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> America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods. This isn't a movie. It's

> America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods. This isn't a movie. It's real life. In the movies, sure, you can have a wizard reshape entire cities, power distribution, roads, sewers, potable water production and deliver, move entire neighborhoods kilometers away, move businesses, factories, airports, etc. In the real world, once a city is well established, while your ideas might be commendable, they are simply not realizable. It's a fantasy. It will not happen. And this isn't because we are some kind of a horrible society who do not want these things. It's because reality. Nothing less. Nothing more. The other reality is that we can't build anything here any more. My favorite thing to point to is the California high speed train project. I think it has been over a decade now and at least 10x over what they promised it was going to cost. I don't think we have a single mile of usable track built, much less moving trains. The other one is the Los Angeles International airport's automated people mover (SkyLink) which is indefinitely delayed and $1 billion over budget. The project started in 2019...and we are still waiting for it to be usable. Oh, and it's just 2.25 miles of low speed overhead monorail (I think) track like they have in Las Vegas (might be a different design). So, like I said, I love your ideas, but, in the real world, they are fantasy. Sorry.

vel0city 2mo ago
You say it can't be done, but it's literally happened several times before. The most recent being when we built all these urban highways. It turns out you don't actually need to tear up sewers and electrical infrastructure to run bus routes. Who knew. Density can change when you change zoning laws.
- ssl-3 2mo ago
  Busses. I rode on a public bus once while visiting Columbus Ohio. I knew a bus ride was in my future and I'd not done that before, so I asked questions of the various people I know who live there. Not one of them had ever had a ride on the bus in the city they call home, or knew how the bus worked, and all of them made a point of telling me that they were sure that it would be filthy and awful somehow. The COTA website didn't set clear expectations for a new rider and wasn't very helpful. I eventually posted on the local subreddit asking for direction, and got exactly 1 useful response out of many non-useful responses. I don't know if it's just a Columbus thing or what, but it seems clear from this experience that folks there hate the bus. Is there a place in the US where they're appreciated? (Anyway, other than having to walk mile or so to get from the airport to the nearest bus stop because WTF, things went perfectly fine. I had a great chat with some random dude who was waiting a different bus. My bus showed up exactly when Google Maps predicted, I had exact change ready, and the transfer ticket for the next bus on my route was easy to deal with. They were clean, comfortable-enough, and I was the only rider.)
  - turdprincess 2mo ago
    Boulder Colorado has a public airport bus route that is pretty widely used - it takes one hour and is well liked by the general public.
    - ssl-3 2mo ago
      It seems that Columbus has one today, but they didn't back when I needed it in 2021 or so. (Need is relative, I suppose. I don't mind walking and I pack light; I was able to spend a couple of weeks out of town with a backpack that counts as just a personal item; getting to the bus stop wasn't a big deal for me.)
  - vel0city 2mo ago
    Your experience isn't uncommon. Lots of cities in the US have pretty limited transit, and a lot of the people in those cities don't use it. It's usually seen as a last resort kind of thing for those who can't get private transportation, as opposed to just yet another option.
- robomartin 2mo ago
  > The most recent being when we built all these urban highways. What? Clarify please, because if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. Today all all of that you are talking about would solidly fit in the "fantasy" category. You must not be from Los Angeles. Come drive our highways for a few months. I've had better experiences in third world countries. > to run bus routes That only works in certain locations and do absolutely nothing for the largest sources of traffic. Nothing. Just like carpool lanes, which area massive joke on us: nobody carpools to use those lanes, so the traffic reduction they deliver, expressed as a percentage and rounded to the nearest integer is, zero. The US, in general, was not built for the kind of mass transport Europeans are used to. And that will never happen here. In the US, self-driving cars will be our solution to the problem. Give it about ten years and we are really going to start to see adoption and the benefits of it. In a sense, virtual mass transit using existing infrastructure. That might work, slowly, but it could work. In ten years I hope that the only human-drivable cars I will own will be my race cars, which get towed to the track. Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent. Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. Driving in Los Angeles absolutely sucks.
  - vel0city 2mo ago
    > Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. And you think I live in fantasy land. > if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again. It seems like if we have the political will to change how we move, we can change how we move at least on the scale of a few decades. It wouldn't happen overnight, I agree, but it's not like it couldn't ever happen. > Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent. This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments: traffic (due to low density of vehicle utilization) and land use/parking. We still end up sacrificing massive expensive public spaces for parking, we still end up with massive traffic issues with the amount of road space required per traveler, etc. I've lived in some of the most sprawly places in the country, trust me I know it's not entirely just "buy busses and it'll figure itself out". But things can change, and judging by history things will change. The way people move, live, and work in a lot of the US will probably be pretty different in 30-40 years than what it looks like today. Things already look different today than what they did 20 years ago for a lot of metro areas.
xnx 2mo ago
The California highspeed rail project is 33(!) years old.
- robomartin 2mo ago
  Even better. I didn't remember. It's a suppressed memory!

vel0city 2mo ago

You say it can't be done, but it's literally happened several times before. The most recent being when we built all these urban highways. It turns out you don't actually need to tear up sewers and electrical infrastructure to run bus routes. Who knew. Density can change when you change zoning laws.

ssl-3 2mo ago
Busses. I rode on a public bus once while visiting Columbus Ohio. I knew a bus ride was in my future and I'd not done that before, so I asked questions of the various people I know who live there. Not one of them had ever had a ride on the bus in the city they call home, or knew how the bus worked, and all of them made a point of telling me that they were sure that it would be filthy and awful somehow. The COTA website didn't set clear expectations for a new rider and wasn't very helpful. I eventually posted on the local subreddit asking for direction, and got exactly 1 useful response out of many non-useful responses. I don't know if it's just a Columbus thing or what, but it seems clear from this experience that folks there hate the bus. Is there a place in the US where they're appreciated? (Anyway, other than having to walk mile or so to get from the airport to the nearest bus stop because WTF, things went perfectly fine. I had a great chat with some random dude who was waiting a different bus. My bus showed up exactly when Google Maps predicted, I had exact change ready, and the transfer ticket for the next bus on my route was easy to deal with. They were clean, comfortable-enough, and I was the only rider.)
- turdprincess 2mo ago
  Boulder Colorado has a public airport bus route that is pretty widely used - it takes one hour and is well liked by the general public.
  - ssl-3 2mo ago
    It seems that Columbus has one today, but they didn't back when I needed it in 2021 or so. (Need is relative, I suppose. I don't mind walking and I pack light; I was able to spend a couple of weeks out of town with a backpack that counts as just a personal item; getting to the bus stop wasn't a big deal for me.)
- vel0city 2mo ago
  Your experience isn't uncommon. Lots of cities in the US have pretty limited transit, and a lot of the people in those cities don't use it. It's usually seen as a last resort kind of thing for those who can't get private transportation, as opposed to just yet another option.
robomartin 2mo ago
> The most recent being when we built all these urban highways. What? Clarify please, because if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. Today all all of that you are talking about would solidly fit in the "fantasy" category. You must not be from Los Angeles. Come drive our highways for a few months. I've had better experiences in third world countries. > to run bus routes That only works in certain locations and do absolutely nothing for the largest sources of traffic. Nothing. Just like carpool lanes, which area massive joke on us: nobody carpools to use those lanes, so the traffic reduction they deliver, expressed as a percentage and rounded to the nearest integer is, zero. The US, in general, was not built for the kind of mass transport Europeans are used to. And that will never happen here. In the US, self-driving cars will be our solution to the problem. Give it about ten years and we are really going to start to see adoption and the benefits of it. In a sense, virtual mass transit using existing infrastructure. That might work, slowly, but it could work. In ten years I hope that the only human-drivable cars I will own will be my race cars, which get towed to the track. Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent. Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. Driving in Los Angeles absolutely sucks.
- vel0city 2mo ago
  > Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. And you think I live in fantasy land. > if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again. It seems like if we have the political will to change how we move, we can change how we move at least on the scale of a few decades. It wouldn't happen overnight, I agree, but it's not like it couldn't ever happen. > Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent. This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments: traffic (due to low density of vehicle utilization) and land use/parking. We still end up sacrificing massive expensive public spaces for parking, we still end up with massive traffic issues with the amount of road space required per traveler, etc. I've lived in some of the most sprawly places in the country, trust me I know it's not entirely just "buy busses and it'll figure itself out". But things can change, and judging by history things will change. The way people move, live, and work in a lot of the US will probably be pretty different in 30-40 years than what it looks like today. Things already look different today than what they did 20 years ago for a lot of metro areas.

xnx 2mo ago

The California highspeed rail project is 33(!) years old.

robomartin 2mo ago
Even better. I didn't remember. It's a suppressed memory!