Do Your Buses Get Stuck in Traffic? Traffic solutions & the Downs-Thomson Paradox
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
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Do your buses get stuck in traffic? It's amazing what a difference it makes to life the city when public transit is treated as a first-class alternative to driving, as it is in Amsterdam, and many other cities in the Netherlands.
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The Downs-Thomson Paradox on Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.o...
The description of the Downs-Thomson paradox is simplified in this video, but in general, this principal applies. Technically it is possible to meet demand for car traffic, but in practice, this is unaffordable, simply due to the amount of infrastructure required per person carried by car: there is no city that has done this in a sustainable way (as StrongTowns.org is keen to point out). More information can be found at StrongTowns.org, in articles such as this one: www.strongtown... and this one: www.strongtown...
The Dutch traffic per hour graph was taken from this report:
3e Publieksrapportage Rijkswegennet 2017
www.rijksoverh...
The graph of daily traffic in a car-dependant city is based off of the graph here:
www.wbez.org/s...
Comparing the traffic volumes between countries is difficult, as they use different methods of measuring traffic, so don't take this comparison too literally; it's meant to be illustrative.
Footage of New York provided by RUclipsr Walk NYC:
Walk NYC: 10/3/2019 New 14th St Traffic Regulation "Busway"
• Walk NYC: 10/3/2019 Ne...
Footage of San Fransico provided by RUclipsr UpDownAcross38:
First day of Car-Free Market Street. 2/10/2020
• First day off Car-Free...
![Would You Fall for It? [ST08]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n94-_yE4IeU/mqdefault.jpg)
My dad explained it to me as a kid like this: a full bus represents a row of 40 cars in front of you, that aren't there because of the bus
Your dad's analogy is amazing and to the point.
It's a fair point to consider, and I think the Dutch have got it right. But watch out for oversimplifying. The articulated bus that drives by with priority at 5:35 seems to be nearly empty. It really is going to be hard to fix NA.
@@duaneeitzen1025 yeah, thats what i think sometimes.
@@duaneeitzen1025 The thing is that for the bus to be "better" it just needs to have had a total amount of passengers that equal more than the amount of car space it takes and that is almost always the case.
So while obviously his example of the bus taking the space of 40 cars is simple and assumes a full bus, it's still a easy way to think about it.
All depends if the buses are full. Unfortunately in London too many buses drive around empty and in those cases cause more congestion. I think the transport services need reviewing with Covid, as now less people are willing to use public transport - and most people are travelling less.
In my hometown they made public transport free for all registered citizens. At fist everyone was like "yea, it's not free, it's tax payers money". But when public transport infrastructure was getting money from people who wouldn't take the bus it improved so much that now no-one complains. They even turned the city center to mostly bus lanes so drivers would avoid this route.
Roads and lanes for cars are also funded by tax payers' money anyway. In fact you could say that they are the result of people who cannot/do not own a car subsidizing infrastructure that will benefit only car drivers.
That's how all public institutions are destroyed, first they are delibaretly underfounded, then they are presented as bad and people don't want their money spent on something that doesn't work well, then public institution gets funded even less which further detoriates the view of the public of the said institution.
Also, if you have public transport financed entirely by taxes you are incentivizng the use of public transport, if you are already paying for it, you might as well use it. Especially if it is well funded and thus you have good clean busses which come often.
My town cars take the bus lane as a short cut 😢 no hope for humanity
The best argument I've heard against free public transport is that if you have it then people will take the bus for trips that they could walk instead, which isn't great for heath reasons and can hurt surface level businesses in a walkable commercial district.
I never understood that paradox. Though rewatching your video and with the magic phrase “There’s usually no bike people, var people, train people...” it just clicked. It truly shows how nothing needs to be done one way and how much potential we have to change that into sustainable, livable streets. How speeding up a bus with a minute here and there can relief a whole city. I’ve read about that in New York how the 14th busway decreased car traffic in neighboring streets. But never understood it was directly connected to the increased speed in buses/alternative modes of transport. How a cars detour can increase the speed for everyone.
Now I understand also why my city is laser focused on saving time on bus lines. We’ll get there with bike lines eventually. :)
The planning truly matters.
Greetings from a Swedish viewer.
I'm glad I could make it clear for you. I had a lot of trouble with this concept myself until I thought of it this way.
@@NotJustBikes I'm the opposite. I'd never heard of the paradox before, but reading it in your video (I had to pause to process it), I don't understand how anyone could think this is a paradox. It makes perfect sense.
In short summary, minority of people sacrifice benefits the society (or the majority) or otherwise the entire society got screw up.
@@Wouter10123 same.
@@chungonion There's no sacrifice, only the illusion of one, because the car drivers that are detoured don't know that the alternative they are asking for is worse.
Your videos are one long love letter to the Netherlands.
And the Dutch love you for it, even if that's not your intention.
Although I certainly do like the more critical videos. Public spaces are generally well-planned in the Netherlands but they're certainly not perfect.
@@Quintinohthree not perfect, but leagues better than anywhere else it seems, especially comparing to where I'm from
I've learned a lot about managing traffic flows playing Cities: Skylines. My first city was where I learned the hard way that trying to solve traffic by building more roads and lanes just leads to disaster: commuter and tourist vehicles clog roads and street parking, trucks can't make their deliveries on time so your industry faces supply shortages, and worst of all service vehicles can't reach certain areas of your city leaving garbage piling and fires roaring. Gets even worse when you start building giant rows of apartment complexes... and every single tenant has to drive a car.
My current file is doing much better, highways only serve the purpose of getting trucks into the industrial zones and back out onto the highways again (or to the nearest cargo train station), metro stations are in every residential area so everyone can get around the city without cars (though I did have to use buses earlier on until I unlocked the ability to build metro), and commercial zones are within walking distances of residential areas so people don't have to drive to get to those either. With all of that together, I've got a nice little city that doesn't have any roads with more than two lanes. Something I never thought was possible in a city when I first started playing.
Now I know Cities: Skylines isn't a perfect representation of real life, but it's because of what I learned from that game that I find this channel very interesting. I agree that there's a lot we could do here in the States to make our cities better places to live. And I know first hand from living just a few miles from NYC that the biggest complaint everyone has is the TRAFFIC.
Imagine if NYC made protected bike lanes instead of little painted gutters. Suddenly everyone would bike and the car traffic would decline massively
What people really don't seem to grasp, especially in the US, is that you benefit from public transit even if you never use it. If other people use it, that's less traffic you have to deal with. Likewise, people complain about funding public transit through taxes, subsidizing it's operation they believe should be self-funded. But don't think about how much they're paying for road repairs and upgrades. Nobody expects roads to be self-funded, and they have far worse cost per usage. As for buses and trains getting stuck in traffic, one thing that drives me crazy in the US is that trams and bus rapid transit systems - even if they have their own dedicated lanes - have to wait for traffic lights. They should have immediate priority, a transmitter on the bus/tram should trigger the light to change before it even arrives. My college town (Fort Collins, Colorado) had a great bus rapid transit scheme, but that was it's one flaw - it would be sitting at many of these lights for several minutes before they would change. It was thus slower than a car except in the worst traffic, but if the lights changed for it immediately it would be by far the fastest way across town.
Here, in Europe, the busses have their own lane at the traffic light, and get a few seconds head start when the light turns green.
But the busses also signal to the traffic lights if they're on schedule, or God forbid, behind schedule.
When the busses are behind schedule they get priority at the intersections until they are on schedule again.
It helps !
And ofcourse, the bus lanes are also used by the emergency services, police and taxis.
Here some more from the police: ruclips.net/video/qyNbhDZMdKc/видео.html
@@xFD2x Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Though you could schedule them for faster overall times if the lights will favor them, which it sounds like they do for the most part. Most important thing you said there was "in Europe" - in actually developed countries, not countries that peaked in the late 1970s and have been in decline ever since.
@@quillmaurer6563
Busses don't need to be faster. They need to be on schedule, and thus dependable.
What if you're on time at the bus stop, and the bus was early and left ? The busses need to be dependable.
In Greece where my wife is from, public transport is used by many different people of varying socioeconomic standards and levels. It's not just the poor. For example, when getting from Thessaloniki downtown to Agia Triada where her mom lives, we took a ferry from downtown to Peraia, then we took a bus from Peraia to Agia Triada. It was about an hour for the ferry, and ten minutes for the bus.
It's so normal for so many to do that, that while they don't have organized infrastructure specifically for the busses, no one is impatient on the roads when a bus is slowing down to get over onto the side of the road to let people out and take on new people.
There's road synergy. There's also lots of consideration for the motorcycles and scooters all over the road.
The big problem is that no one follows the rules of the road, the roads are built in a way that everyone can kinda do whatever they want to do in terms of cutting each other off, and so there's lots of chaos and stupidity on the road.
I know what you mean. I'm a bit of a "car person" myself, because I think it's just the most convenient way to travel. But when I have to be in downtown Amsterdam or Utrecht, I much rather go by train. Those cities did a great job promoting public transportation by road design alone.
It's only most convenient way to travel, because the area where you live has been designed with car in mind. So it's not really because you 'think it is', it's more of a because someone else made that decision for you and you simply go along with it.
@@Mikolaj_u I don't know, my commute is 30 minutes by car (in ideal conditions, may take up to 1 hour with traffic though) and 2 hours 30 minutes by public transport. There might be some optimisation possible with that public transport link but I rather doubt it would get below 1 hours 30 minutes. There will always be some journeys which will be best made by car. We should strive to reduce those journeys to a minimum though.
In Utrecht they just made the roads close to central station impossible to navigate by car 😂 (seriously they have already been working on rearranging the roads for 3+ years)
@@Quintinohthree Easy fix to make taking the car a worse option than taking the train: Remove all parking.
@@bramvanduijn8086 Where there is a road, there is parking, and I don't need a lot.
Canadian here 👋 I live downtown Toronto and was amazed by how much you spoke my own thoughts. You truly know how to give the full picture ☺️
Thanks!
I like how in France it takes 12 hours to travel from north to south by car and only about 4 hours by train.
France is big on Trains Grand Vitesse. That would certainly discourage a lot of car usage in theory.
In the UK I used to work in Salisbury. I tried the park and ride and like you say, it got stuck in the exact same traffic and was only a small amount cheaper than normal parking. Add in the bus waiting times and it most definitely wasn’t worth it. I then worked in Winchester, which had a perfect park and ride. Literally a minute drive off the motorway, plenty of spaces and at rush hour, busses every 10 mins or so, which then took you straight through the centre of town. Busses had priority for most of it, or were allowed down roads that cars weren’t, and it was half the price of car parking. Absolute no brainer.
The problem is that if a bus line is popular then the transit company increases service, but for the bus to get popular they need to have increased service.
Also, is it bad if it is quicker to bike to work than to take the bus?
It's quicker to take a bike for short trips.
@@NotJustBikes the other problem is just relatively sparse bus service. Taking the bus to work would be ~1hr 10min but biking is only ~55min, to be fair ~15mins quite a substantial difference.
That bus is taking like 30 people, now imagine if each of those 30 people was in their own car in that lane, yeah that's certainly more traffic.
Fantastic video as usual. I came across your videos a few months ago and absolutely love them. I've always had an interest in these kinds of things, for one being that I studied in Copenhagen/Amsterdam in college and two, my dad is a traffic engineer in the states (Ironic right?). He's very progressive with these kind of thnigs and has always been open to bike and safety infrastructure, but I think like a majority of people his age and in his profession, car infrastructure is always the number one priority (over livability, practicality, child safety, pedestrian access, etc) so it's always a good time bringing up topics that you bring up in your videos and that you too have experienced living in Canada with those big ugly highways, few sidewalks, practically no bike lanes, etc. I often use points from your videos to fuel my arguments.
I moved from Germany to Canada and have to drive on the dreaded 16-lane stretch of the 401 you showed. They're widening that area even further now I believe (between Bayview and Leslie)... There is no more rush hour as you mentioned, I plan for traffic on this Highway at any point during the day. I never owned a car in Germany and got around just fine by bike/tram in Düsseldorf. No one seems to get the idea of induced traffic demand in North America
At this point, I just assume US and Canadian cities will just bankrupt themselves trying to meet their traffic demands, and still deny that induced demand is a thing.
I do wonder how much better our country can be if we did increase public transport and walking paths and made more tiny shops for suburbs to go to that are easily reached via biking or walking. That would open up a large swath of the population who don’t have a car to these businesses. I would imagine it would really make economic sense
My town has underused buses and expensive parking. We need park and rides between the suburbs and city. I won't work for a job where I need to pay $100-$150/month just to park.
The city likes the parking revenue, or rather the revenue from tickets, which were $2 thirty years ago and are now $15 that turn to $25 if not paid on time.
Parking is the same price everywhere, so you may have to walk six blocks from a residential area to get to your job and still pay $2/hour.
The newer electric buses in the Netherlands were great. They were the same quality as charter buses here in the states. Nice, clean, well-lit, with free wifi, and usb charging ports at every seat. Video screens to show the stops. It was amazing that something as large as a city bus could move with just a whoosh of sound.
Your videos make me miss living in Saltville, VA. I used to live in one of the big white old duplexes in the part of Saltville where the people living in the duplexes could walk to the Rite Aid, Dollar General, BB&T, library, the park, and if you really wanted to walk the mile and back, the doctor's office. Unfortunately, crime still seemed to be pretty common around that town so I would sometimes be woken up or disturbed by the sounds of sirens going by. My family and I couldn't afford the duplex so we moved into a trailer park in Meadowview, VA and sadly, it's not much peaceful: a woman called the police on her kids because they weren't cleaning up after themselves and one of them is a young deaf boy that doesn't seem to realize you shouldn't go into people's houses uninvited.
Great video! I live in Toronto and commute by transit (subway and bus). I choose transit because I like public transit, and am resigned to the tradeoff that it takes much longer than if I were to drive. Most of my colleagues just want to get to and from the office as fast as possible, and so they drive.
In pune, India there are seperate roads for busses in which cars aren't allowed,this also has another benefit that ambulances can go through them without worrying about trafic
Yes & that‘s why I always take the „slightly slower“ tram line in the morning because I exactly know the bus will be stuck and too late
I live in Toronto. That shot of the 401 is a dream. It's always worse than that, except maybe between 2am and 4am. Also, I can vouch for walking being faster downtown than literally any form of transportation
So my commute is 20 miles each way by car. I can make the trip constantly in 25 minutes. I tried biking. Shortcuts make it about 16 miles. That takes me a bit over an exhausting hour.
I was excited to hear public transit was being extended past where I work. I have a bus stop a block from my suburb home so I could walk there. Then….I looked at the time. It would take over 1 1/2 hours plus wait and walk time (guessing 2 hours total) each way! Nope especially when it’s cheaper to drive.
My last chance is ebike. Would make the ride doable for me and the ride is actually about 90% trails so that’s cool. I’m giving it a shot after the winter.
I live on the east side of LA and when I worked on the West Side I used to leave at 4am and sleep in my car until I had to go in because that was easier than sitting in hours of traffic
My brother used to make an early start because he did not want to be stuck in traffic. It mucks up the body clock.
It's kind of pathetic that my city offers an "express bus" that skips most bus stops, but it waits at stoplights so long that it only has a 50/50 chance of beating the "local bus" to your destination
Ocean City, Maryland is an example of a great bus system. Dedicated lanes for the bus, pay one fare and ride as much as you want for the day. Not to mention they run all night, and there are frequent buses. Its great! You drive into town, park your car for the week and just take the bus.
I think you would love to check out the city almere, it has its own infrastructure for busses, taking a car in that place is most of the time a lot slower than public transport, even from 1 end to the other end of the city.
Especially Almere-Haven. Each street is a fractal set of spirals creating a lot of cul-de-sacs where kids can play safely. You will need GPS to find a specific address by car though, when seen from a car no part of it makes sense.
Even the commuter busses in Houston get stuck in traffic. That really shows where the city’s priorities are
Based on what I have seen in videos... yeah, Houston is a sprawling car-addicted shithole. Classic Texas.
In London UK it was allowed to park or to drive on certain bus lanes at off peak hours and on Sundays. Since the pandemic they were made anytime bus lanes improving the transit speed.
Cringe car traffic lanes vs based bus lanes
Being Dutch there was always public transport; from the moment I could walk, we lived just 150 meters away from a busstop. So 26 years ago, knowing I would be working downtown for 25 years, I bought a new house next to a new metro station. The best!
that end looks like a regular ol day on the 101 which cuts through my town. A congestion car infested city. Most of our streets have no sidewalks only fences that make it impossible to walk even if we wanted to.
4:48 Groningen, Netherlands. the street from left to right (folkinge straat) is a direct pedestrian/bike connection from the train/bus station to the university, and further. Passing the museum, skirting a movie theatre and crossing a street-buslanes-street, and a market-square. It is essentially car free.
The other road is part of the red-light district. Bonus: cars drive very slowly. Downside is that the drivers tend to be distracted.
In my city I decided to just move within 1.5 km of my office so I can bike it in 3 minutes, I used to drive 25 km to work and it took 40 minutes, the bus would have been 90 minutes and biking would have also been about 90 minutes (never actually tried that) now I simply don't drive during rush hour and my attitude while driving has improved significantly
I wish more politicians and other people would understand it. Here in Austria, Linz builds a big highway through the city.
In my city in Greece there is a bus lane on an avenue in order not to get stuck in traffic but people have the habit to use this lane as a standard car lane causing the bus to get stuck in traffic
My buddy and I had a concert to attend in downtown Toronto a few years back, and since the traffic is so horrible, and the amount you have to pay for parking downtown so expensive, it made financial, time, and stress sense to take public transit instead, so we took it. I took the GO bus/train from Niagara Falls to downtown Toronto, and he took the VIA from Cornwall to Toronto. Amazingly our trains arrived at union station downtown Toronto within 5 mins of each other, and we walked downtown and enjoyed our concert. As for that 16 lane highway, it is horrible for traffic, could be midnight on a Sunday and sometimes it has traffic, for my sanity and safety when I go visit my friends in Cornwall, I routinely just stomach the 407 toll route cost of 80$ each way to bypass that 401 highway through Toronto, the money is worth the reduction in stress for me. As for why I don't take any alternatives, they are either more expensive(VIA), and not as convenient when I am in Cornwall, since most of my friends live in the country outside of public transit, so I must have a car.
Your channel made me decide to be an Urban Studies major at my university.
It's interesting that people apparently complain about the existence of public transport in NA, but in the Netherlands you will most often hear that too many people are on there.
What bothers me about Canadian public transit is how the decision to remove rail early last century made towns so car dependent and adjacent towns may as well be on the other side of the province if you don't drive. For example a 15 minute drive to Hamilton or St. Catharines (assuming the QEW isn't clogged up) turns into a whole day affair if you don't drive. The funny thing is, these used to be commutable even if you didn't have your own vehicle. Main St. used to have a rail line running through it as historic photos show and that rusted billboard at the end of the street I suspect was a train stop which was a ubiquitous sight in small town Ontario not just cities. Even back in the 60's I had an aunt who commuted by bus to pick fruit. Somehow she managed to do that alone while raising her kids plus one. Hey, I tried commuting by bus to the next town over for a summer and it was awful. Not only was it infrequent, but not least bit economic either.
And yet... when I visited Guernsey C.I. I drew a couple of comparisons. One being the town/city population sizes and proximities to each other being somewhat similar to Niagara, but this little island has this working bus schedule that feasibly connects these towns on the half hour. It certainly left me with the impression many people worked where they lived, but if they wanted to work in the next town over by taking the bus, they could do so and it wouldn't create this isolated economic class of locals.
That's exactly what happened to me in uni. I had a car but tried to take the bus for the first year and a half. With how far out of the way the route went, how often it ran and how it go stuck in traffic anyway it was taking me 60-90 minutes. If I left at the right time to avoid the traffic I could drive it in 15 minutes.
I used a unicycle instead of a bicycle when i was a little girl, it was easier to park at school bc the lack of handlebars in a sea of them,also it was allowed on the pavement
In secondary i switched to a ww2 womans bicycle
I think I have a pretty good example of good urban planning for my hometown of Malmö, Sweden. I live near the coast, If I want to visit my father in the suburbs across the city. It's a 10km drive. (Malmö is a rather small 300k city) this will take me about 15-20 minutes (depending on traffic lights and traffic throughout the city), and it takes me an additional 10 minutes to fetch my car, so in reality it takes about 25-30 minutes to go visit my dad. If I take my bicycle on the other hand I just walk out of the door and unlock it. The bicycle lane is dedicated and safe, away from car traffic, I travel through tunnels and bridges instead of getting stopped at intersections and red lights. In the end it takes me 20-25 minutes to get to his house by bicycle (avg speed 20km/h, about the same as an electric bike). It's a bit faster than the car, I get A LOT more exercise, I don't spend money on gas, and I free up traffic. Generally it's more convenient. If it rains? well, it takes 10 minutes to go to the car, it takes the same amount to go to train. and the train leaves once every 30 minutes and it takes 10 minutes to get there. With all of these options, car isn't really necessary or very convenient anymore. So I am actually thinking of getting rid of it and only rent one whenever I need a car.
Those first closed streets in the USA you talk about where also some of the first steps applied in the Netherlands.
He's right (about leaving earlier for work). I start work at 8:45am and leave for work at 6am for a 50km drive to Toronto.
5:55 Holy shit that sound! I thought there was a plane above 😭
Yep, it's bad. My niece lives in the Greater Toronto area and drove to North York everyday. My other niece does not drive and had to take a series of buses and trains to get to a university campus in Toronto in time for her shift in the canteen. I did experience the bus service - taking a bus from Pickering to Scarborough - and it was good and fast with no hold-ups. The nearest rail station was the Pickering GO terminus, but even that was a bus ride away.
Clever ad placement, I like it
And then you have rural areas like mine in Germany. The busses are allways empty. Too expensive, too much detour, and nobody cares about our busses. Because: We don't have traffic rush hour. The streets are empty. But when you driving: You have the bus in front of you with nobody in it. XD
Idk why this is called a paradox, this is exactly what I expected
This is video all city planners and transport planners need to understand.
Fascinating observation, man I want this to be a thing everywhere
Cities NEED to start using diverging diamond interchanges . That will cure issues in HUGE numbers.
A standard bus takes up about 2 cars of space, which means if there are 3 people riding that bus, it's saving space on the road.
The Seattle region is currently building out its light rail system to the rest of the suburban towns and should be finished by 2035-2040. I do hope that this works out being a convenient transportation option as much effort has been done to keep things grade separate and to build out the network as rush hour traffic becomes less appealing. This should be more frequent than the sounder heavy rail which not many people use
Maybe Singapore bus lane solution might work for your countries.
We have narrower roads but we practically got no jam.
1. Priority bus lane at rust hour time. Fine if cars stays in this lane for too long. Other times all vehicles can use the lane.
2. Made owning of cars less affordable.
Killing 2 birds with 1 stone so to speak.
More revenue for the government, less roads need to be built.
3. Other incentives like,
a. Nice, efficient, comfortable & handicap, including wheelchair friendly buses.
b. Incentives to scape cars more than 10 years, new cars less pollution, heavy tax after 10 yrs.
c. Etc.
Id like to point out that the 401 is this busy because there simply aren't any other alternatives. The city had cancelled most of its other expressways, leaving the 401 the ONLY east-west choice between Mississauga and Durham. The 407 is too expensive for a lot of people. In addition, lots of truck traffic moves along the 401, which also slows everything down. If you look at Montreal, it has far more options, and thus is able to have less lanes per freeway.
Interesting video. But, while you are correct that essentially all large cities where the vast majority commute by car face these issue, there are smaller cities in North America which seem to be able to avoid this, such as Las Vegas. In these cities rush hour commute times are low and traffic volumes remain manageable over the long term. While they face the other issues of car dependency, they do seem to be able to a use car commuting model effectively as means of transport. Perhaps you would consider a video examining cities like this in North America? Perhaps it is the case that if you build your city around cars to such an extent as occurs in LV it does work, even with many other harms?
I think that LV is able to pass by this problem is because it's size, they aren't really big. But when the moto of an urbanistic style is 'when you're city is not so big and is completely obedient to my style it more or less works!* *Ignoring the countless other problems that the system causes' then it ain't good chief
Yea in my city to get from the centre to one of the oldest/largest suberbs would take you half and hour by car and 10 minues by city rapid railway. And the railway stops on the way are so frequent you could literally walk from one to another in half an hour or less. And apart from that you have a tram network in most places going once every 10 minutes. Theres literally no reason to have a car if you live and work within the city.
My bus usually gets stuck in traffic behind other busses
Happens too at some of Singapore's bus interchanges/terminals as public buses have to pass through various minor roads & turn at multiple junctions (which requires them to wait to give way to crossing pedestrians too) to get in & out of some of them
14 St busway is such a revelation (for the uninformed). I have noticed the ridership change from old & lower income folk to EVERYONE on the corridor. Obv pandemic changed things but as ridership returns the trend is the same. Naysayers warned of traffic apocalypse on the nearby parallel streets. There wasn't, there isn't and will never be any apocalypse.
I must say I dropped any plans to visit the US just because I don't really want to rent a car there. I love driving in France, but the idea of having to drive in North America is so repulsing
Anytime I get only the slightest idea to buy a car, I go watch one of your videos and immediately get reminded why thats a shit idea. Cheers for your content mate
There's also another solution, build a road network so spread out and so massive that it can fit all of the cars on it at all times!
But in all seriousness, balance, as always, is the key.
Enrique Penaloza: "Giving Public Transportation Right of Way is Democracy in Action". If you haven't already I encourage you to check out his TED talk!
Every day I wake up and thank God I'm not an American.
You guys get bus priority lanes?! I've thought before that just doing that would make buses so much more viable, especially since they have to stop much more then cars. Giving them priority might allow them to make up that lost time and cut down on the hour long ride needed to drive what a car can do in 20 minutes.
I would love to see the rush hour graph for Los Angeles.
Ha! I can see my store from here! In the fake London!
0:17 R I P chester form linking park
Q: Do Your Buses Get Stuck in Traffic?
A: No, because my local council not provide buses from my living area to work.
We need those dedicated bus lanes here in Mumbai. At least on the highway. But nobody cares...
Additionally, when poor people take the public transit, people see it as “Undesirable” or “unsafe”, leading to less people taking public transit.
I do love trains and bicycles.
I heard it put a different way: The ultimate limit on the speed of traffic is the traffic itself.
Fair point on unicycle,
BUT
many public transit operators don't allow bikes on the bus/ train (at curtain hours)
Unicycle on the other hand is fair game.
(Probably because they know in advance I'll be a pain in the butt with my "technically It's not a bike", and avoid it)
Never understand the need to take bicycles on public transport. Surely it defeats of object of having a bike in the first place.
@@eattherich9215 I used to live 2km from the train station and my office was also 2km from the terminal station. So taking my bike on the train was really useful. (Leaving a bike at the station was asking to get it stolen)
@@ShurikB93: we have secure bike parking at stations in my country (England), but was a 4km ride too much for you? Isn't cycling supposed to be exercise too?
@@eattherich9215we don't have secured bike parking. I used to ride the 4km,without taking the bike on the train I couldn't have done it.
So taking a bike on the train is very important.
(I moved so I'm mostly using a bike or a bus for my commute)
I'd say the TTC headways are good enough that some people who do own cars do take the bus and then transfer to the subway to go to work
Just wondering ... why Buses is with only two S's.
The reason I'm coming up with : English is a Germanic language, the name Valtteri / Valter is the Nordic version of Walter, the letter W (VV) is called double U, therefore V and U are connected ergo U (pronounced as "You", with a constenent) was regarded as a constenent so no double constenent after?
The bus makes me nauseous because of all the constant stopping and starting being stuck in traffic but I'm still gonna fight people about buses being essencial and better in general, they just need more regular buses, more investment + remove cars from cities etc
Thats why i never understand car-guys ranting about public transport or bikes. the more people switch over, the more they could enjoy driving a car.
A lot of them are paid shills. Don't underestimate how much money goes into astroturfing anti-transit initiatives, the auto and petroleum industries have deep pockets.
2:18 How come I’ve never seen this before? This is genius!
The busses here get stuck in traffic all the time. Not because of cars though. There are barely any cars in the city centre. They are stuck behind a wall of busses and trams. Especially during rush hour
Those stats on Toronto are quite biased. Having a high percentage of people walking to work is partially based on an unnaturally strong population density in condos in the downtown core, which demographically skews fairly young age-wise as well. Which is in turn driven by a real estate bubble that extends well beyond the core. The city is a total mess transportation wise, and would benefit from multiple additional Subway lines, but there has been a complete lack of political will to improve that situation over the past 30 years.
kind of funny i went back to driving instead of the subway to the city becouse its cheaper then public transport if you dont have to pay for parking, prices of the public transport here have risen quite high
Great information
(0:13) now i know why i liked Chandigarh soooo much (:
(1:26 my future self got a mention ;)
LOL try explaining that to my parents. But I got to say that Vancouver is better than Toronto. I say this as a Vacouverite.
Im my town buses dont get Into Traffic jams, because they have a Trafficlight and Sometimes Lanes Just for them.
Surely the SECOND question is “is your metro rail network any good?”, with buses being third
Not really. Metro networks can provide very efficient public transportation, for sure. But... over here in the Netherlands, only Amsterdam and Rotterdam really have a metro/subway system. Yet, walkability and transportation doesn't really suffer for _not_ having a metro network in any of the other cities.
I won't say that metro networks are overrated, because (again) they really can move a lot of people very efficiently. They are not a _necessary_ addition to an effective and efficient (public) transportation system though. You _can_ have perfectly solid transportation without a metro network. You _can't_ have perfectly solid transportation without buses that don't get stuck in traffic though. Because if you're buses get stuck in traffic, you're a.) crippling one of your most basic public transportation options and b.) it means that _your traffic's stuck._ After all, if the traffic wasn't stuck, neither would your buses be.
Thus, "Do your buses get stuck in traffic" becomes the second question.
Metros are a thing that's characteristic of large cities, meanwhile, buses can form part of the transportation system of even tiny villages. Buses are far more universal in their applicability.
that traffic in canada is really not THAT bad. i’d rather drive in that freeway than sit on a bus any day.
They do now. Government put in an LRT that doesn't work into the bus trench.
Where I'm from people don't just use buses because they're broke. It's also because our roads are atrocious from endless construction and parking is impossible to find. Who would want to drive in that?
The route I have to take to get home from school has to go through some crappy tight parking lot at a mall and it takes 30 minutes
If the public transport system is only used by the poor or desperate than it's a failure.
Public transport has to be a real alternative for everyone, instead of the only option for some.
As a byproduct of this, what's best for the poorest is also good for the middle class, as it almost always is.
In Vienna i saw a city mayor in a subway, somehow cannot imagine this in some U.S. city.
@@radimkatrinec6935 most us cities do not have subways.
Radim Katrinec It's not a subway, but Joe Biden uses the Acela Express occasionally. It's not common for European politicians to use any kind of public transportation besides PR, since they all own not so inexpensive cars.
The problem is that if a bus line is popular then the transit company increases service, but for the bus to get popular they need to have increased service. See the problem?
Also a cool fact is that the buses and trams automatically get a green light when they are on or behind schedule, but not when they are ahead of schedule (; - Amsterdam resident
Wow. I had no idea. Do you have a link to an article about that? If not, I'll find one. I'm researching a video about traffic lights right now and that's a great bit of information to add!
@@ucantbcereal Great, thanks! That gives me something to research.
@@NotJustBikes I don't know if you've already made the video but emergency vehicles also use this to automatically get a green light when passing traffic lights to make it faster and safer.
What about the 'green' traffic-lights for cyclists by bad weather ;)
New York City’s new buses just added this. It’s so awesome!
You're not stuck in traffic, Karen. You ARE traffic.
@@ericolens3 Or maybe swallow that classism and mix with people of different socioeconomic than you.
@@ericolens3 wew, all that wall of text just to say you won't ride the bus because of the poor people.
@@ericolens3 they do ? I mean this is not about you agreeing or disagreeing, buses take up less space
become the traffic
@@ericolens3 dude you’re a fucking menace, what an awful take.
I love how some government idiots think the solution to traffic issues is to constandly BUILD MORE LANES! When that just ends up creating more traffic.
I've been involved in municipal politics several times over the years, and I've found that a surprisingly large number of politicians understand that building more lanes does not solve traffic in the long-run. But the people who vote for them DO believe that it solves their traffic problems, and the best way to get re-elected is to do what your constituents ask for.
@@NotJustBikes huh, interesting. So basically they do something they know won't help to get re-elected to do more of that which doesn't help...
@@NotJustBikes so people are stupid
Well, people are ignorant ...
... but many of them are stupid, too. 😆
@@NotJustBikes Since you're close to Belgium; how would you solve the traffic jam problem in Brussels then? All the highways cross there and everybody needs to get to the other side while driving on a 3-lane road. In my simple mind making extra lanes would solve those kind of traffic jams.
Dear Canada.
Bus lanes. Look it up. Trust me.
Kind regards,
The Netherlands
@@wclark3196 having an enormus but empty country is no excuse for having shitty public transportation where there is significant population density (toronto, ottawa, montreal, quebec city)
Really? Clearly, you've never visited your own country's capital city. Ottawa is FULL of bus lanes. The buses even have their own highways in many cases.
@@xxTheminemanxx Im a paramedic in Toronto, this video is accurate to about 80 percent, mostly all of the surrounding areas have bus lanes stringed everywhere, and a lot of the street car lines in Toronto dont allow cars on them at all. The biggest problem with Toronto itself is that its simply out of room. Everything is stacked on top of itself so closely there is simply no room to rebuild a better road, without taking down the entire block of buildings and starting over. The TTC (Toronto transit) all things considered is relatively not *too* bad, everyone tears it to shreds if they use it, but a vast majority, myself included in some cases, have a car, but its more convenient to take the bus. We arent as far behind as this video makes us out to be, but we are nowhere even remotely close to being "well off" in the transport sector, the city was designed with 500,000 people in mind, we are at 8 million living in the area.
@@wclark3196 Yes, i think toronto or montreal have good (not excellent if compared to europe but very good if compared to america) public transportation systems (although maybe for example streetcars should have priority in crossings and streetcars would also benefit from being separated from cars, where I live in Barcelona we have that and is very impressive the speed that a streetcar can have given this priorities). What I was trying to say is that canada could have europe level intercity trains in the quebec city to toronto corridor but thats is not the case. And that saying that canada is huge is no excuse for that bc there is population density for good intercity trains in some areas.
@@wclark3196 Adding bus lanes to the rural roads of Nunavut would be a bit of an overkill (do they even have roads there?) but I don't believe those were the subject of this video.
16 lanes dang.....it's like continually upgrading your broadband internet because they keep uploading 240p footage in 1080p containers.....
Come to Texas, you will see the Katy freeway (interstate 10) with 29 lanes
@@culvuil Katy Freeway makes me want to vomit. If adding more lanes was a real solution, it’d be an international model not the embarrassment it is.
@@culvuil What in the holy...
@@culvuil Traffic = disaster
@@eriklakeland3857 The Katy is a unique product of bad (non existent) zoning policies causing completely unmanaged traffic. Most other American cities have higher population and less lanes.
I would say that I'm somewhat of a "car guy", but I really don't understand the obsession with designing our roads around them. I also love bikes, and buses, and walking. This might sound weird but I preferred it when I was younger and cars were more of a novelty. Cars are " a" choice, but in North America they're just used to give us the illusion of choice.
Well, you do have a choice in America. It's just a choice between Toyota, Volkswagen, Mazda, Ford...
Yep, the illusion of choice is pretty on the dot. In much of North America, a car is basically a necessity. You need it to run errands, go to the grocery store, see family, and especially to get to work/school.
it's not a choice really, most times you don't have a choice to save money and not get a car. You have to have a car to have a good job to survive unfortunately.
I would love to live in a place where the only people driving around would be the "car guys" who could really enjoy their ride or people running delivery errands. Being able to spend your commute time reading, playing or checking social media is so much better.
@@caiofernando I agree with you. :) In 1989, Japan had a concept on paper to build a vertical city called Sky City 1000 with all the amenities of a traditional city (condos, schools, offices, movie theatres, parks, stores, places of worship). It would have been 3000 ft tall, and have elevators instead of cars.
I live in Prague, where public transport is also really good (sadly still very little bike infrastructure but it is getting better) and everyone uses it. Politicans, rich people, poor people, famous actors or even the mayor of the city who uses bike or public transport.
It is really strange when someone from US says that they dont have or use public transport and that it is dangerous or only for poor to use public transport.
This thinking is so wrong. I cant imagine driving around Prague. It would be so much slower and so much less convinient. Especially the parking.
Absolutely! Good public transport is an absolute necessity for a city. It's crazy that so many Americans think they can resolve their traffic problems without it!
To be fair to Americans, the only public transport they have ever seen is probably complete crap, maybe busses that come every half hour and move slower than a bicycle. If they live in a major city like NY they might see something decent, but even the NY subway is falling apart and smells like pee. Many people assume that this is all public transit can be.
That is another factor about moving around with a car:
Unless you are going to a shopping mall, parking will be hell. And if you are going to a shopping mall you will walk farther from your car to the mall than city dwellers in Amsterdam walk from their flat to the corner store.
@@alexcat3121 my town is one of those "bus comes every half hour on the weekdays, once AN HOUR on the weekends". Seattle's public transit is alright, but I live 30 miles north of the city, so I'm left with no other choice BUT to learn to drive. There's too few opportunities here, and the best ones are south and best accessed by car.
In Trnava, Slovakia, we have a mayor that doesn't even own a car, he just travels by bike and helped build an amazing infrastructure of bike lanes. It is now much more convenient and faster than driving. But buses don't seem to be supported enough.