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Ardennes posted:The difference is Amsterdam is an entire city that has had its infrastructure built around public transit and bike use, you can get across almost all of Amsterdam very easily with a bike and public transportation. It really isn't the case of the Santa Clara valley, especially since the distances are comparatively vast. More bike lanes is fine, and I am sure a few people are going to use them but ultimately the mistakes of the fifties are still going to guide the future of the valley. It is a situation that is hosed in a way that will take generations to be fixed if ever, and is only compounded by being wanting to live in SF [which tried to resist those mistakes]. Amsterdam in the 70s vs now:  To be clear, Amsterdam and the major Dutch cities as a whole had some of the most consistently heavy congested car traffic in the world. It was basically impossible to find a parking space anywhere near your home or destination and so many children were being ran over it caused a national crisis. Cycling was a rare, dangerous activity partaken only by the terminally old fashioned or those too poor for a bus pass. They fixed it.
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Apr 24, 2016 00:25
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PT6A posted:It's really sad. I was watching BBC and I saw a story about how they're installing tap cards on buses in Kigali, Rwanda, and yet we still can't get a working system in a first-world city of over 1,000,000 people after three expensive failed attempts. I mean, it boggles my loving mind how they managed to screw up this many times. We have a system on some buses that announces stops, too, but it doesn't announce every stop so it's literally worse than having nothing at all, because you can't rely on it. And our "real-time tracking system" has shown me buses that don't ever show up, not to mention the boards at train stations which seem to display the times of upcoming trains with no reference to reality at all. Were we just unlucky or did we hire incompetent people or what? How did this many things get hosed up when it seems like every other place can manage it? Typically any large scale IT project like this is farmed out to private companies, who get the contract written up as lax as possible while technically-not-bribing the other party into accepting it. So they can drag their asses on developing it for as long as possible so they get paid more, deliver a dogshit product, and then get to provide extortionately priced "support" for many more years. The local government feller who got their proposal accepted then gets a cushy position at the company when their term expires. It's the F-35 business model.
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May 23, 2016 05:35
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British Rail was the good one, though. You want Universal Jobmatch for a true British competitor to the F-35
HorseLord fucked around with this message at 22:02 on May 23, 2016 |
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May 23, 2016 22:00
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PT6A posted:That still doesn't explain why other cities, which probably follow this same process, manage to emerge with a functioning system at the end of it. Three attempts over the last decade and we still don't have it. All things vary. Other places will have had the contracts signed by people slightly less drunk.
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May 25, 2016 18:51
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Are there any cities in the world with an extensive subway system that's totally free for the riders? I can't imagine it happening in the US since the massive screaming about unfairness from non-riders would drown it out. On a weird level, I could see DC being vaguely able to argue it since their ridership is spread out over multiple states even for "locals" plus huge numbers of temporary riders for gov/biz/tourism. DC clearly can't afford it alone, but it could be allotws funds in a way similar to how DC gets a federal disbursement for all the tax-free federal land it has that it has to indirectly support and can't raise revenue from. none are 100% free that I know of, but as of the last time I checked the price of riding the Minsk Metro is about $0.22. That's an unlimited journey, across as many trains as you want until you leave the system. If you get a monthly pass then it's so cheap the price means nothing. This is of course remnant of the soviet planned economy so you can never reproduce something like this.
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Nov 10, 2016 23:05
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