Thread about a thing y'all gotta catch yourselves on.
"But sometimes!"
"But sometimes!"
Reposted from
jamelle
fascinated by a rhetorical strategy i see all the time now, which is making up an extreme edge case to argue against doing anything for the public good, and doing this from the putative left.
Comments
1 - Improved the service for people taking the bus
2 - Meant that each bus + driver could do more trips per day, further improving service at no additional cost, and with more fare revenue per bus.
Yes, the bus times got faster, but were there more routes added? Did the fares go down? Stuff like that.
London doesn't need more bus routes - there are >670 routes, with most running every 10-15 minutes and something like 80% of Londoners living <400m from a stop (can't find the actual stat).
The problem is car traffic slowing them down!
Don't get me wrong, London is much easier to get around in than every US city. But I'm sure Londoners could easily point to areas that could be improved
In my town theres a bus route that stops near the cinema, but no one uses it because it stops running at 6pm - that kind of stuff
I guess I'm just looking for places that can use improvement to assist in reducing the need for personal vehicles. Yes, the congestion pricing assists in that as well - but only if there are alternatives to driving.
It's just an additional tax that ppl who can't use public transit have to pay.
A lot of blanket "solutions" often just giving them the stick without the carrot.
I don't really understand point about tolls, sorry.
So you're making cars harder by forcing a choice to spend more money, and NYC already has pretty great transit.
I live in the middle of nowhere. There's not really enough "mass" for mass transit to function out here. A lot of discussions around mass transit tend to devolve into "everyone should move to cities."
It's all about the conclusions you draw from edge cases. Nothing needs to be perfect but it's good to know where a thing stops being good.
My critiques of transit enthusiasts usually stem from those folks not seeing the ways transit is hard for the car brained, but "use the understood toll paradigm in places cars shouldn't be" is good.
Sure, not all transit systems can be free, but as a way to get people on board it's a handy tool.
NYC having an objectively terrible subway map and everyone going "but that's just new york, deal with it" for an example.
If it doesn't have a train, it needs a train.
Moving trucks back to rail, building on mass passenger infrastructure and bullet trains, and more!
TRAINS!
You could save so much energy on a train! You could have a party on a train! Rolling wonder machines for everyone!
I'm curious what efforts would go into making transit more obvious.
Would that be an education thing? A restructure to our approaches on building transit infrastructure?
The gold standard is seating with a shelter and a real time display showing the wait time for the next bus
Buses are straight up the worst possible option where I live
My dad uses an SMS text based schedule system and can’t figure out the app.
I never bothered for the longest time because I would have had to carry cash, and didn't have access to any
Using transit is a skill.
I'm not saying insults are therefore productive, to be clear. Just that it's hard.
Some people in transit enthusiast circles are like "EMV so slow! What about faregate throughput"
It's frustrating, literally and figuratively putting up barriers to new riders.
The use cases for taking public transit in the suburbs feels really limited. Commuting to the train station for work and... anything else?
Metra may be scrappy and a *lot* of it could do with some upgrades, but even with their ancient trains you can get well into DuPage county in 30 minutes, which you cannot by car.
The old, slow trains aren't a problem.
The Metra was a godsend while I went to grad school at Elmhurst
https://www.spokanejournal.com/articles/15332-heat-pump-efficiency-said-to-be-improving