8 ms·

As somone who's lived in different European and Japanese cities it just saddens me that highways replaced local public transport in many American cities rather

As somone who's lived in different European and Japanese cities it just saddens me that highways replaced local public transport in many American cities rather than added to it. That really doesn't make any sense to me. The way I see it, any healthy city needs local transport like metro or streetcar so sou can do your business there without wasting time (getting back to your car, drive to the next place you need to go, find a parking lot, walk). It seems like shopping malls have replaced that 'going to the city' activity - the problem there is that you have no choice in the individual stores - they tend to have one, max two of the bigger stores you need. Low competition results in low quality - then the next big thing gets built further away, people drive there instead and the whole cycle continues. The lesson here is to stop lobbying from becoming too powerful - building highways is not the problem, ripping apart public transport is.

sologoub 11y ago
Los Angeles is the prime example of it. So what are we doing now? We are having to build it back up! Unfortunately, the current construction is a far cry from what the old red car network was and doesn't really touch the San Fernando valley in a meaningful way. I am excited about the Expo line phase 2 though...
- phamilton 11y ago
  I actually think LA is very different case. The 101 is the backbone of California for a reason - it's been there since the Spanish built the California missions. Los Angeles grew up around the highway, rather than the other way around. So instead of a beltway being built around a city, you've got a city stretched out along the highway. That said, there are plenty of micro examples of defaulting to pavement over rail for public trans in LA. The so-called "black and blue" line in the San Fernando valley is a pretty amusing example. (Rather than put in light rail, they built roads that only buses could go on. This caused a lot of confusion and there were a lot of accidents in the first 6 months, thus earning it the nickname "black and blue") It was sort of a clever solution. The city knew how to build roads and so it stuck to what it was good at.
  - jowiar 11y ago
    There's a reasonable argument for busways over light rail -- the non-disaster failure mode of buses is a lot more reasonable than the non-disaster failure mode of rail. If a bus has mechanical issues, it doesn't stop the entire bus system. With rail -- a bit of engine trouble breaks the whole system. I've seen them work reasonably well in Pittsburgh, along with the Bus lane going opposite traffic on the one-way streets (as opposed to say, Philadelphia, where everyone drives in the bus lane).
    - sologoub 11y ago
      I haven't seen them work out too well in San Fernando Valley. They seem to be less used than I would have guessed.
      - mixmastamyk 11y ago
        The Orange line is packed at rush hour, not sure what you're expecting?
    - m_mueller 11y ago
      The problem with buses IMO is the planning - most of the time planners take the cheap way out and just let them use the same road resources as cars. IMO a good local transport is completely separate from the roads used by cars, such that congestion on the car road network doesn't affect the second system - i.e. you always get a real alternative. Having one lane for buses, taxis and ambulances would be a pretty good solution, but that's usually not how it works out. Also, you have to look at the whole system in terms of how much surface space it needs - in any reasonably dense city you soon start to need to go either underground or stilted. Railways have a much narrower footprint due to their efficiency - so if you can make them reliable (which is clearly doable, see Japan and Switzerland as examples), it's just a more space saving solution, thus you need to tunnel / stilt less.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      With rail -- a bit of engine trouble breaks the whole system. That depends on how you engineer the system. With reasonably frequent crossings, you can route around stalled vehicles. If you've got dedicated rights-of-way (rather than mixed-mode auto-and-LRV routes) then wrong-side operations isn't so critical. With sidings or triple-tracking, you can offer only modestly degraded service, though at markedly higher initial cost and land use. Still far better than highway / surface-street designs. Or you can "bounce" vehicles to either side of an outage, running service to the problem location and running truncated shuttle service on either side. It's largely a matter of political will, costs, and frequency of outages. Which, generally, even on less-reliable system aren't exceptionally prevalent. The other issue is that busses tend to fail (for various reasons) more frequently than rail.
- m_mueller 11y ago
  Check my other comment where I compared L.A. to Tokyo [1]. I kind of expected it already, but the outcome still blows my mind a bit.. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9562430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9562430
hippich 11y ago
Article mentioned metro/streetcars - these were not profitable, so were closed. Of course you can make tax-paid public transportation, but I guess because it has to be funded locally vs. funded federally as in case of interstate highways, it never happened.
- __z 11y ago
  Most public transportation is taxpayer subsided.
- m_mueller 11y ago
  The article also explained how the road system is subsidized (gas tax only covering 40-75% of freeway costs if I remember correctly). That's not too different from subsidies needed for public transport. If you want to see an example for highly profitable and privately owned public transport systems for cities, just look at Japan.
- tsotha 11y ago
  There are just a handful of public transportation systems that aren't subsidized with tax money. The Tokyo subway system is a good example, but even there it's probably only profitable because the subway lines own prime real estate around stations.
bane 11y ago
When I was a kid, I used to go visit family in Dayton, Ohio. We would take a day to "go downtown" and hop on the local electrically powered trollybus, pay some minimal fee and get a comfortable ride from suburbia to city. We'd go and walk around and hit a few department stores, eat some food, maybe take the bus a couple more times, and then grab a trollybus to get back home. It was easy, cheap and just worked. I understand some of the system is still active in the city. It's kind of mindblowing to me that there's only 5 such systems in all of the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Dayton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Dayton
- tedunangst 11y ago
  Why does it have to be a trolleybus? What's wrong with a regular (possibly hybrid) bus?
  - bane 11y ago
    It was built in 1888, doesn't smell, probably cheaper than laying track and moving trollies around.
    - Buge 11y ago
      Regular buses don't involve track or trollies.
    - __z 11y ago
      I was a regular bus rider for most of my childhood and all of my adolescence. Buses were never "smelly" to me. Nowadays all of our buses are hybrid anyways.
  - andrewliebchen 11y ago
    Streetcar lines don't change like bus routes do. Their funding is harder to cut, and indeed their operating expenses are less than busses. Businesses can count on their presence into the future, as can riders who try to plan their car-less lives in their community.
ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
In the Bay Area, Foothill Expressway literally replaced a good sized chunk of a rail line. Prior to the early 60s, one of the Penninsula Commute rail routes actually split off in Palo Alto (right where Groupon is now, and where a Y existed until 30 some years ago), went down across El Camino and through where the VA is, and down Foothill to Los Altos, ultimately connecting up with the extant Permanente Branch. That was an alternate commute route from San Jose to San Francisco, hitting the west valley and south of San Jose. Outside of the Key System, that was I think the biggest loss of rail transit in the Bay Area.
forrestthewoods 11y ago
No. Any city needs a good way to get around. Ideally any person could go from any point to any point with ease. Theres nothing fundamentally special about the mechanism used to do so. If cars can do it, great! If they can't but trains and trolleys can, good! I maintain that a pre-requisite to "good" public transportation is bad infrastructure for cars. If you had good car infrastructure, and many medium sized cities do, the public transportion wouldn't be needed. Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the country. No thank you. Self-driving cars are obviously the future. Well, part of the future at least. I'm very curious what the "ideal" city would look like with self-driving cars at the center. What would a city look like if built from the ground up with them in mind?
- rayiner 11y ago
  > Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the country. No thank you. New Yorkers have long commutes because of how phenomenally efficient their public transportation system is. During rush hour, it takes up to two hours to drive the 15-17 miles from my parents house in the Virginia suburbs to the middle of DC. An hour and a half is typical, most of it parked on I-66 or GW Parkway. The Metro North from Greenwich to Manhattan makes that 30-mile trip in an hour flat, like clockwork, in a far denser metro area.
- Frondo 11y ago
  Nope. Having a good car infrastructure doesn't mean everyone has or can have a car. No amount of car infrastructure will serve the need of having the city core fill up with workers driving in their own cars during the day, either. In a fictional future world where self-driving cars are ubiquitous, they'll likely serve, in miniature form, the same role that buses and trams do now; except they'll be more point-to-point than those; one could pick you and a few others on the corner near your flat, drive you to your offices, and go do it again.
  - jerf 11y ago
    "In a fictional future world where self-driving cars are ubiquitous, they'll likely serve, in miniature form, the same role that buses and trams do now; except they'll be more point-to-point than those; one could pick you and a few others on the corner near your flat, drive you to your offices, and go do it again." To be honest, since I suspect that world won't be fictional, I think this whole debate is really a waste of time now. It wouldn't even matter if an alien brain ray struck the entire world and suddenly everybody agreed that public transportation was totally the only way to do anything ever, and all public transport spending was 100% rerouted into public transport... self-driving cars would still obviate all the plans before we could possibly fully enact them. In a world where that level of consensus isn't going to happen, it's even moreso a waste of time.
Goladus 11y ago
> As somone who's lived in different European and Japanese cities it just saddens me that highways replaced local public transport in many American cities rather than added to it. The population density and distribution of that density is massively different in Europe and Japan than in the US. For effective shared or public transit, you need transportation hubs that are a convenient distance from where people are and where they want to go. If people and population centers are very spread out, then the transit becomes both more expensive and less useful. Even if you can take rail between two population centers, odds are good that you'll still have to drive a long way to the train station then drive another long way to get where you're actually trying to go. Because there's not a lot of population, transit can't run frequently without being a massive waste of energy, so schedules become less convenient. Check out this density map: https://dhs.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/popdensity.png https://dhs.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/popdensi... Note how Europe is consistently dense over a very large area, with a core of highly dense areas all fairly close to each other like London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Munich, and Bern, while the adjacent regions like Italy, the Balkans, and even Poland have fairly consistent population density. In Japan, the density is highly concentrated on Honshu, and even then it's concentrated into certain cities and prefectures. The US, meanwhile, has only a few dense regions, mostly in the Northeast, with the rest of population centers spread out very large areas. Not coincidentally, those more densely populated cities tend to have more public transit than the average American city. There are notable exceptions, such as Los Angeles, but LA is not representative of most of the country.
- brenschluss 11y ago
  This is a chicken-and-egg problem. The US only has a few dense regions because suburban housing typologies strung together with highways have been dominant. If you consider that public transit makes areas walkable, creates street-level shops, restaurants, and cafes, and densifies areas as a result, then creating public transit is an argument for creating density.
  - Goladus 11y ago
    This is a chicken-and-egg problem. Only if you ignore the fact that most of the US population centers developed long before the automobile. The US only has a few dense regions because suburban housing typologies strung together with highways have been dominant. Suburbs are largely a 20th century phenomenon and rail was very important in the history of the US. US population spread itself out for primarily for economic reasons (and also likely socio-political reasons).
milspec 11y ago
I tried this "public transport" in San Francisco. It was a disaster. It takes forever and doesn't run when you need it. This of course is a big city with nice weather; ponder waiting by the curb during an ice storm while your bus/tram/streetcar is cancelled. Even if it did sort of work, I'm not lugging two to four carts of groceries home that way, nor am I willing to make multiple trips per day. Besides more free parking, what we really need is land reform. People don't live where they work because property taxes are grandfathered, real estate agents gobble up 6% of the home value, and so many other stupid expenses.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  Some public transport there works well. I've taken BART from the airport to a hotel downtown and it wasn't a bad way to get there. I felt safe, should I have been concerned? Most of your other points about mass transit are quite valid. E.g. "lugging" groceries. But why not "think different"? Can't you purchase in small quantities from neighborhood stores? When I grew up in NYC it wasn't uncommon to shop just a block or two from home. You bought 1 loaf of bread, 1 quart of milk, a few pounds of potatoes, etc. It was easily possible to carry that stuff back to the apartment. It wasn't only possible, it was what you had to do. Hardly anyone owned cars. I wonder what percent of residents of San Francisco own a car? How many use a car daily?
- m_mueller 11y ago
  I think this is a case of where you just can't imagine living in a differently working system anymore. What you describe are typical problems in a place with bad public transport and/or urban planning that's not made for public transport (i.e. suburbia). Here's how this works out in any Japanese or Swiss town/city above ~80k inhabitants: You have a public transport network where all the schedules are synched up. Ideally you have a metro/streetcar/trolley station nearby that can pick you up (if it's a normal bus you may have congested road, so you can't plan exactly by the minute, just like with cars). You go there 2min in advance. Once on board, you work/read HN/read/play/whatever [1]. You arrive at a trainstation, swipe a card, walk ~50m and wait 3min for a train. Again, read. 15-60min and 1-2 changes later you have arrived at your destination without even thinking about it, without putting you or anyone else in significant danger, without already being stressed out. On your way home you spend 10-15m more at one of the train stations where you had to change anyway, get some fresh grocery, and be done with it. No need for your exhausting weekly trips to the mall. You don't even have to leave the station building. Got anything else to do? No problem, there's service offerings for pretty much anything you need within 200m of where you are, because the train station brings so much density of people that it's worth it to have all kinds of stores open. You know, I like driving - I dream about fast cars and all that. I just wouldn't want to be forced to do it every day with unplannable traffic conditions and all that. When I drive, I want to have an flexible schedule, i.e. the weekends.

sologoub 11y ago

Los Angeles is the prime example of it. So what are we doing now? We are having to build it back up! Unfortunately, the current construction is a far cry from what the old red car network was and doesn't really touch the San Fernando valley in a meaningful way. I am excited about the Expo line phase 2 though...

phamilton 11y ago
I actually think LA is very different case. The 101 is the backbone of California for a reason - it's been there since the Spanish built the California missions. Los Angeles grew up around the highway, rather than the other way around. So instead of a beltway being built around a city, you've got a city stretched out along the highway. That said, there are plenty of micro examples of defaulting to pavement over rail for public trans in LA. The so-called "black and blue" line in the San Fernando valley is a pretty amusing example. (Rather than put in light rail, they built roads that only buses could go on. This caused a lot of confusion and there were a lot of accidents in the first 6 months, thus earning it the nickname "black and blue") It was sort of a clever solution. The city knew how to build roads and so it stuck to what it was good at.
- jowiar 11y ago
  There's a reasonable argument for busways over light rail -- the non-disaster failure mode of buses is a lot more reasonable than the non-disaster failure mode of rail. If a bus has mechanical issues, it doesn't stop the entire bus system. With rail -- a bit of engine trouble breaks the whole system. I've seen them work reasonably well in Pittsburgh, along with the Bus lane going opposite traffic on the one-way streets (as opposed to say, Philadelphia, where everyone drives in the bus lane).
  - sologoub 11y ago
    I haven't seen them work out too well in San Fernando Valley. They seem to be less used than I would have guessed.
    - mixmastamyk 11y ago
      The Orange line is packed at rush hour, not sure what you're expecting?
  - m_mueller 11y ago
    The problem with buses IMO is the planning - most of the time planners take the cheap way out and just let them use the same road resources as cars. IMO a good local transport is completely separate from the roads used by cars, such that congestion on the car road network doesn't affect the second system - i.e. you always get a real alternative. Having one lane for buses, taxis and ambulances would be a pretty good solution, but that's usually not how it works out. Also, you have to look at the whole system in terms of how much surface space it needs - in any reasonably dense city you soon start to need to go either underground or stilted. Railways have a much narrower footprint due to their efficiency - so if you can make them reliable (which is clearly doable, see Japan and Switzerland as examples), it's just a more space saving solution, thus you need to tunnel / stilt less.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    With rail -- a bit of engine trouble breaks the whole system. That depends on how you engineer the system. With reasonably frequent crossings, you can route around stalled vehicles. If you've got dedicated rights-of-way (rather than mixed-mode auto-and-LRV routes) then wrong-side operations isn't so critical. With sidings or triple-tracking, you can offer only modestly degraded service, though at markedly higher initial cost and land use. Still far better than highway / surface-street designs. Or you can "bounce" vehicles to either side of an outage, running service to the problem location and running truncated shuttle service on either side. It's largely a matter of political will, costs, and frequency of outages. Which, generally, even on less-reliable system aren't exceptionally prevalent. The other issue is that busses tend to fail (for various reasons) more frequently than rail.
m_mueller 11y ago
Check my other comment where I compared L.A. to Tokyo [1]. I kind of expected it already, but the outcome still blows my mind a bit.. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9562430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9562430

hippich 11y ago

Article mentioned metro/streetcars - these were not profitable, so were closed. Of course you can make tax-paid public transportation, but I guess because it has to be funded locally vs. funded federally as in case of interstate highways, it never happened.

__z 11y ago
Most public transportation is taxpayer subsided.
m_mueller 11y ago
The article also explained how the road system is subsidized (gas tax only covering 40-75% of freeway costs if I remember correctly). That's not too different from subsidies needed for public transport. If you want to see an example for highly profitable and privately owned public transport systems for cities, just look at Japan.
tsotha 11y ago
There are just a handful of public transportation systems that aren't subsidized with tax money. The Tokyo subway system is a good example, but even there it's probably only profitable because the subway lines own prime real estate around stations.

bane 11y ago

When I was a kid, I used to go visit family in Dayton, Ohio. We would take a day to "go downtown" and hop on the local electrically powered trollybus, pay some minimal fee and get a comfortable ride from suburbia to city. We'd go and walk around and hit a few department stores, eat some food, maybe take the bus a couple more times, and then grab a trollybus to get back home. It was easy, cheap and just worked. I understand some of the system is still active in the city. It's kind of mindblowing to me that there's only 5 such systems in all of the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Dayton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Dayton

tedunangst 11y ago
Why does it have to be a trolleybus? What's wrong with a regular (possibly hybrid) bus?
- bane 11y ago
  It was built in 1888, doesn't smell, probably cheaper than laying track and moving trollies around.
  - Buge 11y ago
    Regular buses don't involve track or trollies.
  - __z 11y ago
    I was a regular bus rider for most of my childhood and all of my adolescence. Buses were never "smelly" to me. Nowadays all of our buses are hybrid anyways.
- andrewliebchen 11y ago
  Streetcar lines don't change like bus routes do. Their funding is harder to cut, and indeed their operating expenses are less than busses. Businesses can count on their presence into the future, as can riders who try to plan their car-less lives in their community.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago

In the Bay Area, Foothill Expressway literally replaced a good sized chunk of a rail line. Prior to the early 60s, one of the Penninsula Commute rail routes actually split off in Palo Alto (right where Groupon is now, and where a Y existed until 30 some years ago), went down across El Camino and through where the VA is, and down Foothill to Los Altos, ultimately connecting up with the extant Permanente Branch. That was an alternate commute route from San Jose to San Francisco, hitting the west valley and south of San Jose. Outside of the Key System, that was I think the biggest loss of rail transit in the Bay Area.

forrestthewoods 11y ago

No. Any city needs a good way to get around. Ideally any person could go from any point to any point with ease. Theres nothing fundamentally special about the mechanism used to do so. If cars can do it, great! If they can't but trains and trolleys can, good! I maintain that a pre-requisite to "good" public transportation is bad infrastructure for cars. If you had good car infrastructure, and many medium sized cities do, the public transportion wouldn't be needed. Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the country. No thank you. Self-driving cars are obviously the future. Well, part of the future at least. I'm very curious what the "ideal" city would look like with self-driving cars at the center. What would a city look like if built from the ground up with them in mind?

rayiner 11y ago
> Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the country. No thank you. New Yorkers have long commutes because of how phenomenally efficient their public transportation system is. During rush hour, it takes up to two hours to drive the 15-17 miles from my parents house in the Virginia suburbs to the middle of DC. An hour and a half is typical, most of it parked on I-66 or GW Parkway. The Metro North from Greenwich to Manhattan makes that 30-mile trip in an hour flat, like clockwork, in a far denser metro area.
Frondo 11y ago
Nope. Having a good car infrastructure doesn't mean everyone has or can have a car. No amount of car infrastructure will serve the need of having the city core fill up with workers driving in their own cars during the day, either. In a fictional future world where self-driving cars are ubiquitous, they'll likely serve, in miniature form, the same role that buses and trams do now; except they'll be more point-to-point than those; one could pick you and a few others on the corner near your flat, drive you to your offices, and go do it again.
- jerf 11y ago
  "In a fictional future world where self-driving cars are ubiquitous, they'll likely serve, in miniature form, the same role that buses and trams do now; except they'll be more point-to-point than those; one could pick you and a few others on the corner near your flat, drive you to your offices, and go do it again." To be honest, since I suspect that world won't be fictional, I think this whole debate is really a waste of time now. It wouldn't even matter if an alien brain ray struck the entire world and suddenly everybody agreed that public transportation was totally the only way to do anything ever, and all public transport spending was 100% rerouted into public transport... self-driving cars would still obviate all the plans before we could possibly fully enact them. In a world where that level of consensus isn't going to happen, it's even moreso a waste of time.

Goladus 11y ago

> As somone who's lived in different European and Japanese cities it just saddens me that highways replaced local public transport in many American cities rather than added to it. The population density and distribution of that density is massively different in Europe and Japan than in the US. For effective shared or public transit, you need transportation hubs that are a convenient distance from where people are and where they want to go. If people and population centers are very spread out, then the transit becomes both more expensive and less useful. Even if you can take rail between two population centers, odds are good that you'll still have to drive a long way to the train station then drive another long way to get where you're actually trying to go. Because there's not a lot of population, transit can't run frequently without being a massive waste of energy, so schedules become less convenient. Check out this density map: https://dhs.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/popdensity.png https://dhs.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/popdensi... Note how Europe is consistently dense over a very large area, with a core of highly dense areas all fairly close to each other like London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Munich, and Bern, while the adjacent regions like Italy, the Balkans, and even Poland have fairly consistent population density. In Japan, the density is highly concentrated on Honshu, and even then it's concentrated into certain cities and prefectures. The US, meanwhile, has only a few dense regions, mostly in the Northeast, with the rest of population centers spread out very large areas. Not coincidentally, those more densely populated cities tend to have more public transit than the average American city. There are notable exceptions, such as Los Angeles, but LA is not representative of most of the country.

brenschluss 11y ago
This is a chicken-and-egg problem. The US only has a few dense regions because suburban housing typologies strung together with highways have been dominant. If you consider that public transit makes areas walkable, creates street-level shops, restaurants, and cafes, and densifies areas as a result, then creating public transit is an argument for creating density.
- Goladus 11y ago
  This is a chicken-and-egg problem. Only if you ignore the fact that most of the US population centers developed long before the automobile. The US only has a few dense regions because suburban housing typologies strung together with highways have been dominant. Suburbs are largely a 20th century phenomenon and rail was very important in the history of the US. US population spread itself out for primarily for economic reasons (and also likely socio-political reasons).

milspec 11y ago

I tried this "public transport" in San Francisco. It was a disaster. It takes forever and doesn't run when you need it. This of course is a big city with nice weather; ponder waiting by the curb during an ice storm while your bus/tram/streetcar is cancelled. Even if it did sort of work, I'm not lugging two to four carts of groceries home that way, nor am I willing to make multiple trips per day. Besides more free parking, what we really need is land reform. People don't live where they work because property taxes are grandfathered, real estate agents gobble up 6% of the home value, and so many other stupid expenses.

PhantomGremlin 11y ago
Some public transport there works well. I've taken BART from the airport to a hotel downtown and it wasn't a bad way to get there. I felt safe, should I have been concerned? Most of your other points about mass transit are quite valid. E.g. "lugging" groceries. But why not "think different"? Can't you purchase in small quantities from neighborhood stores? When I grew up in NYC it wasn't uncommon to shop just a block or two from home. You bought 1 loaf of bread, 1 quart of milk, a few pounds of potatoes, etc. It was easily possible to carry that stuff back to the apartment. It wasn't only possible, it was what you had to do. Hardly anyone owned cars. I wonder what percent of residents of San Francisco own a car? How many use a car daily?
m_mueller 11y ago
I think this is a case of where you just can't imagine living in a differently working system anymore. What you describe are typical problems in a place with bad public transport and/or urban planning that's not made for public transport (i.e. suburbia). Here's how this works out in any Japanese or Swiss town/city above ~80k inhabitants: You have a public transport network where all the schedules are synched up. Ideally you have a metro/streetcar/trolley station nearby that can pick you up (if it's a normal bus you may have congested road, so you can't plan exactly by the minute, just like with cars). You go there 2min in advance. Once on board, you work/read HN/read/play/whatever [1]. You arrive at a trainstation, swipe a card, walk ~50m and wait 3min for a train. Again, read. 15-60min and 1-2 changes later you have arrived at your destination without even thinking about it, without putting you or anyone else in significant danger, without already being stressed out. On your way home you spend 10-15m more at one of the train stations where you had to change anyway, get some fresh grocery, and be done with it. No need for your exhausting weekly trips to the mall. You don't even have to leave the station building. Got anything else to do? No problem, there's service offerings for pretty much anything you need within 200m of where you are, because the train station brings so much density of people that it's worth it to have all kinds of stores open. You know, I like driving - I dream about fast cars and all that. I just wouldn't want to be forced to do it every day with unplannable traffic conditions and all that. When I drive, I want to have an flexible schedule, i.e. the weekends.