8 ms·

In the U.S.A, public transit is not feasable. I was in Texas a while back - compared to Europe, things are just way too far apart to make trains or subways feas

• DanielStraight 17y ago
  How fast can you drive? Even on the open highway in Texas, it's probably unreasonable to assume you'll be doing more than 90 mph. A train could easily do 200 mph over the same terrain and probably push 300 mph if we put in the effort. If you could get from Dallas to Houston in an hour on a train, why would you want to drive?
  • davidw 17y ago
    > If you could get from Dallas to Houston in an hour on a train, why would you want to drive? Because once you got there, you'd need a car again. Texas is a bad example though. I think public transportation can work just fine if you look at where it's being applied. It's insane, for instance, that the BART stuff in the bay area (which is fairly densely populated) doesn't go down and around through San Jose.
    • DanielStraight 17y ago
      Why would you want a car there when you could, from anywhere, hop on a train or bus and get where you're going without having to worry about parking in the city?
      • davidw 17y ago
        I don't know Houston very well but a cursory look at Google Maps indicates that it's extremely spread out, which would make what you describe difficult.
      • sokoloff 17y ago
        Having your own car is extremely convenient. It can carry all your stuff and be reasonably secure against theft. If you're worried it's going to rain, toss an umbrella in the trunk. If it turns out not to rain, you didn't have to carry an umbrella all damn day, etc. In most Texas cities, there's ample easy and free/cheap parking. Parking in NYC or DC is a nightmare. Those two cities also have very high densities and reasonably good public transit systems. It seems there's a naturally inverse relationship between parking convenience and public transit convenience. I believe that's driven from environmental factors (cutting it back to only one factor, it's probably the cost of land as #1 driver). If your public transit system has to cover all of Dallas/Fort Worth at the same transit density/convenience as Manhattan is covered, you're going to spend an ENORMOUS amount of money on that infrastructure and that's not likely to be paid back by the moderate/low level of usage that would occur. (Because parking would still be plentiful and convenient in those cities...)
        • elblanco 17y ago
          Plus to pay for a system like New York's or D.C.'s in Dallas, the fare would be astronomical, such that people simply wouldn't ride it.
          • maukdaddy 17y ago
            Most systems in the country have flat-fare daily, weekly, monthly passes. $5.75 for a daily pass here in Chicago. That is an AMAZING value considering that pass allows unlimited rides on trains and buses.
            • elblanco 17y ago
              Which is true. Don't know about Chicago's, but the ones I've seen have restrictions on time of usage, usually after rush-hour, which makes those types of fare systems unusable to the majority of riders. I can't remember if NYC also raises rates during rush hour, but D.C. does as well. I think I stopped taking the D.C. system when a single day's transit and parking started topping $13/day.
    • mtalantikite 17y ago
      I guess you could compliment it with a service like Zipcar, but you're right, it makes a lot more sense going city to city in a place like the northeast. In France you can do Paris to Lyon in a little under 2 hours, and a similar system (a relatively slow one at that) would get you between NYC and Boston in about 1.5 hours. The current options are 4 hours (no traffic) on a $15 Chinatown bus, or 4 hours on a $100 Amtrak train. When you're stuck on a bus in a gridlock in Manhattan trying to get to Boston, and it takes you 1.5 hours just to get out of Manhattan and over the bridge, is really the time you start to wish the public transit infrastructure wasn't so far behind every other modern nation in the world.
      • davidw 17y ago
        That's my point: why waste time trying to make places like Houston work with public transport. Concentrate on the places with a high enough population density to make it function.
        • alxp 17y ago
          Well if you are Houston and you don't want to end up like Detroit when the cost of owning and operating a personal car becomes out of reach for most people, you'll want to do something to ensure people will still want to live there.
    • blackguardx 17y ago
      BART was always planned to go to San Jose, but one of the municipalities down there didn't want to pay for it 20+ years ago, so it didn't pass through. These days everything seems more expensive and voters are leery of bond measures. It probably will eventually go to San Jose, but not in the next few years.
    • j_baker 17y ago
      Texas also happens to have the biggest city in the US without any form of public transit (Arlington).
• sparky 17y ago
  For most of the land area of the US, indeed population density is probably too low to support any meaningful public transit, at least for commuters. I tend to think that public transit in the city with spokes leading out to major suburbs (with park-and-ride lots in the suburbs to account for the sparsity you mention) should be applied more widely. I've only been to New York a couple times, but I'm a big fan of this model there. What are your thoughts on high-speed rail between major cities?
  • maxklein 17y ago
    High Speed Rail between cities make a lot of sense, but what if the city you are arriving at does not have a public transportation system? For example, what would be the point of a high speed rail between Dallas and Houston? How would you get around once you arrive? In Europe high speed rail makes sense because when you arrive there is a dense network of trains and buses you can use. In the U.S there is none.
    • sparky 17y ago
      I agree that short-haul and long-term public transportation systems are very complementary, and as you allude to, there may be a chicken-and-egg problem with building one over the other. However, I think of long-haul rail networks as an alternative to air travel, and in the short term, can't people get around in their destination city the same way they do now when they fly? Rental car, taxi, friends, family, public transport such as it is (you're right that the US is far behind Europe in this respect, but most major-ish cities at least have buses).
    • driax 17y ago
      You could always rent a car.
      • elblanco 17y ago
        Or I could just drive my own.
    • fortes 17y ago
• elblanco 17y ago
  This is the perpetual problem of public transit in the U.S. If you build something, say a metro system. It has to be sprawling, with large parking areas at the outlying stations. And then significant infrastructure upgrades to handle the traffic to/from the station parking decks. See, http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/ http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/ The D.C. metro system for example, is about as wide across geographically as the Seoul Subway (in other words, its service area is very similar). But its daily ridership is something like 1/10th the amount (800k vs 8million). On the long arms of the system, adding more stations won't necessarily increase the ridership because the population density of those areas is too low, a station in one of these outlying areas with parking decks might only see a couple thousand riders a day. At any rate, in most cases it's actually faster, cheaper and more convenient to drive all the way to your destination than to drive through rush hour to a station, fight for the limited parking then take the metro in. "Just move further into the city then!" Is a sentiment I've heard quite a bit. But D.C. is not able to handle much more growth in density. By law no building can be higher than the Washington Monument, and even if that law were to be relaxed, it's unlikely to spur lots of tall, high density residential apartment buildings because there is a major airport right next door. So outlying areas like Silver Spring, MD and Arlington, VA end up with lots of high density growth. But at exorbitant pricing. Apartments 10 miles apart, in a relatively low density area like Northern Virginia or Southern Maryland can be as much as 3x the rental price of each other. Housing can be even worse. While the East Coast of the U.S. is generally low density, it's almost all owned by someone. Lots and lots and lots of suburbs. Nearly any additions to a mass transit system requires heavy handed uses of eminent domain laws, which are always unpopular. All of this to encourage people to ride mass transit. But from the rider's perspective the equation makes no sense: - Parking is expensive at the outlying stations, and even worse closer in - Fare is expensive, I'm always surprised at how cheap mass transit is in other countries - Added up, a single trip on a U.S. mass transit system can cost 2-3x the cost in gas and wear and tear on your vehicle. - Many systems are relatively unreliable, the New York system is pretty good, and tends to route around problems pretty well, but later systems like D.C.s suffer from daily breakdowns, and single tracks, so a breakdown in one part of the system literally brings the entire system to a screeching halt. Resulting in hour long delays getting home. - A trip on mass transit usually takes longer than just driving anyways, and in more crowded less pleasant conditions - American cities tend to not be terribly walkable once you do get dumped off of a mass transit system. With few exceptions, like New York City, or Most of D.C. and Boston, walking in a typical American city is walking with a death wish. Crossing highways and major arteries full of high-speed traffic, few sidewalks, few pedestrian rights-of-way and on and on. - Buses are also generally unpleasant, usually populated by people with vast, on-display, personal problems like drug addiction, homelessness, mental health problems, etc. Mostly because people without these problems have cars and simply drive. Expanding on this basic idea for local mass transit, rail also stands a similarly poor chance. Outside of the Middle and Northern East Coast, rail is generally poor, and transit times are incredibly long. New York to Chicago for example is basically a 1-day trip by rail (overnight). But only a 3 hour flight. And those are relatively close cities by American Standards. By European standards that's further than London to Munich! New York to Miami, on the same Coast, is a 31 hour trip by rail! But only 20 hours by car and 3 hours by plane. Which would you take? New York to LA, across the continent takes several days. That's like taking a rail trip from Barcelona to Minsk. The solution to the problem is thus usually phrased as "just throw down some more rail lines and start counting the jobs". Even more realistic people consider that, in an idealized world that would cost billions. But really, with the eminent domain considerations, massive restructuring of cities, de-suburbanization, rerouting of existing lines to be more efficient, easy transit to and from the system, parking, etc. we are more likely talking trillions of dollars. So instead we get more limited visions like - 1 more line on the D.C. metro over the next 20 years - and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/18/map-of-potential-high-spe_n_167804.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/18/map-of-potential-hi... Which, while really fantastic, and a great start, won't affect the vast majority of the country.
• DaniFong 17y ago
  Buses work admirably, even in the USA. They're more economical, faster to deploy, and actually have a smaller carbon footprint. But bus systems tend to be underfunded, and there's a stigma for those who ride them -- essentially, many believe buses are for poor people. What a mistake!