Transporting 200 people:
🚌 in busses (0:31 minutes)
🚋 in trams (0:32 minutes)
🚶 walking (0:38 minutes)
🚲 biking (1:59 minutes)
🚗 driving (4:08 minutes 😱)
That’s the kind of visual we need to make the point. But I wonder if these analyses account for the fact that buses/trams stop for passengers and cars/bikes go “straight” to the destination?
Things really improved when urban planners were forced to design cities as one long road with a single stop at both ends, and every commuter were forced to start their journeys from a single location at a specific set time.
A more interesting model would be starting and ending in random locations across a wide area, starting at random times.
Model of what? Because that wouldn’t show what this model is meant to.
A model of road utility. Roads don’t look like this and aren’t used like this, so anything this proves has little to no bearing on reality. Yes, cars take more space, but they’re also doing a completely different task than a bus or a bike. The use case of using any mode of transport to go a short distance in a straight line and then stop is pretty contrived.
This graphic does not need pedestrians or bikes. They aren’t competitive with vehicles of any kind when you start talking about multimile distances.
A more realistic simulation would be including the loading time for each vehicle type (car/bus/train) for a 5, 10, and 20 mile distance. That way you see how these vehicles are actually used rather than a shitty first past the post “race”. Removing the loading/unloading times of each vehicle wildly skews it in mass transport’s favor.
It would also be interesting to include usage costs associated with each mile range. I figure a bus pass for a 20 mile trip is a lot cheaper than loan payments, gas, and maintenance for a single passenger car ride.
But this isn’t about speed, it is about space efficiency. The whole point is even taking speed into account, cars waste so much space per person that it takes them 2-8 times as long to make up for the space they take as any other mode of transportation.
I would also like to see parking lots shown for space visually at a location needed extra for those types of transport because that also is a problem.
If you’re worried about speed that’s not so much a visual, as an entire study on travel in a metropolitan area, including stuff like walking to metro, boarding/unboarding, walking to final location, heating up car in the winter, finding and paying for parking, traffic patterns, etc.
That’s a completely valid point, with less cars there would be a lot more space with the lesser need of parking lots
No, bikes are competitive up to 8-10 miles in city traffic. And if traffic is especially bad for even longer distances.
I know it’s only anecdotal, but my 5 mile commute is the same by bike or car, 15-17 minutes depending on traffic.
On the other hand the 25 mile ride to a friend’s house takes 90 minutes by bike compared to the 30 it takes by car on the highway.
Makes sense to me, the last time I did a long bike ride was over a decade ago. With my lack of cardio even a handful of miles sounds daunting.
Get an ebike to work your way back up. Start with full assist and you’ll get some stamina pretty quick
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