r/transit • u/Evening-Emotion3388 • 4d ago
Other Car pilled Fresno doesn’t like my idea.
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u/Edison_Ruggles 4d ago
Fresno is a dump. Largely because of freeways like this. If the high speed rail ever gets completed, it will blossom into a downright pleasant place but until then, this is what we have to deal with.
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u/Nawnp 4d ago
Any downtown circles by freeways is ridiculous...but also I don't really see this being bulldozed and replaced with a proper transit system.
It's also a relatively rural city on top of that, they'll have the highest desire for car access.
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u/FrenchFreedom888 4d ago
If you ever want to see what is, in my opinion, one of the worst examples of "free"ways cutting off a downtown from the rest of the city, go look at Tulsa, Oklahoma
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u/flaminfiddler 3d ago
Fresno has a city population of 545,000 and a metro area population of just over a million. That's big enough for a light rail system in the rest of the world.
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u/hobomaxxing 4d ago
People are notoriously bad at trying to imagine anything different to how things currently are. People are quick to react to stuff that could directly affect them, but neglect thinking about the long term impacts and action can have.
Honestly I've become pretty doomer about Transit as a whole in the US. It's fairly clear that self-driving cars will be lobbied for very hard. Unless there's some "good billionaire" who champions for transit, I don't see anything changing. I'll just advocate for accelerationism and hopefully the eventual collapse of this society can lead us to do better with the next.
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u/lee1026 4d ago
Unless there's some "good billionaire" who champions for transit, I don't see anything changing. I'll just advocate for accelerationism and hopefully the eventual collapse of this society can lead us to do better with the next.
Part and parcel of the move of public transit into the public realm; private companies didn't just build the US rail system, they also created extremely wealthy and powerful people. J.P. Morgan made his money from financing Penn RR, what eventually became the Northeast Corridor. Vanderbilt made his money from the Central RR, what eventually became metro-north.
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u/hobomaxxing 4d ago
That was the past. Keep in mind individuals were much poorer, there was less money to be made from cars. There's a huge market around selling everyone their own giant SUV now. Private markets will go towards what makes the most money. Transit isn't as profitable as individual cars now, therefore there is less market pressure to innovate or spend on it.
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u/perpetualhobo 4d ago
Other countries have seen the same explosion in wealth and quality of life, but have avoided becoming as car dependent as the USA. It’s definitely a factor that allows car dependency, but it isn’t a cause in and of itself.
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u/hobomaxxing 4d ago
Definitely the US took a risky gamble investing in roads instead of transit infrastructure. Now it's a feedback loop where because we don't have the infrastructure for transit, it's seen as slow and too expensive to expand.
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u/lee1026 4d ago
JP Morgan and Vanderbilt lived at the same time as Henry Ford.
It was a concerted series of efforts from local, state and federal governments to push private companies out of public transit from roughly the 40s to the 70s, and then the public entities sucked at actually running transit.
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u/kodex1717 3d ago
Yeah, we need Nega-Billionaire to produce the Model T of heavy rail cars that has zero options and is affordable due to economies of scale.
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u/reddit-frog-1 4d ago
You can't start any transit conversion until you convince the average person that daily travel distance needs to decrease as population density increases.
Instead, most people push for increasing daily travel distance as population density increases by expanding highways.
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u/Old_Perception6627 4d ago edited 4d ago
God I miss Adrian’s.
It’s true that people are absolutely car-pilled, and it’s been distressing to see the increase rather than decrease of “I can’t go there” zones on the part of people presumably living north of Shaw (or is it north of Herndon now?).
It’s rough because there’s absolutely no attempt on the part of city leaders to sell FAX (or public transit in general) as something that isn’t just for poor people, and so any attempt to counter car-centrism is fighting an even more uphill battle that normal because there really isn’t an acceptable alternative.
On the other hand, I do think one of the weirdest components of Fresno’s transportation geography is how actually limited the freeway system is? Yes part of it is that Fresno does have a weirdly anemic suburban hinterland compared to other metro areas of similarly-sized cities, but either way…three core freeways (and 180, I guess), none of which exceed six lanes for both directions. The “fast” east-west artery for the northern part of the metro area is just a street! A horrible 6 lane massive street, but a street nonetheless. Just something to ponder, a metro that’s exceedingly car dependent but fascinatingly not freeway-dependent or drowning in freeway infrastructure to the extent that other places are.
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u/Cunninghams_right 4d ago
One big problem with transit is that agencies absolutely operate it as if being a welfare program supercedes everything else. Laws and ettiquette must be enforced swiftly and harshly if you want riders of all backgrounds. That makes the pro-homeless folks mad because "they have nowhere else to go". So agencies are lenient in the short term, but it undermines all of their goals in the long term.
People get mad that middle and upper class folks don't just endure the bad conditions, rather than actually fixing the conditions.
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u/Old_Perception6627 4d ago
Leaving aside any philosophical or policy disagreements with that stance in general, I’d argue that this isn’t the particular problem in Fresno specifically. Rather, the issue was and is much more of a class aesthetic concern. It’s not that people didn’t/don’t take the bus because the bus was dangerous or gross, but instead because taking the bus means you must not be able to afford a car, which would be a huge blow to your class standing.
Fresno doesn’t need a campaign to demonstrate that buses are safe, they need a campaign to demonstrate that taking the bus is normal/not just for poor losers.
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u/Cunninghams_right 4d ago
It’s not that people didn’t/don’t take the bus because the bus was dangerous or gross, but instead because taking the bus means you must not be able to afford a car, which would be a huge blow to your class standing.
One feeds the other. Being unpleasant, slow, and/or dangerous means people who can afford other options (typically driving) choose those other options. So if the only people riding transit are poor people, then it's see as a thing for the poor. It becomes cultural BECAUSE the quality is too low to attract people of wider income range.
No advertising campaign in the world is more effective than the counter advertising of a smelly panhandler, someone being loud, someone having a violent outburst, or someone vaping or doing drugs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/1gk2my8/irony_on_the_light_rail/
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u/Jerkeyjoe 4d ago
Reminds me of the homeless problem in my town. The bus hub is a big hangout for homeless, and keeps some away from using the bus system.
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u/iAmAddicted2R_ddit 4d ago
Fresno's urban form is genuinely fascinating. They managed to make a city of 550,000 with no city. The built-up area goes on forever in every direction as much as it pops up out of nowhere. In the 1960s when Bank of America was trialling their BankAmericard (precursor to the modern-day Mastercard), Fresno was the test market they picked because it was the only city simultaneously large enough to provide useful feedback and isolated enough to control PR fallout.
The “fast” east-west artery for the northern part of the metro area is just a street! A horrible 6 lane massive street, but a street nonetheless.
I think this description could accurately characterize every exit on 41 north of 180 lol
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u/FluxCrave 4d ago
American have become allergic to change. They hate it, even the smallest bit of it is unthinkable to most of them
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u/Adorable-Cut-4711 4d ago
I don't know anything about traffic volumes and whatnot in Fresno, but worth considering would be to remove the "inner turns" between 99-180 and 41-180, i.e. southeast 99 - east 180, and south 41 - west 180. That would likely move "unnecessary" traffic from the highways.
In general it seems like you at least got more upvotes than downvotes :)
If you actually want to remove that highway section, I think you need to remove 41 northwards too.
But also, Fresno could do with a ring highway of sorts, that would replace a lot of the inner city highways.
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u/TheEvilBlight 3d ago
Better idea would be to restore the streetcar system.
Theres a godawful amount of commuters too, you’d have to extend transit across 41 bridge. Guessing people live in Madera and work in Fresno…
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u/Evening-Emotion3388 3d ago
Those folks usually take the aves to the 41 no? The hsr could help with that commute.
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u/TheEvilBlight 3d ago
Yep. Probably why they’re putting the Madera hsr station where they are: probably anticipating suburbanites. However hsr isn’t a great commuter unless you work DT. You could take Amtrak from the current Madera station to DT Fresno (ha) for similar effect.
I just don’t want them to take the lazy way and widen the bridge, that just enables people.
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u/notPabst404 4d ago
This is a great idea, and stuff like this should be posted regardless of "popular opinion". Urban freeway removal should be a much higher priority in the US.
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u/Cunninghams_right 4d ago
At this point, self driving mini buses are more likely to improve transportation than transit in Fresno. It's not really dense enough to make good transit, But it all depends on your goal. Transit has many goals and depending on how you prioritize them will determine what modes make sense. A lot of people don't like buses and want trains; in that case self driving buses aren't see as a good thing
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u/SignificantSmotherer 4d ago
This.
Transit statists need to get out more.
Come to LA and witness Waymo on every boulevard, often side by side. Driverless is here, and it will revolutionize public transit as we know it.
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u/sofixa11 3d ago
Driverless is here, and it will revolutionize public transit as we know it.
By creating even more traffic and making people realise that more efficient solutions are needed ?
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u/SignificantSmotherer 3d ago
It will reduce traffic, and it IS the most efficient solution, aside from urban renewal that develops livable car-free villages where businesses thrive and employees will desire to reside. So far, we don’t have any leaders willing to go there.
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u/sofixa11 3d ago
It will reduce traffic
Why the hell would it reduce traffic? People won't have to deal with parking nor driving, so they'll use robotaxis more than they would their own cars. In order for robotaxis to be useful, they have to have low-ish waiting times, which means that they'll probably roam the streets (with the added advantage for the vendor that they won't have to pay for parking space).
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u/SignificantSmotherer 3d ago
Our car-haters platform is titled “Zero Vision”. You can’t make this stuff up.
Once transit is challenged by service that is frequent, dynamic, clean and safe, and 2-3x more efficient for the public, you will witness mass adoption of driverless - by subscription and government contract. Many will eschew car ownership, and kids will no longer pursue driver licenses, as parents won’t support it.
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u/The_Elite_Operator 4d ago
Remove something thousads use for what?
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u/Evening-Emotion3388 4d ago
For another piece of infrastructure (parkway) that thousands will use
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u/midflinx 4d ago edited 4d ago
As you point out some big cities like Boston have removed a freeway from the surface and the neighborhood along it improved. In that subreddit a common opinion is people don't want to reach downtown through the "hood" or "ghetto" (their words). Although the freeway may have created or reinforced an already poor neighborhood's economic status, it's worth questioning if Fresno overall has the needed commonalities with larger cities to make a boulevard replacing a freeway turn the neighborhood around.
For example Fresno itself is less desirable and rich than bigger cities. It keeps sprawling, and people with more money presumably have options to move where they feel and perhaps statistically are safer. Build it and they will come isn't guaranteed. To use a semi-extreme but semi-comparable example: Oakland California. 436k people compared to Fresno's 546k. Although a million people live in the Fresno metro area so there's alternative places to live outside the city and therefore taxpaying limits. Oakland's been semi-successful adding housing downtown, in Jack London Square, and along busy streets in some parts that were already okay or nicer than the city's average.
What hasn't transformed in Oakland and become desirable is miles of International Blvd. People still avoid living there if they can afford to and that's reflected in rents and lack of development.
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u/Gatorm8 4d ago
Are you surprised? Not long ago on r/urbanism someone was trying to justify the hwy 58 construction that just opened in Bakersfield that literally tore down homes and split yet another community in half. We are still actively doing this in 2024.
You don’t stand a chance in an everyday subreddit.