Dubai is a car dependent hellhole that exploits guest workers slaves. They’ve only got metro because it’s cool to have some and some people aren’t allowed to drive and you sort of have to pretend that you’re giving fair options to people who don’t drive.
Your average SUV or pickup truck is deadly enough. Also the so-called self-driving vehicles that aren’t really autonomous are deathtraps and lethal to third parties, like children that one can’t see while sitting in a 2024 Ford F-150.
Yep, actually in a city setting there are scenarios where walking has got better throughput rates than car traffic…
Probably part of the problem is where they make you walk, or that nobody actually plans for safe nor comfortable walking anywhere.
Apart from the time when they don’t.
Let me take this apart: “Nobody except for a select few hyper-fit nutjobs are ever going to walk even so much as an 1/8th of that images span for anything.” What’s the span in the image? Maybe a mile? Two? Come on! IF the surroundings aren’t noisy and are pleasant a normal average human of the planet earth is capable and willing to walk about 2-5 miles a day. In civilized countries you also have multiple options, it’s not just “suffer and walk” or “sit in a car and bang your head on the steering wheel”. Just the option to walk to most places where you need to go actually gets rid of some of the traffic that causes congestion. And the highway intersection hellscape depicted only serves the people who have no other option than to drive everywhere. It’s a prison.
“The area is far too large to want to walk, so we use it for transit instead.” No, it’s not.
“Forget that it transports millions of people, products, goods, etc.” You know there are better ways to do this than building an eversprawling city with highways cutting right through it. Highways are among some of the most inefficient ways of transporting goods and people. They cause noise and pollution. Everyone wants to live as far away from one as is convenient. Not that these human errors aren’t to be found everywhere in the world, it’s just that it’s only in the North America where this is more prominent than elsewhere.
“They want it to house hundreds of people instead.” You just looked at a picture where you have an area in Italy, similar in size to a highway knot in Texas that houses 30k people and you fail to understand what you just saw. 🤦♂️
“People who will then not be able to get those products and goods, because…they fuckin’ ripped the road out!” I can’t even… 🤦♂️
…and even though it’s next to industrial zone, this is what downtown Houston actually looks like on a map. Numerous square miles of space just for “letting traffic through”. The bill on the upkeep of this kind of wasteful infrastructure must be much more than what it costs to provide housing for all the homeless people in the county!
This is not really outside the city though
Soviet Union was bad for multiple reasons but in major cities the housing was not really any worse than anywhere else in the world. I guess you just enjoy spending 3 hours a day in your car.
Fair point. Also a way of classification that I completely omitted inside my mind during previous days.
Also how swirly is the bus route you’d replace by tram, light rail or whatever?
I would argue they’re not equal. Bus makes a bad replacement for a tram and tram can’t really replace the bus if there are no tracks. The reason why I was asking is because Essen and Mühlheim a.d. Ruhr plus some nearby areas have got sections where trams aren’t confined to just the populated areas and do not have many stops and outside the city core they aren’t Stadtbahn, but are that and much more outside the urban areas, act part of the way like the good old Strassenbahn but are marked as Stadtbahn. I guess I don’t really have a point here, just rambling. But really there’s big difference between what you can offer on rails (if you don’t make stupid planning decisions and your system isn’t falling into disrepair) and by buses. Yes, they’re comparable mostly in the way that they’re both moving dozens of people per unit. In everything else, how comparable are they?
I was referring to the numerous options that exist alongside the said rail option in most real world places. But yes, most of the time the bus is the worse option of them two. Less accessible, economical etc.
This video is so full of American stereotypes about transit and bad examples of what is considered improvement because you’re having 10k instead of 3k riders per day in a city with an urban area of more than 600k people?! I think you could have a pretty sensible network that better serves people with the money poured in the UVX. The initial cost of the BRT is higher than that of light rail but with 10k riders per day do you even need a BRT? BRT also is not direct replacement for the tram or light rail, it doesn’t offer the same capacity and ride comfort. Also the queue jumps mentioned in the video are potentially lethal to cyclists.
With good planning of infrastucture this is less of a problem. I say this as someone who’s suffered minor head injury and minor TBI because of the mentioned problem. Only reason for this was I was obeying the law in a place where the only legal place to cycle was in this case the most dangerous one too, and where I had cycled numerous times before without an incident. Now it luckily has a separate path for cyclists, and soon the tram tracks are located in a place where you’d have to do mad stunts to “get into the groove” (no pun intended).
Short answer: no.
You can charge electric buses at termini though. Albeit this doesn’t change the challenges much. The electric buses are best suited for lines where the higher capacity isn’t needed and where the line is not likely to be longer than a little over 15 km.
You wouldn’t even have to go for the “replacing the S-Bahn” to show how ludicrous a BRT is as a suggestion, unless you’re not paying the constructors and drivers a living wage, which is why it makes sense in say Colombia and not in Germany…just think about replacing the M-lines of Berlin tramways with a BRT. It would have to be couple meters wider, would be terribly unreliable and inefficient, not to speak of noisy and bumpy. Now who would want to have that? Not to mention how much the upkeep of two lanes of dedicated BRT costs vs. maintenance of steel on steel rails and catenary. (Most of the time you’d find the latter to be cheaper.) In Helsinki, Finland we are currently waiting for a new tram/light rail option to replace a bus service that should have been a modern tram/light rail line in the first place: https://raidejokeri.info/en/ In the neighbour municipality Vantaa some parties were trying to push for a BRT option but the independent research suggested light rail/tram option to be the best and this is what was chosen: https://www.vantaa.fi/en/housing-and-environment/traffic-and-transport/vantaa-light-rail (they call it light rail but in some ways it’s also reasonable to call it a tram)
This is a common misbelief. Trams and light rail usually have points where the units can go around if one unit has derailed, unless the unit has tipped over, which in itself is very very rare. Good planning is crucial. “A better solution uses corridors dedicated to buses that are electric powered.” Nope, nope, nope. You have to present arguments to this claim, maybe then I can be bothered to counterargument such nonsense.
The point was that in total you probably spend more time in your car than any sane average European would, because you lack options. And because you lack options it’s a hellscape for anyone who can’t drive a car. The point wasn’t your commute, because your commute probably doesn’t represent the median. Also good for you. My commute is also irrelevant, but it’s five minutes walk to a train, ten minutes by train and five minutes walk from the train to the office, all that in an environment where I don’t fear for my life, the noise level permits me to whisper to other people without them having difficulties hearing me.