I never thought about how you could be coerced into voting a specific way like that and it does seem to be a big problem to me. But is that already possible with mail-in voting?
I wanted to provide an anecdotal example, my bus commute is about 30 minutes and by car would be about 15 minutes. The extra time I spend commuting is ~150 hours per year (- WFH days/personal days/sick days). Owning a car and buying parking would cost me about $4506 more than having a bus pass per year. So I'm essentially getting paid ~$30/hr for those 150 hours each year to read books / listen to podcasts in public. I understand this is leaving out a lot of details. And if my commute times were twice as long I would only be getting paid ~$15/hr, still not bad if you already enjoy reading books or listening to podcasts for free.
If your city is anything like a typical US city, note that your bus pass costs 3-5 as much as you think you’re paying for it. The rest of the cost is covered by the taxes you are paying. This means that you are paying 70-80% of the public transport’s fare regardless of whether you’re actually using it. If you account for that, it might not change your calculations, because you cannot opt out of the transportation tax anyway, but it should make you think as to why buses are really so attractive after all.
That's true, I hadn't thought of that and in my city 70% of PT is indeed funded by taxes. But if there wasn't PT my city would probably need to be less dense because of the additional required parking, roads, suburbs, etc and therefore generate less taxes per acre. Also once a high enough percentage of people use PT, it could pay for itself through fares (Tokyo apparently?). The entire situation is complex and hard to measure IMO.
Well, if you want another anecdote, I used to live in a neighborhood close to DC/Beltway, and my commute by car was 20-22 minutes.
By public transportation, it would be north of 1:15, because it takes 20-25 minutes just to walk to the nearest bus stop.
Maybe you can concentrate and do work on a bus, but I can't, so for me it's just wasted time (almost 2 hrs every work day, adding up to 400+ hrs/year). Having a car is essential (unless you live and work downtown, for which you're paying a premium, obviously)
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't think the car manufacturer Toyota is likely to build a city that doesn't focus on demonstrating how cars will continue to be a significant part of our, and their, future.
The irony here being that Japan already looks like this. It has wonderful public transportation and cars are almost non-existent in Tokyo and Osaka.
You see a lot more cars in the outskirts and in smaller cities (like Kyoto) where they haven't hit critical mass, or there has been mismanagement of the transit infrastructure.
Non-existent is seemingly hyperbole (never been to Japan) but I can imagine it might be shocking if OP were from NA and he/she are actually witnessing traffic volumes cut in half or more.
I'm not certain how to parse your comment. If 25% of people drive in Tokyo to commute, that means 75% of them don't, which supports my point. Compare that to most cities in North America where more than 85% of commuters drive.
Here's a link to some photos on my last trip to Tokyo. This is in and around Akihabara and Asakusabashi, and I think there might be one in Shibuya. I realize this can be considered anecdotal or "cherry-picked", and I'm sure there are parts of Tokyo which have way more traffic (most likely closer to the outskirts), however, this was the experience that I've had in many parts of the city the multiple times I've been there.
In my experience, most US cities, even those with terrible traffic, are not uniformly packed with cars. That's because there are lots and lots of roads in a city, but only so many cars. However, usually there are certain corridors that one practically has go through if one wants to get from one area to the other, and those are the most congested.
For example, I live in Seattle, city with one of the worse traffic situations in the country. However, if you stroll on most of the surface streets in downtown, you'll never notice that. Most congestion in the metro occurs on the major freeways that allow one to travel through the area on a north-south axis: SR-99, I-5 and I-405, and on the surface streets and ramps directly leading to these freeways. Before you get to these, and after you get off them, you'll see rather little traffic, and pretty much no congestion to speak of.
They're looking to use it to research the possibilities of integrating autonomous vehicles into cities more tightly I suspect. It makes sense that they're in no hurry to deprecate their own core business.
What I find interesting is there wasn't really any illustrations of the reported three layer road system, and the majority of the illustrations are of huge, open walkable areas. I would love to see how they're looking to address separating slow speed traffic from high speed traffic while keeping them both useful.
I don't understand why cars are bad. ICE are bad because they contribute to global warming, sure. But things that move small numbers of people to exactly where they want to go -- are those bad?
In fact, a lot of science fiction I can think of describe Disney-style people mover things that quickly and efficiently take you exactly where you want to go. I guess they aren't exactly cars, but they aren't exactly trains either.
As someone who grew up in the States, I never really understood this either, until I lived in Korea and visited Japan.
There, residential zoning is mixed with business zoning. There is no such thing as a "suburb", because you have apartments nestled right next to grocery stores, cafes, and restaurants. I don't think I ever had to walk more than 2-5 minutes to get to a convenience store. Cars still existed of course, but so many people walked, rode bikes, or took public transit. (It helps that both countries have extremely good public transit systems).
Once I realized how nice life could be, I started hating suburbs. I hate having to drive 10-20+ minutes just to get food or groceries because the only thing around you is a vast sea of houses. I hate that public transit is basically nonexistent, or if it does exist, it's slow and not on time. I hate having to drive, which is both unsafe and prohibits me from studying or getting work done, because I have to pay attention to the road.
Centering around a suburb model is one of the US's greatest structural failures.
Neighbourhoods built to car-scale rather than human-scale are isolating and hostile. Try walking to get lunch from a hotel or office park in suburban America and see how it feels.
Regardless of gas or electric, cars are dangerous and kill more citizens than just about anything in modern society. Furthermore, encouraging people to drive everywhere rather than walking or cycling only exacerbates the obesity crisis (another major driver of mortality).
"things that move small numbers of people to exactly where they want to go" -- I can describe feet in the same way! My feet also work after drinking, they don't take up space, they gave me independence at a young age, and they provide health benefits (even the thirty minutes a day of walking needed to get to public transit and do grocery shopping makes a big difference over a totally sedentary lifestyle).
A lot of that science fiction was written by Americans.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, here. Used to live in Nagoya and have been to Toyotashi many a time. It's a pretty average small Japanese city.
Not if it's built by a carmaker. Perhaps the point is to show that we'll never separate ourselves from personal transportation vehicles (cars) but the future of the symbiosis will be far smarter and efficient.
Walking around doesn't scale indefinitely. No form of transportation does, but walking scales significantly less. Plus, designing with public transit in mind makes it more accessible, which becomes a serious concern if you want anyone over sixty to live in your city.
I think that's what the parent is saying. Everybody wants to score virtue points for loving their feet or bike but at the end of the day you need to compliment that with some sort of public transit network to give them the distance covering power they need to be truly practical.
I don't think anyone was arguing that. We obviously have to cover distances that are not practical for walking, so public transportation goes hand in hand with a walkable city.
That is still a tremendous improvement over having to drive everywhere. The quality of life is so much better, it's almost indescribable.
As opposed to banning research on everything that hasn't already been researched because it could have some negative health effect we don't know about?
Yeah that's typical conservative mentality that is feeling based rather than reason based. It's a real shame how backward governments are in this respect.
I once made anki flashcards while reading a book on linux. I think I was able to memorize a lot of useful CLI utilities because of that. It also helped me stay motivated to get through a very dry book.
