You do live awfully far from work, based on your other comment. Doubly so if you’re in (probably western) Europe; that could be two entirely different regions of a country. Most of the drivers will not be going that far.
If you happen to be a farmer or otherwise need to commute to or from somewhere unpopulated, you’re in the “or something” in my comment, and other drivers need to get off the road (I’ll address the question of if less cars is really better a bit later). If you’re going from one populated area to another, it kind of seems like there should be an express bus, but I guess I don’t know what exact time you go to work or what other constraints the service has to deal with.
I’m not disabled, parking wouldn’t be a problem if I were, there’s lots of disabled parking spots, they set one at the person’s home and at the workplace if needed and then some randomly (not random, there are rules, like a spot every x shops, restaurants, bars…or something, don’t know very well how it works).
Oh shit, I forgot about that. My bad.
The problem is the same for cars and public transportation. We need to have enough buses, trains, trams, rails and roads, people to operate them for the rush hour, and then what afterwards? And for cars is the same.
Yeah, they are the same in many ways, but one’s much denser than the other. That’s just an incremental improvement for sure, but it’s something.
There is always misery when you need to get through a crowd. Having your own car can be convenient, especially if your movements are unusual, but then you need more space to store it in that other 90% of time you mentioned. We’re left with the question of which unrelated thing is better, and for the most part we’ve decided to solve those kinds of problems with a free market. In my country, and America, it is not a free market, but free parking has been mandated from unrelated businesses for decades.
I haven’t spent enough time abroad to really understand the pain of public transit, but I do understand the pain of everything being a highway or parking lot. Maybe “the grass is always greener on the other side”, but I suspect our situation really is suboptimal - even before you consider the hidden costs of emissions that have been there all along. Everywhere is flat, grey, dangerous and empty. I guess my point is, I don’t know why parking is such a nightmare for you, but I’ll need more than your word for it to be convinced Lemmy is wrong, and just the fact busses also have idle time isn’t enough.
You are right that my case is a bit above the average, but it’s not that uncommon as you could think, it’s almost the same for all my tradesman friends, I drive more distance but having to go from inside the city to one of the surrounding towns or the other way around is super common.
From and to populated areas, or even some less populated areas really you can get everywhere by bus, when it’s a couple connections most people choose public transports (as I said they all get saturated at rush hours, and I mean packed full. I don’t know how you could push the system much further), but when it’s a few of them, specially changing from one type to another (bus-train, or even bus-other kind of bus), it adds up. If you happen to work in an industrial area on the outskirts of another town the times can go crazy high, twice or thrice more than by car even with jams and parking.
As you said you don’t understand the pain, but you sure understand that really most people just choose the less hellish option. For many of us that means a car, even with top notch alternatives, most of us hate it but the alternative is even worse.
I don’t know if I’m sounding like a car lover or something, I’m not. I firmly believe if we put all the money we collectively put towards cars into good use we’d have futurama pipes or some shit by now, but we have to work with incremental improvements as you said.
Planed parking could improve the situation. For example here they’ve put lots by some metro stations at the limits of the city so people can park there and take the metro and not drive into the city. I must say I was thinking in ‘regulated’ as in the local government somehow controls and manages it, mandate business to build the lots/spots seems like a very American thing and I see now how it contributes to this necessity for cars over there. But having into account where the people are going to drive and park when approving any development like a residential building/area, or a mall, or anything seems like a good idea, people driving around without going anywhere is the absolute opposite of taking cars out of the roads.
About leaving it to the free market, I don’t know some things that are inherently collective and limited like space and its use within a city/town should be administered more democratically by the people that live there through some rules. The market has shown it doesn’t have any problem to fuck a lot of (poor always the poor) people in this regard if it’s profitable when left alone.
I don’t think your situation is much greener, but the costs of emissions are all but hidden over here we have a perpetual ‘pollution bonnet’ and all the children have lots of respiratory illnesses almost unheard of thirty years ago. Everywhere’s grey and dangerous here too but not flat, you have to lean backwards to see a small portion of the sky most of the time, and everything’s always full. This isn’t quite optimal either.
![[meme] Why do we make it so obscenely hard to build anything?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a17f6156-018a-458c-ae3d-9ce53bc0bd14.jpeg){kind=link}
That’s fine. I appreciate the effort, honestly.
You do live awfully far from work, based on your other comment. Doubly so if you’re in (probably western) Europe; that could be two entirely different regions of a country. Most of the drivers will not be going that far.
If you happen to be a farmer or otherwise need to commute to or from somewhere unpopulated, you’re in the “or something” in my comment, and other drivers need to get off the road (I’ll address the question of if less cars is really better a bit later). If you’re going from one populated area to another, it kind of seems like there should be an express bus, but I guess I don’t know what exact time you go to work or what other constraints the service has to deal with.
Oh shit, I forgot about that. My bad.
Yeah, they are the same in many ways, but one’s much denser than the other. That’s just an incremental improvement for sure, but it’s something.
There is always misery when you need to get through a crowd. Having your own car can be convenient, especially if your movements are unusual, but then you need more space to store it in that other 90% of time you mentioned. We’re left with the question of which unrelated thing is better, and for the most part we’ve decided to solve those kinds of problems with a free market. In my country, and America, it is not a free market, but free parking has been mandated from unrelated businesses for decades.
I haven’t spent enough time abroad to really understand the pain of public transit, but I do understand the pain of everything being a highway or parking lot. Maybe “the grass is always greener on the other side”, but I suspect our situation really is suboptimal - even before you consider the hidden costs of emissions that have been there all along. Everywhere is flat, grey, dangerous and empty. I guess my point is, I don’t know why parking is such a nightmare for you, but I’ll need more than your word for it to be convinced Lemmy is wrong, and just the fact busses also have idle time isn’t enough.
I was trying to not give out many details but I think I’ve already commented about Madrid in another post so here you go: https://www.capitalradio.es/amp/programas/movilidad-sobre-ruedas/cuanto-tiempo-pierden-madrilenos-buscando-aparcamiento_94445259.html (in Spanish sorry, but you should be able to make out the numbers, maybe some aid with automatic translation).
You are right that my case is a bit above the average, but it’s not that uncommon as you could think, it’s almost the same for all my tradesman friends, I drive more distance but having to go from inside the city to one of the surrounding towns or the other way around is super common.
From and to populated areas, or even some less populated areas really you can get everywhere by bus, when it’s a couple connections most people choose public transports (as I said they all get saturated at rush hours, and I mean packed full. I don’t know how you could push the system much further), but when it’s a few of them, specially changing from one type to another (bus-train, or even bus-other kind of bus), it adds up. If you happen to work in an industrial area on the outskirts of another town the times can go crazy high, twice or thrice more than by car even with jams and parking.
As you said you don’t understand the pain, but you sure understand that really most people just choose the less hellish option. For many of us that means a car, even with top notch alternatives, most of us hate it but the alternative is even worse.
I don’t know if I’m sounding like a car lover or something, I’m not. I firmly believe if we put all the money we collectively put towards cars into good use we’d have futurama pipes or some shit by now, but we have to work with incremental improvements as you said.
Planed parking could improve the situation. For example here they’ve put lots by some metro stations at the limits of the city so people can park there and take the metro and not drive into the city. I must say I was thinking in ‘regulated’ as in the local government somehow controls and manages it, mandate business to build the lots/spots seems like a very American thing and I see now how it contributes to this necessity for cars over there. But having into account where the people are going to drive and park when approving any development like a residential building/area, or a mall, or anything seems like a good idea, people driving around without going anywhere is the absolute opposite of taking cars out of the roads.
About leaving it to the free market, I don’t know some things that are inherently collective and limited like space and its use within a city/town should be administered more democratically by the people that live there through some rules. The market has shown it doesn’t have any problem to fuck a lot of (poor always the poor) people in this regard if it’s profitable when left alone.
I don’t think your situation is much greener, but the costs of emissions are all but hidden over here we have a perpetual ‘pollution bonnet’ and all the children have lots of respiratory illnesses almost unheard of thirty years ago. Everywhere’s grey and dangerous here too but not flat, you have to lean backwards to see a small portion of the sky most of the time, and everything’s always full. This isn’t quite optimal either.