4 ms·
God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport
by m_a_g 2mo ago
God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport
- yostrovs 2mo agoIt's effectively xenophobic to comment such as you did about "Americans" without addressing the points by the author, which deal with real, structural issues.
- Guestmodinfo 2mo agoOne thing about private car ownership in the US is that it is a VERY BIG country and sparsely populated so who will pay for the public transport connecting every nook and corner because in the US it's so sparsely populated. Even in India I see metro train being very successful in places which are densely populated but in states like Rajasthan which are very big and sparsely populated there public transport is a failure because who will pay for the fuel when people are not enough. Walking and public transport are good options in Europe because European countries are small and are more densely populated
- pibaker 2mo agoThe US is ten times more dense than Australia. And yet Australian cities tend to have comparable if not better transit than similarly sized American cities. The overall population density of a country is largely irrelevant in this discussion because 99% of day to day travels are contained within the same metro areas.
- annzabelle 2mo ago> comparable if not better transit Yes, but Australian, (and Canadian, and New Zealand) cities are all in the same range as many similarly sized American cities. Maybe Auckland has transit as good as Seattle with half the population, but it's not the order of magnitude difference that US vs European or US vs Asian cities do. All of the Anglo settler-colonies have rather lackluster transit compared to the Old World, and one of the first things I tell anybody who wants to come to New Zealand is to plan on having a car.
- sebmellen 2mo agoDude, Australia is like 95% sand and nothingness with Alice Springs in the middle. Where is your bullet train between Perth and Darwin and Melbourne? Boo! I jest, but not completely. The US is more dense but more distributed too. You can’t realistically link someone in a rural West Virginia holler up to a regular bus schedule, nor can you build a train between Morgantown and Pittsburgh that gets ridership. America doesn’t do badly at public transit in places like Florida where private companies can fill the gap and the communities are within a reasonable distance and the geography is flat and simple. See the Brightline trains for proof of concept. But it’s kind of ridiculous to imagine Australia and the US to be comparable in that way.
- jdxcode 2mo ago90% of australians live in 0.22% of the country's land
- bluGill 2mo agoWhole the us has different numbers, but the same point applies. Most of the people in the US live in dense enough areas. The Mid west has similar size and population as France for example.
- hibikir 2mo agoIt's not a matter of the size of the country, but the density of the metro areas: See Spain, a low density country with high density cities. The US' high suburb, low density metro design is the one thing ruining transit
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bobbylarrybobby 2mo ago1. We don't need to connect every nook and corner with public transit. Each city having its own would be sufficient. 2. The US is sparse _because_ of cars: the space allocated for parking pushes things apart.
- ChadNauseam 2mo agoSarcastic and self-satisfied comments like this are uninteresting IMO. The GP comment is talking about reducing parking requirements for new development, and parking requirements are probably some of the least efficient use of land imaginable. But he shouldn't talk about that because it'd be better if every city all across america suddenly had public transit tomorrow? It's like if a city in europe was talking about setting up a cooling station in a town square during a heat wave, and someone condescendingly commented "god, I love how europeans will do anything but install air conditioning." It's just not that easy and one doesn't preclude the other
- hocuspocus 2mo agoMany European countries do install AC actually, poor ones at that, so it'd be a valid point because yes, it's that easy.
- xeromal 2mo agoMissing the forest for the trees
- thundercleeze 2mo agoYou're avoiding the point and wrong in assuming the analogy is incorrect. The US has around 1/5th the heat related deaths that Europe does despite being hotter, more often and mostly of European background. https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/how-europe-became-the-world-champion https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/how-europe-became-the-w...
- stratom 2mo agoNice graphs, but these numbers are not reflecting the reality. As both count heat deaths differently. Europe does calculate it based on excess mortality studies and US only counts them if it is listed as contributing cause on the death certificate. With similar statistics, US numbers are several times higher. And as Europe has an older population, rates are likely higher, but the real difference is much smaller.
- DiscourseFan 2mo agoA network of fully autonomous electric self-driving cars on a developed roadway can only be superseded in efficiency by high speed rail. There is no way that traditional forms of public transit could outclass it. This is Waymo's big moneymaker: public contracts. The bus drivers and taxi drivers unions will fight it, but smaller towns looking to build denser housing and make their public spaces more walkable will happily adopt this as policy, and it will eventually spread to the bigger cities.
- pibaker 2mo ago> A network of fully autonomous electric self-driving cars on a developed roadway can only be superseded in efficiency by high speed rail [citation needed] Not an expert but it seems trivial to me that a road full of cars each carrying one or two passengers will take up a lot more space than trains or buses carrying the same number of people.
- DiscourseFan 2mo agoOk but an autonomous bus, or autonomous vehicles designed to fit different numbers of people, would not be better than a one size fits all bus?
- bluGill 2mo agoThe one size fits all bus would be better. A tiny car cannot share rides without adding big delays to the person already on it. That means you cannot count on getting there on time with a shared ride. The bus has defined delays so you can predict when you will get there and this arrive on time.
- DiscourseFan 2mo agoIf a root is only serving a smaller number of people, why have an entire bus? Busses make sense for thoroughfares, but I often board nearly empty express busses that are only running because of state/city appropriations. If we could modulate form to meet demand precisely, like Uber but for all transit, it would be far quicker and more efficient.
- jdale27 2mo agoWaymo is already working, on roads today, for less time and money than it took to build zero miles of high speed rail in California.
- toddmorey 2mo agoYou can’t do inter-city Waymo trips. These are different animals.
- thundercleeze 2mo agoYou also can't do inter-city train trips in most of the US either. Inter-city autonomous car trips will almost certainly happen before the trains arrive.
- runarberg 2mo agoYou think we will have Waymo between Bakersfield and Merced before 2033? That is a bit optimistic I would say.
- getnormality 2mo agoOne could say the same about the train.
- jdale27 2mo agoYou can’t do intercity trips on California high speed rail either.
- zzyxy 2mo agoThe thesis needs some refinement. One can get a Waymo ride from San Francisco to San Jose, though one can also argue that Bay Area is one big suburb and thus the trip does not count as inter-city, even though both SF and SJ are most certainly different cities. That said, Waymo is indeed not the right tool for the actual inter-city trips.
- trymas 2mo ago
- xnx 2mo agoJust because it's not a train doesn't mean a self-driving car system isn't public transport. Free your mind.
- stratom 2mo agoDefinition of public transport: Cambridge Dictionary (UK): "A system of vehicles such as buses and trains that operate at regular times on fixed routes and are used by the public." Collins Dictionary: "A system of buses, trains, etc., running on fixed routes, on which the public may travel."
- lkbm 2mo agoQuoting a dictionary won't get you very far with real people. Those are obviously wrong in that they're overly prescriptive and tied to what was common when they were written. The dictionary is trying to give you an idea of what most public transit looks like. It's not strictly reflective of reality or of actual usage. Is the city and county provided point-to-point transit for disabled people[0] not "public transit"? Is Line 0[1] not public transit? Most people say yes; the dictionary should be updated to reflect actual usage, not the other way around. [0] https://www.mta.info/accessibility/access-a-ride https://www.mta.info/accessibility/access-a-ride [1] https://fairtiq.com/en/blog/line-zero-the-public-transport-experiment-everyone-is-talking-about https://fairtiq.com/en/blog/line-zero-the-public-transport-e...
- FromHoiPolloi 2mo agoI know in some places taxis are considered public transport. But I do not agree with that. It's still a car with one or two passengers. The only similarity with public transport is that you can use it while under influence.
- schainks 2mo agoTHIS. It's not like there isn't _fabulous_ public transit in every other developed country. All they had to do was make healthcare and education low cost/free.
- annzabelle 2mo agoIn the countries that are closest to America's peers (Canada, Australia, NZ), the public transit is also lacking outside of a few dense cities.
- bluGill 2mo agoThose cities are enough to prove that transit works. We can then look at other parts of the world and see the same in smaller cities.
- nunez 2mo agoI agree with you, but the car is embedded deep into the American DNA, mostly because it perfectly feeds into the dream of single family homeownership. I've come to the conclusion that the cities where public transit works got lucky and invested into it at the right time in history. I would love to be able to take a comfortable train to suburbs an hour away, but most people think that's freedom-limiting and won't vote to pay the taxes for it.
- hibikir 2mo agoPublic transit is at its most useful and effective connecting dense, walkable locations. That's why it's so great in the world's best cities. The problem is a metro like DFW doesn't have the density to have said good public transit. If anything, many American cities have more bus lines and light rail lines than they would if you asked an European transit authority to decide where to build. Density first, very good transit second. Or at the very least, wait for zoning and incentive decisions that will bring infill to those locations in less than 5 years. But we sure aren't doing that.
- bluGill 2mo agoDensity is important, but overrated. There is plenty of density in the suburbs to support transit, but nobody gives transit the money needed for good service and so they don't get it. The money needed for his transit would be less than cars cost everyone.
- skipkey 2mo agoSo the DFW metroplex is an example of why it's difficult to build decent public transportation - it has a population of about half that of Greater London, covering over 24k square kilometers. Very few people work in the downtown areas. Most people live in a suburb and work in a suburb. I lived in the area for many years. At one point, I lived in a house, basically at Belt Line and highway 75, and worked at an office on Midway Road across from Addison Airport. About 13 kilometers on side streets. With traffic, about 20-25 minute drive on side streets, or about 15 minutes if I took the highway, which included a toll road. There were reasonable bus stops near both my house and my office. So I looked into what it would take to use public transportation if I had car trouble. All bus routes went through downtown Dallas. So the most optimal route getting me to the office took almost 2 hours. And the earliest I could get there was 9:30am. Why did all routes go through downtown? Because in order to get the routes approved they had to serve areas that were considered 'disadvantaged'. And this makes sense - there probably wasn't enough potential traffic to make loop routes break-even. Now I did use public transport regularly - I had Dallas Stars season tickets, and I'd ride the train downtown rather than park all the time. But if I didn't need to go downtown it was useless. And the reason is just math - half the population of greater London over 15x the area.
- bluGill 2mo agoBad operations is not the fault of transit it is the fault of operations. Making transit serve the poor is a political choice and the result is it didn't serve you. However there is every reason to think good operations with a good budget could serve you well.
- HDThoreaun 2mo agoNo there really is not. The problem is that static routes in low density areas do not work. The reason the transit system has a policy about poor areas is because they know people with cars will never take the bus unless the government makes driving onerous which will never happen.
- bluGill 2mo ago
- fishfasell 2mo agoDallas needs public transit badly too. It's the least walkable city I've ever been too.
- master-lincoln 2mo agoHow do you get to and off stations if it's not walkable? Isn't walk-ability a requirement for successful public transport?
- bluGill 2mo agoPeople will figure it out if there is good transit. Sidewalks are cheap, they will build them if there is a place to get to.