The throughput of a column of people walking from NYC to LA would be quite good. But I certainly wouldn't want to cross the country that way. Other things matter too.
This is about cities. Highways between LA and NYC are not "cities" (cities shouldn't have highways in them, see Robert Moses's destruction of New York), so I don't see the relevance (also, fly?).
That image also doesn't include that one of those drivers might kill someone, and most of them will turn aggressively into crosswalks. I see and experience those turns every day in New York, and read about the unpunished deaths almost daily. Enough of it.
I'm choosing an extreme case to demonstrate the point. The same thing applies in a city. Take a city road and fill it with people walking. The throughput will be huge. The latency will suck, and you will not want to go a long distance, even intra-city, that way.
Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice? It's not because throughput sucks and they just want to stick it to the man.
> Why do you think so many people choose to drive their own car, when given the choice?
It's just anecdotal, but in my experience most of the people I know who live in places where having a car is an actually choice don't own them at all, i.e. people who live and work in city centers.
Due to the US's terrible public transportation infrastructure, however, that's not a real choice in most places. If you want to work, you or someone in your household is going to need a car and it's going to eat up an uncomfortable portion of your income.
There are precious few places where you literally can't walk or bike.
There are a lot of places where it's impractical to do so, because it takes too long, and so people mostly don't. That's despite the fact that walking or biking would increase throughput, because throughput isn't all that matters. I would even argue that it isn't all that important.
Do you know why it takes too long? Because it's illegal to build things that people need on a day-to-day basis near where they live in large swaths of the US.
Some people want their car-centric lifestyle, and hey, that's fine too (as long as they're paying for it); I think the problem is that it's simply not a choice for many people due to the central-planning style zoning regulations entrenched in much of the country.
I completely agree. My objection is simply to the idea that increasing throughput matters when talking about the merits of cars versus other forms of transportation.
"There are precious few places where you literally can't walk or bike."
Where you literally can't? No. But where current infrastructure has made it hugely impractical to? I'd say that's most of the country, especially suburbia.
"I would even argue that it isn't all that important."
If you're ok with driving everywhere, then no, you wouldn't think it was. Not everyone wants to do that, though. And making things friendly for cars tends to make it harder for walking and biking.
The "it" which I'm saying "isn't all that important" is throughput. Not biking/walking, traffic throughput.
I don't understand why everyone is coming out of the woodwork here to criticize my car-centric viewpoint and tell me how great biking or walking is. I guess it's Yet Another Example of how people on the internet can't handle the concept of disagreeing with a single point.
In the context of designing cities, traffic throughput is ABSOLUTELY important. It governs how dense the city can be and the quality of life for its inhabitants. Sure, you can have spread-out cities but that sprawl has negative effects (increased travel times, inefficient traffic patterns leading to congestion and delays, economic burden of owning a car, kids have a hard time getting around, health effects of reduced walking, etc).
No, it's because people with a car centric viewpoint push solutions that prioritize the car to the exclusion of other things, making cars a requirement.
