The gentrification argument is strange to me.

Gentrification as an effect happens when an area becomes more desirable to live in. That means here that people place a positive value on public transport.

To deny an area the benefit of public transport based on some weird altruistic and paternalistic motive doesn't really seem credible.

It's really tail wagging the dog too. To say we should just keep areas shitty or undesirable to avoid gentrification seems totally backwards.

Welcome to the world of political rhetoric. If something is likely to trigger the desired emotional answer by matching a number of keywords, it's an acceptable device; the literal meaning is secondary at best, and ignored in many cases.

It's unbelievable, sometimes maddening, but a great number of people still falls for it.

It works the other way too - people see right wingers attack public transport and assume it's evil without looking into whether it might just be an poor use of tax money.

There seems to be too much ideology on both sides of the argument, a bit more pragmatism would be better.

No, freedom is against public transport, not the other way around. It may be a silly argument (personally, I like BART and Metro in D.C.), but you don’t get to erect a straw man.

It pretty clearly says it both ways. "Public transit, Americans for Prosperity says, goes against the liberties that Americans hold dear."

I'm not american, so this is cheap talk. I'll start with that.

I don't have an outright objection to these positions. They're not crazy or nonsensical. They're matters of judgement, taste & perspective. Cars/roads have been very successful, as a transport technolgy. It's not wrong to be pro cars.

What I do have a problem with is the Das Capital-esque, think-talk-esque, manifesto-esque statements. The position isn't presented as "I like cars better," it is presented as:

"Cars are better. This is an absolute truth. I proved it.^" I can prove it using complicated philosophy with roots in America's founding or Bastiat. I can prove it with Adman Smith & Ricardo derived philosophy. Here is my horrendously complex econometric analysis, that only ever seem to convince their own authors.^

This type of argument is ironically bolshevic, and has all the characteristics that oponents of marxism took issue with, from fredriech hayek to Karl Popper. More importantly, it is fanatical and this makes it hard to engage others of different opinions/tastes. This is particularly frustrating here in this case, where the arguments so clearly involve matters of taste and subjective preference.

Cars need public infrastrucure too, all the asphalt you see everywhere. The infrastructure is costlier in land use. Consumer choice.. I'd say you could make the consumer choice argument both ways. People certainly like (judging by house prices) to live in (and visit) less car-centric cities.

This way of presenting politcal cases is not unique to the american right, it permeates all places & all parties.

^Al la: You are an ass. I can prove that mathematically.

That is a common meme among right-wing politicians who try to profit from private cars factories; but here in Europe it doesn't fly with the general public, who know better.

Public transport is demonstrably the most cost-efficient method for the daily commute of hundred of thousands people in a city, provided the city itself and transport routes are designed accordingly (which arguably is the main problem in the US). For those sporadic free range transportation needs such as vacations and weekend escapades, car rental and taxi services should typically be enough for for all those who normally have enough travelling by public transport.

Even though I am strongly in favour of public transport it's hard to compare Europe to the US. For one thing our populations are much more dense than the US, more than ten times as high in the case of the Netherlands.

> Public transport is against freedom? I got to say, that is creative.

It's a clever word play.

> If someone has the freedom to go where they want, do what they want [...] then they’re not going to choose public transit.

This argument is in itself probably not wrong.

Now switch the antecedent (freedom) and consequent (not public transport), and you arrive the argument "public transport is against freedom".

Anyone familiar with logic will know how wrong this is, but the other 95% won't notice.

  This argument is in itself probably not wrong.

That argument is almost certainly wrong. In areas with good public transit options, there are any number of examples of people choosing it over other options they very clearly have.

Over the limited options they clearly have.

Show me the person with the freedom to go where they want, do what they want, would choose to wait for the crowded bus rather than some eco-friendly quiet car with air-conditioning and your own driver.

I'm married to one, and I see crowds of others every day.

In a big city, public transport can be much more convenient than driving. You don't have to fight traffic, you don't have to find parking, you can read or watch videos while you travel....

Its really the density argument. Do you go for public transport and hope the density then follows to make it more worthwhile? The alternate of getting a dense place and then trying to add good transit options seems just as likely to fail. I'm sure theres some middle ground I'm missing. But busses using the same clogged roads, or trying to find space for more rail/bus/bike lanes in already overcrowded areas seems like an expensive problem to fix. I obviously don't know the answer either way. I gotta think that we can't just do sprawl forever though.

> You don't have to fight traffic

A public bus has to fight the same traffic a private car would (my example)

> you don't have to find parking

Neither would a car with driver (my example)

> you can read or watch videos while you travel....

Same applies to a car with driver (my example).

Look, I'm not defending the original argument -- I clearly stated in my original post how wrong it is. I'm just pointing out why this rhetorical bullshit works as intended.

Sorry, I guess I misread with the assumption that the hypothetical was in some way connected to reality.

I mean, if we're removing limits, show me someone who would ever take a car anywhere, as opposed to sitting on the beach of their own private island sipping cocktails made by their butler.

You mean like someone who has the freedom to go where they want, do what they want?

Indeed, they would probably be sitting on the beach of their own private island sipping cocktails made by their butler.

They would probably not be using public transport.

And thus, the rhetorical trick they used works.

   A public bus has to fight the same traffic a private car would (my example)

But LRT or subway doesn't, for example. Neither do buses using HOV lanes, for another.

Isn't freedom about letting people make their choices? Not going for public transit because people are "probably not going to choose it" sounds specious.

As is commonly the case, raising taxes would hurt those who can buy and maintain a good car properly, but benefit those who depend on quality public transport.

Car owners in any place which has bad traffic should be in favor of improved public transport. The more cars you take off the roads, the nicer the driving experience will be for people who want to keep driving!

The problem is that in many American cities it doesn’t work like that - e.g. a lane of traffic is removed for a dedicated bus lane, increasing general traffic congestion, but bus utilization does not fully replace that same number of drivers that would have used that bus lane

Bad implementations of things are always going to be problematic. That’s an argument for doing them well, not for avoiding it completely.

Agreed - I suppose the point I was getting at was that public transport's record in the US is very mixed, and as such, it is not unreasonable to be skeptical of proposed plans...

Yeah, that’s quite reasonable. We kind of suck at big public projects. I just wish more people wanted to fix it instead of just giving up.

This is America! Where you literally need a license from the government just to go outside your house to fetch milk.

>Public transport is against freedom? I got to say, that is creative

If you manage to filter out actual information from the crass left-leaning garbage that makes up 90% of this completely biased article, you'll see that the core of the story is a actually a fight again raising taxes.

You may or may not agree with the proposition to raise taxes to finance public transportation (which is pretty much impossible to pass judgment on without more local context on how public finances are managed in Nashville), but please, please try to see through the rank propaganda.

There is a point here. Public transportation is great, but under the incredibly inefficient management of the government it will almost always cost anywhere from 2x to 10x what it really should. That means it not only costs more, but takes longer to complete and is possibly irrelevant by the time it is actually usable. This wasn't the case in the past as much it is today and it's only getting worse.

This almost reads like a mad lib of every surface level, trope-like critique of publicly funded initiatives without actually saying anything at all of substance.

Government may be inefficient at times but so far they've been the most consistent purveyor of public mass transportation. It may not be great but I think in the larger picture the general public is probably well satisfied with transit that is consistent if you polled riders.

No mass transit system makes a profit, at least the last time I talked to someone who was heavily involved in the numbers. They require a subsidy of, what was it, 70%? That doesn’t make it wrong, but it has to be considered.

That is wrong. The Munich public transport system has been turning a profit for at least 15 years out of the last 17. For the two missing years, I did not find numbers or sources, but it's probably the same.

Pretty sure there are others that run successfully.

BTW only road systems where you pay for every mile you drive (see e.g. motorways in France, Spain, Italy) turn a profit. All others are, basically, just a waste of taxpayers money ;-)

It's usually failed policies and nincompompous administration that make public transport systems fail.

Sources: >https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pre... >https://www.swm.de/dam/swm/dokumente/unternehmen/swm/geschae...

MTR in Hong Kong was making $2B per year in profit. The model they use is largely the same one being tried in Florida where real estate projects are integrated with the rail system.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/30/news/hong-kong-mtr-subway-pr...

No road system makes a profit either, but very few people seriously discuss getting government out of the road business.

The Metrolink in Manchester - the UK's largest light rail network - is entirely funded by fares and receives no operational subsidy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Metrolink

The cost of a blue line ticket in Chicago — a line running from downtown out to O’Hare and out west past city limits - is $2.50. If you take it every day, a monthly pass is... $120 or so? That’ll take you anywhere: buses & trains.

Do you have an example of where this a) exists b) isn’t government-run, c) cheaper?

$105, and you can get it pre-tax with the right employers.

I disagree that public transportation is great, it's shit, it's crowded and uncomfortable. I avoid it outside of Amtrak. I don't agree with the article but if the choice is CTA or Uber pool im taking Uber for roughly the same cost.

Where do you take Uber pool that is similarly priced to CTA?!

Didn't even use a throwaway account to make your slightly dissenting opinion, brave.

I see the same things in my area with the light rail that was years late, millions overbudget and still is largely underutilized. I am a proponent of mass transit but not every plan is worth endorsing.