6 ms·

Geographically, Sweden and the US are immensely different. Sweden, as well as most of Europe, is densely populated and has good public transportation infrastruc

by m00x 10y ago

Geographically, Sweden and the US are immensely different. Sweden, as well as most of Europe, is densely populated and has good public transportation infrastructure. The US on the other hand is a very large area with low density and poor public transport.

bryanlarsen 10y ago
Sweden and the US have almost exactly the same population density (22/km2 vs 24/km2) and GDP (50K vs 56K). The only reason that Sweden has substantially better public transportation infrastructure than the US is because it chooses to.
- Nadya 10y ago
  It's also much easier to build infrastructure in regions of 447,435 km² than it is for 9.834 million km². Sweden is a little larger than California (423,970 km²) "The United States has terrible public transport" doesn't hold true for pocket regions which have very reliable public transport. You just can't very reliably go across the country because some of our states are larger than many, if not most, European countries. Not to mention geographical differences. Compare a topography map of Sweden with California.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    > You just can't very reliably go across the country because some of our states are larger than many, if not most, European countries. This is such a weird argument. I can take a train from London to Paris to Zurich to Berlin, despite them being entirely different countries. You're telling me travelling between US states is somehow massively harder? > Compare a topography map of Sweden with California. Switzerland has a) some of the most challenging topography in the world and b) one of the most extensive, heavily used train systems in the world.
    - soared 10y ago
      Yes, the US is bigger than Europe: https://jeffsbiketour.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/usa-europe.png https://jeffsbiketour.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/usa-europe...
      - corybrown 10y ago
        Your map clearly shows Europe being larger. Unless you want to completely ignore European Russia.
        PerfectDlite 10y ago
        So, you're ok with Turkey and Syria being included in Europe?
        corybrown 10y ago
        Both countries are far, far smaller than Russia.
      - vacri 10y ago
        Both the US and Europe are about 10M square kilometers in size, with Europe ending up marginally larger.
      - ceejayoz 10y ago
        Even your own map doesn't show that. The US is 3.797 million mi². Europe is 3.931 million mi².
    - stagbeetle 10y ago
      > This is such a weird argument. I can take a train from London to Paris to Zurich to Berlin, despite them being entirely different countries. You're telling me travelling between US states is somehow massively harder? I think this has to do with the frequency of rest-stops/ tourist destinations. There are many places to stop and see if you were to have a track going through all of the EU, but if you do that with the U.S, you're just going through "nothing" for hours on end. There's no site-seeing, sparse and isolated rest-stops, etc. This is if we assume coast-to-coast travel, not just state-to-state. If we do, it's just not worth it to spend that much money.
  - tbihl 10y ago
    The problem with US public transit is not its interregional distances, but the low density of its regions. Diffuse populations defeat transit. People in those diffuse regions are more likely to utilize cars for midrange travel because the time to reach transit is high. In many regions, this means that transit is only for people too poor to have reliable cars, introducing another problem. That we have any American cities with decent transit seems to be largely thanks to the restrictive geography of those cities, as well as some excellent activists (Jane Jacobs being the easiest example.)
    - Nadya 10y ago
      So... it's the interregional distances between populated regions? Same difference honestly. The argument boils down either way to "US is too big". Smaller countries or countries where half the country isn't populated (due to geography such as frozen tundra or large mountains), focusing population in a smaller region of that country don't have to deal with as many pockets of low density populations. Because they're small.
      - Dylan16807 10y ago
        > So... it's the interregional distances between populated regions? No. It's a lack of "populated" regions at all. The problem being described is that the population density is too even.
      - tbihl 10y ago
        Thanks for responding. I'm afraid I haven't made myself clear; let me see if I can do better. The issue is not the spacing of our metro areas in relation to one another (interregional distances). Rather, we have bad geometry withinour metros (intra-regional distances.) To me, this seems to stem largely from the many ways we've subsidized automotive transit and low density, single family residences since WWII. The difficulty created by our development pattern is that you can almost never gather enough people into one place to justify building a train station, subway station, or even a bus stop. When you can gather them, it's normally by those people driving to the stop, and the disappointing crowd that shows up often doesn't pull enough weight to get reliable, frequent service to those stops. And as long as those people are going to get in the car anyway, and then have to wait a long time to catch the next bus/train, a lot of them are just going to say "the hell with it" and drive to their destination instead. Alternatively, maybe you live in a downtown area where there actually are enough people in close proximity to justify transit stops with a high level of service. If you're in a typical American city, you'll run into the problem at the other end of your journey. Sure, you easily walked to your stop, but maybe when you get off at your other stop, several miles from the center of town, you're still several miles from the store, or the restaurant, or your friend's house. And it's typically not on streets that are pleasant to walk, because they're not very interesting and the cars may be quite fast. So you'll have to make your friend pick you up, or pay for Ubers both ways, or walk anyway in an act of defiance against the place you've ended up. None of that sounds great, and if you even did it once, you're probably thinking seriously about driving your car next time. And so it turns out that what you really need are at least two places, neither of which really require cars, for transit to be all that helpful. And in the US, we seldom have that, because we have a single center of intensity, with the density decreasing radially in all directions. These places don't have to be huge, either. A compact outlying town of 30,000 or so could reasonably have hourly bus service to the major city an hour away. The key is that the town needs to be walkable enough that people can easily get to the bus, and the big city also needs to be navigable without a car. As to intercity: I'm not saying NYC and LA should have a dedicated rail line between them, but it would certainly be reasonable to have SF, LA, and SD all connected by rail, perhaps high-speed. But at the same time, given the spread out development of those three cities, it doesn't surprise me at all that that's not feasible.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    > It's also much easier to build infrastructure in regions of 447,435 km² than it is for 9.834 million km². If that's true, so what? Split it into 20 separate jobs, each equivalent to Sweden in terms of landmass, population, and budget. Or maybe 48 separate jobs.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  You can't compare population densities that way. They vary far too much from place to place. In the US, for instance, 2/3 of the population lives east of the Mississippi River. Most of that other 1/3 lives on the west coast (largely California), while states like Wyoming are almost completely empty (~500k people total). Also, if your number includes Alaska, that skews it horribly because Alaska has an enormous amount of land and very little population. Similarly, the Nordic countries are not homogeneous: most of the population lives near their southern borders (on the Baltic Sea), while their northern areas are barely populated at all. It's very similar to Canada: most of the population there lives within 100 miles of the southern (US) border. So you can't compare population densities like that: you have to focus on specific areas. What's the population density of Malmo versus Philly? Stockholm vs. DC? And even here it's hard to compare, because for instance "DC" could mean just the District itself, or it could mean the much larger metro area around it, and all parts that are reasonably commutable. Most of the "DC" population lives outside of DC. Offhand, I'd say Sweden has substantially better public transportation because most of the population lives in a few large cities, and also because it's a better-managed country that invests more in infrastructure for the common good.
  - s0rce 10y ago
    I'd say the US invests in infrastructure, specifically, roads, the interstate system is an amazing way to get around and much more flexible than trains. For numerous reasons other forms of public infrastructure not centered around cars get much less investment.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    Population density varies a lot in Sweden, too. A vast majority of Swedes live south of a line that is slightly north of Stockholm, and the northernmost Norbottens län has 21 % of land area and 2.5 % of population.
kalleboo 10y ago
I just laughed seeing as the comment above you right now says "This only works since Sweden is so sparsely populated"

by m00x 10y ago

bryanlarsen 10y ago

Sweden and the US have almost exactly the same population density (22/km2 vs 24/km2) and GDP (50K vs 56K). The only reason that Sweden has substantially better public transportation infrastructure than the US is because it chooses to.

Nadya 10y ago
It's also much easier to build infrastructure in regions of 447,435 km² than it is for 9.834 million km². Sweden is a little larger than California (423,970 km²) "The United States has terrible public transport" doesn't hold true for pocket regions which have very reliable public transport. You just can't very reliably go across the country because some of our states are larger than many, if not most, European countries. Not to mention geographical differences. Compare a topography map of Sweden with California.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  > You just can't very reliably go across the country because some of our states are larger than many, if not most, European countries. This is such a weird argument. I can take a train from London to Paris to Zurich to Berlin, despite them being entirely different countries. You're telling me travelling between US states is somehow massively harder? > Compare a topography map of Sweden with California. Switzerland has a) some of the most challenging topography in the world and b) one of the most extensive, heavily used train systems in the world.
  - soared 10y ago
    Yes, the US is bigger than Europe: https://jeffsbiketour.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/usa-europe.png https://jeffsbiketour.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/usa-europe...
    - corybrown 10y ago
      Your map clearly shows Europe being larger. Unless you want to completely ignore European Russia.
      - PerfectDlite 10y ago
        So, you're ok with Turkey and Syria being included in Europe?
        corybrown 10y ago
        Both countries are far, far smaller than Russia.
    - vacri 10y ago
      Both the US and Europe are about 10M square kilometers in size, with Europe ending up marginally larger.
    - ceejayoz 10y ago
      Even your own map doesn't show that. The US is 3.797 million mi². Europe is 3.931 million mi².
  - stagbeetle 10y ago
    > This is such a weird argument. I can take a train from London to Paris to Zurich to Berlin, despite them being entirely different countries. You're telling me travelling between US states is somehow massively harder? I think this has to do with the frequency of rest-stops/ tourist destinations. There are many places to stop and see if you were to have a track going through all of the EU, but if you do that with the U.S, you're just going through "nothing" for hours on end. There's no site-seeing, sparse and isolated rest-stops, etc. This is if we assume coast-to-coast travel, not just state-to-state. If we do, it's just not worth it to spend that much money.
- tbihl 10y ago
  The problem with US public transit is not its interregional distances, but the low density of its regions. Diffuse populations defeat transit. People in those diffuse regions are more likely to utilize cars for midrange travel because the time to reach transit is high. In many regions, this means that transit is only for people too poor to have reliable cars, introducing another problem. That we have any American cities with decent transit seems to be largely thanks to the restrictive geography of those cities, as well as some excellent activists (Jane Jacobs being the easiest example.)
  - Nadya 10y ago
    So... it's the interregional distances between populated regions? Same difference honestly. The argument boils down either way to "US is too big". Smaller countries or countries where half the country isn't populated (due to geography such as frozen tundra or large mountains), focusing population in a smaller region of that country don't have to deal with as many pockets of low density populations. Because they're small.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      > So... it's the interregional distances between populated regions? No. It's a lack of "populated" regions at all. The problem being described is that the population density is too even.
    - tbihl 10y ago
      Thanks for responding. I'm afraid I haven't made myself clear; let me see if I can do better. The issue is not the spacing of our metro areas in relation to one another (interregional distances). Rather, we have bad geometry withinour metros (intra-regional distances.) To me, this seems to stem largely from the many ways we've subsidized automotive transit and low density, single family residences since WWII. The difficulty created by our development pattern is that you can almost never gather enough people into one place to justify building a train station, subway station, or even a bus stop. When you can gather them, it's normally by those people driving to the stop, and the disappointing crowd that shows up often doesn't pull enough weight to get reliable, frequent service to those stops. And as long as those people are going to get in the car anyway, and then have to wait a long time to catch the next bus/train, a lot of them are just going to say "the hell with it" and drive to their destination instead. Alternatively, maybe you live in a downtown area where there actually are enough people in close proximity to justify transit stops with a high level of service. If you're in a typical American city, you'll run into the problem at the other end of your journey. Sure, you easily walked to your stop, but maybe when you get off at your other stop, several miles from the center of town, you're still several miles from the store, or the restaurant, or your friend's house. And it's typically not on streets that are pleasant to walk, because they're not very interesting and the cars may be quite fast. So you'll have to make your friend pick you up, or pay for Ubers both ways, or walk anyway in an act of defiance against the place you've ended up. None of that sounds great, and if you even did it once, you're probably thinking seriously about driving your car next time. And so it turns out that what you really need are at least two places, neither of which really require cars, for transit to be all that helpful. And in the US, we seldom have that, because we have a single center of intensity, with the density decreasing radially in all directions. These places don't have to be huge, either. A compact outlying town of 30,000 or so could reasonably have hourly bus service to the major city an hour away. The key is that the town needs to be walkable enough that people can easily get to the bus, and the big city also needs to be navigable without a car. As to intercity: I'm not saying NYC and LA should have a dedicated rail line between them, but it would certainly be reasonable to have SF, LA, and SD all connected by rail, perhaps high-speed. But at the same time, given the spread out development of those three cities, it doesn't surprise me at all that that's not feasible.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  > It's also much easier to build infrastructure in regions of 447,435 km² than it is for 9.834 million km². If that's true, so what? Split it into 20 separate jobs, each equivalent to Sweden in terms of landmass, population, and budget. Or maybe 48 separate jobs.
Arizhel 10y ago
You can't compare population densities that way. They vary far too much from place to place. In the US, for instance, 2/3 of the population lives east of the Mississippi River. Most of that other 1/3 lives on the west coast (largely California), while states like Wyoming are almost completely empty (~500k people total). Also, if your number includes Alaska, that skews it horribly because Alaska has an enormous amount of land and very little population. Similarly, the Nordic countries are not homogeneous: most of the population lives near their southern borders (on the Baltic Sea), while their northern areas are barely populated at all. It's very similar to Canada: most of the population there lives within 100 miles of the southern (US) border. So you can't compare population densities like that: you have to focus on specific areas. What's the population density of Malmo versus Philly? Stockholm vs. DC? And even here it's hard to compare, because for instance "DC" could mean just the District itself, or it could mean the much larger metro area around it, and all parts that are reasonably commutable. Most of the "DC" population lives outside of DC. Offhand, I'd say Sweden has substantially better public transportation because most of the population lives in a few large cities, and also because it's a better-managed country that invests more in infrastructure for the common good.
- s0rce 10y ago
  I'd say the US invests in infrastructure, specifically, roads, the interstate system is an amazing way to get around and much more flexible than trains. For numerous reasons other forms of public infrastructure not centered around cars get much less investment.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  Population density varies a lot in Sweden, too. A vast majority of Swedes live south of a line that is slightly north of Stockholm, and the northernmost Norbottens län has 21 % of land area and 2.5 % of population.

kalleboo 10y ago

I just laughed seeing as the comment above you right now says "This only works since Sweden is so sparsely populated"