The problem of cities is a problem of space, geometry, and elite projection

The fun thing is that Jarret really came to prominence about 2 weeks ago when he had an argument with Musk on twitter. Insightful as he is, I am not sure he’d have found a platform in the FT without Musk’s unintended help!

Some very interesting stuff, but some odd things too. A few points:

Apps: they are not just things like Uber! In Melbourne, I use the “tram tracker” app all the time to help me figure out when a tram is coming (should I take the 70, which I like more, or the 75, if it’s coming 10 minutes sooner? Should I just walk home rather than wait for the tram? Etc.)

On Uber – does it really keep people from using public transit, as claimed? It seems more likely that it either competes with normal taxis or with driving one’s own car. I have never used it on my own (only ridden with others who have “called” for it) but my understanding is that it is very often cheaper than a “normal” taxi, so the talk about it being expensive seems at least a bit misleading. It’s more expensive than a bus, but it’s hardly an “elite” thing as is suggested, it seems.

But if it were easy to drive there every weekend, if I had someone who would drive me there or if I could ride in a driverless car, I would buy that cabin in the woods and so would everybody else and so we would chop down the woods. What’s the point of over-stating things like this? Obviously, not “everyone would” – lots of people want to live in the city! Or the suburbs, not the woods. Maybe it would hurt the woods, but “I want to live in the woods” is not a good description of why many people wanted to live in the suburbs, as suggested. This seems like its own form of projection to me, the thing being cautioned against.

The discussion of people living in big towers far from the center and it being a nightmare to get into the city could have used a picture of Moscow to illustrate it. It’s by far the best example of that situation I have experienced. (The last time I was there, a few years back, the drive from the airport to the center took significantly longer than the flight from Frankfurt. I had never regretted having had a car come meet me so much.)

Given the focus on “geometry” I was surprised to see so little on “geography” – this matters! In Melbourne, there are sort of neat little bike lockers near a lot of the commuter trains, so that you can ride your bike to the train station and securely lock it up. That would help with the “last mile” problem discussed. Except that Melbourne is a terrible place for biking – in part because of the aggressive drivers and bad roads for it, but also because it’s really hilly, making biking much harder than in many areas. This makes even walking harder for many people. Biking, and walking, are much easier to take advantage of in flat areas, especially if people are, say, carrying groceries. When its hilly, or really humid, or it rains a lot, or hot as hell or really cold lots of the time, those are all serious limit on those options. It was surprising to me to not see those things mentioned, as they are very salient to people who have to do without cars.

I get that it’s the point of their driverless car pitch, but were you not among those who were arguing that this is a pipe dream? (I think that’s especially likely for Uber, as opposed to other options.) The claim was, as I understood it, that it’s already taking people away from public transit. I am not sure, but it seems unlikely to me that it is doing that very often, and when it does, it may be a good thing. (That is, sometimes it really is better to drive than to take transit, when transit will be very slow, laborious, etc.) So, the claim still seems to me to be, at best, over-stated.

Matt 3: “Biking, and walking, are much easier to take advantage of in flat areas, especially if people are, say, carrying groceries.”

Topography has become much less of an obstacle to bicycle commute since the advent of e-bikes with decent battery range. That technological advance – finally a tech fix that really solves a problem – seems to be much underappreciated in the public debate but e-bikes have become very popular in places where decent infrastructure exists. There can now be no question whatsoever that the bike has a huge efficiency advantage over the car for urban transport.

Incidentally, autonomous cars might pose a new threat to bicyclists. There is this idea in certain heads that roads will be safer once human drivers are out of the equation but pedestrians and bicyclists are never mentioned.

Apps: they are not just things like Uber! In Melbourne, I use the “tram tracker” app all the time to help me figure out when a tram is coming (should I take the 70, which I like more, or the 75, if it’s coming 10 minutes sooner? Should I just walk home rather than wait for the tram? Etc.)

How does this contradict his thesis that apps aren’t going to solve the fundamental problems of transport, even if they have removed a lot of the friction in the system from communications problems?

Wow that is such a good article. I always find it frustrating to see discussions where people ignore real world physical/energy constraints. So it’s great to see someone not only bang that drum, but also show why it matters.

I’m glad to see Jarrett Walker getting some more attention! I’ve been following his blog and writing for several years, because his mix of practical knowledge and theoretical sophistication has been extremely illuminating for a lot of things I think about.

Also agree with Nathan and Matt: Ibnever use Uber etc & imho the two indispensable apps in London are the bus countdown timer (lots of bus stops don’t have that info otherwise) and the cycle docking station availability map.

Mr. Walker seems to be assuming that the recent class structure of Western (Anglophone? American?) life will persist for at least a few more decades. However, in the US at least, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, especially with regard to real estate. As a result the residences of the better-off are moving towards the city centers while those of the less well-off, the poor, and the less attractive industries are being moved to the periphery. If the proles become poor enough, it will be possible to move them en masse to large blocklike structures and haul them to the city in busses or cattle-cars to perform those services which the elites desire, and then haul them back again; they won’t need to be taken to the opera or the most fashionable restaurants. Out in the sticks, the simple needs and wants which they can afford can be provided for locally. It will be rather like Le Corbusier after all.

… there’s a lot of room for improvement.

there’s no rational case for cars in a city any more unless you are physically unable to ride a bike.

Where do you live? Because I live in a city where it is quite possible for the temperature to never get above freezing for three months straight.

Mr. Walker seems to be assuming that the recent class structure of Western (Anglophone? American?) life will persist for at least a few more decades…As a result the residences of the better-off are moving towards the city centers while those of the less well-off, the poor, and the less attractive industries are being moved to the periphery.

He made no such assumption. His point was simply that you can’t just build roads to large Corbusier style structures and expect that to work without mass transit because of physical constraints.

Given that one of his examples was a development in a developing nation I seriously doubt he’s making any assumptions about anglophone life.

Just to remind people: bikes use more road space than buses do.

Uber is a taxi service that is often cheaper, primarily because they have found a way to get drivers to work for less, but also because Uber has broken down regulations that limited taxi supply. It’s Econ 101 that a reduction in taxi fares will reduce demand for alernative modes of transport, both owner-driven cars and public transport.

The facts that Uber called itself ride-sharing to get around regulation and that it uses an app are irrelevant to these effects, as is the possibility of autonomous cars. The only relevant fact is that Uber has put a lot more taxis on the road than were there before.

As I read Walker, he is making this same point. The apps and so on make no difference to the capacity of the network to handle more cars. If it was sensible (or not) before Uber to restrict car numbers by pricing, regulation or whatever, it’s just as sensible (or not) now.

A few replies: I didn’t mean to suggest that the article said apps were no use, only that it underplayed the usefulness of many. I thought that was worth pointing out. (A disadvantage of writing just before going to bed, as I was doing, is sometimes being less clear than I’d hope to be.)

On Uber (and car sharing, something else discussed briefly, and something I have sometimes used) – no matter how good a public transit system is, it is sometimes very bad for certain activities – the routs will be very long, and it it’s difficult to, say, take two large suitcase or a bit of furniture or the like on a bus or tram. If such trips and tasks have to be done modestly regularly, but not all the time, then Uber (typically cheaper than taxis, I think) or a car share, is a good option that _complements_ public transit, as a user can use these services on occasion, but still mostly use transit. But, if these other options are not available, and only (more expensive) taxis are, then just getting a car starts to seem a lot more attractive. If such scenarios are common, then even if uber or car sharing cuts into transit a bit (reducing these especially tedious trips) they can be better for transit over-all (by discouraging people from thinking they need to buy a car.)

E-bikes – maybe a good idea, perhaps worth encouraging. Do they have something like an ignition key to make theft less of a problem? I’d worry about that. Of course, there are still limits to what most people can do on a bike, even leaving aside the real issues of weather in many cities. (Except for the occasional torrential down-pour – non-trivial when it happens! – Melbourne is pretty good for biking weather wise, but the weather is a real issue in many places.)

On the hilliness of cities: I’ve lived in and biked in a bunch of cities (and biked in a few others that I didn’t live in) in the US and other countries, and except for San Francisco, Melbourne has been the worst in regards to hilliness. Now, it’s obviously not the worst possible, and there are, as noted, flatter areas, but lots of people either live or work in parts of the city where the hills are long and not so flat. I’m in okay shape and and okay biker, but they still matter to me. I have no doubt that they’d discourage a lot of people who might bike in other places I’ve lived, like Denver, Boise, NY City, or Philadelphia. (The aggressive drivers are also a problem.) Perhaps it’s worth noting that the people who deliver the mail in Melbourne all use E-bikes, suggesting that just peddling might not be so great. (I might note as well that google maps ability to tell you how hilly potential bike routs are is another very useful feature of technology for transit options.)

I think it’s possible to argue a contrary case to Walker’s along the following lines. *Assume* that we replace the current car fleet with autonomous electric vehicles (whether privately-owned or shared is secondary in this context). Then cars will acquire a lot of the desirable features of mass transit
* by maintaining optimal distances between cars, they can use road space more efficiently while avoiding crashes and traffic jams
* they will be safer and less polluting, *assuming* a decarbonized electricity supply.

From the viewpoint of riders, cars will maintain the advantages of flexible routes and personal occupancy. On the other hand, the autonomy of the vehicle obviously replaces the autonomy of the former driver.

As I said in the other thread, I don’t think it will be long before there are autonomous vehicles that can share urban roads with existing drivers. But the assumptions required for the scenario above will take a lot longer to realise.

An important intermediate step, bound to meet a lot of resistance, is imposing technological controls to put the distance between cars under the control of the car rather than the driver. So, no tailgating, no discretionary changes in speed, reliance on automatic detection systems rather than drivers to manage braking for hazards . Not happening any time soon, I suspect, although I would welcome it myself.

JQ’s comment at 2:54 misses Walker’s point, which is that travel inescapably involves quite severe physical constraints. A road can move 2000 people an hour, a tram 7,500 and heavy rail 20,000 or more. If all the cars linked together they might come close to the capacity of a tram-line while using much more space. And these figures become worse for cars as bottlenecks (bridges, tunnels) come into play. Neither Uber nor autonomous vehicles shift these margins very much.

Also worth noting that Uber is losing money, and would need to charge fares approximating those of taxis to actually make money.

In the early 20th century streetcars provided economically viable public transit in the US. However as automobile traffic increased streetcars became less reliable because they shared the street with automobiles, which slowed down the streetcars. A better solution is light rail, which runs in its own right-of-way. Plus there is the advantage of parallel loading. An intermediate technology is bus rapid transit, which has buses running in dedicated lanes. This loses the parallel loading advantages but keeps the avoidance of car traffic. With modern traffic lights it is possible to synchronize the lights to either light rail or bus traffic.

Peter T’s numbers ( 5:51) are useful. Los Angeles, for example, was basically developed by streetcar companies. I’m sure many people know that up to the 1940s LA had a fantastic streetcar system. Places like London and Paris were maybe more structured by heavy rail.

Toronto and San Francisco are North American cities that managed to hold on to their streetcars. I have some limited experience with Toronto streetcars and to me they seem to work pretty well. Toronto has a nice subway system, but there are large areas of the city that are not serviced. Toronto seems to have two kinds of bus lines–ones where a bus will sh0w up every 5-10 minutes, and ones where your smartphone app says a bus will arrive in 40 minutes but after waiting in -15 degree weather for 40 minutes there’s no bus. Comments from full-time Torontonians?

Where I live we have 1950s traffic lights and buses that run on a timetable. You look up the website and it says the bus will arrive at 5:55. (Once or twice an hour usually.) In the last couple of years I’ve been combining carpooling and bus travel a lot more. Even though there is little technology involved, it still works pretty well for me. People who criticize existing mass transit options I think are often people who don’t use them much. But the bus I ride more or less duplicates the route of the streetcar that was there in the 1920s. I think the tracks are still buried under the modern street surface.

Scott 21: I have lived in Quebec City and got around by bike just fine, year round, and since then, bike infrastructure has much improved. Sure, I’m not disputing that climate and geography matter – they matter for everybody but for bicyclists perhaps more than for motorists – for most people in most cities, the main hurdles are man-made.

Obviously I’m not suggesting that e-bikes can solely solve the transportation problem. My point is that for city dwellers, the most efficient setup is to use (e-)bikes for short distances, transit for longer distances, and the occasional rented/shared car if you need to transport something or go on a trip that isn’t well served by transit. There simply is no rational case for owning a private car any more.

Matt: “On Uber (and car sharing, something else discussed briefly, and something I have sometimes used) – no matter how good a public transit system is, it is sometimes very bad for certain activities – the routs will be very long, and it it’s difficult to, say, take two large suitcase or a bit of furniture or the like on a bus or tram. If such trips and tasks have to be done modestly regularly, but not all the time, then Uber (typically cheaper than taxis, I think) or a car share, is a good option that _complements_ public transit, as a user can use these services on occasion, but still mostly use transit.”

I think this underlines and misses Walker’s point at the same time. The point is that Uber can’t serve as a transplantation alternative for more than fraction of the people who need transporting for reasons of capacity, which means in practice it’s always going to be a solution for elites. Capacity will be constrained, which means the price will go up, which means only people who can pay the price will use it for their transportation needs. It’s easy to come up with a scenario where it is more convenient *for me* to use an Uber than to use mass transit, but that’s not a mass transit solution.

The same applies to self-driving cars. Look at NYC, where 7 million people ride the subway each day, while 1.4 million own cars. The mass transit system there is stressed and needs more capacity, but what the self-driving car touts are pushing is more infrastructure to support cars, and the elites want that too, because they already use cars rather than mass transit. But what happens if 10% of mass transit users switch to cars, whether Uber or Waymo or GM? Is the traffic congestion going to get better, or worse?

I just had 14 undergraduate students to my home last night for dinner. My home is a 2 mile walk from campus. Prior to Uber they’d have all come by bus or walked (I know, because I did this several times before Uber) last night they arrived in a total of 5 ubers and left in a total of 3 ubers. The bus is free. But Uber is more convenient and sufficiently cheap that they don’t think of the cost when they share; where a cab is sufficiently expensive that they wouldn’t do it. The last students left at 11.10, whereas pre-uber they’d have left at 9 before the buses become really infrequent (for me this was a plus, they were delightful company and helped me clean up). I read the piece yesterday morning after CB linked to it in fb, and then marveled, last night, at the confirmation of Walker’s conjecture….

Why they can’t walk 4 miles is beyond me, mark you.

Yes, it makes a huge difference. Though, the density on and just off the isthmus is pretty good, and there are about 5 buses an hour between my home and downtown where they live, with pretty reliable schedules outside rush hours. And free for them…

@steven t johnson

Don’t discount the “boys and their toys” explanation, where the real motivation is the sheer disruption of it all. Like rolling coal. That esp. applies to Uber, who set themselves defiantly uber and above existing administrations. So we know social value is not their thing. In the meantime, the EOs get nice salary/perks and if the VCs are losing money, well everybody got to pay for their fun.

For drivers Uber provides a greater level of flexibility, which is valuable to many under 30’s, i.e. my kids generation. My son who primarily does music gigs, can drive in between gigs. Many of his friends use it in between jobs, or as a source of supplemental income. Another son, who for a few months had a recovering leg injury, and for whom the dozen block walk to work was inadvisable was able to take Uber to work for $4 a crack.

I agree that the current Uber business model is financially unsustainable. I think they are hoping to transition into an autonomous cab company.

= = = As for what the plan is when the VC spigot is finally turned off? Who can say. Maybe there isn’t a plan (I’ve been around enough startups to know that often there isn’t). = = =

Given how adept Uber has been at developing software and businesses processes to evade regulatory and police scrutiny I’d say the backup plan is to become the software supplier and app developer for the Mob.

Uber isn’t the solution to transport problems because it’s current model isn’t sustainable. The price and convenience of Ubers is only possible because it’s heavily subsidized. As soon as that subsidy disappears it’s just another taxi firm.

Taxis aren’t expensive and inconvenient because of licensing, or monopolies, or the rest of it. There’s a minimum price that taxis have to charge in order to be economically viable. At that price there’s a limited market for their services. There’s also a fixed limit on how many taxis you can have operating, for taxis to be a viable business. Too many taxis and everyone is chasing the same fixed pool of customers and is unable to make a profit.

For drivers Uber provides a greater level of flexibility, which is valuable to many under 30’s, i.e. my kids generation.

Why do you think flexibility is so important to the young ‘uns?

Cian:

Kiwanda – when reality catches up with Uber there will be far fewer uber drivers.

The point had more to do with the barriers to entry to small operators, which remain non-zero even with reductions in driver numbers. I’m not convinced that such monopoly positions are possible or necessarily profitable, but rather describing what the investors holding Uber’s $70 billion market cap might be hoping for.

NB: references to “crunching the numbers” are not persuasive by themselves.

Cian, you write “The reason that taxis are heavily regulated is that if taxi prices fall below a certain level it becomes impossible for any taxi to make money.”

Is there any serious evidence that this claim is true? Or even strong hints that it might be true? Not the second clause (it is trivially true that at certain prices it is impossible to make money, but the normal response is to raise prices) but rather the first–that the taxi regulations are necessary to ensure that prices will remain high enough for taxis to make money.

“Tarifs and taxi numbers being determined by fixed costs, optimal utilization rates, etc.”

Oh really? Are you sure that the number of taxis are determined that way, rather than sharply limiting the supply well below optimal utilization rates in order to capture monopoly profits?

It seems kind of weird that detractors of Uber so often raise the scare that Uber “tries to drive taxis out of business so they can get a monopoly.” What’s going to happen? Are they going to get a monopoly LIKE THE TAXI MEDALLION OWNERS ALREADY USED TO HAVE? And then are they going to screw over consumers LIKE TAXI MEDALLION OWNERS USED TO DO?

“And incidentally for the taxis are evil crowd – taxi firms are typically very efficient on costs. ”

Now this is a true statement. Taxi firms used to be VERY efficient, largely by paying their drivers quite badly. But that efficiency did NOT get passed on in lower prices to consumers, because Taxi firms operated in a position of monopoly power granted by the cities. So calling them ‘efficient’ isn’t really helpful for the public good that you are appealing to because that efficiency is just translated into monopoly rents–of exactly the same kind that you fear from Uber.

“Uber has sort of got round this temporarily through VC subsidies”

Now this one I believe to be true. I don’t think that they can maintain their current cost structure at about 1/2 of taxi rates. But you are suggesting that the natural market price is approximately 100% what Taxis charge (or used to charge pre-Uber). That seems wrong. If that were true, Taxi medallions wouldn’t have been so ridiculously expensive pre-Uber. If that were true, black car services operating outside the taxi system couldn’t have profitable at about 2/3rds the cost of Taxis (but they totally were).

On the main topic from the US point of view, I think Jarret Walker is correct–the main problem with public transit in the US is that it is WAY too damn expensive. Because of that, only tiny projects are tackled, which works to undermine support for public transit projects because the proposals are not particularly helpful to the overall transit problems they are trying to address.

“On the main topic from the US point of view, I think Jarret Walker is correct–the main problem with public transit in the US is that it is WAY too damn expensive. Because of that, only tiny projects are tackled, which works to undermine support for public transit projects because the proposals are not particularly helpful to the overall transit problems they are trying to address.”

It’s almost like you’ve read a different Jarret Walker interview than I did. I read the one which argues that the problem with public transit projects is that they’re conceived by and for elites, and elite solutions can’t possibly scale to solve mass transit problems. Which one did you read?

Cian, I’m not sure what you’re responding to. To reiterate my part of the comment thread: I’m aware that it’s very likely that Uber charges substantially below cost, via VC funding, as I mentioned above. The question then arises of what Uber and their investors hope to achieve by burning through investor money this way. One explanation people have made (as at the link that I gave) is that Uber hopes to monopolize markets, and then charge at a profitable level in those monopolized markets. Matt responded that such a strategy is obviously doomed, since the barriers to entry in the taxi business are close to zero. I then suggested that network effects allow the possibility of effective monopolies.

@TM: Elites don’t by-and-large use public transport, see. So public transport projects that get elite support are the ones that elites do use: urban circulators, airport or event links, school buses. Not high-capacity suburban bus links or early-morning transport.

Just put all the bikes on the pavement with the pedestrians and you solve all those problems with a stroke.

You couldn’t do this in London because about 25% of cyclists are maniacs who attach as little value to pedestrians’ safety as they to do their own.

‘Just put all the bikes on the pavement with the pedestrians and you solve all those problems with a stroke.

It depends what you want to do with the bicycle. Most people who use them for transportation want to get where they’re going faster than by walking, but in a densely-populated area the speed of a bicycle will be pretty much limited by the speed of the pedestrians using the same paths. Those who attempt to move faster will be considered ‘maniacs’ (see above), there will be collisions, and eventually laws will be made restricting their use to sport and children’s play in parks. There is more theory about how people can or do move around, but I’ll spare you.

CS 63: Nice of you to explain my argument to me. Of course “elites don’t by-and-large use public transport” *and therefore most public transit, conceived as a necessity only for the poor, sucks* – in the US. Not true in Europe.

Sorry I intended to include a link to Pedestrian Observations in my previous post, but forgot to.

Construction Costs Metro Stations

t’s that elites conceive of mass transit projects that only they, themselves, could use, and fuck the poor.

Something something empathy impairment.

Layman, I disagree. The argument as you put it @72 in my view is not wrong but it’s very incomplete. As I said, a big part of the problem with US transit infrastructure (not the kind in the fantasy of people like Musk but the real existing kind) is precisely that the elites in charge assume they themselves will never have to use it.

Further to 75: As a rule, public transit is well-funded where it has a large enough constituency with enough political clout. In the US, in most places that is not the case. And that situation is aggravated by the fact that transit policy in the US is a highly partisan issue. Republicans hate the cities and hate the idea of public transit (which they consider “collectivism”) and have no scruples to actively sabotage transit projects, as Chris Christie did (and was reelected), as Donald Trump is doing (without facing any backlash despite his promises to rebuild the country’s infrastructure. US cities have been neglected, under-invested in, allowed to decay, for half a century, public transit was deliberately underfunded and in many places actively destroyed. I’m a bit surprised this fact isn’t even mentioned in a thread about “the problem of cities”. Pointing out the flaws in Elon Musk’s futurist fantasies is worthy enough but what is the evidence that these fantasies have a significant impact on actual policy?

Harry I don’t know if the ‘why’ is well understood. It is like the fact that public plus private expenditures on health care per capita in the US are about 2x public plus private expenditures on health care in per capita in Canada while the US covers only about 80% of the population and Canada covers 100%. (I.e. BOTH the private insurance world and the public expenditures are SEPERATELY enough to cover the entire population if we cost as much as Canada, but even together they don’t cover as many people as Canada.)

I think we have good guesses in broad strokes, but the many of the answers don’t seem nearly enough (the big insurance companies and Medicare SEPERATELY have the size to leverage costs structures better than say Switzerland, but they don’t).

Anyway I linked to him in comment #71, and there are a bunch of ancillary supporting links that can be followed off of that link.

One of the clearest ones is here. Basically even the simplest US subway projects are more expensive than the very most complex European ones. Standard costs in Europe appear to be about $250 million to $450 million per km. The LOWEST cost in the US is in SF and isn’t even really a subway (it is light rail) at $500 million. The LOWEST cost in NYC is $1.3billion, and that is for a super easy short run.

The HIGHEST cost European system is Crossrail in London which is essentially digging an entire subway system below the existing subway system and crossing it at multiple points (the most complex type of subway project) it is still below the cheapest NYC one coming in at $1billion. A similarly problematic project in Paris is at $230 million. Berlin for a straightforward project is $250 million, Copenhagen $170 million.

If we were at Paris level prices, NYC could extend the subway 5-8 times longer than the current extensions for the same price they are spending now. That kind of project wouldn’t need to be elite driven side projects. That could be a true mass transit project.

Very interesting Sebastian.

Faustusnotes @62

I’ve never traveled to Asia, but I have extensive commuter experience in the US and Canada. As Engels points out, the only way to safely share a busy path with pedestrians is to pedal at pedestrian speeds — in which case you might as well walk. (The bike gives an advantage if you’re carrying a heavy load, or if you’re infirm enough that walking is too hard, but not so infirm that you can’t ride a bicycle.)

So, how do those billion Asians do it? Do they give up speed, give up safety, or is there an alternative I’m not thinking of?

In my case, I’ve got a 25-minute-each-way commute through the streets of downtown Toronto, which because of stop lights and traffic congestion is about what it would take in my car. At walking speed it would take more than an hour.

I live right by the 72nd St. station, and let me tell you, it’s both a) incredibly nice, and b) a huge, monumental, gargantuan waste of money. As per the link above, the estimate is that this station cost $740 million, which is just mind-boggling. I’m glad that a station exists near me and glad for the 2nd Ave. subway extension, because god knows the Lexington line can’t handle the traffic, but there’s absolutely no reason to build these colossal stations, not when that money would have been far better spent on the actual rail.

There is some indication that part of the problem is the union featherbedding, but not from just the salaries–from the number of workers required to do each task. It seems odd, as French unions are clearly a real thing, so maybe something different in the way unions play out in different countries?

Also it may be that the number of choke points on a project is higher in the US. You often have to buy off parties in the federal, state, county, city, and neighborhood level. Also litigation is offered as an explanation (especially ‘environmental’ Nimbyism in SF, NYC and DC). As I said, I don’t think anyone has gotten a good answer nailed down. But it certainly seems like a partial explanation for why transit often has such difficulty getting traction. It is amazingly expensive compared to the rest of the world, and thus either lends itself to MUCH smaller (and therefore less vote getting) projects, or will be MUCH more expensive (causing it to push up against other interests more quickly).

Humorously, this subdiscussion seems to exemplify exactly what Mr. Walker wrote about — elites, or rather people taking the elite view, discussing the movement of politically marginal people who they don’t seem to have much experience with, or as.

In London a least cyclists (especially the ‘serious’ lycra-clad tribe) are overwhelmingly white, male and middle-class, often in gentrifying areas, which might also be connected to the arsehole factor.

the only way to safely share a busy path with pedestrians is to pedal at pedestrian speeds — in which case you might as well walk

Well you can speed up when there aren’t pedestrians around, which is usually quite often, unless you’ve chosen a really stupid route.

The responses here about cycling are remarkable.

OCS, it’s possible to share footpaths with pedestrians and move faster than walking pace. In case you don’t believe my personal experience (I’ve been doing it for 12 years) consider engels’ example above where he complains about cyclists passing him. If they’re passing him they’re moving faster.

Anarcissie, I’m not talking about ox carts and low infrastructure in Nepal or something, I am talking about (and referenced) countries like Japan and China with very high levels of infrastructure and no ox carts. The street in front of my house has no footpaths and it is a thoroughfare for delivery trucks, buses, taxis and cars, but schoolkids and mothers on bikes with their kids use it without incident. Yes cars don’t get to move at 80km/h but that’s my point – they don’t need to be arseholes, and then everything works. (Pro-tip: driving fast through a residential area is dangerous and makes you an arsehole).

So no, this subdiscussion is not about politically marginalized groups moving slower. And I have a lot of bike cred to talk about this – I have commuted by bike in Australia, London, and rural and urban Japan and I can tell you that your image of Asian cycle commuting is very limited. Here in Japan everyone rides a bike (not the politically or economically marginalized), on the footpath, with pedestrians, and they do so because it’s faster than walking. I don’t anymore because although I get to the station faster I then have to spend a lot of time looking for parking, so in the end I might as well have walked (this is not a problem for every station). It’s not a problem of weather either – we had 10cm of snow last week and on the weekend I was nearly taken out by a cyclist going haywire on an ice patch. Here in Japan when a family decides to have a kid they buy a bigger bike not a bigger car, and it’s common to see parents with two seats for kids on their bikes, haring around on the pavement with the kids (and sometimes a third baby in a body carrier) without a care in the world. That’s a car taken off the road, but it would be impossible in the west because the parent can’t ride on the pavement and anyone riding with children gets scolded.

The consequence of this is a complete transformation in local economies, because people can use their bikes to move around the local area more rapidly and conveniently than if they were walking, without taking up (or requiring) much road space, which means much life happens locally rather than at centralized car-friendly locations. Japanese urban roads are narrow precisely because they are dominated by cycle and foot traffic on local errands. It also means that railway stations far apart can still act as commuter feeders because they have attached bike parks (except mine for some stupid reason) and people can move to and from the station at quite large distances in short times. The standard commuter process in Tokyo is bike+train. You don’t fit 37 million people in this city and have them all using cars.

It also means that everyone is a cyclist which means that car drivers are much more respectful of cyclists. But in general people here are much better at negotiating shared spaces, and this is because they accept that we have rules for a reason. As I said above: less arseholes.

So I guess the point of the OP should be expanded to add one additional thing that drives planning decisions: Arseholery, and breaking laws because you think you, personally, are special.

Which is it – bikes share footpaths with pedestrians, or there are no footpaths?

Both. It makes sense if you know the japanese urban environment; there’s a big gap between the back streets and any sort of throughfare. The former are maybe three metres wide, purely for local access or foot traffic, and you might have to walk a hundred or more metres to get to a road wide enough for cars to pass each other. These have footpaths, but are also full of cars.

[japan had virtually no wheeled traffic pre-meiji; the country was too poor for draught animals.]

Also TM, if you dig up the stats on road deaths in the UK disaggregated by mode, you’ll find that the number of deaths of cyclists hasn’t declined at all since 2000, while pedestrian, cyclist and car deaths have halved. You’ll also find that national statistics don’t match those of the wikipedia report you cite (see here) and cyclist deaths have nearly halved in 10 years. Japan had about 4 times the absolute number of cyclist deaths as the UK in a population that cycles about 100 times more, including the routine practice of parents cycling with their children. Japan’s traffic deaths are also heavily driven by aging.

There are other ways to organize our transport system, and people in the west can’t even conceive of them.

faustusnotes @95

There are other ways to organize our transport system, and people in the west can’t even conceive of them.

That’s why I’m interested, even though it means continuing to derail this thread a bit. You inspired me to Google this article about bike commuting in the Tokyo suburbs: http://www.tokyobybike.com/2014/12/how-suburban-tokyo-promotes-cycling.html
Does this fit with your experience?

If so, it helps explain the disconnect I was feeling. According to the article, the excellent train service from the suburbs to the city centre means no one bikes from suburb to city. Instead, they make relatively short commutes (average 2 km) to the train station, which is usually in the centre of the village and surrounded by shops and stores. So instead of walking a half an hour to the train station they bike 10 or 15 minutes, with the flexibility to make a few side trips on the way home for shopping.

At those short distances, I can see why cruising along the sidewalk at a relatively slow speed is still attractive. It uses the bike as what John Forrester calls a “pedestrian accelerator” — you’re traveling a little faster than actual walking speed, but still slowly enough that you can more-or-less-safely interact with pedestrians.

In my case, my current commute to work in Toronto is relatively short compared to other’s I’ve had, but at 6 km it still takes me 25 minutes by bike, riding on the road. Google Maps tells me it would take and hour and twenty minutes to walk. If I rode my bike on the sidewalks I could probably go a little faster than that, passing pedestrians slowly or speeding up when they were few and far between, but why would I? It would be slower and less safe, and there’s a perfectly good road right there.

Anarcissie

The likelihood of collision rises with difference in speed (according to what I’ve read, and also my experience and intuitions); if you are sharing a path closely with pedestrians (who can move in any direction at any time for any or no reason) and you go even a little bit faster, you’re going to hit one.

When I am a pedestrian myself I sometimes share paths closely with other pedestrians and sometimes go a little bit faster than other pedestrians, and yet don’t collide with them; so it seems to me you have significantly oversimplified.

it seems to me you have significantly oversimplified

It’s obviously not literaly true that you have to cycle at the same speed as them in the sense that you can’t pass anyone (pedestrians don’t all walk at the same speed anyway) but I think it’s roughly true that to be safe and not annoy anyone in a crowded area you’re reduced to something close to walking pace (< 5 m.p.h.)

Also while I don’t know what the demographics of different methods of transport are, an
annual travel card in London costs upwards of £1500. Compared to that running a car could be very economical, especially if you have a family or do private taxi hire to earn money, so the opposition elites/motorists v proles/public transport seems at best over-simplified.

BILLIONAIRE BILL ACKMAN’S ILL-FATED BIKE RIDE: “HIS MIND WROTE A CHECK THAT HIS BODY COULDN’T CASH”

Matt: I see, so Uber is a Greater Fool play, disguised as a monopoly-creation play, disguised as a self-driving car play, disguised as a monopoly-busting/regulation-evading play, disguised as a smart-app/ridesharing play.

I rest my case! Westerners simply can’t conceive of certain ways of doing things, and even when they’re shown a billion Asians able to do it, simply look past it – “it is nonsense”. Come live in Japan and you’ll see how different things can be. Come to Asia – it’s where the future is, not in your crumbling bloated American cities of the past.

faustusnotes@109
I rest my case! Westerners simply can’t conceive of certain ways of doing things, and even when they’re shown a billion Asians able to do it, simply look past it – “it is nonsense”.

In fact, Western traffic planners and cycling advocates have given these issues a lot of thought. I was interested because what you were describing was so outside of my experience — large numbers of bicycles used as primary transportation sharing sidewalks with pedestrians without friction. These two articles confirm a lot of what you say, but with a slightly less rosy view. It turns out there is a lot of conflict with pedestrians. Even worse, the fact that Japanese are afraid to cycle on major roads actually limits the usefulness of their bikes to relatively slow, short journeys.

In many ways, what’s happened in Japan is the same thing that has happened in North America. Cars were allowed to push bicycles off the road. The main difference is that the Japanese continued to use them on the sidewalks, while North Americans pretty much consigned them to the role of toys. A lot of the pushback you’re getting, I think, is from cyclists here who are trying to rehabilitate the bicycle as a useful means of vehicular transportation.

Using a bike as a vehicle means using it at a reasonable speed — a healthy adult can easily cruise along at 20 km an hour without too much effort. If you can travel at that speed a big chunk of the city is open up to you — in my case, I’d be willing to cycle 12 to 15 km to work before I started thinking about other mass transit options, and I’ve done commutes that were 22 km.

But if I’m confined to the sidewalk I can go on average probably half that speed safely, narrowing my range a lot. Yes, you can pass pedestrians at any speed you want, but to do it safely you probably shouldn’t be going over 10 km an hour, and I’d say less. (I do have experience passing pedestrians on shared use paths, and it’s dangerous to go by too quickly. People on foot change course all the time — why shouldn’t they? — and if you’re coming up fast when they do you’ll hit them.)

So, the Japanese have continued to use the bikes despite allowing themselves to be pushed off the road by cars. They use them for short, slow trips, with a certain amount of conflict with pedestrians. That’s a choice they’ve made, and as you point out it has a lot of benefits. But it’s not a model I think Western traffic planners should emulate.

OCS, I mentioned above that many Japanese roads have no footpath and are shared use (since I started commenting here I have really started noticing that all the roads around my home have no footpaths). So no Japanese have not surrendered the roads to cars.

The commute you describe is not ever going to be a viable form of mass transit, because it makes bikes inconvenient. A 10-20km commute in traffic requires special clothes, protective gear, those stupid clips for your pants, a good bike, serious locks and a shower at your destination, especially in a rainy and intensely hot city like Tokyo. It will only ever be the province of people in alrge institutions and aways mostly aggressive young men, since it involves conflict with cars. You can’t do it in a suit or fancy clothes and you can’t do it if you need to be somewhere else (eg a date or party) after work, if you need to drop children off somewhere, etc. It’s a fantasy.

It’s also not a viable system in a mega city. I guess you are used to living in some dinky little European or American city but when you live somewhere like Tokyo a 15km commute is shirt to say the least. If you live in one of the affordable feeder cities in the west, southwest or east you’re likely 20-40 km from your work. Sure lots of people live within bike commute of work (2 of my gaming group of 5 do) but if you have other lifestyle reasons for being elsewhere (eg me wanting to live near my kickboxing gym in one of Japan’s most popular suburbs) then bike commuting is impossible. You don’t move 37 million people this way. But it’s very easy to take pressure off of public parking spaces, have viable mass transit, and develop local amenities, if you assume bikes are a convenience and not a lifestyle choice. I think most of Asia’s mega cities are based on this idea: bikes for local travel, a heavy rail spine, and buses linking stations.

The fact that you can’t conceive of this model doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, and it’s a symptom of what I’ve been repeating here: that the west is making cultural choices that trap us in an environment of aggressive and dangerous car use, heavily centralised and sprawling cities dominated by parking, and an ideology of separating cars and people instead of merging them. There are better ways!

Walker’s claim about “geometry” is largely irrelevant. High-density, transit-oriented urbanism is mostly a relic of the era before the mass affordability of cars, and is mostly limited to the core areas of a handful of old cities like New York and Chicago and San Francisco. In the vast majority of metropolitan areas public transit has only a tiny share of the urban travel market even at rush hour. It would only require a small increase in road traffic to completely absorb all current transit users. Within the next decade or so, most mass transit will be replaced with cheap Uber-style services using self-driving cars.

As for Japan, it’s a densely-populated mountainous country with very little land available for urban development. That’s why its urban areas are so much denser and more transit-oriented than ours. They simply don’t have the land for the kind of low-density, car-oriented urban design that we have.

Faustusnotes 02.01.18 at 11:00 pm @ 113: ‘OCS, I mentioned above that many Japanese roads have no footpath and are shared use…. So no Japanese have … surrendered the roads to cars.’

There you go. The purpose of the sidewalk infrastructure (in places like NYC) is to push non-motor traffic off into the narrow margins of the road because only the cars driven by and for elites and their more important servants count (besides, of course, money-making commerce and working-prole haulage). Suppose, however, we considered the citizens to have equal rights to road space? On this basis, the arrangement I saw in the Indian videos would probably be the result. The most significant factor would be the reduction in the speed and arrogance of motor traffic.

Eh? Footpaths (“sidewalks”) predate motor cars significantly: the wiki suggests eighteenth century. If I were to guess I’d suggest the growth in animal _freight_ transport and the desire not to walk in horseshit was the driver: private passenger vehicles were marginal before the car.

Perhaps this needs to be repeated: the idea that driving a car in London or New York is the prerogative of ‘elites’ is batty.

@Trader Joe, the interview with doesn’t really have anything to say about the residents of (say) Waco, TX. It is about mass transit in large cities, for commuting, and for long-distance travel. And, IIRC, he doesn’t really suggest the need to take cars away from people (maybe he does, I read it more than a week ago now). He’s talking about what kinds of solutions work for mass transit, and which solutions can’t. ‘More cars’ doesn’t work for mass transit in dense urban areas, nor does ‘different cars’; which says nothing about whether it works anywhere else.

@pbrown, 25 million Americans live in cities of one million people or more, of which places there are 10. Not surprisingly, the top two cities by congestion and population are the same, and 6 of the largest 10 cities are on the list of 10 worst congestion spots. If you expand to the list to 25, the correlation between population and traffic congestion approaches 1:1. It’s a real problem, one which won’t be solved by eliminating pubic transportation and replacing it with self-driving Uber cars.

our suggestion that the bike is mostly for “aggressive young men” is outright offensive

Why are London cyclists so white, male and middle-class?

@Layman: US population figures “by city” are grossly misleading for economic purposes because of the fragmented nature of US local governance by international standards. The figures you want are the metro area figures.

121: Our resident class warrior seems obsessed with the idea that bikes and not cars are the real marker of privilege. Of course, in the US or the UK, car ownership as such is not limited to to the elite but it is still true that the kind, brand and price of a car is a marker of class status, and it is still true that even in God’s car country, the poor often cannot afford cars and are reduced to rely on shitty public transit service, and in places where such doesn’t exist, the poor are often forced to drive unsafe cars without insurance, because they can’t afford insurance, which means every police stop could mean economic ruin, job loss, even prison.

pbrown: “That’s why they’re willing to spend so much money to own and operate a car.”

Certainly (most) people like to own cars, but this bit is highly misleading. The vast majority of people living and working in the US have no alternative to owning a car. Most of them couldn’t get to a grocery store without one, much less get to work. The fact that the working poor have to spend money on owning, licensing, insuring, and maintaining a car probably contributes substantially to the impact of their poverty. As someone who once was working poor, I can clearly recall what a nearly-insurmountable disaster a mechanical failure was.

(I’m 57, and retired about 3 years ago. Two years ago we sold our house and cars and moved to a walkable city, where we rent an apartment near the city center and walk everywhere. I’ve probably taken a cab 10 times in 2 years, to and from the airport mostly. I don’t miss the cars at all.)

pbrown 02.02.18 at 6:43 pm @ 126 —
In a dense urban area, one must add time to park one’s vehicle near one’s destination, and then walk to the destination. Also, time to work (or ‘work’) at obtaining the money to pay for the parking must be counted, which is trivial for the very well-off but may be significant for others. The parking problem is paid for in different ways; I’ve seen maps of some cities which showed that about 50% of the land area was devoted to roads, parking lots, service stations, and garages. Sometimes these are free or very low-cost at the point of usage, but are paid for in nuisance (one’s destinations are now further apart) and a loss of community coherence, which has commercial as well as cultural value. Empirically, the fastest way to get around Manhattan and adjoining areas is by bicycle or other minimal vehicle; private automobiles are relatively slow even for those privileged to park wherever they want (the aforesaid politicians, high bureaucrats, cops, etc.) I imagine that is true of other large conurbations not laced and diffused with parking lots.

pbrown: “This certainly isn’t true. Even in the sprawliest metro areas like Houston and Atlanta and Phoenix and Los Angeles, lots of people don’t have cars.”

Only for special definitions of ‘lots of people’.

Percentage of households without cars

Atlanta: 16.4%
Houston: 8.1%
Los Angeles: 12.1%
Phoenix: 9.1%

http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-vehicles-by-city-map.html

I mean, are you making this stuff up, or what?

(I lived in Phoenix off and on for 30 years. Don’t try to bullshit me about Phoenix.)