urbanism

the misconception I hear a lot is that riding transit means you're stuck "on someone else's schedule" whereas driving a car apparently gives you a greater ability to travel whenever you want. People who say this must believe traffic is like a random force of nature that can't be managed rather than something that happens on clear time tables. They also must believe transit is always unreliable and buses only arrive every 5 hours or something, which is a fair belief if they're american.

In a properly operating mass transit system you're never going to be waiting for more than maybe 15 minutes for the next bus/train/trolley to arrive. You show up at the station whenever you like if it's reliable. I've never had to wait more than several minutes to get moving when I've been to China and Japan. I've only experienced two delays on Japanese trains too. Once was an earthquake and the other was an injured monkey on the tracks (the monkey was evacuated to safety).

The first one I believe, the second has to be a joke

My old boss thought trains were obsolete because rubber wheels on pavement was "more efficient".

He's too busy weaving through his Mario Kart LARP to notice the train weaving right past him on its own tracks.

I have basically no experience with mass transit, having lived most of my life in a rural area with only a notoriously unreliable bus line that services the county seat and university area. I've played a few hundred hours of Cities: Skylines and love playing pretend with digital infrastructure, but really, when it comes to transit, I am a bumpkin and I know it.

Even I am astounded at the wild ignorance on display in those anecdotes.

Is transit just one of those things that is deeply misunderstood by most people or does this guy know some world-class yokels?

What's the best way to balance public input on something like transit with "no investigation, no right to speak"? Comments like these are common at public meetings (plenty of private ones, too) and they're notorious for sucking up the time and good will of everyone involved. Ordinary people engage less when your meetings run to midnight in no small part due to nonsense like this, and the people running the meetings get burnt out far more quickly.

Guy's talking about Atlanta, people there are just different. Non-Atlanta people fucking HATE eating in Atlanta. Keith Lee's recent reviews are a great example of this. People there want to feel like celebrities, even the Harold's chicken in Atlanta looks like an expensive club.

at least I can weave through traffic

crab bucket grindset

peak bazinga brain

I was speaking with a California Republican and it seemed one of his complaints about the HSR project was that it was not advanced technology and that if he were in charge it would be maglev.

most people are dumber than the dirt they walk on.

I love the woman's energy and I'm willing to believe that Atlanta's transit is obsolete. In fact, I'm with her that the bullet train people need to be begged for their mercy and labor. However, you probably don't spend billions making these stations and high speed rail for Atlanta specifically. That's a project for a non-failed state to go across vast swathes of land. You'd probably find yourself despondent when your train travels across urban hellscape, destitution, and black sludge fields instead of the Japanese countryside where all the projects of man have some respect for nature and aesthetic.

Though, with some preliminary googling, it looks like I'm being pedantic. There's every reason why you'd want to revamp the transit instead of having a big police budget any given year. You just don't need the intra-city transit to be mag lev trains.