Originally Posted by
alhedges
You might be right in general - but car sharing has the significant advantage that the taxpayers don't have to spend billions of dollars for it. It also makes being bike free easier because you can use the car in those cases where biking wouldn't be convenient - hauling home 50 lb bags of planting soil or whatever.
For me, it would increase the number of times I can bike to work easily. If I have a meeting in the morning for which I need to wear a suit, I tend to just take the car; with the car share, I can drive in but bike home.
I see your points here but what about the need to reduce parking and the seas of cars that fills roads and parking lots and demand more lanes and longer distances between destinations? Sprawl really comes down to including room for cars in any and all developed land. How do car-sharing and ride-sharing change that unless a significant number of people forgo automobile ownership? I think the whole problem would be solved if local governments zoned a certain amount of parking spots and no more. Then people could choose EITHER car-sharing/ride-sharing OR personal auto ownership but not both. Even then, there still might be too many cars to prevent sprawl and facilitate transit and bike commuting.
The public resists public transit because - in many places - it will be very expensive and provide worse service. The light rail that my city periodically discusses would cost $1.75 billion (assuming no cost overruns); the city's budget is only $1B annually. Although the proponents hope to recoup 25% of the cost through rider fees, predicting how many people would actually use it is completely speculative.
Right, but this is also a chicken-egg problem, or rather a catch-22. People don't like buses because they associate them with low status and poverty. Then if you propose a high-status transit alternative that costs more, people complain that they're too poor (publicly) to afford it. So either accept a low-cost bus system and use it or pay for a transit system you will use; don't reject one because it's too cheap and then reject the other because it is too expensive (not you personally, of course, I'm just using a generalized 'you' here - sorry if it sounds like a personal attack).
And I'm not sure how public transit will prevent "inherently unsustainable growth patterns" - I'm not completely sure what patterns you mean. But public transit doesn't stop sprawl; in many cases it enables it, as its main use is often to bring workers into the center city from the suburbs. I.e., it makes it easier for people to not live in the city.
The patterns I mean are patterns of living that require the ability to drive on demand, park close to the destination, travel unbikably long distances between destinations, create bus routes that have to be long with many stops that make it extremely time-consuming to take the bus relative to driving.
Public transit should reduce sprawl if as many or more people use it than driving. Destinations would have half the parking area and would cluster around transit stops for convenience. Cities would subdivide into primary and secondary zones where people would tend to prefer to operate within their primary zone and would only invest time in traveling to their secondary zones for special reasons. Longer distance buses might be used to get to work and back if you lived far from your job but you would tend to just take the bus back to your primary zone after work and then take local buses or bike or walk around to do shopping, recreation, leisure activities, etc.
Sure, but these campuses also provide on-campus housing. What they're not doing is building a trolley system out to distant apartment complexes. And the reason that the campuses limit driving is generally due to the difficulty of parking on campus and the overall high density of the campus generally.
Distant residential areas should be mixed-use areas with shopping and amenities. Limited parking is part and parcel of sprawl-reduction. It shouldn't just be amusement parks and universities that restrict parking/driving and ensure adequate transit availability. Municipalities and communities can do it too. Why not?
You say majoritarianism like it is a bad thing. Please explain a better way of spending tax money. Dictatorship?
Popular democracy is based on the idea that people will reason with each other and agree on reasonable policies. It is not supposed to be a means of building up the power of one team against others and forcing the majority will on everyone just because they can outvote minorities.
If majoritarian automotivism continues to avert growth of public transit and bike commuting as transportation options, cities are going to keep getting worse, I challenge anyone to produce a model of a driving-dependent area whose population can expand sustainably without it eventually resulting in congestion, diminished quality of life, and people moving to other areas because commuting grows too time-consuming and tedious.
The dream of sustainable automotivism hinges on population growth leveling off and even then sprawl alienates people from the natural activities of walking and biking around to accomplish mundane life activities. There's a documentary on youtube made in the 1950s by the auto industry celebrating the achievement of 1 car for every 3 citizens, and there were only 50million citizens. That might have been a sustainable and pleasant model but population grew, the car population grew to more than 1 for every 1 person. The roads grew, parking lots grew, highways grew, inner cities become blighted areas of high motor-traffic. Growth turned out to be unsustainable.
If the population would have grown through bike commuting and transit and the number of cars, parking, highways, road lanes, etc. remained about the same, would the prospect of future growth be as bleak and disturbing as it is today?