4 ms·
> Transportation is the biggest difference between the us and a lot of the rest of the world. Switzerland is the size of a small New England state. Mass transit
by bhaak 7y ago
> Transportation is the biggest difference between the us and a lot of the rest of the world. Switzerland is the size of a small New England state. Mass transit is a tough thing to scale.
I don't buy this argument. "We are much bigger than $OTHER_COUNTRY therefore we can't have comparable public transport".
I concur that for the whole country this might be a viable argument but it doesn't explain why the public transport in metropolitan areas are also often not good at all.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoI wonder how many people that don’t buy that argument have driven across the USA a few times?
- opportune 7y agoThe commenter restricted it to metro areas and I concur. There is not too much difference in density from cities like Seattle and San Francisco from European cities. I don’t think we should be building high speed rail from Anchorage to Lincoln, NE but there is no reason we can’t have a ubahn/sbahn system in each large city and high speed rail down the coasts
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago>There is not too much difference in density from cities like Seattle and San Francisco from European cities. Not sure I can get on board with that. It's the number of cities. Switzerland has ONE city with a population over 250k. USA has EIGHTY EIGHT or so over 238 times the area. That matters where you invest, how you build, etc. As to why we can't have high speed rails, ask California.