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> You must have never lived in a country with decent public transportation.

Like France, where transit lines work to confine immigrants to suburban ghettos with limited opportunities?

Which is very different from North America, where we use highways, red lining and housing prices to divide the poors and the not poors.

Transit lines are doing that? How so? They can't move somewhere else and buy a car?

Yes because the country favors transit and makes car ownership very expensive. So they’re stuck with the limited opportunities and housing they can reach from the transit lines.

First off, car ownership is already quite expensive, even in the US. Even a paid-off $2000 beater will cost at least $250/month in registration, maintenance, gas, and insurance to operate. Probably more, if there's a long commute or paid parking. That's way more than any transit pass I know of and it's the absolute best case. A more typical case is needing to make car payments, which means paying interest and higher insurance rates, and tying up a significant portion of one's net worth and monthly cash flow in a depreciating asset (current used car market aside). I don't see how that's good for anyone's finances, let alone poor people. I own a car, but I still know it's a net negative in financial terms.

> makes car ownership very expensive

How much more expensive are we talking? If we say it's say $600/month to operate a beater, shouldn't the better job opportunities that are now available compensate for that? And if they don't - I mean, it's only $450/month more - how much better are these jobs anyway?

But hey, I don't know, maybe you're an expert on immigrant urban issues in France. Maybe you have in-depth knowledge that tells you that it's solely the availability of transit, and absolutely nothing else whatsoever, that has led to the current state of things.

$250/mo is about what I pay driving a paid off beater 100mi/day. And I pay "you have a dick and live in a shitty zip code" insurance rates.

A payment on a random economy subcompact that gets 40mpg would probably be cheaper because I only get ~22mpg.

>That's way more than any transit pass I know of

You are unaware of the cost of the various commuter rail passes that anyone not already living in the "inner ring" well served by bus any or subway needs to use to get into that inner ring.

It would cost me $380/mo to commute via rail (and take longer too). I used to pay it when I worked downtown. The prices don't go down that much for living farther in.

> $250/mo is about what I pay driving a paid off beater 100mi/day. I only get ~22mpg.

Your numbers simply don't add up. Assuming a 5-day work week, 48 weeks of work/year, and $2.50/gal gas (pretty cheap), you're spending $227/mo just on gas. You really only spend $23/mo on insurance, oil changes, brake pads and everything else?

I think you're seriously underestimating how much your car actually costs you.

And again, the paid-off beater is the absolute best case scenario. A financed new or new-ish used car (which is the more typical case) has additional insurance, registration, interest, and depreciation costs.

I'm not anti-car. I own a car and I think cars are great, for a wide range of use cases. I am anti-"favoring transit over cars hurts poor people" lies. Because they are lies.

>You really only spend $23/mo on insurance, oil changes, brake pads and everything else?

This actually wouldn't surprise me, too much.

Insurance is the most expensive of these, and I've heard of Liability-only rates of $30/mo

For someone who claims to drive 100 miles/day? Impossible.

Also, $30/mo just on insurance (which, again, to me is not credible) is way more than $23/mo on insurance, registration, and maintenance. Registration is usually $5-10/mo. Maintenance on a car driven 2x the national average is going cost a pretty penny.

SF Muni is < $100/mo.[1]

The NYC subway is $127/mo.[2]

Caltrain's most expensive pass, which covers 6 zones, is $400. But at a minimum that's a commute from Morgan Hill to San Bruno, which is a 120-mile round trip. It's going to cost at least $20/day to drive that commute.

> It would cost me $380/mo to commute via rail...when I worked downtown

Was parking free in downtown?

> and take longer too

If it was both more expensive, and took longer, why didn't you drive? Why take public transit at all? My guess is that it was still cheaper than driving, after considering all the costs.

1. https://www.sfmta.com/fares/monthly-adult-ages-19-64

2. https://new.mta.info/fares

3. https://www.caltrain.com/stations/systemmap.html

First of all, there is ghettos INSIDE Paris too:18th, 19th, 20th districts....

Transit lines are not used to confine them to the suburbs, they're the only thing allowing them to actually have any opportunities.

As a poor student I lived in a rich Parisian neighborhood and I also lived in a very poor suburb. I definitely preferred living in comfortable housing with a 40min commute than in a closet with a 10min commute.

There is some places where there is actually no opportunities because of the LACK of public transportation, like in some neighbors in the north of Marseille where there is 80% unemployment.

You realize that New York to Los Angeles is like 4800km right?

Airplanes exist. The network of infrastructure in Europe isn't just trains...

Part of the problem in North America is that there's not adequate public transportation from airports to city centres (whether it's a train terminal or frequent buses), not enough trains from city centres to suburbs/outskirts and not enough buses in between or from town to town.

I recently went from Paris -> Prague as an example. So I walked from the hotel in St. Germain to a metro station, took the metro to the airport, hopped on a plane, landed in Prague, then took a bus to a metro terminal and the metro to downtown Prague. That's what it looks like. You could have the same in the US... I haven't spend a ton of time there but the airport I'm familiar with in Canada, YYC (Calgary) has terrible access to/from the airport. The cab industry basically has convinced the city to not run a train line to the airport, nor to have a proper bus schedule. You need a taxi or ride for no good reason.

You can do that in the US, you can't do it everywhere, but for the cities on the level of Prague and Paris you certainly can. Most of the major cities on the east coast and West Coast that's applicable and for Chicago.

Philly, DC, NYC, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, South Florida, LA, and the Bay area I've done entirely public transit trips many times to the major areas and that's covering a population larger than any EU country.

That doesn't change the fact that trains and public transportation in the US are crap.

In the US, can you travel +1000km for next to nothing at +300km/h in an environmentally friendly way?(in most cases you can arrive up to 5 minutes before the train leaves btw, no waiting)

It's easier to travel through Europe than through the US and we're like 40 different countries....

> In the US, can you travel +1000km for next to nothing at +300km/h in an environmentally friendly way?

No, but the way that is worded essentially the only form of travel that meets those criteria is high speed electric rail in a country with little to no fossil fuel usage in the electric grid. For various reasons, passenger rail isnt as viable in the US as Europe (population density, suburban sprawl, etc).

You absolutely can travel >1000km at >300km/h for next to nothing in the US though, since air travel is quite inexpensive.

and we have 50 states?

throwawaynay says >"It's easier to travel through Europe than through the US and we're like 40 different countries...."

Certainly public transportation in USA lags Europe but there's no need to overstate the case. <sarcasm>It only took two world wars and innumerable smaller wars before that to get "Europe" to the point where it has "300km/h" trains.</sarcasm>

BTW I question the "300km/h" number: Only a few trains in Europe travel at that speed. Most trains in Europe are 10X slower. Many I could outrun on foot and many more on a bike.

As for "environmentally friendly" I remember when many European trains' toilets dumped fecal matter directly onto the space between the tracks (or do they still?). I'm still careful walking around railroad yards in Europe: one stumble and I could scratch my leg and catch God-knows-what from a 1970s-era Algerian turd dropped on the rails. "Railroad system as waste processing facility" comes to mind as a topic.

A little bit of poo like that isn’t going to hurt the environment to a degree at all comparable to the massive damage done by car pollution and tearing down forests and obliterating animal migration routes.

That level of public transportation in the US would be an ecological disaster.

Compared to the ecological marvel of everyone needing a car

Given that we already have roads to every residence, the amount of earth moved, steel smelted for tracks laid and additional fuel to run throughout the country, I dont see trains everywhere being a net positive.

Through some dense urban states, yes, but most of the sparsely populated rural states would see them barely used and lots of additional habitat disruption.

We have industrial train tracks near us. Literally noone is clamoring for residential trains here. Even within the nearest city, a 20 minute drive from one popular destination to another becomes an hour and a half excursion if you wanted to take light rail instead.

Are you joking?

Cars and planes are an ecological disaster, I don't know a single place on earth where the ecological impact of public transportation is worse than the impact of cars and planes.

And yet, we already have them. Smelting enough steel and moving earth (and forests, and wetland, and prairie, etc) to also add passenger rail to anywhere you could want to go in the sparsely populated rural states would not be a net positive. There are a dozen or so villages within an hour drive of me that each have less than 1000 people living in them. The damage of adding roads and cars is already done. What good would connecting and powering light rail trains between these villages do?

>The damage of adding roads and cars is already done.

No.

We build millions of cars every year, they still consume fuel everyday, they still have to be repaired, they still crash and kill a lot more often than any mean of public transportation.

A few farmers using cars is not a problem, but cities like Austin needing that many cars is outrageous.

You said:

> In my home country I could go anywhere in a 50km radius for 50$/month via public transportation.

> Anywhere in the country via high speed train for 100$/month.

That literally isn't feasible to do with a low impact unless your definition of "anywhere" is a handful of major cities, especially since cars aren't going away.

New York City has a population density of 27,000 people per square mile. Statewide is 420, though NYC metro brings that up. Austin is 3,000.

If you want "anywhere", you also need to think about places like Montana, with a population density of less than 7 people per square mile.

Trains make sense for metro areas, not rural areas, and there is a lot of rural area to cover.