Mixed-use development

These days with high gas prices and awful traffic, we are starting to hear more about mixed-use development, generally with terms like "urban villages" and such. The point seems to be that people can live next to where they work and have short commutes. But that is, for the most part, just wishful thinking, and entirely misses the point of being in a city, that being the access you have to a wide variety of jobs and leisure activities. A city is more than just a bunch of villages concatenated together.

No, the real point of mixed use development is just plain old efficiency. Things like raods, transit, and sewers are expensive to build, and they have to be built to meet the peak demand. The neat thing about mixed-use is that the peak demands of the uses generally come at different times, so the overall peak is only as big as that of the biggest use. If you've built roads and parking lots to support an office park, you can probably build a shopping mall next to it with only a little extra road capacity and parking, since the office park is empty on evenings and weekends, which is exactly when the shopping mall is full.

Carpets in subway car

I was reading some documents published by WMATA (which runs the Washington Metro) about their subway train fleet, and I learned an interesting fact: 15% of maintenance downtime is due to carpet replacements. I suspect this is slightly less bad for BART, but it's still pretty significant. No wonder both systems are looking for ways to get rid of carpets and save themselves money and maintenance headaches.

Another interesting fact is that 20% of in-service delays related to equipment failure are due to the ATC system. So maybe there's some advantage after all to having a nice simple mechanical train-stop system like NYC does: it's very, very reliable, and most light rail systems can get by just fine with no train-stop at all, just plain old block signals, again with much higher reliability since there's no carborne equipment to fail.

Automobile

I read a post on a forum on the topic of cars, and I think it is a wonderful demonstration of the sheer cognitive dissonance that is America's "love affair with the automobile".

Nothing will ever beat the private car for convenience. Its right there, whenever you want it. Its fast, it can be used by almost anyone, regardless of physical health. No wait times to use it, no sharing it with the smelly unbathed guy, the psycho homeless person, or the screaming infant. No stops along the way. And it can be used for trips of any length, to any location, without being forced to walk a mile from a bus stop to the destination. And depending on where you're driving, it can be quite pleasant- driving in the mountains with the top down is *fun*. I've never had a fun bus ride.

Apparently this person has never lived in a city, never had to walk a quarter mile across a parking lot, never had to sit in traffic for half an hour, never even stopped at a traffic light. He's never gotten drunk and been unable to drive, never been a teenager too young to drive or had a grandparent too old to drive safely.

Bofa?

When I came over to do my internship, I decided that it might be convenient to have an account at a local bank, so I opened myself a Bank of America account, since it was free. But then I got the pamphlet explaining the fees, and it's just... horrible. They charge for using another bank's ATM (and of course the other bank charges you too). Even to check your balance. And to make up for the fact that ATMs don't charge for using foreign cards, BofA charges even more for using a foreign ATM. And just today they sent me a letter explaining that they've confiscated my paycheck for a week, basically giving themselves an interest-free loan. It's like they think that I should be paying them to take my money and make a profit with it or something. I find that sort of attitude in a bank to be most... unhelpful.

Abonnement général

Switzerland has one of the best train systems in the world: It may not be the fastest, but it is one of the most comprehensive and reliable. You can get from anywhere to anywhere else in the country, trains almost always run at least hourly, and generally scheduled for easy connections. And while it's not cheap, if you live there, you can get all sorts of discounts, and they even have a yearly unlimited pass. That's right, if you pay 3100 Francs (worth about $2500 before the dollar became worthless), you can ride on any train, bus, tram, etc. anywhere in the country as much as you like.
Imagine if such a thing existed in Northern California: you would be able to go from Salinas to Reno, from Yosemite to San Francisco, all for just one easy payment of, say, $3000. That's hardly more than a year's worth of Caltrain and Muni passes, yet it offers one the freedom to go anywhere at all, without having to bother with tickets, or even think about how much it costs. You just hop on the train and go.

Automotive abomination

As I was walking down the street here in Sunnyvale, I saw a giant one-and-a-half-decker RV, towing behind it a trailer with two jet skis. And then it pulled into the gas station where gas is $4.20
a gallon. I can imagine the many-hundred-dollar fuel bill this guy had, and I can't imagine that this sort of fuel-guzzling wastefulness can keep going for much longer, with gas prices as they are.

Riding the VTA

Now that I'm in Silicon Valley, and temporarily bikeless, my main form of transportation is the VTA. While the buses and light rail are nice, and there's at least some service in most of the area, the system as a whole is just too slow, infrequent, and doesn't go where you want it to. For example, there is no bus that goes from downtown Mountain View to Google. Likewise, there's no bus that goes from where I am to downtown Sunnyvale: I have to take the light rail two stops and then transfer, waiting another 10 minutes in the process, and making a 3.5 mile trip take over half an hour in the best case. Another example: my friend wanted to go to a rollerskating rink in southern San Jose from Mountain View. This rink is conveniently not far from a light rail station, and Mountain View has light rail too, so one might naively think that this is one of those rare trips that is well served by transit. But no, it takes 1h40 from station to station, versus about 40 minutes by car. Taking Caltrain from Mountain View to Tamien and transferring there is generally much better, taking 53 minutes station to station, but that means you have to catch one of the few Caltrains that actually stop at both Mountain View and Tamien, and on the way back, Caltrain is no longer an option, as the last one leaves Tamien at 9:23, and the last train from San Jose is at 10:30 pm. It's just not practical: you can do it, but you'll feel like you're fighting the system the whole way. But I think there's some hope for the VTA, and maybe one day I'll explain what I think needs to be done.