Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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It’s specifically a problem because the mentality is that it’s fine to drive 30 min for food, but not fine to ride a tram for 30 min. It’s an incorrect mentality, but there it is.
That's a crazy mentality.
Not if you consider door to door times.
(Obligatory "fuck cars and car-oriented developments" but to play devil's advocate here)
If driving: Most people's cars are parked in their garage/driveway, or on the street or in a group lot very near by. This means 0-1 minutes to get to the car. Snowy weather can add 1-10 minutes of cleaning/idling time, but since we're talking about a development in AZ I'm not going to count that here. There's the drive itself. Then there's finding parking (time required is very location-dependent, but since a grocery store was mentioned, those usually have huge dedicated lots that require 0-1 additional minutes to park). Then there's the walk from the parking spot to the store (again, for a typical US grocery store, that's about 1-2 minutes). So all in all, door to door times are only a few minutes longer than the drive itself, if that.
If taking transit: The typical numbers in American urban planning for a reasonable transit distance are 1/4 mi for a bus and 1/2 mi for a train. It takes 15-20 min for a healthy adult to walk one mile, but that doesn't include time to cross intersections (waiting for signal or gap in traffic). This will obviously vary wildly based on the route, 0-5 minutes depending. Doing some averaging math, you're looking at about 4 minutes to walk to a bus stop and 8 to a train, but up to 7 minutes bus and 15 minutes train (and I'm leaving out the time to get into the station because it varies wildly, but large stations can add several minutes just to get to the bus/train itself). Then there's the wait; you can reduce the wait at the stop by using an arrival app, but you still can't leave at exactly when you want like with a car, so I'm negating that benefit. Frequent service in the US is defined as anything from every 5-15 minutes depending on location and time of day, so average of 10 min, which gives an average wait time of 5 minutes. Then there's the ride: with only exception of the rare BRT, buses are always much slower than driving on account of all the stops and still being subject to the same traffic as cars. Trains fare somewhat better, although not streetcars, and many US trains follow interstates, where cars are traveling much faster than the train. So what might be a ten minute drive may be more like 15-20 minutes via transit. (Then there's a potential transfer if your destination doesn't happen to be along the transit route = more waiting and a potential longer travel time if driving would utilize a more direct route.) Then there's the walk from the bus/train to the destination, another 4-8 minutes. Taken together, door to door times via transit can easily end up being 2-3x longer than the trip itself (and many more times longer than driving the same route would have been).
So considering all factors, a "30 minute drive" will get you much farther and to many, many more places than a "30 minute transit trip." And while I used American figures, even "good" transit systems can be quite time consuming. When living in Tokyo (one of the best transit systems in the world where most people commute by transit) I lived very close to a subway that ran every 3-7 minutes and was a mere 15 minute ride before arriving at a stop quite near my work, but when all factors were considered (including a very long trek to/from the subway train through the station up to the street), my "15 minute train ride" was more like 45 minutes total.
I was considering the 30 min as brutto times. So 30 mins are 30 mins. The only thing to consider then are frequencies, if they are bad (which they are in most of the US admittedly).
Anyhow. This whole scenario sounds bemusing and absurd to my European ears. Do you only have one supermarket in town or why do you have to do a small world travel like that to get there? Is that what splendid car only urban planning turns cities into?
It all boils down to the fact that if you build cities primarily or exclusively for cars, transit sucks. It is like getting around in Venice by car. Of course it sucks (you are basically limited to drive in circles in the parking garage). I take neither car nor transit to make most groceries. I either do that at a transit exchange, on my way, spending practically zero travel time for it or walk 3 min to the store. I rarely feel the need to go to a hypermarket but if I do, it is a 5 min bus ride add a few min more for total travel time. That is only possible because my city is not primarily built for cars. Of course that's nothing that can be achieved over night. However consider that it took the US also many decades to bulldoze its cities for the car. After all, they used to be built for transit as well before.
PS: What might blow the minds of many US Americans is also the option to combine, simply having a nice walk, with going to the store. You know, a bit of relaxed physical activity, seeing the the hood and doing the chores all at once.