It really fucking sucks that the auto industry lobbied the US government so goddamn hard in the 30’s - 70’s and got so much of this country built on car centric infrastructure while also systemically dismantling countless forms of public transit nationwide too. Most major cities and metropolitan areas used to have a pretty comprehensive streetcar system, yet where are they now? That’s right, manufacturers like GM bought majority stakes in those companies and then had their infrastructure dismantled all in the name of “progress.”
As far as I’m aware, the only city in the western world that truly kept its pre-automobile streetcar network was Melbourne, Australia. A result is it today has the largest tram network of any city in the world.
It hurts my soul to imagine how basically every city in North America had similar networks, but they were almost completely annihilated, save for small fragments in a small handful of cities.
Technically Australia is east of the international date line so it’s not even really the western world.
Most of the people there are white so it counts as Western
I don’t understand this visualisation. Perhaps I’m lacking context. Anybody willing to do ELI5… maybe ELI15? What quantity is being compared and what are potential passengers?
The context is that they’re showing one metric among many and are hoping you’ll draw the conclusion they want: that cars are an inefficient way to travel. It’d be interesting to see distance and time metrics added. For example, while pedestrian capacity is pretty large, the distance travelled for any specific time period is short, so people aren’t walking somewhere 100 miles away.
Similarly, door-to-door travel time can vary a lot. Suburban commuter rail around here is fast, but you need to drive to the station (because suburbs are designed for cars), wait for a train, commute on the train, then find your way to your actual destination from the station you get off the train at, so that might include walking or public transit.
Obviously, any one of the options can make the most sense in a given situation, but the infographic isn’t trying to show that.
Yes, but context matters. Nobody is taking a train up the street to get groceries. And using a car (or a huge ass truck) for that is often overkill.
Bikes FTW!
No mention of motorbikes. Am sad.
Efficiency is not the objective. In fact, were all energy and materials used in making and powering cars from relatively renewable sources, it wouldn’t be a problem. I am aware they’re not. All else being equal, efficiency is a worthwhile goal. But the tradeoff for inefficiency here is the freedom to go where you want when you want.
There are places here in Europe, contrary to what some people in this community might claim, that simply cannot be accessed by train. Smaller villages and the like.
Access to a car is useful. Ownership might not be unless you live there. But cars have their place.
But cars have their place.
True. However with all the downsides of cars, they should be only the fallback if most other options don’t work. As it is, in many places, they are the highest priority that everything is planned around.
Yes. Agreed.
I don’t own a car and don’t want to, but I do rent one once in a while.
Unfortunately, I’m immunocompromised, so most of these options are too high risk.
There is always exceptions and in some areas, you have to have some cars. But removing most of the cars and replacing most of the 8 lanes of traffic with alternatives would be more than enough.
Inefficient energy wise. Not timewise.
They’re measuring how many people can pass through a fixed point in space in an hour, not how long it takes one person to get from point A to point B.
So not really time or energy, but quantity.
Or throughput, which is important in areas with congestion, like busy streets and highways.
This visualization is space efficiency.
Obviously cars have terrible energy efficiency. The most efficient vehicle is a bicycle, since exercise is good for you it’s arguably negative energy usage.
As for time efficiency, you have to consider car dependent development as a package. Everything spreads out, so overall there may not be an improvement in time efficiency, especially when you factor in the longer travel time of people not in cars. You could even consider the time spent working to pay for the car, or the time lost from people killed by the car, and I doubt cars would come out particularly time efficient then.
And usage of space. And money, at least if you include all the externalities.
People don’t drive cars because they think they’re efficient in absolute numbers. They drive cars, because cars are way more comfortable and faster than anything else in everyday life.
They’re only faster because transit infrastructure is built exclusively for cars at the expense of everyone else, including car drivers. Driving during rush hour sucks, but many people don’t have a choice.
The only thing I wish is that we had more accessible and safe single-seat vehicles. I bring 3 empty seats with me to work every day. I would be more than happy to have a cheap, efficient single seat vehicle for commuting if it was safe. I’m not going to ride a motorcycle 25 miles each way every day in the Florida heat and rain. I’m certainly not going to share the road with the maniacs we have here on a motorcycle.
I’m certainly not going to share the road with the maniacs we have here on a motorcycle.
In other words, it isn’t that biking or motorcycling or walking or whatever isn’t safe, it’s that the presence of cars makes everything unsafe (including the cars themselves).
Similarly, bike lanes etc. are car infrastructure, not bike infrastructure, because in the absence of cars cyclists would have no problems using the normal lanes. (Remember that the next time some dipshit complains about spending on bike lanes or cyclists not paying their “fair share.”)
Pretty much every argument drivers have against other transportation modes is rooted in projection.
Ain’t nothing comfortable about being in an environment where one wrong move will end your life
Not to mention how every time you drive a km, you kill a statistical fraction of a person. How do people do that fucking calculus? How many micromorts are you willing to inflict on others just to get some OJ from the store? People DON’T do the fucking calculus, that’s how. They just push it from their minds, like they have been conditioned to by the religion of the automobile ever since birth.
Gonna use some of that suburban rail to travel dooway-to-doorway. Oh wait. No, you can’t. It is almost as if having options for different needs is important. Instead let’s use overly simplistic explanations for a rather complicated problem.
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Hey all you people that live in that city, some troll online wants to take away all your choices. Yeah, I know that’s ridiculous and beyond arrogant and ignorant of them, but then again that is why they are a troll.
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that’s a problem with the city and not with public transit. there are many cities where public transit is safe, it always depends on the general safety of the city
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Yeah, I regularly take public transport around London and none of that happens to me. Seems like more of a cultural issue than a public transport one.
Honestly, these days I feel like it’s hard to claim that driving is “safer”. It feels safer enclosed in your metal box, except for all the other high speed low-intelligence high-rage boxes driving around near you.
I can also respect the frustration of finding crazies on public transit, and won’t try to spin that as a positive - but to me, it speaks towards visibility of the world around you, and willingness to exist in it and change society when it’s broken. It’s like the lords in their manors that “cannot fathom consorting with all that plebeian filth”.
I’m biased. I’m a tall guy, and I’ve had an incident having to stare down a homeless guy that was spewing Asian hate to a poor Korean guy on the train. I’ll keep taking those trains, claim them for the reasonable people.
There was a woman who would beg for money on the last stretch of my commute home. Either she was on the bus or she must have been coming back from the other end of the line.
Every now and then she would start shrieking. Once she started she just… Didn’t stop. She would walk the length of the bus shrieking directly in people’s faces. This happened about a dozen times before I just started getting off the bus if I saw her. I would rather walk 30 minutes then have to put up with her.
I’m my country the transit system won’t ban anyone because it is considered excessive punishment for the extremely poor.
As a result, transit just sucks for everyone.
Behavior that is anti-social should be unacceptable. We’re so afraid of placing limits on anyone that the most unstable/unwell place limits on the rest of us.
In the case of the woman I mentioned, she’s also a victim. There’s no proper support for her. She needs help too.
It’s not fair to her, banshees should also be able to take the bus.
That’s illegal in Denmark, i have seen people do this kind of things sometimes and everytime they are kicked off the transport at next stop. And then they jump on at the next transport and kicked off again, this behavior have forced the public transport in the big cities to have guards on board the trains all the times.
![[image] Cars are an incredibly inefficient way to move people](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a55ce0e0-9740-4207-9d5f-64bc68231a3d.jpeg){kind=link}