining power as it is. Higher construction costs push developers towards luxury units. Fifth, the city needs to do its part in terms of developing infrastructure -- above all public transit, but also schools, water, sewage, etc.
I agree, but I think that's part of a larger picture.
There are a huge range of perverse incentives on all sides of this issue right now. In a completely non rent controlled environment then there is a much larger incentive for renters to support new construction that reduces rents across the board. Which, IMO would impact the landmark process that has less to do with Landmarks than NIMBY.
>"In NYC rent control refers to a program that freezes rents"
This is not actually correct. Your rent in a rent controlled or rent stabilized apartment is still subject to increases in rent but there are guidelines on how much those increases can be.
Huh? Rent Control apartments only represent 1.2% of the total rental stock in the New York City. That is as of 2014 and so its likely less now as that number only ticks down. How is that heavily subsidizing a retired population?
"Olive Freud, a retired schoolteacher, and her husband, Edgar, a retired engineer, also pay more than $2,000 a month in rent for their rent-controlled, two-bedroom unit on West 72nd Street"
The rent controlled apartments called "Rent Controlled" are just one part of the problem. As these people needed to rent their apartment starting in 1971 those 27,000 apartments are rented by retired people. Which generally don't do daily commutes but do reduce density making other peoples commutes longer.
The much larger rent controlled group aka "Rent Stabilized" includes plenty of retired people, but also many working people who are discouraged from moving due to their below market price rent and the difficulty in finding new apartments. The working fraction of that much larger group creates congestion issues from these longer commutes, while the retired people reduce effective density.
TLDR; I am making more than one argument for why each type of rent control is part of the problem.
That 1.2% figure for the number of rent controlled apartments in 2014 equates to 27K apartments. I was responding to the OP's claim was that New York City was "heavily subsidizing" retired people.
Lets say that those 27K apartments have two occupants - the reality is probably less. so that is 54K people out of population of 8.1 million. The percentage of people that rent in NYC is ~ 70%(see link below) or 5.6 million? Would you consider that 54K a heavy subsidy burden on the majority of renters even if they were only paying peanuts which they are not see my second link above.
The retired population in NYC is not 5.6 million. Further, these are older buildings which are not being replaced in part from rent control. So, the 'Gap' is wider than just 27,000 missing apartments.
In any case there still is a highly subsidized subset of the overall retired population that is part of the problem.
Nowhere did I say the retired are 5.6 million people. I used 54K people as the number of retired people at 2 people per each of the 27K rent controlled apartments. I also stated 5.6 to be the total number of all renters using 70% of 8.1 million total residents. Using 54K people again as an example mean that .96% of the populating is in rent controlled apartment. In reality that number is probably much lower because we are talking about an aging population.
I have provided actual numbers and data to demonstrate there is not a high subsidy. You have not provided any supporting evidence to the contrary.
This aside it is pretty disturbing that you keep insisting retired people are a "problem." They have as much right to live New York City as anyone else. They have paid into the system longer than anyone, they stuck it out through the tough times - the bad old days when New York City was a crime-ridden and financially insolvent city. They are not freeloaders by any measure.
Which says nothing about everyone, or every retired person, just these 27,000 apartments with vastly below market rents. On it's own this is not a big deal, but it really is a solid example of the problem with other forms of rent control.
The wider subsidy across ~1,030,000 apartments is a smaller subsidy, but also part of the same problem.
PS: Some of them could also afford to live in the same area without the subsidy. But, they also create jobs for people in the city further driving up demand for housing and thus rental prices.
Netherlands is a special case in terms of human-powered transpo. It is flat, engineered, and has relatively tame weather. Some of us do not live beside calm waterways and associated setbacks and level grades so loved by bikes. The nearest waterway to me is more gorge than river. The road in front of my house has a 30* slope in places and, at the moment, is covered in ice. Bikeing to work in my town is a fundimentally different experiance than the average netherland commute.
Segregated cycle lanes need to absolutely be a priority. I was considering cycling to work (London), and literally this morning walked outside for a break to see a load of paramedics and some poor person under a truck at the junction outside my office. Needless to say, this soured my view distinctly. City cycling in London is really dangerous, and courts are highly favourable towards drivers.
I cycle here everyday and don't find it very dangerous if you're careful. The city has done a lot for cyclists in the last years (highways are only one example) and the fatality rate is relatively stable for several years now, even though cycling numbers increase by ~20% each year.
Most lorry drivers are very aware of cyclists now, so if you don't try to pass them on the left (where they can't see you even if they wanted to), they'll be careful to stay away.
I also don't know where you get the argument with the courts from. Any evidence for that? I've never seen police pulling over a cyclists, but I've seen several occasions of police pulling over cars that stood in cyclist areas (the ones in front of traffic lights).
In India I experienced low tech ride sharing. You stand at an intersection and a three wheeler asks you where you're going. You get in, and the driver heads to a major intersection near your destination.
Along the way he asks other people standing at intersections if they are going his way, and if they are they pile in. The more people he stuffs into his three wheeler the more money he makes per trip.
In terms of reducing traffic, these shared three-wheelers, to pick-up/drop-off more rides, stop just about anywhere. At-least, that was the case in Noida and Greater Noida (cities right next to Delhi). Around certain regions, they were primary reason for traffic-jams.
Subways are primarily unpleasant because of the (worst parts of the) clientele, not because of the rider density. Just the simple act of requiring riders to have a credit card will get rid of >90% of the unpleasant co-riders.
Riding in an Uber Pool has always been perfectly pleasant for me. Quiet and awkward in some cases, but not unpleasant. Some basic restrictions about not cramming people into the vehicle like it's a clown car should alleviate most concerns about unpleasantness, I'd think.
Sorry if that was unclear. 2 pickups, 2 drop offs.
I wanted to make clear that we didn't just pick the people up. But they were both dropped off first too. Worse yet, the other destinations meant that for my 20 mile drive, we drove through residential the whole time.
Traveling in remote parts of the world it becomes very obvious we in the developed world are now using "tech" to go back to the way things were.
Uber and AirBnb are extremely popular all through Latin America and Africa - there just is no app. You walk up to a human and ask, a price is negotiated and you have a ride or a place to sleep.
In a lot of ways, I think these kinds of apps will actually lower the standard of living in developed countries (less regulation, less safety, less insurance, etc.) which is probably a good thing, because it should make stuff cheaper too.
SF Bay area has a similar thing, casual carpool http://sfcasualcarpool.com/. I always see them waiting in line on my way to work but I'm not going the right way to pick people up.
New York City includes Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island as well. Misleading title and perhaps incomplete study if footprint of cabs is not included from those remaining boroughs in this study. If you live in Manhattan, then you don't use cabs as much within Manhattan because subways cover Manhattan pretty well and travel times in cabs are hellish comparing to subway commute. You often use cabs when you commute to other boroughs from Manhattan because, for example, Brooklyn and Queens do not have great subway network.
You are incorrect. Brooklyn and Queens have subway networks that are each larger than the next largest subway networks in the US. Brooklyn has a slightly better network than Queens, but both are fantastic. Eastern Queens (after the end of the 7 train) indeed is a transit desert, but still has many commuter rail stations.
There's a station central-eastern Brooklyn called "Broadway Junction" that has as many connections as the largest transfer station in DC.
I had the opposite experience! My girlfriend and I walked from the Bronx to Battery Park, it was great. We saw the neighborhoods change from block to block, bought bootlegged DVDs from a sweet old lady, and even ran into Robert Krulwich outside of Central Park. If you have 10 hours it's worth it.
For my 30th bday, some friends and I walked around the perimeter of Manhattan. It took just over 20 hours, but that's mostly because we stopped several at bars along the way.
Try Pelham Bay Park (Bronx) to Conference House Park (Staten Island): 35 miles, 10 hours walking! Or Inwood Hill Park (Manhattan) to Rockaway Park (Queens): 25 miles, 8 hours walking.
> travel times in cabs are hellish comparing to subway commute
Isn't this because of road congestion though? I thought the principle behind the study was to remove all cars except those 3,000 ride sharing vehicles.
Yes, it is one of the factors but not the only one. Others being people commuting in their own cars (yes we have stubborn folks who refuse to take trains), pedestrian traffic (primarily composed of tourists and selfie enthusiasts), never ending construction and repairs in Manhattan, Food carts maneuvering etc. to name a few.
Yeah but I bet you can't name 15 cities larger than LA that depend on an outdated tech like trains. When's the last time you saw one of those at TechCrunch Disrupt?
Seriously though, this is a solved problem everywhere but major US cities. Paris - which once loved cars - has totally changed over to being bus, bike, and train promoting, and it works.
Not so fast though. Comparing Paris to LA isn't quite fair. Paris is about six times denser than LA and therefore creating a competitive public transportation network is quite a bit cheaper there.
We've been building our cities wrong for what(?) 80 years or so. We've been aware of it for over 50. Still, there are depressingly few examples where we've been able to meaningfully change course. We don't drive our personal automobiles, they drive us. We ironically associate the car with freedom, yet building for the car renders every other mode of transportation ineffective, at great cost to our wallets, our physical, mental and social well-being, and to our environment.
Zoning is the issue in some cities, but sometimes it isn't the root problem.
Robert Caro gets into this a little bit in his book "The Power Broker" describing Robert Moses' development of highways in NYC: basically, if you build a highway before you build a subway line, the resulting area will be developed in a low-density pattern (regardless of zoning), as the "last mile" of driving is much less difficult than the "last mile" on foot, coming off a train.
If you look at NYC in particular, this happened in eastern Queens -- the highways were built (with poor public transit coverage) and the properties were developed in a low density pattern.
This cannot be fixed by simply building more high-density housing (despite the massive city-wide demand for housing), because no transit exists. But you cannot build new transit because it's a political nightmare: current residents will complain that you're disrupting their neighborhood, and city residents elsewhere will complain that your new transit development doesn't "go anywhere useful."
From what I saw in LA when I visited a few weeks ago, much of the new systems of transit serve (a) large office campuses (I was regularly taking the metro at Universal City) and (b) non-commuter destinations such as Hollywood (for tourism) and the airport. The result, as pointed out to me by an Uber driver, was a huge explosion of development in Downtown LA. The newest line in LA, the Expo Line to Santa Monica, seems more commuter focused -- perhaps it is serving the new residential population moving into DTLA?
Eastern Queens, unfortunately, doesn't have the luxury of important destinations or office campuses. It's overshadowed by Manhattan in terms of tourism, and Moses built the Long Island-bound highways specifically to prevent the sorts of development that would lead to Long Island becoming a commuter destination rather than a residential community. Thus, Queens is trapped in this residential catch 22, and not even rezoning can fix it. The only solutions I can see involve closing down lanes of highway to obtain right-of-way for transit (the overpasses were intentionally built too low to support bus service, so it'd be a permanent closure), a sure path to political suicide in an area utterly dependent on its highways.
And tighten zoning on the periphery to encourage density in the core.
I live on the periphery of a major urban area and regularly see farmland/woods being turned into senior housing/single family homes/strip malls/banks etc. Some of it is needed but some of it just seems unnecessary. Why not build senior housing closer in where there are better public transportation options and amenities?
This, and making it harder/more expensive to develop inefficient uses. I'm surprised this is so hard because the increased public expenses for car oriented development over car optional development is large. It's mostly a revenue now vs expense later tradeoff cities almost always have taken in US.
I see this in Tokyo. Americans just stuck at home, stranded and helpless because of their culturally reasons. Oh no wait they just use the awesome public transport system. But it's very difficult for them to enjoy such efficience because...you..know...culture
Huh? Americans don't have a cultural aversion to using world class public transit when in a place like Tokyo. They have a cultural aversion to altering their cities in the radical ways that'd be necessary to build a functional public transit. They call this NIMBY.
It's not really even cultural. It is a socio-economic and technological issue. Every rich country that settled new territory or experienced massive growth after the invention of the car has cities that are spread out.
Europe was already developed pre-car. Asia had huge population growth when their people generally couldn't afford cars.
This is why US cities that were big before the Model T have a dense core with decent public transit. And cities that exploded after the Model T are basically suburbs of themselves, LA, Houston, Jacksonville. It's always why newly formed European suburbs often are just as car reliant as US suburbs. Though it's worth noting that some European suburbs existed before cars and at the time were just outlying cities that now got subsumed into the metro area.
If Japan had a new city naturally develop in an open area, it would a lot more like LA than Tokyo.
DC in the US is a solid counter example as low density city older than the car. Density is based on a huge range of factors with for example geography playing a significant role. Another huge factor is they type of industry. Garment factory's for example have historically had very high density's where Iron Works are much lower density.
DC is a pretty good counter example. As you say the type of work matters, and DC has never an industrial town. It was also a planned city. It was intended to not be dense from the start. Something like 40% of DC is federal government land.
DC also is doing a decent job at using mass transit to re-densify areas. The orange line corridor is making suburbs become dense. That is pretty unique in America.
For a city that was "intended to not be dense from the start", it sure is up there as far as density and would be #16 on the list if it counted as a part of a state.
DC is incredibly dense by American standards and is actually one of the very few places in the US that you can get by without a car (which is, of course, priced into exorbitant rents and property prices)
I guess what I meant to say is that the grandparent comment is blatantly false. DC _is_ a high density city and is much more like a European city in that it combines decent public transport and medium-rise developments.
Toronto was a fairly big city already in 1900. LA started growing massive in 1890-1910, but really exploded after.
Vancouver went grew 250% from 1900 til 1911, which was right around when cars started being affordable for the common person. Vancouver also is somewhat restrained by being on a peninsula.
LA started growing massive in 1890-1910, but really exploded after. LA added 3.7 million people since 1910, but Vancouver only 500k.
A lot of Americans (in my anecdotal experience) have a very negative view of public transit. It's what you take when you are too poor or desperate to have a car. Chicken/egg, that's how it ends up, particularly in smaller metro areas (not your major cities, but cities).
I currently live in Seattle, and when I met guests and said we'd be taking the bus to my house (which involved a walk of about a block in good weather, with a bus line that ran every ~15 mins, would get us there in 30 mins, and I was covering the $3.50/person) they refused and called a $45 cab (they paid) to take the trip (still took 30 mins - the bus was an express).
I'm willing to bet a lot of city dwellers that DON'T use their public transit system have this negative view. They got it from somewhere else, brought it with them, and have no personal experience to change it. This will certainly impact how they vote on things like paying for transit and managing lines and stations.
From my own experience, I've lived in a place were the bus coverage was pretty good, but they ran in circles and were infrequent. So going from Point A to Point B might take 20 mins with a bus that came every 1.5 hours, but going from Point B to Point A would take over an hour, on that same bus that came every 1.5 hours. In another place (Richmond, VA) the coverage was TERRIBLE. Going to work from my apt (roughly 5 miles away) meant that I had a bus with 2 time slots I could catch (one at 6 something am and the other at 7 something - no buses ran after that until end of workday), it would take over an hour to make the trip, the bus was loud, smelly, and bouncy (I was unable to read on that bus, but have no such issues in Seattle), and if I had to work past 6pm, I had no transit options to get home, nor if something caused me to want to get home before the end of the workday. Needless to say, while there I drove myself and contributed to the traffic, parking, and environmental problems. I haven't even mentioned the other passengers on the bus, but let's just say all of us on the bus probably were on it for lack of other options. Very few people "elected" to take the bus, they were forced to.
I see this attitude even in NYC itself. A lot of people dislike the idea of taking the bus (even though it costs the same as the subway) for some reason.
I dislike taking the NYC bus because of the time variability it adds. Variability in the subway times during "normal" times are way lower.
A huge line at a stop, the amount of stops a bus makes, and traffic, can all make a huge difference in the amount of time a trip can take. Also, some of the crosstown buses are slower on average than walking.
Reply to the parent comment then. He was the one claiming Americans must drive cars.
My reply was to what's called a "parent" comment. And in that comment was context. And using that context you should understand my comment. They need to be read together. My comment and the parent comment. Read both together. First the parent comment and then my comment, the "child" comment.
That's all well and good, but in most urban areas of the US, business owners can't even choose whether they want to cater to you as a customer— instead, all new development is required to have a certain quantity of parking by legislative fiat, effectively outlawing the classic 'main street' that's the anchor of so many communities.
Except in Paris there are so many cars in use, causing such a huge amount of pollution, that the government had to ban half the cars in Paris from driving on certain days last year.
Isn't the main issue of Paris the lack of wind to blow the pollution away? Combined maybe with the high number of diesel cars? I don't think you'd see this level of pollution in a city like NYC, or really any city near the coast, simply because of the wind.
Being coastal just means you have prevailing winds - if geography is working against you (barrier mountains or a basin) then you will have a pollution issue.
LA has the second-lowest carbon emissions in the country, after NYC. The problem is that it sits at the foothills of mountains which block the wind and prevent the pollution from blowing away.
NYC, on the other hand, has very clean air because it has incredibly low pollution output per capita and the geography favors its quick removal.
(In fact, most of the pollution in NYC air actually comes from across the Hudson - pollutants emitted by Newark and Elizabeth and which pass over NYC as they disseminate.)
LA has a very underrated transport system. You can get pretty much anywhere, it just might take longer than by car, but only by an hour or two. Biggest hurdle is bus frequency, but even the routes on the hour are reliable and usable.
So if I have a pretty normal set of afternoon errands like, go to the doctor, get groceries, drop groceries off at home and go to my evening meetup, I'm only looking at an extra 4-8 hours of transit time?
An extra 15-30 minutes of transit time(per leg) is basically what is actually sustainable for non-drivers to be able to get multiple things done in a day.
there's a significant "last mile" problem for many of LA's single-family-dwelling neighborhoods. you get off the bus or train and then walk a long distance (or take Uber).
in limited cases (e.g. the underground red line) you arrive sooner than you would on freeways plus surface streets.
but in most cases, where there's a bus and a 1-2 transfers involved, it takes two or even three times as long to arrive.
one of the puzzles about LA's transportation planning is: they just spent about $1.6 billion to widen the 405's Sepulveda pass segment, which has at best modestly reduced commute times for car drivers, but historically, there's been little or no improvement to the corresponding bus service. the number of bus lines that run through that pass from the SF Valley to LA's west side is just way too low. and it's like: why? shouldn't bus line capacity have been the FIRST thing they improved?
beyond regular you need a bus service which can quickly adapt to changing needs and you need safe places where people can leave their cars to use the service to get deeper into town. you also need to convey and absolute sense of safety for the service.
in the end, routes cannot just end because it is deemed to be too few people across certain hours. they must always be a guarantee of service at all hours.
This is great news, until we look at the open space and say, "Wow! Now we can fit so many more commuters on these streets."
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Not to denigrate the science, I respect the math greatly. It's just that NYC culture is about trying to cram the most things in one place. Few open resources like Central Park remain so very long.
>This is great news, until we look at the open space and say, "Wow! Now we can fit so many more commuters on these streets."
>It's just that NYC culture is about trying to cram the most things in one place.
One possibility in this case is to just fill the streets with people in the way they transiently get filled during coordinated street closures and in the way they are more or less permanently so in the right areas of Barcelona, Paris, Pattaya, etc. This would take a lot of planning and lobbying to get done right I imagine.
But nature seems to just not abhor the "vacuum" left in cars filled with just a single rider hard enough to fill that. This is about finding a lower bound for the vehicles needed to fulfill demand with multi-occupancy.
What I would find even more interesting is if they used the same simulation to determine the number of cars required to fulfill that demand without multi-occupancy, but with the same level of dispatch smarts and similarly strict optimization for the lowest number of cars possible.
Why would this be interesting? There are not 13000 cabs because less would not be able to meet the existing demand, there are 13000 cabs because the market is big enough to support them (and decisions regarding the volume of the medallion system are surely not done with the optimization vigor as researchers looking for an impressive lower bound in a simulation). Hailable transportation is a very special market where more supply only increases instant hailability, but does not have the conventional effect of decreasing prices. And because more supply means more congestion, it can even increase prices (when rates have a time component on top of a distance component) and demand (when permanent congestion makes it unattractive to have a personal vehicle).
> But nature seems to just not abhor the "vacuum" left in cars filled with just a single rider hard enough to fill that.
I'm not sure exactly what this sentence is supposed to mean, but I assure you as an NYC outer-borough resident, if you created a traffic vacuum in manhattan I would be driving there filling the vacuum by the end of the day.
I believe what they're saying refers to the empty 3 seats you might find in a singly-occupied 4 passenger car, as is often seen commuting.
And I basically agree. There is still space in many passenger vehicles. And the vacuum is not strong to get those filled, because it is not infinite or even powerful enough, but there are people trying to fill those spaces to some extent. That was some of the original pitch of the "sharing economy..." That if you had "extra space in your car or house," you could fill it with a rider or a roomer.
It's just that managing the complexities of the extra space in a vehicle is very difficult, particularly in comparison to the simplicity of filling any empty Manhattan streets with new instances of vehicles.
Its not just about NYC. The vacuum problem is a real issue for congestion. During peak hours there are plenty of people with cars that avoid the road due to traffic but would jump right in if the roads were less congested. So increased supply in road space (due to building new roads or this hypothetical carpooling scheme) is immediately met by additional driver demand and congestion quickly returns to where it was before.
Anecdotally, the times I see taxis most crowded/unavailable in New York is in the East Village / Lower East Side on weekend nights, headed towards the bridge; my guess is that most of the passengers are drunk and trying to get home, and I don't particularly want to share a normal-sized car with three drunk strangers. (Enhancing subway coverage between that area of town and Brooklyn would help; if someone vomits on a subway, it's easy enough to move to the end of the car or to the next car.)
Also it's not clear to me if this research assumes that every cab is carrying a single person. That's often not true, especially for the going-home-from-a-night-out crowd.
Both of those statements are nonmathematical when parsed strictly, you need a translation mechanic to turn them into a forumula ("per cent", literally, doesn't mean a multiplier either). It happens that the percent framing became common earlier, but when it did it was surely just as ad hoc.
Multiplier framing like that is at least as common, and given that "3" is easier to understand than "66" (which one has to recognize as the result of 100*(1-(1/3)) for goodness sake!) I genuinely don't understand your peeve here.
Yes, this annoyed me. Additionally, its not "traffic" that was reduced, it was the total size of the taxi fleet. While this would have a positive effect on overall "traffic" we can't tell what that might be from the article.
I think America should look into the point to point system that Istanbul developed (and likely other places) called the dolmuş. These are 10 seat cars where people split the price to move along one line. (People will usually go end to end, but can get out along the ride as desired.) The route never deviates as to provide predictability.
That said, most people take cabs because they don't want to be around other people -- else, they would take the subway, no?
Most of the time in NYC when I take a cab, it's because there isn't sufficient subway or bus coverage for the route I want: either I'm going to/from somewhere deep into Brooklyn or Queens where it's a 10+ minute walk to the nearest subway (and I'll need at least one transfer once I'm on the subway system), or I'm trying to take some particular trip across Manhattan that requires multiple transfers and is much faster by cab. As you'd expect, the trips that aren't well-served by subway are rare, but they do exist.
> The New York City-area dollar van system is highly used, and in 2011, it was rated the 20th most used "bus system" in the United States. The dollar van and jitney system has been praised as "quietly disruptive" as compared to other ride-share services, such as Uber. This has allowed the vans to operate without being restricted by the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC).
That's very interesting, it fills a void during public worker strikes spontaneously and ends up being a widely popular service. Thanks for the link.
It's the Dollar Van concept as below. The difference between it and a bus is that the dollar van doesn't pick people up in between, speeding up transactions and ensuring limited stops. The speed of pickup/dropoff is a large issue.
Except it's on-demand as the bus fills up rather than on set schedules.
It's conceptually a different model. a 10 person van stays at point A, leaves when full, and drops people off along the line on demand rather than having set stops, and doesn't pick people up.
My anecdata from 30 years in the city is that commuters only take cabs if work pays for it, or they have phone calls to make. I don't know anyone who takes one daily, except in the case of a recent job change and they haven't had a chance to move apartments to a more convenient commute.
For a while now, I've been wanting to explore single-seating electric commute pods. At least from my basic analysis, they would be more efficient at moving people from point A to point B within an urban area.
Cars, imho, are too inefficient a mode of transport for short distances. You have to make sure they're at capacity to reach 100% utilization.
If anyone is interested in talking more about this or exploring it, I'd love to hear from you.
Any city building high-throughput transit corridors should take this into account. I think carpooling and on-demand, self-driven vehicles can help.
Some adjustments might include putting stations further away from each other, so total travel time decreases. If your last mile is solved by carpooling, you can go an extra block to get on a train / subway / etc.
Some transit agencies might even consider including these vehicles as part of their overall offering, especially if that replaces "park and ride". That land near stations is more valuable when developed with something other than a parking lot.
I'll continue my little crusade by reminding people that when talking about a reduction, you should use a fraction or percentage less than 100 for clarity.
For example, this article should have been titled "carpooling apps could reduce traffic by one third" or "reduce traffic to 1/3 of current levels"
"Reducing something by three times its original amount" is a difficult sentence to parse correctly, and the linguistically correct interpretation is almost certainly not what you mean.
It would help if NYC would actually encourage not to drive. I was recently there with 3 people in the car and compared driving & parking in Manhattan vs. parking outside and taking a train in. In many cities (Amsterdam as an excellent example), you get cheap, secure parking lots outside of the city that you can combine with a train/subway ticket. In NYC, this would've been much more expensive than parking for 3 days.
I agree. It would be great if NYC eliminated its free street parking (perhaps making it residents-only) and priced the rest comparably to parking in Secaucus.
the obsession with number crunching in the transportation space is really unfortunate because if you just focus on what is going on 'IN THE STREET' , you will see that black market transportation already optimizes for transportation. the problem is that it is not legal, let alone funded for growth.
there are too many vested special interests,namely, the police, the mass transit system, the cab drivers, and now, yes, uber and the ride sharing apps have become part of the institutional dead weight on policy change.
if you want to see what common sense would dictate in ride sharing , it would be pretty simple.
mini busses would not only be allowed all over new york , anywhere and everywhere ( because they already run up and down flatbush avenue in brooklyn) , but large companies would ----if ONLY THEY WERE invited by nyc government---------flock to build premium versions of minibusses with a minimum of one entrance per 2 passengers all along the side of the vehicle.
the designs for such a vehicle are plenty. MANY examples of these designs exist. they are also easily buildable even with safety gear and precautions built in.
optimizing ride sharing is obvious, you give people vehicles with enough entrances and enough privacy so that every pair of people can get enter together, and at most a stranger will be forced to share a pseudo cabin with one other stranger.
the problem as always IS NOT THE LACK OF MATH AND NUMBER CRUNCHING BY WONKIES , it is the vested interests that have crushed innovation by having their meathook money suckers squidlike suffocating government with the help of willingly crooked politicians.
the same issue plagues all major metropolitan areas in the u.s. , especially san francisco.
While the algorithm is an interesting development, any discussion of 'reducing traffic' without even acknowledging the concept of induced demand is an indicator that someone isn't engaging with urban planning remotely seriously. (hopefully just the person in the PR office?)
Do you mean like the increased total number of cars on the road since ride share has become popular (not sure this is the case, but it seems to be in dense urban areas where drivers come in from the suburbs)?
The Netherlands is also the only western country with a negative obesity trend expected to hit 8% by 2030, currently at 10% vs the UK's 25%. The USA I believe is getting close to 36%.
We can try and blame our diets, however our built environment is creating a public health crisis of inoordinate scale. The car is very much to blame for this.
The car and car sharing is not the answer to traffic. Creating segregated end to end cycle networks with good junctions enabling people to choose to ride up to 5 miles to school/work is absolutely critical to avert this public health crisis.