There's a woman from a town in Québec that had CPS called on her because she is using a cargo bike to carry her kids around.

Story in French: https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/2022-06-20/signalee-a-la-dpj-a-cause-de-son-velo-cargo.php

At least in the US, there is no activity that is more likely to result in an interaction with cops than driving.

This kind of design sounds completely insane. You could walk half way to Cockfosters along the Piccadilly line in that time. Any other city I can think of here you could walk the entire diameter of the city within 3 hours.

I don't even need public transport because I live in a town, usually quicker to walk and always quicker to cycle compared to waiting for a bus. Not sure if its better to swim than take the ferry, maybe I need an amphibious bike?

Yeah, I mapped my public transit commute out one time. For starters, it’s complicated because Google/Apple/Waze/etc have the public transit option greyed out. Like it’s not even an option. If I try, Google suggests getting a Lyft. Which is really just saying “lol get a car, scrub.” I wish I were making this shit up:

Here’s a quick visual of my daily drive, versus the public transit route I would have to take:

So my commute starts with me biking 20 minutes away from work, to get to the nearest bus stop. Then I take a 20 minutes bus ride to the nearest rail hub. Then I take a commuter rail south-south-west for an hour, to get to the connecting line. Then I make a connection. The rail times rarely line up, so I’d probably have to wait at the station for ~15 minutes for the connection. Then I take the second rail line 45 minutes northwest.

But here’s where I run into my next problem… My house is serviced by one public transit system, and my job is serviced my another entirely separate transit system. Due to local politicians in the different cities not getting along, the two systems don’t connect. So now I need to bike 20 minutes north, to get from the northernmost station in one transit system, to the southernmost station in the other. Then I take another train 20 minutes north. Finally, I have about a 10 minute bike ride to get from the train station to my job.

All together, that’s ~50 minutes biking, ~20 minutes on a bus, and a little over 120 minutes split across three different trains. Plus the waiting time in between each connection, because the trains I need only run every 15-20 minutes. Bare minimum, I’m looking at around 3.5 hours for public transit… Or I can just take the highway 10 minutes west.

“But wait, you have walking and biking options! You could do those instead! The biking option in your screenshot is only 54 minutes!”

While this may be true on paper, I’d like to refer you to the “I had to go 2 hours out of my way to avoid certain death” panel in the posted comic. That 54 minute bike route is on a 70 MPH two lane highway, with no shoulder or sidewalk. I’d be dead before I was even halfway there.

“So take an alternate route?”

That giant loop I listed earlier is the alternate route. That 10 minute highway route cuts through a nature preserve. There are no other roads or paths parallel to it. You either take the highway, or you go all the way around.

I can’t even legally reach my grocery store without a car. I have to cross that same highway to get to the store, and there is no sidewalk that crosses it. So I’d need to break the law to walk to the grocery store.

If it's a US road it's also much much too wide and much too fast. The country is designed to kill people who aren't in cars.

Carry a brick and make eye contact with anyone in a car. Crossing the road gets much easier.

Where I live the roads have shoulders that are roughly 6-12” from where the pavement stops, which is usually terrain that is both difficult/impossible to ride on and privately owned. These are holdovers from carriage/wagon roads during like “founding America” times (yeah Pennsylvania) and expansion would require a great deal of money, property easements, etc, so it just isn’t done.

A random spot from google street view (because I don’t need some geoguesser nerd doxxing me). The state is plagued with this and the further east you go the more you get hills, stone walls, etc right against the edge of the road.

These are also mostly back roads and as a result are not really monitored well by police or anything so drivers go absolutely wild on them, especially in rural areas. Where I live there is a T intersection that has accidents somewhat often because people will go down the (35mph) rural road insanely fast during the night, like highway speeds (70+mph). Then all of a sudden the road stops and it’s either a 90 degree left or right turn, which they fail. Sometimes they die.

All the road signs are shot up too because redneck teens and young adults drive drunk at night and shoot signs, which is a thing that coal roller types do for fun apparently.

To walk or bike to the nearest grocery store isn’t terribly far, ~3 miles, and the nearest bus stop is ~5.5, but the path there is a death trap

I hate it here

It just isnt realistic to have public transit in webs of suburbs that brings you to islands of stores that are only accessible by road.

Since the 90's american cities have been successfully passing ballot initiatives to raise their own taxes to fund transit. They don't always pass but the tide has been slowly, painfully slowly turning for a while now.

Hey, we're working on it. I'm in Seattle and we're doing better than most in the country. People are coming around.

Almost like that's the point (and not entirely US-exclusive anyway)

Cool bigotry.

Most people can't even really afford their car. They are reducing their quality of life, home ownership, putting off any hope of retirement, etc for an object that has a shorter lifespan than most pets.

Of course they want you to do the same. They need constant justification for staying on this treadmill. The fact that all that time and money is being wasted, is hard on the ego. Especially for anyone that claims they live a frugal life.

how do their children walk to school if there’s no bloody paths? Come on.

They don't. There is a reason why kids are so desperate to get a driver's license, as before they do they are effectively trapped in their house if they are unlucky enough to live away from transit (Or even if they are they are still somewhat trapped). Before then they are driven to school and to activities. That is where the stereotype of the "Soccer mom" comes from.

Local government should be run out of office for endangering the kids like that, nevermind everyone else.

There is a perception that walking is inherently dangerous and for the poor, so people would get run out of office for trying to fix things. In Canada most cities have sidewalks to most places, but not to wealthier neighbourhoods.

I mean… how do wheelchair users etc get around? Christ.

Most of the bigger busses here can 'kneel' to let people on if need be, and if they live far from transit then they can schedule special busses to pick them up. The trains are also very good on accessibility. All of this is in a city with fairly well funded transit, in most cities and towns they are completely dependent on others to drive them around.

https://www.calgarytransit.com/content/transit/en/home/calgary-transit-access.html

No one is going to willingly choose to take an hour to get somewhere that a car can reach in ten minutes. No one is going to willingly choose to stand out on a random corner in the snow, rain, cold, or extreme heat just to wait for a bus that might already be delayed, and whose environmental systems might be malfunctioning.

That's the point of improving things, then it wouldn't be like that. But the previous sentence you said it was a pointless endeavour so I'm not sure what your point is.

If you have bad public transport you can't argue against making it good based on the fact that it's bad now since if it was good then it would no longer be bad. I really don't know what else to say.

Do you understand how much roads actually cost? Do you understand how bad the ROI on road expansions is?

Besides, I will 100% take a little extra time to not drive. Google Maps will give you a door-to-door driving time which doesn’t include finding parking and walking from said parking and for the metro it gives the longest time so you can pman for waiting for the train+transfers but you can regularly go much quicker than that. I own car, I own a sportscar, and I only drive it when I absolutely need to which often means driving it just so it doesn’t sit still for too long and gather rust. Plus, a monthly metro/bus pass costs less than my insurance on a car which they know I only drive around 5,000km/year and then there’s gas, tires and oil, and any maintenance(which I do myself to save money).

Public transit is awesome and it works. We know this because we can see it working even in rural Europe, places very similar in many ways to North America. The US and Canada spread their cities out in incredibly ineffective ways and they aggressively shoot down public transit expansion. Montréal and New York are cities in North America that prove that there is no magical anti-transit field on the continent. Shit works, and it’s awesome.

TL;DR the only reason that your public transit is bad is because all levels of your governments actively resist the tried-and-true methods that make it work while burning billions of dollars on car-centric projects which are shown to never have any lasting effect on traffic(we’re talking a year or less) due to induced demand.

eminent domain to build sidewalks

Probably not. The land to either side of roads is typically owned by the road-owning entity already, in case they need to make improvements.

Even in my urban environment, the city owns the verge, the sidewalk, and something like eight inches past the sidewalk, six inches past everyone's front fence.

I don’t see how it could be made better without having to do billions or trillions of taxpayer-funded upgrades to every road

This seems like a good-faith comment, so I'll try to keep the snark to a minimum. Honestly, when I hear this sentiment, I think that somebody believes that roads are naturally-occurring phenomena. They just sort of... grow? appear? form from the bedrock?

Good lord, no! Roads are highly resource-intensive structures, and roads for cars have a finite lifetime, typically figured in the range of about 30 years before they have to be re-constructed. And that's not counting perhaps several rounds of re-surfacing and maintenance in that span. In fact, Strong Towns often points out that when businesses acquire a capital asset, they have to book the cost of future maintenance as a liability. Municipal governments, by contrast, book roads as an asset, and ignore the future maintenance liability. If they followed GAAP, most cities and towns would be bankrupt. Hence, the reason the American Society of Civil Engineers grades our roads as D+. As a country, we keep building roads that we can't afford to fix.

That is a long way of saying, "We have a backlog of trillions of dollars of maintenance to roads already!" They have to be re-built regularly, anyway, and lots are overdue. One of the major reasons that we can't afford to do it, and the reason that there are so many lane-miles of road to maintain, is cars. The simple geometry of the space needed for cars means that everything has to be far apart in order to fit the roads, and the parking lots, and the drive-thrus in between.

So, we're on the hook for a backlog of trillions of dollars of taxpayer-funded basic maintenance to roads, and we can't afford it. Wouldn't it be better to re-construct our cities and towns—which again, have to be re-constructed no matter what—around more opportunities for walking, biking, or transit? It would be way cheaper. And without all that pavement for cars, we could put things closer together. Walking to the local grocery would be convenient, because the nearest grocery wouldn't have to be 5 miles away, on the edge of town, where land for a parking lot is cheap enough. We could be healthier, stopping by the grocery for a few minutes on the way home a couple of times a week to pick up fresh, healthy ingredients, instead of loading up the car with a pallet of highly-processed food from CostCo every two weeks. We could have better weak ties with neighbors by seeing them from time to time at nearby places, which science shows is critical to addressing our mental health crisis. We could let our children, elderly, and disabled people have independence again. And the buses could be fast and convenient, if they didn't have to go so far and get stuck in private car traffic all the way.

Anyway, I've gone on long enough, but I hope that this is a peek at just how bad our car-based system is, and how it could be made better, and for cheaper.

Here is something good to read from an organization that is actually trying to improve things.

https://humantransit.org/basics