Context: i am in Europe so might be irrelevant to US.
I was thinking : we already have a usable solution to traffic jams. It’s called parking lots, as the ones in airports. You drop your car, then you take public transport to go anywhere. So imagine doing the same, but on daily basis. Build many such parking spots outside of the city , irrigate with public transport, make the price reasonable for daily usage (fuck you Charles de Gaulle Airport and your 14€/day fee). Boom, reduces your traffic by X% every morning.
As someone who drives regularly from Reims to Paris, I d be glad if such option existed, so I wouldn’t have to drive on Périphérique.
The two reasons I think it’s not used is “planning” and “politicians”. The latter isn’t good at former.
Parking is not a solution. Because of induced demand, if you make it easier to take a car more people take car instead of public transport and you are back to square one in worse. Parking is also a very inefficient use of space. More than 10 square meter per car for véhicule that stay unused it build up quickly. It seems easy but it’s really not.
Sure parking + public transport outside city is not that bad. But it is more a bandage than a real solution. I work in planning in France, believe me parking is the first go to solution for decade it never worked.
The fun part about that is how we in the US haven’t learned that lesson. We’re still building massive park and ride systems that see very little use in many places, but we’d rather fail big (and expensively) than actually reduce traffic.
To make Park and Ride be more effective it needs to be paired with fast, high frequency public transit (and/or great biking infrastructure), then make it very painful to driver the car into the city. Reduce speeds, narrow out lanes, remove in city parking, remove free parking, put in speed bumps, prioritize pedestrians. Basically make it suck to use your dangerous, ecologically destructive noise machine where people should be instead of cars. Otherwise people just skip the overhead of the Park and Ride to drive into the downtown area anyway.
Yep. Gotta make the bus faster than cars with bus only lanes.
edge of city park-and-ride is there to shut up the numbnuts who cry “but how will i get into the city?!?!?!”