Intro
When growing a city, people need to consider that you need public transportation if you want a population above 500,000. If you don’t, then your city will be a car hell-hole. But why is this public transportation helpful in the city in the first place? In an earlier post, I outlined why you should choose public transit first, but I still need to outline the benefits; here’s why.
Traffic Improvements
First, the most obvious reason is that public transportation improves traffic flow. When people move into your city, they need to get around. Their first choice in America will be to get a car. But, if you provide cheap, fast public transportation, they will choose public transit. For the people who want to bike, the open roads will allow for more bike lanes and more pedestrians who wish for more prominent and safer bike lanes and sidewalks respectively. This will further decrease the traffic on the road and allow for more ambitious projects like Superblocks. People still complain that public transportation, bike lanes, and pedestrian infrastructure will not take them to work. In that case, they should connect those three to where people work. This will even further reduce car traffic and set the minimum number of cars on the city’s roads.
Increasing Productivity
One of the more minor but still significant improvements is that it will improve the general public’s productivity. For example, imagine you are driving a car and need to respond to emails and work on an urgent project. Well, you can’t work on your project because you can’t type on a computer and drive at the same time. If you can, then you are a significant minority. You also can’t respond to urgent emails on your phone while driving because that is outlawed in most states, including Georgia. However, when you go on a subway, bus, trolly, taxi-ferry, train, tram, train ferry, taxi, or any other form of public transportation, you are not the one driving, so you can respond to those urgent emails and projects. Or you can work on a personal project, like art on your phone or a book.
Accessibility
In a thriving city, there are usually thousands of bus stops that allow people to go around the city at a cheap cost. This is awesome for people who can’t afford a car or are homeless. This will enable them to live without worrying about a $100,000 bill or a million-dollar car. We also shouldn’t look down on these people for not buying a car; we should look up to them. We should look up to them because they aren’t destroying our city’s health, and they improve our commute by not crowding the roads. With this accessibility, someone in a car could easily ride to work on a bus, train, or heavy rail. Or if the city’s public transit is terrible, they still have public transit, so they should take whenever they can to wherever they need to go. If public transit is awful in a city, we should not be ripping it up; we should be building it so more and more people can take it more and more often.
