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ChineseRethinking Congestion
Contributed by Fred Camino on November 2nd, 2007 at 11:43 am
[tags]planning, congestion, traffic, public transportation, bicycle[/tags]
Click to see full image.
The above image is from a poster in the City of Muenster Planning Office, August 2001.
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
This one’s definitely worth a thousand words. Now if only there were a good visual for train capacity.
Awesome poster–where can I buy one?
Funny thing: The bus is more compact than the cyclists, no?
Ummm, what are the cyclists going to eat?
Before anyone else mentions it. Clearly the zoom level for the car picture is greatly increased, creating the illusion of even more density.
Not just the zoom level but the parallax aspect and the azimuth perspective.
Here’s another thing to think about. Circuit density. Those cars and bicycles) drive and stop. They both also optimize route selection and time of travel. The bus circulates and that at all hours but in aggregate mostly at peak times.
Another thing to consider. Cars and bikes require storage at any potential destination they may end up at. Storage requires space. So the area taken by cars/bikes in the above pictures must also be available anywhere the cars or bikes might want to stop. Buses on the other hand, due to their circulatory nature, are stored at a single central location (per route) and thus require much less space – and that space can be placed
Fred you are correct. And to the buses advantage that location need not be near destinations.
That said, the auto picture is misleading in that the bus is full and the cars not even at commute occupancy. The comparison bus v. bike is even more skewed against the bikes. LA has about 12 people per bus and 1.57 people per car and 1 person per bicycle. Forget the bikes for now and fill up the cars the same way the bus is filled up.
I might as well add a hypothetical commute to the discussion. If we imagine a fictional city where these various commuters live… let’s say we have a dense residential neighborhood of 40 people who are all commuting to a dense business district. The car group decides to carpool (since they live in a dense suburb and they are all going to the same business district) and pile into 8 cars (Toyota Prius), 5 people per. A single Prius takes up 77 sq. ft, so 8 of them require 616 sq. ft. That 616 sq. ft will have to be available in the residential neighbordhood (individual garages, curbside parking, etc) and in the business district (parking lots, parking garages, etc). And of course the roadway will have to be able to to handle that capacity.
On the other hand, a NABI 40-LFW bus (seating capacity is 39, so one poor bastard would have to stand) takes up 340 sq. ft. and only requires a single storage space (which can be placed away from both the residential and business areas).
If we use Dawgs numbers it would still take about 7 Prius’s (539 sq. ft.) to move the same 12 people in the 340 sq. ft. bus.
Of course the above is all hypothetical because we don’t necessarily have dense residential neighborhoods with commuters going towards the same dense business district.
I remember seeing similar pictures put out by the Toronto Transit Commission in the 70’s or 80’s. That set of pictures included streetcars along with the cars, bikes and peds. I’ll see if I can dig it up sometime….
Here’s another good image:
http://bikeforpeace.org/packing_pavement.html
tampa bay baby babayyyyyyy