this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Eh, I'm still not sold on transit (for people). If you live in a well designed city, everything should be right there in front of you, no more than steps away. The need to move further than your feet (or wheelchair, if that's your thing) can reasonably allow is a straight up urban planning failure.
I can buy into the idea that, given our existing urban planning failures, it is better than nothing. As a bandaid, sure. But in the context of looking to build the world in which we want to live, why settle for bandaids? Why not go straight to building cities properly, thereby having no need to move people around with external propulsion at all?
Those in the rural parts are a harder problem, but it seems you think the car is still their best option. So, when does transit become useful?
Is it the freight transit infrastructure you see as needing improvement? It is true that, even with the best laid plans, we are not in a place to give that up yet. As interesting as vertical farms are, the technology just isn't there yet to supplant food grown in rural areas, never mind things like lumber and other commodities that aren't usually found in cities.
But when it comes to people, concentrating them close together is kind of a city's whole deal. Why then pretend it is a rural area that requires travel over long distances?
What if I have a friend on the other side of town and we are meeting up at a restaurant on their side of town? Or maybe there is a high speed rail connecting a few cities and now I can visit my parents the next city over by taking the train. Or maybe I didnt manage to find a job in the more walkable part of town (we cant fix cities over night) but the transit hub can connect me to my job. Or maybe I usually walk the 20 minutes but I injured my leg and its only 5 minutes of walking if I take the bus.
I think transit belongs within a well designed city and for intercity connections. Even with the best urban planning, some cities will just be too big to get everywhere in the city just by walking. Some people might be fine staying in their neighborhood but others will want to see other people, try different restaurants, shop different places.
I would add people who change jobs and households with more than one worker.
Nobody is going to move every time they change jobs.
Approximately nobody is going to live close enough to the workplace of everyone in the household who works.
Then who is going to be left to support the walkable economy? You need approximately every working person who lives within that community to be active in the walkable economy, else you will quickly find that services are no longer within walking distance.
Are you imagining that you'll hop on the train to go work on the other side of town, while someone living on that side of town hops on the train to work in your neighbourhood? That is not a good reason for transit at all. That's just silly.
There are many problems with the idea that every community should be so maximally walkable that you don't need any other modes of transit. Some urban uses like parks require local low density in an urban setting and they can easily get large enough where 20min walking barely gets you across. Also the social network of people even just including the closest friends and family usually even in dense cities spreads out at least a few km. Also super tall buildings aren't actually particularly efficient. Also some services greatly benefit from a certain centrality that can never be in walkable reach for all people of large cities e.g. universities or other more specialised institutions. Transit and bikes are huge enablers for people to freely live their life as they see fit, and some level of global interconnectedness is probably needed forever. Build one efficient medical supplier, steel mill, semiconductor FAB or generally any larger factory and walkability is immediately gone just because these facilities need lots of space, and their entire supply chain would be much less (thermally/CO2/resource) efficient if we were to split theses factories to enable local production.
Who do you think is going to maintain friendships across a few kilometres? Maybe the hardcore walkers, but the average person is just going to find new friends, just like they do now when distances become too great.
That's a feature. Have you seen how much Canadians bitch and moan about wealth inequality? Splitting up central operations into small, local operations is how you beat wealth inequality.
But I get it. Change is scary.
Nah Change isn't scary, maximizing any single concern in the real world is just too shortsighted. Also not accepting transit or bikes as a part of walk-ability is just confused. Last month I traveled ~400km 206 bike 180 transit and just 8km on foot and 1km in a car. The 180km transit were traveled in a time slightly longer than the 8km walking. This travel is only for maintaining social connections, I don't commute and I have 2 Supermarkets on my street still it is very important to me to be able to move in this way. Even if I could easily find new friends or get my family to move so close walking would be viable, still travel would be important to me just to experience a diverse collection of places and people. Nobody in a modern Context will ever consider a few km a far distance, you can feasibly walk 40+km in a single day bike 140+km in a day and take a train almost 2000km in a day, its nonsensical to discard the later two just because they use technology, especially in places where this technology exist.
Sure generally I agree splitting and localizing things might be part of a way to more equitable wealth distribution but at the same time, for some essential industries it is largely impossible, just because of the limitations physics gives us. We should take control from the owners of these industries and hand it over to the workers for real democratic control and not destroy thermally efficient production processes. Because thermal efficiency is actually not the same as profit, which is the primary reason for wealth inequality. But I get it even the slightest threat to property rights is scary :P