It's a dead-simple concept that can be applied to everything: public money should only be used for public services. If the private sector is viable, it shouldn't need public money to prop it up.
Public money should fund public transit. No public money for private transport infrastructure.
Public money should fund public schools. No public subsidies for charter and private schools.
Public money should fund public health care. No public funding should be wasted on propping up a wasteful private healthcare industry. ACA wastes so much money buying insurance for people when we could just build public hospitals and public clinics.
It's not that private industry shouldn't exist. It's just that private industry, conceptually, shouldn't need to be propped up by social funding. But currently it is. And it's a tremendous waste of money. Public money should only fund public programs. So simple.
Shared-use paths work best when they’re low use and low-speed. Ergo why people will walk, bike and drive in the road on a cul de sac but not on a main stroad.
It’s common to have separate sidewalks and bike paths on faster, more commonly used routes, because bikes don’t actually mix all that well with pedestrians. It’s the same reason we don’t make sidewalks wide enough to drive a bus down.
By your logic, public car roads are fine so long as there’s a bus that drives down them. Even if 99% of the people on them are in a privately-owned bike or car.
Fair enough, it was an unthought retort to “bikes are private, cars are private, same thing.”
I’m against building roads for personal vehicles because it is very expensive. Sidewalks and bike paths are cheap to build, cost nothing to maintain (other than SNIC) and last 30+ years.
I’m also not opposed to building roads for the transport of goods and services, that’s why humans have built them for recorded history. I’ve got nothing against personal vehicles using roads built for trucks anyways (the maintenance cost of one truck on a road is equivalent to a lot of cars); so long as the cars don’t impede trucks.
My bigger issue the the building of roads specifically for personal vehicles and the building of free (or under market value) parking alongside roads, increasing their cost.
Also, why wouldn’t build bike paths the same width as a bus road? It lets you use the same SNIC fleet on paths and sidewalks as roads, allows emergency vehicles to pass, and provides easier access to path amenity maintenance.
Don’t you know the famous communist cities of Amsterdam, Tokyo, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Singapore, London, Madrid, New York (where Wall Street has been recently renamed into Stalin Street), Beijing, Chicago, Milan…
I’ve been to Amsterdam before. Can confirm filthy communists. Biking is also commie behavior and it’s getting more popular in EU. Especially in Germany… Very concerning
Suspiciously Tram Shaped General Motors: All of these tram lines wouldn’t have disappeared if people liked them! Clearly people just hate public transport so buy our cars!
It is easier and cheaper to make one larger electric vehicle than 68 smaller ones, and they would damage the road less too. Of course this kind of comparison between two different things is inherently very difficult to do fairly
Ik that ttolleybuses are better than electric cars in carbon footprint, traffic, etc. I’m just proposing that we compare things with the same power source together. It makes more impact to say that an electric trolley is x% better on y metric compared to electric cars, than to say they are x% better than gas cars.
Imagine a situation where you say electric trolleybuses are superior to gas cars for reasons x, y, and z on xcretion or speddit. Then some elon musk bootlicker or big oil bootlicker replies to you saying “what about electric cars” or “what about gas buses”? You craft a meticulous reply about why gas buses are better than electric cars. But it’s too late. Thousands of lurkers saw the bootlicker’s reply to you but will never see your rebuttal. Many of them are now more against public transportation.
Nope, a car electric or not creates multiple issues like urbanism, pollution (i.e: noise, visual, microplastics), hotspots, hostiles environment like parking lots, increase deaths rates, consequences on flooding, etc.
A lot of them can be solved with public transportation.
How are buses still not better? The ratio of individual people being moved to total mass being moved is better. The maintenance and insurance fees are collective. The driver of the bus is a trained professional vs some rando commuter.
Or maybe tell bosses that if your job can be done remotely it should be done remotely. Then there's more room on the bus for people who need to be in meatspace to do their jobs.
As much as I enjoy wanton violence for the ruling elite, a good start would be threatening the politicians with this unless they implement laws that make it unprofitable to force people into offices.
It should be codified that if a job can be performed remotely, it ought be, with the voluntary option to have people go to offices and such.
I wish I didn’t need hands for my job, 90% of it is brain work with a tinker here and there. I see so many videos of robotic hands being used for things and can’t wait for the day I can just send one of these out to a site equipped with some tools and just remotely tap into the video stream. It’s coming and I don’t think it will be too long. Hell, I’m just a layman and if you gave me a dedicated year and some funding I could get something viable up to par so I’m sure it’s possible, guess it just won’t profit anyone enough to sell it yet.
We used to have trolleybuses when I was a kid in the 70’s, they were so insanely much more nice to ride than a diesel. No bad smell, and they were smooth and quiet.
I guess we will get back to something similar soon, but with batteries.
Yes in some aspects, it’s like we are moving backwards. Funny since the talk about environment is more serious now than back then, still we often use unnecessarily polluting solutions, where the older “too expensive” solutions were viable when we had way less money as a country than we have now?
One would have thought the oil crisis had made us keep the trolley busses?
Until in 5-10 years when the batteries are fucked.
That’s the beautiful thing about trolley buses - they do not need a (substantial) battery. They are basically trains on wheels.
There are some places where battery powered buses make sense - for example, where I live, lucerne Switzerland, there is one bus line that just goes up and down a rather steep hill. By using recuperative braking, the battery powered bus is super efficient. For other, normal ‘high traffic’ lines, trolley makes so much more sense
Trolleys don’t really make any sense. I come from Riga, it has a lot of trolleys and the city is designed around trolleys and trams. And yet modern trolleys have bloody diesel engines, because being permanently hooked to the wire makes no sense at all. It’s much better to have electric buses with a few overhead wires here and there to fast charge on the go.
Lucerne has a few trolley lines. They are ONLY trolley buses. The long, 3 Segment ones. Then, some 1 Segment hybrid buses that have pantagraphs. At the end of those lines, there is a longer stop where the trolley lines end, the pantagraph gets pulled down and the bus trucks along the last few stations with diesel.
Then theres just normal hybrid buses for more rural lines, and a battery operated bus that goes up and down a hill.
There’s a solution for every line - you just need the proper infrastructure. The reason that we have this great pantagraph-compatible infrastructure is that, while there are a lot of trains in Switzerland, there is no metro. So in lucerne, the trolley buses work almost as a metro, with the main lines having buses every 7 minutes.
We talk about fuel economy in miles per gallon, but fuel prices are shown per litre. And this is from 1980 - everything gets a bit weirder measurement-wise the further back you go.
Nah, driving distance is generally miles and speed is mph too. I think sometimes distances under a mile can be in metres (like signs that say, for example, no hard shoulder for 200m).
If you read the Highway Code, you’ll learn that it’s all over the place. Long distances on signs are in miles. But distance markers are placed in metres. But emergency phones are placed every mile. And distance markers, which are placed in metres and indicate distances in meters can also have a distance to the next emergency phone in fucking yards. One sign, two numbers, no letters, two systems. FUCKING HELL!!!
The only issue I have with this is there’s a British gallon (that is DIFFERENT from the American gallon) that is used to measure milk. :D. That was the only place I saw gallon being used.
Still british units :D. In 1826 Britain decided to redefine gallon to mean “10 pounds of water”. The earlier standard was 231 cublic inches (potentially meant to be 8 pounds of water). The US never adopted the new gallon.
Actually, as much as I dislike imperial units, when it comes to body temperature I do think in Fahrenheit. Mostly because that’s how my mum would tell if we were too sick to go to school. 99 - just a little ill, but you can have the day off. 100 - pretty ill, probably at least 3 days off. 101+ - super mega ill, off all week.
They pretty much do have to suck. They arrive infrequently, stop frequently, accelerate like an overloaded lorry, and are only remotely feasible if your start and end points are on the same route. Switching buses is a huge time penalty. They only approach usability in urban hellscapes that are so densely populated, it makes my skin crawl.
Yet they keep putting them in small cities and towns where they take 3x as long to get anywhere as driving because of indirect routing, while causing traffic congestion because of frequent stops and low performance. Seriously, fuck buses.
None of this is inherent to buses. Poorly planned and managed bus routes may have some of these features. And in the US this may be common but there are many many bus routes that do not resemble this at all.
Also the idea that buses make traffic worse than cars is absurd. Buses are a solution to traffic, not a cause of it.
I swear this is a no-true-Scotsman argument: “you don’t hate buses/apartments/transit, you just have never lived anywhere that has the good stuff”.
I’ve lived many places and traveled plenty, and I’m convinced there’s no good stuff. To have transit that works, you need density that’s oppressive. I did it in NYC, which is a best-case scenario for transit facilitated by high density. NYC has transit that runs frequently, and 24/7/365. Buses, subway, trains, and even ferries. It’s so dense most people don’t own a car (I certainly didn’t). Everyone lives in apartments. Walking and biking is the norm. Even pizza delivery is done by bike instead of car. Catching an Uber was still much faster for many point-to-point trips, because transit necessarily can’t go direct from everywhere, to everywhere.
Now that I’m back in suburbia, a trip to the grocery store takes 1/4 as long by car (same distance). I don’t have to spend a ton of time waiting to catch a connecting train or bus that I missed by 30 seconds. I don’t have to ride though stop after stop, packed in with other people. I can just go direct from origin to destination in quiet comfort, without the headaches
I’m not claiming your bad bus experiences aren’t true buses, so that phallacy doesn’t apply in any way I can tell. You described what you said were universal features of bus routes. I pointed out that those are not at all universal. And indeed, you now admit that you yourself have used buses that run frequently, which undermines your original argument, even if they had other flaws in your view.
I’ve never lived in New York but I think there’s still lots of room for improvement even there. But regardless, I’ve used transit that was better and faster than driving many times. So that remains my point, even if you haven’t experienced that.
It sounds like you just don’t like cities or being around too many other people. Which is fine for you but tons of people do or at least it does not bother them. And for those people, buses, when run properly (clean, on time, frequent, with dedicated lanes so they don’t get stuck in traffic, and directly connecting places people need to go) are an excellent way to get around. I’ve even used some buses in rural areas that beat out car travel, though that’s more rare obviously. So yes, it can be done well. Maybe not to your standards of zero wait time ever and zero tolerance for being around other people but most people aren’t that picky.
Me: but it says here that a Scotsman committed the crime
You: No true Scotsman would commit such a crime…
Compare:
You: buses are great!
Me: I take buses and they suck!
You: good buses are great, you just aren’t taking the good ones…
It’s exactly the same. You get to decide who is a true Scotsman for the purpose of argument, and what constitutes a good bus service. You can simply declare that the bus service isn’t a good one and therefore doesn’t reflect badly on bus services, just as you can decide the criminal wasn’t a true Scotsman, and therefore you’re always right.
you now admit that you yourself have used buses that run frequently, which undermines your original argument, even if they had other flaws in your view
I have used buses which run frequently for buses, but which are still too infrequent and thus add lots of unnecessary time.
I think NYC is an excellent representative of transit done well. It may not be world-best, but there aren’t many places that are as dense or more dense and that creates a best case scenario for running at all hours and with maximum frequency. Also, most people don’t own cars and don’t drive there. There are few places with so many built-in advantages for transit as NYC.
It sounds like you just don’t like cities or being around too many other people.
It applies to generalized statements, which I never made. You even had to falsely paraphrase my statement to make it more applicable (that phallacy is called a straw man by the way). But I never said all buses are great. In fact I think you’re right that most buses in the US are terrible. I’m just saying that they don’t have to. It’s a totally different type of claim. If anything your argument is more logically similar because you are making a universal claim that buses are always bad.
Part of the issue is that we probably don’t have a common definition of a good or bad mode of transit. I would say cars are a terrible way to get around in most urban areas, but you obviously don’t agree because we have different definitions of what makes something a good or bad way to get around.
But I will maintain that bus systems, when properly managed and implemented would be preferable over driving for that majority of people in urban areas, and even in some rural or small towns too.
I read the link I posted, which is the same one you linked. I think some of the way you presented your argument suggests to me that you’re making a distinction between well-executed and poorly-executed transit, and saying that because I find transit/buses to be inefficient and an unbearable mode of travel, I must be using a poorly-executed system. That sounds a lot to me like no-true-scotsman, because you seem to be judging whether I’m experiencing the “real thing” based on whether I thought it was efficient or not. Clearly I must be experiencing a bad version of it if it was inefficient or otherwise not to my liking - or at least that’s what you seem to have implied.
I agree that we probably don’t have a common definition of good or bad transit.
I also think you should read up on what a phallus is.
That one bus company in the nearby city that absolutely refuses to replace their miserable old buses 🥴🤡 while the others run modern air conditioned hybrids, and some fully electric
Multiple bus companies can be a good thing if done well. The busses in Taiwan are also privatized and the service is quite good. In Japan even the metro and rail networks compete in a private market.
When you privatize a company and make it a monopoly though you get the worst of both worlds.
Fair enough. I start to get grumpy at 24 but I grew up in the desert SW USA but have acclimated to our temperate PacNW weather. I’d say similar to Manchester and Liverpool but summers definitely get hotter.
Lmao exactly. I’m all for better public transportation but these comments seem like they’re from kids who don’t have people depending on them for a roof and food.
Let me lose my job so I can go yell into the void for better bus routes
If you don’t have a bus route, no one is here telling you to hitch hike or cycle in heat stroke weather for long commute or not go to work. Can you please point out where I or anyone here said so?
But “what can I do” was the question.
You can recognize the benefits of a good urban infrastructure and public transportation, highlight the lacking infrastructure in your areas, and support the goals of building that up by contacting your local officials or participating with groups who do organize.
This “child” lives within walking distance of his work office (for the few times I even have to to in) and on a bus route that can get me there as well (a bus system that is highly lacking in its own ways, to which I make note of to my local council).
I guess I should act like an “adult” and go “oh your work isn’t near a bus route. What can I do? Guess nothing.”
That is how we solve problems.
This post isn’t attacking you for your area’s lack of infrastructure.
Holy shit can you imagine? If we’d take all the investments that are done on a yearly basis for cars and we stuff that in trains, busses and bikes and their infrastructure?
We’d get walkable cities, cities would get more tax income, we’d all get healthier, we’d have tonnes of money left for parks… and we’d actually for once really do something to stoo climate change to boot
Ahhh to dream…it’s so nice. The world could be so pretty if people just weren’t such dumb egocentric assholes.
The correct answer actually should -and could- be 0 gallons if they simply cycle to work. Granted, that requires them to have the right infrastructure available, but if (once) that existed, the vast majority of the work force could cycle to work happily. Most people don’t live 20 miles or more from where they work
It could also be 0 gallons if the busses are electrified, or if the rail system is expanded, or if we stop pushing office workers to commute every day.
I’m just sayjt that we need to change the way we live. Like you said, people should not be required to work in offices anymore. If they physically need to be at locations, let them walk for short distances, cycle for medium distances and use public transportation for large distances.
Most cities in the world have been redesigned over the past 80 years for cars. It’s insane and it left most cities awful places to live in. Almost all Dutch cities have been redesigned for people. So people walk and cycle because they can, and the cities look and feel amazing and beautiful.
I was being facetious; ambulance fuel use is a silly comparison :)
Listening to all y’all winter cyclists I lament that I live in a city where the bike lanes are where the city piles up the snow it plows off the car lanes on the streets. RIP me. It gives me hope and happiness to know that there are cities that don’t do this!
To be fair 1 person using car is not 450 people that could use a car. To be fair at most 20% of people have a car in heavily car-centric cities. In good cities it hangs in single-digit.
fuckcars
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