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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

This would seem to contradict the finding that lower commute times are associated with overall happiness [0, not the best link but there are many].

Slowing down a metro area by, say, forcing a modal shift towards bicycles will not make conveniently located housing any cheaper. If anything, it'll be more desirable and therefore more expensive. Absent a change in housing spend, commute times will rise and free time will sink.

EDIT: I'll add that while I don't live far from work for a bigger yard, I do live far from work so I can have my own apartment, instead of roommates. Having lived both with roommates and without, I'm confident I really am happier this way.

[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-rese...

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> This would seem to contradict the finding that lower commute times are associated with overall happiness

Not at all! Happiness _is_ correlated to shorter door-to-door time, but higher speed does not equate to shorter times if the distance grows as well. From the article:

> We have a strong hunch as to why traveling faster might not generate more satisfaction with the transportation system. Faster travel is often correlated with lower density, and longer travel distances to common destinations, such as workplaces, schools and stores.

> Not at all! Happiness _is_ correlated to shorter door-to-door time, but higher speed does not equate to shorter times if the distance grows as well.

Exactly! This is also related to the The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: building new roads just allows people drive more. (See Duranton and Turner.)

You can view this as an equilibrium. People will prefer uncongested roads until they become congested.

Surprising, yet simple when it's pointed out.

> building new roads just allows people drive more.

Not only that: it allows more people to drive.

I'm not the first to say this: people will choose to drive into congested agglomeration as long as the alternative (public transport) yields a longer door-to-door time.

Different regions have dramatically different average commute times which don't directly correlate with population. Thus disproving your point.

Insufficient roads, poor zoning, etc all add up into a complex whole. But, roads reduce the value of some peoples property which is why you get such strong opposition.

PS: Importantly, congestion has a cost not just for the average commute but the number of hours in the day that are congested.

> Different regions have dramatically different average commute times which don't directly correlate with population. Thus disproving your point.

Average commute time is not the desired metric here, see Duranton and Turner[1].

[1]: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Matthew_T...

Road miles driven has utility, but there feedback effects which make it a poor long term measure. Duranton and Turner have a biased view of the situation as which does not map to economic, social, or even environmental utility.

Sure, but in context this is an argument for, "see, we should slow cities down, because you'll be equally happy."

It's easy to move farther out in response to faster travel. Low housing prices in the outer suburbs with reasonable commutes attract people to a city. How are people going to move closer in if fast travel is eliminated? Should the people who can only afford the outer suburbs just leave?

It seems like the whole study is missing the point. The question is whether people in New York would be happier if their system was faster, not if they'd be happier if they moved to St Louis.

Basically the study finds that trains go faster if there's a larger gap between stops. Not really that interesting a result. It then has a headline that implies a causal relationship where clearly none exists.

No metro area is slowed down by bicycles. The longest a commute can be practical by bicycle (by practical I mean for the average, street/work clothes wearing person riding nearly every day) is under ten miles. You're still in the heavily congested car travel radius of any metro at that distance anyway, and bicycle traffic does not impede motor traffic what so ever.

Bicycles don't slow drivers down. Removal of parking infrastructure, with the intention of getting people to switch from cars to bicycles, slows people down.

I have a 6 mile/10 minute freeway haul to the last suburban train station on the way to work, then 20 minutes on the train. They've announced a plan to demolish the parking lot at that station and build offices, with the intention that people like me switch to bicycles. There are good reasons to do this, but I think it's absurd to suggest that we'll be equally happy with ~40 minutes added to our daily roundtrip.

There are some good arguments. BART will make money from those offices, meaning it needs to ask for less from the taxpayer. There will be fewer traffic accidents near the station, and less polluted air (though the real air pollution problem there is urine). I merely argue that the happiness of the reluctant bicyclists isn't one of them.

> meaning it needs to ask for less from the taxpayer

Or they could align their charges to their costs, and have the users pay for the service.

Do things play out that way though? Every time you raise prices, fewer people use it, resulting in requiring another price increase. Demand for public transit is actually pretty price-sensitive. Look at what's currently going on with the New York subway system, for instance.

Now, consider the case where the current prices could actually cover costs if utilization was high enough. (I don't know if that's true for BART, but it's certainly possible for a public transit system.) Wouldn't it make much more sense to increase ridership than prices?

This strategy is hardly unique to publicly-funded projects. Lots of businesses sell a new product at a loss, expecting to grow their sales of it until they can use economies of scale to make the product profitable.

A policy of naively basing prices solely on recent demand and current costs misses a lot of possibilities. It's very worth considering how increased demand changes economies and pricing with a long-term plan in mind.

> Wouldn't it make much more sense to increase ridership than prices?

In peak hours, BART seems pretty close to capacity. My favorite is that while fewer people travel south of the city, rather than east, because of all the "back-trackers" looking for seats (but adding 10 minutes to their commute), even the other direction is pretty crowded.

In order for it to work, they would have to eliminate subsidies to alternate forms of transportation, like private cars. Once all costs are properly aligned and not externalized, it should work fairly well.

All the giant surface parking lots around BART and Caltrain stations are a ridiculous waste of prime real estate. If they got rid of the surface parking lots, narrowed nearby streets and eliminated most of the street parking, filled the 3-block radius with 3–6 story apartment buildings (ideally including a decent proportion of small studio and 1-bedroom apartments) with shops on the ground floor, and then let someone build a parking structure nearby, everyone would end up better off, especially “the taxpayer”.

That would be by far the best way to make a dent in the Bay Area housing shortage.

Agreed, but BART is no exception to the public's impassioned hatred of new market-rate housing construction.

What's proposed for these sites is mostly commercial, with a little bit of lottery housing for homeless seniors, at-risk veterans, etc. Market rate housing, if proposed, stalls out (see MacArthur).

Whether bikes slow down traffic is totally dependant on specifics. In a well-designed city they are no issue. But where they must share narrow lanes with cars, the cars must yield and that often means missed lights and slower speeds. Force a bike to ride up a bridge and everyone's commute then depends on that one biker's leg power.

(Happened to me yesturday when roadworks closed the bridge sidewalks. City didnt provide the shuttle vans they normally do in such circumstances and one biker decided to make a point. Or, more likely, the vans were there but he didnt want to wait.)

Did you time the delay?

Being in a car makes you feel like your drive gets 10x longer when stuff like this happens (whether it's a slow car or a slow bike), but the reality is that we're rarely stuck behind someone slow for more than a minute or two, and for that minute or two you're still only going maybe 30% slower at worst. In other words, it's mostly perception.

> No metro area is slowed down by bicycles.

Totally untrue. The DC area has plenty of two Lane roads whose speed limit is higher than the average bicyclist can maintain, with the predictable result that you'll have a line of cars being held up by a bicycle. It's especially bad on the Virginia side; many very pretty Virginia roads are virtually undrivable on nice days because of slow bikes.

Bicycles slow and impede pedestrian traffic, and more importantly, make it less safe.

Sometimes the transit quality matters. When there's traffic but we hit consecutive green lights, we don't go fast but it's smooth, there's not much break in flow, people don't rush and time feels good.

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