Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

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The induced demand memes always show the crazy west coast mega highways.

Meanwhile east coasters have roughly the same HOV-less, 2-3 lane highway infra in the suburbs that we had 50 years ago when the population in some areas was 1/2 of what it is today. Worse yet, we also have roughly the same transit infra we did then too.

You can tax cars/roads, you can make trains free, but at the end of the day.. you need to build SOMETHING. If you want your economy to grow as your population grows, you need to grow your infra. It's a sorry state in the NYC metro area because we are not.

You can't just keep slicing up the existing infra pie differently, you need to grow the pie. Otherwise you are just reallocating winners & losers, and unlikely to make the overall situation any better.

Thinking we will simply increase the pain of driving until the existing state of trains is tolerable is idiotic, but I see plenty of this in the alt-transit movement. Make trains great, make them awesome, make me want to take them.. make me regret having to drive when I do!!

> You can't just keep slicing up the existing infra pie differently, you need to grow the pie.

Converting 1 out of every 4 or 8 lanes on dense cities to be bus only would decrease the number of cars that can be physically on the road, but increase the throughput of people, as buses do scale much better than single occupancy cars.

Well, as long as you have actual buses running on that strip, with trips that aren't much slower than cars, with ticket prices that are smaller than the cost of a car, and going from and to the places people want to go.

In my experience, governing bodies that use terms like "induced demand" have a high probability on failing to provide those details. But will still want to take the capacity down.

Yup. I live on a street that was recently de-car'd.

They didn't add a bus, light rail, trolley, or anything. They kept all the parking. But they painted cute little two way bike lanes. It's a regular pedestrian promenade. Surely increases the value of my condo.

Nor did they allocate reasonable pickup/dropoff taxi zones or delivery loading/unloading, so its a giant mess of double parking and people improvising.

Also makes literally zero trips for me faster, and most of them slower. And all the traffic has spilled over onto adjacent streets creating worse traffic.

Painting new lines is always cheaper and easier than actually building infrastructure, and the politician who decided on the new lines can say he's Doing Something™. Even if it's just virtue signaling and doesn't actually help, it's enough to fool voters.

Right, so my 3 block radius has added about 3000 new units in the last 5 years (great) and all we've done to improve transit is.. remove a road (not great).

Agreed, we absolutely should put in real express bus lanes, and enforce them vigorously.

But even this is "building" for a very low bar/definition of building. You need to actually create new bus routes, paint lanes, put up new signage, add cameras for enforcement, coordinate with NYPD to ticket, etc.

Even this simple example of "building" is something the city seems paralyzed and unable to accomplish outside of what.. 14th st?

We don't NEED to build something. Maybe NYC is big enough and people need to consider going elsewhere with better policies. We need to stop this narrative that growth must continue indefinitely.

Those people don't cease to exist if they're not in NYC, you realize?

If they're not there, they're probably somewhere more sprawly, that uses more energy and cuts more space out of the environment.

Then why do the policies of NYC not match that perspective? I wish everyone would move to NYC personally but there doesn't seem to be any movement to improve the city itself. I don't think you have to build more roads or trains to build more and taller in NYC itself instead of pushing the problem outward.

Because NIMBYism is part of the cultural momentum within America as a whole.

There's a lot of well-intentioned regulations that had the cumulative effect of making it really hard to build things, and people have gotten used to this. Many even feel entitled to randomly stop new construction for whatever reason they feel like, and many planning boards are all too happy to go along with them.

The people who suffer most from not enough new housing, after all, are potential residents, and potential residents can't vote.

But the parent wants to build roads in the same place? I get the NIMBYism but building roads and trains is going to have the same exact problem from NIMBYists.

This guy gets it

A lot of NIMBYs seem to lack object permanence.

If dastardly "newcomers" have to move elsewhere, they chalk that up as a victory for degrowth, as if those people poof out of existence as soon as they leave the metro area.

I am not for degrowth though. I am for densification. Make the city larger and more compact instead of bussing and training more people in from the sprawl. Build more and taller and for more people than what is being done.

> We don't NEED to build something.

How do you make cities denser, larger, and more compact without.. building things?

I was replying to your desire for more roads and transit into the metro. Upscaling the existing low density closer in the city itself would be far cheaper if the barriers were removed.

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