Kyle Piira

Tag: transportation

  • The Toll No One Charges but Everyone Pays

    When you drive on a busy road, you always pay a price. The real question is how you pay it, with money or with time.

    In most of the United States, we have chosen to charge drivers in time. There is no toll for entering a congested road, but during peak hours you might spend an hour commuting when the same trip would take 20 minutes with no traffic. Because there is no monetary cost, the time price people are willing to tolerate rises dramatically, and congestion becomes the norm.

    The problem with using time as the cost is that it creates bad incentives, especially around carpooling.

    Imagine two people traveling from the same neighborhood to the same restaurant across town. They could drive separately or share a car. If traffic makes the trip take an hour either way, there is no time savings from sharing. Each person still loses an hour. Given that, many people will choose separate cars so they can control their own music, podcasts, or comfort. Time-based pricing gives no reward for reducing the number of vehicles on the road.

    Now consider the same trip with congestion pricing. Suppose there is a $10 toll, and as a result traffic flows freely and the trip takes 20 minutes. If the two people drive separately, they pay $20 total. If they share one car, they pay $10 total, or just $5 per person. Suddenly, carpooling has a clear, direct benefit.

    That incentive scales. Larger groups are pushed toward higher-capacity vehicles like buses and trains, where the toll cost per person becomes almost negligible. A $10 toll split among 20 bus riders is just 50 cents each. At that point, the toll barely matters, especially if it is offset by fares.

    Once pooling becomes economically attractive, this also opens the door to entirely new transportation options. Private bus services, pooled taxi services, and on-demand shuttles become much more viable in a congestion-priced world. When the road cost is shared across many riders and travel times are predictable, these services can compete effectively with private cars while offering convenience and flexibility that traditional public transit may not always provide.

    This shift matters because traffic engineers should not be optimizing for the number of cars moved on a road. They should be optimizing for the number of people. Congestion pricing encourages fewer vehicles to carry more people, which reduces traffic and moves everyone faster.

    There are secondary benefits too. Revenue from congestion pricing can fund better public transportation, improving affordability and access. Wealthier drivers can still choose to pay higher tolls to use private cars during rush hour, as long as traffic keeps flowing and high-capacity vehicles are not stuck.

    In fact, if congestion pricing truly eliminates traffic, some dedicated bus lanes may become less necessary. Their primary purpose is to help buses avoid congestion. If congestion disappears for everyone, the system becomes simpler and more flexible, even on roads where bus lanes are not feasible.

    In short, you pay the cost of driving either way. Making that cost monetary instead of temporal creates far better incentives, rewards efficient behavior, and allows cities to move more people in less time.

  • Luxury Overnight Buses as an Alternative to Flying

    I recently came across an intercity bus service starting up in Europe that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. It’s an overnight bus, but not in the usual sense. Instead of upright seats and cramped legroom, the buses are built around fully lie-flat seats, similar to what you’d find in first class on a long-haul flight.

    Floor plan of a European luxury sleeper bus

    The idea is almost obvious once you hear it. Airlines already know how to make seats people can actually sleep in for eight or ten hours. So what happens if you take that same idea and put it on a bus, where the trip is slower but much cheaper to operate? At that point the comparison is no longer bus versus plane, but time versus comfort.

    If the entire trip happens while you’re asleep, the extra travel time matters a lot less. You board at night, go to sleep, and wake up somewhere else. There’s no early alarm, no airport security, and no sitting upright trying to doze for ninety uncomfortable minutes. In the best case, it barely feels like travel at all.

    Where this really starts to make sense is for trips that are just a bit too long to drive comfortably in one day. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and some of my family lives in Orlando. That drive is about eight hours on a good day. It’s long enough that you lose a full day to it, but short enough that flying can feel like overkill once you factor in the airport time.

    An overnight bus fits almost perfectly there. You leave Charlotte around 10 p.m., sleep through the night, and arrive in Orlando early the next morning. You didn’t spend the day driving, and you didn’t spend the night in a hotel. You just… arrived.

    That said, there’s one part of the European implementation that I think really works against the whole idea. Many of these routes include multiple intermediate stops. A single bus might start in one city, stop in several others along the way, and keep going past your destination.

    That sounds efficient on paper, but it creates a real problem for passengers. If you’re getting off at one of those intermediate cities, you may be forced to wake up at two or three in the morning. At that point the magic is gone. You’re tired, it’s dark, and there’s nowhere to go. Now you need a hotel anyway, which defeats one of the biggest advantages of the service.

    I think these routes should be strictly point to point. One bus per corridor. Charlotte to Orlando. Charlotte to Tampa. Charlotte to Miami. Airlines fill planes on these routes every single day. There’s no reason a well-designed overnight bus couldn’t fill up too.

    Going point to point also opens up something I think is crucial: treating the bus more like a hotel than a vehicle. Imagine arriving at your destination at 6 a.m. but not being forced off the bus immediately. Instead, your ticket includes a checkout time, maybe 9 or 10 a.m. If you want to get up and leave right away, you can. If you want to keep sleeping, you can do that too.

    That small change makes a huge difference. It turns the experience into transportation plus lodging, rather than just a long ride.

    Once you think about it that way, other details fall into place. Clean bathrooms are non-negotiable. Food should be available, even if it’s simple. A small breakfast option at the arrival depot would make mornings feel less rushed. Luggage handling could work the same way hotels do, with a claim system so people can leave when they’re ready instead of all at once.

    In theory, you could even plan trips where you string together several of these overnight routes and barely use hotels at all.

    This kind of service feels especially relevant in the United States. We used to have a far more extensive passenger rail network, but much of it is gone now, and recreating it at a national scale would take decades. What we do have is a massive interstate highway network that already connects most major cities.

    Intercity buses can take advantage of that immediately. The infrastructure is already there, and it’s effectively subsidized. For trips in the seven-to-ten-hour range, a comfortable overnight bus could easily compete with flying for a lot of people.

    Looking further ahead, this gets even more interesting when you consider autonomous driving. Long highway stretches are exactly where autonomy performs best. If the bus doesn’t need a human driver, that role could shift toward an onboard attendant instead. Someone whose job is to help passengers, keep things running smoothly, and generally make the experience better.

    That kind of staffing change could actually improve the service rather than cheapen it.

    This isn’t going to replace planes, and it’s not meant to. Nobody is taking an overnight bus from the East Coast to the West Coast. But for the many city pairs that sit in that awkward middle distance, this feels like a genuinely underexplored option.

    I would be surprised if something like this doesn’t eventually appear in the U.S. Once someone gets the execution right, it’s the kind of idea that feels obvious in hindsight.

  • I had to take an Uber to cross the street in Charlotte

    I was recently heading out to dinner with my girlfriend at a restaurant in one of Charlotte’s suburbs. Before I left, I checked the transit options and noticed there was an express bus that went straight from Uptown, near my apartment, to a stop only about half a mile from the restaurant. Perfect.

    The timing lined up almost exactly with our reservation. The bus would get me there about fifteen minutes early, which seemed like plenty of time to walk the short distance to the restaurant. It was only half a mile away, which should take no more than ten minutes on foot.

    At least, that’s what I thought.

    When I got off the bus, I opened the map and had a sudden realization: there was no way to cross the street. The “street,” as it turned out, was an eight-lane arterial road with traffic moving around fifty miles per hour. In other words, a classic American stroad.

    Looking at the map more closely, I saw that the nearest crosswalk was about one and a half miles away. So to reach the restaurant legally, I would have had to walk a mile and a half to that crosswalk, then another mile and a half back on the other side. And as if that weren’t absurd enough, the entire route lacked sidewalks.

    In total, that would have been a three-mile trip to cover what was, in a straight line, about two-hundred feet. Apple Maps estimated it would take an hour and seven minutes.

    This was not what I expected, and I definitely didn’t have an hour to spare. So I had two choices: jaywalk across an eight-lane stroad, or hail a ride.

    Jaywalking wasn’t an option. Between the speed of the cars and the lack of any safe refuge in the median, I would’ve been taking my life into my own hands. So I pulled up the app and ordered a car.

    Ten minutes later, a Lyft picked me up and drove me across the street. The ride cost five dollars.

    What should have been a five-minute walk became a fifteen-minute ordeal that cost money and produced emissions. And by forcing me to summon a car to do something as simple as crossing the street, the design of the area made traffic worse for everyone else too. For the Lyft driver to reach me, he had to drive along the same congested, rush-hour road, adding one more car to an already overloaded system. After picking me up, he drove me across the street, dropped me off, and then merged back into that same stream of traffic, slowing down all the other drivers just a little more because there was no safe way to walk.

    This isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s an example of how poor street design isolates transit riders and pedestrians while making traffic worse for motorists. The city provided a bus that went right to where people might want to go, but the surrounding infrastructure made it functionally useless.

    If Charlotte wants to be a city where people can move around without a car, it needs to do more than run buses. It needs to connect those buses to sidewalks, crosswalks, and safe, human-scaled streets.

    Because no one should ever have to pay five dollars and wait ten minutes just to cross the street.

    My Lyft crossing the street

  • Death by Poor Urban Planning

    Every time we hear about a tragic car crash, the story is usually framed around individual blame. Someone made a mistake, someone wasn’t paying attention, or someone was reckless. But beneath these headlines lies a harder truth. Our urban design itself creates the conditions for these deaths. Poor urban planning is not just an inconvenience or an aesthetic misstep. It is a public health crisis that costs lives every day.

    In too many American cities, Charlotte included, roads are engineered like highways. They are wide, fast, and hostile to anything but cars. Corridors such as Independence Boulevard prioritize vehicle flow over human life, encouraging high speeds and leaving pedestrians and cyclists exposed. In this environment, even a brief lapse of focus, just a few seconds, can turn a mistake into a tragedy.

    Accident on Independence Boulevard, Charlotte NC injuring 6 people

    Just a few hours ago, as I write this post, there was an accident on Independence Boulevard that sent six people to the hospital, one with severe life-threatening injuries. It is tempting to place all of the blame on a driver going too fast. The harder truth is that the driver was simply responding to incentives created by reckless city planning, such as wide lanes, high speed limits, and a lack of safe transit alternatives. If the road had been designed to slow speeds and protect people, it is likely this crash would not have been so devastating or have happened at all.

    And incidents like this are far from rare. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department website listed seven similar traffic events in just the past three hours alone.

    To err is human. Every driver will make mistakes behind the wheel, such as misjudging a turn, glancing at a phone, or reacting a second too late. A safe transportation system recognizes this reality and builds in forgiveness. Narrower lanes, slower speeds, and protective infrastructure can ensure that a mistake does not automatically mean death. But our current design does the opposite. It demands flawless driving from every user, every second. That is not just unrealistic. It is negligent.

    There is another layer to the problem. Many people simply should not be behind the wheel of heavy machinery. Teenagers, seniors, those with medical conditions, or people who are poor drivers are still forced to drive because cities have left them with no alternatives. By designing systems where car travel is the only viable option, we compel people into dangerous situations that put their lives and the lives of others at risk.

    The spread-out, car-dependent development pattern of low-density housing, long commutes, and seas of parking creates endless demand for driving at higher speeds. Strong Towns and other urbanist voices have long warned that this model is both financially unsustainable and physically dangerous. More driving leads to more crashes, and higher speeds lead to more fatalities. The math is simple, and it is killing us.

    If we want fewer deaths, we must stop pretending this is about individual failure. Real safety comes from systemic change.

    • Slower streets with narrower lanes, traffic calming, and enforced lower speed limits.
    • Safe alternatives such as protected bike lanes, sidewalks, and reliable public transit.
    • Walkable, mixed-use communities where housing and jobs are close together, reducing the need to drive.
    • Equitable design that prioritizes vulnerable road users and invests in underserved communities.

    We call crashes “accidents” as if they were unavoidable acts of fate. They are not. They are predictable outcomes of policy choices, zoning codes, and street designs. Every fatal crash reflects a system that refuses to put people’s lives above the convenience of cars.

    Poor urban planning kills. With better choices and people-first design, we can build cities where human mistakes no longer cost human lives.