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maxanderson350 t1_j3xdv3a wrote

Reply to comment by AutoCommentor in 'People don't feel safe': West Hartford pledges to eliminate roadway deaths by -ctinsider

I appreciate the rail comments and would support such proposals but they are not solutions to auto-related fatalities and serious injuries. Such rail proposals are not only impossibly expensive with no realistic option of ever being built (aside from maybe high speed rail on 84 and 91 corridors - but even that would be decades away), but I'm also skeptical of how much traffic they would take off the road in a place like WH.

I do agree that road re-design is helpful and that would be more cost-realistic.

Increased enforcement should also be part of the solution.

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AutoCommentor t1_j3xj3x2 wrote

> but they are not solutions to auto-related fatalities and serious injuries

This is not true. Increased public transportation usage directly corrolates to reduced traffic accidents: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-11/cities-with-good-public-transit-have-fewer-road-fatalities

And this makes sense logically. If more people are using public transit, fewer people are driving. If there are fewer vehicles on the roads, there are fewer opportunities for accidents. If you can take the bus home from the bar, why would you drive? This isn't the end-all-be-all solution, which is why I mentioned road re-design. But it needs to be seriously talked about.

Vision Zero talks about this too: https://visionzeronetwork.org/public-transit-an-undervalued-effective-vision-zero-strategy/

> Such rail proposals are not only impossibly expensive

A common misconception. For one thing I bet this is cheaper than you're thinking. Sure it costs a few hundred million dollars (edit: per mile, sorry), but the state is eager to drop 5 BILLION dollars on repairing a stretch of I-84 that's shorter than a mile in length. So clearly this level of cost is not an issue for us.

Also, every dollar spent on public transit returns four to five dollars in economic benefit: https://www.apta.com/research-technical-resources/research-reports/economic-impact-of-public-transportation-investment/

So even if this ended up costing 20 billion dollars, that means we can expect a return of nearly 80 billion back into the economy. Are you willing to turn down 80 billion dollars of economic growth? Because I'm not.

> I'm also skeptical of how much traffic they would take off the road in a place like WH

Entire cities in Europe are completely car-free and they're doing just fine. And they can do that because of strong public transit.

> but even that would be decades away

If we aren't building and planning for future generations, what the fuck are we even doing??

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maxanderson350 t1_j3xltjr wrote

"This is not true. Increased public transportation usage directly corrolates to reduced traffic accidents: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-11/cities-with-good-public-transit-have-fewer-road-fatalities"

- Thanks for sharing but I'm not sure how the experience of these cities would be useful for a suburb like West Hartford.

"And this makes sense logically. If more people are using public transit, fewer people are driving. If there are fewer vehicles on the roads, there are fewer opportunities for accidents. If you can take the bus home from the bar, why would you drive?"

- Yes, I agree - in places like NYC or Boston, but not in WH.

"A common misconception. For one thing I bet this is cheaper than you're thinking. Sure it costs a few hundred million dollars"

- I've never seen new inter-town rail costing only a few hundred millions dollars. Have you? If so, where?

,"but the state is eager to drop 5 BILLION dollars on repairing a stretch of I-84 that's shorter than a mile in length."

- Which project is that?

"Also, every dollar spent on public transit returns four to five dollars in economic benefit: https://www.apta.com/research-technical-resources/research-reports/economic-impact-of-public-transportation-investment/"

- Yes, i'm quite familiar with that but I'm not sure how it is relevant to WH's vision zero goals.

"Entire cities in Europe are completely car-free and they're doing just fine. And they can do that because of strong public transit."

- Those places are very different than WH and the Greater Hartford area. i'm not sure how the experiences of these cities in Europe would at all be instructive here.

"If we aren't building and planning for future generations, what the fuck are we even doing??"

- My sense is that WH is looking for solutions in the near term, not merely in 40 from now ;-)

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