“It’s nothing to do with the population of the city and everything to do with – when you step off that transit vehicle, where are you?”
In this episode, Chuck welcomes back Jason Slaughter, producer of Not Just Bikes, to the Strong Towns Podcast, where they discuss one of his recent videos, “America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit).”
Jason and Chuck go in depth about some of the absurdities of our modern transit system and the urban deserts they tend to drop riders off at—bringing to light some reasons why people don’t want to use public transit. They also debunk the reasons some DOTs use for why we can’t have better transit, and what the process for building efficient public transportation systems should look like.
For Further Information:
Strong Towns: https://www.strongtowns.org/stmedia
Not Just Bikes: https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes
“America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnyeRlMsTgI
Strong Towns on public transit: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/category/Public+Transit
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Jason transformed my life. 20 years ago (like many people), I wanted the large home on an acre of land which required moving to the outer edge of a city for new construction. At the time the mindset was 'who needs sidewalks?' and the Southeastern subdivision has minimal sidewalks and no bike lanes. You must drive at minimum 4 miles to get to a main thoroughfare. I never questioned the building choices are this was the norm.
Approximately 5 years ago, we were given an opportunity work anywhere we wanted so we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to a city 45 minutes from San Francisco by public transport (BART) which requires a 5 minute walk to the station. We shipped one of our cars with us and over the past 4 years have only put 2,500 miles on the vehicle. Every type of store (basics to high-end) is approximately a 15-minute walk. The city has dedicated bike lanes and trails to navigate the city. Access to rail (Amtrak) is a 30 minute ride by public transport and 90 minutes to SFO airport.
I can't imagine going back to the old mindset of living in a car dependent city. Retirement is approximately 10-years away and we are looking for our next home that offers a similar non car dependent lifestyle. I would like it to be in Canada but are open to any European city. We have read Confessions of a Recovering Engineer and use it as a reference book on the topic. Thank you for waking us up from our car-dependent slumber.
Mr @Not Just Bikes mentioned the Eglington LRT project. Look a bit north to the 401 with I think 11 lanes of traffic. I think transit needs to stop trying to reduce traffic to downtown only and start to provide transit alternative to workplaces outside of downtown. They need to look at wherte the cars on the 401 come from and where they go. If you want to reduce the 11 lanes down to say 6, perhaps you need to give the people that use it an efficient way to get to work.
The original focal point was to reduce traffic going to downtown because roads to downtown were overwhelmed. But if the focus is to provide transit that is faster and serves zones of employment that includes zones outside of downtown, that is when you can change travel habits of more than just bankers who work downtown.
On good transit: I will bring up New York City where even bankers know it is faster to take subway than to drive. When transit is faster, then it wins and its biggest problem is inability to cope with the demand. Transit should compete against cars, instead of making cars so miserable than people switch to a lesser evil. Transit needs to be seen as a better mode of transportation than a car.
“Then two buses show up at once”
It’s like he was riding my bus.
The mindset is that only poor people catch the bus, so if you want to be anything in life you must have a car and a house that you own and so few want to catch the bus because it is that you're a less than desirable person
In my city of Richmond Virginia, RVA, transit is free and ridership exploded. It should be free for everyone. Having a cost for something so essential to humanity needs to be done with. We need housing and transit first
I agree with everything he says except the density argument. There is not one developed country in Europe or Asia that could even compare to the lack of density we have in Canada. Essentially every city in Europe compared to Canadian counterparts are by definition are dense. Density is by far the number 1 reason transit is more expensive/harder to achieve in Canada. Is this because of single family homes and the planning that is involved with them? Yes. But nonetheless its silly to argue that Canadian and European cities have even remotely comparable densities.
To any European, the idea that a city has such a large population that it needs a six-lane road, but not such a large enough population that it needs some decent busses… Is frankly barmy!
Both of your channels have made me feel less insane as an American. Thank you. And yes no one really talks about how ridiculous our infrastructure is. Instead people think the answer is getting a car, and if you don’t have one, that’s on you for not growing up and getting a car like a good citizen :/
What's with all the dry humor lovers that make urban planning videos?
49:00 : In Italy for example most of the times you can't build a tower for two reasons: limits on height and maximum volumes. So I'm curious, don't you have the same in the us urban plans?
So what do you do in many of the rural areas without public transportation and people miles away from each other?
A clever thinker with a great explainer… very cool. I live in Bristol, UK. pop. 500 k+ …Still no effective transport and they are even taking OUT cycle lanes. It's maddening, but at least there's a lot more engagement around solutions. And NJB often gets mentioned.
The U.S. is very sparsely populated. China has a similar land mass with over a billion people, America only has 330 million. This is why we don't have high speed rail–our population is too low for it to compete with air travel.
39:22 I am not sure what photo of the towers over single family homes you're talking about is, but here in Cleveland. There was some push back on a proposed 5-story apartment building because it would "tower" over the single family homes. I called BS on this, I live near where that development was proposed, and there are LOADS of 5 story buildings mixed in with single-family homes. Usually on a corner, or grouped together. These buildings have stood for 70+ years, and they are a part of the character of the neighborhood. And yet, when it comes to this new building, they're crying foul. The development in question isn't a TOD. Though Cleveland is making some (slow) strides in that regard, which is nice.
@Strong Towns : How would you feel about a sort of "rolling average proportion" zoning policy. For example, house setbacks from the street. You have a lot and take the average of 3 lots to your left, and 3 lots to your right, and then on your lot, you can build with 50% less (or whatever) of a setback than the average. So if the average was 20 feet, yours could be 10 feet. This way, neighborhoods don't radically change, but they are still set up in a way that allows them to grow.
If I'm thinking of this correctly, it would also allow cities to grow from the most dense areas out first. Since the downtown area typically has the tallest buildings with the least setbacks, the properties/lots surrounding downtown would have more room to expand than properties/lots surrounded by single family homes. Seems to restore some of the balance of organic growth, while reining in developers desire to only take on massive projects. A desire that may be fueled by the scarce amount of land where multi-story projects are even allowed.
Another development near me is going on, I asked a city Councillor why they are insisting on developing it all at once, when there are so many unknowns, do it a section at a time instead. And he said that the developer would pull out if that was the case, that no developer wanted to develop a portion of the 5.7 acres of land (used to be an old hospital).
One of the good things to come out of the pandemic is definitely that it is more normal to have interviews via the intertnet. This was a great interview that would probably have been incredibly difficult to arrange otherwise (not to mention bad for the environment) considering travel distances!
I think if should start with removing zoning. Allow small local shops and restaurants with regulations on noise and hight. This way people wont need to go 1h car ride to the supermarket. If I were to have to travel that much to a shop and have return with heavy bags, I wouldn't take the public transport no matter how good it was. I live in NL and I think usualy, people keep close to their home, rarely travel for long hours by train.
IMO is also the association of Class (and possibly race in the US) as transit for “Those people”
The foolishness of North America planning is not to include transit from Day one. Trying to insert transit afterwards is usually very expensive and the built form is almost always designed for car travel so the inserted transit is never going to be as successful as it could have been. As it stands, North American cities are so far behind in building effective transit that they cannot catch up so that new development can include effective transit from Day one. This follows 70 years of poor urban design.
my hometown of Sebastopol CA had a tram through downtown in the 1800s. I don't know what the population was then, but it's like 8 thousand now, so….
No one in my city seems to understand the…biological needs….of a trip longer than an hour. No washrooms anywhere.
Thank you, gents, you've really opened my eyes to the connections between carbon burning, car-dependency, fiscal sustainability and urban design. It made me realize that electric cars, per se, are not the key to the future we want. Even if we could magically switch every private and public vehicle to electric tomorrow, it would do nothing to solve the "growth ponzi scheme", congestion, sprawl, alienation and all the consequences that flowed from letting car companies rip up our streetcars. Also, thanks to you, my kids can't go anywhere without pointing out "stroads". Once we saw them we can no longer not see them. As annoying as this can be, watching your videos with my kids has implanted a consciousness in how they see their local environment that is priceless. I'm dropping hints that their next school projects should be around themes they've learned from Strong Towns and NJB. Thank you and keep it up.
When you were talking about transit as "Charitable Overlay" you remind me of an exchange I heard about when I used to volunteer at a food bank. A government official made a public appearance there, and talked about how when she took her children to the grocery store, she had them pick out some items they thought a family going to a food bank should have. A food bank client asked her, "Why should your children decide what my children eat?" People making decisions about transit that they don't themselves use often make the same kind of uninformed choices.