Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "The Pros and Cons of Airport Transit" video.
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I'm seeing a whole lot of evidence that cities designed such that you cannot walk to either your destination, or a transit stop that will lead to a non-awful route to your desitination in a reasonable length of time, in ten minutes or less are generally less comfortable on every level than those designed such that you can. You know, assuming those responsible for such things don't screw up any other major aspect of things to offset the benefit.
Being forced to sit through hour, or multihour, long traffic jams every day just to get to work, on the other hand? Yeah, 'comfortable' an't the right word for that. Stressful sure is though.
Seriously, 10 minutes of gentle exercise, 10-90 minutes (and in a well designed city with well designed transit, it's more likely to be in the 20-30 minute range in most cases) of sitting in a seat*, then another 10 minutes of gentle exercise? Ok, it loses some of its appeal in particularly bad weather, but it's not like driving in those conditions is any fun either (and clothing and accessories suitable to the conditions exist to heavily mitigate this issue anyway).
The shear amount of space you can just not waste on road vehicle infrastructure if you have good transit infrastructure is huge. Cutting down on massive paved areas in a city will actually Lower The Temperature In That City (some fairly basic science behind why that is, parking lots and highways are basically massive heat traps), Greenspace helps with that even more, in addition to the psychological at atmospheric quality benefits.
Walkable cities also typically result in increased sales for street facing businesses, just fyi.
*with, Usually, more room to move and stretch, better ergonomics, and no need to be constantly aware of everything going on around you least some random idiot do something potentially lethal you have to react to, when compared to a car, though admittedly on the particularly heavily used lines you can end up cramped or standing instead at the busiest times of day... though on a well designed transit system that actually sees the level of use that causes such a situation to arise, the answer is usually to just make your trip 20 minutes earlier or later and skip the rush, same as if you were driving.
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A couple of things done post 9/11 actually helped Substantially reduce risk of reoccurance. The vast majority of the benefit was from a redesign of cockpit doors and procedures surrounding them. Airport security? Maybe there are some exceptions somewhere, but the USA's implementation has been proven, repeatedly, to be an utter joke. And not a terribly funny one, given the negative effects on legitimate passengers.
Simply put? It is WAY TOO EASY to get direct access to the planes without any security oversite whatsoever. Tampering with cargo takes basically no effort, tampering with engines and control surfaces is more difficult, but quite possible. Meanwhile, passengers are no longer able to actually get into the cockpit. A regular luggage scan would show up any bomb substantial enough to matter, and that's really the only thing they can do to affect anyone outside the plane (those On the plane having already been written off as acceptable losses if the alternative is the plane hitting something important, like, say, anything that isn't open ocean or fields.)
Oh, and lets not forget that, for all the fuss and bother about other things (with varying degrees of legitimacy from 'yeah, we'd rather not have your thing explode in the hold' to 'the person who added this to the list was a petty twit with a vendetta') that they won't let you bring on a plane (be it in the cabin or in the hold, and the two lists are different), they DO still let you bring lithium ion batteries in various devices in the cabin. Which is kind of amazing given how easily those can be turned into a Nasty incindiary (with added bonus toxic fumes). They won't let larger ones in the cargo hold (it's not pressurised, and lithium ion batteries apparently do FUN things if you drop the pressure. Or at least, the larger ones are sufficiently more prone to doing REALLY FUN things if anything goes wrong under those circumstances).
So, yeah, checking your documentation and bags (and maintaining biosecurity in the parts of the world where that's significant)? Quite reasonable. And was (mostly) being done pre-9/11. All the other extra nonsense? Slows everything down and causes a bunch of extra stress and inconvenience for no actually useful purpose (In the USA it does let certain individuals get away with some otherwise utterly unacceptable behaviour with the only result being another letter about how the TSA will 'review their policies' so that this 'doesn't happen again', or similar meaningless twaddle, though.)
In short: the passenger facing changes to airport security post 9/11 are pure theater that do nothing to stop any actual threats.
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@starventure Yeah, see, the problem there is less mass transit and more the perpetial US incompitence and corruption when it comes to urban and transit planning and infrastructure. Mass transit is plenty inviting... when the people responsible for planning and running it aren't (effectively) idiots. See, for example, pretty much everywhere that isn't the USA that actually put any money or effort into mass transit (you know, plus or minus the places where the entire city is basically a shithole and the transit is the one thing they managed to actually get right, and even then the transit is no worse than anywhere else).
Putting transit stations in the middle of highwayus has always confused me... a lot. Running Track down the highway median or elevated over it makes perfect sense, lets you dodge the NIMBYs for the most part, among other factors, but building stations there? Stations are Expensive, why the hell would you stick them somewhere no one can actually Get At Them? (yes, yes, I'm aware that they're usually either interchanges or have pedestrian bridges to the surrounding area, it's still generally fairly rubbish compared to having the track Leave the Highway and building the station somewhere actually useful.)
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Busses are in fact extremely good at things trains are bad at. Such as 'last mile'* service in lower density areas. Try to use a train where you Should use a bus and you're going to have problems. Of course, if your bus is going any significant distance down a highway, (well, unless it's serving a bunch of small places that aren't quite big enough or far enough away to warrent a rail connection) then its not really being used for what busses are best at, and using busses where you Should be using trains is going to cause issues too.
Of course, saying that busses Benefit from highways is a bit of an interesting statement... because they kind of do, about as much as cars do, but they also Suffer from them, much as cars do. ... basically, at rush hour? if they don't have dedicated lanes, they're just a mildly less stressful way of being stuck in traffic.
But yeah, saying that busses are 'never' the solution is just blatantly incorrect. (now, there's a solid argument that a heck of a lot of them Should be Trolley busses, of course).
*this can actually be a fairly long way in more rural areas.
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