9 ms·

I don't know if it really proves anything and it might be OT from your point, but, the confounding variable is that in the US - especially outside of the major

I don't know if it really proves anything and it might be OT from your point, but, the confounding variable is that in the US - especially outside of the major urban areas - everything is just very far away in terms of miles. Lacking a car, you can expect life to be very difficult. there are still plenty of places in the US where the range of a tesla might be a borderline problem week-to-week. (though probably not as often as people think and if you plan well) My casual observation is that smaller countries just have a lot more good options when it comes to transit because the total distances are much smaller.

craftyguy 9y ago
So national policy is essentially catering to the minority that live in rural areas? That seems backwards.
- tonysdg 9y ago
  That minority controls a non-trivial portion of the nation's political power -- just look at the 2016 presidential election for evidence. I'm 100% for clean energy and reducing/eliminating fossil fuel use, but I also recognize the reality that electric vehicles just don't yet have the capability -- and more importantly, infrastructure -- to replace gas- and diesel-powered cars/buses/trucks. Telling rural Americans to piss off is just as bad as asking urban Americans to deal with the smog IMO.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    It would be a good start if we replaced ICEs wherever possible, i.e. in cities. The majority of the people lives in cities, almost all car trips are well below fifty miles. If EVs work 100% of the time for 20% of the population that would already be a huge win for the environment and their sales could fund the R&D necessary to make them viable for the rest.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  It's not about real rural areas, it's sprawl largely. It's been the dominant and TOP-DOWN planned development pattern for a whole generation, and it's totally tragic. Not only from energy perspective but nearly all other variables. There's almost nothing arguably redeemable about sprawl. https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/ is about the best org discussing these issues and isn't coming from a left- or right-wing perspective but a sane, critical-thinking, research-based perspective.
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    > and TOP-DOWN planned development pattern for a whole generation, I'd almost think it is bottom-up not top-down. Top down would imply some central planning, allowance for more space, livable communities, more trees, more parks and trails, mixed zoning etc. I grew up in a Soviet Union and towns and cities were designed top-down. Nice wide streets, electric trolley buses in the city that ran regularly. For all the ills and terrible things it was actually not as a bad as far as the general layout was concerned. In US it is bottom-up because every developer buys land then tries to maximize their profit by shoving as many houses and cul-de-sacs as they can. Or as many office buildings etc. Every town wants to maximize its property taxes so they have their own interests at work. People who bought the property also now have different incentives so you have zoning and NIMBY. Ideally all these self-interests would somehow magically align to produce something great. But it often doesn't.
    - mantas 9y ago
      Not all central planning mean same end result. US gov did embrace suburban sprawl. Bottom-up planning example would be post-USSR where people converted community gardens into suburbs on their own. Without any central planning or viable infrastructure.
      - rdtsc 9y ago
        > US gov did embrace suburban sprawl. Yeah but they didn't directly design cities the way a top-down developer would do. They are some planned communities in US. I live next to one, and it is a different feel to it definitely. But it is not a common thing at all. At the federal level there are tax incentives and credits and subsidies and those affect everything but it is still very much a local "maximize my profit" kind of deal. Uncle Sam doesn't care if there are enough play grounds or parks for given area and population density. I think that you are trying to say that the incentives (say cheap mortgages) and subsidies for oil and car manufacturers resulted in suburban sprawl? But that's more of a nasty side-effect than a direct policy or law. In other words we got the bad part of top-down influence without the good part of it. > Bottom-up planning example would be post-USSR where people converted community gardens into suburbs on their own. I jokingly say that overnight they become more capitalist and laissez faire than most countries in the West.
- abakker 9y ago
  I didn't say it was a good idea...but yeah, most of America by area is totally dependent on cars for access, because more of America is private property, spread far apart. Not a great use of public transit. In many places, the roads themselves are the only real public property.
- csours 9y ago
  The majority live in Sub-urban/rural areas. Even urban, non-city center areas are not easily servable by buses. See Houston (or anywhere in Texas).
- nradov 9y ago
  So we should just abandon our rural areas? That seems backwards.
  - dao- 9y ago
    It's already happening for loads of other, often good reasons. It's called urbanization. You can try to resist the future but you cannot stop it. You might just as well embrace it. How exactly does that seem backwards?
    - tonyarkles 9y ago
      The situation is already problematic for agriculture. Further decreasing population density in rural settings just makes that worse (e.g. instead of going to the grocery store 10 miles away that happily supports a population of 5,000 people, you instead get to drive 2 hours to Costco in the nearest city to get enough groceries to make the trip worthwhile)
    - wool_gather 9y ago
      Just don't forget that even those urbanites still need resources that come from rural areas, like food. Yes, the service/information economy is clearly the future. But being able to domestically supply essentials to the service/information sectors is overall a good thing from several perspectives, including environmental health.
  - landryraccoon 9y ago
    When China is the dominant economic superpower I doubt they will care much about abandoning the rural United States.
freddie_mercury 9y ago
The OP was talking about China. China is bigger than the continental US. I think the persistent myth about the US's size being some unique problem doesn't explain much. What's more, if you think of the EU as a comparison for the US, with the individual counties as analogues for US states, it seems to explain even less. Belgium and Massachusetts are the same size but over has much better transit options than the other.
- reissbaker 9y ago
  Sheer landmass is less critical for transit than population density. The US has a population density of 33 people per square kilometer; China is nearly five times more dense at 144 people per square kilometer. [1] This sparse population distribution is one of the causes of many of the difficult-to-solve infrastructure problems in the US, such as poor broadband rollout, poor transit, etc. For what it's worth the United States is actually larger in landmass size than China: 9.834 million square km in the US vs. 9.597 million square km in China. But China has over quadruple the population. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
  - ItsMe000001 9y ago
    > The US has a population density of 33 people per square kilometer; Yes, and they are evenly spread out across the country, right? What you conveniently leave out, and which turns all these kinds of arguments based on a "total area / total population" numbers into absurd exercises in futility in showing anything useful, is that you have some few mega regions: http://osnetdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/2050_Map_Megaregions2008_150.png http://osnetdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/2050_Map_Me... Even a country like Germany has extremely uneven population, never mind countries like China or Russia. There is nothing special in the situation the US finds itself in at all - especially not since the enormous population shifts of the 20th century from rural areas to cities. When I lived in the US (for a decade), the area I lived in was the SF Bay Area, several places. This is far more densely populated than area in Germany where I grew up (former East Germany). And yet, I could not do anything or get anywhere without a car. It has next to nothing to do with population density - in the US you are forced to drive for distances where you would walk, use a bike or public transit in areas with less pop. density in other countries. Even during my brief first visit to the US end of the last millennium, which was a three month tour of the continental US (NY to Alaska, to Arizona, CA to FL) the "must... use... car!!!" bug got to me too. Towards the end I caught myself getting into the car and driving <200 feet to drop some waste into a wastebasket (from the car window of course) on a shopping mall parking lot... it seemed the natural thing to do, I had to deliberately catch myself and consciously think about what the hell I was doing to recognize the absurdity. After only two months in the country.
fulafel 9y ago
The nordics have canada level pop density and are still doing better.
fsloth 9y ago
I think it is well known the car and petrol companies were heavy lobbyists in developing the transit architecture in the US (including zoning and so on) after the second world war. To exaggerate a bit, the entire country was designed to facilitate automobile sales. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_car_on_societies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_car_on_societ... In the continental europe most of the urban centers predate the automobile hundreds if not thousands of years, thus the existing infrastructure does not use the private automobile as one of the key design constraints. Not so in the US, where huge areas were populated and zoned specifically with the support of the automobile as one of the key constraints. Once the infrastructure has been built using one design constraint, it's really expensive and difficult to unravel it.
- DoctorOetker 9y ago
  the webs we weave :o
- simonh 9y ago
  This was the one thing that really surprised me when I first visited the US in the 90s. We'd stop at a store or restaurant somewhere and the nearest neighbouring stores on either side would be 200m away, with their own huge parking lot and no pedestrian route between them. We were driving from Chicago to LA and so when we'd stop I'd want to stretch my legs, but the barriers in the way made a walk like that rally difficult. I couldn't understand why anyone would design a place like that. It was engineered around cars, not people.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Yes, and it all looks the same. We call it "Generica" :)
    - archagon 9y ago
      As an aside: this is one of the running themes in "Little Golden America", a book that chronicles a coast-to-coast American road trip underdtaken by two Soviet humorists in the 30's. The title in Russian is "Single-Story America", in reference to the flatness and uniformity of the country between the few major cities. Really fascinating account, and much of it still rings true to this day. (My review, if anyone is interested: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2114423486 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2114423486)
nickserv 9y ago
Yes, it's difficult if not impossible to live in most places in the US without a car, the only real exception I can think of is NYC. However, it has nothing to do with the size of the country, it's in the way towns and cities are laid out. For one thing, discrete residential and commercial zones separated by vast distances and linked by highway are the norm. This makes it impractical to walk or bike to work or shopping. In suburbia, there is no such thing as a corner deli...
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
How about inside the major urban areas though? The vast majority of people live in cities, which also means they will mostly drive inside the city itself, which means relatively short distances. There's no reason why that demographic couldn't switch to electric cars, or why the government isn't helping them go for more eco friendly alternatives.
TulliusCicero 9y ago
The US is this way because we've zoned and developed it this way, not because of the geography. If zoning changed to allow higher building density in cities, especially major cities, you'd see much less sprawl, and better support of walking, biking, and transit. In the US, we are forced to drive because we force ourselves to drive.
jernfrost 9y ago
Yes which is why efficient public transport start with city planning. American cities are not built for public transport. They are built for cars. You need to redesign American cities. The most obvious thing to change is zoning laws. Residential areas, offices and stores need to be more mixed. Another issue is that many problems exist simply because it is too easy to drive. With easy driving you end up with donut cities where anything of importance is located in a ring around the outskirts of the city. That kills the ability to utilize public transport effectively. If you discouraged driving more activity would be forced into neighborhoods and into the downtown area, which would make public transport functional. It is much easier to feed people with public transport into a downtown area than into a ring on the outskirts.

craftyguy 9y ago

So national policy is essentially catering to the minority that live in rural areas? That seems backwards.

tonysdg 9y ago
That minority controls a non-trivial portion of the nation's political power -- just look at the 2016 presidential election for evidence. I'm 100% for clean energy and reducing/eliminating fossil fuel use, but I also recognize the reality that electric vehicles just don't yet have the capability -- and more importantly, infrastructure -- to replace gas- and diesel-powered cars/buses/trucks. Telling rural Americans to piss off is just as bad as asking urban Americans to deal with the smog IMO.
- adrianN 9y ago
  It would be a good start if we replaced ICEs wherever possible, i.e. in cities. The majority of the people lives in cities, almost all car trips are well below fifty miles. If EVs work 100% of the time for 20% of the population that would already be a huge win for the environment and their sales could fund the R&D necessary to make them viable for the rest.
quadrangle 9y ago
It's not about real rural areas, it's sprawl largely. It's been the dominant and TOP-DOWN planned development pattern for a whole generation, and it's totally tragic. Not only from energy perspective but nearly all other variables. There's almost nothing arguably redeemable about sprawl. https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/ is about the best org discussing these issues and isn't coming from a left- or right-wing perspective but a sane, critical-thinking, research-based perspective.
- rdtsc 9y ago
  > and TOP-DOWN planned development pattern for a whole generation, I'd almost think it is bottom-up not top-down. Top down would imply some central planning, allowance for more space, livable communities, more trees, more parks and trails, mixed zoning etc. I grew up in a Soviet Union and towns and cities were designed top-down. Nice wide streets, electric trolley buses in the city that ran regularly. For all the ills and terrible things it was actually not as a bad as far as the general layout was concerned. In US it is bottom-up because every developer buys land then tries to maximize their profit by shoving as many houses and cul-de-sacs as they can. Or as many office buildings etc. Every town wants to maximize its property taxes so they have their own interests at work. People who bought the property also now have different incentives so you have zoning and NIMBY. Ideally all these self-interests would somehow magically align to produce something great. But it often doesn't.
  - mantas 9y ago
    Not all central planning mean same end result. US gov did embrace suburban sprawl. Bottom-up planning example would be post-USSR where people converted community gardens into suburbs on their own. Without any central planning or viable infrastructure.
    - rdtsc 9y ago
      > US gov did embrace suburban sprawl. Yeah but they didn't directly design cities the way a top-down developer would do. They are some planned communities in US. I live next to one, and it is a different feel to it definitely. But it is not a common thing at all. At the federal level there are tax incentives and credits and subsidies and those affect everything but it is still very much a local "maximize my profit" kind of deal. Uncle Sam doesn't care if there are enough play grounds or parks for given area and population density. I think that you are trying to say that the incentives (say cheap mortgages) and subsidies for oil and car manufacturers resulted in suburban sprawl? But that's more of a nasty side-effect than a direct policy or law. In other words we got the bad part of top-down influence without the good part of it. > Bottom-up planning example would be post-USSR where people converted community gardens into suburbs on their own. I jokingly say that overnight they become more capitalist and laissez faire than most countries in the West.
abakker 9y ago
I didn't say it was a good idea...but yeah, most of America by area is totally dependent on cars for access, because more of America is private property, spread far apart. Not a great use of public transit. In many places, the roads themselves are the only real public property.
csours 9y ago
The majority live in Sub-urban/rural areas. Even urban, non-city center areas are not easily servable by buses. See Houston (or anywhere in Texas).
nradov 9y ago
So we should just abandon our rural areas? That seems backwards.
- dao- 9y ago
  It's already happening for loads of other, often good reasons. It's called urbanization. You can try to resist the future but you cannot stop it. You might just as well embrace it. How exactly does that seem backwards?
  - tonyarkles 9y ago
    The situation is already problematic for agriculture. Further decreasing population density in rural settings just makes that worse (e.g. instead of going to the grocery store 10 miles away that happily supports a population of 5,000 people, you instead get to drive 2 hours to Costco in the nearest city to get enough groceries to make the trip worthwhile)
  - wool_gather 9y ago
    Just don't forget that even those urbanites still need resources that come from rural areas, like food. Yes, the service/information economy is clearly the future. But being able to domestically supply essentials to the service/information sectors is overall a good thing from several perspectives, including environmental health.
- landryraccoon 9y ago
  When China is the dominant economic superpower I doubt they will care much about abandoning the rural United States.

freddie_mercury 9y ago

The OP was talking about China. China is bigger than the continental US. I think the persistent myth about the US's size being some unique problem doesn't explain much. What's more, if you think of the EU as a comparison for the US, with the individual counties as analogues for US states, it seems to explain even less. Belgium and Massachusetts are the same size but over has much better transit options than the other.

reissbaker 9y ago
Sheer landmass is less critical for transit than population density. The US has a population density of 33 people per square kilometer; China is nearly five times more dense at 144 people per square kilometer. [1] This sparse population distribution is one of the causes of many of the difficult-to-solve infrastructure problems in the US, such as poor broadband rollout, poor transit, etc. For what it's worth the United States is actually larger in landmass size than China: 9.834 million square km in the US vs. 9.597 million square km in China. But China has over quadruple the population. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
- ItsMe000001 9y ago
  > The US has a population density of 33 people per square kilometer; Yes, and they are evenly spread out across the country, right? What you conveniently leave out, and which turns all these kinds of arguments based on a "total area / total population" numbers into absurd exercises in futility in showing anything useful, is that you have some few mega regions: http://osnetdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/2050_Map_Megaregions2008_150.png http://osnetdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/2050_Map_Me... Even a country like Germany has extremely uneven population, never mind countries like China or Russia. There is nothing special in the situation the US finds itself in at all - especially not since the enormous population shifts of the 20th century from rural areas to cities. When I lived in the US (for a decade), the area I lived in was the SF Bay Area, several places. This is far more densely populated than area in Germany where I grew up (former East Germany). And yet, I could not do anything or get anywhere without a car. It has next to nothing to do with population density - in the US you are forced to drive for distances where you would walk, use a bike or public transit in areas with less pop. density in other countries. Even during my brief first visit to the US end of the last millennium, which was a three month tour of the continental US (NY to Alaska, to Arizona, CA to FL) the "must... use... car!!!" bug got to me too. Towards the end I caught myself getting into the car and driving <200 feet to drop some waste into a wastebasket (from the car window of course) on a shopping mall parking lot... it seemed the natural thing to do, I had to deliberately catch myself and consciously think about what the hell I was doing to recognize the absurdity. After only two months in the country.

fulafel 9y ago

The nordics have canada level pop density and are still doing better.

fsloth 9y ago

I think it is well known the car and petrol companies were heavy lobbyists in developing the transit architecture in the US (including zoning and so on) after the second world war. To exaggerate a bit, the entire country was designed to facilitate automobile sales. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_car_on_societies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_car_on_societ... In the continental europe most of the urban centers predate the automobile hundreds if not thousands of years, thus the existing infrastructure does not use the private automobile as one of the key design constraints. Not so in the US, where huge areas were populated and zoned specifically with the support of the automobile as one of the key constraints. Once the infrastructure has been built using one design constraint, it's really expensive and difficult to unravel it.

DoctorOetker 9y ago
the webs we weave :o
simonh 9y ago
This was the one thing that really surprised me when I first visited the US in the 90s. We'd stop at a store or restaurant somewhere and the nearest neighbouring stores on either side would be 200m away, with their own huge parking lot and no pedestrian route between them. We were driving from Chicago to LA and so when we'd stop I'd want to stretch my legs, but the barriers in the way made a walk like that rally difficult. I couldn't understand why anyone would design a place like that. It was engineered around cars, not people.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Yes, and it all looks the same. We call it "Generica" :)
  - archagon 9y ago
    As an aside: this is one of the running themes in "Little Golden America", a book that chronicles a coast-to-coast American road trip underdtaken by two Soviet humorists in the 30's. The title in Russian is "Single-Story America", in reference to the flatness and uniformity of the country between the few major cities. Really fascinating account, and much of it still rings true to this day. (My review, if anyone is interested: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2114423486 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2114423486)

nickserv 9y ago

Yes, it's difficult if not impossible to live in most places in the US without a car, the only real exception I can think of is NYC. However, it has nothing to do with the size of the country, it's in the way towns and cities are laid out. For one thing, discrete residential and commercial zones separated by vast distances and linked by highway are the norm. This makes it impractical to walk or bike to work or shopping. In suburbia, there is no such thing as a corner deli...

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

How about inside the major urban areas though? The vast majority of people live in cities, which also means they will mostly drive inside the city itself, which means relatively short distances. There's no reason why that demographic couldn't switch to electric cars, or why the government isn't helping them go for more eco friendly alternatives.

TulliusCicero 9y ago

The US is this way because we've zoned and developed it this way, not because of the geography. If zoning changed to allow higher building density in cities, especially major cities, you'd see much less sprawl, and better support of walking, biking, and transit. In the US, we are forced to drive because we force ourselves to drive.

jernfrost 9y ago

Yes which is why efficient public transport start with city planning. American cities are not built for public transport. They are built for cars. You need to redesign American cities. The most obvious thing to change is zoning laws. Residential areas, offices and stores need to be more mixed. Another issue is that many problems exist simply because it is too easy to drive. With easy driving you end up with donut cities where anything of importance is located in a ring around the outskirts of the city. That kills the ability to utilize public transport effectively. If you discouraged driving more activity would be forced into neighborhoods and into the downtown area, which would make public transport functional. It is much easier to feed people with public transport into a downtown area than into a ring on the outskirts.