America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)

public transit is pretty bad in North America it's inefficient it's slow it doesn't take you anywhere you want to go and in most cities with very few exceptions nobody takes it unless they're really desperate what's worse is that even when us and Canadian cities do build new Transit projects they often have very low ridership but if you look at many other cities in the world public transit actually works pretty well it's clean and efficient and many people happily use it for all kinds of trips providing lowcost Transportation options reducing car travel and generally making the city better for everyone so what's the difference we can't build Rapid Transit here our population is too small if you've ever lived in a small to midsize us or Canadian city you've probably heard this before I've certainly heard it said in my car infested hometown of London Ontario Canada a city with no Rapid Transit at all just some infrequent bus service that's constantly stuck in traffic a few years ago there was a discussion in my hometown about building an LRT that's the North American code word for tram because street cars have a bad name mostly because they're built wrong and always get stuck in traffic but anyway it was decided that ridership numbers couldn't justify building an LRT So the plan was downgraded to a brt or bus Rapid Transit and then it was downgraded to maybe regulars or maybe not happening at all but I made a separate video about that in that video I mentioned that the city of inbrook in Austria with a population of less than 150,000 people has six tram lines in addition to frequent bus service and over 300 inter city trains per day my hometown has a population of over 420,000 people but apparently it's too small to build a tram lots of small towns in Germany have tram lines too in fact there are 40 cities in Germany with a population of less than my hometown that have tram lines oh sorry wait a second beld doesn't exist so it's only 39 but that's still a lot and what's even more ridiculous is that my hometown did have a tram sorry street car in the late 1800s but it was torn out in the 1940s so somehow when the population was less than on Tenth of what it is today it could support a tram but now it can't why the answer to this question is the true reason why public transit sucks so much in North America it's because we don't build our cities for Transit anymore today cities in the US Canada and other places like them are built for cars it didn't used to be that way they all had tram I mean street car lines seriously look it up Los Angeles had the most extensive electric street car Network in the world and even places like Regina Saskatchewan and Chattanooga Tennessee had street cars but nowadays we don't build for Transit instead we build for cars and when traffic becomes a gaping wound that is bleeding us dry we try to apply the transit Band-Aid because we've heard that Transit can reduce car usage this is exactly the situation that London found itself in when it couldn't afford to widen this road to six Lanes but public transit doesn't work that way in order for transit to be successful it needs to have people to ride it and destinations those people want to go to I know really mind-blowing Revelations here this means that people need a Transit stop near to where they live and near to the places they want to go the area around a Transit stop that can be accessed by walking is called the walkshed I guess then the area accessible by biking should be called the bike shed but that just sounds wrong so this area around a rapid transit stop is some of the most valuable and critical land in the whole city and this is the key to a successful transit system unfortunately we don't treat this land as if it were important in the US and Canada we often subject the area around Transit stations to the same strict regulations that prioritize cars for example minimum parking requirements that require a certain amount of parking spaces to be built alongside any new development this doesn't just G guaranteed that will be easy to drive here it also steals valuable land within walking distance of a Transit stop that could be used for somebody's home or somebody's destination this is what the land use looks like around a typical train station connected to Canada's largest city an empty lot and a self storage facility they're more concerned with building parking lots for suburbanites than productive Urban places and I've talked about this before in a previous video a Transit plan without a good land use plan is a waste of time and resources because the transit is doomed to fail it will forever be underfunded and struggling to gain ridership and a good land use plan without a Transit plan is a lost opportunity and it's likely to just become a funny curiosity or retirement community like most new urbanist developments these two things need to come together they are completely dependent on one another you simply can't have a successful Transit plan without a good land use plan but we don't do this in North America and this is why our Transit projects are doomed to fail I recently made a video about this crappy Business Park that I used to work at in Moga Ontario Canada I compared that Transit experience of buses that are always stuck in traffic to a business park development in the Netherlands built around a train station and a brt line some people said this wasn't fair to Miss Saga because several kilomet away they have some fancy new brt stations and yeah these brt stations in Miss Saga certainly are impressive and they've clearly spent a huge amount of money on them over half a billion dollars in fact but look at what surrounds them here is the view from the train station at the business park in the Netherlands the buildings are right there easily accessible by wide sidewalks and here is the view from the local brt stop just around the corner these destinations are immediately accessible to people on foot now compare that to missas Saga where they drop you off at the S of a high-speed stro and a half a kilometer walk to the nearest building through a sea of car parking this place is not designed for Transit it's a place designed for driving with Transit as an overlay to car Centric planning for example at this station there are these houses only 150 m away but there's no connection except via the roads so you'd need to walk almost a kilometer along a stro like this to get there and you could theoretically get to the area around my old office but you'd need to walk over a kilometer in the other direction along a narrow sidewalk like this now misaka may build a bunch of highrises near these Transit stops as some other suburbs of Toronto have done but this brt station has been here since 2014 and the area around it still looks like this but regardless of those hypothetical developments I guarantee you they won't be reducing the size of this Strode which means there's always going to be a huge amount of car traffic around these stations which will require parking lots parking garages and driveways that make this place less inviting to people outside of a car this public transit as fancy and expensive as it is will never be as successful as the same trans Transit connected to a mixed use walkable neighborhood now this isn't exactly an unknown concept to American planners which is why in recent years there's been a lot of talk about to or Transit oriented development the idea is that the area around Rapid Transit stops is upzone that is allowed to be something other than a single family home or a parking lot in this way new developments are created in places where public transit is convenient for the people who live work and shopping there City beautiful recently made an excellent video about Transit oriented development that's definitely worth watching if you'd like to see some examples of this done right in the US now the problem is that to is often far too limited here in Toronto for example where there's a subway station and a new LRT station being built the Avenues directly next to the transit station shown here in red may be up zoned but the rest of the area in yellow is still all single single family detached homes this creates such intense pressure to build on the small amount of upzone land that developers cram in as many units as possible so you get huge condo Towers right next to single family homes within a 5-minute walk of a transit station a better solution is to allow and encourage walkable mixed use developments within a 10 to 15minute walk shed of every rapid transit station in most cases this would allow for a more gradual range of missing middle housing like those found in most of Europe instead of giant condo Towers next to single family homes again good land use and Rapid Transit need to go hand inand and neither should be built without the other but here's the problem if you propose building transit in North America where there is no development you'll be laughed out of the room but historically almost every town in the US and Canada was built this way towns were built next to Rapid Transit first canals and then along railway lines and As Cities grew they expanded outwards along tram sorry street car lines now that type of development is considered crazy but for some reason we don't think twice about building roads and even highways before development is started this is seen as completely normal that's exactly how we get exurbs like this one Suburban neighborhoods that are connected to nothing these places will never be accessible by public transit and the people who live here will need to depend on their cars forever when we design a neighborhood only for cars people will drive they will drive to work they will drive to shop they will drive to do everything they will set up their life around driving because there's no other alternative but once you've built this way it's almost impossible to put that Genie back in the bottle and over time car tra traffic will increase indefinitely with no way to build any feasible Alternatives a few years ago images of this subway station in Chongqing in China were circling around the internet people in North America were laughing at the stupid Chinese government who built a Subway to nowhere but a few years later it looked like this because this wasn't stupid it was intentional the city needed more development so they built it around public transit lines now does this mean we should be building trains to every corn field and cow pasture in the country build more [Music] trains damn it Allan your memes are leaking again anyway no it doesn't but it does mean we should be making it legal to build more mixed juice walkable neighborhoods and the transit to go with it this is the island of iberg in Amsterdam the city needed more housing so this area was identified as a good candidate close to the city center but notice that as this area was built they built the tram line here at the same time the tram line opened in 2005 just as the first homes are being completed so as residents moved in they had regular and reliable Transit access to the rest of the city this ensures that right from the beginning these people can build their lives around Transit this place would be totally different if they had built it only for cars and then tried to add Transit a few decades later this is a whole other level of Transit oriented development that is far beyond what you'll find in North America now if you live in the US and Canada this kind of development is probably beyond your city's ability but it is possible to build upon those few walkable places that do exist in his book confessions of a recovering engineer Chuck morone talks about how Transit can be a wealth multiplier for cities a way to bring value to developments by making them more accessible but that only works if when you exit that Transit it brings you somewhere that's friendly to people walking not like this we still have a few old walkable neighborhoods in the US and Canada built before the 1940s these places have been neglected for too long but they could be revitalized and good public transit is the wealth multiplier that could make that happen these walkable places can and should be connected by regular Transit that comes so often you don't even need to look at a schedule a bus coming every say 10 minutes or so that loops around this area and connects the historical walkable areas around it would bring with it a massive positive change and would provide the seed that could grow into an expanded Rapid Transit Network in other parts of the city Chuck's book has more information about how this could be done so check it out if you're interested there's a link in the description in North America we've forgotten the rules of good land use and we've forgotten how to build good Transit that supports it but if we could dust off those old history books or learn from the place is still doing it correctly we might just be able to start building good Transit again Transit that doesn't suck now I love walkable neighborhoods and I firmly believe that they are better places to live and better for society as well and they support the highquality public transportation systems that you'd actually want to use one US city that is doing this correctly okay well mostly correctly is Portland Oregon City beautiful has made a great video about Portland's light rail system that I strongly recommend and it's available on nebula nebula is the streamy award-winning streaming service that's the perfect place to watch content from independent educational creators like me as well as City beautiful in over 140 others you can watch all of my content from YouTube completely adree but also bonus videos nebula originals and other content that's not available anywhere else by signing up the link right here you'll be supporting this channel as well as all the other independent creators you watch on nebula in the future I'd also like to thank my supporters on patreon who pay me to call out Mrs Saga again come on guys let's get some good land use around those stations eh if you'd like your name in this list of supporters visit patreon.com SL not just bikes

Channel: Not Just Bikes

Views: 1,952,745

Keywords: amsterdam, netherlands, urban planning, public transit, land use, good land use, why is public transit so bad, why americas public transit is so bad

Id: MnyeRlMsTgI

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 20 2022