Recent panels with the Antiplanner and several transit advocates exposed some disagreements that are legitimately difficult to prove one way or the other. For example, Jarrett Walker thinks that there is a pent-up demand for dense urban living and I don’t, but government regulation has so screwed up housing markets that it is hard to prove who is correct.
These photos are a lie. (Click image for a larger view.)
At the same time, the transit advocates made some claims that are easy to prove wrong. For example, one said that a two-track rail line can move as many people as a sixteen-lane freeway. Another used the above photos to show that a bus uses far less space to move people than cars. Both of these claims are highly deceptive.
First of all, they depend on an assumption that the United States has a shortage of land and it is vital that we use that land as efficiently as possible. Nothing could be further from the truth. Currently, 81 percent of our population lives in urban areas of 2,500 people or more that occupy only 3.1 percent of the nation’s land. Of the other 97 percent, at least 22 percent is range or pasture land that is not very productively used: it is farmed intensively enough that it is not great wildlife habitat but not intensively enough to actually produce much of value to the economy. Thus, our cities could “sprawl” out to cover eight times their current size (not that they ever would) with no serious economic or environmental impacts.
Second, claims that transit is more space efficient than cars are highly exaggerated. Note that bus part of the above photo set (taken by the German city of Münster) shows a conventional 40-seat transit bus. To fit 60 passengers on that bus, 20 of them will have to stand. In other words, the bus is pretty much filled to capacity.
Meanwhile, to move the same 60 people, the above photo shows 60, count them, 60 cars. In other words, the city assumed that all of the cars would be nearly empty. Why is it fair to compare a full bus with nearly empty cars?
To be fair, we would have to assume the cars are full. Most cars can comfortably hold 5 people, but 20 people on that bus aren’t comfortable, so it is more reasonable to say a “full” car has 6 people. That means you only need 10, not 60, cars to move the same number of people. Or assume all of the cars are eight-passenger minivans, which take the same street space as an ordinary sedan. Then it only takes 7-1/2 cars to move the same number of people as the bus. Stick a couple of people in the rear cargo area to mimic the effect of standees and we’re down to six cars equal one bus.
Of course, most cars aren’t full. According to the National Household Travel Survey, the average car has 1.54 people, the average SUV has 1.83 people, and the average full-sized van has 2.44 people. The average for all light vehicles is 1.67, so assuming a typical mix of vehicles, it would take 36 cars to move 60 people.
To be fair, if we count cars at average occupancy, we have to count buses at average occupancy as well. In 2017, that was 9.0 people. That means it would take 6-2/3 buses to move 60 people.
On the road, one bus is considered the equivalent of 3.5 cars, so 7-1/2 cars occupy roughly twice the space of one bus and 36 cars occupy about 54 percent more space than 6-2/3 buses. But cars have another advantage over buses: they can go almost anywhere. While 40-seat buses generally have fixed routes on arterials and major collectors, the cars will go on all routes from interstate freeway to minor collectors to local streets. Not only does this provide more convenient, door-to-door service to users, it means those cars aren’t all going to be on the same streets at the same time as the bus that is the supposed alternative.
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The claim that a two-track rail line can move as many people as a sixteen-lane freeway is similarly deceptive. A freeway lane can move 2,000 vehicles per hour (some more recent designs can move 2,400, but let’s go with 2,000). That means sixteen lanes can move 32,000 vehicles per hour.
The number of people a rail line can move is equal to the number of people who can fit into a railcar times the number of cars on the trains (which is limited by the length of the platforms) times the number of trains that can be safely moved per hour. These numbers vary from system to system.
According to the National Transit Database revenue vehicle inventory, modern 75-foot heavy-rail cars have about 60 seats and room for 30 to 187 standees, depending on which transit agency you believe: MARTA says 31, BART says 80, and WMATA says 187 all for pretty much the same vehicle design. I suspect about 80 is about right before Americans think it is too crowded and turn away.
Some New York City subways lines can run trains that are eleven cars long, but these cars are only 51-feet long and don’t hold as many people. Washington Metro trains are limited to eight cars in length while BART trains can be ten cars long. But BART can run only 24 trains per hour while WMATA can run 28. At 33,600 people per hour, BART slightly edges out the DC Metro’s 31,360.
BART is hoping to do a multi-billion dollar upgrade that it claims will increase its capacity to 30 trains an hour. But that may be wishful thinking as it is doubtful that passengers can deboard and board trains fast enough to run one every two minutes.
In short, the maximum throughput today is 33,600 people on a single track or 67,200 people on a two-track line. While 67,200 people is more than 32,000 cars per hour, it once again unfair to assume full trains and nearly empty cars. If those 32,000 cars have 6 people per car, the freeway can move 192,000 per hour, or nearly three times as many as the rail line. If we assume 8-passenger minivans, we’re up to nearly four times as many people as the rail line.
Or we can assume the cars have 1.67 people in them for a total of about 53,440 people per hour. The average heavy-rail car carried 25.7 people in 2017. That’s only 6,168 people per hour, or about 1.85 freeway lanes worth (or 3.7 lanes when counting both tracks of the rail line). Even at 30 trains per hour, a two-track rail line moves only about as many people as 5.75 freeway lanes.
In short, a heavy-rail line in normal service today moves fewer people than four freeway lanes. Commuter trains, some of which use cars with nearly 150 seats and room for another 100 people standing, can potentially move more people than heavy-rail lines, and on average commuter-rail cars carry about 35 people. But they tend to serve low-density suburbs, and to get that many riders they typically operate no more than twice an hour.
A two-track rail line is still more space efficient than four freeway lanes, though not by much. But we come back to the original issues: land isn’t in short supply and cars can go so many more places than trains that the cars aren’t going to all be clogging up the same roads at the same time. The claim that transit in general and rail transit in particularly is spectacularly more efficient than cars is pure fantasy.
I remember sitting in traffic on a freeway somewhere in Portlandia and the rail ran parallel to it. Vehicles where jammed pack and looking down the retro rail, I could see one light rail train for at least a mile or so.
irandom, so do you teahadi’s just want to do like your Incel friends and drive down the sidewalk? :$
There goes that highwayman again, trying to butt in on adult conversations.
What’s disengenuous about this picture is the assumption that all the people are going to the same destination. That’s public transit’s flaw, collectivist transit takes time to accommodate every person that uses it or their destination isn’t served at all.
I don’t see how BART is going to survive the forseeable future when the agencies maintenance backlog is on the total of nearly 10 billion dollars, the city is raising property taxes to pay the dividend but even then it’ll get only 30% of what it needs and they’re still spending on new rail lines. Cities shouldn’t double down on new infrastructure investments until they’ve fixed what they already possess. Burrowing billions to build when they cant afford what they currently have is like buying a second house when you haven’t even paid off your first mortgage.
High speed rail, BART, Metro LA, …This is all part of Gov. Brown’s lasting political monument to himself. A tycoon style rail empire of track all across the state. Apparently working off some kind of competition with his late father, the former Gov. Pat Brown, who successfully built much of the state’s water infrastructure and its freeways. The difference was Jerry’s dad built stuff people actually needed and used. Where as Jerry’s lasting monument is one of total fraud. And when these projects fail, it will serve as his ultimate political legacy. A legacy of waste, ego-driven public policy, one upping daddy narcissism, and refusal to recognize basic fiscal reality. It might even bankrupt the state, which is already technically insolvent due to its outlandishly enormous pension obligations and huge social expenditure on non-citizen residents and plans for a “single-payer” health care program that dwarfs the rail project in size. But don’t worry: The Democrats in this one-party state will find a scapegoat, as they always have, when the bills come due. They’ll blame the Republicans.
I didn’t know what the center panel of the picture was showing so I clicked over on one of the links and it’s labeled bicycle. I guess that’s great if you can go to and from work w/o worrying about rain or snow.
AVs have the potential to reduce injury and death from traffic accidents by an order of magnitude so it’s likely that automobile safety standards will be reduced, allowing much smaller automobiles, automobiles that don’t take up much more room than a motorcycle.
It seems to me that utilizing small AVs for commuting would reduce congestion while still providing car drivers what they expect: point-to-point transportation in a private, non-shared car. For decades Americans have gotten used to driving either by themselves or with one or two select people. Collective transit advocates are fighting a losing battle if they think American drivers will give up that privacy and ability to choose their traveling companions.
Then humanity is fighting a losing battle. Who is going take a self driving car, to a non existent job? :$
“ho is going take a self driving car, to a non existent job?”
Because, you know, after the car replaced the horse, humanity imploded and all jobs disappeared.
Why don’t you leave the discussion to the adults, Andy?
Trudeau ‘s eye brow wit groomer is out of work again and trolling. This time he should be canned. Comments disparaging someone based on th for sexuality shouldn’t be tolerate d. That crosses into the realm of dehumanizing then.
But what would I know, eh? I only use less energy in a month of my .life than that Loonies-login crank uses in a day.
“First of all, they depend on an assumption that the United States has a shortage of land and it is vital that we use that land as efficiently as possible. Nothing could be further from the truth. ”
Depends where you’re looking. If the corridor is built-up and congested, it doesn’t matter if there is a lot of farmland ten miles away. There’s nowhere to add the extra lanes.
“Of course, most cars aren’t full. According to the National Household Travel Survey, the average car has 1.54 people”
At the same time, bus use depends crucially on price.
Percentage change of bus use = percentage change in price x elasticity
The elasticity is very high for buses, of magnitude 1 !!!! This is much higher than the peak hour elasticity of general traffic, of magnitude 0.3. Price is key.
Congestion charge is symbiotic to bus services such as park & ride. Congestion charges deter excessive car use, pushes car drivers to buses, and also fund the buses. Low cost park & ride provides an effective alternative to cars, and enhance the effectiveness of the congestion charge.
“On the road, one bus is considered the equivalent of 3.5 cars, so 7-1/2 cars occupy roughly twice the space of one bus (a ) and 36 cars occupy about 54 percent more space than 6-2/3 buses. ”
That’s plain wrong. A regular 50-seat bus is 2.0 PCUs. A 3.0 PCU bus is a large articulated bus, carrying 80-100 passengers.
But the biggest problem with the article is that it proposes a Manichean struggle between cars and buses. The people density of buses means that you can have both on the same street. Although all complete journeys are unique, the cars tend to use the same high speed roads to get to similar destinations.
Well I happened to meet Justin Trudeau several years ago and thought he was sleazy. Also lots people consider him to be a crook and well he is a crook.
Frank, there’s no need for the forklift driver if the forklift drives it self.
This isn’t just the replacement of the human muscle power, but of brain power too.
Frank, there’s no need for you to indoctrinate kids, when they can be indoctrinated by a machine, that’s if there are still kids in the future :$
Like Francis King, I would take issue with Mr. O’Toole’s take on the available supply of land. Indeed, the United States has no shortage of land. North America is full of mountains that have probably never been scaled by man, and of prairies that have probably only had only small numbers of human visitors cross them over thousands of years of human habitation. But the availability of land within a city or suburb is different. Every acre that is along a road has development potential that land in the wilderness does not have. Every road requires money to maintain. We only have so many roads, we can only afford so many roads, and we only have so much land accessible by those roads. If we can become better stewards of them, then that would be a good thing.
” But the availability of land within a city or suburb is different.”
How ’bout the availability of the land in exurbs, which is arguably unlimited? AVs will allow commuters to extend their commute times to one or even two hours, with no loss in productivity or revenue to their employers, or remuneration to themselves. In fact, their entire commute can be spent working instead of piloting an automobile.
What vistas does increasing commute time to an hour or two open up for housing?
CapitalistRoader, you’re assuming that white collar jobs are some how safe from automation. They aren’t :$
CapitalistRoader, another way to state my point is to say that the U.S. does not have a shortage of land, but we have a finite amount of land that is accessible by our public infrastructure. The exurbs can never have an arguably infinite amount land that is accessible by roads. Although, I suppose that the exurbs can stretch their available land through cheap-to-maintain infrastructure like gravel roads and through creative lot shapes (long thin lots that only touch upon roads along a little bit of their perimeters).
Although, I suppose that the exurbs can stretch their available land through cheap-to-maintain infrastructure like gravel roads and through creative lot shapes (long thin lots that only touch upon roads along a little bit of their perimeters).
CardGame, how do you account for exurbs currently experiencing the fastest growth? Much of which is high-end housing with correspondingly high-end infrastructure and amenities.
Not all states are on the brink of bankruptcy. The big, blue states may be having a hard time retaining enough high-income people to support their aging infrastructure run by corrupt administrators/politicians, but the rest of the states typically don’t.
Lots of high-end exurban development in the states those high income blue-staters are fleeing to.
The model of city development that looks accurate to me is that in many communities, a developer builds some brand new neighborhood infrastructure along with new houses. The municipal government collects taxes for brand new homes, with very little maintenance costs in the short term. From an accounting perspective this is not ideal because it hides the long term costs. Over decades, the taxable value of the land doesn’t quite keep up with inflation as the houses age, and maintenance starts to climb. Sometimes, as new neighborhoods start to get built on the edges of the old ones. taxes from the new neighborhoods get used to maintain the old ones, which works for a period of time.
Yet most of the municipalities in US operate quite well using that model and are quite solvent. Sure, many of the old, Democratic-run municipalities are either insolvent or close to it, but the vast majority of municipalities aren’t. Now, I realize that President Awesome Boyfriend had a grand scheme to eliminate suburbs with his Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program but there’s a new sheriff in town so that crap bit the dust a year ago.