What about a bus?
Comment on Well done, all of you!
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 3 weeks agoI’ve got a solution. It’s called a train.
CanadianCarl@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 3 weeks ago
Buses are awesome too!
But I think any bus route that runs for more than 5 years should just be replaced with a tram at that point, because trams are even better. Buses are great for temporary changes to routes, but they can’t beat trams for efficiency or convenience.
CanadianCarl@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
My city doesn’t think long term investment. Our bus routes change every few years also, because of construction or other reasons.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Take that Centralizationist attitude back to Reddit.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 3 weeks ago
I think you deserve more freedoms. Right now you’ve got a car as your option, and if you’re lucky you can walk or bike to work. I want you to have your choice of bus, train, or tram to get to work. I want all three to be available to get you there in a reasonable time. The train goes faster, but you have to walk a bit farther to the station, so it’s good for exercise. The tram is slower, but you get to see the city as you go along and it’s very disability friendly thanks to level boarding. The bus goes along the lower traffic routes, it’s more direct but comes less often. I want you to have all three of those options, plus what you already have. And then you don’t have to risk your life or road rage. You can play Mario on your Nintendo while the train takes you home from work.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
That’s a lot of infrastructure. Seems like it would require an exorbitant population density to support all that.
Why are we stacking everyone on top of each other? Every person, urban or rural, needs 2 acres of cropland to sustainably provide their food. That’s 320 people per square mile of agricultural land.
Why are we cramming 25,000 people into a square mile of urban blight? Why not spread out enough that we aren’t all huffing each other’s farts?
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 weeks ago
When you spread people out, you have to build more water and gas pipes, more internet cables, more roads, deliver things farther, send the garbage trucks farther, the post, the news… It all adds up to a LOT of money. Strong Towns is a financial consultancy organisation that helps cities get out of debt, and they keep finding the same pattern, very consistently, in American cities: The urban core generates tons of revenue for the city, and then the suburbs spend it all. The suburbs are making American cities broke, because they just cost way more to maintain than the residents are paying in taxes. The city is subsidising the suburbs.
America’s “welfare queens” are the people living in detached single family homes in cul-de-sacs and making 100,000 a year. If cities charged those welfare queens a fair amount of taxes, they’d all be broke and try to move into the urban core, and the housing problems would get even worse for poor people. So cities are stuck propping up a failed economic housing model while trying to figure a way out of the crisis.
The answer that Strong Towns keeps finding is to invest more money in medium density mixed use neighbourhoods. The kind of place where you can live down the road from your office and walk there on a nice day, or take a leisurely stroll to the tram station for a day trip into the city. Those wonderful neighbourhoods full of trees, which are quiet because there are less cars, where kids can ride their bikes to school in safety, are economic powerhouses. Those neighbourhoods make more tax dollars than they spend. And I think you deserve to live somewhere like that.
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
If you think that’s a lot of infrastructure, wait until you learn how huge roads are.
WhoIzDisIz@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Works really well when the nearest station is over a dozen miles away from your home, and you’ve got a full load of shopping bags with you.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 3 weeks ago
I’ve got a solution for that one too. It’s called a train station. We need to build more of them.
WhoIzDisIz@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Who needs the actual railways, amirite?
VibeSurgeon@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
It boggles the mind that Americans cannot figure out any other way to buy groceries than by using a car.
I cover all of our shopping needs comfortably with a bike along with walking to the closest store.
The problem is that you’ve fundamentally fucked up your built environment, and trying to paper over your failure with car apologia is just not going to cut it