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If you'd ask the people in 1900s, they'd say the "right solution" is faster horses. Public transit SUCKS. And I don't understand why people are pretending that

If you'd ask the people in 1900s, they'd say the "right solution" is faster horses. Public transit SUCKS. And I don't understand why people are pretending that it doesn't. Space efficiency and throughput are not the only important variables here. How about freedom? Once I take that train and reach my work, what if I have to go somewhere nearby work? There's a reason cars exist. In your imaginary world, trains might be better than cars, but in the real world, cars are way better, even in those higher culture societies with planned cities like Scandinavia. Cars exist there too. Why? Because they do solve some problem, which I'd imagine could be comfort, freedom, privacy, hygiene, and many others I'm sure.

Retric 9y ago
Public transit can be awesome once you scale it enough. You basically want one subway stop per 4 blocks. With the upside being you don't have to park and unpack your car or deal with traffic, or stop lights. However, you want a train every 3 minutes in both directions and 2 train lines per stations. Which takes a lot of effing trains, but means your average wait time is 3 minutes per trip, and you generally only need to use 2 trains to get to any point in the city. Also, you want a nice layer of cabs for short hop trips.
- justjonathan 9y ago
  Small Correction: if you have trains coming every three minutes I think your average wait time should be 1.5 minutes.
  - Retric 9y ago
    1.5 minutes for first train, get off that train 1.5 minutes wait for second train. You can now get to any point on an XY grid with ~3 minutes of wait time. 1.5 minutes works if your only going down one line but that's not a huge number of stops.
    - arcticbull 9y ago
      That could also be improved with timed connections.
      - Retric 9y ago
        Those are hard to pull off across a full XY grid as soon as something happens like a line is single tracking or your grid is missing a stations it's a mess. You also really want some slack in the system for cases like single tracking if the average train is 4 cars, but you can send 6 cars trains when demand is up that makes a huge difference. So, yea that's one way to lower the average wait time, but again just sending more trains and the system becomes more stable.
    - mikepurvis 9y ago
      Anything less than 5-10 minutes is generally considered to be "frequent service", where it's no longer necessary to worry about hitting a specific train, since the next train will be along fairly quickly regardless.
      - Retric 9y ago
        There is a large quality of life difference based on maximum trip time. If I need to make 2 trains each way with an max of 15 minutes of wait time each. Then I need to add 1 hour of padding to cover that worst case over the day or risk being late. Further, if anything happens that can go well past 1h of just waiting. Cut that to a daily 12 minutes 'worse case' makes a massive difference.
hellcow 9y ago
In London or several other major cities, public transit is amazing. It's clean, reliable, fast, efficient, cheap, safe, and everywhere. If you have to go somewhere near work, walk, bring a bike, or Uber. But chances are, there's a tube stop less than a 10 minute walk away. The problem isn't public transit. The problem is its implementation.
- closeparen 9y ago
  Aren't London commute hour trains just as crowded as those in the US? Whether the train shows up and departs on time, or goes where you want it to, is rarely the problem for existing systems in major US cities. It's about the experience of being inside the train for an extended period of time. I'm about to double my rent and halve my square footage to get away from BART. It has noting to do with reliability and everything to do with standing on a crowded moving vehicle for 90 minutes a day. Modern cars are palatial. Even the best (fast, frequent, good coverage, reliable) train systems are squalid and cramped when they are needed most.
  - fleitz 9y ago
    Traffic is worse and gas is more expensive in London, so public transit is comparatively better
  - arcticbull 9y ago
    You could make the case that modern, palatial cars are the problem though. As far as I know, rent for places along the BART/CalTrain lines are much higher than away since it opens up living in outlying areas to people who work downtown.
    - closeparen 9y ago
      Obviously some people prefer trains, but if the problem you want to address is winning over the people who don't, you'll need to engage with what makes trains unpleasant to them. "Your commute is too comfortable, let's make it miserable" doesn't win elections.
  - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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jdmoreira 9y ago
I can absolutely guarantee you that public transit doesn't suck in Stockholm. Most people don't even own a car here, I don't and the people that do complain all the time about how it's expensive to pay insurance and have it parked 99% of the time. Cars don't get used more than twice a week or so and if you take your car everyday into the city to just go to your job you are pretty much frowned upon.
adamkrez 9y ago
Public transit doesn't suck, but the biggest problem as you say is that it fails to solve the last mile. Public transit is incredible if you live very close to the designated routes. For now. Once cars are fully autonomous and become cheaper, faster, and more efficient than current forms of public transportation, current low speed trains and buses will become unused and obsolete. Except for the hyperloop and air travel, I see any investment in public transit infrastructure (trains, buses, subways - hell even parking lots!) to be a complete waste of money. In the 10 years it would take to build a new train through a city, cars will make it completely useless.
- engx 9y ago
  Public transist in LA is akin to mild torture. I feel for those who have to take it every day for work. Aside from the haphazard and oblique bus scheduling routes, the ride itself is jarring and agnozing. Unnecessary repeated montoned annoucements bombard your trip with sudden jerking stops. Of course, the homeless and drug addicted use the bus and trains for temporary shelter. The train has even more mind numbing announcements with a ridiculous annoucement system that could be replaced by screens. And if you want to go anywhere beyond one bus route, your trip time will be 3 to 4 times that of driving. We're supposed to commend those who take public transist, but the City of LA doesn't care. Corrupt, incompetent, indifferent -- whatever it is, they don't have a clue what they are doing.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > Of course, the homeless and drug addicted use the bus and trains for temporary shelter. The problem is not the public transit, the problem is how homeless, drug addicted or mentally ill people are treated in the US. Fix this and suddenly public transit will be viable again...
  - seanp2k2 9y ago
    The audio announcements are also for people who can't see the screens, due to blindness or just people in the way. They're typically repeated so you don't miss what was said. It's potentially annoying for frequent riders but most people just wear headphones if they know where they're getting off. The homelessness thing is a much bigger problem. Shelters are always full, and even if you do have a job, rent is totally out of control, and the wait for section 8 housing is >a decade in some places. It's not surprising that people end up on the streets, and yet rich people in this country want to further cut back on social safety nets while offering ever more subsidy to the wealthy. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeownership-became-the-engine-of-american-inequality.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeowner... discuses this.
yoz-y 9y ago
When I look outside of my window I can see that cars in the city are mostly useful to generate traffic and block ambulances. Car is a fine tool if you do not live in the centre. This tech aims to alleviate this, obviously, but still for me this seems like a huge waste of energy.
8ytecoder 9y ago
Sorry about the snark - if you ask an American, they'd inevitably say they'd want better roads as well. Cars have a place in the world, for sure - just not for daily commutes and inner-city travel. There are model public transit systems throughout the world. It's not just possible it actually exists.
pdelbarba 9y ago
I think it's an American thing. ITT everyone is complaining about the last mile stuff and the logistics of it all, but fundamentally everyone just hates it for cultural reasons. In you head, you just see images of plastic seats covered in hobo urine and a train car that smells like disinfectant of some sort. In places where it's actually practical as a complete transportation solution, the conditions are also somewhat better.
- princekolt 9y ago
  It is a very american thing. In most european cities public transport works very well and people don't really mind walking 10-20 minutes if needed.
  - pdelbarba 9y ago
    Yea, that and the HN bubble is strong here. Transport is one of those issues that's divided along class lines. As you go up in class, you become more segregated from your fellow city goers and this plan exemplifies that. A person at the poverty line takes the bus, a little more money, a car that you park and walk to, maybe a plane ticket somewhere, but at a certain point, your driver drops you off at the entrance to your building and you have a personal jet on standby at the nearest satellite airport fueled and ready to take you anywhere in privacy.
    - hinkley 9y ago
      Grandparent talks about freedom but it's only freedom for the upper and middle class. That's not freedom, that's privilege. In cities where public transportation is expected, places you want to go tend to be clustered better, so you can walk/bike/bus/train to several things at once. "Location location location" has to consider foot traffic.
      - geezerjay 9y ago
        > Grandparent talks about freedom but it's only freedom for the upper and middle class. That's not freedom, that's privilege. Nonsense. Just because some people are unable to exercise their rights it doesn't mean that others should not, let alone that those rights suddenly become mere privileges. You should try your best to improve the life of everyone around you, not drag down those who are better off just to force them into everyone's misery.
Johnny555 9y ago
Once I take that train and reach my work, what if I have to go somewhere nearby work? Then you walk or take a train there? You may say "But my area doesn't have good transit", but if you're going to spend billions of dollars building relatively low capacity car tunnels, you could spend those same billions to build higher capacity transit. The car only offers a certain type of freedom. When you take a train (or cab) from work to go across town to meet friends for dinner/drinks (since you don't want to drive during commute traffic or try to find parking in a busy downtown), why should you have to make that same trip all the way back to your office just to get your car so you can drive home? Just hop on a train from the restaurant and go directly home. At least that was my biggest discovery when I first moved to an area with good transit -- without the car I had a lot more freedom to go where I wanted and didn't have to structure my activities around where I parked my car. Also I didn't have to pay for (and protect) a $20,000+ car and the transit pass was less than the monthly car insurance alone.
- pdelbarba 9y ago
  This works especially well in areas like Boston with multi-layer transit. Take the subway under the city to one of the stations and if you need to go somewhere local, hop on the light rail that runs above ground and has stops placed much more frequently. Beyond that, you have buses and taxis all over the place as well. It's driving in that city that's inconvenient...
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  Yep. I would actually prefer to just drive on the weekends / to places without trains, hopefully out in the mountains or something. Europe even has trains which go to remote locations. Having to park a car is terrible in cities. Combine this with the social acceptance of alcohol consumption plus the danger (and laws) of driving intoxicated and public transit is fantastic. Public trans like trains also avoid traffic, so they can be significantly faster than driving. Pollution-wise, it's also no contest. Hong Kong has a great subway system and because of it, most people there don't need personal vehicles. Taxis are also cheaper and much better service-wise than in the US. Busses service more remote routes, like to the beach (which is kinda far on HK Island).
Tiktaalik 9y ago
Oh my god Musk is the one pitching the "faster horse" solution here. He wants to travel faster and doesn't want to deal with congestion, and so he comes up with this zany idea for cars on sleds in tunnels. Maybe the real problem here is the car. Car oriented infrastructure simply doesn't scale well as demand increases. His solution is going to run into all the same issues of induced demand just the same as highway expansion has.
- fittingin 9y ago
  So it the car is the problem, what if you could build out new train rails everywhere and get people to use them? What if people refuse to use the train because it's scary, dirty, stinky, etc.? What if you could re-imagine trains where everyone can bring their own private mini-car and add it to the train? Then the car can be private, clean, luxurious, cheap, or whatever the owner wants. Would people adopt it then? Yeah. that's pretty zany. As long as I'm not forced to pay for it, why criticize? I'm curious to see which zany idea out there proves itself.
  - Tiktaalik 9y ago
    The reason criticism is warranted is because unfeasible, far out ideas like Musk's distract the conversation from proven and viable solutions and undermine their implementation. Musk is providing ammo for persons that oppose public transit spending for political and idiological reasons that can be used in the political arena to argue to decrease public transit spending and slow down or stop implementation of public transit expansion.
  - so33 9y ago
    >What if people refuse to use the train because it's scary, dirty, stinky, etc.? What if you could re-imagine trains where everyone can bring their own private mini-car and add it to the train? Then the car can be private, clean, luxurious, cheap, or whatever the owner wants. Would people adopt it then? Because the "private mini-car" isn't as space efficient as just having one person. Space efficiency is a major point of public transportation, and the "scary, dirty, stinky" aspects can and have been solved in other parts of the world like Europe and Asia. What public transport advocates are worried about, I think, is that just like freeways, we are potentially going to create an enormous strain on the surface road system... the cars are going to have to come out of the tunnels some time, after all, right?
xbeta 9y ago
I am not going to downvote you on this but using Scandinavian cities aren't great example. Think about the amount of people they are transporting everyday compare said a city in China, in Japan, in Indonesia?
- arcticbull 9y ago
  Hong Kong MTR is one of the busiest in the world, it's also I believe the timeliest in the world (three 9's [1]) and serves 1.6 billion per year. These things definitely work. MTR does such a good job operating in HK that they were tapped to run the new Elizabeth line in London as MTR Crossrail. [1] http://www.mtr.com.hk/en/customer/main/performance_201407.html http://www.mtr.com.hk/en/customer/main/performance_201407.ht...
rz2k 9y ago
How many people actually used horses though? A good portion of the trips done by car today simply would have been on foot with towns built accordingly, and in larger cities, trams and streetcars were popular. Complaints about horses probably would have revolved around their upkeep, and maybe their endurance rather than their speed. Though driving can be fun, I’ve much preferred commuting in the subway to having to drive to and from work every day. I think there is some snob element in different impressions of public transportation. People go to coffee shops when they have coffee machines at home and in their office, because they enjoy the social aspect. Perceptions of public transportation are influenced by wait times and how they are treated by transportation employees, but probably more importantly by whether the other riders look like their coworkers and peers.
TulliusCicero 9y ago
Cars are fine, so is transit. Transit sucks in the US because we don't invest in it, and our land use regulations are largely hostile to anything that isn't a car.
yongjik 9y ago
...and if you ask Americans in 2010s, they'd say the "right solution" is more roads. Convincing Americans that public transit sucks should be studied as one of the greatest PR coups of the 20th century. :/
hmmidunno88 9y ago
There's a reason why public transit sucks. "...what if I have to go somewhere nearby work?" I work in a metro core area. I can walk to anything within 5 mins. Even in my residential neighborhood everything is a 15 min walk. It's actually faster by bike since I can avoid traffic issues. This is some ranty stuff. Of course cars solve a problem, but so do buses, trains, etc..

Retric 9y ago

Public transit can be awesome once you scale it enough. You basically want one subway stop per 4 blocks. With the upside being you don't have to park and unpack your car or deal with traffic, or stop lights. However, you want a train every 3 minutes in both directions and 2 train lines per stations. Which takes a lot of effing trains, but means your average wait time is 3 minutes per trip, and you generally only need to use 2 trains to get to any point in the city. Also, you want a nice layer of cabs for short hop trips.

justjonathan 9y ago
Small Correction: if you have trains coming every three minutes I think your average wait time should be 1.5 minutes.
- Retric 9y ago
  1.5 minutes for first train, get off that train 1.5 minutes wait for second train. You can now get to any point on an XY grid with ~3 minutes of wait time. 1.5 minutes works if your only going down one line but that's not a huge number of stops.
  - arcticbull 9y ago
    That could also be improved with timed connections.
    - Retric 9y ago
      Those are hard to pull off across a full XY grid as soon as something happens like a line is single tracking or your grid is missing a stations it's a mess. You also really want some slack in the system for cases like single tracking if the average train is 4 cars, but you can send 6 cars trains when demand is up that makes a huge difference. So, yea that's one way to lower the average wait time, but again just sending more trains and the system becomes more stable.
  - mikepurvis 9y ago
    Anything less than 5-10 minutes is generally considered to be "frequent service", where it's no longer necessary to worry about hitting a specific train, since the next train will be along fairly quickly regardless.
    - Retric 9y ago
      There is a large quality of life difference based on maximum trip time. If I need to make 2 trains each way with an max of 15 minutes of wait time each. Then I need to add 1 hour of padding to cover that worst case over the day or risk being late. Further, if anything happens that can go well past 1h of just waiting. Cut that to a daily 12 minutes 'worse case' makes a massive difference.

hellcow 9y ago

In London or several other major cities, public transit is amazing. It's clean, reliable, fast, efficient, cheap, safe, and everywhere. If you have to go somewhere near work, walk, bring a bike, or Uber. But chances are, there's a tube stop less than a 10 minute walk away. The problem isn't public transit. The problem is its implementation.

closeparen 9y ago
Aren't London commute hour trains just as crowded as those in the US? Whether the train shows up and departs on time, or goes where you want it to, is rarely the problem for existing systems in major US cities. It's about the experience of being inside the train for an extended period of time. I'm about to double my rent and halve my square footage to get away from BART. It has noting to do with reliability and everything to do with standing on a crowded moving vehicle for 90 minutes a day. Modern cars are palatial. Even the best (fast, frequent, good coverage, reliable) train systems are squalid and cramped when they are needed most.
- fleitz 9y ago
  Traffic is worse and gas is more expensive in London, so public transit is comparatively better
- arcticbull 9y ago
  You could make the case that modern, palatial cars are the problem though. As far as I know, rent for places along the BART/CalTrain lines are much higher than away since it opens up living in outlying areas to people who work downtown.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    Obviously some people prefer trains, but if the problem you want to address is winning over the people who don't, you'll need to engage with what makes trains unpleasant to them. "Your commute is too comfortable, let's make it miserable" doesn't win elections.
- 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jdmoreira 9y ago

I can absolutely guarantee you that public transit doesn't suck in Stockholm. Most people don't even own a car here, I don't and the people that do complain all the time about how it's expensive to pay insurance and have it parked 99% of the time. Cars don't get used more than twice a week or so and if you take your car everyday into the city to just go to your job you are pretty much frowned upon.

adamkrez 9y ago

Public transit doesn't suck, but the biggest problem as you say is that it fails to solve the last mile. Public transit is incredible if you live very close to the designated routes. For now. Once cars are fully autonomous and become cheaper, faster, and more efficient than current forms of public transportation, current low speed trains and buses will become unused and obsolete. Except for the hyperloop and air travel, I see any investment in public transit infrastructure (trains, buses, subways - hell even parking lots!) to be a complete waste of money. In the 10 years it would take to build a new train through a city, cars will make it completely useless.

engx 9y ago
Public transist in LA is akin to mild torture. I feel for those who have to take it every day for work. Aside from the haphazard and oblique bus scheduling routes, the ride itself is jarring and agnozing. Unnecessary repeated montoned annoucements bombard your trip with sudden jerking stops. Of course, the homeless and drug addicted use the bus and trains for temporary shelter. The train has even more mind numbing announcements with a ridiculous annoucement system that could be replaced by screens. And if you want to go anywhere beyond one bus route, your trip time will be 3 to 4 times that of driving. We're supposed to commend those who take public transist, but the City of LA doesn't care. Corrupt, incompetent, indifferent -- whatever it is, they don't have a clue what they are doing.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > Of course, the homeless and drug addicted use the bus and trains for temporary shelter. The problem is not the public transit, the problem is how homeless, drug addicted or mentally ill people are treated in the US. Fix this and suddenly public transit will be viable again...
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  The audio announcements are also for people who can't see the screens, due to blindness or just people in the way. They're typically repeated so you don't miss what was said. It's potentially annoying for frequent riders but most people just wear headphones if they know where they're getting off. The homelessness thing is a much bigger problem. Shelters are always full, and even if you do have a job, rent is totally out of control, and the wait for section 8 housing is >a decade in some places. It's not surprising that people end up on the streets, and yet rich people in this country want to further cut back on social safety nets while offering ever more subsidy to the wealthy. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeownership-became-the-engine-of-american-inequality.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/magazine/how-homeowner... discuses this.

yoz-y 9y ago

When I look outside of my window I can see that cars in the city are mostly useful to generate traffic and block ambulances. Car is a fine tool if you do not live in the centre. This tech aims to alleviate this, obviously, but still for me this seems like a huge waste of energy.

8ytecoder 9y ago

Sorry about the snark - if you ask an American, they'd inevitably say they'd want better roads as well. Cars have a place in the world, for sure - just not for daily commutes and inner-city travel. There are model public transit systems throughout the world. It's not just possible it actually exists.

pdelbarba 9y ago

I think it's an American thing. ITT everyone is complaining about the last mile stuff and the logistics of it all, but fundamentally everyone just hates it for cultural reasons. In you head, you just see images of plastic seats covered in hobo urine and a train car that smells like disinfectant of some sort. In places where it's actually practical as a complete transportation solution, the conditions are also somewhat better.

princekolt 9y ago
It is a very american thing. In most european cities public transport works very well and people don't really mind walking 10-20 minutes if needed.
- pdelbarba 9y ago
  Yea, that and the HN bubble is strong here. Transport is one of those issues that's divided along class lines. As you go up in class, you become more segregated from your fellow city goers and this plan exemplifies that. A person at the poverty line takes the bus, a little more money, a car that you park and walk to, maybe a plane ticket somewhere, but at a certain point, your driver drops you off at the entrance to your building and you have a personal jet on standby at the nearest satellite airport fueled and ready to take you anywhere in privacy.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    Grandparent talks about freedom but it's only freedom for the upper and middle class. That's not freedom, that's privilege. In cities where public transportation is expected, places you want to go tend to be clustered better, so you can walk/bike/bus/train to several things at once. "Location location location" has to consider foot traffic.
    - geezerjay 9y ago
      > Grandparent talks about freedom but it's only freedom for the upper and middle class. That's not freedom, that's privilege. Nonsense. Just because some people are unable to exercise their rights it doesn't mean that others should not, let alone that those rights suddenly become mere privileges. You should try your best to improve the life of everyone around you, not drag down those who are better off just to force them into everyone's misery.

Johnny555 9y ago

Once I take that train and reach my work, what if I have to go somewhere nearby work? Then you walk or take a train there? You may say "But my area doesn't have good transit", but if you're going to spend billions of dollars building relatively low capacity car tunnels, you could spend those same billions to build higher capacity transit. The car only offers a certain type of freedom. When you take a train (or cab) from work to go across town to meet friends for dinner/drinks (since you don't want to drive during commute traffic or try to find parking in a busy downtown), why should you have to make that same trip all the way back to your office just to get your car so you can drive home? Just hop on a train from the restaurant and go directly home. At least that was my biggest discovery when I first moved to an area with good transit -- without the car I had a lot more freedom to go where I wanted and didn't have to structure my activities around where I parked my car. Also I didn't have to pay for (and protect) a $20,000+ car and the transit pass was less than the monthly car insurance alone.

pdelbarba 9y ago
This works especially well in areas like Boston with multi-layer transit. Take the subway under the city to one of the stations and if you need to go somewhere local, hop on the light rail that runs above ground and has stops placed much more frequently. Beyond that, you have buses and taxis all over the place as well. It's driving in that city that's inconvenient...
seanp2k2 9y ago
Yep. I would actually prefer to just drive on the weekends / to places without trains, hopefully out in the mountains or something. Europe even has trains which go to remote locations. Having to park a car is terrible in cities. Combine this with the social acceptance of alcohol consumption plus the danger (and laws) of driving intoxicated and public transit is fantastic. Public trans like trains also avoid traffic, so they can be significantly faster than driving. Pollution-wise, it's also no contest. Hong Kong has a great subway system and because of it, most people there don't need personal vehicles. Taxis are also cheaper and much better service-wise than in the US. Busses service more remote routes, like to the beach (which is kinda far on HK Island).

Tiktaalik 9y ago

Oh my god Musk is the one pitching the "faster horse" solution here. He wants to travel faster and doesn't want to deal with congestion, and so he comes up with this zany idea for cars on sleds in tunnels. Maybe the real problem here is the car. Car oriented infrastructure simply doesn't scale well as demand increases. His solution is going to run into all the same issues of induced demand just the same as highway expansion has.

fittingin 9y ago
So it the car is the problem, what if you could build out new train rails everywhere and get people to use them? What if people refuse to use the train because it's scary, dirty, stinky, etc.? What if you could re-imagine trains where everyone can bring their own private mini-car and add it to the train? Then the car can be private, clean, luxurious, cheap, or whatever the owner wants. Would people adopt it then? Yeah. that's pretty zany. As long as I'm not forced to pay for it, why criticize? I'm curious to see which zany idea out there proves itself.
- Tiktaalik 9y ago
  The reason criticism is warranted is because unfeasible, far out ideas like Musk's distract the conversation from proven and viable solutions and undermine their implementation. Musk is providing ammo for persons that oppose public transit spending for political and idiological reasons that can be used in the political arena to argue to decrease public transit spending and slow down or stop implementation of public transit expansion.
- so33 9y ago
  >What if people refuse to use the train because it's scary, dirty, stinky, etc.? What if you could re-imagine trains where everyone can bring their own private mini-car and add it to the train? Then the car can be private, clean, luxurious, cheap, or whatever the owner wants. Would people adopt it then? Because the "private mini-car" isn't as space efficient as just having one person. Space efficiency is a major point of public transportation, and the "scary, dirty, stinky" aspects can and have been solved in other parts of the world like Europe and Asia. What public transport advocates are worried about, I think, is that just like freeways, we are potentially going to create an enormous strain on the surface road system... the cars are going to have to come out of the tunnels some time, after all, right?

xbeta 9y ago

I am not going to downvote you on this but using Scandinavian cities aren't great example. Think about the amount of people they are transporting everyday compare said a city in China, in Japan, in Indonesia?

arcticbull 9y ago
Hong Kong MTR is one of the busiest in the world, it's also I believe the timeliest in the world (three 9's [1]) and serves 1.6 billion per year. These things definitely work. MTR does such a good job operating in HK that they were tapped to run the new Elizabeth line in London as MTR Crossrail. [1] http://www.mtr.com.hk/en/customer/main/performance_201407.html http://www.mtr.com.hk/en/customer/main/performance_201407.ht...

rz2k 9y ago

How many people actually used horses though? A good portion of the trips done by car today simply would have been on foot with towns built accordingly, and in larger cities, trams and streetcars were popular. Complaints about horses probably would have revolved around their upkeep, and maybe their endurance rather than their speed. Though driving can be fun, I’ve much preferred commuting in the subway to having to drive to and from work every day. I think there is some snob element in different impressions of public transportation. People go to coffee shops when they have coffee machines at home and in their office, because they enjoy the social aspect. Perceptions of public transportation are influenced by wait times and how they are treated by transportation employees, but probably more importantly by whether the other riders look like their coworkers and peers.

TulliusCicero 9y ago

Cars are fine, so is transit. Transit sucks in the US because we don't invest in it, and our land use regulations are largely hostile to anything that isn't a car.

yongjik 9y ago

...and if you ask Americans in 2010s, they'd say the "right solution" is more roads. Convincing Americans that public transit sucks should be studied as one of the greatest PR coups of the 20th century. :/

hmmidunno88 9y ago

There's a reason why public transit sucks. "...what if I have to go somewhere nearby work?" I work in a metro core area. I can walk to anything within 5 mins. Even in my residential neighborhood everything is a 15 min walk. It's actually faster by bike since I can avoid traffic issues. This is some ranty stuff. Of course cars solve a problem, but so do buses, trains, etc..