8 ms·

It's curious but unsurprising that privatization of public transport is considered an answer to congestion when existence of good (or great) public transport is

It's curious but unsurprising that privatization of public transport is considered an answer to congestion when existence of good (or great) public transport is the working answer one can find in many places around the world. When I visited NYC two years ago, I was blown away by how unbelievably bad public transport infrastructure is. The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center. The fact these have not been built, in 2025, when Metro transport networks in most cities are now over a century old, is telling. IMHO the real problem is cars. The US still can't imagine itself without cars. I live in Berlin center. The only reason for me to own a car is prestige. So I don't. During rush hour any destination I go to, even outer city, would take me the same time by public transport as by car. At least. During non-peak hours going by car can be from 25-40% faster than by public transport if you trust Google Maps & co. But these estimates only consider travel time. When you add finding a place to park at the destination (and walking to the destination as the place may not be right in front) this shrinks to either negative numbers or max. savings of maybe 25%. My average travel time is around 30mins by public transport. This includes walking to and from the station. Why would I own a car to save maybe, on a lucky day, 5mins? At the same time bike infrastructure is being improved. Lots of side streets have been declared bike streets, cars may only enter if they have business there (you live there or deliver something). The city has enforced this with blocking off intersections on such streets with permanent structures that let only bicycles pass. Big streets have bike lanes that are often separated by a curb or bollards from car traffic. This makes it also less nice to drive a car. You can't use Waze any more to guide you through side streets to avoid congestion because these streets can't be passed through any more by car, only on foot or by bike. Which means the chance of being stuck in traffic increases. When at the same time you have options to be there just as fast with public transport and almost as fast but more healthy and with less likeliness of being ran over by a car, by bike. These ideas are not new. And there are many more things other cities do to reduce car traffic/need for cars. If you think of private mini busses, the best examples IMHO is actually ridepooling, e.g. Volkswagen's Moia in Hamburg and Hannover.

Thorrez 1y ago
>IMHO the real problem is cars. The US still can't imagine itself without cars. All of the US except NYC. In NYC 45.6% of households own a car. In Berlin it's 49%. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-the-highest-and-lowest-vehicle-ownership/ https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-th... https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/car-free-berlin-li.113268 https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/car-free-berlin-li.113268
- coliveira 1y ago
  This only showcases how bad the US is in this area, when the city that most relies on public transportation still has such a bad service.
- steadicat 1y ago
  You’re kind of proving the point here. NYC has fewer car owners and yet NYC doesn’t have a single pedestrian street or street closed to through traffic. Sounds like a city that can’t imagine itself without cars even though it’s completely realistic.
  - lbotos 1y ago
    There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one. Broadway has had large expansions to its curbing from the flatiron building to union square. Its a slow process but its getting there.
    - blululu 1y ago
      Which one? Berry is semiclosed, but people routinely remove the wooden barriers so they can drive on it and delivery app e-bikes/motor bikes routinely blast down it at speeds that make it uncomfortable to walk. Broadway has expanded the sidewalk but it is definitely not closed to traffic. Also 2 partial closures in a city of 10 million kind of proves the point.
    - virtualritz 1y ago
      > There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one. One street in a city the size of NY? I thought you were joking when I read that reply. I thought it might have been straight out of a Monty Python sketch. ;) On that note, if you want to get an idea what pedestrianization does to cities, enter "Barcelona Superblocks" into your fav. search engine.
jfim 1y ago
Part of the reason is that public transit for whatever reason appears to be unusually sketchy in many places in the US. For example, a few years ago, there was an incident with a man with two chainsaws threatening passengers [1] in the local transit system. In contrast, the transit systems I've seen in Europe and Asia appear well maintained, clean, and relatively safe. Biking is also safer in European cities that have proper bike infrastructure. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/man-armed-chainsaw-threatens-bart-riders-says-ill-cut-your-freaking-head-1194182 https://www.newsweek.com/man-armed-chainsaw-threatens-bart-r...
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  ? Japanese subways were infamously the site of a nerve gas attack in the 90s. 33 people were killed in mass knife attacks in Kunming, China in 2014. France has had a handful of subway and train attacks. However, the point is that these incidents, along with the BART one, are unusual. Avoiding public transit because of them would be like avoiding flying because of air accidents or avoiding going to a theater or musical event because of the various massacres that have happened at them over the years.
  - horns4lyfe 1y ago
    That’s rare enough to not keep people away from public transport. Speaking from experience in Portland OR, it’s more the daily low level stress of having to keep an eye out for the meth crazed lunatics around you. There always seems to be one and they’re wildly unpredictable.
    - h2zizzle 1y ago
      That's another way of saying that we need more public investment (in addiction intervention programs, for one), not less.
  - Tallain 1y ago
    BART crime is up over the past decade. People don't avoid BART because of that headline with the chainsaw man. They avoid it because of everyday crime and violence. I'm sure it's similar for many other metro transport options in the USA. California in particular has a rough go for many reasons. It doesn't even have to be something bad or happen to you. One "my buddy had his bike stolen off the light rail" and several people will be turned off of ever trying to use it.
saalweachter 1y ago
It's not the only reason, but in general in American history, "why is this weird thing this weird way?" is usually answered in part by "racism". Avoiding public transit has historically been one way affluent white people avoided contact with poor people in general and black people specifically; underfunding or shutting down public transit in turn disproportionately hurts those populations. Again, not the only explanation, but it's the simplest for a number of things.
- FreebasingLLMs 1y ago
  [dead]
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  In northern cities, the black population is quite recent, and urban renewal programs predate much of the Great Migration. The Great Migration was itself weaponized by WASP elites against the European and very often Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in northern cities (who were out-procreating the WASPs given their stance on contraception, for example, which differed from the Protestants who had began to accept its use in the 1930s). To disguise the project, terms like "white flight" were invented in order to frame the disintegration of these European neighborhoods as a racist reaction. This worked especially well during the Civil Rights movement, because it played on black/white categories in the forefront of everybody's minds. But were these European ethnic groups "white"? We already know that the Irish and the Italians weren't considered "white" until recently. Perhaps you've seen videos of "white people" in Chicago throwing rocks at black marches led by MLK into these ethnic neighborhoods? These were people, like Lithuanians, who were defending the integrity of their neighborhoods from an invasion. That the marching masses entering their neighborhoods were black is completely irrelevant: any mass migration of another cultural group into a host population harms and destroys the integrity of the host population. And that was the point. White flight destroyed the ethnic neighborhood through mass migration and the subsequent dispersal of them across the newly created suburbs. This process hastened their assimilation into an amorphous mass shaped by the mass media. These assimilated groups formed a buffer between WASP neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of the new black arrivals from the South. The construction of highways played a similar role by erecting psychological or physical barriers between these neighborhoods. They were also used as excuses to demolish "undesirable" neighborhoods.
b112 1y ago
Yet your example purposefully sabotages cars by blocking streets to cars, and by not having city planners enforce enough parking spots for cars. The system can prioritize either method of travel. It's no surprise that when this happens, one is faster than the other.
- paddy_m 1y ago
  You can never build enough parking spots if the cost of parking is $0. Optimally managed parking charges variably so that there is always about 10% of spaces free in a block. The entitlement of drivers to think they have a right to park a metal box wherever they want for free in the middle of the most expensive real estate in the world is staggering.
  - macNchz 1y ago
    As an anecdote about any amount of parking winds up being used if it's free: there's a guy a block over from where I live in dense, transit-connected Brooklyn who has, at any given moment, at least 6 cars parked on the street, that he tinkers with and seems to occasionally buy and sell. The houses on that block sell for around $3-4 million these days, but the parking is free. The neighborhood is also quite clearly full of cars that basically never get used—given there's no cost to store them, the owners save them for an occasional trip and in the meantime they accumulate snow/leaves/pollen etc the rest of the year, in proportion to how long they sit without being used. The dysfunction of this system is particularly aggravating when you have an actual need to park nearby your home, e.g. if you're loading/unloading heavy things, and there's never any space. I would love if every block had temporary loading zones, but people freak out about the idea because it requires taking away some free parking.
woooooo 1y ago
Ring lines around which center? Midtown? It's already a criss-cross of lines, NQR does a semicircle..
tlogan 1y ago
The decline public transportation, in my view, reflects a shift in priorities within the Democratic Party. Back in the 1990s, Democrats were more focused on tangible public services—things like infrastructure, roads, transit systems. Today, the emphasis seems to have moved toward issues like environmental policy, DEI, and gender identity. As someone who’s deeply frustrated by the lack of progress on projects like high-speed rail between SF and LA, completing the BART loop around the Bay, improving public schools in San Francisco, and addressing homelessness, I find it maddening. These are real, urgent issues, and yet they often seem sidelined. Of course, Republicans generally oppose these kinds of initiatives altogether. Trying to push for change within the Democratic Party has been incredibly difficult for me. It often feels like the space is dominated by highly educated, well spoken, intellectually confident people (far more so than myself) which can make it hard to even participate, let alone influence policy. So I just think: screw it, I’m a Republican now. And that is not going to make public transport any better. So this is why…
- MisterTea 1y ago
  > So I just think: screw it, I’m a Republican now. Complain and vote all you want but the best way to fix the government is to become the government.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  What a stupid self centered excuse for supporting fascism.
- TingPing 1y ago
  This whole comment is insane but I’ll just say the last administration helped fund transit, but is of course being rolled back by the new one. https://www.transit.dot.gov/about/news/biden-harris-administration-announces-nearly-4-billion-support-14-major-transit https://www.transit.dot.gov/about/news/biden-harris-administ... https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/biden-harris-administration-provide-205-billion-federal-funding-support-transit https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/biden-harris-ad...
  - tlogan 1y ago
tacker2000 1y ago
Not every city needs a ring line, or has a geographical shape where it would be practical. Manhattan is a long rectangle, whilst Berlin has a more rounded shape. Its faster to cross the small width of the rectangle than to go all the way around.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  It's perceived as a problem around NYC that a lot of people might want to go from Brooklyn to Queens or to Harlem and the Bronx but public transit funnels everyone through downtown or midtown Manhattan. NYC doesn't need a ring but it could use a supplementary arc.
  - crmd 1y ago
    Yes! I'm going to see Underworld[0] play tonight in Brooklyn, exactly 7500 feet from my house, and according to google maps the options are a 14 minute taxi ride or 53 minute train + bus journey. I think it's insane that we don't have efficient intra-boro public transit outside of manhattan. 0. https://www.underworldlive.com https://www.underworldlive.com
  - danielthor 1y ago
    In the 1990s the RPA proposed reviving an abandoned rail line connecting Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx into the Triboro X line as a supplementary arc. The truth is the boroughs were well connected. In the postwar era the many of light-rail lines connecting Brooklyn and Queens were demolished. As were three elevated lines in Brooklyn/Queens and four elevated lines in Manhattan. The MTA still has a gap in the funding for the 2020-2024 capital plan due to Andrew Cuomo's raiding and Kathy Hochul's incompetence, so I wouldn't expect much from the 2025-2029 capital program! It is $48 billion short of maintaining existing levels of service, "with a focus on areas in need of urgent investment".
code_for_monkey 1y ago
its hard to really get how culturally tied to cars Americans are. Politicians in NYC essentially act like 'a car' is the unit of citizenship in the country, and not 'a person'. We make laws so cars dont get offended, we prioritize them over lives and safety. Its honestly pretty crazy.
genewitch 1y ago
I live ~33 miles away, round trio, from the nearest grocery store. No trains, no uber, no bus. The US is massive. It doesn't look like it on the mercator projection, but the US is massive. It takes days to drive across it at highway speeds. I tire of "you guys just love your cars too much". I've lived in several states and only when I lived in Los Angeles county was there ever a bus within "walking distance" - but still that was a 25-30 minute walk. Oh, and in case you were curious, California is about 60,000 square kilometers bigger than Germany. And I live 36 hours away from California in the United States. At highway speeds. That's why we "love our cars"
- TingPing 1y ago
  Most of the US population lives in metro areas of large cities. You are an outlier, that’s fine for rural areas.
  - gmueckl 1y ago
    I would not call ~20% of the US population an outlier. It's a very different situation from urban areas, but just as valid And even cities in the US are vast sprawls compared to organically grown very old cities in other parts of the world. That makes a huge difference for walkability.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      Furthermore, the 80% urban stat from the US census gets routinely misinterpreted. Just going through some property line details with a couple neighbors on collectively about 75 acres plus adjacent conservation land. The census considers this urban. And, as you say, Urban != dense city downtown.
      - genewitch 1y ago
        yes, the cutoff for "urban" to not is 2000 housing units in an area. I don't consider that urban, 2000 homes is a decent "town". This is just "othering" of people who live more than 25 minutes from a metro which is what i consider "urban". i am 25 minutes from my nearest metro, and the metro population is smaller than the city i grew up in in california, population-wise. my point is, talking about Berlin and then carrying that thought over to "americans just love cars" is silly. Germany is smaller than CA, and double the population of california. Most people "in california" live in the "san angeles" range or in the "bay capital" area. a half hour outside of any of those areas and it's either sand or farms or mountains. and i wish i was "rural", there's ~600 houses within 6mi radius, that's not very rural. It's rural compared to Manhattan, i guess.
gazarubbleparty 1y ago
[flagged]
richardfontana 1y ago
> The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center. The fact these have not been built, in 2025, when Metro transport networks in most cities are now over a century old, is telling. I'm having trouble imagining where a useful ring line could exist in the New York metropolitan area or within the city itself, given its geography, longstanding commuter movement patterns and other characteristics. Maybe you could have a relatively small ring just in midtown Manhattan?
- paddy_m 1y ago
  The Interborough Express is one example. Going from southern Brooklyn on the water up to queens. Previous proposals had it also connecting to the Bronx. If you want to be really ambitious, connect Bayridge to Staten Island and continue on with branches to Elizabeth and Bayonne. Up north, it's surprising there isn't rail from the Bronx, through Manhattan, across the GW Bridge to NJ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Express
  - richardfontana 1y ago
    That's not what I'd understand as a "ring" though. I guess something like that could be useful in providing an alternative to what's mostly been car options for travel between Brooklyn and Queens. Edit - your more ambitious idea could be a "ring", yes, but I'm not seeing how it would be especially useful. Why would it be helpful to provide a single line allowing someone in Bayonne to get to Jackson Heights, for example (given what are probably more pressing transportation improvement needs)? As a visionary means of facilitating a longer term integration of eastern New Jersey communities to New York City, maybe.

Thorrez 1y ago

>IMHO the real problem is cars. The US still can't imagine itself without cars. All of the US except NYC. In NYC 45.6% of households own a car. In Berlin it's 49%. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-the-highest-and-lowest-vehicle-ownership/ https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-th... https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/car-free-berlin-li.113268 https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/car-free-berlin-li.113268

coliveira 1y ago
This only showcases how bad the US is in this area, when the city that most relies on public transportation still has such a bad service.
steadicat 1y ago
You’re kind of proving the point here. NYC has fewer car owners and yet NYC doesn’t have a single pedestrian street or street closed to through traffic. Sounds like a city that can’t imagine itself without cars even though it’s completely realistic.
- lbotos 1y ago
  There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one. Broadway has had large expansions to its curbing from the flatiron building to union square. Its a slow process but its getting there.
  - blululu 1y ago
    Which one? Berry is semiclosed, but people routinely remove the wooden barriers so they can drive on it and delivery app e-bikes/motor bikes routinely blast down it at speeds that make it uncomfortable to walk. Broadway has expanded the sidewalk but it is definitely not closed to traffic. Also 2 partial closures in a city of 10 million kind of proves the point.
  - virtualritz 1y ago
    > There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one. One street in a city the size of NY? I thought you were joking when I read that reply. I thought it might have been straight out of a Monty Python sketch. ;) On that note, if you want to get an idea what pedestrianization does to cities, enter "Barcelona Superblocks" into your fav. search engine.

jfim 1y ago

Part of the reason is that public transit for whatever reason appears to be unusually sketchy in many places in the US. For example, a few years ago, there was an incident with a man with two chainsaws threatening passengers [1] in the local transit system. In contrast, the transit systems I've seen in Europe and Asia appear well maintained, clean, and relatively safe. Biking is also safer in European cities that have proper bike infrastructure. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/man-armed-chainsaw-threatens-bart-riders-says-ill-cut-your-freaking-head-1194182 https://www.newsweek.com/man-armed-chainsaw-threatens-bart-r...

h2zizzle 1y ago
? Japanese subways were infamously the site of a nerve gas attack in the 90s. 33 people were killed in mass knife attacks in Kunming, China in 2014. France has had a handful of subway and train attacks. However, the point is that these incidents, along with the BART one, are unusual. Avoiding public transit because of them would be like avoiding flying because of air accidents or avoiding going to a theater or musical event because of the various massacres that have happened at them over the years.
- horns4lyfe 1y ago
  That’s rare enough to not keep people away from public transport. Speaking from experience in Portland OR, it’s more the daily low level stress of having to keep an eye out for the meth crazed lunatics around you. There always seems to be one and they’re wildly unpredictable.
  - h2zizzle 1y ago
    That's another way of saying that we need more public investment (in addiction intervention programs, for one), not less.
- Tallain 1y ago
  BART crime is up over the past decade. People don't avoid BART because of that headline with the chainsaw man. They avoid it because of everyday crime and violence. I'm sure it's similar for many other metro transport options in the USA. California in particular has a rough go for many reasons. It doesn't even have to be something bad or happen to you. One "my buddy had his bike stolen off the light rail" and several people will be turned off of ever trying to use it.

saalweachter 1y ago

It's not the only reason, but in general in American history, "why is this weird thing this weird way?" is usually answered in part by "racism". Avoiding public transit has historically been one way affluent white people avoided contact with poor people in general and black people specifically; underfunding or shutting down public transit in turn disproportionately hurts those populations. Again, not the only explanation, but it's the simplest for a number of things.

FreebasingLLMs 1y ago
[dead]
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
In northern cities, the black population is quite recent, and urban renewal programs predate much of the Great Migration. The Great Migration was itself weaponized by WASP elites against the European and very often Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in northern cities (who were out-procreating the WASPs given their stance on contraception, for example, which differed from the Protestants who had began to accept its use in the 1930s). To disguise the project, terms like "white flight" were invented in order to frame the disintegration of these European neighborhoods as a racist reaction. This worked especially well during the Civil Rights movement, because it played on black/white categories in the forefront of everybody's minds. But were these European ethnic groups "white"? We already know that the Irish and the Italians weren't considered "white" until recently. Perhaps you've seen videos of "white people" in Chicago throwing rocks at black marches led by MLK into these ethnic neighborhoods? These were people, like Lithuanians, who were defending the integrity of their neighborhoods from an invasion. That the marching masses entering their neighborhoods were black is completely irrelevant: any mass migration of another cultural group into a host population harms and destroys the integrity of the host population. And that was the point. White flight destroyed the ethnic neighborhood through mass migration and the subsequent dispersal of them across the newly created suburbs. This process hastened their assimilation into an amorphous mass shaped by the mass media. These assimilated groups formed a buffer between WASP neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of the new black arrivals from the South. The construction of highways played a similar role by erecting psychological or physical barriers between these neighborhoods. They were also used as excuses to demolish "undesirable" neighborhoods.

b112 1y ago

Yet your example purposefully sabotages cars by blocking streets to cars, and by not having city planners enforce enough parking spots for cars. The system can prioritize either method of travel. It's no surprise that when this happens, one is faster than the other.

paddy_m 1y ago
You can never build enough parking spots if the cost of parking is $0. Optimally managed parking charges variably so that there is always about 10% of spaces free in a block. The entitlement of drivers to think they have a right to park a metal box wherever they want for free in the middle of the most expensive real estate in the world is staggering.
- macNchz 1y ago
  As an anecdote about any amount of parking winds up being used if it's free: there's a guy a block over from where I live in dense, transit-connected Brooklyn who has, at any given moment, at least 6 cars parked on the street, that he tinkers with and seems to occasionally buy and sell. The houses on that block sell for around $3-4 million these days, but the parking is free. The neighborhood is also quite clearly full of cars that basically never get used—given there's no cost to store them, the owners save them for an occasional trip and in the meantime they accumulate snow/leaves/pollen etc the rest of the year, in proportion to how long they sit without being used. The dysfunction of this system is particularly aggravating when you have an actual need to park nearby your home, e.g. if you're loading/unloading heavy things, and there's never any space. I would love if every block had temporary loading zones, but people freak out about the idea because it requires taking away some free parking.

woooooo 1y ago

Ring lines around which center? Midtown? It's already a criss-cross of lines, NQR does a semicircle..

tlogan 1y ago

The decline public transportation, in my view, reflects a shift in priorities within the Democratic Party. Back in the 1990s, Democrats were more focused on tangible public services—things like infrastructure, roads, transit systems. Today, the emphasis seems to have moved toward issues like environmental policy, DEI, and gender identity. As someone who’s deeply frustrated by the lack of progress on projects like high-speed rail between SF and LA, completing the BART loop around the Bay, improving public schools in San Francisco, and addressing homelessness, I find it maddening. These are real, urgent issues, and yet they often seem sidelined. Of course, Republicans generally oppose these kinds of initiatives altogether. Trying to push for change within the Democratic Party has been incredibly difficult for me. It often feels like the space is dominated by highly educated, well spoken, intellectually confident people (far more so than myself) which can make it hard to even participate, let alone influence policy. So I just think: screw it, I’m a Republican now. And that is not going to make public transport any better. So this is why…

MisterTea 1y ago
> So I just think: screw it, I’m a Republican now. Complain and vote all you want but the best way to fix the government is to become the government.
DonHopkins 1y ago
What a stupid self centered excuse for supporting fascism.
TingPing 1y ago
This whole comment is insane but I’ll just say the last administration helped fund transit, but is of course being rolled back by the new one. https://www.transit.dot.gov/about/news/biden-harris-administration-announces-nearly-4-billion-support-14-major-transit https://www.transit.dot.gov/about/news/biden-harris-administ... https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/biden-harris-administration-provide-205-billion-federal-funding-support-transit https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/biden-harris-ad...
- tlogan 1y ago

tacker2000 1y ago

Not every city needs a ring line, or has a geographical shape where it would be practical. Manhattan is a long rectangle, whilst Berlin has a more rounded shape. Its faster to cross the small width of the rectangle than to go all the way around.

PaulHoule 1y ago
It's perceived as a problem around NYC that a lot of people might want to go from Brooklyn to Queens or to Harlem and the Bronx but public transit funnels everyone through downtown or midtown Manhattan. NYC doesn't need a ring but it could use a supplementary arc.
- crmd 1y ago
  Yes! I'm going to see Underworld[0] play tonight in Brooklyn, exactly 7500 feet from my house, and according to google maps the options are a 14 minute taxi ride or 53 minute train + bus journey. I think it's insane that we don't have efficient intra-boro public transit outside of manhattan. 0. https://www.underworldlive.com https://www.underworldlive.com
- danielthor 1y ago
  In the 1990s the RPA proposed reviving an abandoned rail line connecting Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx into the Triboro X line as a supplementary arc. The truth is the boroughs were well connected. In the postwar era the many of light-rail lines connecting Brooklyn and Queens were demolished. As were three elevated lines in Brooklyn/Queens and four elevated lines in Manhattan. The MTA still has a gap in the funding for the 2020-2024 capital plan due to Andrew Cuomo's raiding and Kathy Hochul's incompetence, so I wouldn't expect much from the 2025-2029 capital program! It is $48 billion short of maintaining existing levels of service, "with a focus on areas in need of urgent investment".

code_for_monkey 1y ago

its hard to really get how culturally tied to cars Americans are. Politicians in NYC essentially act like 'a car' is the unit of citizenship in the country, and not 'a person'. We make laws so cars dont get offended, we prioritize them over lives and safety. Its honestly pretty crazy.

genewitch 1y ago

I live ~33 miles away, round trio, from the nearest grocery store. No trains, no uber, no bus. The US is massive. It doesn't look like it on the mercator projection, but the US is massive. It takes days to drive across it at highway speeds. I tire of "you guys just love your cars too much". I've lived in several states and only when I lived in Los Angeles county was there ever a bus within "walking distance" - but still that was a 25-30 minute walk. Oh, and in case you were curious, California is about 60,000 square kilometers bigger than Germany. And I live 36 hours away from California in the United States. At highway speeds. That's why we "love our cars"

TingPing 1y ago
Most of the US population lives in metro areas of large cities. You are an outlier, that’s fine for rural areas.
- gmueckl 1y ago
  I would not call ~20% of the US population an outlier. It's a very different situation from urban areas, but just as valid And even cities in the US are vast sprawls compared to organically grown very old cities in other parts of the world. That makes a huge difference for walkability.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Furthermore, the 80% urban stat from the US census gets routinely misinterpreted. Just going through some property line details with a couple neighbors on collectively about 75 acres plus adjacent conservation land. The census considers this urban. And, as you say, Urban != dense city downtown.
    - genewitch 1y ago
      yes, the cutoff for "urban" to not is 2000 housing units in an area. I don't consider that urban, 2000 homes is a decent "town". This is just "othering" of people who live more than 25 minutes from a metro which is what i consider "urban". i am 25 minutes from my nearest metro, and the metro population is smaller than the city i grew up in in california, population-wise. my point is, talking about Berlin and then carrying that thought over to "americans just love cars" is silly. Germany is smaller than CA, and double the population of california. Most people "in california" live in the "san angeles" range or in the "bay capital" area. a half hour outside of any of those areas and it's either sand or farms or mountains. and i wish i was "rural", there's ~600 houses within 6mi radius, that's not very rural. It's rural compared to Manhattan, i guess.

gazarubbleparty 1y ago

[flagged]

richardfontana 1y ago

> The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center. The fact these have not been built, in 2025, when Metro transport networks in most cities are now over a century old, is telling. I'm having trouble imagining where a useful ring line could exist in the New York metropolitan area or within the city itself, given its geography, longstanding commuter movement patterns and other characteristics. Maybe you could have a relatively small ring just in midtown Manhattan?

paddy_m 1y ago
The Interborough Express is one example. Going from southern Brooklyn on the water up to queens. Previous proposals had it also connecting to the Bronx. If you want to be really ambitious, connect Bayridge to Staten Island and continue on with branches to Elizabeth and Bayonne. Up north, it's surprising there isn't rail from the Bronx, through Manhattan, across the GW Bridge to NJ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Express
- richardfontana 1y ago
  That's not what I'd understand as a "ring" though. I guess something like that could be useful in providing an alternative to what's mostly been car options for travel between Brooklyn and Queens. Edit - your more ambitious idea could be a "ring", yes, but I'm not seeing how it would be especially useful. Why would it be helpful to provide a single line allowing someone in Bayonne to get to Jackson Heights, for example (given what are probably more pressing transportation improvement needs)? As a visionary means of facilitating a longer term integration of eastern New Jersey communities to New York City, maybe.