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Yea, he covered this with his line that "A lot of North American public transit advocacy can feel like a perpetual lament that North American cities aren’t laid

Yea, he covered this with his line that "A lot of North American public transit advocacy can feel like a perpetual lament that North American cities aren’t laid out like European ones."

reissbaker 7y ago
That seems like a pretty dismissive response: are European cities laid out like that as a response to light rail? If so, what's to say that North American cities won't also adapt to the presence of light rail? And it's not just European cities; Japan has an excellent subway system, and I've heard China's very new one is good as well. This feels like the learned-helplessness counterpart to American exceptionalism: what's so special about North America? Other cities adopted rail and adapted; the article doesn't address why North American cities couldn't as well. And in places with a good subway, buses are despised — they're slower, overstuffed (a single subway station can accommodate hundreds or thousands during commute hours; a single bus stop would have lines hours long at that rate), less comfortable... Buses can't move people in a dense area at the volume a subway can. (Also, why does this article only address Toronto? NYC is a pretty strong retort to the idea that subways can't work in North America.)
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  It's also easy to forget that the high density portions of most American cities were built around long since abandoned light rail or equivalents. San Francisco has turned a couple classic lines of street cars into a working museum, but it's easy to forget a much larger amount of San Francisco was served by them for several decades to the point where neighborhoods were shaped by them. It's even sometimes harder to further recall how many other American cities (almost all of them) had street car routes and passenger train routes lost to time other than as ghost remnants of neighborhood layouts (the odd street circle that used to be a street car turntable, the odd on street parking spaces where once was a street car passenger transit center, the odd railway trellis that used to be for passengers, etc). It's almost cultural amnesia at this point that so much of North America believes it has used nothing but the car for transport. It's not even that far removed in history (the "Greatest Generation" had a lot more transit options than today, which is not even 3 or 4 generations removed).

Yea, he covered this with his line that "A lot of North American public transit advocacy can feel like a perpetual lament that North American cities aren’t laid out like European ones."

reissbaker 7y ago

That seems like a pretty dismissive response: are European cities laid out like that as a response to light rail? If so, what's to say that North American cities won't also adapt to the presence of light rail? And it's not just European cities; Japan has an excellent subway system, and I've heard China's very new one is good as well. This feels like the learned-helplessness counterpart to American exceptionalism: what's so special about North America? Other cities adopted rail and adapted; the article doesn't address why North American cities couldn't as well. And in places with a good subway, buses are despised — they're slower, overstuffed (a single subway station can accommodate hundreds or thousands during commute hours; a single bus stop would have lines hours long at that rate), less comfortable... Buses can't move people in a dense area at the volume a subway can. (Also, why does this article only address Toronto? NYC is a pretty strong retort to the idea that subways can't work in North America.)

WorldMaker 7y ago
It's also easy to forget that the high density portions of most American cities were built around long since abandoned light rail or equivalents. San Francisco has turned a couple classic lines of street cars into a working museum, but it's easy to forget a much larger amount of San Francisco was served by them for several decades to the point where neighborhoods were shaped by them. It's even sometimes harder to further recall how many other American cities (almost all of them) had street car routes and passenger train routes lost to time other than as ghost remnants of neighborhood layouts (the odd street circle that used to be a street car turntable, the odd on street parking spaces where once was a street car passenger transit center, the odd railway trellis that used to be for passengers, etc). It's almost cultural amnesia at this point that so much of North America believes it has used nothing but the car for transport. It's not even that far removed in history (the "Greatest Generation" had a lot more transit options than today, which is not even 3 or 4 generations removed).