Just like nuclear energy requires enormous upfront costs but are more efficient over time than carbon based energy (some unjustly due to regulations that are more about fear, rather than safety), subways and high speed rail in heavily congested areas also require big upfront costs, but wind up being more efficient over time. Remember, the highway construction under Eisenhower was a massive undertaking of public expenditure at the time, but it was well worth it. Transportation, like energy are public utilities. That doesn’t mean that the government ought to run these endeavors, but, if properly done (yeah, I do agree these endeavors are not always properly done given our political structure), government expenditures in these areas wind up being beneficial to society as a whole.

First, “smart growth” can support viable transit (and neighborhood commerce and offices) at densities as low as 13 units per acre. Of course London is much denser than this (probably 40 – 60/acre). Making smart growth bear the brunt of his claustrophobia (agoraphobia?) seems like an excuse to editorialize rather than a legitimate complaint.

The “smart growth” pattern is really independent of density overall, and supports everything from very rural to very urban (see this link to dpz.com for a nice, pictorial example.)

Finally, the sprawl model (the alternative to smart growth’s mixed-use, mixed-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods) is fundamentally non-working when it comes to transit *and* congestion. Pedestrians meet many obstacles when they try to walk to transit stops and the sprawl answer to traffic congestion is to widen roads that are already too wide.

A typical two-lane sprawl street in a suburban neighborhood is 40′ wide. That’s two 12′ travel lanes, and two 8′ parking lanes. FYI, 12′ travel lanes are typical for freeways. These streets *must* bend every 1,000 lineal feet or so, or speeding traffic invited by these widths will mow down the neighborhood’s kids.

Bends are absurd bulbs, incredibly wasteful of asphalt, and discouraging to pedestrians. These are included because the garbage trucks might have to turn into oncoming traffic when they take the turn (remember, this is a residential neighborhood with relatively little traffic). That’s the excuse, except “fire trucks” are what to substitute for “garbage trucks.”

By way of contrast, London’s Oxford Circus street is…wait for it…40′ wide (when you exclude the medians, and just pace off the four 10′ travel lanes). In other words, one of the largest shopping streets in London, populated with the equivalent of multiple regional malls and six-story office buildings, gets by with exactly the same amount of auto space as a two-lane sprawl road in a low-density neighborhood. But no, transit is wasteful and scary!

A study conducted by the Southern California Association of Governments reveals that adding width to streets is not even the answer to congestion. They mathematically modeled every remedy they could imagine, including double-decking the freeways. Only one remedy provided significant reductions in traffic: mixed use. That is, providing shopping, public buildings, offices, and residences (even light industry) in a single neighborhood.

You don’t really need a study to understand that people who can shop, work, send their kids to school and live in the same neighborhood do less inter-neighborhood commuting. It just makes common sense.

I’d like to think Warren is ignorant of this, but I detect a little self-interest in promoting individual motoring, since his business requires people to continue doing that.

Unfortunately things are so much more complex than just miles per gallon. Lets say that we took a lane of a freeway and converted it to rail. The train may get great mileage but the lane lost to cars would reduce the mileage of all the cars due to increased traffic congestion and this burden should properly be placed on the train. Even though the train uses less energy the economy is using more. Lets take a more real world example. Politicians take dollars they could use to expand highway capacity and spend it on light rail. This raises traffic congestion, raises fuel consumption, lowers productivity, increases pollution, not to mention the devastating societal effects from people having to spend more of their time stuck in traffic (less time with family, less sleep, road rage, etc.)

Also, to point out the obvious, the humans spend energy to improve efficiency. If we all walked everywhere we would use zero fossil fuels but we would get very little done.

Actually the price is pretty inelastic – there are no real alternatives for commuters into London. It costs money to drive in (Congestion Charge) and even more to park. Cycling is dangerous, it’s not so compact that you can walk anywhere much realistically. And though the buses are more user-friendly in some ways, they can get snarled up in traffic and take too long to get anywhere in rush hour. This means that people pay what it costs, whatever it costs pretty much, simply to get to work.

And the sheer concentration of work in London means it isn’t as easy simply to move somewhere else in the country as it might be in the US. It dominates the region in a way that I think US readers may find unfamiliar.

Hence your ghastly experience. But I hope the rest of your trip was pleasant…

WTF? It’s crowded, smelly, hot, and many stations lack escalators, meaning carrying a heavy suitcase up the stairs is good way to get sweaty, which might not be such a good thing if you are wearing clothes you intend to wear your clothes for the rest of the evening.

I always take the bus instead.

Roads are congested because planners take the money allocated for highway expansion and divert it to trains.

It should be obvious to even the most liberal thinker that roads are far more efficient and useful than rails. Roads can be used for cars, buses, trucks, bicycles, walking, deliveries, emergency vehicles. Roads are far cheaper to build and maintain. Roads go everywhere. Roads can easily be trenched to provide utilities. Even if you are a mass transit fanatic, you should support roads with buses on them, not rails. Rails should be used to transport extremely heavy, bulky loads over long distances, not people.

Nobody wants to be part of a mass. We are individuals with individual needs, wants and travel schedules. Roads accommodate this.

Longer term, roads can be made to carry much more traffic by using intelligent systems to insure an even safe flow sorta like an auto-pilot. You drive your car normally to a intelligent road entry point where you enter your desired exit and turn control of the car over to an auto-pilot. The auto-pilot will drive your car at high speed and close inter-car separation to the exit where you take over again. Lots of details to be worked out, but its could be made workable and safe. In the interim, you could add lanes or even a second deck to some highways to handle peaks loads.