It seems the network of roads built in the 40s, 50s and 60s just can no longer be done efficiently.
Of course they can, we have not lost that capability. It's not a matter of efficiency but effectivity. Road constructions of the 1960s are not effective for 21st century traffic demands. Today's level of traffic far exceeds the anticipated level of traffic at the time of construction. Germany sees this all the time, esp. with regards to bridges. Maintaining a road or a bridge to be effective at supporting the original traffic levels is easy but under today's load would require constant maintenance to not deteriorate immediately. Those constructions need to be upgraded which is hard to impossible to do in situ.
Let's take a well-known construction in Germany, the Leverkusener Brücke an der A1. It was originally built in the 1960s for a traffic level of 40,000 cars (and trucks) per day. It was upgraded and refurbished over the decades (meaning almost constant construction work happening) to a level of 100,000 cars per day. It wasn't enough, in 2016 about 120,000 cars crossed the bridge per day. At the same time trucks got about 30 % heavier from 1960 to 1990 and we all know that passenger cars got heavier, too.
So the whole bridge was replaced, which took 7 years, ending in 2024. During that time traffic was rerouted over two nearby bridges in Cologne and Düsseldorf. The Cologne bridge was so badly damaged by the additional load that it had to be partially closed down and now is up for refurbishment or, maybe, replacement. Network effects at work ;)
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is: we are actually better at building stuff than our predecessors but the demands put on our constructions are much, much higher. I don't dare to say if our capabilities have grown as much as the demands require.
Citation needed.
As I see it, the US is still riding on the coattails of 1960-s road construction. We should be doing more of it, in fact, not sabotaging it with bike lanes and road diets.
Counterintuitively perhaps, bike lanes, road diets and public transport actually work better. Give people other ways to move around, and you take pressure off the road system, making traffic better for everyone. And that includes the drivers.
It is just that trains and bikes are much more efficient in terms of land use.
The 3 lane road in front of my house is "good" for 16,000 cars a day. The 2 lane train line a 5 minutes walk from my house is "good" for 120,000 passengers a day. A train line can carry about 10x the traffic of a car lane (in practice) with similar ground usage.
So when a train system has more demand/use than expected (e.g. leman express in the geneva region) there are more options to increase throughput (in the leman express case double level trains) that require less new infrastructure to be build.
When new infrastructure is required, limitations of space mean that a 15 year period from plan to implementation is normal. Which means infrastructure which has more head-room is preferred over quickly saturated ones.
To add the adding of one lane to the A1 for 18KM costs half the total of the leman express infrastructure. But has significantly less benefits in total transit capacity.
But that's not true. Your chances of living within 5 minutes of a train stations are slim, unless train stations are spammed everywhere. And if stations are spammed everywhere, then they become inefficient.
Meanwhile, cars are only mildly affected by additional 400-500 meters of distance.
There's a great resource: https://www.geoapify.com/isoline-api/ - it shows isochrones for different commute methods.
> A train line can carry about 10x the traffic of a car lane (in practice) with similar ground usage.
In practice, a train line effectively is only slightly better than cars, unless you enshittify your city into a Manhattan-style dense hell.
Moreover, self-driving cars with mild carpooling (think 4-6 people per vehicle) blow ANY transit mode out of the water in speed and efficiency. It's not even close. A good approximation of this are airport pickup vans (the ones that you arrange in advance).
> To add the adding of one lane to the A1 for 18KM costs half the total of the leman express infrastructure. But has significantly less benefits in total transit capacity.
Yeah. Imagine that instead of wasting money on useless transit (see: Seattle ST3), we used them to incentivize companies to build more offices outside of dense city cores.
Then these lanes wouldn't even be necessary!
And, a lot more stations are within say a 15 minute reach if you use a bike O:-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UxCbmT9elk
And then what? How do you get there?
Your time budget is 30 minutes (the average commute in the US). Go on, try to play around.
> that or telecommute
Yes. But if you telecommute, then why bother with all those trains and dense offices?
> And, a lot more stations are within say a 15 minute reach if you use a bike O:-)
That's already too much for commutes and will result in commutes inferior to the current status quo in the US.
Of course I do have a slightly different set of requirements; since I've always lived out in the countryside. You trade in a longer commute for more elbow-room at home.
The trains generally run on time, so that's what I often used to use if I needed to get into a dense town.
That was before COVID. Post-COVID, telecommuting has become available to more people. In my opinion, that's the best solution where possible.
At the very least telecommuting and trains gets the OTHER cars off the road when I need to physically be at factories, labs, or workshops.
The commutes in large cities (New York is a bit more nuanced) in the US are still faster than in _any_ large European city. Mostly because of cars.
> Of course I do have a slightly different set of requirements; since I've always lived out in the countryside. You trade in a longer commute for more elbow-room at home.
My favorite city from the urban design standpoint is Houston (I hate its climate and Texas that surrounds it). People there can have beautiful and spacious single-family houses with backyards, and yet still have short commutes because it doesn't have a well-defined city core.
So it lacks the obvious traffic magnets, and people tend to chose jobs near their housing. This is the model that needs to be promoted, and it can solve housing issues.