“Giving people more viable alternatives to driving means more people will choose not to drive, so there will be fewer cars on the road, reducing traffic for drivers.”
Concise, easy to understand, and accurate. I have used it at least a dozen times and it is remarkable how well it works.
Also—
“A bus is about twice as long as a car so it only needs to have four to six passengers on board to be more efficient than two cars.”
So you don’t have to work, and therefore no need to commute? Lucky you. Normal people still have to work for a living.
And here it is. The only other option you can think of is to be unemployed. You’re so tied to the thought of a driving commute you can’t even imagine anything else.
I am not tied to a driving commute. The point is that for a lot of people, a commute by public transport or bike simply is no viable alternative. As long as you dwell in the city center 99% of your life, you will not encounter this, but outside the city, public transport is a joke.
Then you agree we should change that?
Indeed. If you have a miracle cure to fix that, feel free to apply it.
Not acting like it’s impossible would be the first step. Advocate for it at every level.
They want to either live in walking/biking distance of work, have a mass transit system that gets them to work, or work remotely.
Normal countries don’t require every person drive to get to work.
There are a lot of jobs - the majority, even - where WFH is not an option. A baker is not making the bread at home. And those people are often forced to change employments for a number of reasons. And they simply cannot just chose where to live due to financial constraints.
All this “fuck cars, use bikes and public transport” is just a dream of a wealthy white collar society who has lost the touch with reality.
I’m not against bikes and public transports. On the contrary. But unless those two options are actually viable, condemning cars is just a stupid idea. You cannot expect people to up their commute from 30 minutes one way to 3+ hours, just because the city dwellers don’t like their cars.
Do you think ~90% of the 30 million people in Shanghai are all white collars who lost touch with society? What about 99% of Singapore?
These places public transit, including intercity, is far, far superior to driving, so people use it. In America, our public transit is garbage, so people don’t use it.
Those places are so densely populated that they can afford a good public transport system. But look at other cities in the world - or, more precisely, their environment - and you will soon see a serious lack of public transport once you leave the cities. Yes, people are living there.
That is totally fine. I was not talking about city dwellers, they do have access to public transport in most cases. I’m especially talking about the people not living in the city centers.
That’s not actually true. Our decentralized system of roads and cars is actually more expensive than a robust rail and bus system. And I’ve been to other places, in Europe and South America. They all have better developed mass transit. You don’t need to be South Korea. You just have to be willing.