I was just watching an interesting series of YouTube videos.

The first one: Urban areas are being dominated by tangled messes of highways that do nothing to solve congestion! They should go back to the neat and orderly grid system!

The second one: The grid system is inherently flawed because humans’ decision-making time is not fast enough, which causes more cars to slow down, which causes gridlock. Public transport should be used more often.

The third one: Public transport is set out in a way that makes it very inconvenient for many commuters and wastes a lot of time.

What I kind of learned from this is that all of these different ways of getting places are products of each other. Public transport is by far the best option, but it’s designed in such a way that it’s not a viable alternative to the already-inefficient means of commuting by car. It’s a vicious cycle. Why take a 1.5-hour train ride to work when it’s a half-hour by car on the most congested days? The way all of these different means of transport interact means that even if all of the options are inefficient, even the ones that are slightly less inefficient are the best option. The problem is that to fix this, there needs to be a complete overhaul of cities’ infrastructure, potentially costing billions of dollars. And this isn’t something that happens overnight.

Thanks for coming to my rant guys idk where I was going with this but I thought I needed to say it