Reply to What would it ACTUALLY take for you to consider biking or taking the bus, in lieu of motoring?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I would need affordable housing and better schools in DC to live near enough to my job to bike.

For metro: I suppose I could drive and park at the metro and then metro to work - but that would take longer than driving and cost more than gas ([b]I get free parking at work[/b]). [/quote]

This is a major factor in people's choices. When there is free parking, people are more likely to choose to drive by themselves than when they have to pay for parking.[/quote]
That people take cost into consideration of their choices is not revolutionary insight. Time is also a cost that people take into consideration, which is something that you don’t seem to understand.[/quote]

OP's question is: What would it ACTUALLY take for you to consider biking or taking the bus, in lieu of motoring?

So one answer is: if people who currently don't have to pay for parking would have to pay for parking.[/quote]

However, life is offing hard enough as it is, and [b]we shouldn't use sticks when we can use carrots[/b] to shape behavior, especially when what we'd consider as carrots is the bare GD minimum public service in Capitals around the world.  
Let's continue to make it easier to use transportation modes that aren't cars. Take the burden of transporting thousands of independent kids to school away from parents in their personally-owned vehicles. Continue to grow public transit and protected bike lanes so that as they become safer and more convenient, they become the obvious choices.

The only "stick" we really need to step us is enforcement of traffic rules in the city, including ensuring MD and VA scofflaw drivers with tens of thousand of dollars in unpaid tickets for their dangerous driving and parking habits pay those tickets and fix their behavior.[/quote]

We can use sticks as well as carrots. In setting policy, we usually do use sticks as well as carrots. If you even think it's a stick to stop subsidizing "free" parking, vs. simply removal of a carrot to reward driving.[/quote]

Okay but wouldn't you agree that it doesn't make sense to expend tons of policy energy forcing employees to use transit systems that still suck before doing enough to make them suck less? Having to wait 14 minutes for a busy bus at rush hour Downtown sucks especially when you have to take another one before you get home. It just doesn't make humane sense to use the stick before you're done doling out a very low bar basic level of the carrots, which means we must offer viable alternatives.[/quote]

We can't improve the buses until more people ride them, and more people won't ride the buses until we improve them, and we can't improve the buses until more people ride them, and...

I don't think it would require the expenditure of tons of policy energy to stop some of the very, very many ways we subsidize driving.[/quote]

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