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Why wouldn’t it work in the suburbs?

• Qwertious 2y ago
  Current suburbs are quite low-density due to roads and front-yards pointlessly wasting space. It works fine with Japanese-style suburbs, but car-centric suburbs need those front yards to cut down on the sound of fast-moving cars directly outside the house (and reducing speed limits in suburbs down to 5 or 10 is utterly unthinkable for most people), and they also need a 2-car garage with another 2 car spots on the driveway and then another 3 spots on the curb, in case they need to park 7 cars at once for some reason and all their neighbours do too.
  • lazyasciiart 2y ago
    It works in plenty of Australian suburbs, which seem pretty car centric. I don’t know how they compare to Japanese suburbs.
    • Qwertious 2y ago
      Australian housing prices are literally some of the highest in the world; we're in the middle of a housing crisis. It might "work" in that sense that with sufficient mineral exports, we haven't gone bankrupt yet, but it's horrifically inefficient. Sydney housing prices are higher than in Tokyo.
      • lazyasciiart 2y ago
        That’s totally irrelevant to whether you can implement public transit in a suburb. If you were actually talking about Australian suburbs in your first comment then you were wrong.
• AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Why wouldn’t it work in the suburbs? The number of cars per hour during most of the day on a suburban street is commonly around one. If a bus runs that frequently it would have one passenger and all you've done is replace one midsized car with one large bus at significant expense. If the bus runs less frequently than that it would have zero passengers because people will buy a car and drive it themselves rather than wait that long for a bus. This is already being somewhat generous by assuming that people would be willing to wait the balance of an hour for a bus. For mass transit to actually work you want service every five or ten minutes.