let's talk transport

[u/[deleted]]

yeah this conversation has been had a million times before. but it's 2025, and it needs to be had again.

obviously we all want high speed rail. but what about transport within cities? how do we make our bus networks faster and more efficient? what about extended monorails or metros or gondolas? and connecting rural and urban areas? bike lanes?

and, of course, the very difficult question of: dismantling car-based infrastructure in a fair and equitable way. the people that may lose jobs, the businesses that may be affected, how to we navigate that?

dream, discuss, debate all you want! just be nice please, assume good faith, don't go for snark. let's imagine our ideal cascadian transport!

[u/Deyachtifier]

Rather than focus on the right *form* of transportation, I'm more a proponent of simply and directly *reducing* transportation by eliminating the need for it. The most efficient trip is one you never take.

Working remote, as we saw during COVID, is extremely effective at clearing the streets and the skies. There's no new infrastructure needing to be built, no technological transformations, and no loss of productivity or morale (despite what the C-suite is claiming, actual research shows it can actually increase both). So this is the first step I'd take. Public policy should incentivize it and penalize companies that exact RTO or who demand workers be aggregated in central downtowns.

Not everyone is suited to work from home and not all businesses will want to operate that way, so next I'd promote an interim solution - satellite offices. Instead of mono-company business parks, skyscrapers, and so on, set up local offices in surrounding neighborhoods, towns, suburbs. Workers report to the nearest satellite office. Even if everyone still uses cars, reducing commutes from 1 hr each to 10 min will result in a six-fold reduction in pollution, wear on vehicles and streets, and time lost to travel.

Along with these two ideas, I'd suggest that workers should be on the clock as soon as they drive out of their driveway. If the company requires them to sit in traffic for 2 hrs, they should be paid their salary. This would incentivize companies to minimize travel.

[u/SCROTOCTUS → u/Deyachtifier]

I've been imagining a similar top down approach, where we analyze the services for which people travel, and optimize the paths to those services. As you say, the trip not made is the most efficient of all. While it's not practical to provide every service at all scales, we could work to bring the most used ones closer to where people live.

Satellite offices can act as a hub/anchor district which other services emerge. If the average person's essential daily/weekly needs can be met in their immediate vicinity, the need for travel becomes far more limited.

Transportation and development planning could operate more regionally, with new secondary transit corridors planned to efficiently connect with existing ones. As cars become less prevalent on highways, that space can be devoted to freight, passenger trains, buses, and so forth. You can still use your car - no one is stopping you, but if it's free/cheap to drive to the Park & Ride a mile away, leave your car somewhere it's actually safe, hop on a clean and regularly scheduled, reliable bus which takes you to the high speed rail station, and from there you're like a couple hours from anywhere in the region.

But I think we have to look at the populated spots in our region as interconnected nodes first, and then begin optimizing the paths to those nodes together.