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  #81  
Old Posted Feb 7, 2021, 6:20 PM
Crawford Crawford is offline
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Originally Posted by biguc View Post
There are a lot of reasons to not drive: caring about the environment, hating traffic, back pain, it's dangerous, fewer cars make for better cities, hating car maintenance, hating the expense of a car in general, preferring cycling, preferring walking, being an alcoholic.
Little Rock doesn't have traffic, and buses would obviously be stuck in the same traffic. And I don't think it's at all clear that running empty buses in LR would be indicative of "caring about the environment". Don't get the back pain comment, as buses are obviously much bumpier than cars. And there's no car maintenance if you lease.
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  #82  
Old Posted Feb 7, 2021, 6:51 PM
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Again, I think people need to stop looking at transit as something completely opposite to cars. Transit is a consequence of sprawl to a certain extent, just like car culture. You can see in Canada, transit usage is a consequence of longer travel distances just like car usage is. A shift from cars to transit is just not a major cultural change like cars to bikes, or cars to walking. And I'm not talking about 100% shift from cars to transit anyways. I'm just talking about 5% or 10% shift or something, nothing crazy.

And biguc makes a good point. Of course, the whole point of investing in transit and building more walkable cities is to gradually change the culture of places like Little Rock. Cultures are not static, discrete, and monolithic entities. Cultures are subjective, overlapping and continuously evolving. To say it is pointless to improve transit in a place because people won't use transit doesn't make sense to me. The fact that people won't use transit is exactly why transit needs to be improved.

And don't talk too much about Canadian culture vs. US culture or collectivism vs. individualism either. Again, cultures are not monolithic entities, especially a culture of an entire country. And roads are dependent on government support anyways, same as transit. And here in Canada, we have the Highway 407, a privately-owned toll highway. How much did privatizing Highway 407 and building it as a toll road help to promote car culture here? How many privatized highways are there in Arkansas? Think about that.

Speaking of culture, I have noticed on SSP how much opposition there is to any suggestion of better transit, the immense effort by US forumers to either portray transit something completely foreign or incompatible to US culture, and to completely downplay the importance of transit and the significance of high transit ridership, even going as far as to claim transit has zero effect on built form of cities and the amount of parking needed in them. Such hostility to the concept of transit of course will be reflected in policy-making, but whether that means the average American is that much less willing to use transit compared to the average Canadian if given the same opportunity, I'm not convinced. Blue Water Transit and Sarnia Transit both have around 1.5 million riders for example. Transit ridership in Port Huron and Sarnia are basically identical. Identical. You can talk about cars or transit or Trumpism or COVID denialism or whatever, I don't see much difference between USA and Canada, and if there is a difference, it's not necessarily because of US vs. Canadian culture.

Last edited by Doady; Feb 7, 2021 at 7:43 PM.
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  #83  
Old Posted Feb 7, 2021, 7:24 PM
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Originally Posted by Doady
The fact that people won't use transit is exactly why transit needs to be improved.
That argument might work in some cities (that's the argument they're using to improve transit here and yeah I think it could work here because even though Windsor has an Americanized culture it has a Canadianized built environment). But in a city like Little Rock where there are interstate highways cutting through the centre of town from all directions and where traffic flows easily and where the residential density is very low even in neighbourhoods close to downtown, I don't see how it could work even if we ignore the whole cultural argument (which we shouldn't do).
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  #84  
Old Posted Feb 7, 2021, 7:48 PM
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doady,

I would agree that there are blanket statements being made about cultural differences vs transit that are probably wrong, but what many Americans here also see in their own cities, is intensification of urban areas and development of parking lots / other low-end uses, into residential and commercial properties, without much in the way of a rise in transit.
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  #85  
Old Posted Feb 7, 2021, 8:16 PM
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Originally Posted by Blitz View Post
That argument might work in some cities (that's the argument they're using to improve transit here and yeah I think it could work here because even though Windsor has an Americanized culture it has a Canadianized built environment). But in a city like Little Rock where there are interstate highways cutting through the centre of town from all directions and where traffic flows easily and where the residential density is very low even in neighbourhoods close to downtown, I don't see how it could work even if we ignore the whole cultural argument (which we shouldn't do).
Again, I live in a city built for the car, freeways and free-flowing traffic everywhere, but transit still successful. And you can look at all the freeways in Quebec City, ridership still similar to Winnipeg and London.

Of course, density is important, but all the more reason to invest in transit. You need to gradually increase density and promote infill development, and you need gradually get people out of cars at the same time.

But look at nearby Oklahoma City: it has dense, Sunbelt-style sprawl, but the transit ridership is even worse than Little Rock. I don't think the built form or US culture explains the whole problem. We are talking about almost 0% transit mode share, less than 1/30th of the transit ridership of another mostly post-war Great Plains city of 1.3 million people, Calgary. Is the built form and culture really THAT different from Calgary?
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  #86  
Old Posted Feb 7, 2021, 11:20 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Blitz View Post
That argument might work in some cities (that's the argument they're using to improve transit here and yeah I think it could work here because even though Windsor has an Americanized culture it has a Canadianized built environment). But in a city like Little Rock where there are interstate highways cutting through the centre of town from all directions and where traffic flows easily and where the residential density is very low even in neighbourhoods close to downtown, I don't see how it could work even if we ignore the whole cultural argument (which we shouldn't do).
That indeed is part of the problem.

US cities are awash with freeways but what sets the US is apart is that they also have huge inner city freeway systems and many the dreaded downtown loops...................the damage is done and it will be nearly impossible to undo it.
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  #87  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 12:06 AM
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Originally Posted by Doady View Post
Again, I live in a city built for the car, freeways and free-flowing traffic everywhere, but transit still successful.
And Mexican cities are all built for the car too, highways everywhere, and transit is even more "successful" than Canada. Why can't Canadian cities emulate Mexico?

Good luck with your campaign. Will never work in U.S. cities like Little Rock.
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  #88  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 12:56 AM
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Originally Posted by Doady
Again, I live in a city built for the car, freeways and free-flowing traffic everywhere, but transit still successful. And you can look at all the freeways in Quebec City, ridership still similar to Winnipeg and London.

Of course, density is important, but all the more reason to invest in transit. You need to gradually increase density and promote infill development, and you need gradually get people out of cars at the same time.

But look at nearby Oklahoma City: it has dense, Sunbelt-style sprawl, but the transit ridership is even worse than Little Rock. I don't think the built form or US culture explains the whole problem. We are talking about almost 0% transit mode share, less than 1/30th of the transit ridership of another mostly post-war Great Plains city of 1.3 million people, Calgary. Is the built form and culture really THAT different from Calgary?
I get what you're saying but I've also spent a lot of time in the South and I've used the bus systems in Albuquerque, El Paso, Jacksonville, etc. Just from my experiences I have little faith that it could work.
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  #89  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 3:36 AM
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I think I agree with Doady.

The US refuses to invest any resources at all into transit or improving transit. Of course ridership is non-existent. I think having transit more comparable to Canada is an attainable goal for the US but it's going to take a huge amount of political will to do it.
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  #90  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 3:49 AM
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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
And Mexican cities are all built for the car too, highways everywhere, and transit is even more "successful" than Canada. Why can't Canadian cities emulate Mexico?

Good luck with your campaign. Will never work in U.S. cities like Little Rock.
The differences between Canada and Mexico are a lot more stark than the differences with the US. But since you mention it, some Canadian cities have dramatically increased transit ridership in the last decade through nothing more than increasing frequencies. Others haven't learned that lesson and wonder why nobody rides the bus. Quality of service has a lot to do with ridership.
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  #91  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 5:57 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doady View Post

But look at nearby Oklahoma City: it has dense, Sunbelt-style sprawl, but the transit ridership is even worse than Little Rock. I don't think the built form or US culture explains the whole problem. We are talking about almost 0% transit mode share, less than 1/30th of the transit ridership of another mostly post-war Great Plains city of 1.3 million people, Calgary. Is the built form and culture really THAT different from Calgary?
Oklahoma City is not dense. I don't think you can compare it to a city like Calgary which seems to have a pretty dense core and a overall more compact footprint than the OKC area.
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  #92  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 6:14 AM
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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
Yeah, West TX, to me, seems like peak anti-urbanity. I mean, Amarillo, Midland and Lubbock are decent sized towns, but their downtowns barely exist. And there don't appear to be prewar neighborhoods of any note.

El Paso has decent urbanity and some prewar neighborhoods, but that's basically New Mexico/intl. bordertown and culturally very different.
There's tons of prewar neighborhoods in Amarillo, though they were pretty much all built for the car (in the 1920s). The city must have boomed in the 1920s, many intact neighborhoods from that era. (My Amarillo duplex that I recently sold after managing it remotely for over five years was from 1925 in a very homogeneous and intact neighborhood, though not very walkable.)

I lived in Amarillo for a couple months and was waiting on a diesel injection pump for my truck so I was a pedestrian for about a month. The bus system is a total joke. It's not really possible for a normal person to live there without a vehicle.
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  #93  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 12:27 PM
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The differences between Canada and Mexico are a lot more stark than the differences with the US.
The argument is that cities' transit share can be compared across national boundaries. Mexico has much higher transit share than Canada and U.S., and isn't radically culturally different, and has very autocentric cities, so Canada needs to step up its game.
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But since you mention it, some Canadian cities have dramatically increased transit ridership in the last decade through nothing more than increasing frequencies.
Correlation/causation fail. How do you know that ridership grew due to frequencies growing? Isn't it much more likely that frequencies grew as ridership grew?
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Others haven't learned that lesson and wonder why nobody rides the bus. Quality of service has a lot to do with ridership.
No, no one "wonders". This isn't a "problem" that those in Little Rock are trying to solve. People aren't riding the bus in Brampton because of "quality of service", it's because they're immigrants with few options. If Brampton service were on broken-down mules, it would still likely have far higher ridership than Little Rock.

Note that core Canadian urban neighborhoods with much better service, areas like Forest Hills and Rosedale, have relatively low transit share, despite far better service options. I wonder why?
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  #94  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 3:04 PM
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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
The argument is that cities' transit share can be compared across national boundaries. Mexico has much higher transit share than Canada and U.S., and isn't radically culturally different, and has very autocentric cities, so Canada needs to step up its game.
Yes, Canada needs to step up its game, as does the US. I'm glad we agree.

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Correlation/causation fail. How do you know that ridership grew due to frequencies growing? Isn't it much more likely that frequencies grew as ridership grew?
No. The ridership increases have followed service improvements. In cities that improved frequencies, ridership was stagnant and steeply rose after improvements started to be put in place. The relationship between service frequency and ridership is well understood by researchers and there are many real world examples.

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No, no one "wonders". This isn't a "problem" that those in Little Rock are trying to solve. People aren't riding the bus in Brampton because of "quality of service", it's because they're immigrants with few options. If Brampton service were on broken-down mules, it would still likely have far higher ridership than Little Rock.
Wrong again. You seem to have a strange view of immigrants in Canada being these poor huddled masses who can't afford to drive. Most can, and most aren't as poor as in your imagination. Brampton's ridership growth accelerated after frequencies started to improve. Other GTA communities that are just as immigrant heavy continue to have poor service and stagnant ridership. And cities with few immigrants have done the same thing Brampton has, with the same results.

Little Rock may have no interest in getting more people into its transit system, but that doesn't change the fact that it's possible to do.
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  #95  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 3:41 PM
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Originally Posted by Mister F View Post
The differences between Canada and Mexico are a lot more stark than the differences with the US. But since you mention it, some Canadian cities have dramatically increased transit ridership in the last decade through nothing more than increasing frequencies. Others haven't learned that lesson and wonder why nobody rides the bus. Quality of service has a lot to do with ridership.
yeah frequency -- this is a big complaint i have with nyc busses.

they replaced the single busses with articulated busses on some routes, but there are less of them, and often bunched.

of course the bunching issue is somewhat decreased a bit more recently with better tracking and gps, but still there are less busses. meh.

as for little rock, do they at least have some upcoming development prospects for those lots?
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  #96  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 6:47 PM
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I'm not really understanding the intense focus on transit in this thread. The acres of surface parking lots in downtown Little Rock are there because land values are low and there's little incentive to develop these lots that serve as maintenance-free money generators for the owners. The parking lots aren't there because of some crushing need to accommodate a ton of vehicles to the city center, but rather because there's little to be gained (from the owner's perspective) by developing them as anything else.

There is no need to 'get people out of their cars' to develop these lots. That's not what's holding development back. And even if bus service were to improve slightly in Little Rock, would that be enough to go car free? Isn't that what this conversation around transit is getting at? That if transit improved, more people would ditch their cars, and the city wouldn't need so many parking lots? I think that's a pretty sophomoric assessment of the situation in Little Rock.
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  #97  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 7:27 PM
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I'm not really understanding the intense focus on transit in this thread. The acres of surface parking lots in downtown Little Rock are there because land values are low and there's little incentive to develop these lots that serve as maintenance-free money generators for the owners.
Right. Transit plays little to no factor in Little Rock's core form. The parking lots aren't there because of parking demand, they're there because parking is the highest and best use (i.e. there's no incentive to build anything so parking becomes an interim default).

Transit usage, in affluent countries is mostly non-choice riders. So even if you somehow increased Little Rock's transit share, you would basically make downtown Little Rock slightly more accessible to poor people, which wouldn't move the needle on land use.
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There is no need to 'get people out of their cars' to develop these lots. That's not what's holding development back. And even if bus service were to improve slightly in Little Rock, would that be enough to go car free? Isn't that what this conversation around transit is getting at? That if transit improved, more people would ditch their cars, and the city wouldn't need so many parking lots? I think that's a pretty sophomoric assessment of the situation in Little Rock.
Also true. You can have outstanding transit and poor ridership, or crap transit and great ridership. Choice riders, in a city like Little Rock, won't ditch their autos if you ran buses more frequently.

This is even true in the most transit-oriented metros. For example, the Yonge Street corridor, in Toronto, has the best transit service in Canada. Heavy rail frequencies are outstanding, and overall ridership is very high. Yet some of the most prime, core stations, on some of the most valuable land, have basically the worst ridership.

Look at the ridership for Summerhill and Rosedale stations. These are the closest stations to the Yonge/Bloor hub, easily the busiest, most important subway crossroads in Canada. The poor ridership isn't because the service needs to improve, or the built form sucks; it's because these neighborhoods are wealthy and residents prefer a relatively autocentric lifestyle.

http://www.ttc.ca/PDF/Transit_Planni...20-%202018.pdf
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  #98  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 7:28 PM
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these lots [...] serve as maintenance-free money generators for the owners. [...] there's little to be gained (from the owner's perspective) by developing them as anything else.
You are fully correct on this part, but you're wrong on this one:
Quote:
There is no need to 'get people out of their cars' to develop these lots. That's not what's holding development back.
For the record, I've been owning parking lots in the downtown of my hometown for many years now (yes, I'm somewhat "part of the problem", I don't deny that ). They did something smart a few years ago - even though it had a negative effect on me, I admit it's for the greater good - which was to drastically raise the tax rate on vacant/parking land within the perimeter of downtown, in order to push people like me to either build or sell to someone who will.

My parking lots have been really wonderfully headache-free for a real estate asset. Best of both worlds in fact - as trouble-free as stocks but as long-term "solid" as real estate. (I also have a bunch of old buildings in the same downtown, so I know what I'm talking about when contrasting the two!)

As you say, there's little to be gained trying to do something else with these parking lots as long as they are maintenance-free money generators. (This is exactly why mine are still full of cars as I write this - actually only half-full these days due to WFH from Covid, but that's temporary - rather than with buildings on them.)

However, should people stop needing parking downtown (or even just not need it anywhere as much as they currently do), it would change things: these real estate assets would stop producing decent cashflow. An empty downtown lot would be cashflow negative (property taxes and a modicum of mowing/landscaping).

Sure, maybe SOME people would still want to hang on to theirs for speculative purposes, but many (and I'm among those) would not tolerate that, and would build something on these lots. (Or sell them to someone who'll develop them.)

So, yep, the fact that people in Little Rock all drive to their downtown offices, and need parking there which is something someone has to pay for, is the reason these lots are not getting developed. If you couldn't get decent cashflow from these lots by using them as parking (lucrative parking lot being the dreamiest land use from an individual landlord's POV), many of them would get developed. (Or else left as urban prairie, if Little Rock was as bad as the worst areas of inner city Detroit; I really doubt that it is.)
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  #99  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 7:36 PM
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Right. Transit plays little to no factor in Little Rock's core form. The parking lots aren't there because of parking demand, they're there because parking is the highest and best use (i.e. there's no incentive to build anything so parking becomes an interim default).
Um, parking is the highest and best use only BECAUSE there is strong demand for parking in downtown Little Rock.



Quote:
Transit usage, in affluent countries is mostly non-choice riders. So even if you somehow increased Little Rock's transit share, you would basically make downtown Little Rock slightly more accessible to poor people, which wouldn't move the needle on land use.
Depends. If you "increased Little Rock's transit share" by raising Arkansas gas taxes to the point where a gallon costs $10, you'd totally move the needle on land use, as most middle class people would now choose to take the bus to their downtown offices, and many owners of these lots would not tolerate continuing to pay year after year for maintaining (remove weeds, etc.) these empty cash-flow-negative lots, so they'd be doing something with them eventually.
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  #100  
Old Posted Feb 8, 2021, 7:37 PM
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Yeah, more people using transit, less demand for parking, more parking lots getting redeveloped. More transit, more demand for urban and downtown living, higher land values, more parking lots getting redeveloped. Not sure what is hard to understand about this.

The problem with articulated buses is more people waiting at each stop, and if there is still front door boarding only, then that means more time spent at each stop for people to board the bus. This means the bus falls further and further behind schedule, and as it falls further behind schedule, the amount of people waiting at each stop increases even more and causes even more delays. At the same time, the buses behind pick up less and less people and they get more and more ahead of schedule. This is what causes the bunching problem. Articulated buses are best with limited stops and an all-door boarding scheme to prevent them from falling behind schedule and prevent the bunching. With really high ridership routes, they need to start considering conversion to rail so that they can use rail vehicles that are even longer than articulated buses, and unlike buses the rail vehicles can be combined into trains.

Reducing the distance and gaps between buses is important for attracting ridership, but that doesn't mean frequencies. It also means the amount of routes to reduce the distance to the near bus stop, or more options to reduce the amount of transfers. Of course, there is also the gap between the last trip at night and first trip in the morning. Frequencies are important but it is not the only way to increase service and attract riders.

To treat higher transit ridership numbers as a sign of poverty and economic hardship is really just mind-boggling to me. Brampton has worse poverty than Detroit? Calgary has worse poverty than Oklahoma City? Halifax has worse poverty than New Orleans? To suggest that the USA is doing better than Canada in terms of closing the gap between rich and poor, in terms of a more even distribution of wealth, in terms of eliminating poverty, because Canadians don't use the car as much, I think THAT is the root of the problem in the USA. I said it before, such hostility and belittling of transit will be reflected in policy-making, and it's bad policy-making that is the real problem. Whether it's bad transit, Trumpism, weak COVID response, lack of universal health care, it's not because US and Canadian culture are different, it's because the system of government is different. It's just incompetence and lack of leadership. I also talked in the homelessness thread about the dysfunctional government of the USA, the representation of wealth instead of the representation of people, and bad transit is mostly just another symptom of that.
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