LogFAQs > #972715970

LinkPizza posted...

That said, if walking areas arent safe because they are close to the road, I havent seen many safe walking areas in my life (compared to the amount of non-safe Ive seen, at least)

Welcome to America.

LinkPizza posted...

It didnt have to do with zoning laws It was on base, where they basically just follow their own laws

Ah, well then that's not overly relevant to city planning. Self-contained microcosms like bases and campuses tend to be designed better (by virtue of having a cohesive design vision instead of just making it up as they go along), and in the case of bases, it's never really going to happen that the government says "we allocated a bit more land than was actually needed for this base, let's develop it into something more functional" because of security concerns and wanting to have some flexibility available if something changes that demands more land.

LinkPizza posted...

They dont really fix the roads here, anyway So, reduced roads maintenance wont get us much Plus, theyll still need to fix the roads. The public transport will still use them, plus most people would still tend to drive cars

Roads still need to be maintained, but if those roads are being used more efficiently than to carry around a bunch of single-occupant cars, you end up paying less per person moved.

LinkPizza posted...

And more space for everything

This, I think, might be the big thing tripping you up. Car-centric infrastructure requires more space to mvoe the same number of people than any other alternative. Period. If building transit infrastructure does entail taking up more space instead of converting existing space (most likely on-street parking), that's an expansion that would end up happening in the not-too-distant future anyway for the sake of trying to move more car traffic (which is only ever a band-aid solution because induced demand means that new lane will fill up pretty quickly and traffic will continue being just as bad).

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/10/how-can-cities-move-more-people-without-wider-streets-hint-not-with-cars/

As outlined there, a lane filled with just cars can generally move somewhere between 600 and 1600 people per hour. You can nearly double that just by throwing frequent buses into the mix (bear in mind that a bus can comfortably carry 50 times more people than most cars have in them, with ~3-4 times the footprint). Make it a dedicated bus lane instead (with appropriate bus saturation), and you can push 4000-8000. Building for transit does not require "more space for everything." Precisely the opposite: Building for private vehicle use is what requires more space, which is why it comes at such a massive infrastructure cost and actively impairs walkability (by making everything further apart), even before considering the question of what has to be done with all those cars that spend an average of 96% of their lifetimes parked.

LinkPizza posted...

And the front-end cost would end up being a ton to change a whole city around to be public transport friendly

Depends how you do it. Tweak zoning laws to allow mixed-use developments of an appropriate density for where they are, put a complete halt on developing new suburbs that don't have enough population/commercial density to pay for the road/transit infrastructure needed to connect them to everything else, and right off the bat you've got a near-zero-cost initiative that will encourage the city to grow sustainably and help to ensure that new transit projects will be used enough to justify the expense.

Beyond that, though, there is indeed a front-end cost, but it's a front-end cost that can be expected to yield a significant return on investment. The alternative is to maintain the status quo and continue hemorrhaging money (quite a bit more than this front-end cost, long-term) trying to tread water and never actually making anything better. Gotta spend money to make money, and in this case, the alternative is spending just as much money and not making anything. There's a pretty clear winner.