Comment by jerven | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerven | Hacker News Reader

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I would like to state that good bike lanes and trains also have induced demand. The Netherlands and Switzerland, have demand for more of both (as well as more demand for car lanes as well)

It is just that trains and bikes are much more efficient in terms of land use.

The 3 lane road in front of my house is "good" for 16,000 cars a day. The 2 lane train line a 5 minutes walk from my house is "good" for 120,000 passengers a day. A train line can carry about 10x the traffic of a car lane (in practice) with similar ground usage.

So when a train system has more demand/use than expected (e.g. leman express in the geneva region) there are more options to increase throughput (in the leman express case double level trains) that require less new infrastructure to be build.

When new infrastructure is required, limitations of space mean that a 15 year period from plan to implementation is normal. Which means infrastructure which has more head-room is preferred over quickly saturated ones.

To add the adding of one lane to the A1 for 18KM costs half the total of the leman express infrastructure. But has significantly less benefits in total transit capacity.

> The 2 lane train line a 5 minutes walk from my house is "good" for 120,000 passengers a day.

But that's not true. Your chances of living within 5 minutes of a train stations are slim, unless train stations are spammed everywhere. And if stations are spammed everywhere, then they become inefficient.

Meanwhile, cars are only mildly affected by additional 400-500 meters of distance.

There's a great resource: https://www.geoapify.com/isoline-api/ - it shows isochrones for different commute methods.

> A train line can carry about 10x the traffic of a car lane (in practice) with similar ground usage.

In practice, a train line effectively is only slightly better than cars, unless you enshittify your city into a Manhattan-style dense hell.

Moreover, self-driving cars with mild carpooling (think 4-6 people per vehicle) blow ANY transit mode out of the water in speed and efficiency. It's not even close. A good approximation of this are airport pickup vans (the ones that you arrange in advance).

> To add the adding of one lane to the A1 for 18KM costs half the total of the leman express infrastructure. But has significantly less benefits in total transit capacity.

Yeah. Imagine that instead of wasting money on useless transit (see: Seattle ST3), we used them to incentivize companies to build more offices outside of dense city cores.

Then these lanes wouldn't even be necessary!

Or, you know, DO put offices in dense city cores, say within 5-15 minutes of a train station. (that or telecommute). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXB0CY2tSQ

And, a lot more stations are within say a 15 minute reach if you use a bike O:-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UxCbmT9elk

> Or, you know, DO put offices in dense city cores

And then what? How do you get there?

Your time budget is 30 minutes (the average commute in the US). Go on, try to play around.

> that or telecommute

Yes. But if you telecommute, then why bother with all those trains and dense offices?

> And, a lot more stations are within say a 15 minute reach if you use a bike O:-)

That's already too much for commutes and will result in commutes inferior to the current status quo in the US.

Not much different from average commute in a lot of places TBQH. Though definitely not in big-city-traffic. If you’ve ever seen bumper-to-bumper queues in LA or Manhattan, you know there’s no way those folks are getting anywhere in the next eternity or two. That kind of gridlock pushes up the average for everyone else.

Of course I do have a slightly different set of requirements; since I've always lived out in the countryside. You trade in a longer commute for more elbow-room at home.

The trains generally run on time, so that's what I often used to use if I needed to get into a dense town.

That was before COVID. Post-COVID, telecommuting has become available to more people. In my opinion, that's the best solution where possible.

At the very least telecommuting and trains gets the OTHER cars off the road when I need to physically be at factories, labs, or workshops.

> Not much different from average commute in a lot of places TBQH. Though definitely not in big-city-traffic.

The commutes in large cities (New York is a bit more nuanced) in the US are still faster than in _any_ large European city. Mostly because of cars.

> Of course I do have a slightly different set of requirements; since I've always lived out in the countryside. You trade in a longer commute for more elbow-room at home.

My favorite city from the urban design standpoint is Houston (I hate its climate and Texas that surrounds it). People there can have beautiful and spacious single-family houses with backyards, and yet still have short commutes because it doesn't have a well-defined city core.

So it lacks the obvious traffic magnets, and people tend to chose jobs near their housing. This is the model that needs to be promoted, and it can solve housing issues.

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