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You’re missing some intangibles that don’t allow for that calculation with the density you’ve got.
People spend money on cars because it’s more convenient. You wouldn’t get the same amount of money out of a less convenient option, even if it’s more “efficient” overall. You can’t(or rather shouldn’t) have sex with your high school date in the back of the bus.
What about long distance travel? Bus service between towns would be needed too, and at high frequency in order to make up for the lack of cars. It currently takes me 2.5 hours to drive to my in-laws place. On a bus it’s a 4-5 hour trip because of bus switching at key cities in between. Additional frequency doesn’t even fix that. Density would, because then there would be high speed trains between population centers (like in Japan)
Another big one is shopping, a family can’t grocery shop by bus unless they’re doing it multiple times per week to make each shop smaller. This problem is solved by density, where’s there’s a grocery store within a couple of blocks of every house like what I had in Japan, but doesn’t work when you need 15 minutes on a bus to get to the store.
It also doesn’t account for peak commuting. If you have 60% of your population all needing to travel in a one hour period each morning and afternoon, all moving in a single direction, when your bus routes are 30-60 minutes long, you end up with a lot of problems of needing to over-buy busses and over-hire drivers who aren’t needed outside two single runs each day and which are separated by 7-8 hours. A car doesn’t mind sitting there unused and unpaid all day.
These problems don’t exist with autonomous vehicles.
My bigger point is that the density required for busses (and therefore trams, regional, and high speed rail) is way, way, lower than Canadians and Americans think it is.
People spend money on cars because it’s more convenient
Correct, and cars are mostly more convenient because of the lack of transit options.
You can’t(or rather shouldn’t) have sex with your high school date in the back of the bus.
Just have sex in your house? Car sex is awkward and ungainly anyways.
What about long distance travel?
Trains.
Another big one is shopping, a family can’t grocery shop by bus unless they’re doing it multiple times per week to make each shop smaller
Shop every day, or have it delivered. Also, assuming 1.2 pers per car, we get 6 people per bus. Lots of space for your stuff!
It also doesn’t account for peak commuting
Correct, I gave the number of bus services averaged over the year, these can obviously be adjusted to each services points real requirements.
needing to over-buy busses and over-hire drivers who aren’t needed outside two single runs each day and which are separated by 7-8 hours
Busses, yes. Drivers? Split the shifts to cover the two commuting peaks, cross-train with light maintenance. Non-driving is wrenching, cleaning, and admin. Frankly I think finding sufficient drivers is a bigger problem.
These problems don’t exist with autonomous vehicles.
Cars are not more convenient simply because of a lack of transit options. This is a massive misconception. Even in Japan (Osaka) where I lived with some of the best transit infrastructure in the world it was still less convenient than driving for everything except commuting. No matter how frequently bus or train services exist, there will be a need for connections, for carrying bags, and for dealing with others that do not exist in a dedicated personal vehicle.
As for Sex, it isn’t adults who own a home that are the primary group banging in the back of cars. It’s teenagers and young adults who need more privacy than their home options allow for. You’ve missed the point here that a car is a private(ish) space that people use for non-driving related tasks.
Long distance travel even with trains doesn’t make sense either. Even if there was a train from where I live to the town my in-laws live in, it would still take longer and be more hassle (see luggage) than driving. It’s also not cheap. The bullet trains I took multiple times in Japan (again, pretty much the best transit system country in existence) were hundreds of dollars per ticket to go 500 kilometers. For a family, hopping in the car and driving is going to be a hundred dollars in gas and that’s it. Trains are great for high capacity links, but again we lack the density to make these viable even if we ripped out all of the cars. There’s probably only a few hundred people a day going from my City to the City where my in-laws live, even hourly service would only see a handful of people per entire train.
Shop every day using a bus… now you’re just getting silly. I live in a rural area, by bus it takes 15 minutes to get to the store, even if my bus was 2 minutes frequency, I’d still be spending an hour a day doing the shopping. Nobody has time for that shit unless it’s literally a 4 minute walk from your house.
The peak commuting problem is a lot bigger than you think, finding drivers willing to split shifts is very unlikely unless you pay them FAR more than they currently make. Suggesting they do maintenance/cleaning during the day is hilariously out of touch with what busses need in terms of maintenance and cleaning.
Autonomous vehicles do have problems, no doubt, the question is whether they’re a better choice for the situation at hand.
The question was “what is the minimum density for viable transit”
The dirty economic answer is 106 houses per mi^2.
Other arguments for and against transit are valid in their own right, but obviously require analysis based on individual situations. I don’t have the modeling capacity to cover every house everywhere.
Cars don’t cost “some money in gas” that’s an incremental cost. They cost $8,700 per year to the individual, about $14,000 to the state, plus uncaptured medical, climate, and social costs.
My baseline point isn’t that we can magic cars away tomorrow, my point is that “too rural to transit” means actual rural, not suburban, even the least dense.
Also, your culture may need to reconsider priorities if teenagers aren’t able to fuck safely in their home, and require and insecure third place, increasing risks.
The economic answer doesn’t account for individual experience and desires.
It would be economically efficient to remove meat from everyone’s diet and make them vegetarian. Massive cost, land, and emissions savings. It’s simply not something people want.
Even Japan hasn’t given up cars despite the incredible transit system, they have around 590 cars per 1000 people, the US is at around 800 per 1000 people. Even if you only look at Tokyo, it’s 300 per 1000 people (comparable to New York)
As for the sex thing, it’s not a safety problem, it’s a privacy problem. Japan solves this issues with dedicated sex hotels (called Love Hotels) that can be rented by the hour and have extra privacy provisions for coming and going.
I want to see car use reduced, but I’m not walking 100 meters to the bus stop, for a 15 minute bus ride to the nearest train station, for a 20 minute train ride to the city, for another 10 minute bus ride to my work place, with a 5 minute wait on each of those for the transfers. I can drive there in 50 minutes even in rush hour traffic, and it’s only 35 minutes when things are clear. Luckily I only commute 1 day a week.
For my situation, a personal autonomous vehicle is the superior option. Or even perhaps a neighborhood dedicated taxi for the commute in, supporting 2-3 people’s commute based on time and destination.
In your case this issue is that transit takes twice as long as driving. That sounds like a transit design failure.
I’m aware that transit has challenges in rural areas, but that’s a small portion of transit.
The primary point I’m trying (and clearly failing) to get across, is that the North American lie that suburbs arent dense enough to have any transit. As we seem to be agreeing, a large share of somewhere even as low as 6 acres houses can work. Therefore that “standard” 1/4 acre lots that are all over the bloody place are more than dense enough for transit.
There also dense enough for businesses too, but that another argument.
It sounds like a road issue to me. There’s only one road the to local village from my house. One road between my village and the nearby city, and my work isn’t on that direct line. Nothing can be done about any of those short of a personal bus line just for my house, which is normally called a taxi.
I live in an area with only slightly larger than quarter acre lots, less than a half acre each.
So your neighborhood is somewhere in the 1200-2500 houses / mi^2 ? But it’s a ~15 min drive to the village for any shopping? Perhaps a lack of goods and services for your neighborhood is the more important issue.
I’m also not clear on how the train from the village to the city is slower than driving. Is it just a very slow train?
Edit: US units are confusing, my initial density figures were way off. 640 acres to a mi^2
My neighbourhood is on a lake, so while the properties are small, they only exist as a strip along the water and a block out from that. We are surrounded by mountains which make building further difficult.
I think there’s around 2000 people around the whole lake, and it takes 15 minutes to drive from top to bottom.
I live on the other side of a mountain from the city, the train we had (it doesn’t run anymore) was definitely slower than cars. It also would have to stop multiple times once it got to the suburbs of the city to pick up or drop off people.
You’re missing some intangibles that don’t allow for that calculation with the density you’ve got.
People spend money on cars because it’s more convenient. You wouldn’t get the same amount of money out of a less convenient option, even if it’s more “efficient” overall. You can’t(or rather shouldn’t) have sex with your high school date in the back of the bus.
What about long distance travel? Bus service between towns would be needed too, and at high frequency in order to make up for the lack of cars. It currently takes me 2.5 hours to drive to my in-laws place. On a bus it’s a 4-5 hour trip because of bus switching at key cities in between. Additional frequency doesn’t even fix that. Density would, because then there would be high speed trains between population centers (like in Japan)
Another big one is shopping, a family can’t grocery shop by bus unless they’re doing it multiple times per week to make each shop smaller. This problem is solved by density, where’s there’s a grocery store within a couple of blocks of every house like what I had in Japan, but doesn’t work when you need 15 minutes on a bus to get to the store.
It also doesn’t account for peak commuting. If you have 60% of your population all needing to travel in a one hour period each morning and afternoon, all moving in a single direction, when your bus routes are 30-60 minutes long, you end up with a lot of problems of needing to over-buy busses and over-hire drivers who aren’t needed outside two single runs each day and which are separated by 7-8 hours. A car doesn’t mind sitting there unused and unpaid all day.
These problems don’t exist with autonomous vehicles.
My bigger point is that the density required for busses (and therefore trams, regional, and high speed rail) is way, way, lower than Canadians and Americans think it is.
Correct, and cars are mostly more convenient because of the lack of transit options.
Just have sex in your house? Car sex is awkward and ungainly anyways.
Trains.
Shop every day, or have it delivered. Also, assuming 1.2 pers per car, we get 6 people per bus. Lots of space for your stuff!
Correct, I gave the number of bus services averaged over the year, these can obviously be adjusted to each services points real requirements.
Busses, yes. Drivers? Split the shifts to cover the two commuting peaks, cross-train with light maintenance. Non-driving is wrenching, cleaning, and admin. Frankly I think finding sufficient drivers is a bigger problem.
Different problems though.
Cars are not more convenient simply because of a lack of transit options. This is a massive misconception. Even in Japan (Osaka) where I lived with some of the best transit infrastructure in the world it was still less convenient than driving for everything except commuting. No matter how frequently bus or train services exist, there will be a need for connections, for carrying bags, and for dealing with others that do not exist in a dedicated personal vehicle.
As for Sex, it isn’t adults who own a home that are the primary group banging in the back of cars. It’s teenagers and young adults who need more privacy than their home options allow for. You’ve missed the point here that a car is a private(ish) space that people use for non-driving related tasks.
Long distance travel even with trains doesn’t make sense either. Even if there was a train from where I live to the town my in-laws live in, it would still take longer and be more hassle (see luggage) than driving. It’s also not cheap. The bullet trains I took multiple times in Japan (again, pretty much the best transit system country in existence) were hundreds of dollars per ticket to go 500 kilometers. For a family, hopping in the car and driving is going to be a hundred dollars in gas and that’s it. Trains are great for high capacity links, but again we lack the density to make these viable even if we ripped out all of the cars. There’s probably only a few hundred people a day going from my City to the City where my in-laws live, even hourly service would only see a handful of people per entire train.
Shop every day using a bus… now you’re just getting silly. I live in a rural area, by bus it takes 15 minutes to get to the store, even if my bus was 2 minutes frequency, I’d still be spending an hour a day doing the shopping. Nobody has time for that shit unless it’s literally a 4 minute walk from your house.
The peak commuting problem is a lot bigger than you think, finding drivers willing to split shifts is very unlikely unless you pay them FAR more than they currently make. Suggesting they do maintenance/cleaning during the day is hilariously out of touch with what busses need in terms of maintenance and cleaning.
Autonomous vehicles do have problems, no doubt, the question is whether they’re a better choice for the situation at hand.
The question was “what is the minimum density for viable transit”
The dirty economic answer is 106 houses per mi^2.
Other arguments for and against transit are valid in their own right, but obviously require analysis based on individual situations. I don’t have the modeling capacity to cover every house everywhere.
Cars don’t cost “some money in gas” that’s an incremental cost. They cost $8,700 per year to the individual, about $14,000 to the state, plus uncaptured medical, climate, and social costs.
My baseline point isn’t that we can magic cars away tomorrow, my point is that “too rural to transit” means actual rural, not suburban, even the least dense.
Also, your culture may need to reconsider priorities if teenagers aren’t able to fuck safely in their home, and require and insecure third place, increasing risks.
The economic answer doesn’t account for individual experience and desires. It would be economically efficient to remove meat from everyone’s diet and make them vegetarian. Massive cost, land, and emissions savings. It’s simply not something people want.
Even Japan hasn’t given up cars despite the incredible transit system, they have around 590 cars per 1000 people, the US is at around 800 per 1000 people. Even if you only look at Tokyo, it’s 300 per 1000 people (comparable to New York)
As for the sex thing, it’s not a safety problem, it’s a privacy problem. Japan solves this issues with dedicated sex hotels (called Love Hotels) that can be rented by the hour and have extra privacy provisions for coming and going.
I want to see car use reduced, but I’m not walking 100 meters to the bus stop, for a 15 minute bus ride to the nearest train station, for a 20 minute train ride to the city, for another 10 minute bus ride to my work place, with a 5 minute wait on each of those for the transfers. I can drive there in 50 minutes even in rush hour traffic, and it’s only 35 minutes when things are clear. Luckily I only commute 1 day a week.
For my situation, a personal autonomous vehicle is the superior option. Or even perhaps a neighborhood dedicated taxi for the commute in, supporting 2-3 people’s commute based on time and destination.
In your case this issue is that transit takes twice as long as driving. That sounds like a transit design failure.
I’m aware that transit has challenges in rural areas, but that’s a small portion of transit.
The primary point I’m trying (and clearly failing) to get across, is that the North American lie that suburbs arent dense enough to have any transit. As we seem to be agreeing, a large share of somewhere even as low as 6 acres houses can work. Therefore that “standard” 1/4 acre lots that are all over the bloody place are more than dense enough for transit.
There also dense enough for businesses too, but that another argument.
It sounds like a road issue to me. There’s only one road the to local village from my house. One road between my village and the nearby city, and my work isn’t on that direct line. Nothing can be done about any of those short of a personal bus line just for my house, which is normally called a taxi.
I live in an area with only slightly larger than quarter acre lots, less than a half acre each.
So your neighborhood is somewhere in the 1200-2500 houses / mi^2 ? But it’s a ~15 min drive to the village for any shopping? Perhaps a lack of goods and services for your neighborhood is the more important issue.
I’m also not clear on how the train from the village to the city is slower than driving. Is it just a very slow train?
Edit: US units are confusing, my initial density figures were way off. 640 acres to a mi^2
My neighbourhood is on a lake, so while the properties are small, they only exist as a strip along the water and a block out from that. We are surrounded by mountains which make building further difficult.
I think there’s around 2000 people around the whole lake, and it takes 15 minutes to drive from top to bottom.
I live on the other side of a mountain from the city, the train we had (it doesn’t run anymore) was definitely slower than cars. It also would have to stop multiple times once it got to the suburbs of the city to pick up or drop off people.