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Cunninghams_right OP t1_j6lu3cv wrote

Reply to comment by z3mcs in Would be awesome if the JFX and Jones Falls river could be converted like this by Cunninghams_right

I'm generally torn. I very much wish we could transform Baltimore into a less car-centric, more livable city. however, there are a LOT of different groups who oppose such things.

the worst of both worlds tend to have loud voices:

  1. one group being the people who want to preserve their car-centric lifestyle (like when they modified the monument street bike lane just to make a few more parking spaces for church, one hour per week), or people who just commute by car everywhere.
  2. the other voice is one that is delusional and wants transit modes that are not cost effective (streetcars), and when presented with their poor cost performance simply declares "just raise taxes" as if that's the way out of the problem.

that leaves me with a feeling that I can't really cause the kind of change that I think makes sense, so I just try to help people see how much better things could be if they just didn't make everything about cars.

the hard truth is that Baltimore's transit is completely failed. the operating cost per passenger mile is above the cost of just ubering everyone everywhere, and the most efficient and effective mode (bikes, scooters, rental bikes, rental etrikes, etc.) is not even considered because prevailing the culture sees it as such a foreign concept that they can't even imagine taking an ebike anywhere.

I wish I could magically take every Baltimore resident, one at a time, to Amsterdam or Copenhagen for 2 years and let them live a life where they don't need a car and let them see how much money they could save and how much more pleasant it is to have most people moving by bike. unfortunately, I can't do that, so I have to live in a city where people think arguments like "what about bad weather" are valid at all compared to the lived experience of people around the world.

basically, every day I'm beaten down, between various urban planning, transit, Baltimore, etc. subreddits where I'm to the point that I doubt I can change anyone's mind with real-world cost and ridership data. the logical thing to do seems foreign and wrong, so we keep doing the familiar BS that has turned the city into a less livable place (car centrism).

when I feel like fielding arguments, I'll post about cost/benefit of different modes, but people REALLY don't like honest, objective analyses of transportation because the logical conclusion is that bikes are the most important and should be funded in the tens of millions of dollar per year range (similar budget to our light rail line), and private companies like Uber and Lyft should be contracted by the city and MTA to provide the glue/feeder service into the rail lines, and the rail lines should be automated as soon as possible (currently possible for the metro, and only a couple of years away for the light rail).

so I just post more general "wouldn't it be cool" posts, hoping to convince people that maybe the status quo isn't ideal, rather than actually present them with a real alternative (which they will criticize without knowledge)

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physicallyatherapist t1_j6mz91r wrote

I'm not really sure #2 is very common compared to #1. I don't know anyone that wants to bring back all of the streetcars? It may be neat to have one or two for the nostalgia and maybe for tourists but that would be it. But i think the public transportation people are far more open to changing from a subway to a bus route than a car person is to changing anything at all. This isn't a "both sides" argument

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Cunninghams_right OP t1_j6nco0l wrote

I agree that it isn't an equal "both sides" argument, but it's hard to gain momentum for anything when the people on your side all disagree about what is wanted/needed and I've found very few people have a connection to reality. there are a lot of considerations that need to be made with regard to construction cost of different modes, capacity requirements, M&O cost, the attractiveness of different modes, etc. etc., and I can't even find transit planners who will just follow the numbers. transit planners hate to outsource to private companies and transit unions will resist automation.

basically, I don't see a path for getting people on the same page.

MTA hosted a little conference thing a few years back where transit-minded folks could present. perhaps if they still do that I can present on how to get everyone on the same page and elicit some discussion on the topic.

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physicallyatherapist t1_j6ngxqi wrote

Regardless of what is built I think there will be disagreements with the details (what is put where and how often) but I really think transit people will want something built regardless. I'm not picky with public transportation. Tram, trolley, light rail, buses, bikes.. bring it all! The issue I get mad about is that a large majority of car people simply cannot wrap their heads around not driving a car and I get sick of the same excuses "where will I park? It's going to be more congested for cars. It's going to hurt businesses if we can't park right in front". Which is all BS. Hell in my other thread the one guy said I was being "polarizing" because I suggested that cars aren't the only ways to get around. Transit people complain about details while car people try to prevent any of it at all from happening and you're right.. I'm not entirely sure how to get through to many

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Cunninghams_right OP t1_j6nx5wi wrote

I think that is part of the issue. you have car users who are all unified in what they want, and you have people who want things other than cars who cannot agree on anything. there is no coherent plan to be less car-centric, and I find pro-transit folks to be just as unable to imagine non-standard solutions as pro-car folks are unable to imagine using anything but their car.

one example that is obvious but hard to get anyone to agree on:

scooter subsidy. the bird/link/spin scooter monthly passes are $16-$50, which is a tiny fraction of the unsubsidized cost of a transit pass. people talk about making buses free, but free scooters (at least for a couple of rides per day) would move more people per dollar spent, and would increase demand for bike lanes. it shouldn't be hard to sell that to anyone, but for some reason it is. people complain about scooter parking as if it is a real problem when sidewalk blockage by scooter is a fraction as much as other sources of sidewalk blockage, but those other things, like tree roots, are "normal" to them but scooters are new. and people complain about them being ridden on sidewalks because it feels dangerous to see them going quickly, but the actual damage done is next to nothing, and infinitesimal if you exclude the rider. I don't care if a rider is reckless and hurts themselves. that's on them. if someone jay walks in front of a bus and gets hit, we shouldn't ban buses from streets. the arguments are provably BS as soon as you bring in objective information like actual injury rate and actual sidewalk blockage rate compared to other things, but pro-bike and pro-transit people still complain and create drag on any progress.

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physicallyatherapist t1_j6nza2e wrote

>it shouldn't be hard to sell that to anyone, but for some reason it is.

But do you think it's a hard sell to the public transportation people or the car people? I feel like public transportation people would be ok with more scooters at a discounted price (they're more expensive than down in DC). I'm not sure why anyone that's for more public transit would be against scooters though and I haven't really seen that personally (though maybe you have). The people complaining about scooters are probably the car people.

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Cunninghams_right OP t1_j6o4pe3 wrote

generally, what I get most from pro-transit people are

  1. not everyone can ride it, so it shouldn't be done (ignoring than some of these companies actually offer rentable mobility scooters)
  2. without bike lanes, it would be a problem for sidewalks
  3. we shouldn't subsidize a private company
  4. we should do X instead (where X is running more buses, or building trams, etc. )

the problem is that it's something that pro-transit folks don't necessarily hate, but they will advocate for something else instead.

the result is that you get 100 different ideas that each have a handful of supporters against a unified group of pro-car people that is 100x larger. the result of all of the disparate pro-transit voices is that the city council and mayor just keep doing more of the same.

if we made a decision matrix with factors like door-to-door time, construction cost, operating cost per passenger-mile, speed of implementation, accessibility, reliability, energy usage per passenger-mile, pollution, noise pollution, and any other performance metric of a transit mode, the result would come back scooter/bike subsidy every single time. it wouldn't even be close. it is an issue that anyone who advocates for non-car transportation SHOULD all agree is the top priority... but scooters have been in Baltimore more than a decade and yet they're still not getting any significant support from the city (they are getting SOME support, but a miniscule amount compared to a buses, PPM)

there is another obvious thing we should at least be looking into, but I don't even dare mention it because of its unpopularity in spite of objective evidence that is outperforming our transit by every metric.

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physicallyatherapist t1_j6oo787 wrote

I see what you're saying. I've never come across that much animosity towards scooters but I guess I see some of the points. However, that is only solution to the issue. Also, most of those reasons could be removed if we focus on more bike lanes which would free up space for scooters as well. I think most pro-transit people would support that, yeah?

What's the unpopular opinion?

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Cunninghams_right OP t1_j6ozoi9 wrote

>Also, most of those reasons could be removed if we focus on more bike lanes which would free up space for scooters as well. I think most pro-transit people would support that, yeah?

it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. the opposition to bike lanes comes largely from people thinking they're not worth being built unless they're filled with riders. most people don't think about it long enough to understand network effects, or that restricting car traffic is a good thing for livability and their slightly slower drive due to the driving lane being fully makes the city better and safer. so if you can inflate the number of people biking/scooting, it makes more pro-bike-lane people and reduces opposition.

I was actually saying in another thread a while back that if you took the budget for a single light rail line ($1-$2 billion), you could offer a voucher of $1k to anyone in the city for a bike/trike/ebike/etrike/scooter and still have enough money left over randomly give 1 in 25 people who are riding $1000 each month (each person can't win more than per year), and sustain that random lottery for somewhere between 2 and 10 years, depending on how many people take up biking in order to try to win that lottery. think about that; 1 in 25 people is VERY common. everyone would know at least 1 person who won that lottery and facebook/instagram would be FILLED with people celebrating that they won. you would pretty much entice everyone in the city to at least bike SOME of the time, but the more you bike the more likely you would be to win, so you may as well bike to work, bike to the store, bike when you're bored, etc. etc.. the result would be a MASSIVE demand for bike lanes and on streets without bike lanes, cars would be constantly driving near cyclists, so they would get used to having to watch out for them. by the time the lottery was finished, everyone would be used to riding and bike lanes would already be in place, so continued bike usage would be high. I think it would be absolutely transformative to an entire city, much more so than adding 1 light rail line.

but anyway, that's a pretty radical idea and might be hard to convince people to try. it would also be a massive and sudden change, which people hate. even sudden changes for the better are hated by many people.

edit: oops, hit submit too early, standby for the next paragraph

>What's the unpopular opinion?

to start, we have to understand the real-world costs of transportation modes (I'm using pre pandemic data, bus LRT costs have gone up since)

  • taxi/uber/lyft: somewhere around $1.50-$2.50 per vehicle-mile
  • DC/WMATA buses, pre pandemic: $1.99 per passenger-mile
  • St Louis light rail: $1.01 PPM (unfortunately, I don't have Baltimore data but I think St Louis is going to be similar to Baltimore, based on ridership)

so, how many people do you need in a taxi before the cost is on par with transit? well, in the case of buses, 1-1.25 person in a taxi. what is the average occupancy of a taxi? well, it's 1.3-1.56., so it's actually already cost competitive with the average bus. for light rail, you'd need 1.5-2.5 ppv. cool, so uber-pool would likely be right around the cost of a light rail system on a per-passenger-mile basis.

ok, for the next part, we need to understand the cost to construct different things.

the cost of surface rail in the US is around $125M/mi to $245M/mi. (source1 source2).

the cost of a simple car or utility tunnel is $60M-$88M/mi (source). if the TBM is brought to the surface for each station and a road deck installed instead of train infrastructure, it would be possible to make a tunnel for taxis for less than the cost of a light rail line.

now, the taxis would need to be electric in order to reduce the exhaust requirements (still need a directional vent at each segment for fire safety).

the average vehicle occupancy would need to be 1.5-2.5 in order to be on par or cheaper than a light rail line, so a Ford e-Transit would be an ideal vehicle as it can comfortable seat 4 with bags, and 6-7 in a pinch. so even if the vehicles had low occupancy (1.2-2 ppv) during off-peak hours, peak hours of 3-5 would be able to raise the occupancy enough to be on par or cheaper than a typical light rail line.

so, lower construction cost, much more frequent vehicles (more than one departing per minute at peak, a couple of minutes wait during off-peak).

if Waymo vehicles, which can already operate autonomously and seat 4 comfortably and 6 squeezed, can be used, then theoretically, the cost to operate each vehicle would drop by 30%-50% due to the elimination of the driver.

ohh, and if you're curious, regular roadway vehicle density with 4 ppv would easily cover weekday peak-hour on our light rail, and 6-7 ppv would even handle typical stadium even ridership (would actually handle DC stadium entrants per hour).

the key is for it to either be driverless or to only use regular taxi drivers. if you use buses or trains, then you need expensive drivers and expensive vehicles, which will make it more expensive to operate while also making longer wait times.

this concept would work, but people HATE it because Elon Musk is implementing a project similar to this and that has created a whirlwind of false information about safety, cost, capacity, etc.

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ElectricStar87 t1_j6nm7dl wrote

Oof. I’ve been shocked by how many people think throwing down dozens of dedicated right of way trolleys are the answer to the problem. It really is a perspective that pops up here pretty frequently, unfortunately.

Generally I tend to be in agreement with Cunninghams_right in these conversations, but I see a greater relevance for bus transit than perhaps they do, especially for people going back and forth to labor-intensive jobs at odd hours of the day/night. Relatively minor point.

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physicallyatherapist t1_j6no282 wrote

I believe you and trust that you have but I just really haven't seen it I guess. Plus, as I've mentioned a few times, I think convincing hard line trolley people to do buses would still be easier than telling car people we're adding a bus lane or more buses

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