Memes

The key is public transit that doesn't suck. For the last 100 years the car and oil/gas industries have spent billions of dollars undermining public transit.

Dedicated transit lanes, subways, light rail, protected bike lanes all make cars less appealing to those that want to use them.

Public transit that share lines with cars are always going to be worst that cars, but if you add exclusive lanes for Public transit they go smooth as hell. This is why metros are usually the best option on cities with good metro infrastructure.

The key is that both adding car lanes and adding alternatives like transit are subject to induced demand, but the consequences of it are different for transit than for cars. Not only is the limit of the added capacity much, much higher for a train than it is for a car lane, adding more traffic to the lane up to that limit makes the performance worse and worse (increasing congestion), while adding more transit ridership up to its limit makes the performance better and better (increasing train frequency and therefore reducing wait times).

Similarly, induced demand for walking and biking is a good thing because more people doing those things improves public health, doesn't pollute like cars do, and takes up much less space.

So it's not that induced demand is bad, it's that inducing demand for cars, specifically is bad.

The goal for alternative transit is not to remove traffic jam, it's to transport people.

9mph is slower than a bike, it fits with my experience. When living in a city (in Europe, it might be different in the US) my feeling was always that bike was the fastest, public transport a bit slower but more comfortable (mainly protected from the elements and car drivers) and lastly car was the slowest and more stressful.

There will always be traffic, but public transportation allows for a higher throughput for the same speed and total surface area of the roads.

Let's be generous and assume that every car has 2 people in it (the truth is that the vast majority of cars, especially in the US, only have 1 person in them). Now imagine 15 cars vs. 30 bicycles. If we figure that you can comfortably fit 3 bikes in the same space as 1 car, you're looking at 150% throughput for the bikes compared to the cars at the same speed. Give them their own dedicated, separate infrastructure, and they can probably go faster than traffic while also removing the danger of bikes and cars sharing the road. If you figure buses can fit 20 people in the space of 2 car lengths, you're looking at 10x the throughput.

And that's not even getting into transportation that doesn't use the roads. The Boston T is a perfect example of this. Despite its notoriety for constant failures due to poor maintenance, and only being half the size it was 100 years ago, the T is considered to be the 3rd best public transportation network in the US. Why? Because the average commute time is about half the national average at roughly half an hour, and a full 50% of Boston's commuters use the T every day. That's half as many cars in traffic every day than if the T didn't exist. Could you imagine if Boston, notorious for its bad roads and heavy traffic, suddenly had twice as many cars driving on its streets?