How Sydney Destroyed Its Trams For Love of the Car (theguardian.com) 308
An anonymous reader shares a report from The Guardian about the questionable decision in the 1950s to get rid of Sydney's trams in favor of private cars. From the report: In the late 1950s Sydney ripped up its tram network, once one of the largest in the world. Nearly 1,000 trams -- some only a few years old -- were rolled to the workshops in the city's eastern suburbs and stripped of anything that could be sold, before being unceremoniously tipped on their sides, doused with sump oil and set ablaze. Barely a decade before its closure, Sydney's tram system had carried 400 million passenger journeys a year on a network of more than 250km, primarily serving the eastern, southern and inner-west suburbs, and stretching as far north as Narrabeen at its peak. But the explosion of car traffic in the postwar years persuaded the New South Wales government that urban freeways were the way of the future (the first in Australia, the Cahill Expressway, opened in 1958), and trams were an impediment to that vision.
The destruction of the network from the mid-50s was swift and brutal. In 1958 the bizarre castellated Fort Macquarie depot at Circular Quay was demolished to make way for the Opera House, and the lines along George Street were torn up. The last Sydney tram ran on 25 February 1961 from Hunter Street to La Perouse (along much of the same route now being rebuilt), packed to the rafters and greeted by crowds of people, before it joined the dismal procession to "burning hill" at Randwick. Mathew Hounsell, a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, has called the destruction of the network "the largest organized vandalism in our nation's history." He says the decisions made in the 50s had a disastrous long-term effect. "When the trams were removed from Sydney, mass transport patronage plummeted and private car usage soared. Our space-saving trams were replaced with ever-more space-hungry cars, causing ever-worsening traffic. That wasn't how the planners saw it at the time. They were strongly swayed by powerful international influences, which chimed with the unstoppable rise of private car ownership in Australia. The trams are slowly returning, as the city painfully rebuilds a tiny part of its old system. "The construction of 12.8km of light rail from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kingsford will cost $2.7 billion at the latest estimate, has caused untold misery to shops and other businesses in its path and will be almost a year overdue by the time even the first section is open," the report says.
"The new line hardly represents a fundamental shift in Sydney's transport thinking, coming as it does alongside the vast 'congestion-busting' WestConnex freeway project, and further investment in metro rail (a separate light rail link is also under construction at Parramatta). But it is a reminder that the city might have looked very different today but for the decision taken in the 1950s -- and ruthlessly carried out -- to prioritize motor transport."
The destruction of the network from the mid-50s was swift and brutal. In 1958 the bizarre castellated Fort Macquarie depot at Circular Quay was demolished to make way for the Opera House, and the lines along George Street were torn up. The last Sydney tram ran on 25 February 1961 from Hunter Street to La Perouse (along much of the same route now being rebuilt), packed to the rafters and greeted by crowds of people, before it joined the dismal procession to "burning hill" at Randwick. Mathew Hounsell, a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, has called the destruction of the network "the largest organized vandalism in our nation's history." He says the decisions made in the 50s had a disastrous long-term effect. "When the trams were removed from Sydney, mass transport patronage plummeted and private car usage soared. Our space-saving trams were replaced with ever-more space-hungry cars, causing ever-worsening traffic. That wasn't how the planners saw it at the time. They were strongly swayed by powerful international influences, which chimed with the unstoppable rise of private car ownership in Australia. The trams are slowly returning, as the city painfully rebuilds a tiny part of its old system. "The construction of 12.8km of light rail from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kingsford will cost $2.7 billion at the latest estimate, has caused untold misery to shops and other businesses in its path and will be almost a year overdue by the time even the first section is open," the report says.
"The new line hardly represents a fundamental shift in Sydney's transport thinking, coming as it does alongside the vast 'congestion-busting' WestConnex freeway project, and further investment in metro rail (a separate light rail link is also under construction at Parramatta). But it is a reminder that the city might have looked very different today but for the decision taken in the 1950s -- and ruthlessly carried out -- to prioritize motor transport."
So, like the U.S. then (Score:2, Funny)
The red-eyed toon's cockamamie plan also succeeded down under.
Cars are awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of bemoaning the car as some sort of evil conspiracy, let's ponder a moment at how great it is. It is available on your schedule, late for work at 930 or early at 5. It goes where you want when you want, can carry you, 3-7 of your friends or family, and enough food to feed them for several weeks. It's always as clean as you want it to be. Nobody sits next to you that you don't know and don't want to sit next to. Cars are popular because they are GOOD. There may be reasons why as a society we want to wean ourselves off of them, but we need to do so with open eyes. People chose cars because cars are (or were) better than trains and trams by almost any measure. If you want to get people off cars, you can't just pretend that away. You need to address the fact that cars are really good.
Re:Cars are awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
They also consume so much space and infrastructure that they make a functional human-scale city impossible if everyone uses one. Instead, to make room for all the parking, buildings have to be spread out, and the cars then need wide roads to transport everyone, which makes things even more spread out, and since the roads are run on a Communist-style *FREE TO USE* basis, they clog up like Soviet bread lines. Widening free roads doesn't solve traffic congestion any more than giving free money to homeless people gets rid of homelessness. Making something free just makes people wasteful in how they use it and encourages more people to get on the gravy train until the resource becomes scarce again -- again, just like Soviet bread lines.
So now instead of everyone walking/biking to work in 10 minutes or taking the subway for 20 minutes, everyone winds up stuck sitting in traffic for 1-2 hours. Since buildings are far away from each other now to support the car infrastructure, subways become more expensive and you have to ride them further, and much of your public transit becomes slow uncomfortable buses stuck in traffic instead, so even more people wind up driving. Or, alternatively, if the jobs are REALLY spread out you might luck out and be only a 20 minute drive away, but then you're married to that job and have to move if you get a different one because all the *other* jobs are 1-2 hours away in traffic. If your household has 2 jobs then more likely you got your house to be close to one job but the other then has to deal with traffic.
Re:Cars are awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
Not every city is Los Angeles.
I live in a city of 400,000 and I drive my car to work. Before this, I took the bus. I had to wake up early, walk 4 blocks to the bus stop, and take a bus that took 30 minutes to arrive. Back home I would walk. The walk would take me 40 minutes. That's correct: 30 minutes bus (25 if lucky), 40 minute walk...
Nowadays I drive my car. It takes me 6 to 10 minutes to arrive to work.
So yeah, driving actually gives me basically 1 hour of my time back. Time I don't really have. Because I work 9 hours a day and I need to take a 15-30 minute nap when I get home because I'm REALLY TIRED.
I would prefer to bike to work, but my workplace, while "green", "cool and hip", "eco friendly because they switched to LED lighting", doesn't provide bike parking. And since this is south america, leaving my bike chained outside has a significant chance of theft. This is not feasible in summer, though, since temperatures of 30C at 9AM are normal, and this workplace has a strict "long pants only" dress code, where you can't even enter the building wearing shorts. Biking with jeans on 30C weather is not really a good idea, neither for me nor for my coworkers.
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Oh my ! Bike theft is universal and certainly not a speciality of South America ! And everywhere, it has been a big obstacle to bike adoption. Lucky me, they allow me to leave my bike under constant watch.
It is rather hot where i live too. I bike in long pants too, by more than 30 C. I change my shirt and refresh myself with a wet towel. I am fortunate enough to be allowed to do do that inside the building too. But otherwise i would refresh myself in a semi discreet spot outside like the parking.
The problem
Re: Cars are awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
If there is ever a need to evacuate the city, people will be grateful that they have cars
The highways will be a parking lot.
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If there ever is a need to evacuate a city the only people capable of doing so will be the ones on dedicated forms of transport such as rail. The first thing that breaks down in any crisis is the road.
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If there is ever a need to evacuate the city, people will be grateful that they have cars instead of an intracity tram system.
Read a science fiction story where the Earth was slowly being destroyed (decades) and humanity was scurrying to build moon bases and heavy lift shuttles to put the population there.
Anyway, the crust under London was breaking up early on, so people were evacuating. The government diverted people off highways and forced them onto trains because of a policy from pre-WWII where few had cars so trains were the natural escape route. This massively slowed things down in an emergency, of coursd.
It was obviously a
Lopok at San Francisco, Los Angles, Altanta... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank the push of big business like GM, Standard-Oil, Goodyear, plus other trying to production up to WWII levels.
You still see the scars of those past eras on the roads and tunnels:
1) Solono Tunnel, in Berkeley
2) The lower deesk of Bay bridge, including the Tunnel in the middle, shows the railways.
3) Just look at a street and see the raillines on San Pablo Ave from Oakland 14th to San Pablo (pass Richmond).
4) Branch Lines from Telegraphic Ave and cross points like 51st - you can see the 1890's - where the Bakery, Meat Shop, and other local stores once was. Becuase that location was a train stop / transfer location from the downtown Oakland.
One facct... in 1906 you could get from Berkeley Campus to Market St Ferry Building in San Francisco faster than you can today, by car, bus, BART, - And you even had to travel by Ferry then.
Re:Lopok at San Francisco, Los Angles, Altanta... (Score:5, Interesting)
All of the above is true. What else is true the traffic load was lower by far than it is today.
Bidirectional rail and truck traffic on the lower deck? You betcha... At lower density than today, not even counting the "traffic" that crossed the bay at the same time... You DO know the Berkeley pier was for full blown trains, right? And there was no Dumbarton, San Rafael or San Mateo bridges either so what needed to go there ALSO used the bay bridge or a ferry. Ever been on the bay in really bad weather?
It's easy and nice to holler "it was better!!!"; and it was... To a point through certain color glasses. But isn't that what certain hat wearing types are doing now?
All of that said, I like ferries even in bad weather.
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"All of that said, I like ferries even in bad weather."
Typical of that area.
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I hated trams way back then. I still hate them. Horrible things. Full of disease and stench and people standing hanging on for their lives. Slow, noisy, dangerous space guzzling tractors of evil. Turn them on their sides and burn them, burn them all!
Were you abused by a tram as a child or something?
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Other cities around the US too (Score:2)
They still have trams in Melbourne, a disaster (Score:5, Informative)
Being stuck on tracks, trams really do not mix well with other traffic. Buses work much better. There were also trolly buses (like still in San Francisco) which were better but had similar issues.
Adelaide kept one tram, from the city to Glenelg. But it runs mainly on its own tracks away from other traffic. In the 1980s they wanted to build a tramway to the north east. But very sensibly the elected for an "OBarn" system that let buses run along concrete tracks. The great advantage of that system is that at the end of the track the buses can fan out and take people to where they actually want to go without changing transport modes.
Today Sydney is largely hollow. There are tunnels everywhere, and for a toll price you can travel quickly about.
The decision to remove all the trams may not have been optimal, but it certainly was not as unreasonable as is made out. It is not trams vs cars. Rather it is trams vs buses.
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None of that shit is true, except maybe the bit about Adelaide, no one knows what they do over there.
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You're not from 'round here, are you?
Remove Sydney Trams, Melbourne got it right (Score:4, Interesting)
The decision to remove all the trams may not have been optimal, but it certainly was not as unreasonable as is made out. It is not trams vs cars. Rather it is trams vs buses.
Buses, in Sydney, are a disaster. They are more often than not late. A single idiot on Sydney roads can cause *billions* of dollars worth of lost productivity by having an accident whilst sending a text message. Most cars only have *one* passenger so the transport density of people moved is very low compared to the volume of traffic. Trams have a much higher density of people they can move compared to buses. Self driving buses won't solve the problem either.
It cost so much to go *anywhere* in Sydney and you have to say goodbye to hours of your time just to get around. The Sydney train system only makes sense when you overlay where the trams *were*. Considering the increased density of the trains it was quite obvious that trams had room to expand and the system at the time needed an upgrade.
Now traffic itself is killing Sydney and it has limited the density of the city itself. Any Sydneysider will tell you the joy of sitting in Sydney traffic in the middle of summer, the "gawkers" who create traffic jams by looking at why someone has been pulled over and the frustration of having to wait any more than *literally* 200ms after a green light if someone isn't paying attention.
I want a special shout out to Premier Cahill whose corruption has caused a haze of pollution that can be seen all the way to the Blue Mountains and damned us to the traffic hell we endure daily and are still paying for.
And a special special shout out to the NRMfuckingA who should be held responsible for not only the destruction of social life in Sydney but for every drink driving accident that the city has had since they decided to completely FUCK the city. Sydney's roads were never as organised as American cities.
Most Sydney dwellers don't know what we lost, unless they study our history, but for those who do everyday life on Sydney roads is a reminder of just how corrupt and self serving the state politicians have always been.
Sydney is a magnificent city if you don't have to drive anywhere.
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What makes you think that a tram, stuck on tracks, will be able to move through Sydney's narrow streets more efficiently than a bus?
Because tracks?
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What makes you think that a tram, stuck on tracks, will be able to move through Sydney's narrow streets more efficiently than a bus?
Because tracks?
Please feel free to use the wet fish to slap Mr AC with.
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What makes you think that a tram, stuck on tracks, will be able to move through Sydney's narrow streets more efficiently than a bus?
So you haven't noticed that buses in Sydney are articulated? They're *slower* than trams, ffs.
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Expensive? HA! Sydneysiders don't know how good they have it. I came to Sydney from the Netherlands, and I can tell you mate, public transport in Sydney is dirt cheap.
Where did I say public transport in Sydney is expensive?
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Trams run on stable, straight track with only minimal suspension to compensate for tiny defects in the rails. Unless your rails are in really bad repair it's a comfy ride.
Buses run on streets on bouncy pneumatic tires with nothing to hold them straight, possibly with potholes, and have big lurchy suspensions to deal with the uneven roadway. They make big lurchy turns to pull in and out of traffic, and wind up leaning sideways when they pull to the side of the road (because roads have to be sloped at the edg
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Guided busways like the O-bahn still have bouncy bus suspension designed for crap roads, so they still sway even on the guided segment. Then they turn back into a puke-inducing lurchy bus the moment they leave the guideway.
Yes it's a big improvement over being a regular crap bus the whole journey, but still nowhere near as good as even mediocre rail.
And on *GOOD* rail it's so stable that you can set a coin on its side and it won't fall over. Try that on a bus, or your automobile for that matter.
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I'm pro-rail, but your description of bus suspension is inaccurate. Maybe they're not well-designed where you are, but our bus (from 1999) has lovely air ride suspension. Even for people who aren't in an air ride seat like I am, it's quite reasonable even on bumpy roads. (I didn't figure out the air seat controls until I was almost out of Sacramento; we picked it up in Roseville.)
Buses still suck, because they perturb traffic, ride on pneumatic tires which become dust in the streets and in the air, and so o
Re:They still have trams in Melbourne, a disaster (Score:4, Informative)
Adelaide is rebuilding the tram network. Adelaide had a very good tram network that was also ripped up in the 1950s to make way for cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Maybe riders will pay more in the future if they aren't fondled while they sleep on long rides.
Why would you be going to sleep on a tram?
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Regarding asylums, we need to expand our concept of "danger to self and others" to include destructive, unsafe, and unsanitary behavior, not just immediate danger of death or serious injury. Someone screaming at demons with poop smeared on themselves belongs in a hospital, not on the subway. Someone who has a crippling drug or alcohol addiction that leaves them comatose in their seat, sitting in their own soiled garments belongs in a rehab hospital, not on the subway. When you are so far gone that this is w
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So, we need to lock up Those People?
Another thing - isn't it interesting that the people who dislike The Wealthy so much work so hard to separate The Wealthy from the Riff-raff? The car is an equalizer....
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The US really looks after the tourism side of transport. Clean, good service, safe all the way.
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The problem is that in the U.S., rail systems are mostly located in liberal cities that refuse to detain/hospitalize/reform vagrants and hoodlums.
They can't afford to. Those cities are choked with people who have either literally been sent there from the states they grew up in (who can't afford to solve the problem either) or who naturally migrated to them in search of kinder treatment, kinder climate, or both.
When the flyover states figure out how to handle their own dicks, the rest of us can stop holding 'em for them while they piss.
Rose tinted spectacles (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm thinking there are a lot of rose tinted spectacles involved in these sort of stories - sure, there is a move back toward shared public transport in a lot of places these days, but it wasn't necessarily a bad decision to move away from transport systems such as trams et al back in the day and the move back today is more angled around environmentalism than anything else.
Trams require maintenance (obviously) - both of the units themselves and of the rails and power delivery systems spread all over the city. Cash strapped councils saw the benefit in shifting vehicle maintenance to the individual (through ownership of cars) and of allowing transport networks to be more fluid (through use of busses, which could go anywhere there was a road and more busses laid on at short notice, not to mention special routes for special events) and so they did it. They had to maintain the roads, sure, but then they had to maintain the rails et al anyway, so that was pretty much a wash (if not a net reduction in cost).
Plus, cars were going to take off anyway - they are more convenient, they offer personal space for the traveller and they were getting cheaper every year. Public transport is often times inconvenient, can be more expensive (hell, take a look at the cost of last minute train journeys in the UK vs just hopping in the car and driving the 100 miles - a last minute train ticket can cost multiple times that of the car journey) and can often be less comfortable (spending 8 hours with the entire side of your body pressed hard against a stranger, not many peoples idea of comfort...).
So, not quite the questionable decision at all - more a decision of its time, as is the attempt to go back to mass public transport of one kind or another.
electricity... (Score:2)
sure they made the wrong decision, but they made a bet
now what was questionable was to destroy the electricity network.... we could have electricity powered bus's
in fact it would be nice if we could go back to that, free electricity in the city for trucks and cars that do not use their motor
plus tax for all the diesel polluting during the day (forcing delivery and construction to actually THINK about when they want to run)
John
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No, that was a logical consequence of deciding to shut down the trams. Had the network been left up, it would have been necessary to maintain it--even out of use, it becomes a hazard if minimal maintenance is not done on it. They didn't want that expense for something that was serving no purpose.
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You're comparing long distance vs short distance. Take a look at the cost of driving a car to work in London and being squished against a stranger starts to look far more desirable.
The problem ultimately is that urban planning is fixed with a certain vision in mind, and Sydney was well planned. Whenever a week planned city suffers a change it doesn't go well and the city turning into the parking lot that is is today may not have necessarily been predicted by the council but that doesn't mean it wasn't predi
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They weren't out to just enable cars, they were out to *promote* cars. They didn't just shut down the tram systems, they actively destroyed them. Why were they in such a hurry to shut down the infrastructure, to rip out the rails, to *SET BRAND NEW TRAMS ON FIRE*? They weren't just reducing the tram network due to lack of use, they were actively destroying it permanently so it could not be restarted, because their end goal was to force everyone to drive, even the people who didn't want to.
If you feel your f
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It's interesting that you think you know what I included in my costs and what I didn't.
I didn't learn to drive until I was 30. Why did I learn to drive in the end? The appalling state of public transport in the UK and the fact that it wasn't getting any better.
And even recently, I used to walk or take the bus for my commute depending on my job - a 30 minute walk each way, in all weather, to one office, or a 50 minute bus journey, with a change in the middle, to another office. That's if the bus wasn't f
Re:Rose tinted spectacles (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Amsterdam, one of those major urban centres where reality matches the ideal. The Hague also has an excellent tram network, Rotterdam too. Germany has quite a large number of urban tram networks as well, and several cities in other European countries too. It's obvious that it can be done if one chooses to. I may have rose tinted spectacles, yours aren't untinted either.
Re:Rose tinted spectacles (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did I learn to drive in the end? The appalling state of public transport in the UK and the fact that it wasn't getting any better.
Which is one of the more compelling arguments for public transport. People who can't drive for whatever reason - can't afford a car, too young, too old, disability etc. - need to get around too. In fact it's better for everyone if they can get around, because then they can work more easily, care for relatives more easily, and generally participate in society and be less of a burden on the state.
Of course the other benefit is less traffic for people who do drive.
Public transport is an ideal, one which has yet to be matched by reality anywhere outside of some specific major urban centres.
My experience of Japan suggests otherwise. Even outside the major urban areas it's reliable, frequent and well integrated. The timetables are designed around people's needs, such as commuting.
One of the main reasons it works so well is that the public transport companies are involved in planning new facilities. If someone wants to build a new town, or a new business park, or a new shopping centre, they work with public transport companies to make sure it is well served. That way most of the desirable destinations are accessible on public transport alone, and in a decent amount of time.
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Why do you talk about the UK when we are discussing city based transportation?
Rather than using the letters UK, use the word London and realise that when you take a city specific example you can literally live your entire life without a drivers license.
Welcome to italy (Score:5, Interesting)
For the sake of FIAT(who pays tax abroad) we destroyed all of the public transportation system.
Stop the conspiracy bullshit already (Score:3, Interesting)
Trolleys & Tramways weren't torn up in some grand conspiracy to promote buses. They were torn up because light rail running at-grade in traffic fucks up traffic.
Eliminating the trolleys/trams allowed cities to add a lane or two for cars, which made it popular with voters... most of whom drove cars. Cities switched to buses because they didn't fuck up traffic as badly as trams & trolleys used to... and since most bus-riders were poor (compared to car-owners), their preferences were politically irrelevant.
This is what elected officials in Miami just keep NOT getting, over and over again. Miami voters are promised elevated rail expansion over & over again, vote for new taxes to pay for it, then get bait & switch fucked over again & again when the money gets used for goddamn buses that nobody (except for elected officials) wants. Miami voters are only willing to pay for elevated rail, because they hope it'll get the *other* drivers off the road. At-grade light rail & bus rapid transit can't make that promise, and in fact usually makes traffic congestion along their affected roads profoundly WORSE(*). Ergo, voter-opposition & zero willingness to fund.
Right now, Miami is on the cusp of a taxpayer revolt over transit taxes. We voted once to approve a half-cent sales tax after being promised Metrorail expansion. The county fucked us, blew it on buses, and actually CUT BACK on Metrorail service. Leaders begged for forgiveness, promised Metrorail expansion if we voted AGAIN for ANOTHER half-cent tag, and we fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker. Criminally-blatant bait & switch... except now, the voter backlash is coming, and the county government is in full-bore existential panic over the real possibility that voters are going to kill BOTH surtaxes & leave transit completely defunded.
It's the same story in Broward. Voters were promised Metrorail-like elevated transit, then officials came within one vote of blowing it all on at-grade transit instead. Except unlike Miami, in Broward the backlash was INSTANT. Angry voters in Broward made it clear that we want elevated rapid transit or nothing... and the county government backed off (for now, at least) to try finding a way to fund the transit system people actually voted for.
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(*) True story. Back in the late 1980s, Dade County spent a small fortune synchronizing the traffic lights along US-1 between downtown Miami and Homestead & optimizing their timing to turn South Dixie Highway into a road that was a half step below a freeway. It worked. In 1991, you could drive from Kendall Drive to Cutler Ridge Mall (now Southland Mall) in about 15 minutes... AT FUCKING RUSH HOUR. Then, the South Dade Busway was built alongside the road, and the light timing was fucked to hell to give buses priority. Literally overnight, the time to drive the same stretch of road doubled. And in the ~15 years since, it has only gotten WORSE. If our elected officials had done their goddamn jobs & just extended Metrorail (elevated) along the same route like they originally promised to do, we would have gotten rapid transit AND still had non-gridlocked traffic in that area.
At-grade transit fucks up travel times for EVERYONE. Grade-separated rail might (in the short term, at least) be a "boondoggle" that fails to visibly reduce gridlock... but at least it doesn't make matters *worse* the way trams, trolleys, and Bus Rapid Transit do.
Re:Stop the conspiracy bullshit already (Score:5, Informative)
It's a 2km drive from work to the freeway entrance, there are no trams on any of the roads to get there. One Friday afternoon it took me 90 minutes to drive that 2km. There were no accidents or roadwork involved.
Trams don't make roads worse, cars make roads worse.
Re: Stop the conspiracy bullshit already (Score:2)
If it's taking ~90 minutes to drive 2km, your road situation is already fucked & dysfunctional, and transit can't make it much worse (though I'd equally argue that with a road situation *that* bad, money spent on ANYTHING that doesn't involve tunnels or grade-separation would be completely wasted and pointless *anyway*).
I just wish Elon Musk could get Boring Company tunnels to be at *least* as wide as London's old tube tunnels. At costs that make tunneling cost-competitive with viaducts, we could *deal*
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...only if people prioritize their lives that way.
There are vast regions of the US (I assume that's where you live) where it doesn't take 90min to drive 2km.
So why do you put up with it?
Why don't you live where you could walk to work?
Your specific answers don't matter, because your complaint and evident unwillingness to change suggests that you prioritize OTHER THINGS over that 90min of your life. AND THAT'S FINE, but don't pretend you don't have a choice about it.
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A tram serving 100 customers uses a lot less roadway than 100 customers sitting alone in their cars. The problem is we let people use 30 times as much roadway for free just so their car can occupy it and cause a traffic jam.
It's like if your website instead of running an instance of nginx that handled everyone's requests, you had an individual server for every customer running an instance of nginx that only they ever accessed. Yeah, sometimes people do need their own servers, but not the average person goin
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No, you're not looking at this from the perspective of 1950's Australia. It was done to please our new American masters with the dwindling influence of the UK and, in particular, to please Ford and GM. It really was an act of vandalism. You find the presence of trams in the US upsetting? I would argue that this is only because road traffic was allowed to develop to titanic proportions and *only then* have they tried to reintroduce mass transit to help. It will take a while for behaviours to shift and for th
Sydney Trams (Score:4, Informative)
No, you're not looking at this from the perspective of 1950's Australia. It was done to please our new American masters with the dwindling influence of the UK and, in particular, to please Ford and GM.
This is the map of the tram system [tundria.com] before it was closed down compared to the shadow of what it was [transportnsw.info]. Here are some more articles and pictures of Sydney's Tram system from back then:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au]
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne... [dailymail.co.uk]
https://innersydneyvoice.org.a... [innersydneyvoice.org.au]
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... and since most bus-riders were poor (compared to car-owners), their preferences were politically irrelevant.
Perhaps a good public transport system is a sign of low corruption levels in politics.
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You think trolleys fucks up traffic, well yeah but getting rid of them puts traffic in the receiving end of a hateful hardcore BDSM gangbang.
No cities in the world have ever improved traffic by wholesale elimination of a popular public transport system.
Re:Stop the conspiracy bullshit already (Score:4, Interesting)
At-grade trams are just fine, like yeah there's an occasional accident with cars or pedestrians that wouldn't have happened with separated lines but it's not a huge deal.
The reason everything fails to visibly reduce gridlock is because in congested areas there's always more demand than road capacity so it will always fill up to some range-inducing equilibrium. I avoid going to the city center here because of traffic, if it were reduced, I'd drive there occasionally, contributing to the traffic.
Let's say you have a road transporting 100 people/minute. You add a tram that can also move 100 people/minute (numbers completely made up, obviously). 50 people that used to drive now take the tram, and 50 new people that used to stay at home also take the tram now. So the road now only carries 50 people, right? Not for long, because everyone sees that the traffic is now flowing smoother and some more people that stayed home now decide to drive, and some of the tram riders switch too because it's more convenient.
Overall you've made things much better as way more people can get where they want to go, but you didn't visibly fix the traffic.
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Trolleys & Tramways weren't torn up in some grand conspiracy to promote buses. They were torn up because light rail running at-grade in traffic fucks up traffic.
Yes, but fuck traffic. The whole idea of making your city convenient for a bunch of cars is a shit one, because it inevitably leads to too many cars.
An active rail line can carry 100 times as many people as a lane of roadway, for only ten times the cost. If you don't have much traffic, a road makes sense. If you do, you really want to get those people onto trains. Building more road lanes doesn't work, ultimately, because it just encourages more people to drive, and then they clog your new lanes — and
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Re: Stop the conspiracy bullshit already (Score:4, Interesting)
> perhaps gondolas would be more appropriate
lol, people who honestly think cities like Miami will be passively abandoned to the sea in an orgy of earth-worship.
What will *really* happen: as sea levels rise, every trace of Florida's natural environment will get buried under 10-30 feet of crushed limestone & concrete, Miami will start to look like a cross between midtown Manhattan & LA from the air, and the seeds of Coruscant will be planted.
The computer-rendered illustrations of Florida underwater are pure bullshit. Not because sea levels won't rise, but because they all assume the existence of a natural coastline & people doing *nothing* to mitigate higher tides. Newsflash: Florida hasn't had anything that vaguely resembles its 'natural' coastline since the 1920s.
Try this experiment: get the software used to render 'city underwater' images... and run it with *today's* sea levels. Guess what? They'll STILL show the city underwater, because the software acts like storm surge during a king tide is the daily norm.
Fact: every skyscraper ON EARTH has "wet feet" & stands in water like an oil rig. Statistically, 95% of the buildings in Florida will be destroyed by a hurricane or wrecking ball within 100 years... and replaced by buildings that are even BIGGER.
A century from now, Florida will have ~100 million people, and the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-WPB conurbation will have 20-30 million of them (statistically, Florida's population has doubled on schedule every 25-40 years for almost two centuries).
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What will *really* happen: as sea levels rise, every trace of Florida's natural environment will get buried under 10-30 feet of crushed limestone & concrete, Miami will start to look like a cross between midtown Manhattan & LA from the air, and the seeds of Coruscant will be planted.
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a state on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That was burned down by tweakers on krokodil riding alligators, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest state in all of America.
Re: Stop the conspiracy bullshit already (Score:3)
Porous limestone just means we can't build below sea level behind a wall. In Florida, we don't do that *anyway* -- we just dig holes, crush & dump the excavated limestone on a low area, and turn it into a new high area.
Florida is basically the biggest land-reclamation experiment in human history... Dutch terraforming technology, but applied wholesale to an area the size of Germany. Look at aerial/satellite photos of Broward County sometime. Literally 90%+ of what's now the Fort Lauderdale area USED to b
Re: Stop the conspiracy bullshit already (Score:2)
If you want to see true transit horror, go to New Orleans & observe a trolley as it cuts across 3 lanes while traversing a roundabout. They have DAILY accidents. Americans have lots of accidents in roundabouts to begin with... adding trolley tracks to them is like pouring gasoline onto a fire.
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There's a huge roundabout with a tram going through three lanes here too, I've never seen an accident there. I think it's pretty easy to avoid it because it's a GIANT SLOW TRAM :)
https://www.google.com/maps/@5... [google.com]
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Americans tend to behave like any paved road without speed bumps is a freeway.
Monday Morning Quarterback (Score:2)
I'd lay odds that the system was starting to lose money because people wanted cars. Cars gave you the freedom to go when/where you wanted, and not wait for a tram that might drop you somewhere blocks away from your destination in bad weather. Nobody was concerned about saving the planet back then, so the rise of the automobile was inevitable, as was the drop in riders.
Trade-offs (Score:5, Insightful)
There were pros and cons of trams, like everything else, and the rising prevalence of automobiles did change the relationship between trams and the other traffic they shared the road with. But it is fair to say that political leaders were short-sighted, as people did not really think through the implications of urban sprawl nor did they foresee the rise in fuel prices in the 1970s, and that's on top of making decisions about infrastructure with 100-year life spans on the basis of short-term factors.
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I'm sure there were some decisions made for the benefit of some company or industries (or racism...) but certainly at the time the downsides weren't as obvious at the time. Nobody cared about pollution, and cars do work much better with the lower population densities that existed at the time. There's this video that explains the history quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I love cars and driving, and precisely because of this, I'm all for getting as many people as possible off the roads and into pu
Narrabeen (Score:2)
revisionist history (Score:3)
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He didn't say thousands of deaths. Thousands of accidents isn't unbelievable.
just like the rest of the world? (Score:2)
there is nothing specific to Sydney in this story, all cities with trams basically destroyed that infrastructure or reduced it heavily.
it's amazing to see how cities were transformed around cars so quickly; they paved paradise to put up a parking lot.
to some extend you can see the same thing happening again, but in reverse, a lot of cities are now trying to keep cars out, reducing car specific infrastructure or making life hard/difficult for cars, mostly to the benefit of bicycles, pedestrians and public tr
Just sayin' (Score:2)
Believe I saw the Sydney trams operating in the film version of On the Beach. Fitting...
Trams / Light Rail are the worst of all worlds. (Score:2, Troll)
I used to be a fan of Trams and Light Rail, until I actually started riding them, living in cities with them, and ultimately - understanding the economics behind them.
The deficiencies are totally obvious once you actually start riding them:
1. They have to stop at every red light.
2. They require entire lanes of road for their virtually exclusive use.
3. They do not yield to pedestrians, or anyone or anything else for that matter.
4. They are limited to driving on tracks, which have to be laid and maintained.
5.
Faster correction than in the US (Score:2)
Aussie bikers here ? (Score:2)
I see the almighty car has devoured much in Australia as it did elsewhere. Now that i finished my morning commute in a mildly bike friendly city,i am curious to hear how Aussies commute by bike. Is it practical ? Dangerous ? Do you feel at ease ? Do the municipalities try to expand its use ?
I know the main subject is tramway but biking is a surprisingly good option for work commute even if you come from suburbia to the inner city.
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Indeed. From memory, there are some great pictures in a section of Adelaide Arcade showing some of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
http://adelaidearcade.com.au/h... [adelaidearcade.com.au]
Re:Seems expensive. (Score:5, Interesting)
Because light-rail is a failure world-wide? Every city that opts for "cheaper" light rail over subways or elevated rail, is digging their own grave in subsidizing the construction, operational, maintenance, employee pensions, and liability for when it kills people.
Automate your rapid transit lines, or stick with buses. There is no net cost benefit to switching to light rail from just using buses, and with the push to electric buses, there also no cost savings, just very expensive rails that can't navigate around accidents caused by the rails existing.
Every city with more than 100,000 people should have a subway or elevated rail system that is either a straight-line through the city center (eg college/university-residential-central business-residential-airport/ferry) or a circle loop with the business district on one end and the destinations at each 1/8th of the system (eg business district-residential-airport-residential-college-residential-HSR terminus-(loop back to business district.))
Cities with millions of people need to have both elevated and subway systems to connect their major destinations via different routes.
Light rail accomplishes none of that. They end up being worse than riding the bus, with any perceived cost savings over the bus coming from running it less frequently than the bus, thus having less capacity.
Light rail is rubbish, and cities that invest in them without first building automated grade separated transit systems first, are going to just create more congestion and push more people into driving, the light rail ends up being the "crime train"
Re: Seems expensive. (Score:5, Interesting)
Utter BS. A light rail train can carry up to 4 times more people than a bus in far more comfort, dont pollute at point of use and unlike battery buses dont have a limited range. Yes they can get stuck in traffic but most modern systems are mostly segregated anyway particularly in the suburbs and some reuse old heavy rail routes. An underground metro is obviousky a better solution but costs 5-10 times as much per mile.
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Yes, fixed rail can carry up to 4 times more people from one place where they don't want to be, to another place where they don't want to be.
Re: Seems expensive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, fixed rail can carry up to 4 times more people from one place where they don't want to be, to another place where they don't want to be.
To a certain extent that's also like cars as typically a car park nearish where I am going isn't actually somewhere I want to be.
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Unless you live along the rail route and work at the destination (downtown).
I did this for years. Hopped on the train and 15 minutes later was 2 blocks from work. I used my bike or legs for all other utilities. I drove my car maybe 2 or 3 times a month.
I would still be doing this, but I moved into a house with the love of my life, who takes priority over any living situation, no matter how ideal it was :)
Re: Seems expensive. (Score:2)
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But it wasn't a valid point. Whenever I go downtown, I tend to take the lightrail. I don't have to fight with traffic, so it's faster and less stressful. I don't have to pay for parking so it's cheaper. And the station is closer than anywhere you're likely to find parking. Now, downtown hasn't been designated as walking only, it's just that there's so many people there that trying to find parking.....yeah, have fun with that.
Re:Seems expensive. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cities shouldn't have "central business districts" at all. They should have *downtowns* where people live, work and play. A district with just office towers only serves a purpose from 9am to 5pm, and sits like a ghost town the rest of the time, wasting the valuable infrastructure that was built to support.
There should be no such thing as residential or commercial zoning. Build tall buildings with housing/office in them, retail on first 1-3 floors. Further out, dense suburbs with townhomes, then further out from that detached single family homes with the people who want them (taxed appropriately so that they cover their own infrastructure, since they're basically using bespoke roads and sewers etc.). If your city grows a lot, build a second downtown, and a third one, etc.
Build rail lines that connect the downtowns with the dense suburbs, with endpoint stops in the light outer suburbs. Build crosstown lines that link the dense suburbs with each other directly. Set up congestion pricing so that outsiders have to pay to drive in the dense suburbs and inward, and charge *everyone* who wants to drive in the downtowns, even if they live there -- this way the roads are kept uncongested for vital delivery trucks, taxis, etc.
The whole idea is to make it so people live close to where they work and can walk/scooter there way there in minutes, and motor vehicles are only used when absolutely needed. Locals used to this will have more money in their pocket from not paying 20% of their income just supporting their vehicle.
People who desperately want to live far from others still have that option, but they're on the hook to pay for that inefficient infrastructure, instead of counting on taxes from the downtowns. Maybe make the outer suburbs not even government-funded at all, but private corporations that are responsible for paying for all their roads/water treatment/sewers/etc. paid for via HOA, with the only taxes funding their endpoint rail stations.
Keep zoning in place for heavy industrial -- the only real positive benefit that ever came out of zoning was keeping polluting factories away from housing. Even then, factory pollution should be kept at a minimum such that it is safe to live next to a factory if you really want to. Light industrial should still be able to locate wherever it wants.
Zoning is social engineering at its worst.
Re:Seems expensive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Zoning is social engineering at its worst.
And yet you just proposed a form of zoning. Newsflash: not all zoning is done like it is in Sim City.
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multi-use zoning is actually making a comeback combining shops, businesses and residences in one building or neighborhood
Re: Seems expensive. (Score:3)
They should have *downtowns* where people live, work and play.
I'll bite: so city dwellers are supposed to do everything "downtown." What's the rest of the city for, or is it "all downtown?"
BTW, rational thought can manifest in a variety of ways; one is the desire to not live like a fucking cockroach.
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A district with just office towers only serves a purpose from 9am to 5pm, and sits like a ghost town the rest of the time, wasting the valuable infrastructure that was built to support.
How is this not true regardless? Unless people live in their offices, or do some sort of hot-desking with around-the-clock shifts, all of the office infrastructure is going to be a ghost town outside of business hours.
Re:Seems expensive. (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Sydney.
There is a 'subway' train network, with a city circle going through the CBD, and an airport line + lines to different suburbs.
Light rail that is put in place actually connects areas between major train lines, and complements the trains & will take away some of the strain from a number of very busy bus lines.
Travelling on the light rail frequently, I can assure you it is nothing like a 'crime train'. In fact, the experiences I've had with metrolines in major world cities suggests to me that they are more 'crime trains' than any other rail transport.
The only mistake Sydney are making at the moment is this WestConnex BS. Public transportation is actually quite all right. The issue with people driving is more cultural than a necessity in the urban areas. I don't even own a car :-)
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Finally, a sensible comment.
Re:Seems expensive. (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in a town with 120,000 inhabitants, which has all three: light rail, buses and suburb trains -- simply out of necessity. Just recently (January 2019), a bus line was converted into a light rail line (actually into two lines, running different routes downtown) because it had reached the bus capacity limits (38,000 passengers per day).
Rules of thumbs are just that: rules of thumbs. In theory, they make sense, in reality, they don't work out most of the times.
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I live in a town with 120,000 inhabitants, ... because it had reached the bus capacity limits (38,000 passengers per day).
So almost a full third of the population ride 1 bus line everyday?
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Re:Seems expensive. (Score:5, Informative)
Amsterdam has a combination of public transport modalities including tram, metro, bus, and train.
Trams transport 280 thousand passengers on an average working day (*), let's assume that this means 100k people commuting by tram in rush hour. If these would all take the car, that would increase the number of cars by probably at least 75k.
The public transport company owns 200 trams (**), say that 150 are actually in operation. Their route is on average about 10km, and the tram goes about 30km/h average, so let's say it takes half an hour to run the whole length including stops. Assuming rush hours is 2 hours, each tram operates the route 4 times, so in total there are 800 'tram movements'. So, each tram on the road replaces 100 cars. This sounds a bit high since a tram has 60 seats (plus 125 standing) (***), so let's say it's half that. But still, you cannot argue that a single tram takes up more road space than 50+ cars.
Another way to reach the same conclusion is to look at passenger density. A car takes ~4 meters (plus say 2 meters space between cars) to transport ~1 person. A tram takes 30 meters (plus say 20 meters space) to transport 50-100 people. That is about 5 to 10 times more dense.
Moreover, trams (and buses) are an important part of the total network and allow people to get to the more space efficient modalities such as train and metro. When a new metro line was opened in Amsterdam, it allowed total passengers to grow by 6% even though the number of tram passengers declined as more people used the metro. This shows how the different modalities interact: people choose the (combination of) modalities that gets them from A to B in the most comfortable, fast, and/or cheap way. Saying that you should only have a separated train modality (metro or commuter rail) doesn't make sense since these modalities by design have more space in between stops, so people need a way to get from their home/work to the metro or train station. Only real exception is the metro system in very densely populated cities like Hong Kong or New York, where metro stops are close enough together to not require transport to get to the metro. However, even there in the less populated / suburban parts the metro system is complemented by buses and/or park+ride facilities for the "last mile".
*) https://over.gvb.nl/nieuws/vervoercijfers-sterke-groei-reizigers/
**) https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdamse_tram
***) https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdamse_Combino%27s
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Oh noes! The cities/counties/states/feds are subsidizing a mode of transportation! What will we do!
Unclutch your pearls and take a good long look at the disaster our cities/suburbs/ex-urbs have become because we keep SUBSIDIZING ROADS.
Yep. We subsidize building roads. We pour B-B-BILLIONS of dollars every YEAR into building, maintaining and widening roads just so people can drive cars on them and damned little else. Talk about failure. Oh sure, there are some trucks using those roads, but the roads are buil
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I live in a city with 160k inhabitants. There is no light rail or tram or metro but still I can get to almost any place in the city within 30 minutes with my bicycle.
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I personally think it is totally nuts for cities to be building out new tram lines at this point, when we are on the cusp (just years away) from fully self driving buses that could go to a lot more places than any tram system could reach, vastly cheaper.
Self-driving buses along known routes are probably the first really solid use we'll see of the technology and will eventually obsolete all but very long distance rail systems... maybe even those, though they have the advantage of much more direct cross country routes.
Alll of the car related infrastructure cities have been building will be a huge boon when it's more efficiently used by mostly self-driving traffic.
Why is a self driving bus any better than a regular driven bus in terms of replacing trams? A bus is a bus at the end of the day and it's only really good for the company who doesn't have to hire drivers. A regular bus can take just as many people and go just as many places as a self driven one.
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For inner city travel: Instead of electric scooters, what about tiny capsule cars that automatically drive to where you want to go?
Why don't they just invert fucking teleporters already.
Re:Building out tram lines now is foolish (Score:4, Insightful)
Could you explain this freedom of car ownership?
Every day I need to get into a one ton metal box, hurl it at speeds of excess 100kph, While avoiding hitting others doing the same thing. Being that everyone is doing this, the chances of accidents are high, so I will be stuck in traffic unable to move, and unable to just get out of my car and walk the rest of the way. Once I get near my destination, I need to find a place where I can park the car and then walk the rest of the way to my actual destination.
Now if you want to talk about freedom. These roads are highly monitored by police, and are willing to fine you for any sort of transgression, going too fast, going to slow, not turning on your lights, keeping your lights on, driving to tense, driving to lax. While on the road in Freedom Loving America, I am currently in a tyrannical police state.
Then there is the cost of automobile ownership, we are normally paying hundreds of dollar a month for car payments, having to pay for car insurance, registration inspections, make sure it is filled with Gas, the Oil is replaced regularly... All comes out of my salary, which I would rather be doing something more enjoyable with.
A car is a tool, tools solve problems, they are not a key to freedom. Also like all tools, not everyone should be required to have one.
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To stop at a location, stay at a location, then enjoy transport again without having to keep to a schedule, route, connecting route?
Thats the freedom of a "car". 24/7 transport.
Re "not everyone should be required to have one."
In the past many people did and enjoyed that ability. To save up, buy a car they liked and travel.
In Communist nations the gov approved getting a car years after asking for approval.
Now ci
Varied use (Score:3)
In spite of US politics this is not an us against them issue, it's a matter of doing what works. Cars and transit are for different things. Guns are for