Boom.
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Boom.
(I’m late posting this link, it’s hardly solid science, many variables and tradeoffs, blah blah blah. But still: boom.)
What’s the fastest way to the Minnesota State Fair? We tried four methods.
We took a look at the transportation options for how to get to the MN State Fair and tested which was the fastest this year: car, bus, bike or park and ride.
(www.startribune.com)
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The thing about that story that’s a useful object lesson — a good scientific demonstration, if not definitive scientific research — is that it highlights a failure mode of car-based transit:
Driving doesn’t scale.
I’m quite sure driving would be the •fastest• route at 3am on a Tuesday in October. But when the MN State fair is pumping 100k+ people/day into a small space, driving degrades fast due to resource contention — the resource being sheer •space•. Cars are spatially inefficient.
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Driving chokes the network for very much the same reason that, say, TCP traffic delivering 1 byte / packet would choke the network. The per-passenger spatial overhead of driving is bad, can only improve with carpooling, and even then can’t improve much.
Buses scale up better: a crowded bus takes the same space.
Bikes have far lower spatial overhead to begin with.
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People keep making different versions of this graphic (and rightly so!) to make the point above. It’s fascinating to see it play out in practice.
(And yes, there are other factors about the way traffic moves etc with different modes of transportation. But I’m going to venture that sheer space is the primary factor here.)
One mistake all of these images make: they have all the cars tailgating. Cars in motion require huge amounts of space •in between•, more the faster they’re moving.
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Another analogy for the extra-nerdy (a pretty bad analogy, and uninformative, but it amuses me):
pedestrains = ints
bikes = ints tucked inside tagged pointers
buses = int arrays on the heap
cars = ints individually boxed on the heap -
Stone Bear :HeartGenderqueer:replied to Paul Cantrell last edited by
@inthehands They also all make a different mistake. Just as cars need space between, so do buses. TRAINS (or even trams) can string four, six, eight cars in a row with no more space needed (or wanted) between them than the length of their couplers... and if those trains have dedicated places to run instead of having to fight traffic, they can speed up and slow down and generally go a lot faster than buses.
Just sayin'.
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Paul Cantrellreplied to Stone Bear :HeartGenderqueer: last edited by
@stonebear
This is a good point! It gets complicated: more passengers do not multiple space between buses, pedestrians and bikes move around each other more fluidly than large vehicles, etc. And trains…while •cars• can be close, •trains• must be spaced farthest apart of all, and cannot move around obstacles on the tracks. Much more to the problem that those images show!