Cars seem to live in a special category in peoples minds where the costs simply do not exist, and thus the problems can be solved by simply throwing infinitely more resources and space at the problems.
Cars are inherently spatially inefficient, which makes them a terrible form of transport for cities. That is the hard mathematical reality that so many people avoid reckoning with.
Think of the space taken up by 1000 people on a single metro train, vs 1000 people in nearly 1000 cars. Think of 1000 people on bikes vs 1000 people in cars.
It's so obvious that this is a terrible way of moving people about, and we see this in congestion, in longer commutes in spite of cars traveling at higher speeds, sprawling patterns of urban development, road deaths (the biggest cause of death of children in most western countries), noise, pollution, sprawl, inactivity and social isolation.
Only ideology (car brain) prevents people from seeing it as the problem it is.
Public transport is far, far more cost effective than car infrastructure. And that's just direct costs - not even including the cost of sprawl (which makes all other infrastructure more expensive), road deaths and injuries, noise, pollution, storage costs for vehicles, the health costs of inactivity and social isolation, etc etc.
> build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals
This is a terrible idea because the numbers simply do not stack up. A typical metro train can carry roughly 1000 people. A large car park might fill half of a single train. At a station with good frequency, a train will leave the station roughly every 5 minutes.
A much better idea is to run good regular public transport to the station, build bike paths to the station and quality bike parking at the station, and build more housing at/near the station instead of a big parking lot.
Uh huh honey. Newsflash: Most people are doing their jobs because they have to to get by, and don’t have the choice to work on socially-useful-but-not-lucrative stuff.
Cars are inherently spatially inefficient, which makes them a terrible form of transport for cities. That is the hard mathematical reality that so many people avoid reckoning with.
Think of the space taken up by 1000 people on a single metro train, vs 1000 people in nearly 1000 cars. Think of 1000 people on bikes vs 1000 people in cars.
It's so obvious that this is a terrible way of moving people about, and we see this in congestion, in longer commutes in spite of cars traveling at higher speeds, sprawling patterns of urban development, road deaths (the biggest cause of death of children in most western countries), noise, pollution, sprawl, inactivity and social isolation.
Only ideology (car brain) prevents people from seeing it as the problem it is.