It seems that to Americans, public transport is unthinkable and the mere suggestion that it could be a solution is met with shock and horror since the only public transport they have ever known is the American kind with useless timetables and primarily used as homeless housing.

The timetables could be deemphasized if you could see the public transportation moving live on a map. The homeless housing aspect could be reduced if a phone or app was required for the upscale public transport.

>reduced if a phone or app was required

No thanks. I don't want government mandated spyware on my phone. Its shocking that your solution is to try and ban poor people from public transport rather than providing them a proper place to stay.

The AirTrain is only eight miles long, cost $1.9 billion to build, and is relevant only to those going to or from JFK. Public transport, especially the AirTrain, is great but I think such advocacy would be well served by discussing the costs as well.

I think it would only be fair to put the cost of constructing roads next to that number since those are mindblowingly high as well. The first result I saw was that a 6 lane highway costs about $7-11 million per mile and that doesn't count the cost of all the cars that use it where as the first stat would count the train. I also assume that steel tracks last a lot longer than road surface which has to be rebuilt every few years. Also the cost of carbon emissions is often ignored in car price stats.

For reference, in the United States, the amount of money spent on road maintenance per state controlled mile looks something like this:

* $2,700 in Alabama

* $80,000 in Massachusetts

* $84,000 in California

* $208,000 in New Jersey

https://reason.org/policy-study/23rd-annual-highway-report/m...

For context, making a new 2-lane road costs 2-5 million USD per mile.

I didn't realize roads were so expensive.

When land is expensive roads are expensive.

Self driving cars are a form of individual travel. An airport train is prescheduled and prerouted. The former beats the latter under specific circumstances only (or we would not have these two categories of transportation).

I would argue that traveling from and to a large airport is about as disadvantageous as it gets for individual travel: Your schedule is determined by someone else. Your route is already fixed. The only benefit of individual that I can think of in that case is the possibility to travel to/from somewhat remote locations directly from/to the airport.

>The former beats the latter under specific circumstances only.

A large part of that circumstance being the nonexistance of the former and creation of our urban environments to specifically cater to the latter.

> A large part of that circumstance being the nonexistance of the former and creation of our urban environments to specifically cater to the latter.

That's a nice talking points and might even apply to some (US) cities. But I live with an extensively (and expensively) built public transportation and still it loses vs. individual transport quite often.