I know I've shared this link before, but please take a few minutes to tell the US Federal Railroad Administration that we need more passenger trains. (Nicely! They know we need them and are gathering data for where they'll get the most bang for their buck, so to speak.) If you don't personally have any specific opinions on where trains are needed, please encourage them to reopen the old Amtrak Floridian line, because it would make my life so much nicer.
Let me preface the following with the following statement: Trains are great. I firmly believe that most cities everywhere should ban cars, should invest in public infrastructure, and should ban most cars in a majority of places except for a very limited section of the population for daily use.
And, I know this will take points off of my progressive environmental and safety regulatory scorecard, but if you haven't ever driven a car on winding, curving, rural backroads at 100mph with music blaring, you haven't ever really understood just how great driving is and you shouldn't be talking about how driving is the worst thing in the world, and that no one should have that right or ability and that cars themselves are a menace to society and the communality of a society. I can just say that driving can do more to alleviate depression and increase self-fulfing individualistic exhilaration at a dizzying rate of effectiveness.
This isn't just a statement on just how much fun driving can be, but that rural areas require cars, and that no amount of [alternative] will be effective for extremely scattered rural communities.
@macleod Your point is correct! At the same time I think there’s a bit of a strawman argument here.
The “rural people need cars” line is often thrown up as a gotcha “whataboutism” point in rebuttal to people saying cities and towns should become less car-dependent or entirely carfree.
No sensible urbanist would propose taking vehicles away from people who live in truly rural areas. Honestly I don’t believe anyone ever has.
And yeah, driving and road trips are fun.
The issue isn’t cars, so much as car dependency, where you cannot participate in the economy or society without a car, because the spatial arrangement of an area makes it impossible otherwise.
This makes life especially difficult for those who don’t drive: under-16s, people with disabilities, the elderly, but particularly, anyone too poor to afford a car in the first place. A minimum wage job in many places does not pay enough to own, fuel and maintain a car and pay rent, utilities, or eat.
And without a car it’s dangerous or impossible to actually get to work in a lot of places.
Rural America and Canada have lots of smaller towns that once had dense walkable centers, even streetcar systems, but expanded into car-dependent sprawl post WWII. They went from being small towns that could grow into denser small cities, to low-density cul-de-sacs with minimalls along the highway collector roads, if you’re lucky.
This has been a historically bad land use pattern that drives small rural towns into bankruptcy, requiring state & federal bailouts to repair crumbling infrastructure.
So yeah: Rural people need vehicles, for sure. But they could also benefit from a restoration of the extensive passenger rail and streetcar systems that interconnected towns before WWII, and town planning that focuses less on growth and more on becoming economically self-sustaining.
the thing that radicalizes people is visiting, y’know, other countries
The Aesthetic City looks at the new Cayala district of Guatemala City, designed from the ground up by Estudio Urbano with Léon Krier.
It’s a human-scaled, mixed-use, moderate density development using traditional town planning principles, incorporating a mix of Spanish colonial, classical, and indigenous Mayan architecture; it’s designed for the local climate, and is a carfree / autoluw environment.
People flock to it. They spend money there. It’s such a success, new developments nearby advertise how close they are to it.
I don’t want to say “see, this isn’t hard,” because in our current car-centric, Euclidean-zoned planning environment, with every type of NIMBY group waiting to complain about the nerve of other humans to exist within their field of view, it’s very hard to build something like this.
Cayala succeeded because it was an entirely private real estate development on privately owned land, whose owners could have built a cluster of generic five-over-ones that would degrade in a tropical environment, but chose instead to allow themselves to be won over to this kind of vision.
If I were king of Chicago I would insist that this be the norm, and that when parts of land are up for redevelopment or expansion, this kind of process and insistence on high-quality, detailed building be mandatory.
Thinking again of the area around the UIC Circle Campus, the weird dead zone in the Motor Row District / South Commons hospital campus, or any of the clusters of office parks out towards the airport or Schaumburg, there has to be a strategy to rehabilitate these non-places into real places.
My ideal street layout, wide sidewalk, wide bike lanes, and a 2 lane road that only allows streetcars on it. Yes I know this a bad drawing, I made it in a hurry
Are those (black circles w/ small things) supposed to be eg cafe chairs?
If so, they’re posing an accessibility issue due to blocking the sidewalks. Recommend your street layout allow for outdoor seating without blocking sidewalks.
Agreed. The foundation is sound, but there needs to be plenty of space to walk by seating without getting run over by a bike. Seating that hugs the walls of the nearby structure, and open storefronts that let people and services flow seamlessly between the commercial spaces and the sidewalks would be an improvement here.
If the tracked area is for trams/streetcars only, may I recommend that you make it green track?
Not only does it add much needed greenery to public spaces, but it also reduces heat at street level, reduces the running noise of trams and dramatically improves water drainage at street level. It even goes as far as reducing the damage to the tracks caused by the material expanding and buckling in high heat by simply keeping the rails cooler and better displacing heat.
It doesn't even have to be grass! Different species of plant, local species or hardier, low-maintenance species can be used, and furthermore, it tends to reduce maintenance costs of the tracks, as soil is easier to dig up than concrete or tarmac, and so the tracks can be accessed and worked on easier.
Obviously, if you want the street to be able to accept buses along with trams/streetcars, or other rubber-tyred vehicles, then a hard surface is necessary, but if it's light rail only, then green track gets my vote.
we still need green so maybe put flowerpots in the middle of the sidewalk? Like rectangular ones that only take up maybe a fifth of the sidewalk width, and their intermittent, maybe one between every other set of trees.
Honestly if you want some good green space you should consider bioswales between the bike facilities and the "street", which would help replace some of the lost drainage/filtration function from de-greening the track
hey @amtrak-official and all y’all, just to let you know there’s an online tool for doing this called Streetmix (desktop and tablet only) which lets you drag and drop street elements, estimate number of people it can serve per hour, and set maximum widths as constraints.
It’s super useful for kickstarting discussions and charrettes about street redesigns.
I mean, if we still have air travel, or we bring back airships or something
Instead of driving out to the middle of nowhere and parking your car in one of fourteen football-field-sized lots and getting on a shuttle bus with your luggage to get to the terminal, having to check your bags and then go through customs then the mandatory mall then walk literal miles to get to your gate…
You go to a major transit station downtown, something like Toronto’s Union Station.
You can get dropped off there, take the bus, regional rail, light rail, metro, or park your bike in a bike garage
You do check-in and bag check here;
You go through security here;
Possibly, you go through outbound customs / border control here too
Your bags are now loaded onto an automatic high-speed baggage train, which whisks them to the airport, and they’re unloaded into the automated baggage handling system at the airport
You board a separate high-speed train which takes you, ideally, as close to your gate as possible; a major airport will have at least one stop per gate group.
The airport may connect this with its own separate inter-gate tram system for connecting flights
The return train to the city station is only boarded after the customs clearance area; your bags are automatically whisked there and available for pickup from the baggage counter - no spinning carousels to deal with.
