4 ms·

This is simply not true at all. There were countless small towns in America that had streetcars. It scales up quite well too. Your town turns into a city? Demol

This is simply not true at all. There were countless small towns in America that had streetcars. It scales up quite well too. Your town turns into a city? Demolish the park-n-rides and turn them into stores. I hate this bullshit of "America is too spread out for transit." No, it is now. It's only happened in <100 years. It was because GM and Ford bought up all the street cars and replaced them with buses or killed them. It can be reversed. Jena, Germany is a town of $100k with 4 trams and 3 intercity rail stations. Chattanooga, TN, home of the famous song about the Chattanooga Choo Choo, has 200k people and doesn't even have an AmTrak station. Public transport is the single largest factor in reducing poverty in any town or city. Car ownership should never be required of any American. It should always be a luxury item.

ingsoc79 8y ago
The reason the streetcars went away in the US was because of competition from cars, which, not coincidentally, were beginning their rise to dominance ~100 years ago. GM and Ford were in the process of killing streetcars the moment the Model T went on sale. The vast majority of American towns, with their lower density and wider streets than their European counterparts, were simply better served by the automobile than by mass transit in 1920, and after 100 years of car-centric planning are even more so today. The genie is already out of the bottle, and with the exception of a few rapidly-growing cities, mass transit use in most American cities is falling.
- pm90 8y ago
  No, no, no. The amount of misinformation in this post is staggering. I'm assuming good faith on your part but its hard to do so. > The reason the streetcars went away in the US was because of competition from cars, which, not coincidentally, were beginning their rise to dominance ~100 years ago. GM and Ford were in the process of killing streetcars the moment the Model T went on sale. They killed it because they knew that a car-dominated culture would substantially increase their markets. By killing streetcars, they were simply increasing their market. They did not do this out of any sense of altruism. The other step that greatly helped was convincing the Federal Government to invest in an interstate highway system that deliberately cut through the major cities. > The vast majority of American towns, with their lower density and wider streets than their European counterparts, were simply better served by the automobile than by mass transit in 1920, and after 100 years of car-centric planning are even more so today. They weren't always this way. Suburbia as we know it now was a consequence of the postwar boom and white flight; most towns fairly dense. In fact, they were dense enough to be effectively served by trams! > The genie is already out of the bottle, and with the exception of a few rapidly-growing cities, mass transit use in most American cities is falling. No its not.
  - ingsoc79 8y ago
    Mass transit is a viable solution to people only when it's more convenient than cars. When the hassle of driving and finding parking is less than the extra walk/transfers/etc of taking transit, most people will drive. If you have mobility issues or have cargo you need to haul back, you're even more likely to drive. Here in Seattle our roads are at capacity and the city is actively working to increase density, creating a virtuous circle of improved transit availability and frequency. This is great when I need to get to the airport during rush hour - I live near the UW and can take the light rail and be guaranteed to be at there in an hour, with a bus transfer. Outside of rush hour, I ask someone to drive me there in ~25 minutes. If I lived farther away from the nearest light rail station, I'd necessarily choose to get a ride every time. Unless your city is actively making transit a priority, or its road system is packed to the gills, the shift from cars to transit is not going to happen on its own. article on falling US transit ridership: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/falling-transit-ridership-poses-an-emergency-for-cities-experts-fear/2018/03/20/ffb67c28-2865-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.eb02731a4aea https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/fal...
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Why would you need to transfer to bus? Wouldn’t link go from UW straight through to the airport?
      - ingsoc79 8y ago
        I take the bus from my neighborhood, transferring to light rail at the UW station.
    - chrisdhoover 8y ago
      It is important to split mass transit from public transit. I ride mass transit everyday but am vilified for it since it is private.
      - mac01021 8y ago
Karrot_Kream 8y ago
> I hate this bullshit of "America is too spread out for transit." No, it is now. It's only happened in <100 years. It was because GM and Ford bought up all the street cars and replaced them with buses or killed them. It can be reversed. Unfortunately, the American population has also exponentially grown in that same time period. It really isn't that easy to switch back to streetcars or light-rail or bicycling, and if someone figures out how, it'll probably be the biggest infrastructural development of the next fifty years.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Unfortunately, the American population has also exponentially grown in that same time period. Even if that were true (I'm pretty sure even with immigration, the doubling time of the US population has been increasing over that period, so the growth has not been exponential, which would be constant time to any given multiple) why would that particular shape of the growth curve make a difference? If you are just misusing "exponential" to mean "fast", more population in the same area makes mass transit more, not less, viable an alternative to individual transit.
  - Karrot_Kream 8y ago
    Was there a reason to be pedantic here? If you look at [1] then the US population has grown exponentially, and we are in the higher slope portion of the curve. But if you zoom into 1920-{current} you can form a linear curve. Anyway, city planners are not looking at aggregate population statistics and making their decisions based off those. Usually, cities grow due to migration of new people. As more people enter the city, city governments decide what infrastructure to add in order to sustain population growth. For many years, the consensus was simply to add more roads. Studies eventually revealed the phenomenon of Induced Demand [2] which caused more roads to be consumed after creation of the roads. This and the realization that roads filled with single-occupancy vehicles don't scale well has led to a more "modern" consensus that transit makes sense once cities become big enough. For a long time, people thought that building more roads was the way to make a city more accessible. [1]: https://www.census-charts.com/Population/pop-us-1790-2000.html https://www.census-charts.com/Population/pop-us-1790-2000.ht... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

ingsoc79 8y ago

The reason the streetcars went away in the US was because of competition from cars, which, not coincidentally, were beginning their rise to dominance ~100 years ago. GM and Ford were in the process of killing streetcars the moment the Model T went on sale. The vast majority of American towns, with their lower density and wider streets than their European counterparts, were simply better served by the automobile than by mass transit in 1920, and after 100 years of car-centric planning are even more so today. The genie is already out of the bottle, and with the exception of a few rapidly-growing cities, mass transit use in most American cities is falling.

pm90 8y ago
No, no, no. The amount of misinformation in this post is staggering. I'm assuming good faith on your part but its hard to do so. > The reason the streetcars went away in the US was because of competition from cars, which, not coincidentally, were beginning their rise to dominance ~100 years ago. GM and Ford were in the process of killing streetcars the moment the Model T went on sale. They killed it because they knew that a car-dominated culture would substantially increase their markets. By killing streetcars, they were simply increasing their market. They did not do this out of any sense of altruism. The other step that greatly helped was convincing the Federal Government to invest in an interstate highway system that deliberately cut through the major cities. > The vast majority of American towns, with their lower density and wider streets than their European counterparts, were simply better served by the automobile than by mass transit in 1920, and after 100 years of car-centric planning are even more so today. They weren't always this way. Suburbia as we know it now was a consequence of the postwar boom and white flight; most towns fairly dense. In fact, they were dense enough to be effectively served by trams! > The genie is already out of the bottle, and with the exception of a few rapidly-growing cities, mass transit use in most American cities is falling. No its not.
- ingsoc79 8y ago
  Mass transit is a viable solution to people only when it's more convenient than cars. When the hassle of driving and finding parking is less than the extra walk/transfers/etc of taking transit, most people will drive. If you have mobility issues or have cargo you need to haul back, you're even more likely to drive. Here in Seattle our roads are at capacity and the city is actively working to increase density, creating a virtuous circle of improved transit availability and frequency. This is great when I need to get to the airport during rush hour - I live near the UW and can take the light rail and be guaranteed to be at there in an hour, with a bus transfer. Outside of rush hour, I ask someone to drive me there in ~25 minutes. If I lived farther away from the nearest light rail station, I'd necessarily choose to get a ride every time. Unless your city is actively making transit a priority, or its road system is packed to the gills, the shift from cars to transit is not going to happen on its own. article on falling US transit ridership: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/falling-transit-ridership-poses-an-emergency-for-cities-experts-fear/2018/03/20/ffb67c28-2865-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.eb02731a4aea https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/fal...
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Why would you need to transfer to bus? Wouldn’t link go from UW straight through to the airport?
    - ingsoc79 8y ago
      I take the bus from my neighborhood, transferring to light rail at the UW station.
  - chrisdhoover 8y ago
    It is important to split mass transit from public transit. I ride mass transit everyday but am vilified for it since it is private.
    - mac01021 8y ago

Karrot_Kream 8y ago

> I hate this bullshit of "America is too spread out for transit." No, it is now. It's only happened in <100 years. It was because GM and Ford bought up all the street cars and replaced them with buses or killed them. It can be reversed. Unfortunately, the American population has also exponentially grown in that same time period. It really isn't that easy to switch back to streetcars or light-rail or bicycling, and if someone figures out how, it'll probably be the biggest infrastructural development of the next fifty years.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> Unfortunately, the American population has also exponentially grown in that same time period. Even if that were true (I'm pretty sure even with immigration, the doubling time of the US population has been increasing over that period, so the growth has not been exponential, which would be constant time to any given multiple) why would that particular shape of the growth curve make a difference? If you are just misusing "exponential" to mean "fast", more population in the same area makes mass transit more, not less, viable an alternative to individual transit.
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  Was there a reason to be pedantic here? If you look at [1] then the US population has grown exponentially, and we are in the higher slope portion of the curve. But if you zoom into 1920-{current} you can form a linear curve. Anyway, city planners are not looking at aggregate population statistics and making their decisions based off those. Usually, cities grow due to migration of new people. As more people enter the city, city governments decide what infrastructure to add in order to sustain population growth. For many years, the consensus was simply to add more roads. Studies eventually revealed the phenomenon of Induced Demand [2] which caused more roads to be consumed after creation of the roads. This and the realization that roads filled with single-occupancy vehicles don't scale well has led to a more "modern" consensus that transit makes sense once cities become big enough. For a long time, people thought that building more roads was the way to make a city more accessible. [1]: https://www.census-charts.com/Population/pop-us-1790-2000.html https://www.census-charts.com/Population/pop-us-1790-2000.ht... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand