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As someone who visited the US as a kid and was even then shocked by the amount of space dedicated to cars, seeing this information on a map still blew me away.

• unsignedint 4y ago
  The concept of a 'big investment' takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to public transportation in the United States, especially considering the vast geographical expanse of many metropolitan areas. In most cases, unless one resides in the heart of a city, public transportation isn't a practical option. This is evident in the fact that a 20-minute drive can easily transform into a commute of 90 minutes or longer when relying on public transit. I truly wish there were a way for me to avoid driving and still get to my destination efficiently.
  • slaymaker1907 4y ago
    I think that’s part of the point. This vast sprawl is somewhat caused by our over reliance on private vehicles. Also, a factor of more than 2 for travel times is VERY bad for public transit, even in the US.
    • sokoloff 4y ago
      I’ve previously written up “what would it take to make a 9 AM meeting at my office?” It’s a factor of 4 or 5 worse via public transit and I live in a probably top 5 (definitely top 10) US city as it pertains to our public transit system (Boston). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197
      • htag 4y ago
        At 8.5 miles a commute by bicycle or e-bike would be cheaper and close to thirty minutes. It would be healthier. It wouldn't require a parking spot.
        • quesera 4y ago
          > At 8.5 miles a commute by bicycle or e-bike GP said Boston.
          • htag 4y ago
            I've never been. Are bicycles illegal there?
            • quesera 4y ago
              Yes.
              • Dylan16807 4y ago
                One of the first search results for Boston bicycle declares it the fourth best biking city in the US, so you're going to need to be more specific about whatever criticism you're exaggerating.
                • jen20 4y ago
                  Boston sometimes gets 2 feet of snow in a single day, and often has sub-freezing temperatures. People just get on with life (but not really on e-bikes).
                  • htag 4y ago
                    Do people in Boston drive in 2 feet of snow?
                    • deleted 4y ago
    • kjkjadksj 4y ago
      Honestly travel times on transit are bad everywhere. Its hard to beat the car, which is essentially a bus that goes express door to door to your destination, and can leave when you want. People take the alternative only when they can’t afford to take the car in regularly (e.g. bridge tolls and high parking costs in nyc ensure mainly high income people enjoy the convenience of a car). Even if you lived just 15 mins walking from a train station, thats a half hour added to every trip just getting back home, to say nothing of the walking on the other end. Imagine if you were not in walking shape on top of this. Its for the greater good of course to take collective transportation over resource intensive individual transportation, but you sure do pay for it with your free time in most places, not just in the U.S.
      • macNchz 4y ago
        I think one of the issues is that once you start designing places around driving, cars become non-optional for day to day living, whereas many places designed around transit generally do not expect people to use transit for every single outing. For example: most car oriented American suburbs simply require a car for anything other than visiting a neighbor, whereas in a transit oriented city you might use transit to commute to work, but be able to walk to some local shops and services. I think many people who are familiar only with car dependent lifestyles make the mistake of imagining a car-free lifestyle that involves replacing all of the car trips they make one-to-one with bus or train trips, which would indeed be really cumbersome, but isn’t really how things work (at least in my experience growing up in a rural small town in the US and having lived in a couple of European cities and NYC).
        • kjkjadksj 4y ago
          Even if you lived out in the kanto plain where the trains came before the highways, its not like people are taking the bullet train to the grocery store thats a 5 min drive with the car you already own. Few places on earth are so dense where the car is actually a consistently losing bet when you account for all your trips. I’m not even sure what building for transit rather than car would look like for a semi urban or rural area, considering the transit with the lowest capital investment, the bus, is also benefited by car oriented development like a road network with more connections between nodes. Even in the times before a car, some people had a horse or mule to essentially play the role of a car today, of an instant express bus.
    • rahimnathwani 4y ago
      Most of my journeys here in SF would take 2.5x to 4x by public transport.
  • kjkjadksj 4y ago
    Because the US insists transit need to look like a big sexy expensive two mezzanine underground platform, when a decidedly unsexy painted bus lane on the already existing wide arterial would offer most of the same utility for orders of magnitude less money.
    • orangepurple 4y ago
      All of the commenters are missing a huge point. US commuter rail projects are hugely corrupt enterprises. Just look at Honolulu for a blatant example of corruption in infrastructure spending (their train NO-ONE wanted)
      • kjkjadksj 4y ago
        I’ve heard sometimes metros are forced to contract with certain contractors in particular because they have headhunted all the talent qualified to interpret the metros own requirements. You can imagine how much abuse this situation can lead to. The US needs to drop the contractor model and just directly staff labor for public works. If there is enough work going around to maintain a contracting company, then there’s therefore enough work to staff a public rail building division, and build out some standardized and therefore cheaper designs for this infrastructure.
  • magicalist 4y ago
    > This is evident in the fact that a 20-minute drive can easily transform into a commute of 90 minutes or longer when relying on public transit. I truly wish there were a way for me to avoid driving and still get to my destination efficiently It's not like it's the natural state of things that 25% of the Atlanta city center is dedicated to parking so we just have to accept the downsides. There's a reason everything is so spread out and so it's difficult to walk places or design efficient public transit, and it's the same reason driving and parking your car is the most efficient transportation method.
• syntheweave 4y ago
  I feel assured that the transition is going to be pretty quick, watching Waymos and Cruises going around SF and dealing with some challenging traffic situations and weather(Waymo is definitely better at not getting stuck, but the gap is not insurmountable). As soon as they proliferate at scale, the risk profile changes such that you can bike everywhere safely, and parking is no longer a major urban issue, because the fleet is going to have a more flexible usage pattern whether or not individuals own the vehicles: instead of one space per vehicle per destination, it's going to be compressed down to parking space for the neighborhood plus drop-off zones. So to me, it's obvious that the market is going at the problem just about as fast as it can, and once the adoption S-curve hits, "need to drive" relaxes because other potential uses aren't being suppressed. You'll still have many instances where mass transit and active transit present a lower cost structure than taxi, and they'll have a lot of leeway to grow.
  • htag 4y ago
    Maybe. From the outside looking in self driving cars are vaporware that are very late on delivery. I wouldn't want to bet my city's architecture on this promise. It might be nice if they deliver on this promise though.
• avar 4y ago
  The answer to this particular problem isn't public transportation. There's places elsewhere in the developed world where there's no public transportation, and everyone uses a car for longer trips. You can usually still cross the street safely as a pedestrian, and expect to reliably find a sidewalk next to the road. US roads, intersections, parking spots etc. are also absurdly large by the standards of most other countries, it all adds up.
  • klabb3 4y ago
    > The answer to this particular problem isn't public transportation. Public transport is not a self-goal, but it’s the best way by far to reduce the spatial requirements for transportation. In particular subways and commuter trains can move an absolutely insane amount of people for even the largest metropolitan areas, without obliterating the ability to walk and getting quickly from point A to B. Others include having motorcycles and bicycles for individual transport. That can work in small cities but usually impact walkability anyways. If you look at south east asia for instance, often lacking in good public transport, but having a lot of motorcycles in large cities making pedestrian movement hard.
    • seer 4y ago
      As someone who recently experienced hanoi traffic as both pedestrian and motorcyclist - I can attest that it can be scary, but after a certain learning period not that bad. The big problem there was the lack of sidewalks for pedestrians so you kinda had to go into traffic even if you were just following the streets. Crossing even the busiest boulevards was actually easy, if a bit nerve racking. The flow of scooters just parts around you as you cross, giving you the “I am Moses” feel - you only have to be visible and consistent with your movement. Honestly they should just get rid of all the zebra crossings and pedestrian lights - those don’t work anyway, and just build lots of pedestrian islands everywhere and they would be golden, oh and ban cars. The amount of people those scooters move throughout hanoi is just staggering - even if they are a bit slow, they make up for it being like an organic flow that doesn’t stop for anything as it can just ride around it.
  • ntonozzi 4y ago
• m463 4y ago
  I know many females who won't park far and walk somewhere because they don't feel safe. This goes 5x at night. Do folks realize that walking somewhere in a city is like running a gauntlet to some of the population?
  • vegetablepotpie 4y ago
    As a man I don’t like the perception that I’m under suspicion of being a threat to half the population. And I shouldn’t be. The vast majority of violence against women is perpetuated by men they know, not strangers [1]. Domestic violence is not a reason why our cities should be filled with 1-ton death machines that spew soot, carbon monoxide, and nitrous oxide. Cars don’t solve that problem. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americas-deadly-epidemic-violence-against-women-2022-07-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americas-deadly-epidemic-vi...
    • tomjakubowski 4y ago
      The potential downside for a woman who misjudges a dangerous man is far more severe than the potential downside for a man who is misjudged as dangerous by a woman.
  • throw0101c 4y ago
    > Do folks realize that walking somewhere in a city is like running a gauntlet to some of the population? Which is more of a reason to have more people walk: the more people in area going hither and thither the less isolated and vulnerable a person will feel. People often feel most vulnerable when they feel isolated, which is what happens on a lifeless street. If a street has a sidewalk cafes, bars, restaurants, and people waiting in lines to get into clubs, then there is a feeling of community.
    • RajT88 4y ago
      This /\ My wife and I a couple years back moved to the very edge of the suburbs. Like, across the street is forest preserves, and behind us is a river. We have only spoken with fewer than 10 neighbors since we moved in 2 years ago. Her, and her sisters all talk about it being like a "serial killer neighborhood". Even my fishing buddy nextdoor sort of rolls his eyes about how his wife says similar things sometimes. But I tell my fishing buddy: You'll never understand how vulnerable women feel. Ever. Honestly, being afraid of a place where nobody is around is statistically safer - people don't lock their doors in my neighborhood. I've started also not locking doors. It's that kind of place. That has been a point of friction for my wife and I too - I have been really diligent prior to this, because I always lived in really populous areas. My wife, thankfully, has never been a victim of any kind of violence. But she has had experiences where she avoided that. Once time some big guy late at night followed her into her apartment building asking to use her phone to call for a tow truck or some nonsense. She knew it was BS, but gave it to him anyways. He ran away. Men will never be able to understand how vulnerable women feel. We simply do not experience the world in the same way. I'll give another example to help anyone still reading get it: I once went to a haunted house (the Rob Zombie one in Chicagoland) with my buddy and his wife. Probably 10 times, actors working there tried to jump-scare her, and not me or my buddy. Every goddamned time. Whether she was in front, or behind, or between us. She does not scare easily, so she was just really annoyed. Predatory men see women as easy victims in ways they do not other men. > females They prefer "women", just FYI.
• donatj 4y ago
  > The hyperloop, a ridiculously bad alternative to a subway The idea was for the Hyperloop was to do the 400 miles straight shot from LA to San Francisco at speeds up to 300mph. I don't see how a subway could do anything comparable.
  • anothernewdude 4y ago
    I agree with you, but I would add: I don't see how a hyperloop could do that either.
    • SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
      Good point! My idea is to have people simply rocket launched via pods from LA to SF over the air about 200-300 meters off the ground on average. Sure, it’s unsafe, and probably has a ton of reasons that it won’t work. But isn’t it an innovative way to solve transportation problems that definitely isn’t a tactic intended to downplay public transit in CA so that my totally unrelated car business has less of a risk of succeeding?
  • bagels 4y ago
    The state can't even build a "high speed" (or as other countries might call it, regular speed) train track between those places.
    • jcranmer 4y ago
      The CAHSR plans were for ~350 km/h rail speed, which is basically the highest end of high-speed rail. It's the ~200 km/h speed of the NEC that is at best barely-high-speed rail.
      • bagels 4y ago
        The plans were for that. It's not built, and much of it, if built, is now not planned to support that speed.
  • aeyes 4y ago
• sublinear 4y ago
  > seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me. Ever see that monorail episode of The Simpsons? Yeah that's where we're at. There's a strong desire from many people to slow things down and be more deliberate and careful before any more big changes. There's a sense of disillusionment about "progressivism" amongst even those who crave the most righteous of vibes. This is a weird time to be alive and people just don't want to wake up to construction crews ironically destroying their cities to make way for yet another wave of gentrification pretending not to be.
• kortilla 4y ago
  > And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me. Because the majority of the people in the US don’t actually want to ride public transportation and they like houses. It’s not that difficult to grasp.
  • rchaud 4y ago
    That's like saying Americans love working at McDonald's and Walmart because they are America's largest employers. Americans not liking public transportation, and not willing to fund public transportation are two different things.
  • aquaticsunset 4y ago
    I'll counter this - the majority of the people in the US want to live somewhere and get around in the least difficult method. Due to decades of policymaking, that happens to be houses and cars. It's very nearsighted to think our model is the penultimate in structuring society. Plenty of people are happy, fulfilled, and productive living in apartments & townhouses while taking trains to work.
    • ipaddr 4y ago
      Why would someone prefer to live like ants? Moving from a large place with a forest backyard to a tiny apartment is a lower standard of living. You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space. People can be happy in an apartment but most would trade that in for a house they could afford it.
      • Dylan16807 4y ago
        > Why would someone prefer to live like ants? Why would someone prefer to live like a snail? > Moving from a large place with a forest backyard to a tiny apartment is a lower standard of living. You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space. A house does not imply a large backyard. Suburbs are the bigger problem, and they don't usually have much forest. And apartments don't have to be tiny. If you're comparing against a house in a similar location, that buys a lot of apartment space.
• loeg 4y ago
  Biking here in the states isn't a problem from a distance perspective -- the problems are road safety and destination security (bike theft is a big problem but typically not valued by police because of the nominally low dollar impact). Walking, yeah.
  • thomastjeffery 4y ago
    That depends on the city, and where in it you live. If you live in a large suburban area (like many Americans), then biking distance is a huge problem. Sure, making an actually tractable amount of public transit in every suburb would resolve that problem, but that's a huge investment, and the overwhelming majority of Americans can't even imagine what the result might look like.
    • brewdad 4y ago
      I would argue biking distance isn't the problem in suburbia, it's biking safety. My rather spread out suburb is about 8 miles across. That's less than an hour for any cyclist and a fit cyclist could do it in half that time. The trouble is that most of those miles are on 45 mph stroads with either no bike lane or a thin stripe of paint for protection from cars and it's full of debris most of the year.
      • thomastjeffery 4y ago
        > That's less than an hour for any cyclist and a fit cyclist could do it in half that time. And how long for a car? 5min? 15min? If you have a car, then you will likely use it for some percentage of trips. That's a pretty serious motivation to not become "a fit cyclist". All of these problems work together. This also works in the inverse: a good solution would do something to resolve all of these problems.
  • antifa 4y ago
    Google maps says going to work would be a 6 hour bike ride. There is technically a train available to for half of the journey.
• thomastjeffery 4y ago
  > And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me. That's because you are looking from the outside in. Every person who has grown up in the US has grown up in this situation. Having to drive nearly everywhere is our version of normal. Public transit in the US sucks. In practically every city that even has it, it's the worst way to get anywhere. It's often a last resort: a tool for the desperately poor. On top of that, most of the US is made up of small towns that public transit wouldn't make any sense for. A significant percentage of Americans must regularly travel between a major city and a small town. That means they must have a car, and a place in the city to park it. It's a fool's errand to convince most people that they should drive and take public transit all in one trip, even if it would save them time and gas. There is more to this situation than the vicious cycle that perpetuates it. If we can be clear about how we intend to accommodate that reality, we might be able to do something about it politically.
  • pharmakom 4y ago
    The UK used to have rail links from all of the small villages into the cities. It was an expensive system, but now that has been ripped out for decades we can see that the alternative is far worse.
  • 29083011397778 4y ago
    > On top of that, most of the US is made up of small towns that public transit wouldn't make any sense for. A significant percentage of Americans must regularly travel between a major city and a small town. That means they must have a car, and a place in the city to park it. Hang on though: I can't tell my neighbouring city to push for more housing because, while I want to live there in the future, the people that live there now like their lack of housing. Similarly, why can't the people that currently live in the city tell their local politicians that spending all this space for parking the residents don't need is stupid?
    • Avshalom 4y ago
      people commuting in is a large part of the work force in cities, tourism and generally shopping are important for their economies, also a lot of that parking space is needed by the residents because chicken/egg they all have cars too.
• vGPU 4y ago
  The last time I took a bus there was a homeless man openly touching himself. The time before a fight broke out between a couple of drunks. Can you understand why I avoid public transport at all costs and don’t wish to expose my family to it?
  • foxyv 4y ago
    I can understand for sure. However, you may want to consider why you only saw drunk and homeless people on the bus. It has nothing to do with public transit, but it has a lot to do with parking lots and how we build our cities. Cars insulate us from reality and allow us to ignore our problems. Our children will not be so lucky.