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Transportation

Cars All But Banned On One of Manhattan's Busiest Streets (nytimes.com) 149

Posted by BeauHD from the devoid-of-cars dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report from The New York Times: On Thursday, New York City transformed one of its most congested streets into a "busway" that delighted long frustrated bus riders and transit advocates but left many drivers and local businesses fuming that the city had gone too far. Passenger cars, including taxis and Ubers, were all but banned from 14th Street, a major crosstown route for 21,000 vehicles a day that links the East and West Sides of Manhattan. It was New York's most ambitious stand yet against cars since the first pedestrian plazas were carved out of asphalt more than a decade ago. Roads that were once the exclusive domain of cars have been squeezed to make way for bike and bus-only lanes. Prime parking spots have been turned into urban green spaces. Traffic lights give pedestrians a head start crossing intersections. And making a vital artery nearly off limits to cars could be the beginning of a new wave of sweeping moves. "From now on, drivers are allowed onto 14th Street only to make deliveries and pick up and drop off passengers from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week," the report adds. "They can travel just a block or two before they have to turn right off the street. No left turns are allowed. The police will give out warnings at first and surveillance cameras will be watching."
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Cars All But Banned On One of Manhattan's Busiest Streets More

Cars All But Banned On One of Manhattan's Busiest Streets

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    • Re:If you think this is stupid, read this: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @08:20AM (#59272744) Homepage Journal

      It isn't stupid. You shouldn't build cities around cars.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by raorajesh ( 1563781 )
        But we did. That is why you have outlying suburbs with a downtown - cars predicated modern city design principles.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Gherald ( 682277 )

          We did when it worked. City downtowns are too dense now. Something has to change; this is an example of that change.

    • Re:If you think this is stupid, read this: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday October 05, 2019 @08:25AM (#59272752) Homepage Journal

      What's stupid about it is banning taxis.

      If you're going to use a medallion system for taxis and then not permit the taxis to go where the people are, you're fucking the city out of having enough functional transport, and fucking the taxi drivers out of what they paid for the medallions.

      Buses fucking suck for public transportation. We literally only use them because it costs over 100k to put a driver in a seat for a year. Once autonomous vehicles can do the same job, we will stop making buses almost entirely and switch to lighter vehicles which are superior to them in literally every way but driver to passenger ratio. Buses can't go many places, perturb traffic by being such big goofy boxes, and do orders of magnitude more road damage than vans, literally.

      Of course, it would make more sense to kick cars out of cities completely and replace all transport with PRT, but that's not happening until things get much much worse, thanks to humans' seemingly infinite capacity to live in denial.

      • Re:If you think this is stupid, read this: (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @08:40AM (#59272774)

        What do you need taxis for - hop the bus. Buses suck because not enough people take them, and they get stuck in traffic. Make them the most attractive option, and you get into a virtuous cycle. Why would you take a car that spends most of its time stuck in traffic when a bus will take you across town at the speed limit while leaving the street mostly empty for pedestrians.

        Once you get to a top close to your destination, *then* you take a taxi the rest of the way (or bike, rentascooter, or whatever). There's no justification for clogging up a huge portion of the city center with slow-moving parking lots of people trying to get across town.

        Also medallions are a Faustian bargain - the city gets some influence on accountability and a trickle of additional income, in exchange for granting the taxi services a monopoly on their services. And at a going rate of over $1 million for a medallion, I guarantee you that the taxi *drivers* aren't the ones who own the medallions.

        • Buses make sense if you run them like a train -- on a dedicated busway where there's traffic to contend with, on a regular, train-like schedule, and with the same kind of limited stops that you do with a train. Otherwise, buses are punishingly slow and unreliable from a scheduling perspective.

          I also wonder why they don't use more, smaller minibuses. They could gain the same capacity as a large bus running multiple minibuses, either in tandem at the same schedule or by doubling the frequency and halving th

          • Buses make sense if you run them like a train -- on a dedicated busway where there's traffic to contend with, on a regular, train-like schedule, and with the same kind of limited stops that you do with a train.

            No, they don't. If you're doing all that it makes much more sense to use rail, which can carry far more passengers, and which doesn't produce tire dust, and which doesn't cover the ground so much as pavement. Rail also better suits electrification whether you use a third rail or a pantograph wire. If you're using buses like trains, you should be using trains.

            I also wonder why they don't use more, smaller minibuses.

            The reason we use buses is that it costs over $100k to put a driver in a seat for a year in the US. The only reason we use minibuses or midibuses is th

            • Rail is an expensive piece of inflexible infrastructure and again only works when commute patterns are fairly static which generally means mid-size cities with stagnant population levels. Rail is a poor choice if conditions are rapidly changing. New York City has a *lot* of rail. Maybe more than any other city and still uses buses to supplement.

            • The Orange Line in Los Angeles is run like a train, uses a dedicated busway, and has huge daily ridership. But it's the only line of this nature in L.A. Though rail is still being built in L.A. now, dedicated busways will probably be a (partial) solution to the traffic congestion on the westside.

            • Rail is certainly better in most cases - and the two can be combined on the same through fare to allow for incidental wheeled.

              Where rail fails is in upfront cost when you already have roads. Especially when you consider not just the direct financial cost of retrofitting roadways with rail, but also amount of disruption that retrofitting will impose, and the speed with which the new system can be deployed and scaled. Especially in downtown areas, where mass transit makes the most sense.

              Here's an idea for

        • If only the last sentence weren't true. Many taxi drivers *do* own their medallions. They financed them often at high interest rates and worked their entire lives to pay them off and the medallion represents their entire net worth. Then the cities let unlicensed taxis (Uber/Lyft) come in and destroy the value of those medallions basically screwing the taxi drivers out of their hard-earned retirement.

          • If only the last sentence weren't true. Many taxi drivers *do* own their medallions.

            But only about 30% or so.

            They financed them often at high interest rates and worked their entire lives to pay them off and the medallion represents their entire net worth.

            Yes, they invested in their business.

            Then the cities let unlicensed taxis (Uber/Lyft) come in and destroy the value of those medallions basically screwing the taxi drivers out of their hard-earned retirement.

            So their business failed because conditions changed. That's sad, but it happens all of the time.

            • There was recently an investigation started into the city practice of advertising medallion sales with lies and false promises. Basically the T&LC and loan sellers were colluding on selling subprime loans for the medallions, that could then be bundled up and resold. reference [nytimes.com]

        • What do you need taxis for - hop the bus. Buses suck because not enough people take them, and they get stuck in traffic.

          But where else are ya gonna get that sweet sweet smel of pee and vomit for free?

          • The US public transport is like this, I'm always being told.

            But around here, they are clean and convenient to a point where using a car nearly always is just pointless and annoying. E.g. streetcars are hosed down each day, and due to being used by lots of people all day, nobody would dare to pee in there, and throwing up is merely an accident or weekend party folk (0-4am) thing right before hosing down time (4-5am).
            You never get a subway/tram station more than 500m away and never a bus stop more than 250m.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by kerashi ( 917149 )

              In the US public transportation, in general, sucks, and no one wants to pay for what it would take to fix it. The last time I took a bus I had to wait over 20 minutes in stifling heat (98 degrees Fahrenheit, that's around 36.6 C for you Europeans) and it sucked extra bad. Definitely not used to that kind of inconvenience, since I live in a rural area without public transit and have my own truck, and just took the bus while on vacation to avoid trouble with parking. Do not want to try that again. Ever.

            • Now imagine you had to stand on the side of the road in 40 celsius weather for a bus that comes once an hour and is already 40 minutes late, will be dirty and overcrowded, and take an hour to make a trip that takes 20 minutes or less by car.

              • It might surprise you, but "40 minutes late" is actually a rare condition in most European cities and a sign of major congestion or traffic accidents. Neither condition makes for fast car travel either. "Once an hour" either means it is night time (low traffic) or more rural areas (low traffic too), so yeah, nice nightmare you are painting, but not a good argument.

        • Bus stops are 250m (750ft) apart. At most. That's not even worth mounting your bicycle for.

          And in the outskirts, there is usually a special kind of bigger "taxi" that works like a bus line, but only comes if you call it first. It nicely fills that gap, while still allowing savings due to not riding alone when possible.

        • Busses have a lot going for them but they do NOT compare with Taxis for convenience.

          The problem is that the Busses stop every couple of blocks, which means they catch almost every light. This reduces their speed tremendously.

          Worse, bus stops are exposed to the environment. Wet when it rains/snows/hails, too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer, too windy when it blows. No fun. Ubers etc. let you wait indoors till they get there.

        • I can get from my house to my work in 45 minutes on a normal day (or 1.5 hours if its bad weather with perhaps an accident or two on the road, but rarely that bad).
          30 minutes on the weekend if no special events in the way.

          I can get from my house to my work in about 2 hours by bus, more like 3 on the weekend because of reduced services.
          If I got stuck at work past about 8, there would be no more busses.

          I can save some time by driving (umm... then I need a car, right?) to the closest main terminal, however I n

        • Buses are great because they are empty. With full capacity buses you will be subjected to worst of human elements.

          Anticar movement in big cities is typical socialist populist, ablist, agist movement

          • NYC has a public transit system called Access-A-Ride. It’s basically a taxicab service for disabled and senior citizens. The fares are very cheap because it’s subsidized by the city. Some users opt to get “AAR MetroCard” which allows them to use both the AAR and the subway/bus. It even goes outside NYC to the neighboring suburbs. You can qualify for it if you have a temporary disability too. Source: MTA FAQ [mta.info]

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        Agreed. That said, I have no objection to parts of cities being turned into pedestrian malls... subject to the constraints that:

        1) The businesses / residents in the area are broadly supportive
        2) Parking capacity on the outskirts is increased by the amount of parking capacity lost inside (e.g. so people can park and then set off on foot)
        3) That arterial traffic capacity is not reduced, both cross-town and to/from the area that is becoming a pedestrian mall.

        There's nothing wrong with having walkable spaces i

        • 2) Parking capacity on the outskirts is increased by the amount of parking capacity lost inside

          The park & ride facilities around our major cities seem to be very popular. Basically it's huge parking lots around subway stations near highways on the outskirts of town. The ones I've used are well-situated, easy to get to from the highway with only a short walk to the subway platform, and at most a 10 minute wait for a train.

          But what's also needed is parking facilities for people living in the city. I used to live right in the center and I did not need a car to get to work, to do grocery shoppi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        For all of the disadvantages that you mention buses to have, I think you underestimate the merit of their overall economy when you consider how many people buses can actually move around at once.

        • For all of the disadvantages that you mention buses to have, I think you underestimate the merit of their overall economy when you consider how many people buses can actually move around at once.

          I obviously don't, since I cite that as the reason we use buses:

          We literally only use them because it costs over 100k to put a driver in a seat for a year.

          Autonomous vans are going to finally destroy buses in the first world, and good riddance. They never made sense in cities. Some form of rail was always a better idea, but you know... streetcar conspiracy. Car, oil, and tire companies are all complicit, and their anti-train lobbying continues to this day.

          • Buses make perfect sense for routes with narrow streets and a lot of intersections. Trams can't cope with that. Hence the main lines are on rail, the secondary lines are bus routes.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mark-t ( 151149 )

            Of course buses make sense in cities... It's simply a matter of economy of scale. Buses can carry large numbers of passengers that could otherwise require 40 or more smaller vehicles which would create far more traffic congestion than the buses cause, and even if that we somehow not an issue, such high traffic volumes would do far more damage to the roads through such use than a bus that moves the same number of people does.

            The only mode of transport that is ultimately more economical than buses for mov

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bodog ( 231448 )

          "Individual vehicles are inferior in the only way that actually matters: Passenger density / lane hour. Because cars take up a great deal more space for the same number of passengers as a bus, buses have a much higher throughput than cars."

          This is only true if one assumes full bus occupancy, which is a major assumption.

          • A normal two axis bus here is 10 to 13m long for a total of more than 60 passengers. That's less than three cars use when waiting at a traffic light. So even with a 25% occupancy it is no worse than fully loaded cars.

          • This is only true if one assumes full bus occupancy, which is a major assumption.

            A bus takes up maybe twice the road space of a moving car, so a bus with 2 passengers has already reached break even. A bus with 20 passengers is far from full, but still an order of magnitude more space-efficient than single-occupancy cars or taxis.

            Also, in a city, at rush hour, the buses do reliably fill up, I assure you.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 )

        Buses fucking suck for public transportation.

        Not when they're done well, and not in big cities.

        We literally only use them because it costs over 100k to put a driver in a seat for a year.

        No that's not the only reason. They can also cram a large number of people into a very small piece of road and transport them efficiently.

        Once autonomous vehicles can do the same job, we will stop making buses almost entirely and switch to lighter vehicles which are superior to them in literally every way but driver to pas

        • We literally only use [buses] because it costs over 100k to put a driver in a seat for a year.

          No that's not the only reason. They can also cram a large number of people into a very small piece of road and transport them efficiently.

          No they don't, not at all. Tires suck, buses thrash roads which you have to take into account in your efficiency calculations, and they don't handle full journeys because of their limited routes so you have to take the last part into account as well.

          The buses don't perturb the traffic, the cars do. The buses are, in terms of the number of passengers, the traffic and everything else is insignificant.

          If you have that percentage of passengers in buses then it makes far more sense to put them on rails.

          • Are you actually understanding what you are writing? On the one hand you are whining about tyres that create particulate matter, on the other you want to replace a bus with several vans that amount to far more tyres.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by serviscope_minor ( 664417 )

            You literally didn't read anything I wrote. You just keep spouting buses such lololol use trains and autovans.

            No they don't, not at all.

            Yes they do.

            Tires suck, buses thrash roads which you have to take into account in your efficiency calculations,

            Yes, and? Cars have tyres. Autovans will have tyres when then exist. And yes you are right about the roads, you have to build the roads stronger in order to take buses and lorries on a regular basis. That's cheaper and easier than building wider roads to take into

      • If you're going to use a medallion system for taxis and then not permit the taxis to go where the people are

        Making people walk to one street over isn't "not permitting taxis to go where the people are". It's just utterly stupid and lazy. Taxis randomly stopping is the cause of a great many problems. On the flip side people walking a block doesn't cause any problems at all, other than maybe reducing obesity, so I'm sure the MIC would go nuts over that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      Enlightened street design... in Zurich...

      You do know that Zurich has a green/left government with the credo of "If you make traffic suck enough, fewer people will enter the city by car", right?

      Well, the streets are full anyway just now it's because you're waiting at a traffic light every 50 meters that will let about three cars through in a green phase. Also if you miss your turn, expect to be driving half an hour longer because you can be certain every other turn in the same direction is going to be one wa

      • "If you make traffic suck enough, fewer people will enter the city by car"

        Sounds like a win.

      • Zuerich is awesome for pedestrians, though. Visited it several times, has always been a pleasure.

    • Re:If you think this is stupid, read this: (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @09:22AM (#59272854) Homepage

      I have a couple issues with this article.

      1) We're told that the trams come once every 3-4 minutes in each direction , and the author claims that they carry 3500 people per hour. Doing the math, this would require the trams to carry an average of 3500/60*3,5/2 = 102 people. Sometimes less, sometimes much more. Looking up the Wikipedia article for Trams in Zürich [wikipedia.org] (there's a Wikipedia article for everything!), and accounting for variation around the average, one can see that only the 3001-3088 "Cobra" trams could possibly meet that spec - but there's only 18 of them in the city's entire tram fleet of 258 trams. Hence I'm immediately suspect of the claimed average ridership figures, and suspect that instead they might be peak figures. My experience with public transit is that the average public transit vehicle spends most of its time way under peak capacity, in order to have capacity for peak events.

      Perhaps these max capacity numbers for the trams are misleading - perhaps they're generally run in double-unit trams, which the author is calling a single tram. But doing a google image search [google.is] for the interior of a tram doesn't show anywhere near the occupancy that could be used to justify that sort of ridership figure. The images look like what I'm used to: most of the time way under peak occupancy.

      2) Trams are not PRT; they don't go from your starting location, to your destination. Which means that you have to travel a greater distance, which partially negates the advantage of packing people tighter together in transportation. This reduces the net effectiveness of the system. Or to put it another way: picture how much more car traffic there would be if every car driver had to drive 50-100% further to get to their destination.

      3) They're using the entirely wrong evaluation metrics. Evaluation metrics include things like space consumed, cost, and time taken to travel between points. The article makes no attempt to measure these things at all for different road systems. So I will.

      As for space, the article itself is in agreement that the system uses up a ton of the city's space (they just try to argue that it's worth it). So there's no dispute on this front.

      As for cost, the price of €1k/yr for city transport - and that's with subsidy - is hardly some great bargain, vs. driving a used car (€1/l (current Swiss pricing), 6l/100km, 7000km/yr city driving = €420 in fuel). Note that I'm only comparing city driving because that €1k/yr only provides you city tram service. And the cost of building such tram systems to begin with are generally truly massive compared to building roads. My city of ~125k / metro area of ~200k is looking to build a basic bus-tram system and it's projected to cost about half a billion euros. And I fully expect it to inflate.

      Lastly, as for time, using this website [fahrplan.zvv.ch], I asked it to find me the fastest route between two random parts of the city - Zürich, Friedhof Witikon and Zürich, Albisrieden. It came back with 42 minutes. This is a distance of 11km, so an average speed of 15,7kph - not counting the time you spend walking to and from tram stops. With that factored in it might be more like 10kph.

      Now let us look at a car-focused city that's famous for traffic - Los Angeles. Let's pick two random places on either side of downtown that are 11km apart - say, Echo Park to City Terrace. Estimated travel time? 11 minutes. Average speed = 60 kph. Maybe lower it for ass

      • Re:If you think this is stupid, read this: (Score:5, Insightful)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @10:24AM (#59272972) Journal

        My experience with public transit is that the average public transit vehicle spends most of its time way under peak capacity, in order to have capacity for peak events.

        Well, you get two of those peak events every day. Everything is fine if you're well under capacity. The problem is at rush hour you get gridlock and the city grinds to a halt. That's the point when you need an otherwise overspecced transport system to be able to take the edge off it.

        3) They're using the entirely wrong evaluation metrics. Evaluation metrics include things like space consumed, cost, and time taken to travel between points. The article makes no attempt to measure these things at all for different road systems. So I will.

        Those are very far from the only metrics. The city has a limited amount of physical space. As someone pointed out the last time this thread came up you can build a metro line for 10x the cost of a road with 100x the capacity. Take my local line with it's 32,000 peak passenger pre hour (each direction) capacity.

        It looks REALLY expensive compared to taking the road, it cost a fortune to build and I suspect it's not cheap to run. On the other hand if you didn't have it, those 32,000 people would all be trying to go by road and suddenly the metrics you're using would change drastically.

        Now let us look at a car-focused city that's famous for traffic - Los Angeles. Let's pick two random places on either side of downtown that are 11km apart - say, Echo Park to City Terrace. Estimated travel time?

        It's LA, so it'll take about 3 hours stuck in traffic unless you take an epic bird journey. I took a Lyft last time I was in L.A. to get to work in the morning. For the last half of the journey we were keeping pace with a dude on an electric scooter. Eventually he pulled ahead and disappeared off.

        My country plans to already have banned the purchase of new ICE vehicles years before it's supposed to be completed, and to be working on phasing out registration renewals of existing ICE vehicles by then. So it loses its argument.

        Pollution is only one argument. The other is that cars simply don't have the same capacity as other forms of transport.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          Well, you get two of those peak events every day

          Well, "semi-peak". The real peaks come at things like major concerts, sporting events, festivals, etc.

          The city has a limited amount of physical space

          But even the linked article starts off by noting how much space is "wasted" by the tram lanes sitting empty (then goes on to try to defend it). Are you saying that car-cities like Los Angeles don't have a limited amount of physical space?

          As someone pointed out the last time this thread came up you can build a m

          • Well, "semi-peak". The real peaks come at things like major concerts, sporting events, festivals, etc.

            It's always a tradeoff. If you overbuild to the point where the largest ever event is free flowing such that even day to day stuff is far from capacity you've probably wasted money to the point where it would give a better return spent elsewhere.

            It also depends on the city. My main experience is London. We have concerts, sporting events and festivals all the time, and they barely make a dent except very loc

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Rei ( 128717 )

              But even the linked article starts off by noting how much space is "wasted" by the tram lanes sitting empty (then goes on to try to defend it). Are you saying that car-cities like Los Angeles don't have a limited amount of physical space?

              Roads with cars have surprisingly low capacities. A mostly empty tram lane with a tram zipping through it can exceed that easily.

              It visibly isn' t in the case of Zurich when compared to "car cities". I'm not here to talk about theoreticals, I'm here to talk about readily o

              • It visibly isn' t in the case of Zurich when compared to "car cities". I'm not here to talk about theoreticals, I'm here to talk about readily observable actualities.

                What are the numbers? As in what's the rush hour person per hour on the tram line, vs what you would cram down there with cars (probably largely single occupancy at rush hour)?

                Yet the fact remains that you get around a lot faster even in LA than you do on a Zurich tram. Even despite LA being more population dense and with people having longer

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

        As for cost, the price of 1k euro/yr for city transport - and that's with subsidy - is hardly some great bargain, vs. driving a used car (â1/l (current Swiss pricing), 6l/100km, 7000km/yr city driving = â420 in fuel). Note that I'm only comparing city driving because that â1k/yr only provides you city tram service.

        Let me get this straight, you're comparing the annual pass price for a city tram service to the fuel cost of a private vehicle and declaring that there's no bargain?

        How about you ac

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by bsolar ( 1176767 )

        My experience with public transit is that the average public transit vehicle spends most of its time way under peak capacity, in order to have capacity for peak events.

        Trams (and public transport in general) are scheduled to cover expected peak hours. You might have fewer or smaller trams off peak hours vs. more, much larger trams during peak hours. Of course off peak hours you have more empty trams, but you'll also have empty streets since there will be much less car traffic too.

        Basically you are correct that public transport has more an advantage during peak hours, but that's where the advantage matters the most.

        Trams are not PRT; they don't go from your starting location, to your destination.

        Typically the public transport are very widespread and you

      • One thing that you might be overlooking is that cars require parking. They ultimately need to end up somewhere and unless they’re merely passing through that consumes space. And the same arguments for going out of the way or extra travel apply for parking lots or parking garages as well.

        I think this is an argument against densely packed city centers themselves but replacing all of that infrastructure is even more expensive. The real premium is space and it’s probably ideal to remove cars outr

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          Indeed, I have no objection to such an approach. Having parts of cities be effectively "pedestrian malls" is A-Okay in my book, so long as they don't cut arterial flow A) past, or B) to/from it, and C) have sufficient parking on the outskirts. I'm also in no way opposed to mass transit where populations can actually be defined as "mass". What I object to is trying to force mass transit "solutions" onto low-density areas to which they're poorly suited.

          Personally, the "mass transit" I want to see is PRT...

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • What I usually don't see in these types of analysis is how long it takes for people to get to where they want to go. As congested and awful as Manhattan is, everyone knows, unless you happen to be near a train or bus line that happens to be going very close to where you are going with no changeovers or stops, taking a taxi is almost always faster than taking a train or bus.

      • I strongly disagree. Depending on how I route it, my daily commute can involve either a bus and two trains or a lot of walking and two trains. The total travel time door-to-door (Brooklyn apartment to manhattan office) is about 40 minutes during rush hour and 60 minutes in the late night, mostly due to waiting for trains. If you tried to drive, particularly during rush hour it always takes more than an hour to get to or from work. I know this because at times I’ve had to take a car to carry a bunch of
    • That seems like a stupid way to do it - the mindstorm of someone who hates cars and just wants to deprioritize them below public transport. The slowdown in city traffic isn't initially caused by the amount of traffic on the streets. It's caused by things which make you change speeds. Traffic wants to flow at more or less a constant speed, and anything which causes you to change speeds gums up the works.
      • The biggest culprit is intersections. Traffic stopping for cross-traffic means traffic in any one di

    • That was not an unbiased source

  • And I why should care about this? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Selur ( 2745445 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @08:35AM (#59272768)

    Just wondering why is this on /. And I why should care about this why?
    Sounds more like news for a live style magazine to me,...
    Sadly more and more /. news are more and more irrelevant.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Green is good. Cars are bad.

    • City Planning nerds (Score:4)

      by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @09:14AM (#59272834)
      There are all different kinds of nerds. Get over it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Traffic engineering is a thing. And people are generally interested in where transportation technology is going in the future, which is why this is spun as an "anti-car" story, although really it's just a traffic engineering pilot program. They'll evaluate this for 18 months and see if it makes any difference.

      • They'll evaluate this for 18 months and see if it makes any difference.

        Then if the same people are in charge they will declare victory, or if not, the new people in charge will either declare it a failure, or call it a victory if they want to do more of it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hey! ( 33014 )

          Whether or not an experiment like this work does affect whether it is continued. It's not like we're talking about Iran policy or something like that that voters will react to based on what they're *told*.

    • Just wondering why is this on /. And I why should care about this why?

      I guess you're a computer nerd and that's the only nerd that counts right? City planning nerds or traffic nerds aren't allowed to talk here, did I nail it?
      As it stands it's the 5th most commented on topic on the front page, so it would appear to be more worthy of being here than most of the other stories.

      Have you considered finding a new suit to suit your particular tastes?

    • Well because transportation is one of the many human challenges where technology is being heavily applied to try to find a solution! Whether that be autonomous vehicles, better routing, ride hailing applications, et cetera. Transportation technology has continuously transformed civilization.

    • Just wondering why is this on /.

      Leftist populist cockroach locusts push their populist commie agenda everywhere. It's like between two rational numbers there always be zillion irrational numbers, with exact cardinality ratio

      The only way to clean the scourge of liberal existence is ultra-violent right wing revolution that will establish rule of sanity over the rule of the mob.

  • Well, It's Manhattan. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @09:17AM (#59272840) Homepage Journal

    It's got a dense street grid where crosstown streets are spaced only 300 feet apart.

    One of the surprising things for me about Manhattan is that when a major street is congested, parallel streets a few blocks over are often quiet. If you were optimizing the carrying capacity of the streets, you might well want to move cars over onto a nearby, less utilized street to create and express route for buses which are heavily used. Also the subway lines generally run uptown/downtown, with crosstown buses serving a linking function to ferry riders between lines without a long trip downtown and back uptown.

    It's not necessarily an anti-car measure; it could well be anti-congestion measures that minimize average trip times. This is the kind of decision you take after consulting traffic engineers. It may take a while for drivers to adapt, since this screws up their habitual cross town route, but people (or apps) will find alternative routes that aren't that much longer, or indeed any longer in many cases.

    • One of the surprising things for me about Manhattan is that when a major street is congested, parallel streets a few blocks over are often quiet. If you were optimizing the carrying capacity of the streets, you might well want to move cars over onto a nearby, less utilized street to create and express route for buses which are heavily used.

      Or you might well want to move buses over onto a nearby, less utilized street, and let people walk a block to get to them. That way you wouldn't fuck up traffic patterns even worse. In fact, by getting the buses off that street, you'd make it much better.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        That's assuming you are already using resources in a way that is, in some sense, optimal. It is always possible to make a system more expensive, worse, and slower.

      • Why can't we pick all three?

        Like we did, you know, for computers? And cars?

        The PC I'm typing this is on is cheaper, better and faster than the one before it, and the one before that, etc etc.

        It's the same with my current car, it took me fewer hours worked (i.e. it's cheaper) to pay for a better and faster car than I've ever previously owned. It's safer, too, and far more efficient with fuel, as well as being better on emissions.

        Using a humourous anecdote ("Cheaper, better, faster; you can only pick two") as

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Our city is very car centric. However, over the years, more downtown streets are blocked off. Main street, for instance, is no longer a though street is prioritized for public transport and pedestrians. There are limited number of street that go through.

      The same thing happens with our 4 or 5 inner city universities. More streets have been closed and dead end at their campuses.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @10:16AM (#59272962)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ruddk ( 5153113 )

      Well me too. I’d like to get all the poor people off the street. I only travel into cities on work related destinations so I don’t care what the price on entry or parking is as I don’t pay for it. If I can avoid traffic and always find a parking port then I am happy.
      Of course at some point I can imagine that the price would be counterproductive and event, meetings and companies would move out so I didn’t have to get in there ever, which would make me even more happy. Cheers.

    • Re:This driver says thanks! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Saturday October 05, 2019 @12:37PM (#59273284) Journal

      If even half of the drivers actually thought abut their own self interests as carefully as you we'd be in a much better position. Mostly they whine because the roads are too full of cars then whine when someone tries to reduce traffic.

      • I do not see motorists whining, because ablist pieces of shit like you downvote them.

        What I see always is ablist pieces of shit like you whining about non-existent problem

        • Well, random insults which appear to have no bearing on what I wrote are always on topic! Also you know slashdot does not allow modding and posting in the same thread so I literally can't mod down whining motorists.

          I wouldn't anyway because in general there's no mood for "I disagree".

  • Now this is a change I can get behind. Put the bicycles and the buses on selected streets and leave the alternate routes open to traffic.

    From now on, drivers are allowed onto 14th Street only to make deliveries and pick up and drop off passengers from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week.

    This could be an interesting experiment if allowed to run for a long enough time, maybe decades. Streets like 14th Street will slowly become the side of the block reserved for loading docks, buses, employee (servant) entrances, garbage pickup, etc. While the alternate cross streets will become the front side and have the public entrances, storefronts, doormen and clean fac

  • - Cars are a huge waste of resources and a bad eco-deal even before they run their first mile.
    - Cars stand around 95% of their lifetime, wasting space.
    - When cars are in use, they are in use by 1.2 people on average, with an average capacity of 4.2+
    - When cars are in use, they stand in traffic jams to a considerable about of that time aswell.
    - Power use of cars is 100kilowatts per 100km per person. And that power stems from fossil fuels which have a significantly negative eco-balance in production and even more so in consumption
    - Power use of bicycles is 1kilowatt per 100km per person, and that's fueled by french-fries, grilled veggie salag or whatever else you fancy

    Conclusion:
    We need to get rid of cars on a global scale. Busses, lorries, transport vehicles, public ICE vehicles - no problem with that. But cars are, in developed countries, an anachronism mostly fueled by sentiment and stupid concepts of status.

    Good move by NYC IMHO.

    • "But cars are, in developed countries, an anachronism mostly fueled by sentiment and stupid concepts of status."

      Not to mention city & transport design, with their planned or evolved main routes that assume car ownership if built in the last 60 or so years, meaning it might be quite expensive to change the type of transport being used to move people and goods around cities.

      There is more to the popularity of cars than simply sentiment and status.

  • Otherwise, this is worthless. Ideally, they will continue to switch streets to busses, bikes, walkways, etc.

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