Solving for the Last Mile of Transportation(medium.com)
medium.com
Solving for the Last Mile of Transportation
https://medium.com/@derrickko/solving-for-the-last-mile-of-transportation-6ffbfec5542#.1eukt3e7g
5 comments
A 20 minute mile doesn't include waiting for walk signals at pretty much every intersection on the route, and the Manhattan distance between the Caltrain station and his office might be larger.
Yeah, I'm just going on his statement that it was "one mile", which I take to be the actual Manhattan distance, not the crow's distance. You have a good point with the walk signals, but as someone who's spent a fair amount of time walking many miles around Manhattan (but not SF, so I don't know about that), I never spent much time waiting for walk signals. With the grid layout, it's pretty easy to take a route that has you catching the walk signal almost all the time in one direction, and then opportunistically cross the street or change direction when you happen to catch a red light in that direction.
It's more like a mile and a half from Caltrain to FiDi.
this was pretty asinine and seems to mainly just be an advertisement for this guy's vaporware company
How does it take 30 minutes to walk a mile, unless you're really slow and out of shape, or taking your time (something you shouldn't be doing if you're "commuting")? Any normal person should be able to walk 2.5-3 mph, which means you should be able to walk a mile in 20-24 minutes.
>New York City has built over 1,000 miles in bike lanes... Barcelona has implemented “superblocks” by closing off streets for use as community and pedestrian areas. Copenhagen is planning to make its downtown core car-free within a decade. In short, cities are prioritizing people over cars.
None of these cities are typical of any cities, especially ones here in America. Copenhagen is the most bike-friendly city on the planet, and has been for a long time, so it's no surprise they're aiming to be car-free downtown soon. NYC is unique in the US for its density, but also importantly is that mentions like this always focus on Manhattan, which is only a small part of the overall city. I doubt there's a lot of progress in building bike lanes in the Bronx or on Staten Island, or even in Queens.
The solution to this problem isn't more public transit, which simply does not work in places with lower density (i.e. suburbs) and are too spread out for pre-planned routes to work out well. The solution is Personal Rapid Transit systems like SkyTran.