So don't spread the jobs out all over the spokes? Is some urban planning really hard to do here?

> Rail transit is an anachronism, best suited for the 1950s when life involved a woman staying home with the kids while dad took the train into the city for work.

That isn't true at all in much of the world. Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries.

Again, not talking about public transit in cities (which is amazing and should be scaled up) but about intercity/state/province transport. The distances, and spread are just not comparable to almost anywhere else in the world and you can't just magically make everyone move.

This is like the one region of the country you actually could scale up intercity/state transport, and it sucks so bad that Amtrak is terrible.

1: https://tetcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2040_Vis....

Even here in montreal, while the metro is pretty good and we are currently building a pretty nice light rail system you still can't really depend on the rail system if your job isn't in montreal itself. The whole transit system is based on feeding the big city, not move people in between smaller cities. (Also, It's a bit tiring then to hear about just how dysfunctional the US is and how good they have it everywhere else when it's just not true. The American self loathing just get repetitive honestly)

I think public transit is amazing for city transit but does not scale very well when there's something else than the usual suburb->city->suburb pattern of movement. You can't really interconnect every single medium-small ish city at a north American scale

This problem has been solved for awhile now, at least since the 1960s when the first intra-city/province shinkansen came online. Just because some other countries suck as badly as the USA at it doesn't mean it is an unsolved problem.

This is just rehashing pop-urban planning buzzwords. Like I'm not sure where the trend of just handwaving every problem as easily solvable by "rail! Shinkansen! City public transit even out of cities!" came from but it particularly does not make sense in this situation considering the commenter you replied to specified he talked about spread out, smaller cities with frequent stops. Which is the opposite of what the shinkansen is for.

Have you ever tried taking these lines before? They have high speed rail between big cities, and tons and tons of small branch/feeder routes out to small towns with the most frequent stops ever imaginable. Getting from huge Tokyo to small Gifu actually works.

It did take some planning however. The USA's model of just "build that office complex wherever you want!" wouldn't work.

Which is exactly my point! That's already the current situation on the ground in the USA. So yes, it wouldn't work there. Unless you'd literally move around millions of jobs, offices etc which is absolutely not feasible. Trying to build public transit around that structure just to fit an idealized vision of somewhere else is weird. Japan built the system that fit their needs and their situation and the USA should do the same.

They did this for a variety of reasons some noble (grand visions of urban renewal based on cars instead of public transit) and some odious (breaking up non-machine voting wards, enforcing de facto redlining post the Supreme Court decisions, etc). They were able to make sections of the city, specifically the near south and south west places you commuted through instead of to. Similar things were done with tearing out el tracks, trolleys and the removal of commuter rail from further south neighborhoods that had been alternate business districts to the loop. These were conscious urban planning decisions to reinforce the pattern of outward/in commutes.

American Pharoah is a not particularly good biography of Richard Daley that happens to include a good book on Chicago urban planning in the late 40s to late 60s era.

“Just completely restructure every single place 80% of the population in one of the country’s largest metro areas lives and works in.”

Yes, there is an argument that Reston, Vienna, etc., shouldn’t exist in their present form (or anything close to it). But that ship sailed long ago.

Efforts to gloss over that reality end badly. The Silver Line and all the adjacent development are monstrosities. Stations are huge concrete edifices in the middle of freeways that are nerve wracking to navigate with a squirrelly three year old. Billions were spent making places that are nice for just a handful of people who can afford $4,000/month for a two bedroom near the McLean Metro so they can take the Silver Line to their job at Google in Reston.

> That isn't true at all in much of the world. Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries.

Those countries are dysfunctional. Birth rates in these transit-oriented metro areas are well below replacement, meaning that their form of civilization is literally sustainable.

Yes, impossible actually to prevent this from happening. Corporations always want a good deal for office space, so they will literally shop around different cities looking at who will give them the biggest tax advantages and the most developable land. City councilmembers literally make careers out of wooing corporations into building suburban office parks, and why wouldn't they? They just injected a thousand white collar workers who will be paying taxes into their school district and another 5 thousand workers who will be driving in every morning and spending money on local sales tax when they get starbucks from the drive through. It's a race to the bottom as long as local governments have local control over their planning processes, and it would probably still continue if planning were done regionally or nationally since it is very easy to bribe American politicians.

You can make your substantive points thoughtfully, without name-calling, swipes, and the like. If you'd please do that instead, we'd be grateful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hong Kong Area: 427 mi²

Washington DC Metropolitan Area: 5,565 mi²

The DC metro area is just a pretty flat sprawl. It should be an easy case transportation wise, but...Americans.

Go to Dallas and look at all the families with 3-4 kids. That’s what the future looks like. (Except the minivans and pickup trucks are probably electric.)

Define "works". Sure it can move millions of people each day, but those people live miserable lives most of the time. Have you lived in a city where commuting one hour each way by train is considered "very good" ? And some of the worse are around 1.30-1.45 hours each way, each day? Even if for a while the train is fine, if the city is growing it will become unbearably crowded, smelly, hot and just a nightmare to deal with when you're tired and want to get home at 6 PM.

A truly regrettable existence that no human should have to endure. We mourn the lack of a reason to own a second car. My husband’s bike ride to work is an even worse torture.

Because every year we refuse to fund public transport at an appropriate level to prevent it from getting worse let alone improving.

If your idea of public transport is confined to only what the US has to offer currently, then you have already stopped having a conversation in good faith and instead are being myopic in the realm of solutions.

If we could build rail miles as cheaply and quickly as Western Europe, everyone in Fairfax Co could commute via rail except perhaps those work west of there.

1: Fairfax county is rather centrally planned compared to everywhere else in the US I've lived since then, but the DC Metro is funded by MD, VA, DC, and the federal government. The difficulty of building infrastructure seems to scale super-linearly with the number of people paying for the infrastructure...

I agree. But we can’t. It’s a cluster fuck even when it’s just one state. Maryland spent $7 billion building the Purple line, which is what Western European countries spent for similar amounts of fully automated underground heavy rail.

At some point we have to treat our infrastructure costs as realities to be planned around rather than solvable problems. This is a keen insight Lee Kuan Yew had in building Singapore. He admired many aspects of Anglo culture, but realized that not all of them would work in an Asian country: https://web.colby.edu/eas150/files/2017/11/Zakaria_LeeKuanYe.... America is a decentralized, low cohesion society built around having plenty of space for a bunch of different groups to leave each other alone. America is continually replenished by the people who are antisocial enough to leave their kin and homelands to start new lives thousands of miles away.[1] We aren’t Germans or Swedes or Japanese and shouldn’t beat our selves up trying to be them. Our future is electric cars and freeways, not trains.

[1] Asians are the biggest immigrant group in the US, but when polled, under 10% of people in Asia said they would immigrate to another country if they had the chance. Guess what kind of people end up making the journey?

I think this is the main point of disagreement in this thread; if we have to spend $500M/mile for light rail in the US, it's fairly obvious that rail is not an option. If there is a large learning-factor for building rail that would bring costs down significantly with more miles built, then rail is certainly an option for the northeast US.

I used to be a rail fan. Then I rode Amtrak to work for a couple of years. I saw the DC Metro, which is well funded, so badly maintained that automated train control, a core feature when the system was built 1970s, had to be turned off. (That was a decade ago and there is no sign of it ever being reenabled.) I came to the conclusion that Americans running transit projects like the Europeans or Japanese is just wishful thinking. A camel cannot be a bird no matter how much it wants.

So prove it with more than your ridiculous anecdotes and metaphors. You do a lot of claiming and literally no sourcing. Try again, this time with data.

>You want to know what the future of America looks like? Go to the Dallas suburbs.

Can I point out the irony that you're posting this in a thread about a natural disaster exacerbated by suburban development patterns, and your example of Dallas suffered a similar disaster less than a year ago, made worse by the thermal inefficiency of the same development patterns? Is that the future we should want?

I say this as a member of a two car family who routinely ferries children to places and hates every minute of it that could be spent paying attention to something other than the road.

I lived literally next to Dulles International Airport - ~8 miles. Yet, to get to Dulles (or Reston/Herndon) by Public transit, would've taken me 2 hours perhaps, or more.

Home to IAD by car: 5 miles, 9 minutes

Home to IAD by transit: 40+ minutes across 2 bus lines

Home to IAD by foot: 10.9 miles, 3+ hours

Home to WAS by car: 24 miles, 29 minutes

Home to WAS by transit: 90+ minutes across 1 bus line, 2 Metro lines, and a few walking segments to link them.

It's sad that walking to the airport is twice as far than driving. It's also sad that I can drive to a airport further away than I can access my closest airport by transit.

1: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9768706,-77.4451826,3a,75y,2...

I have considered cycling to the airport in my area before, and basically run into the same issue you raise.

I read your comments downthread, which I think are pretty insightful; it may be the case that the ship has sailed and we're not going back (and it may even be the case that there's something in our national DNA that prevents us from competently building and operating transit). But it should at least be acknowledged that the status quo isn't the result of personal choice or revealed preference; it was quite literally a big-government social engineering project.

It's sad, but without a car in the DC area, your options are very minimal and you pretty much have to live in the city.

I lived in the DC area for nearly 30 years and moved out right as Covid hit, and have tried to use public transit at various points in my adult life. Unless you live super close to a metro stop and/or need to go to a metro stop the system will barely work for you, and even then you'll be hamstrung with where you can go and how long it will take you to get there.

Dallas should probably get some better research universities if this is going to be a thing.