{"id":930,"date":"2004-08-13T13:04:00","date_gmt":"2004-08-13T18:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=930"},"modified":"2004-08-13T13:04:00","modified_gmt":"2004-08-13T18:04:00","slug":"state-of-the-us-transportation-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=930","title":{"rendered":"State of the US Transportation system"},"content":{"rendered":"

for <\/p>\n

What I’m about to say is based as much on personal experience as anything. And really, that’s okay. [Ed: It’s not as strongly organized as I would like, and there’s sooo much more I have to say, but this seems to be a good overview, and I’ve already sunk a great deal of time into it, so this is it. Ask me questions, if you want to.]<\/p>\n

In my life I’ve lived in a rural area, a few suburban areas, and a few urban areas. I’ve used bus, heavy rail, medium rail, car, bike, skates, and my own two feet as my major means of getting around at various points in time. I’ve done many long road trips, several long rail trips, numerous plane trips, and a few long bus trips. And I’ve done a fair amount of reading and thinking about it all. <\/p>\n

First I’ll talk about transportation mode, and its direct ramifications, I’ll save money for another occasion. <\/p>\n

The United States has a well developed highway and road system, which makes it easy to get around for those who own cars. This is a good thing. Cars are fast, capable of carrying things, effective regardless of one’s physical condition, and the best current solution to connect just about any combination of origin and destination. From the perspective of the individual user, they’re also relatively cheap to operate. <\/p>\n

The United States also has well developed air travel infrastructure. There are airports in a wide range of sizes all over the country. Planes are the fastest mode of transportation currently available (excluding rockets and space shuttles, of course). By its nature, air travel is incapable of delivering the same degree of end-to-end service that the road system delivers, but it serves as a very useful supplement to it. <\/p>\n

And for much of the country, that is enough for effective operation. If one needs space more than the diverse activities and goods afforded by the urban experience, it works well enough I suppose. WalMarts and malls are the [standardized] modern frontiersman’s general stores. <\/p>\n

But there are problems with this. Both of these travel modes are currently dependent on fossil fuels, with resultantly low energy efficiency, and high aggregate air pollution. Additionally, both are noisy, due in large part to combustion as the mechanism for converting chemical energy to mechanical energy. Further, automobiles fare poorly in denser settings without well developed alternatives. Issues relating to traffic congestion, parking, safety, health and property damage all combine to make automobiles, and in particular, privately owned automobiles a serious issue in the quality of city life.<\/p>\n

In short, cars are very good for their drivers and passengers, and a little bad for everyone around them, particularly other motorists (who face greater problems due to accidents, congestion, and parking issues). The more cars in a given area, the more the bad-for-everyone starts to outweigh the good-for-someone(s). <\/p>\n

The thing is, many travel destinations are clumped together. We call them urban centers, places where entertainment, shopping, other people, and a wide variety of goods, and services, not to mention jobs, all exist in close proximity to one another. Having these things close together allows people to engage in many different activities without incurring massive travel expense, and so urban centers are good things, too.<\/p>\n

So, people come from near and far to these urban centers, largely in cars, and the parking, congestion, noise, exhaust fumes, smells, etc, etc, build up from all these cars. This drives some people away. And many people want access to the good things about urban centers, without the difficult or expensive parking, the crawling rush hour traffic, the roar of engines, etc, etc. <\/p>\n

So people start proposing solutions. Car owners want more\/cheaper parking. They want faster roads (which many assume will happen with wider roads). And often, their economic power allows them to get it. A building is demolished and a parking garage put in its place. But that building held something, and was part of the local infrastructure. And this brings out the heart of the matter, which is balancing multiple concerns. The accessibility of a center v the activities available there. <\/p>\n

There are ways of accessing these vital areas without using cars. Most of them are infrastructure heavy or are strongly limited in other ways. Buses operate on existing infrastructure. They solve the parking problem, but are generally not cheaper and are always slower than cars, unless special access is afforded to buses. Trains are more efficient in that they can carry more passengers per trip, with greater fuel efficiency, and at the very high end, can safely run much faster than cars or buses. Trains require heavy, specialized infrastructure investments, and do not have the fault tolerance of buses. (If a section of rail breaks, trains are screwed, if a section of road breaks, buses can go around). Both modes are limited by route as to where they can serve. <\/p>\n

Biking, skating, and walking involve progressively lower space requirements for parking, and progressively shorter radii of accessibility. The can be done on existing infrastructure, though cyclists and skaters are either speed limited or unsafe for bystanders\/fellow travelers (in the case of sidewalks) or dangerous to the traveler (roads). Also, in many suburban locations, sidewalks and bike lanes simply do not exist. Alternatively, special paths can be set aside, ranging from paint-protected margins of paved roads to separate paved paths. Infrastructure costs for these transit paths are low, but the restrictions of travel radii and weather circumstances do limit their utility.<\/p>\n

The thing is, each mode entails a structure of city building and layout. Rails work well in dense linear extensions from a few well connected hubs. Roads allow for what I will call a dendritic structure, where there are many hubs, with branching roads in a ‘tree’ line structure. With this in mind, it is worth noting that the more centralized economic locations will have to be served with trunk lines, and that the branch lines will feed into the trunk lines, making it easy to overflow the trunk capacity. Foot\/bike\/skate based travel has a structure similar to the automotive schedule, but is more suited to dense operations due to its dramatically lower externalities, space consumption, etc. <\/p>\n

Population growth is not humanely avoidable. And people need to live somewhere. And if they’re going to live somewhere, they need things to do, which is what urban\/economic centers are all about. In a truly insane sense, the mall is about humanity’s search for meaning and a way to engage in society. We can do so much better. <\/p>\n

My idea for “the ideal structure” is quite different from what currently exists. Compose the entire city mosaic out of interconnected, pedestrian oriented nuclei, with cycling and skating being the appropriate scale to travel from one edge of a nucleus to the opposite edge, frequent busing and\/or high speed rail transit providing internucleic transportation (with bikes allowed onboard), and private vehicular travel largely used for delivery services, emergency services, cabs, the disabled, and car shares, with individually owned vehicles being useful mostly to those who travel in the less densely populated areas, which would be fairly clearly demarcated from the urban areas, without suburban border zones. Parking, congestion, noise, <\/p>\n

That’s a long way from where we are now. And while I have ideas on how to get from a to b, I doubt most people would agree with me that b is cool. But I think a great many people would, if they experienced it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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