In NYC, buses work, and people take them because they have to. They could be better but the alternative is hundreds of dollars in parking if you think about owning a car.

Cities have actively made decisions to design cities around the car at the expense of every other mode of traffic. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that the status quo can't change.

In fact if you look at the Bay Area, the problems with transit are largely due to other sorts of dysfunction, not due to lack of funding. Los Angeles, OTOH, has been building out public transit in a coordinated way (far more successfully than the Bay Area has). IOW where there's a will there's a way.

That's more dense than Oslo, which has several major rail arteries and a light-rail/subway system, most of which was initially built at a point where Norway was still a relatively poor country. It's vastly more than e.g. Bergen, which has 280k people, a tram

It boils down to whether or not you're willing to actually plan for it and spend money on it.

If I didn't have a car, of course I would ride the bus to the train station. And I have in the past taken a fairly long distance bus to get to an airport hub.

But this doesn't seem to have any relationship to daily life where I am, or similar places, because train or plane rides are for going on long trips, say over 200km.

Indeed, to travel to NYC from where I live by train would be the same time as driving, and considerably quicker than a bus. But no way would I ever spend about 2.5 hours daily going back and forth, so it's all unrelated to my normal transportation needs.

Maybe by a "well developed rail system" you mean a subway, but it doesn't seem realistic for an area with a million or two people to support one. With infinite resources, you could run infinite free buses too, rather than indirectly trying to create some sort of synergy.

Population of Kyoto: 1.47 million

Kyoto subway map:

https://youinjapan.net/maps/kyoto/kyoto_metro_train_map.png

I didn't cherry pick this from some ordered list of cities by train lines to population ratio; I just picked it because I lived there and the train was as incredibly convenient as it looked. And also gorgeous:

https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%AC%E9%98%AA3000%E7%B3...

The net result is that a good subway system in Kyoto can serve a majority of the metro population, while that is not true for Philadelphia or Atlanta. (That is true even though Kyoto is not particularly dense--closer in Atlanta to density than to Philadelphia.)

But let's look at Boston instead. Population 700,000 in the city limits; 4.8 million in the metro area, so about one seventh lives in the city proper.

http://www.rochestersubway.com/images/photos/boston_subway_m...

While perhaps not as developed as Kyoto, that's still a very healthy rail system. And its first subway was built in 1897 when it had a population of just about half a million.

The metro area in which Kyoto is located is around 20 million people. The metro area of Boston is almost 5 million people, you say. These are not counterexamples to what I was trying to communicate. I don't really think my comment was as hard to understand as you make it seem.

The best car alternative is not going anywhere.

Begging the question is a logical fallacy.

If you can do your job on a train on your laptop, why the hell are you traveling to an office in the first place?

Potentially there are some, but not all, parts of the job that can be done without face-to-face interaction. Or potentially there are parts of the job that can be done without face-to-face interaction but would still benefit from being in the office.

The drawback would be that the train isn't that smooth or quiet.

Which seems to suggest you live somewhere without a well developed rail system.

I grew up in Norway - a country with a population density of ~14 or so people per square km. Only 8 US states (Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, New Mexico, Nebraska, Nevada) has a lower population density. But yet, like in the US, most of the population live in much denser conurbations.

What is different from the US is that most of these people as a result also live along rail corridors that makes rail competitive with or faster than driving as the commuting option for a large proportion of the population.

> Maybe by a "well developed rail system" you mean a subway, but it doesn't seem realistic for an area with a million or two people to support one.

Oslo has a light rail/subway system with a population of 673k in the city itself and 1m in the urban area, or 1.6m in the metro area (though the latter includes towns well outside of Oslo proper separated from the city by forest in many cases).

The London suburb I live in has a tram system that is grade separated along substantial parts of the network, for a population of about 400k.

> Indeed, to travel to NYC from where I live by train would be the same time as driving, and considerably quicker than a bus. But no way would I ever spend about 2.5 hours daily going back and forth, so it's all unrelated to my normal transportation needs.

And yet large cities like NYC does have commuter belts that stretch out that far. E.g. London as well - the typical Londoner commutes an hour each way, and about 70% of journeys happen by public transport, because car largely is not competitive unless you happen to live in really odd locations relative to were you work.

But smaller towns do as well - my London suburb attracts commuters by rail from similar distances away, some in fact coming by rail through London from the other side.

But many people commute in to London from 2h+ away - the first trains to arrive in towards London from the South Coast in the mornings are always full of commuters.

Of course London does have the advantage of significant density.

But this was true even when I lived in Norway - trains in to Oslo in the early morning brought in long range commuters, and then filled up by people like me travelling "only" 20-30m from a nearby small low density town, because taking a bus to the local train station and the train in was competitive with car unless you live 20-30+ minutes by bus away from the nearest train station, in which case you'd be living in the middle of the wilderness.

Which of course is possible, but the proportion of the population that is true for even in Norway with it's extremely low population density, is extremely low - even in the US states with lower population density, most of their population is concentrated in relatively dense conurbations.

The point being that once you actually develop rail networks out to those kind of locations, people start using them over time - this is true in the US too - a whole lot of US towns grew out of development around the rail rather than being somewhere that existed prior to rail. Once you then add feeder bus routes utilization tends to go way up, as it takes away the day parking problem.

This whole "the US is just too big" thing just doesn't make any sense, because as you point out, most people have a clear limit on how far they want to commute, and if you parcel up the US similarly based on commuting centres and a ~1h travel radius around them, you cover the vast majority of the US population in regions that are for the most part more dense than many places with perfectly fine rail networks.

Nobody is suggesting rail, or light rail/subways or buses will be viable for absolutely everyone, but as someone who has lived somewhere with population density well below the US average without a car, I'll tell you that it seems weird to you because you have a century of no policy of trying to create an integrated transport system most places.

Which seems to suggest you live somewhere without a well developed rail system.

I grew up in Norway - a country with a population density of ~14 or so people per square km."

If I Google "Norway" and "subway", I get hits for Oslo. The Oslo metro area is close to two million people.

So I don't see any indication that my view of what's possible is likely wrong.

Patronizingly saying "you don't have a well developed subway system" implies that is something that could be changed if Americans were just sensible like Scandinavians. But is there any magical solution outside the largest population centers, in any country? In another post, Kyoto was mentioned, as though that was a refutation of something.

When I ask how you can have a certain level of infrastructure in an area with a million people, pointing to all the arbitrary boundaries enclosing a million people within a significantly larger population doesn't seem like constructive dialogue to me.

[0] Even in London where buses stop every few hundred meters they are faster than walking (unless there is a lot of traffic). How badly designed is GPs system?