https://youtu.be/RQY6WGOoYis is his best one in this context. It explains how public transport only works if it is faster and more convenient than driving.
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" the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport."
(Given that there is public transport system to speak of in the first place.)
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I love to play Cities Skylines, which is usually accompanied by watching other players and learning a lot from online resources. I often find it fascinating to watch people, especially when they build their first city, build on what they know. With US based players that often means multilane streets and cul de sacs abound, lots of traffic lights. European players love roundabouts and public transport. The best working cities turn out to be those with a public transport and walkability mindset first. For the inevitable car traffic one lane roads (or specialized multilane roads where only one lane is for cars) turn out a lot better, as even without the danger of accidents the laneswitching and complex crossings make them congestion traps. You also learn sometimes that it is better to destroy a shortcut which also seems counterintuitive.
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Buses don’t offer a tenth of the opportunity for graft and kickbacks that multi billion dollar capital projects do.
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One of the many things that makes urban centres more desirable (and therefore more expensive) is dense and frequent public transit, which combined with better walkability can give one the option of living car-free (therefore cutting out a huge monthly expense). Taking that into account, one can probably live car-free in Toronto or its older suburbs for about the same cost as living in one of the nearby car-centric sprawl exurbs.
This is why (at least for progressives) affordable housing in city centres has become a crucial aspect of new transit-oriented development, allowing people of all income levels who work in the city to also live in the city. While Toronto’s urban planning might be better in that regard than in comparable U.S. cities, I doubt it’s that much better (although L.A. seems to be making a strong effort in that direction).
Metro North and the LIRR are solid commuter rail systems feeding into NYC, but they’re an exception in the U.S. The suburbs they serve were proto-transit-oriented developments centred on commercial “villages” in the middle of the residential development (those suburbs, well-served by another form of public transit, also end up being more expensive). The MBTA suburbs around Boston are similar. The suburbs surrounding other American commuter rail systems, like CalTrain, aren’t as transit-oriented.
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Oh yes! We had a lovely new above ground light rail transit line planned under a previous mayor, which would have had numerous stations serving as bus nexus points to under-served neighbourhoods, providing faster and more efficient travel around the area and points downtown. It may have been built and up and running by now, but the next mayor, Rob Ford, cancelled it in favour of an astronomically more expensive subway with a fraction of the number of stops. And that seems to be dead in the water at this point. So the money for the studies for both projects was utterly wasted, and the people in the neighbourhoods are still under-served.
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I honestly doubt the Danish company Lego has any interest in propping up the US car industry
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So, in Europe.
Sorry, but seeing the UK as its own thing apart from Europe is an attitude that has done so much damage, I can’t let it stand uncommented
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This week, I was watching a British television program about a massive archeology project in preparation for a high speed rail system between London and Birmingham, and I was reminded again how the US has become a technological backwater thanks to Trump and McConnell.
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HS2.
It’s been pretty controversial but it has provided employment for a lot of diggers.
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It’s been headed that way since Gingrich and the “Contract with America”. The dot-com 1.0 boom slowed the trend for about 5 years but it resumed its pace during the Cheney Regency and continued through the Obama years. I would agree that Biff and Yertle really accelerated it.
Biden has been pushed by progressives into seeing the value of innovating in climate-change mitigation technologies, and he’s always been a big transit infrastructure advocate, but his first (and perhaps second) term will be mainly focused on trying to undo all the damage done by Il Douche and his vandals. We’re pretty much looking at the “Ctrl-Z Administration” if he wins.
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Definitely. I live in Warsaw now, and the public transport is so good that there’s no need to own a car at all. Or at least that was true before pandemic, I prefer not to take risk and just walk everywhere now.
During rush hours using public transport is also frequently faster than driving a car, because large part of it is rail-based, and the buses have dedicated lanes during rush hours.
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It took me a long time to recognise that the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit was based on reality.
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Yep, most of the lines that became the PE were built by developers. Once the land was sold, the developers would try to palm the system off on… well, anyone who thought they could make money on a system with publicly-regulated fares, but no limits on costs.
LA’s Red Cars survived longer than many street railway systems, because Henry Huntington bought up all the individual developer-created lines, converted them all to one single, compatible heavy-rail gauge, and then merged them into a single great system – which he then traded to his long-time nemesis E. H. Harriman of the Southern Pacific, for SP’s interest in the LA Railway (LARy) “Yellow Car” local trolley system.
The idea was that the SP could run the system as BOTH a money-losing, publicly-regulated transit system during the day, AND use electric locomotives to haul standard railroad freight cars for SP at night when the transit lines were closed, a sort of “last 20 miles” distribution system for SPs transcontinental freight operations.
This dual nature kept the PE running long past its sell-by date as a transit system. When the improving road network and new diesel trucks undercut the rail-freight operation, SP closed most of it, and sold off the remnants. It was LA’s first public transit agency (the “first MTA”) that shut down the last of the aging rail system.
System riders actually preferred the modern, comfortable, air-cushioned buses with upholstered seats that picked passengers up at curbside, rather than forcing them to board/de-board in the middle of the street with cars whizzing past on both sides of a 4-foot wide “safety zone.”
. It’s a wonder the PE lasted as long as it did. 
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It’s true that if the US had only started down the path of infrastructure improvements 40 years ago under Reagan (hell, before that with Carter) when they realized the coming problem we’d be at least halfway there by now and at the fraction of the overall cost.
Nope, instead we had to blow trillions on weapons and defense so that we can have a bigger military than the next 7 countries combined.
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Ha! Sorry then!
My only experience has been the rail line in the south of England, which took me, lickety-split from Milton Keynes to London and the airport with a minimum of fuss and confusion for someone who had never been on a British train or tube, or to the airport, so I was very impressed. Far superior to the Ontario rail system, with better connections.
My point was that North America (in my case, Canada), is sooo far behind the rest of the world, that we will never catch up.
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I have plenty of experience of Virgin Trains between Carlisle and Edinburgh. It was always late, but never late enough for me to get compensation (if your train was 1 hour and 59 minutes late, no compensation for you. it had to be two hours or more). I suspect I could have gone on the train without paying, I rarely had my ticket checked because the staff were more concerned about making sure that other passengers made their connections.
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I have to say that even our regional trains (GO trains; Government of Ontario) are better than that; they do clock in at pretty precisely when they are scheduled. I was aghast the arrival time at my closest station was changed from 23 minutes past the hour to 25 minutes past the hour, after several decades of the rather eccentric 23 past the hour. Maybe the extra two minutes is wiggle room.
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Very controversial. And also lots of work for tree surgeons and eco-protester-removal security types.
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