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people living in suburbs realizing that the suburbs are poo poo when it comes to doing anything other than raising kids

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even simple innovations like Google Maps can tell people exactly how to get places using public transit when it might have taken ages to build up the amount of knowledge necessary to use the system to its fullest extent.

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- Seattle: Another fresh young face on the block, the Seattle system just opened its Capitol Hill and University of Washington stations, with a 1.6 mile/2.6km southern extension to Angle Lake opening in September and expanding even further north to open in 2021. It still really only has a single, long North-South line, though, and expanding further into Bellevue, West Seattle, Everett, and Tacoma will voters to approve the Sound Transit 3 referendum this November.

PT6A posted:

Easier said than done. If they can't handle marginal road markings, how are they going to do that?

Curvature of Earth posted:

Highly-regarded transit consultant Jarrett Walker would argue that if your transit systems goal is to actually maximize ridership, you concentrate on fewer high-frequency lines than low-frequency, spread-out lines.

If anything, this should make transit more popular in Edmonton, as focused, high-frequency transit lines are actually useful. Contrast this with once-an-hour, barely-used lines maintained solely so the city can claim their transit network has lots of "coverage", which teaches riders that public transit is slow, inconvenient and not very useful. "Goes everywhere" is useless if hardly anyone wants to go most of those places anyways.

My Imaginary GF posted:

God I love transit orientated development. So much opportunity for contracting poo poo out --- Why the gently caress ain't communities already doing this poo poo? Why do I gotta start up and revive these initiatives?

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buildings taller than 2/3 stories in MY neighborhood? But won't anyone think of the character???

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transit in my neighborhood? But that might bring colored folk POORS here!!!

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but...then those mooching apartment dwellers will take all the free parking! This is America dagnabbit!!

My Imaginary GF posted:

here is my issue with bikeshare: if you gonna spend money on something, spend it on part of a comprehensive plan. if you got a bikeshare and all your bikes have to cross highways like 20 times to get anywhere worth going, you got deeper issues than bikes.

Popular Thug Drink posted:

in my opinion we're already pretty screwed. street networks and land ownership/use, in the absence of cataclysmic events like land-erasing disasters or complete political revolution, tend to be locked in over long periods of time. a ton of virgin land was developed around american cities in the early 20th century for primarily automotive access. it would take sustained political and economic investment over many years to convert this fabric, one piece at a time, to something more pedestrian friendly, and given how we can't even commit to paying the necessary costs for automotive infrastructure...

Popular Thug Drink posted:

just to be clear what i refer to as the land use-transportation framework is largely conceptual and about relationships between land and structure uses and how people navigate between them. this is in part determined by the built environment (what structures actually exist right now at this place and time) but also in part on things like land ownership and rights of way, which tend to be relatively permanent. look at london for example, which burned to the ground ~350 years ago but retained a largely medival-ish road network and building/street relationships when rebuilt because that was the path of least resistance. it takes a napoleon to enable a hausmann, even bob moses tried to tamper with the lu-tran of nyc and he was eventually turned out by neighborhood activists

My Imaginary GF posted:

We are building places. The problem is that we all want the same things, yet there is only political will within very narrow areas to provide them.

Therefore, any community which provides the political will for it will be utilized and may increase its human capital capture rate.

PT6A posted:

On the subject of bikeshares, I still haven't seen a good solution to the fact that there's no infrastructure to provide helmet rentals (which would be gross anyway). Maybe I'm taking the indoctrination of my childhood too seriously, but that seems like an irresponsible thing.

nm posted:

Generally, bike share bikes have a much lower rate of death than cyclists in general despite the helmet issue. I think in large part it has to do with speed. Bike share bikes are heavy and geared to cruise at 10mph, not the 20 mph of a road bike.p

PT6A posted:

I don't think it really has to do with the bike infrastructure.

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Even with good infrastructure, accidents happen. I ended up with a concussion when I was a kid, due to another cyclist basically crashing into me as I was stopped. I can't remember if I was wearing a helmet, but I was either lucky to have been wearing a helmet (because I would've got much worse than a concussion) or I should've been wearing a helmet, to prevent the concussion.

Neon Belly posted:

Just read a neat piece on the structuring of suburban office parks and company's continued resilience to change:

Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?

I've always thought it weird how the offices of Apple, Google, and the likes, are cooped up in suburbs that only seem to have access through large highways.

Trevor Hale posted:

The article also hints at how hosed up cities are because hotshots with money work in the suburbs. If you're driving to work, you never interact with your city. Why should someone who lives in City A and drives to Campus B give a poo poo about the public transit of City A?

Curvature of Earth posted:

Apple's new donut-campus costs $5 billion, which is more than the cost of the new World Trade Center in the middle of loving Manhattan.

Tech company headquarters are built in suburbia because their founders/executives are born-and-bred suburbanites. For them, suburbia is the default. It has nothing do with cost and everything to do with uncritically embracing the system they're most familiar with.

Ardennes posted:

In all honesty I spent quite a bit of time around the Santa Clara valley, and public transportation there is just rather terrible to be honest and barely better than Greater Los Angeles.

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I guess better density is a okay thing, but ultimately the vast majority of those employees are going to be in cars and I doubt bike lanes almost no one is going to use is going to change. I mean by and large as far as the physical surrounding of that area, it really doesn't look or work that differently than Orange County.

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That said, If anything the Apple HQ really make even sense because the only public transportation around it is a local bus line, and it literally faces single family dwellings. It really looks like a HQ some alien overlord just dropped down from space on a random lot with zero thought about anything around it. The 280 is already a parking lot anyway, I guess ten thousand more cars isn't going to hurt.

Ardennes posted:

The issue here is that even during the seventies, Amsterdam had the building blocks to make that transformation possible including just the density itself compared to the Santa Clara valley which by and large is more or less standard California issue suburbia. It took the Dutch decades to fix Amsterdam, how long will it take to fix a place that was never intended to be livable for people without cars?

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There are some American cities that did turn around, like Portland. However, if you talk about a city like Portland, most people st commute to work by car on a road system developed for about half the amount of people and its local government is struggling to find money to find any alternative.

PT6A posted:

Four bottles is easy as pie. I'm thinking a case of wine -- that's a prick to carry over a kilometre or so. Most of the liquor stores around here have delivery services for such things, which is good (because a large delivery van can make multiple pickups and dropoffs in a single trip, increasing efficiency) but it does require loading zone availability to be efficient on both ends. Long-term parking fucks everything up.

PT6A posted:

A very large basket indeed, assuming you have a case of 12 bottles. And it doesn't scale, whereas a delivery van can carry tens of cases of wine. I do grocery shopping on foot and carry everything home on a regular basis. A case of wine is way heavier and more awkward than a few bags of groceries.

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Besides which, my original point was about the fact there's good reasons for loading zones to exist when compared with parking spots in general, just like commercial vehicles are often granted access to streets that are otherwise restricted. Sometimes a motor vehicle really is the best tool for the job, and by removing personal motor vehicles as a common means of just getting from point A to point B and staying for a while, we can make those other motor vehicles even more efficient.

PT6A posted:

Yes, but he's an usually convenient shape for carrying on a bicycle, almost as if bicycles were designed for carrying people.

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EDIT: Also, I think congestion charging in city centres and toll roads in general would be a good thing. You want the convenience of a car? Good, then you can drat well pay for it.

Bip Roberts posted:

Whenever someone mentions that cars are useful for some things in these threads someone needs to chime in that it's perfectly feasible to move that futon on a bike no probs like the idea that the only other possibility from using cars for everything is no cars.

Panzeh posted:

Cities are dogshit places to live and we oughta find a way to make suburbanism work.

Panzeh posted:

Those ones are way too expensive for actual working class people to live in, much like everything else in the cities.

Kalman posted:

That's because we have like five of them total so they're just as in demand. If most suburbs were built that way they wouldn't be so expensive to live in.

Curvature of Earth posted:

Two, and they combine into one during the early morning and evening.

The town next door is only slightly bigger population-wise but has nine bus lines, and is generally better in every way to my hometown's (e.g. free to use, automatic announcements for every stop, real-time tracking). To be fair, they're a classic college town, while we're a bargain-priced blue-collar suburb.

Baronjutter posted:

I think any fare system with physical gates is a bad one. Flow and service are so much more important than the pennies lost in fare avoidance. I love the gateless system the dutch use. Tap in at the start of your trip, tap out at the end. Works on just about every bus, metro, tram, and train in the whole country. You can get on a bus in one city, go to the train station, take a train to another city, ride a tram to your destination, all with one easy to use card.

mobby_6kl posted:

The worst thing about DC metro from a tourist's POV are the loving incomprehensible fares and corresponding ticket machines. I even had to try to explaim it to some locals (well, Americans, at least). In think Munich had something similar, except also in German, so there I just gave up and just drove straight to the center. God bless NYC and its one ticket one ride.

Combed Thunderclap posted: