Ask Lemmy

A mix of bike paths and bus routes

Bus stops on the main road(s), placed so everyone has a stop within a 15-20 minute walk.

Sort of agree with others suggesting getting rid of the neighborhoods in the first place, but sharing walls is hell. When the only way to speak confidentially in your own home is to whisper, it's impossible to wfh or have a telehealth appointment (or, worse, a teletherapy appointment).

As a Strong Towns article pointed out, solving the problem with cars is not the number of people that drive, but the number of people that drive × the average miles that each person drives.

We can reduce the number of miles that the average person drives without taking away anybody's car, and make transit more cost-effective by reducing the distance it has to go, by simply putting destinations closer together. Zap the exclusive residential zoning laws. Intermix cafés, shops, restaurants, doctors offices, community centers, and such, with the existing neighborhoods. These things are all quiet, and low-impact, barely noticeable among houses, if they don't need giant parking lots.

You apply the same concepts used for car traffic management to public transit. You have local access, collectors, arteries, and controlled access express/freeways. The frequency and speed of service goes up with each level, while number of access points decreases.

The problem with public transit arises when you expect it to be single modal- like most people in America, since they're used to single-modal cars.
Single modal public transit works when density is very high and you can expect services to be within pedestrian distances of half a mile or so of any public transit station (access point). But the lower density of American cities breaks those systems and makes them slow and unusable since the number of access points for pedestrian walking distance to most services needs to be insanely high, leaving the entire network underserved and underutilized. You have to artificially increase density by "funneling" larger areas into a smaller public transit network to make them work efficiently.

Things like busses and trams work for collector/arterial tasks, while direct passenger rail works for the rapid point to point expressway.

What you need to do is then promote self driven transport on the lower neighborhood and collector levels, while supporting public transit at the artery/expressway levels. An ideal way for this in my mind would be promoting advanced bicycle/moped networks on the local access level that feed into collector roads, providing distances of 1-4miles traveled from a home to the first arterial bus or tramway. The busses that run on the arterial level would need to be redesigned to accommodate users bringing their bikes or mopeds with them to use on the other end of their journey, which really expands the reach of the network. They then have to transfer between types a limited number of times while in network.

As long as you can limit a journey to 2-3 mode transfers, and make those transfers as seamless ad possible, it can be made a lot more efficient and user friendly. Providing users the ability to retain advanced mobility (bikes/mopeds) on both ends of the public transport network also eliminates a lot of the range anxiety car-centric people may otherwise feel when getting on public transit.

I personally commute entirely by car but that's because it is a long, largely rural drive with no density to support any kind of public transit. My specific case is unusual though, and if I did live in a city, I would be okay with the above system for a majority of my commuting. I would still own a car for long or special trips, of course. I like it too much.

Not certain what exactly you mean by "solve", but some solutions already exist like park and ride. I also think as ebikes become more popular they will also solve the "last mile" problem.

Realistically, the easiest way is to rezone some of those areas to retail and office space, and to encourage high density construction.

Rezoning some of those buildings to low density retail and office space will reduce total traffic by allowing some people to have shorter commutes, instead of everyone jamming every highway out of town every day.

And as those buildings age and become more expensive, small sections of them can be knocked down and replaced with higher density buildings, as property values rise. Eventually the whole area with high and medium density, simply because that is what makes sense.

You can also establish commuter rail, where maybe there's only a couple of stops, but they all go to wherever the jobs are. That will help ease congestion while property values rise enough for higher density development to make sense.

Dedicated bus lanes can have multiple times the capacity in terms of moving people compared lanes that allow cars. Say you got a six lane road in the suburbs, convert the center lanes in each direction to dedicated bus lanes, then have a small median/curb separating the bus and car lanes on both sides. This will make buses faster than cars because of the lower congestion and incentive people to use them, making car congestion go down as well, because people who would otherwise drive are now on the bus.

City Nerd has a great channel focusing on stuff like this on YouTube and Nebula

[email protected] - just need to have infrastructure and enforcement that makes it safe to do stuff like ride a bike or scooter.

You could have a bus route along the major street, bus stops every kilometer and a bus coming every 20 minutes.

That'll take you to the city center or to a junction where you can jump on another bus taking you in a different direction.

Maybe make it cheap, and gasoline and taxes on cars more expensive so people are incentivised to use it.

Those neighborhoods only exist because of cars. Fix transit in the cities and stop subsidizing automobiles and those suburban tracts will empty out.

It kinda depends on what you mean by "solved". You could have a bus route stop at every person house. This would be expensive, frequency would be abysmal, and the routes would take forever and no one would use it.

This issue is that public transit thrives in areas with more density. Get rid of the density public transit ceases to exist.

A more realistic solution for most people would be to try and set up a bike network throughout the neighborhood. Biking, especially e-biking, is mode of transit that can be implemented almost anywhere in a city and have some big benefits to the citizens.

Smaller (6 passenger) buses running autonomously. We're not there yet with the autonomy, but there's no reason to stick with one size of bus. Sure, keep big ones on major routes, but use smaller ones for small routes. Heck, make those routes on-demand.

Put a bus depot at the entrance, allow only bicycles inside each suburban loop or whatever.

But in the bigger picture, convince people that they don't want the suburban home. That's a really hard sell after a few generations of idealizing the identical homes in huge blocks just outside the city.

But once voters don't want to live there, rezone it to allow denser living or put a factory there to chase out the remaining homeowners or completely level it and farm the land... Or allow businesses to set up within the neighborhood so that everything is within walking/biking distance?

Depends if there is a city center people commute to. If so, park and ride lots, which means putting parking lots at an express bus or train station that goes from the suburb to the city center.

I think the problem, at least in the area I live in, is that people who live in those places want to drive to work. In their cars. And transportation is a county function, not city. So they starve the transportation budget, it's a vicious cycle.

Those house farms are a plague.

Network of buses/trams and trains. Trains to get in and out of the neighborhood and connect to the city and other neighborhoods, and buses within communities to get around and to/from the train stations. Like a bus stop on every or every other block, then one or two train stations on every neighborhood.

Maglev tubes everywhere. We must start tunneling.

It has to get approached from two different ways.

On the service side, it means implementing micro transit. These are on demand minibuses. It also means tying this more dense traffic.

On the demand side, it means densifying the community. It could be allowing Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU's) and redeveloping strip malls as high density housing.

Automated light metro. build the same guideways all over. Trains that hold around 50 passengers, half with corgo bikes. Cookie cutter stations that are easy to factory prefab. Stations every mile on the existing grid. Automated means you run 24x7 with frequent service.

the important part: no station is more than 10 minutes ( 20 including you bike trip) to a central station where you can transfer to any many other trains including express toethe rest of the city. The central stations must all be in a zoned high density retail area so you can do your shoping there. there will be a lot of them scattered around the metro area.

the above will be expensive. However once bilt it would be cheaper than cars.