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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'd be all in favor of "road diets" or "traffic calming" or whatever makes it harder to drive... IF they had amped up our public transportation game. Instead they're decreasing bus frequency, removing stops, and cutting entire bus routes, and of course metro is a shitshow.

it takes me 10-12 minutes to drive to my office. 35-40 minutes to walk. 35-40 minutes to take public transportation. What reasonable person would choose the 3rd option that includes waiting and walking time? [/quote]

I agree with this. I live in DC, in a neighborhood that is used as a thoroughfare for commuters driving in from Maryland. I hate the traffic coming through my neighborhood every day and I especially hate all the horrific, unsafe driving I see as people do deranged things and speed to try and make that commute.

But I can also see that public transit is not meeting these drivers halfway. There is metro into the nearby suburbs (we are in NE, adjacent to PG county) but it doesn't serve many of the neighborhoods well at all -- you'd have to spend almost the same amount of time driving to a park and ride on the other side of the county in order to take metro in as they currently spend driving into DC. Metro prices keep going up (though I don't know how that compares to parking costs downtown -- I always wonder about that because when I have worked downtown parking was prohibitively expensive IMO). The buses are not frequent enough, often overcrowded, and sit in the same super slow traffic. For a city dweller, that bus might still be better because it could save you the cost of having a car. But for someone in the suburbs, they have to own a car no matter what, so leaving it at home to take a slow, crowded bus doesn't make a ton of sense. And you lose the efficiency of being able to drop off and pick up kids on the way, go to the grocery store, run other errands. So I get it.

I just do not see any of the PG commuters that currently stream into the city via NY, Florida, Maryland, and West Virginia Avenues, or Bladensburg Road and Benning/H Street, being able to switch to public transit unless there's a HUGE overhaul of what is offered. No one is going to ditch their albeit miserable car commute to pay $10 a day to ride crowded, hot metro or buses that don't even go where they need them to go. You not only need a massive investment in these transit methods but you also need specific kinds of development around the transit hubs so that people can easily pick up groceries or dry cleaning or pick kids up from daycare when they get of the train or bus. You need to make it worth their while. Right now it is not.

Trust me, I'd be thrilled to get all these cars out of my neighborhood in favor of mass transit. It is probably the thing that would have the single biggest impact on my quality of life and property values, even over and above addressing crime issues (yes, really). But these people need a way to get to work. Right now, it involves sitting in traffic outside my house for two hours a day. You need an alternative that beats that.[/quote]

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