Yes, it's hard to literally relocate hundreds of thousands of jobs according to some urban planners dreams. We aren't talking about intra city planning, but about state wide job markets. I guess Canada is dysfunctional too because there is absolutely no way to get rail service working beyond the big cities. Maybe it has something to do with north America not being Europe so trying to just force a European model here is a pure pipe dream.

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.

The context of this thread is about Virginia which is part of the I-95 corridor, the most densely populated area in the country, with a population density comparable to many Western European countries[1].

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....

I guess it could be, but the point of the GP was that the jobs and the population were spread out widely even if the population density is similar. Now I could be wrong, but from what I know from the half of my family living in France, transit in Paris for example is mostly pouring into the city where the jobs are. In this case, everything is spread out, so the density itself does not really matter. The problem is the spread.

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

You can connect those smaller cities with stuff besides rail, you know.

bus service is fairly decent in NoVA

> 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 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.

There's just absolutely no way to compare the shinkansen to what would be required in the DC/VA area. Yes the US should connect its big cities with high speed rail but that would still not do anything for small intercity transit for everyone else

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.

> Yes the US should connect its big cities with high speed rail but that would still not do anything for small intercity transit for everyone else

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.

>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.

My first comment mentioned urban planning. I that involves more than just planning the transit, you have to plan the work places and residential places as well. The USA is too enamored with personal and corporate liberty to let the government plan anything that would actually be effective beyond “let’s just build freeways everywhere and expect everyone to drive.”

You don't get to "plan" the work places and residential places. They are what they are. Your transit plan needs to serve the commercial and residential areas that already exist, not a hypothetical ideal. It isn't easy in Ireland, Germany, or Spain to reorganize an entire metro area by fiat, either.

It might not be easy but big swaths of US cities did exactly this in living memory. Many of them as active parts of building the highway system.

Not really. Cities like New York and Chicago built some downtown freeways, but jobs are still clustered in the downtown core. They're still very different from cities like Atlanta and Dallas that rapidly expanded in the mid-20th century around the highway system. The same for suburbs that grew up around traditional cities during the highway era. Loudoun, a booming part of Northern Virginia, was mostly farmland and exurbs even when we moved to the area in 1989. You're not going to make Loudoun look like New York any more than you can make New York look like Loudoun.

Chicago put the major north/south and east/west highways where they are to make areas more clearly delineated between residential and commercial.

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.

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

“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.

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

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.

Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we're trying for a different sort of discussion here.

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

Some numbers for comparison according to a Google search:

Hong Kong Area: 427 mi²

Washington DC Metropolitan Area: 5,565 mi²

Hong Kong is actually just a few urban areas separated by a bunch of really really tall hills (and rural areas in between). That anyone can get around at all in that city is already amazing.

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

Ok, just compare the Metropolitan areas. The actual city of DC is 68.34 mi², smaller than Hong Kong. Still worse to get around in.

Visit NYC but try to take a train from somewhere in brooklyn to somewhere in the bronx without having to spend almost an hour with a transfer in midtown manhattan. Even in NYC the rail network is primarily oriented toward you having a 9-5 job in midtown or lower manhattan, and everyone else gets served nearly an hour commute transferring on busses or trains.

Sure, I wish we had more outer borough connection lines. This country sucks at building anything but 12 lane freeways.

Nobody in northern Virginia wants to live in Hong Kong, and even if they did that ship sailed long ago. Also, the fertility rate in Hong Kong is less than half the replacement rate. They’re like the Asgard—an impressive civilization, full of marvels, but without a future.

Ok, go to like, every other city in China, Japan, South Korea, or most of the cities of Western Europe. Take your pick.

All civilizations in decline because they can’t accommodate the basic human function of conveniently raising 2.1 new humans per couple. What’s the point of technology that doesn’t serve human needs?

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.)

Texas is 1.8-1.9 child per family, the same as California. If you want to see four kid families, you need to go to SLC, not Dallas.

California is a big place. Just 13% of San Francisco’s population is under 18; and Hong Kong is about the same. Garland and Bakersfield are double that. Public transit apparently kills a civilization’s desire to perpetuate itself.

We're moving to a future where fewer humans are necessary to run economies. The trend of the future is smaller and more prosperous populations doing more meaningful activities, rather than a future of slum-ponzi-ism where an ever increasing amount of bodies are needed to fuel economic growth.

In this context we’re talking about merely being able to maintain population stability.

Sometimes the majority of people just disagree with you. It doesn't always have to be some conspiracy.

I thought you’re not supposed to downvote based solely on disagreement?

True, but it always seems to happen when people discuss politics.

Because the readership of HN is mostly Americans who can't imagine not driving. The knee-jerk against public transport is pathetic and predictable.

> Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries.

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.

Yes, our life in Franconia (northern Bavaria) is nothing but suffering, in our townhouse with a yard that’s a 600m walk from a subway station and a suburban rail station, either of which gets me to downtown Nuremberg in 20 minutes, because that place is a hellhole, and to the miserable corporate 35-hour-a-week job (the fault of IG Metall) that pays for said townhouse in 40 minutes. I especially resent the fact that I can go out for that swill they call beer in Bavaria with my colleagues after work in that dump called downtown Nuremberg without worrying how I’ll get home.

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.

I was talking about cities (e.g. London) where commuting by train+buses takes 1-2 hours each way. Not sure why you thought I was talking about medium sized cities where you can drive anywhere in 20 minutes. Washington DC is just massive, the metro area is immense both area and population wise, public transport wouldn't do much there.

To be fair, I have no idea how my cousin managed to afford a house in Wendelstein, they all seemed pretty expensive for being a drive away from the subway as opposed to a walk.

Caltrain in the SF Bay peninsula is basically that and people do cope with it and manage to lead happy, fulfilling lives.

works - verb. Moves millions of people efficiently and without the pollution or danger of driving an expensive, private vehicle.