Hmmm... sounds like this was written by somebody who's never tried to find parking in a big city. Sure, I can get from Westchester County to Manhattan a lot faster in a car than on the commuter rail most of the time (forget that at rush hour, though), but the extra time of parking pretty much reduces that gain to near zero or less.
But maybe we're talking about longer trips, say between cities. I travel between Boston and NYC very often. Depending on circumstances I take the train or drive. On good days, driving is faster, but on all days, it's much more stressful. On bad days, driving can be a nightmare of sitting in traffic jams at odd parts of the trip, usually due to road construction or an accident, but often because of just too much traffic. The train is reliable and easy. I almost always bring my computer and get some work done, but around me people are reading, watching movies, eating a meal, having a drink. Unless I've got a particular reason to drive like carrying a bunch of stuff, or needing to go to some out of the way place, I'll take the train any day.
Yes, I know this is cherry picking places where train service is good and the roads suck, but my argument is that if the train service were better in many other places it wouldn't be a bad thing.
Cities should charge a lot more for almost all parking. Free parking in a city of any density makes little sense. Charging an appropriate fee would do a lot to reduce parking congestion. Plow the revenue right back into improving the area where it is collected.
Cities shouldnt provide parking at all. Even street parking. Turn the ownership of the parking lane to the adjacent landowner and get out of the business. All parking should be private. And it will be priced appropriately (some businesses would provide free parking, others wouldnt and rely on parking lots/structures/etc).
That is why I mentioned transferring ownership to the properties. It might seem like a gift, but the city gets out of having to maintain that lane going forward, so in most cases its a win for the city.
You could argue that it would be bad because states (and cities) have fixed budgets for transit. 100 million spent extending the Blue Line or something like that (for an inferior product) is 100 million that could have been spent making traffic less awful, parking less awful, etc.
This could easily be a situation where compromising (on budgets) means that everybody loses, and if either side actually won, the net positive might be greater than the compromise position.
I realize there are parts of the country in which that is a viable alternative, but for cities like Boston, NYC and many other cities in the U.S. and world there's only so much space to build more roads or traffic infrastructure. I'm not sure there's any amount of money that could make the traffic and parking more than marginally less awful for those cities.
I’m a bit skeptical of your intuition that you’d get comparable benefit dollar for dollar on projects aimed at improving traffic and parking. Though I’m sure it depends greatly on a lot of location specifics.
Also there’s an argument that public transit projects can positively impact road traffic if improvements are sufficient to get some people to switch a lot of their previous car commuting to transit commuting.
I doubt it. Manhattan is one of the only places in the world dense enough for trains to plausibly be more efficient than cars, and even there, if you're not traveling more than 30-some blocks it's faster to walk, and it's probably faster and cheaper to cycle.
Given the fixed time costs of taking the train (something improving train service can't improve much), even if you dramatically improved train speed relative to cars, it would still probably only be faster on average for long commutes.
Bryan mentioned peakload pricing for travel and parking as a way to deal with this problem. I agree with him. I'd just like to suggest that government should ease regulation / red tape concerning opening up / setting up new private parking spaces and private garages. Demand is obviously high, yet supply of such parkings stay low. It doesn't make sense in a free market.
"Once your kids reach their tweens or teens, you don’t have to chauffer them anymore."
My kid is 4 and I don't have to chauffeur her anywhere because the streets are free from cars and everything she needs is reachable on foot or her scooter.
This makes sense is low population density cities, but not high population density cites.
Cars use far more land than any other method of transpiration. even when measured properly, by using land use per speed (square feet used) / (miles per hour). Roads have a far lower throughput than an equivalently sized sidewalk, bike lane, bus lane, or train.
In densely populated cities, there is simply not enough land available for most people to get around via car.
Framed more economically, densely populated cities in rich countries have very high land values. A bus lane that has 10 times the throughput of a car lane has the same total land cost, but 1/10 the land cost per person. And if land values are high enough most people would rather take the slower bus than pay more for the faster car lane.
The road tolls you propose are basically a market way to price in the high land value, and if land values are high enough, most people would rather take the slower bus/train/sidewalk/bike lane.
You should visit most if the big cities and rolling suburbia and urban sprawl in the southwest US. There IS space for cars unless city planners deliberately decide to zone and structure everything to prevent car traffic. Property values are still high and part of the value is in parking space for commercial and residential. There is much higher throughput for cars especially when you factor in freeways/highways, and the time difference is orders of magnitude greater when traveling outside of peak traffic hours. The only exception is San Francisco proper, but putting aside it's hellish downfall, is only because of it being confined to a peninsula. Just outside it in Santa Clara county and San Jose county everything is much more expansive, and then much more so to the central valley and southern parts.
Bryan, your lack of American history knowledge is really shining through here. Car dominance happened because of an incredibly long series of government decisions and subsidies, not consumer preference.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with cars, but America spent 90 years subsidizing cars at the expense of every other mode of transportation.
Plus the government implemented policies like parking minimums and bulldozed neighborhoods to pave urban freeways (which don’t actually alleviate traffic congestion).
Wait, are you saying busses, light rail, and trains haven't been subsidized in the last 90 years? Wow, I want to live where you live. Around here, money losing light rail systems get billion dollar subsidies all the time. California is busy spending $40 billion on a high speed rail to nowhere.
You might argue we could have subsidized mass transit more had we not spent on roads but you can't say we starved them.
What do you mean when you say "clearly"? Is this statement not heavily disputed by a number of people, and is it not heavily dependent on your personal preferences?
I think it's difficult to say which is cause and effect. No doubt governments subsidized roads. To be fair, governments have subsidized every other form of transportation ever created. BC probably got a subsidy making his stone wheels.
On the other hand, I'm sure there was substantial pressure for those subsidies _because_ people saw driving as being preferable to mass transit. Politicians don't exist entirely in a donor-driven world, they eventually need votes.
It’s quite easy to say which is cause and effect if you know 20th century American history. We had a long series of policies that dismantled transit while making cars the only option for people, thereby forcing car-dependency on the vast majority of Americans. Parking minimums and oil subsidies were just icing on the cake. But obviously you don’t know what those are.
This argument works both ways though, right? If a hypothetical government built fantastic railways and crap roads then most people would use trains to get about, but that wouldn't reflect true consumer preferences either.
How about when countries build both, but force consumers to pay the cost of their behaviour with road tolls? Singapore is famous for its tolled roads and resultingly low traffic. If you look at their modal share statistics they have some of the lowest car use in the world at only about 29% of trips.
Singapore sets a hard cap on vehicles which stopped increasing in 2017. The permit to be allowed to drive a vehicle at all in Singapore is sold in monthly auctions, with the latest prices ranging 82,000 to $122,110 SGP (so about 60-90k USD) for a ten-year permission. That's on top of the toll roads.
With a hard cap it's not hard to get car use down as low as you want, since there's no longer any mechanism allowing for usage to exceed the cap.
Drew is right, if it wasn't for government subsidies, everyone would love being stuck in a tiny, enclosed space with drug addicts and mentally ill vagrants.
In NYC, one of the few places where there's actually an argument for trains, fares cover I think <1/3 of costs are covered by fares. In most cities, the vast majority of the cost of mass transit is taxpayer-subsidized. Cars are nowhere near as subsidized as trains.
I can't think of a case in the US where mass transit is faster than driving. I could have used light rail to my last job if I wanted to turn a one hour commute to two hours. Although, my wife used to take light rail to her job: we had a station near our house and across the street from her office. I don't know if that saved time but it definitely was cheaper and less aggravating for her.
The big thing I think Bryan and others have missed is that when taking a bus, light rail, or train you can get something productive (read, nap, email) done. The number of productive ways to use time while driving is limited to mostly listening to podcasts and making phone calls.
I just thought of another facet: safety. My wife did not feel especially safe on light rail. I think she preferred the risk of a car accident over getting accosted in the transit parking lot.
Don’t you have parking lots whenever you use cars? If it’s the parking lot that’s the issue, then maybe you should prefer the mode that doesn’t require you to enter a parking lot!
But more seriously, bikes beat cars for travel up to a few miles in a city, even though transit very rarely does.
Not everywhere has lots of parking lots. Every time I travel to SF that's one of the questions: where will we park.
However, most of the time I'd prefer dealing with parking rather than doubling the time it takes to get somewhere, if it's even possible. Much as advocates don't like to admit it, there are many, many things you can't do in a reasonable amount of time with mass transit in the US.
Even places like San Francisco have a lot of parking! And as long as you're traveling along the MUNI or BART lines, transit doesn't usually double your travel time compared to driving. (It would if they implemented sufficient congestion charge to keep cars moving quickly, but that only works by getting most people to switch away from driving because of the dollar cost.)
And that's one of the biggest reason I'm looking forward to them. The second being that I'd rather call a robocab than have a car parked in my garage.
Sadly, I think it's going to be a lot longer before automated cars are mainstream. Ten years after that the teens will marvel that anyone ever drove by manually.
How good is your non-American geography, though. I doubt you know many random villages outside major conurbations in Germany. If availability bias skews your sample towards intercity routes then of course that is going to favour trains.
You don't have any transfers then. I used to live in Boeblingen, a suburb outside Stuttgart. Was a 45 minute walk to the S-Bahn and 15 minute walk to the bus station which didn't run 24x7 and only stopped by once an hour. A round trip to the nearest grocery store with mass transit was about three hours door to door not even counted the schedule delays of not being able to leave right now; whereas it's one hour with my car. Going to McDonald's for a quick bite likewise as time consuming.
Mass transit works when you don't like choice s or variety and are good with whatever kebab stand and market is next to your house.
I lived in Jefferson County in the Blue Ridge mountains for a while. Nearest neighbor was half a mile a way. Nearest town probably 30 miles. And you know what I did? I drove a car.
Cars are extremely useful in many settings. Pretending that's all settings and that it should be the default is silly, especially when you handwave government subsidies away. And that's what caused me to comment so much on this article.
I’d prefer a fixed cost of 15 minutes per journey (which is a gross over-estimate) than a fixed cost of $10000 a year to drive everywhere for everything.
The costs of car dependence even exceed this figure when you factor in obesity, injuries and death, pollution, making cities ugly, noise pollution, aggravation from driving, wasted space etc. Creating a great city and being car dependent are mutually exclusive.
Just to add, I really hope you don’t put this in your book. We should be turning parking garages into high rises, not encouraging more car dependence. Additionally, if building more makes property cheaper, then mass transit makes transportation cheaper.
Not to be too conspiratorial, but Cato is clearly pro car-dependence (probably due to the Kochs) the fact that the car in the thumbnail says Cato on it suggests that they’ve been rubbing off. Or it’s possibly a cry for help from Bryan saying that he has been forced against his will to spread these awful ideas. Either way hopefully these ideas never make it to the book.
"Give us well-functioning electronic pricing - and the best argument against cars goes down the drain."
The best argument against cars is that that they're a nightmare to live around. They're loud and dirty and dangerous when there are people trying to, you know, live -work, play, be- nearby. They're delightfully useful between cities. They're terrible in cities.
You were just in Europe, I don't even know how you could post something like this right now.
Are there good estimates of how much time is consumed looking for parking, in order to add that on to the driving rime estimates and get a full comparison with public transit?
I expect that the time added is modest, though not zero; I also suspect that parking has an aggravation factor disproportionate to its actual time cost in most people's minds (i.e., 5 minutes spent looking for parking is seen as a bigger negative than a 5 minute delay riding public transit).
Now, if they ever figure out self-driving cars to the extent that your car can drop you perfectly at the destination front door, and then go park itself, that would be great.
1) When driving a car, you have to be actively driving and focusing your energy and attention. Some people dislike driving generally, and almost everyone dislikes driving in heavy traffic, for reasons that go beyond the time it takes.
2) Because of the above, it is difficult to do other productive work while driving a car -- though sometimes listening to a podcast or audiobook could be productive, and some people do have substantive phone conversations while driving (risky). Laptop work is more possible on public transit, though see below...
3) Safety is a significant factor, which can cut in different directions. Driving a car is not risk-free. Meanwhile, different areas see wildly different amounts of crime committed on public transit (and of course, if you're going to pull out your laptop and work, you risk someone just swiping it and running at a stop, even if the risk of violent crime is low.)
Agree that Uber can be a great solution for occasional trips. It's just too expensive for many people to be a standard commuting method (10 trips/week plus any extra errands). Rates will vary, but at $20/trip, that's $200/week, or $10,000/year, just for commuting.
If someone had a hybrid schedule (say, only needed to go into the office twice a week) or was entirely work from home, then foregoing a car in favor of Ubering would make a lot of sense.
You're not taking into account the time it takes to walk to your car. If you have an attached garage, then it's basically nothing. But what if you live in a city? Then you have to either park on the street, which has its costs, or pay to park in a garage. Regardless, you need to incorporate the cost.
This text tries to pretend that making a city more or less car-dependent isn't a political decision. It also ignores the fact that traffic can and does seriosuly slow down cars in many US cities (LA, anyone?). Having a healthy balance between public transit and car roads will take the load off of both modes of transport. Buses won't get stuck in traffic jams as much, and neither will private cars. Plus, anyone who can't afford a car or simply prefers using trains will then also have that option.
Interesting piece. I lived for 7 years in Beijing and 8 in Hong Kong. Despite huge investment in public transport infrastructure, Beijing was still a full on travel by car city - resulting in horrific traffic jams, terrible pollution and a situation where it was quicker to cycle. This was true at almost all time of the day from 7AM to 11PM and all year bar the few days around Chinese New Year when it was a joy to drive around and get everywhere in minutes. The public transport is extensive but the time getting to and from bus stops and train stations was a real pain. Hong Kong has probably the best public transport in the world and driving (and parking) is prohibitively expensive for the majority of the population. Most daily commutes and journeys were fast and comfortable. I think Hong Kong is the best I’ve seen City transport work- along with perhaps Tokyo, Taipei and Singapore.
Faster could be one of several factors in "easier and more convenient," but it's far from the only one.
When I lived at the edge of St. Louis, a car was easier and more convenient for some destinations, and far harder and less convenient for others. If the destination was downtown, the train would get me there faster than my car, even including the walk to the nearest station -- and once I GOT downtown, there was usually a station within a short walk of any likely destination ... but there might not be an available parking space, and if there was it might cost twice as much as as the train fare did, if not more.
"What about using trains to beat traffic jams and avoid parking problems? Yes, this often works in the most congested cities during the most congested times."
The comments here show a divide between city dwellers and suburban dwellers. There is no conceivable way busses and trains would be faster in your average American suburb.
If you want to live in a city and rely on public transportation, have at it; I’ll do nothing to try to take away that choice.
But don’t try to force public transportation on suburban dwellers.
Suburbanites are always forcing car dominance on the inner city though. Almost every major city in North America has had its inner city completely decimated by highways and parking lots, the result of public policy decisions, for the convenience of suburban commuters.
The highway situation wasn't done for the convenience of suburban dwellers. The original plans for the interstate highway system didn't have the interstates going thru towns, but tangent.
Somewhere it got changed. I am willing to bet on racism over suburban convenience as the deciding factor.
Sure, though it's not just the highways, there are hundreds of policies across North America that nudge people towards car usage, from parking minimums to car manufacturer subsidies to single-family detached house zoning, single-use zoning, setbacks, legal frameworks that normalize road deaths and shield drivers from liability, it goes on and on.
Actually suburbs are dependent on city centers for having their infrastructure subsidized. Suburbs cant fiscally support themselves because they require so much infrastructure per capita. Do a little reading at strong towns to get a basic education on it.
Meh I live in New York City and I try to avoid the subway as much as possible. I simply don't enjoy being around drug addicts and vagrants. Urbanists can cope and seethe as much as they want about it.
And despite being probably the best-funded public transportation system in the world, you get to regularly enjoy being stuck in a train that decided to stop between stations and hang out for 20 min, put up with all the spontaneous route changes, etc; buses randomly show up and leave 10 minutes early. IMO urbanists should focus on making the public transit system not be a total disaster first, before, not after, they go on their crusade against cars.
Hmmm... sounds like this was written by somebody who's never tried to find parking in a big city. Sure, I can get from Westchester County to Manhattan a lot faster in a car than on the commuter rail most of the time (forget that at rush hour, though), but the extra time of parking pretty much reduces that gain to near zero or less.
But maybe we're talking about longer trips, say between cities. I travel between Boston and NYC very often. Depending on circumstances I take the train or drive. On good days, driving is faster, but on all days, it's much more stressful. On bad days, driving can be a nightmare of sitting in traffic jams at odd parts of the trip, usually due to road construction or an accident, but often because of just too much traffic. The train is reliable and easy. I almost always bring my computer and get some work done, but around me people are reading, watching movies, eating a meal, having a drink. Unless I've got a particular reason to drive like carrying a bunch of stuff, or needing to go to some out of the way place, I'll take the train any day.
Yes, I know this is cherry picking places where train service is good and the roads suck, but my argument is that if the train service were better in many other places it wouldn't be a bad thing.
Cities should charge a lot more for almost all parking. Free parking in a city of any density makes little sense. Charging an appropriate fee would do a lot to reduce parking congestion. Plow the revenue right back into improving the area where it is collected.
Cities shouldnt provide parking at all. Even street parking. Turn the ownership of the parking lane to the adjacent landowner and get out of the business. All parking should be private. And it will be priced appropriately (some businesses would provide free parking, others wouldnt and rely on parking lots/structures/etc).
One downside to this is that it will likely lead to a few competing parking payment systems which will be very annoying for the consumers.
Not to mention that the landowners generally don’t own the road next to their house, so why should they get the rightful revenue of the city?
That is why I mentioned transferring ownership to the properties. It might seem like a gift, but the city gets out of having to maintain that lane going forward, so in most cases its a win for the city.
You could argue that it would be bad because states (and cities) have fixed budgets for transit. 100 million spent extending the Blue Line or something like that (for an inferior product) is 100 million that could have been spent making traffic less awful, parking less awful, etc.
This could easily be a situation where compromising (on budgets) means that everybody loses, and if either side actually won, the net positive might be greater than the compromise position.
I realize there are parts of the country in which that is a viable alternative, but for cities like Boston, NYC and many other cities in the U.S. and world there's only so much space to build more roads or traffic infrastructure. I'm not sure there's any amount of money that could make the traffic and parking more than marginally less awful for those cities.
I’m a bit skeptical of your intuition that you’d get comparable benefit dollar for dollar on projects aimed at improving traffic and parking. Though I’m sure it depends greatly on a lot of location specifics.
Also there’s an argument that public transit projects can positively impact road traffic if improvements are sufficient to get some people to switch a lot of their previous car commuting to transit commuting.
I live in Manhattan and finding parking is super easy if you pay for a garage.
I'd imagine it would be. But, how often do you drive to another point in Manhattan for a short visit and how hard is parking then?
I doubt it. Manhattan is one of the only places in the world dense enough for trains to plausibly be more efficient than cars, and even there, if you're not traveling more than 30-some blocks it's faster to walk, and it's probably faster and cheaper to cycle.
Given the fixed time costs of taking the train (something improving train service can't improve much), even if you dramatically improved train speed relative to cars, it would still probably only be faster on average for long commutes.
Bryan mentioned peakload pricing for travel and parking as a way to deal with this problem. I agree with him. I'd just like to suggest that government should ease regulation / red tape concerning opening up / setting up new private parking spaces and private garages. Demand is obviously high, yet supply of such parkings stay low. It doesn't make sense in a free market.
I don't think there's much red tape for private parking. The united states has several times more parking spaces than people.
"Once your kids reach their tweens or teens, you don’t have to chauffer them anymore."
My kid is 4 and I don't have to chauffeur her anywhere because the streets are free from cars and everything she needs is reachable on foot or her scooter.
I will stop commenting now.
Lots of coping and seething.
Where do you live?
"When you drive, (a) you get in your car and go straight to your final destination. There is no (b)."
TIL Bryan Caplan abandons his car in the middle of the street whenever he gets close enough to the destination.
All the people who circle the block looking for free parking are suckers!
Caplan obviously doesn't support free parking.
Because he - being a professor of economics - understands fully well that there ain't such thing as free parking.
I support Free Parking as long as there's a minimum of $50 in the pot + all the taxes collected! 😛
You probably aren't a fan of auctions then
He directly addresses this by talking about pricing parking.
This makes sense is low population density cities, but not high population density cites.
Cars use far more land than any other method of transpiration. even when measured properly, by using land use per speed (square feet used) / (miles per hour). Roads have a far lower throughput than an equivalently sized sidewalk, bike lane, bus lane, or train.
In densely populated cities, there is simply not enough land available for most people to get around via car.
Framed more economically, densely populated cities in rich countries have very high land values. A bus lane that has 10 times the throughput of a car lane has the same total land cost, but 1/10 the land cost per person. And if land values are high enough most people would rather take the slower bus than pay more for the faster car lane.
The road tolls you propose are basically a market way to price in the high land value, and if land values are high enough, most people would rather take the slower bus/train/sidewalk/bike lane.
You should visit most if the big cities and rolling suburbia and urban sprawl in the southwest US. There IS space for cars unless city planners deliberately decide to zone and structure everything to prevent car traffic. Property values are still high and part of the value is in parking space for commercial and residential. There is much higher throughput for cars especially when you factor in freeways/highways, and the time difference is orders of magnitude greater when traveling outside of peak traffic hours. The only exception is San Francisco proper, but putting aside it's hellish downfall, is only because of it being confined to a peninsula. Just outside it in Santa Clara county and San Jose county everything is much more expansive, and then much more so to the central valley and southern parts.
Bryan, your lack of American history knowledge is really shining through here. Car dominance happened because of an incredibly long series of government decisions and subsidies, not consumer preference.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with cars, but America spent 90 years subsidizing cars at the expense of every other mode of transportation.
Plus the government implemented policies like parking minimums and bulldozed neighborhoods to pave urban freeways (which don’t actually alleviate traffic congestion).
Wait, are you saying busses, light rail, and trains haven't been subsidized in the last 90 years? Wow, I want to live where you live. Around here, money losing light rail systems get billion dollar subsidies all the time. California is busy spending $40 billion on a high speed rail to nowhere.
You might argue we could have subsidized mass transit more had we not spent on roads but you can't say we starved them.
>bulldozed neighborhoods to pave urban freeways (which don’t actually alleviate traffic congestion).
Why not?
How so?
What do you mean when you say "clearly"? Is this statement not heavily disputed by a number of people, and is it not heavily dependent on your personal preferences?
I think it's difficult to say which is cause and effect. No doubt governments subsidized roads. To be fair, governments have subsidized every other form of transportation ever created. BC probably got a subsidy making his stone wheels.
On the other hand, I'm sure there was substantial pressure for those subsidies _because_ people saw driving as being preferable to mass transit. Politicians don't exist entirely in a donor-driven world, they eventually need votes.
It’s quite easy to say which is cause and effect if you know 20th century American history. We had a long series of policies that dismantled transit while making cars the only option for people, thereby forcing car-dependency on the vast majority of Americans. Parking minimums and oil subsidies were just icing on the cake. But obviously you don’t know what those are.
You are legitimately one of the dumbest people I’ve ever seen online
This argument works both ways though, right? If a hypothetical government built fantastic railways and crap roads then most people would use trains to get about, but that wouldn't reflect true consumer preferences either.
How about when countries build both, but force consumers to pay the cost of their behaviour with road tolls? Singapore is famous for its tolled roads and resultingly low traffic. If you look at their modal share statistics they have some of the lowest car use in the world at only about 29% of trips.
Singapore sets a hard cap on vehicles which stopped increasing in 2017. The permit to be allowed to drive a vehicle at all in Singapore is sold in monthly auctions, with the latest prices ranging 82,000 to $122,110 SGP (so about 60-90k USD) for a ten-year permission. That's on top of the toll roads.
With a hard cap it's not hard to get car use down as low as you want, since there's no longer any mechanism allowing for usage to exceed the cap.
How so? Buses use the same "subsidized" roads as cars, in addition to receiving direct subsidies in most cities.
Drew is right, if it wasn't for government subsidies, everyone would love being stuck in a tiny, enclosed space with drug addicts and mentally ill vagrants.
Just charge the market rate for transit and those people will be less likely to ride. You also have to factor in the fact of less accidents.
In NYC, one of the few places where there's actually an argument for trains, fares cover I think <1/3 of costs are covered by fares. In most cities, the vast majority of the cost of mass transit is taxpayer-subsidized. Cars are nowhere near as subsidized as trains.
"Go to Google Maps, type in any route you can think of, and see what happens. I say cars win at least 90% of the time."
Did this. Mass transit on 19 of 20 trials. Turns out you just have to be in "not North America."
That's weird. I did that in Switzerland, famous for its great trains, and mass transit lost.
*Edit: I didn't do it 20 times, though. Just a few. I also did some in Amsterdam with the same result.
I'm not believing this. Routes please.
I can't think of a case in the US where mass transit is faster than driving. I could have used light rail to my last job if I wanted to turn a one hour commute to two hours. Although, my wife used to take light rail to her job: we had a station near our house and across the street from her office. I don't know if that saved time but it definitely was cheaper and less aggravating for her.
The big thing I think Bryan and others have missed is that when taking a bus, light rail, or train you can get something productive (read, nap, email) done. The number of productive ways to use time while driving is limited to mostly listening to podcasts and making phone calls.
I just thought of another facet: safety. My wife did not feel especially safe on light rail. I think she preferred the risk of a car accident over getting accosted in the transit parking lot.
Don’t you have parking lots whenever you use cars? If it’s the parking lot that’s the issue, then maybe you should prefer the mode that doesn’t require you to enter a parking lot!
But more seriously, bikes beat cars for travel up to a few miles in a city, even though transit very rarely does.
Not everywhere has lots of parking lots. Every time I travel to SF that's one of the questions: where will we park.
However, most of the time I'd prefer dealing with parking rather than doubling the time it takes to get somewhere, if it's even possible. Much as advocates don't like to admit it, there are many, many things you can't do in a reasonable amount of time with mass transit in the US.
Even places like San Francisco have a lot of parking! And as long as you're traveling along the MUNI or BART lines, transit doesn't usually double your travel time compared to driving. (It would if they implemented sufficient congestion charge to keep cars moving quickly, but that only works by getting most people to switch away from driving because of the dollar cost.)
As a New Yorker, most of my daily trips are faster via train than car.
Cars and city centers don't mix. Never have, never will.
And that's one of the biggest reason I'm looking forward to them. The second being that I'd rather call a robocab than have a car parked in my garage.
Sadly, I think it's going to be a lot longer before automated cars are mainstream. Ten years after that the teens will marvel that anyone ever drove by manually.
How good is your non-American geography, though. I doubt you know many random villages outside major conurbations in Germany. If availability bias skews your sample towards intercity routes then of course that is going to favour trains.
I live in a village of 7000 in rural Germany.
You don't have any transfers then. I used to live in Boeblingen, a suburb outside Stuttgart. Was a 45 minute walk to the S-Bahn and 15 minute walk to the bus station which didn't run 24x7 and only stopped by once an hour. A round trip to the nearest grocery store with mass transit was about three hours door to door not even counted the schedule delays of not being able to leave right now; whereas it's one hour with my car. Going to McDonald's for a quick bite likewise as time consuming.
Mass transit works when you don't like choice s or variety and are good with whatever kebab stand and market is next to your house.
I lived in Jefferson County in the Blue Ridge mountains for a while. Nearest neighbor was half a mile a way. Nearest town probably 30 miles. And you know what I did? I drove a car.
Cars are extremely useful in many settings. Pretending that's all settings and that it should be the default is silly, especially when you handwave government subsidies away. And that's what caused me to comment so much on this article.
I’d prefer a fixed cost of 15 minutes per journey (which is a gross over-estimate) than a fixed cost of $10000 a year to drive everywhere for everything.
The costs of car dependence even exceed this figure when you factor in obesity, injuries and death, pollution, making cities ugly, noise pollution, aggravation from driving, wasted space etc. Creating a great city and being car dependent are mutually exclusive.
Just to add, I really hope you don’t put this in your book. We should be turning parking garages into high rises, not encouraging more car dependence. Additionally, if building more makes property cheaper, then mass transit makes transportation cheaper.
Not to be too conspiratorial, but Cato is clearly pro car-dependence (probably due to the Kochs) the fact that the car in the thumbnail says Cato on it suggests that they’ve been rubbing off. Or it’s possibly a cry for help from Bryan saying that he has been forced against his will to spread these awful ideas. Either way hopefully these ideas never make it to the book.
I live in Germany and travel by public transport a lot. My guess is that cars are faster 97% of the time.
Cars in the home of Mercedes, Audi, BMW, and the Autobahn are faster than mass transit.
Wow, who saw that coming? :)
(Not me when someone flew past me at 160 kph.)
"Give us well-functioning electronic pricing - and the best argument against cars goes down the drain."
The best argument against cars is that that they're a nightmare to live around. They're loud and dirty and dangerous when there are people trying to, you know, live -work, play, be- nearby. They're delightfully useful between cities. They're terrible in cities.
You were just in Europe, I don't even know how you could post something like this right now.
>I don't even know how you could post something like this right now.
I can't imagine people not sharing my idée fixe...
Are there good estimates of how much time is consumed looking for parking, in order to add that on to the driving rime estimates and get a full comparison with public transit?
I expect that the time added is modest, though not zero; I also suspect that parking has an aggravation factor disproportionate to its actual time cost in most people's minds (i.e., 5 minutes spent looking for parking is seen as a bigger negative than a 5 minute delay riding public transit).
Now, if they ever figure out self-driving cars to the extent that your car can drop you perfectly at the destination front door, and then go park itself, that would be great.
Other major differences:
1) When driving a car, you have to be actively driving and focusing your energy and attention. Some people dislike driving generally, and almost everyone dislikes driving in heavy traffic, for reasons that go beyond the time it takes.
2) Because of the above, it is difficult to do other productive work while driving a car -- though sometimes listening to a podcast or audiobook could be productive, and some people do have substantive phone conversations while driving (risky). Laptop work is more possible on public transit, though see below...
3) Safety is a significant factor, which can cut in different directions. Driving a car is not risk-free. Meanwhile, different areas see wildly different amounts of crime committed on public transit (and of course, if you're going to pull out your laptop and work, you risk someone just swiping it and running at a stop, even if the risk of violent crime is low.)
Don't have to worry about parking when taking an Uber.
But you do have to worry about waiting for an Uber.
Agree that Uber can be a great solution for occasional trips. It's just too expensive for many people to be a standard commuting method (10 trips/week plus any extra errands). Rates will vary, but at $20/trip, that's $200/week, or $10,000/year, just for commuting.
If someone had a hybrid schedule (say, only needed to go into the office twice a week) or was entirely work from home, then foregoing a car in favor of Ubering would make a lot of sense.
You're not taking into account the time it takes to walk to your car. If you have an attached garage, then it's basically nothing. But what if you live in a city? Then you have to either park on the street, which has its costs, or pay to park in a garage. Regardless, you need to incorporate the cost.
Especially since allocating land to free and abundant parking at every destination imposes travel time costs on all trips.
This text tries to pretend that making a city more or less car-dependent isn't a political decision. It also ignores the fact that traffic can and does seriosuly slow down cars in many US cities (LA, anyone?). Having a healthy balance between public transit and car roads will take the load off of both modes of transport. Buses won't get stuck in traffic jams as much, and neither will private cars. Plus, anyone who can't afford a car or simply prefers using trains will then also have that option.
Interesting piece. I lived for 7 years in Beijing and 8 in Hong Kong. Despite huge investment in public transport infrastructure, Beijing was still a full on travel by car city - resulting in horrific traffic jams, terrible pollution and a situation where it was quicker to cycle. This was true at almost all time of the day from 7AM to 11PM and all year bar the few days around Chinese New Year when it was a joy to drive around and get everywhere in minutes. The public transport is extensive but the time getting to and from bus stops and train stations was a real pain. Hong Kong has probably the best public transport in the world and driving (and parking) is prohibitively expensive for the majority of the population. Most daily commutes and journeys were fast and comfortable. I think Hong Kong is the best I’ve seen City transport work- along with perhaps Tokyo, Taipei and Singapore.
Faster could be one of several factors in "easier and more convenient," but it's far from the only one.
When I lived at the edge of St. Louis, a car was easier and more convenient for some destinations, and far harder and less convenient for others. If the destination was downtown, the train would get me there faster than my car, even including the walk to the nearest station -- and once I GOT downtown, there was usually a station within a short walk of any likely destination ... but there might not be an available parking space, and if there was it might cost twice as much as as the train fare did, if not more.
"What about using trains to beat traffic jams and avoid parking problems? Yes, this often works in the most congested cities during the most congested times."
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln . . .
The comments here show a divide between city dwellers and suburban dwellers. There is no conceivable way busses and trains would be faster in your average American suburb.
If you want to live in a city and rely on public transportation, have at it; I’ll do nothing to try to take away that choice.
But don’t try to force public transportation on suburban dwellers.
Suburbanites are always forcing car dominance on the inner city though. Almost every major city in North America has had its inner city completely decimated by highways and parking lots, the result of public policy decisions, for the convenience of suburban commuters.
The highway situation wasn't done for the convenience of suburban dwellers. The original plans for the interstate highway system didn't have the interstates going thru towns, but tangent.
Somewhere it got changed. I am willing to bet on racism over suburban convenience as the deciding factor.
Sure, though it's not just the highways, there are hundreds of policies across North America that nudge people towards car usage, from parking minimums to car manufacturer subsidies to single-family detached house zoning, single-use zoning, setbacks, legal frameworks that normalize road deaths and shield drivers from liability, it goes on and on.
Actually suburbs are dependent on city centers for having their infrastructure subsidized. Suburbs cant fiscally support themselves because they require so much infrastructure per capita. Do a little reading at strong towns to get a basic education on it.
Shameful and disgusting comment
Meh I live in New York City and I try to avoid the subway as much as possible. I simply don't enjoy being around drug addicts and vagrants. Urbanists can cope and seethe as much as they want about it.
What if - and I know this sounds crazy - you could have a subway without drug addicts and vagrants on it?
And despite being probably the best-funded public transportation system in the world, you get to regularly enjoy being stuck in a train that decided to stop between stations and hang out for 20 min, put up with all the spontaneous route changes, etc; buses randomly show up and leave 10 minutes early. IMO urbanists should focus on making the public transit system not be a total disaster first, before, not after, they go on their crusade against cars.