Also? We’re not good at infrastructure spending, it’s not sexy enough. And many cities are having trouble just keeping people living/working there.
A very expensive 15-20 year project that may help with that can be a VERY hard sell.
And it’s only to build a few miles of something, so just a tiny piece of what’s needed.
Or you’re NYC and already have an existing subway. But instead of 10s of millions it needs HUNDREDS of millions (or more) to ‘fix’, minimum.
How do you think the national road network was built in the first place?
part of the justification for building it was national defense.
Remind me how much money is in NYC?
SV would have the best public transit on earth and wouldn’t have any homeless or housing problems.
They should. All that would be required is raising municipal taxes.
There’s nothing stopping Silicon Valley companies from migrating to other areas in California or even other states. I’m sure there are more than enough places that would be willing to throw out ridiculous tax advantages to lure big companies there.
The state is very enthusiastic about taking the money out of the city but not so interested in investing much back into any transportation infrastructure to support its' cash cow.
Norman Mailer once ran for Mayor of NYC and part of his platform was for NYC to secede from NY State:
'New York City would be split off from the rest of New York State, and achieve independent statehood as the 51st State of the U.S. The campaign sought to free the city from the control of "upstate legislators who don't care about the city but control our schools, police, housing, and money."'[1]
And perhaps more topical is that part of that platform was also to ban all cars from Manhattan except Taxis and buses. And this was in 1969 :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City:_the_51st_State
If you go to cities like Chicago or New York City, many people do use public transport. I did when I lived in Chicago, generally hated it, but it was cheaper and faster than driving downtown for work in that situation. To get anywhere else in the city or suburbs it would be faster and more convenient to drive.
Adding a bike lane or adjusting road speed to reduce car-pedestrian fatalities is enough to get city council members unelected the next cycle.
Car lobby, brainwashed citizens.
Just watch TV around an election. It's complete and total doublespeak and propaganda every few minutes.
That's what weekend cruising and trackdays are for.
Sitting in commuter traffic is to driving as being a passenger on a low-cost airline is to flying.
To think that you need:
- A 5000 pound machine to take a 200 pound human to work
- Workplace is 60 miles away
- On a road with many other rush hour drowsy 200 pound humans
- Said humans, then spend 30 mins and $30 for parking, in which the 5000 pound machine is just lying around empty
- All the above effort just to bring back the person from work in the evening and leave that car back on the street, lying around?
That doesn't sound insane to you? There's no reason for this for a rich country.
If you want proof that there are better, efficient and human friendly transportation systems, you need to visit HongKong and Singapore. (NYC doesn't count)
It's amazing how many people think this. There are metro areas in "the middle" with populations greater than European countries. And Texas, right in the middle, has a population that would put it at #10 in Europe.
#3 Chicago 9.5 million
#4 Dallas 7.4 million
#5 Houston 6.9 million
#14 Detroit 4.3 million
#16 Minneapolis 3.6 million
#19 Denver 2.9 million
#21 St Louis 2.8 million
The Chicago metro would be the 20th largest country in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
Look at Texas. 200 miles of between Houston and Dallas and Austin. This largely empty triangle itself is half the Texas population. But its barely 10% of the Texas area.
So yes. The US metros are isolated compared to Europe.
It doesn't explain the lack of transit inside the metros.
Metro population density is far more important.
Which absolutely does start to explain the lack of transit inside many of these metros: at the same time the rails were converted to mostly cargo only a lot of the suburban commuter lines were themselves "lost" to time or destroyed. It's utterly depressing to see the old passenger train maps in America and compare to what some of those passenger lines could be serving today if like Europe they'd been kept up/maintained.
A lot more of the suburbs in every American city than people realize were served by trolley and passenger train in their infancy that they grew around, and just because many of the lines have been "lost" over the years doesn't mean that their skeletons don't still show in the overall growth pattern. (Until you get into the entirely car-dependent exurbs and "suburbs of the suburbs", of course.)
America outsourced public transit to the lowest bidders, they got bored serving people directly and went with focusing solely on cargo, and people were too busy driving everywhere to notice what they lost.
That is because whites moved out and systematically starved the cities of a tax base and state funding for infrastructure projects that would benefit minorities.
That's a positive for public transport, you can cover more people cheaper because almost everyone live in big cities.