I would rather spend 45 minutes on public trans moving than 45 sitting in traffic.
I work in a coworking space. They just announced they’re moving the space to a block away. I was talking to the other folks about it yesterday, and one of them was complaining that the new space has no parking. She currently pays to park in the garage adjacent to the current space. I suggested just keeping that garage and she said “yeah, I guess I’m going to have to”
This in a very walkable downtown btw
Same thing in my city. People kvetch endlessly about how hard it is to park downtown. But the city parking utility studies show parking utilization nowhere near 100%, even at peak times. As a friend put it to me years ago, unless there’s a spot within line-of-sight (so even just around the corner doesn’t count) of their destination, drivers say that “there’s no parking.”
My problem is I down know the downtown area, so trying to find out where the parking at a new area is stressful, so much rather just not have to drive there. Just paying attention to the roads for driving safely requires like 100% of ones attention. So unless you remembered to GPS directly to a parking garage or you have passengers to figure it out while you just try to circle around aimlessly, it sucks.
Is it so strange that people don’t want to add another 20 minutes to the commute to a place by having to walk several blocks? I have little enough free time as it is. Maybe it can enjoyable if the weather’s good and it’s a nice part of the city but it’s cold here more often than not and most places aren’t particularly scenic.
According to Google Maps, it takes 17 minutes to walk entirely across the isthmus our downtown sits on, from the Edgewater Hotel to the Monona Terrace convention center, and you have to detour around the state capitol to do so. That’s about 10 blocks, and between city, county, and private parking structures, significantly longer than the distance between any destination and nearby parking.
But then, back to the topic of the meme, drivers will willingly add another 20 minutes to their commute by perversely choosing to sit in a traffic congestion, when they could park at a free park-and-ride lot and take the BRT downtown. Last time I went with my mother to a show at the performing arts center, we spent over 20 minutes breathing exhaust fumes just waiting to get out of the parking ramp. (Like many Baby Boomers, she’s weird about public transit. She lives two blocks from a BRT station; we could’ve been home already in the time it took to exit the ramp.)
I’ve tried using the bus system a few times but it wasn’t ever a good experience, or at least not better than driving and dealing with parking. It’s just now well built out. I don’t think there’s anywhere in the city I can’t get to faster by just driving and walking from the closest parking over parking at one of the ride lots, and waiting on the bus, riding, and then walking from the closest stop to wherever the destination is. Either option sucks really. I hate going into the city.
not sure how large you envision blocks to be, or what exactly constitutes “several”, but even like 10 fucking blocks shouldn’t take 20 minutes.
I was calculating in total. 10 there and 10 back. Which is about the average for me when I go somewhere in the city that doesn’t have parking I’d estimate.
My downtown is the opposite, extremely hot and sunny. So i get wanting to park near your destination, anything else underscores the convenience of driving. However, it’s impractical and ugly for every block to have tons of parking. Which is why i believe that there should be more carless areas and make downtown a pleasure to walk through. Provide shade, chairs, etc.
I’ve always thought they should put more actual garages up rather than having a shitload of parking lots then and have shuttles/buses/trams/people movers/whatever, from those to other points nearby. They could even put facades on the garages to make them look like nicer buildings.
Just mandate all new builds have a parking garage under them. Seattle is my closest big city which has notoriously bad public transit, extremely steep hills, bad and wet weather most of the year, and parking 20 minutes walk for your location is very very common. I used to be disabled, used portable oxygen and the lack of parking combined with these other things essentially made the whole city off limits to me. People like to call others lazy, entitled or stupid for wanting parking but having adequate accessible parking is a real issue that impacts more than just able bodied people. Even some medical clinics don’t have on sight parking. Accessible parking is part of a socially responsible plan for inter city transportation.
Seattle has some transit problems for sure. East-West travel is a nightmare, the interstate runs straight through the heart of the city, there’s a bunch of bridges that bottleneck flow to various neighborhoods, expansion is physically bounded by the Sound and Lake Washington, and we have a loud NIMBY population that has slowed all public projects for decades. Walking sucks, cycling sucks, driving sucks, the busses only don’t suck on some routes, the Link mostly works if the thing you want to go to is near a station, and the ferries work except when they don’t.
Plus there’s the bureaucratic quagmire so bad it has a Wikipedia page.
I don’t know how much it would cost to do that but I feel like that would price smaller businesses out of building in the city as I’d imagine it’d be quite a bit more expensive to build on top of a garage than it would a plot of land. Maybe the city could subsidize the cost though.
Small businesses aren’t the people building towers, and are rarely the people renting space in said towers, but like you said there’s no reason a city can’t encourage any specific kind of business with tax breaks or subsidies
It’s not so much about adding another 20 min onto an already existing commute, but swapping the mode of transportation and keeping the time the same as a thought experiment.
For example, would you choose a 20 min walk to your work/store/playground/park/bank.
Or would you choose a 20 min car ride to your work/store/playground/park/bank.
You can assume distances and time is exactly the same in both situations.
What I meant was having to drive 20-30 minutes to get into the city (and usually the last mile or so of that is atrocious) and then having to walk 3-4 blocks on top of that because there’s no parking near your destination. That’s what makes me hate going into the city to do shit. There’s just no way to get anywhere that isn’t a fucking slog.
If everything’s all the same then yeah I’d rather just walk than drive, except maybe to the store depending on how much stuff I have to get but that’s not the reality of anywhere I can afford to live.
is 16 minute wait for the next bus a lot? Depends on the context.
Bus that goes between cities? no.
Bus that goes inside a single city? Yes.It’s so weird, but the psychological difference of having to wait less than ten minutes for the next train vs maybe 20 minutes for the next bus is, indeed, a bit of a gulf.
Recall that psychological experiment in which the researchers had volunteers sit for 15 minutes in a room, completely empty except for a device with which they could administer themselves a painful electric shock. If I remember correctly, more than half of the people zapped themselves, just for something to do.
The upshot: We need to let people administer themselves painful electric shocks at bus stops. /j
I hadn’t considered that, but yeah. I’m not sure I fully understand it. I just know I feel it.
It’s probably the % of total travel time
i’ve thought about this a lot and i think the two main aspects are travel time and how long it would take to get to the destination otherwise (mostly considering walking and maybe cycling, because drivers are probably not choosing public transport because it’s faster unless we’re talking about high speed trains).
Like if you’re taking the bus to a town 30km away then you’re certainly not walking and biking there would take hours, so hourly buses is acceptable and half-hourly makes you go “oh man this is great”.
But if you’re taking the bus a couple kilometers just to another part of the city then you can totally just walk and cycling might well be slightly faster, so even half-hourly buses becomes… borderline acceptable for commuting to and from work, maybe. You really want AT LEAST every 20 or really 15 minutes for shorter distances, otherwise what the fuck is even the point?
I was once in Iceland and took a guided tour. The bus stopped at a beautiful waterfall that you can walk behind (no loot). You could see the waterfall from the bus but it was a 10 min walk to get to it. I shit you not, the american couple on the bus decided to stay behind because they didn’t want to walk that far. Now I get that people have medical conditions and all but this seemed mostly like an issue of them being tired because the last two stops already required 10 min walks. It’s not their fault either. They grew up in a system that stole all forms of movement from them and fed them corn syrup so now a 20 min walk is unthinkable.
Every study on depression comes to the result that physical exercise is fantastic to combat it but all too often the decisions we make reduce the amount of exercise we get. Teenagers these days zoom past on E-scooters all the time and I often feel like they’re being robbed of what we had with our regular ol’ bikes. Sure it’s harder when you have to pedal and put all the energy in yourself but it also keeps you in a much beter state.
the only thing I would be worried about is if the bus will stay for long enough. Figure with looking around and experiencing it would be like half an hour. 10 to, 10 there, 10 back.
British citizen that moved back to Canada a few years ago. I’d ask my friends to walk a certain distance and they’re utterly bewildered that I’d walk. I also don’t need to wait 5 minutes for a closer parking spot, I can park where it’s free and walk less than a minute.
I’ve changed them quite a bit and now they’ve gotten into running which is nice.
The city guides here tell the same story. The cruise terminal is 200 and change meters/yards from where the historical city tour begins. They have to hire a bus to drive the Americans from the terminal to the spot. If there’s no bus, they stay on the boat. Afterwards they’ll of course say “we could’ve walked that part.”
I hate how many cities here in China got rid of public bikes for public escooters.
one thing I hate with my cities bikeshare program is to me it enshitified with the addition of e-bikes. At this point the e-bikes are the majority and its harder to find standard compared to when they were the only option. Thing is the standard bikes you can ride for an hour for free and then dock and undock a new one and you only have the relatively low yearly membership. E-bikes though have a cost per min even with a membership.
Same deal in China, though in most cities, you can leave the bikes nearly anywhere that’s not blocking traffic.
The escooters only cost 15 cents for 20 minutes, but its the spirit of the thing, I used to grab a bicycle just to go 1 block to get to the subway, now its not worth it.
That does sound like a issue. I wonder though are more people are choosing “standard bikes” because of longer free window as you said, or is it that your bikeshare program is choosing to provide more “electrified bikes” because of increased profits or demand?
Personaly I choose the “electrified bike” (i.e. pedel assist) as its easier for me to get around more comfortably and go further distances with less knee pain and strain, but having both options is a plus.
My area has a docked bike program. In a app I can always see how many bikes are available at a designated dock and how many of those bikes are electric vs manual.
Also, a side note the term “e-bike” has become a “catch all term” for electrified two wheel modes of transportation IMO. Most of this used by the media as a negative generalization or buzzword to group e-motos, and e-mopeds together with electric bicycles. This is mainly related to exploding unregulated batteries which generally are caused by e-mopeds, not electrified bicycles. This is why I generally in conversations try to make a distinction between bicycles, mopeds, and motorcycles, when they are electrified.
yeah definately just bikes in this case. there is an app but an app telling you no bikes that don’t have additional charge are available at the closest rack or any rack around you does not really help the issue. Im pretty sure part of it is supply because you can see fewer manual bikes across the whole system. I think when they started doing electric they did it by replacing end of life manual bikes with e-bikes. im kinda concerned that might keep on going till e-bikes are the only option. although honestly I never stopped having a bike and given the situation the dream of not needing to keep one where I live is kinda dead.
Cause no one has any alone time so they use their commute for that
I’d rather walk 16 minutes alone than sit 16 minutes alone in a car
Depends on the walk…
To work? Annoying. Give me sitting in a car.
To anywhere the fuck else? I’ll walk the night away!
Is it over 100 degrees during commute times for 4+ months out of the year?
I like a walk and a bike ride, but I would also have to bring a garment bag with clothes to change into after showering at the office.
There actually is a shower at the office, but with 30 people sharing 1 shower the line would suck.
I mean nothing against walking in general, but when it’s super cold or super hot, it’s much nicer to spend that time in a climate-controlled interior than outside. Especially before I got a heat pump installed so I could actually get some breathable air at home in the summer, the car was the only AC I had access to.
The 16 minutes also gets me about 20 kilometers away versus about a kilometer for the walk. I MIGHT get to the closest store in that time.
No Man's Sky
For the life time of the universe?
Yes.
Glad to see another traveller!
16 // 16 // 16
Lol, that’s stupid. I haven’t sat in a traffic jam for 7 years or so. And back than, I was getting payed hourly to sit there, so I didn’t mind as much. Can’t imagine sitting in traffic for so ling just to get to the office evry day.
