People flock to places that are great to live, and those that have many services readily available in the walking distance are usually greater than those that don't.

But I am European living near the big city's center without car, so I am biased.

"In US 100 years is old - in Europe 100km is far."

> My pet theory is it effectively decreases the available housing supply by reducing the number of locations that people can practically commute from.

Also consider the Downs–Thomson paradox: the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport. It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if it shifts investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox

Then why are there popular cities that aren't congested? (And coincidentally have lower costs of living)

From the linked Wikipedia page.

Restrictions on validity

According to Downs, the link between average speeds on public transport and private transport applies only "to regions in which the vast majority of peak-hour commuting is done on rapid transit systems with separate rights of way. Central London is an example, since in 2001 around 85 percent of all morning peak-period commuters into that area used public transit (including 77 percent on separate rights of way) and only 11 percent used private cars. When peak-hour travel equilibrium has been reached between the subway system and the major commuting roads, then the travel time required for any given trip is roughly equal on both modes."[citation needed]

----

So in general, it's entirely unclear whether this effect applies in most scenarios on the road network. In my area of NYC, a poster child for arguments about this effect and why we should never build anything due to "induced demand", it is vastly faster to drive across any borough other than Manhattan rather than taking public transit at all times except certain corridors at the absolute peak of rush hour.

This is a symptom of low road demand for Queens-Brooklyn transit which in turn is because of the relative size of both boroughs, their lower population density and most importantly because there isn't a subway line that truly cuts across the two boroughs.

If there were a proper subway line, running say from LGA, through Jackson Heights, Ridgewood and then cutting east through Brooklyn to JFK there's no way a driver could go faster on Grand Central Parkway anywhere near peak times.

Such as? All of the populous US cities have terrible congestion and high cost of living.

The ones that aren't congested and have lower costs are smaller.

Unless you mean something else by "popular."

Wrong in both counts. The largest US cities are among the cheapest large cities in the developed world: https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4758/38890153315_bb29ac1b6c_b.....

Commutes are also shorter. Average commutes in London is 74 minutes (round trip): https://www.thekingsferry.co.uk/industry-news/article/commut.... Houston and Dallas are 20-25 minutes less: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/.... DC is the second worst in the US, and still about 10 minutes shorter than London: https://wtop.com/traffic/2017/04/dc-area-has-2nd-longest-ave...

Those are comparing metro areas to cities, though. The DC one, for example, includes exurban areas and literal farmland in its definition of the DC metro area (which comes from the Census). This is the kind of stuff it includes: https://maps.app.goo.gl/kbfrPLDvBaUn7tzo8

I don't think it's quite a fair comparison to compare that vs. Hong Kong or Singapore, especially when the London exurbs are called out separately.

I'd guess that NYC is in the same ballpark of unaffordability and congestion as London, but the deeper suburbs / exurbs of NYC are cheaper than their British equivalents.

I'd also wager that DC proper is cheaper than both NYC and London, both via absolute terms and income relative terms.

>Those are comparing metro areas to cities, though. The DC one, for example, includes exurban areas and literal farmland in its definition of the DC metro area

So if anything average commute should be longer because of all the people dragging their butts inside/out of the beltway every morning/evening.

Possibly, but keep in mind not everyone living in suburbs or exurbs has their job in the city.

"Median house price"

1. Does that actually mean median 'house' price, or does it mean median 'home' price?

2. Is that price to buy, or rent, or what?

So, I think there's a few factors here. One is that recent booming usually leads to higher home prices, as the amount of building going on usually trails the number of jobs and income increases. It catches up eventually, but not until the boom stops.

The other is that it's true that sprawling out can decrease home prices. However, that tends to also increase transportation prices, since you're further out now. Americans spend a LOT on transportation because of the car dependency. Quick googling and math indicate annual household transportation spending of 9.7k for the US, 6.3k for Germany, 5k for Japan.

That's cheapest compared to median income, which is a valid thing to measure but probably not what GP meant.

And also it's only comparing very large cities in ~8 selected countries (no Paris or Rhine–Ruhr, for example).

(Source of your data, 2019 edition since I couldn't find 2017: http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf)

How else do you define “high cost of living” except relative to median incomes?

I guess you could compare it between cities but as Mark Twain demonstrated in A Connecticut yankee in King Arthur's court that would be extremely silly.

Look at many of the large/fast growing/cheap cities throughout Texas and the southeastern US that have comparatively light congestion for their size.

What cities are these? Most of the large southern cities I'm aware have terrible traffic. Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Tampa, Nashville--they all score terribly for traffic.

The only reason they don't rank at the very top is because they are in fairly low population density areas.

Terrible relative to where? Austin has an average commute of 25 min. Stockholm is 34 minutes: https://www.thelocal.se/20120528/41090. London is 37 minutes each way: https://www.businessleader.co.uk/how-long-is-the-daily-work-....

Other US cities. According to this article Austin is the 14th most congested city in the US.

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-cities-with-most-traffic-2...

If you’re talking in the US: no high-cost city has had long term public policy that favors walking/public transport over driving, to my knowledge. Even in Manhattan, cars are given free parking in numerous places, despite a single parking space being worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you’re thinking of San Francisco: how has public transit grown in the past 20 years? What new lines have been built? Sure, the cost of living has gone up, but has the total area well serviced by public transit increased? That indicates to me SF does not favor public transit as policy.

It's well known in SF that public transit is worse now than it ever has been. In particular, the trains and buses are slower than ever. It's been a long-term, multi-decade trend, but more recently ride sharing significantly increased the amount of traffic, disrupting SF's mostly surface public transit.

It makes sense, because in SF it was really parking that made public transport more attractive than driving... it was always faster to get somewhere driving than public transport, but once you got where you were going parking was impossible. This meant the slower public transport was a better option.

Ride sharing services give you the speed of driving without having to park, so lots of people will use them until they cause enough congestion to make them as slow as public transport.

I was curious whether this was true, so went looking for studies. Here’s a pretty good recent one which concluded that ride-sharing increased congestion in SF: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/05/20190509-tnc.html

The third street LRV has been added and the central subway LRV line is being added. The F line was added too, though mostly for tourists.

Third street LRV doesn't really improve the situation. It was added in anticipation of and simultaneous to the redevelopment of the Mission Bay area. I don't live in that part of the city, but as far as I know folks living in the southeast took the express buses downtown as it jumps on the freeway for most of the way; they probably mostly still do because the LRV is ridiculously slow. I can walk from downtown to AT&T Park almost as fast as the LRV can get there, and the LRV is either underground or has the right-of-way most of the way there. I haven't taken it past Mission Bay into, say, Bayview, but it's still slow getting anywhere in Mission Bay as it loses right-of-way.

The central subway LRV is mostly for tourists, and while the third street and central subway lines were, together, partly intended to help shuttle people from the SE to Chinatown, as of now the Chinese community still oppose it. Everybody knows why they oppose (it just can't be said aloud[1]), but personal convenience usually trumps anti-social community sentiments. Once it opens I guess we'll see. If opposition quickly goes away then that would suggest it's more convenient than the existing heavily trafficked express buses, but somehow I doubt that will happen.

What would be a meaningful addition to the network is if they finally extended the E-Embarcadero (sister to the F line that opened in 2016) to the Marina, using the Fort Mason tunnel. But crime in Fisherman's Wharf is way up, so I suspect it's being quietly stalled by Marina activists.

In any event, LRVs suck, the F- and E-lines notwithstanding. They're slower than buses and 10x as expensive, in SF and most every other American city.[2] Oppose LRVs! All they do is give public transit a bad name. It's right-of-way or no way, but preferably grade separated.

[1] It's the same reason the North Beach and Fisherman's Wharf communities successfully stopped its extension past Chinatown.

[2] I think the only LRV I've been on outside the U.S. is Vienna, but it was mostly historic. Somehow it seems historic routes see less competing traffic, perhaps because they were built in a time and place that doesn't permit much car traffic to begin with. I've been on BRTs in Guadalajara and Quito--if you can't grade separate but can acquire a right-of-way, LRVs seem like a waste of money. They're even a worse waste of money if they don't get unimpeded right-of-way.

Both light rail and bus are fine when given their own lanes so they can run quickly and frequently.

The killer is sharing lanes and traffic lights with single people driving cars, or even worse with double-parked Uber taxis.

Re: [1] District 3 is usually more progressive than some others. So that’s weird.

Re: [2] I think LRVs work when they complement a subway/commuter rail ala U-bahn, S-bahn. But I think your observation is right, they’re often in settings where they don’t need to be fast. (Serving an inner core).

Progressives seem no less conservative when problems are at their doorstep. And never underestimate the depth of racist--specifically, anti-black--sentiments in the U.S. or most places in the world, for that matter.

It's hard to dispute their fears. Considering the profile of crime in SF, especially property crime, they're warranted. This is more true today than when they killed the extension.

Of course, the proper response is to address the underlying problems; to stop the self-perpetuating cycle. But that's intractable in the short-term. Alternatively, the city could just beef up crime enforcement so that we can all enjoy better transit, which is itself a small (tiny) step in dealing with the deeper problems. But we're too busy enabling street addicts and pandering to extremist progressive fear mongers (e.g. anti-vaping, etc). It's difficult to blame anyone for not trusting the city to maintain law & order.

I live in Montreal with city run metro, train, and bus networks. It’s currently building out a light rail network that should start to be operational in 2022.

The cost of living seems reasonable to me, especially compared to other North American cities.

I pay ~$1000 for an 800 sq ft apartment that is 30 minutes by public transport from the downtown area. My monthly transport pass costs $80. All prices are CAD.

Doesn’t seem so high to me. Our roads are a mess of construction, but that’s another story.

Unfortunately that new Light Rail Line, being a suburban mini-metro with virtually all new stations along highways, will not create more walkable, human-scale neighborhoods with great transit connections to downtown. That's because you won't have those neighborhoods where they'll build the stations.

And that's often the problem with public transit that is built nowadays in North America (if any is built at all..) -- it's often built to outer low-density suburbs, along or on highways, with giant park'n'rides instead of neighborhoods at stations.

And that's why walkable neighborhoods with good transit connections are so rare and thus so expensive.

Subways are expensive and displacing buildings to build grade level rail is a problem for many people. Sharing right of way with freeways makes some sense.

Some of the L lines in Chicago are above ground, when they are, they generally use the median area of a major highway (south 90/94 and 290 to the west). There is some at grade stretches on the north side of the city/near suburbs.

I think all of the suburban commuter (Metra, which is an entirely different system & agency) use freight lines, with stations typically near the town/village/city center. Problem with the shared lines is that freight (because they own the line) generally has priority. Freight train breaks down? Youre stuck for hours. 1.5 mile coal train coming through at the switch? You're stuck until it passes.

Granted, when I had to commute into the Loop in Chicago, the hour total of using Metra was far more convenient, less frustrating and cheaper than driving. It was a hour door to door for me, 15 mins to get to the station, 5 minutes of waiting, 25 mins on the train and about a 15 min walk to the office.

Now I both live and work in the West suburbs. Usually a 15 minute drive into work, about 25 home.

There are other other options besides tunnels and elevated along highways - for example using rail ROWs. Also, if you build Urban metros instead of suburban ones, the tunnel costs are often worthwhile.

Yeah, Montreal is super affordable by pretty much any metric.

Montreal is mentioned here, as one style of adding "enough" supply: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...

Indeed supply is the critical factor in housing affordability.

Hey, off-topic question. My father built the fare collection system for the Montreal metro in the early '80s. Do you still have the awful system they built that gave you two paper tickets (one for proof, one for transfer)?

The fair collection has been revamped. It could be better, but I've also seen worse.

Single Ticket Fares

Single tickets are printed on a piece of thick cardstock. They are both used for a proof and transfer. Validation is electronic by inserting it into a machine on a bus or at a terminal of up to 2 hours. The machine prints the times it was used on the ticket.

Multiday tickets are printed on some thin plastic-like paper with an NFC chip inside. They are tapped on terminals and in busses and get no physical markings of when they were used, but are validated 100% digitally with some central system. They are also good for the same type of transfer.

Monthly/Yearly passes are a thick plastic credit-card-like card. They have an NFC chip and work similarly to the multiday tickets.

I do think that there's a correlation, but I don't think it's done out of malice. I believe it's not due to walking/public transportation directly, but because housing and office density doesn't go up enough to counteract people moving in to take advantage of the public transportation.

Yes, it's population density. In denser urban areas walking and transit become more practical and driving and dedicating space to parking become less so. Those areas are also more desirable to live in (or they wouldn't have the population to begin with) and that tends to drive up prices.

Source: half-assed guess

Absolutely.

Developing countries tend to have extremely low cost of public transport. Yet cost of living, such as quality free cost heathcare for terminal or chronic medical needs, such as heart disease or cancer or diabetes are non-existant or minimal to the point there's an ideal but no implementation of the policy. And private medical insurance capped at a $CURRENCY limit, should that be exceeded then lights out on insurance, no 'promise to care' in those private insurance contracts.

I certainly notice the correlation.

No I haven’t seen that correlation. It is a question of culture and what is normal where.

If you had a typical danish city in the US the dynamic would be totally different than in Denmark, where nearly every city has a decent standard when it comes to public transport.

I can’t judge whether your corellation holds true for the US, but certainly not for the parts of Europe I lived in.

Compared to other megacities, Tokyo has a low cost of living, and has a huge and effective public transport system.

That's such a vague statement. The cost of living is way higher than Mexico City, Cairo, Mumbai or New Delhi. I know they don't have the same kind of public transport, but it just seems absurd to me to call the cost of living "low" when it is more than double of other candidates.

Hmm, I'm not sure comparing Tokyo to megacities of less developed countries is fair either since they will usually have a lower cost of living.

Denmark for someone earning a Danish salary is very very affordable...

Obviously its going to depend on the context of your country/city/culture, but i'd point out that your theory of reduced housing supply is a bit counter-intuitive given that these tend to be the areas with the higher density of housing, ceteris paribus.

I think its much more straight forward in that car ownership is actually quite expensive, in both time, infrastructure, and money, density creates opportunities of scale, and employment is a net attraction.

Successful areas that favour walking/public transport over cars tend to have more jobs, higher wages, are net attractors, and people are able to substitute away the expense of other things to live there because of the economies of scale: thus their demand functions, budgets and competition to live there are quite high and people compete strongly for them.

Those areas that are dense and attractive start to increase demand for pedestrian/public transport over cars organically as well, so it sort of feeds back on itself to some degree.

There's also a bit of survivorship bias, if that's the right phrase. An area that is attempted to be designed for pedestrian/public-transport, but which doesn't thrive tends to become a ghetto/ghost-town, because there's neither demand/people there, and its not an attractor, and people will find driving there hard/pointless. These areas will either be abandoned or be primed for redevelopment: and if the later works, it will push up values/demand...

Have you heard of the San Francisco Bay Area?