Extreme car dependency.

Toronto is suffering from the same problem Dubai has. It suddenly became relevant when sovereignists gained power in Quebec and the business class were worried about Montreal being a liability. So they packed up and went down the 401 to Toronto.

It has the infrastructure for a much much smaller city, and one in the North American car-driven style (massive highways, occasional regional rail that is artificially slowed down by regulation, little to no metro service in most areas, etc)

Combine with NIMBYs blocking every form of intensification, and here we are:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6783092,-79.352227,3a,90y,68...

A metro station close to the downtown core. In Tokyo this is the kind of development you find on the far side of Saitama, bounded by mountains or poor soil. In Toronto, this is an area that has suffered population decline, as the locals went from having a nuclear family to being 2 or even 1 empty nesters, being replaced by DINKs.

It gets much, much worse the further out you go.

A lot of the city has a blanket ban on anything more dense than a single family detached home.

Just look at the city's size in sqkm. It will never scale like this, things need to change and density needs to be improved.

All other Ontario cities suffer the same paste-eating mentality, especially Ottawa and cities in the GTHA.

It's not only that, it is also zoning laws that mandate massive front lawns, wide roads etc etc. Compare newer suburbs to an old one like Riverdale. Riverdale is at least 3-4 times more dense and it is mostly single family houses.

Personally, I think the problem is more a question of the sort of business development that happens downtown vs the surrounding areas. If you look, for example, at development on highway 7 over the decades, there's definitely densification going on, e.g. this area[0] used to be farmlands back in the day, but now those red lanes are public transit lines and there are condo buildings sprouting up along that corridor. All in all, though, it's still much sparser than Toronto's downtown core.

If you look around the area, other than campuses like IBM's and CGI's, a very significant percentage of the business development in the area is still big box B2C (walmart/home depot/etc) or small-ish businesses. That's in stark contrast to areas like the financial district where the vast majority of workers are white collar office people. Which is to say, Markham/Vaughan could still stand to become much more metropolitan with the presence of more B2B big corps.

My pet theory is that concentration of white collar work is what drives up home prices. Exhibit A: places like Palo Alto and Mountain View in the San Francisco Bay Area (vs, say, Pacifica or Half Moon Bay) are clearly propped up by the presence of FAANG campuses. I'd bet that if a Google setup a campus in Ajax, you'd see an appreciable increase in demand for housing in surrounding areas even if they are traditionally considered too far from downtown TO (e.g. Whitby)

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@43.842627,-79.3906732,3a,75y,20...

People want to live close to work, because it's hard to multitask while commuting, and if you're paid hourly, it's essentially unpaid work time. Higher paying jobs allow those higher earning workers to bid up prices on the land closest to their high paying workplaces, which tend to be in desirable areas, because those areas have other amenities that the highly paid workers are able to pay to enjoy. It's a ratcheting flywheel that drives up home prices.

The high paying companies benefit from this when the markets are up, as their stock prices appreciate due to being able to compete in the market and remain highly paying companies. And when bubbles burst, their stock prices may go down, but so do their outlying obligations, which are denominated in dollars also. The gains made and invested into the company during the boom years allow strong companies to ride out the lean years better than their weaker competitors, whose workers are then in need of a job at one of the remaining companies unless they become or are already self-employed. This allows the strongest companies to get the benefit of both extremes of market conditions.

All of this causes metro areas, which are full of both established megacorps and VC-infused startups, to become pressure cooker bellwether barometers of property values and rent prices.

There are many ways to solve the problem of unaffordable home prices, and an answer is more supply. Why it isn't chosen more often is primarily a political problem inasmuch as it is a market problem, or land availability problem, or zoning problem.

I mean, for a market like the SF Bay Area, sure, the political landscape wrt housing is notoriously difficult to navigate, but at least for Toronto, I never got the impression of housing construction being deterred to as significant of a degree. In fact I'd say condos have been going up all over the place for decades to the extent that people were even voicing concerns over disappearing parking lots as construction companies gobbled them all up and turned them into condo projects.

I think at some point, even if the government were to scream "let there be more housing", there still needs to be private capital poured into these very expensive projects, and surely there must be a significant amount of analysis done to determine where it makes sense to put up condos, where amenities and other businesses sprout up in response, and rinse and repeat.

The side of supply where I think things get dicier is wrt wealth inequality. The real estate agent I used to buy my house had 3 mortgages of her own, it's an incredibly common thing for well-off people and real estate insiders to over-leverage on rental property mortgages. My wife had friends from China buying up property with corruption money given to them by their parents, it's been a thing since forever. There's no easy way to regulate who gets to buy houses and who doesn't.

> There's no easy way to regulate who gets to buy houses and who doesn't.

I get what you’re saying, but didn’t Canada do just that? That’s not to say that it was easy, but I think it’s a step in the right direction.

Additional/secondary homes, and especially empty homes need to be taxed more to help disincentivize the anticompetitive behavior in the housing market that you mentioned.

I think making it harder for foreigners to buy houses as appreciating assets has always been a talking point and I suppose it probably helps if the bar against foreign money is higher, but I see it more as a whack-a-mole game. The example of chinese kids buying property to park their parents' money comes to mind as a way that people get around regulations. It's relatively easy to get permanent residence and even citizenship compared to the time scales of real estate, combined with the "using family members to siphon money out of China" thing.

But you're right, I don't think there's going to be a single action that solves the problem fully on its own, so taking it one step at a time is a good approach.

London (ON) is definitely on that list.

One of our chief problems is that there’s no interlock between development - whether dense or not - and public transit and other public infrastructure. London is still bisected by surface level train tracks with minimal above or below grade crossings; and in the seven years I’ve lived here nothing has changed.

I too blame the FLQ. Toronto was well prepared to be Canada's second city. But completely unprepared to be her first.

We didn't build a single subway station for decades.

They’re talking about physical size. North American metropolises are a lot less dense than their peers.

The solution is to enable density. Zoning in the US and Canada is done at the local level and zoning codes look like a list of things you can’t do. (You can have a house, but you can’t live with more than X unmarried people, you can have a home office but you can’t do hairdressing out of your home, etc.)

Zoning codes in Japan are a lot more relaxed, in that there are only about a dozen types defined by “maximum nuisance level.” Every additional level of zoning permits all the uses from the previous level as well. Which generally increases building capacity and density and lowers prices by staying ahead of demand.

Car culture. It is insanely inefficient at moving people and at land use.

It’s amazing how many downvotes pointing this out gets. People have quite the kneejerk reaction when the downsides of car transit are pointed out to them.

It’s a lazy slogan that gets us nowhere. I live in NYC and we’ve built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years.

It’s not just a matter of people’s preferences for cars, it’s not possible to build a non car city anymore due to pathologies that have nothing to do with “car culture”.

The number one issue is that we’ve allowed too many people and interest groups to effectively bring any major project to a halt. This is not some inherent feature of democracy either, you can have a democracy where the majority gets to do things. We just don’t have one of those in the US, or Canada it sounds like.

> It’s a lazy slogan that gets us nowhere.

“Cars are land inefficient” isn’t a slogan, it’s literal fact.

> I live in NYC and we’ve built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years

Ah, the stereotype of New Yorkers not paying attention to other cities strikes again! Yes, New York has its own problems, but for the vast majority of other cities GP’s comment is true. New York is one of the very few exception cases in the US.

> The number one issue is that we’ve allowed too many people and interest groups to effectively bring any major project to a halt. This is not some inherent feature of democracy either, you can have a democracy where the majority gets to do things. We just don’t have one of those in the US, or Canada it sounds like.

What if I told you that for a lot of transit activists, undemocratic processes that prioritize the needs of drivers over the rest of society is car culture?

Environmental impact reviews are car culture? Public notice and comment processes are car culture? Kafkaesque public bidding processes are car culture? Decade long litigation needed to exercise eminent domain is car culture? Union work rules are car culture?

For the most part, yes. These items are so inherent in public works projects that it is inconceivable that they wouldn’t exist. But try to build or expand a road or parking lot and none of these exist. The culture is literally biased toward the relatively effortless expansion of car use and relatively challenging expansion of anything else. This duality is car culture.

How do you explain how much of a debacle the Big Dig was? Or the new Kosciuszko Bridge?

The big dig is actually a pretty phenomenal example of what we're talking about. It was a dumb project that was extremely expensive, incapable of fixing the problems it was supposed to fix, highly disruptive to locals, and it still got built.

Meanwhile complaints from a tiny number of affected people completely scuppered the high speed rail planned between Los Angeles and San Francisco before any track got laid.

Governments pull out the stops to complete car-centric infrastructure even over the loud complaints of the populace, but flinch the moment there is any push back against any public transit. Heck, trading on street parking for a bike lane is often a herculean effort.

Oh, and there's this little gem about the Big Dig "As of 2021, promised projects to extend the Green Line beyond Lechmere, to connect the Red and Blue subway lines, and to restore the Green Line streetcar service to the Arborway in Jamaica Plain have not been completed. Construction of the extension beyond Lechmere has begun.[20] The Red and Blue subway line connection underwent initial design,[21] but no funding has been designated for the project. The Arborway Line restoration has been abandoned, following a final court decision in 2011.[22]".

So once again, governments promised the moon about public transit and then did a rug pull once the highways were done. They in fact used this as an opportunity to destroy existing streetcar service. Exactly what we've been talking about.

> Or the new Kosciuszko Bridge?

Completed in 3 years. Again, we are really capable of building stuff, so long as that stuff supports cars.

You wrote: <<built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years>>

That sounds pithy, but it overlooks all the maintenance work done on the system. Have you ever looked at pictures from the NYC subway in the 1970s? It was hell. (You can Google it.) My father lived in NYC in the 1970s and said the subway was like the "Fourth World" (vis-a-via first/second/third world!).

Also, how about PATH, Metro North, NJT, LIRR, AirTrain JFK, or AirTrain Newark? These are not the NYC subway, but they have also seen major upgrades in the last 50 years.

Finally, I tried to Google for list of stations opened from 1972. It could not find a concise list. I'm pretty sure it is more than three, just for NYC subway.

Also, you don’t need to add a ton of subway stations when you already have an extensive network. 3 stations in 50 years would be a much worse outcome in say, Cincinnati.

That just made me appreciate how much greater value still might be unlocked by simply building as few as 3 stations in metro areas that don't currently have any at all, and then expanding from there. That would be an interesting study if it hasn't been done: what is the MVP of underground subway networks? How many stations do you need for a given area is probably a budgetary concern as much as a passenger capacity concern.

Have any metro areas built entirely new subways where there were none before in recent times? I know a lot of places are looking at light rail too, so have there been any greenfield light rail deployments in USA either?

It seems like a uniquely American problem, which leads me to believe that there just isn't political will to overcome the massive car lobby in most places, which is all the more reason to advocate for it, in my view.

"Have any metro areas built entirely new subways where there were none before in recent times?" China is the easiest one to study. The number of kilometers of heavy rail metro lines built since the year 2000 is simply mindboggling. (Specifically, I am not talking about high-speed train lines.) In the same two decade time range, look at Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong, and Singapore. I guess multiple systems have doubled or tripled in size (length or stations). Remember that Korea has two major systems: Seoul and Busan; and Taiwan has Taipei and Kaosiung.

I am not an urban planner but the north-south & east-west initial two-line style seems very popular. In my experience, the trick to quickly increasing ridership on new lines is closely coordinate with private developers. Be transparent about line planning, then team-up with private developers who can build (large) residential or office buildings with subway entrances in their basement. I've never seen a city do it better than Tokyo. My assumption is that the Elizabeth Line in London will spur similarly spectacular levels of redevelopment.

Light rail: Silicon Valley opened their system in Dec 1987.

About "unlocking value": Two massive upgrades come to mind. East Side Access in Manhattan will allow LIRR trains to enter Grand Central Station. The construction photos online are like something from science fiction. And look at last 30 years of Tokyo metro tightly integrating with private suburban rail lines where trains enter same station, but opposite sides of same platform. Everything is timed to the minute, so transfers are seamless.

> Have any metro areas built entirely new subways where there were none before in recent times?

None that I can think of in the US, but Madrid is generally pointed to as the stellar example of rapid and cheap subway expansion. They added an unbelievable amount of track and stations at really low cost.

> Between 1995 and 2007, the Spanish capital swiftly and cost-effectively upgraded its subway system, building more than 150 new stations over 120 miles at costs far below New York City rates. First, in just four years, Madrid designed, constructed, and opened 39 new metro stations and laid 35 miles of rail, 23.5 miles of which required new tunneling. The expansion was unprecedented for its low costs (about $65 million per mile of rail) and speed. Then, between 2000 and 2003, Madrid built Metro Sur, a 28-station, 25-mile circular subway line that connects the densely populated municipalities south of the city. Simultaneously, Madrid completed a direct metro line from the city’s central business district to its airport, now a 12-minute train ride away. Finally, between 2004 and 2007, commuters in the Madrid region gained an additional 80 new metro and light-rail stations, at a cost of $6 billion.

Just like high speed rail, this was less of a revolution in public works, and more a series of unglamorous minor improvements that added up to something greater than the sum of its parts. The government aimed for speed above all else, with the understanding that delays and financial uncertainty are the doom of any large project. So they would hire multiple teams to bore tunnels at once, and pit them in friendly competitions to bore faster. They negotiated with local land and business owners over more interruptions over a shorter period of time to reduce lawsuits (a big issue in NYC subway expansion), and they designed all the stations to be modular so that they wouldn't waste a ton of time designing and constructing bespoke stations. The sum is that they got it done really fast and really cheap.

Ironically, it looks a bit like the way that we construct our highways.

I agree it is car culture... but I feel that too often people treat it similar to self-driving-car predictions.

Sure, we have a good option for a significant majority of the time. But those many edge cases are non-trivial to resolve so a large majority of people will keep their cars for simple practicality sake.

This is pointing out a symptom. Car transit exists due to massive NIMBYism spreading people out and corrupt governments that don't build good transit.

https://www.nationalbcc.org/news/latest-news/1737-ca-high-sp...

Pointing out obvious symptoms without pointing out the causes can get this "kneejerk reaction".

> Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations?

I can’t speak for Canada, but in America the answer is always cars. Car based transit is wildly land inefficient, and the main reason why all car based cities hit their limit at the same time.

In particular there are two huge shortcomings with cars in urban design:

1. Parking eats up a huge amount of space. Either you let that drive density way down (which means commutes get longer) or you build underground parking at exorbitant prices driving up rents. Even in the latter case the roads around housing ends up becoming an issue, limiting density far below what you’d expect in say, Paris on Chicago.

2. Car transit to a shared destination is almost comically inefficient, which is really noticeable when people try and commute via car to job centers. This wouldn’t be as bad if we restricted cars to what they’re good at, such as driving away from the city, but most American cities have the unique psychosis of demanding that transit into the city center be via car. This does not scale, and is why places with wildly different zoning laws can have equally hellish commutes.

The issue is not that we can’t build, we’re really good at adding more highway lanes, it’s more that we are monomaniacally focused on building the wrong things.

Isn't this more a limit of dense (taller) housing?

If we had much more housing in tall buildings near where people worked then they either would not need a car or would at least not need to drive their car to work. You still of course need to provide parking but tall parking garages can solve that as well (or underground).

Seems like tons of cars are the symptom of the problem here not the cause

It’s symbiotic. We can’t build denser housing because we need space for car storage and roads. We can’t encourage people to reduce/eliminate their car usage because our infrastructure makes that miserable.

So I hate driving and actually moved to DC for work and also partly for the transit. Here's what I found:

1) Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building a couple blocks from the initial station to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge. Yes I can redeem a lot of that time with my above average personal mobile computing set up but a: most people have a pretty mediocre personal mobile computing setup and b: now I can't use that time for anything other than programming projects.

2) I couldn't get rid of the car entirely because I still needed it to move bulky things that I really can't take on transit. It's bad enough not having a truck but losing the car entirely would create some serious logistical problems on a regular basis. So while I saved some money I couldn't save as much as I wanted.

3) Most wealthy people (many of my friends) start families^ and people who can afford it buy detached housing for that. You're not going to be taking transit to these places. It might not ever be economical. Like it or not transit will probably always lower property values in the US too. For whatever reason the more violent people here tend to take it and anywhere it goes becomes more violent so building it into suburbs like these is always going to be unpopular.

4) Bringing me to the fact that I've been accosted multiple times on transit by people who were high, drunk, or just belligerent. I have an extremely high tolerance for this sort of thing (I've wandered around some of the more violent cities early in the morning just to see what the fuss is about) but I can absolutely see why most people here would give up after that happening once at a maximum.

I'm a huge fan of transit but pretending it isn't a large sacrifice to give up a car is just going to get people to ignore you, because it is and for most people it isn't worth it.

(^ and for those that don't start families, many have lots of intense DIY projects that don't fit in apartment buildings and actually need either detached housing or industrial space with similar density.)

Almost everything you're saying is a symptom of poor investment in public transport. I have no doubt that the car works better for your commute, as is the case for millions of other people. Unfortunately, stick millions of cars on the road and you have a huge bottleneck for growing the commuter belt, which means only houses in a relatively small area are useful, and they get extremely expensive.

Historically, and in some countries still, we solved this problem by identifying when it was happening and creating new public transport lines for faster commutes and people living further out. In the UK, we even developed whole "New Towns", upgraded their transport, amenities and infrastructure specifically to support shuttling a greater number of people into London. They weren't particularly inspiring towns, and we still make fun of them nearly a century later - but it worked. Even today, it's far quicker to take the train into London from those towns than it is to drive, as is the case for pretty much all suburb to central commuting here.

There are still lots of situations where a car will be better (I have one too, in London), but if we can get people out of their cars for their commutes, that frees cities up to expand and useful houses will become more affordable. Driving to the tip or mall is much less of a problem.

Regarding the violence and antisocial behaviour, that's really a problem of policing and allocation of funding. It needn't be that way and it doesn't happen to nearly the same extent in the UK and I put that down at least partially to the excellent British Transport Police. Apparently it used to be violent and dangerous in the 80s but we turned it around. Now the train stations are mostly far safer than the surrounding environs. If I was ever being harassed or attacked, I would run towards the station as there would most likely be someone to help me there. Living within a few minutes of a train station also significantly increases your property value here, provided you're not so close that it rattles your bed...

Antisocial behavior on public transit isn’t just a matter of policing and funding.

It’s also a matter of civil liberties.

In California, people have a constitutional right to defecate on the streets.

In was once in a San Francisco bus and watched a young woman of West Asian descent break down in tears because a homeless man was calling her a “sand n***”.

She screamed back at him the Trump was going to put him in a concentration camp. He made some comments about the Muslim faith, and she told she was going to pray he’d die a horrible death.

Some more words were exchanged about Trumps policies towards Muslims and the homeless.

She got off early and walked the rest of the way.

This is all 100% constitutionally protected, or at least, under the policies of subsequent DAs (including Kamala Harris) officially tolerated.

It also makes public transportation unusable.

I think that's just a think that happens where people are, and the more people you run into in your travels, the higher the likelihood that you'll run into them.

Public transit is one of the few public spaces we have left, ironically. Perhaps especially so post-Covid. I think that it's worth the investments necessary to make it usable. You can't blame public transit for the lack of effectiveness of homeless programs, and some folks are homeless by choice. It's a fraught situation, and that's why folks choose cars a lot of the time. It's more convenient for them and I guess I don't fault folks for that, but the built environment shows a lot of deference for cars in many metro areas, and that doesn't help with the traffic issues, or with zoning issues, or with housing affordability.

Yet, if you improve those other issues, then property values will probably just go up even higher than they already are, but at least that money will benefit more than just the buyer and the seller; it will benefit the entire community.

It isn’t just a funding issue. In most countries what I described would be illegal.

In America it’s protected.

We have a jurisprudence that allows Neo-Nazis to March through Jewish neighborhoods.

Our public sphere is extremely permissive. So permissive that avoiding the public sphere is necessary to avoid anti-social behavior.

Without that kind of protection usually some group gains power and becomes the only protected group. Neo-Nazis are an indication that even the most socially unacceptable groups still have a voice. They should be considered a canary and a good thing to see occasionally. I wouldn't want to live in a country where they were censored and if you feel so strongly about it I would suggest moving somewhere else (Germany censors Nazis pretty aggressively for example.)

For example: You're upset that Nazis marched through a Jewish neighborhood. Are you upset about the violent BLM protestors marching through White neighborhoods? I would guess not but there's little difference between the two.

I've moved to places to see if I thought the changes improved things, you learn a lot about yourself and the world by doing that.

I’m a civil libertarian. Hideous though it may be, Nazis should be allowed to march through Jewish neighborhoods.

But that’s different from Nazis going around on a subway screaming racial insults at passengers.

For many passengers that would make the subway unusable.

Remember this thread is ultimately about “why public transit is better than people having cars.”

Antisocial behavior is a disadvantage of public transit, and in some cases makes it unusable.

I think keeping this conversation focused around public transit is a good idea.

Are you sure you’re an ex-fascist?

> Regarding the violence and antisocial behaviour, that's really a problem of policing and allocation of funding.

Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in the world with heavy investment in public transportation & policing, and yet they still have issues with sexual harassment and sexual assault on their trains. It’s a hard problem to fix related to population density.

Are you aware that many Tokyo train lines have women-only cars during rush hour? I think they started in the 1990s and have greatly improved the situation for women in Tokyo.

That makes things even worse. If a women can't fit in that car and goes into a normal car, there are POS who can now justify sexually assaulting them. Cracking down on the crime and publicly humiliating the perpetrators would be far better for society.

>Like it or not transit will probably always lower property values in the US too. For whatever reason the more violent people here tend to take it and anywhere it goes becomes more violent so building it into suburbs like these is always going to be unpopular.

This smells of the coded racism that is so rampant in the USA. It's sad because there might be some element of truth at its root, but it gets exaggerated and the attitude creates more and more segregation, exacerbates the divisions and creates a hostile society.

The problem is you’re comparing the commute by public transport in the current status quo and missing the point that fixing the car culture means improving public transport so that it does become more convenient than taking the car.

Plenty of European cities have achieved this. I work in London and I wouldn’t even dream of driving into the city. It’s far more convenient to get the train.

I think you should read my comment a little more carefully. 1 and 2 are due to serious physical and economic constraints that are very unlikely to change and apply to all but the absolute most dense areas. Remember, this is in DC. It's unusually dense and is supposed to be the best we have. 3 and 4 are additionally due to cultural, historical, and demographic problems that are becoming worse rather than better and the current political situation is working to accelerate it.

I'm not against transit but it's not the solution people think it is.

DC isn't unusually dense. It's only the 6th most dense city in America and not even in the top 100 for the world. It doesn't even have an districts that are in the top 100 (Paris, on the other hand, features several districts and still has good public transport networks).

And this is just looking at density in terms of population. There's also building density, London would rank very high up there and has excellent public transport.

The problem in DC isn't technical; the problem is cultural. You see the car as a solution so you keep investing in roads and under funding public transport. Whereas Europe took a different approach. Some UK cities have "park and ride" schemes where you parks on the outskirts and get a cheap bus into the city. Buses will have their own dedicated lanes too so aren't subject to congestion. Some of these cities even go as far as pedestrianizing chunks of the city center so the only way to access it is via subway, bus, tram or bicycle.

The benefits of improving public transport isn't just reducing congestion either. You improve the transport for the vulnerable (elderly, poor, etc), you improve the air quality in the city, you improve road safety. It's better for the environment, it's better for peoples health, it's better for moving people around. But it requires a cultural shift to happen.

>6th most dense city in America

Then both in terms of any arbitrary area in the US or any arbitrary city in the US, it's unusually dense (much more dense than the mean density.)

>Park and ride

Many places in the US have these and both DC and the suburbs around it are full of them.

> Then both in terms of any arbitrary area in the US or any arbitrary city in the US, it's unusually dense (much more dense than the mean density.)

I haven’t visited DC so I’ll have to take your word for it. But it should be noted that I can’t find anything online that supports yours assessment of DC being unusually dense.

And even if it is, that just makes a stronger case for the need of better public transport services.

> Many places in the US have these and both DC and the suburbs around it are full of them.

I’m sure they are but having a park and ride scheme is only of benefit if you invest in public transport, which, by your own admission, DC doesn’t.

It is. But the problem is that the US is about 80-100 years behind Europe in this.

Personal economies are literally built on the idea of driving, it will be painful to solve that, but unfortunately it’s necessary to solve it otherwise you end up losing enormous amounts of your life to traffic and the infrastructure cost grows exponentially.

America is simply too big for public transit to replace cars to any great extent.

There's an old cliche that goes something like, "In America, people think 100 years is a long time. In Europe, people think 100 kilometers is a long distance." It's pretty much spot on.

Even assuming this is fair (which I don't believe it is) that doesn't explain the localized problems per city that we're discussing.

I'm not convinced the physical size is the problem.

The comments pushing for urban densification and public transport are largely theoretical and abstract, while your comment is personal and subjective.

To all those thinking about is as 'policy' - you have to solve ways for making the subjective experience actually better if people are going to go for it.

> and b: now I can't use that time for anything other than programming projects.

Read a book.

Right? I genuinely don’t understand why “I want my commute to be more pleasant” isn’t a more common answer. Not everything has to be productive!

When you're spending twice the time traveling it cuts into time that was otherwise productive. You can't spend all your time relaxing.

> Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge.

Depends a lot on where you live and work. My experience was the exact opposite in Chicago. Heck, for some of my jobs I could outrun car commuters on my bike pretty trivially.

One of the clear downsides to transit oriented cities is that you do need to pay attention to transit access when renting. A unit being “luxury” is no guarantee that it’s in a convenient place for transit, nor that the trip will be short.

> Yes I can redeem a lot of that time with my above average personal mobile computing set up

I find the need to make commute time productive quite an odd but common impulse. How about just making your commute suck less? Reading a book is better than driving in traffic.

> I couldn't get rid of the car entirely because I still needed it to move bulky things that I really can't take on transit.

Again, experience varies. For a lot of people it would be cheaper to abandon the car and pay for deliveries when necessary.

Regardless, do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you relegate your car trips to just when you need bulk goods, that is far more efficient than the current habit of using a car fo every single trip.

> Most wealthy people (many of my friends) start families and people who can afford it buy detached housing for that. You're not going to be taking transit to these places.

We could, but we’ve built our infrastructure with the opposite assumption in mind. Most other rich countries use a mix of regional rail, bus, and cars to solve this problem. The issue of “mass transit doesn’t go to the burbs, therefore I must use a car everywhere for everything” is an entirely self inflicted wound.

> Bringing me to the fact that I've been accosted multiple times on transit by people who were high, drunk, or just belligerent

Maybe we could solve that problem instead? Because that seems like a rather silly rationale for designing a transit system around.

Also, it’s not like all car drivers are sober. In fact, a drunk driver is almost certainly a far bigger risk to your safety than a belligerent drunk on the train.

> I'm a huge fan of transit but pretending it isn't a large sacrifice to give up a car is just going to get people to ignore you, because it is and for most people it isn't worth it.

It’s almost like I’m arguing that we should make public transit more convenient than using a car for urban transit or something.

> Depends a lot on where you live and work. My experience was the exact opposite in Chicago. Heck, for some of my jobs I could outrun car commuters on my bike pretty trivially.

I got a taxi from Gare du Nord to a hotel on Champs Eleyse this evening -- took about 40 minutes to go 2 miles. That's ridiculous, but it's apparently a thing.

That might be partly because Paris has heavily deprioritized cars, in favor of bikes (which seem to be booming in popularity as a result).

A reasonably fit person can walk 2 miles in 30-40 minutes, so your cab was literally going walking speed.

Not with heavy baggage.

Duh? I wasn't literally suggesting that GP walk from a hotel; baggage was obviously implied by the context. I'm just commenting on how taking a taxi on that route is less time and speed efficient than walking.

Obviously a bus would be a better choice, or a train depending on geography. They handle baggage just fine.

A lot of people don’t like public transit for several major reasons:

1. It takes a lot longer to get to your destination even accounting for traffic.

2. The potential for harassment based on your gender or race.

3. The potential for sexual assault.

4. The potential for violence.

Unfortunately, Western society at large is not collective and conformist like the one in Japan, which would heavily mitigate 2 out of the 4 problems stated above. Even then, Japan has a huge problem with harassment and sexual assault when it comes to female passengers.

That's an interesting question, but it skips some steps.

The reason is that these are all post-war constructions. London and Paris (I don't know Seoul) already had dense, walkable cores that predate not just the modern highway, but even the automobile. Inner London was 5 million people in 1911, and the rise of the car drove that population down! And things didn't really get going until the highway boom. The interstate system (and similar projects in Canada) didn't start until the 50s, and didn't finish until the 80s. So this whole project is fairly recent. Highways enabled a whole new kind of development - the suburban project. And now the boom is over, and it's time for the hangover.

And you'll note that it hasn't been all at the same time. LA famously hit these limits in the 80s. While Atlanta only hit them in the last couple of decades. What you're seeing is the end of a long process.

I'd argue that NYC is not such shining example when it comes to commutes or sprawl, either. That particular corridor has some of the most traffic and longest commute durations in the country.

Sure but it got to almost 20 million before it hit that point, unlike Canadian cities.

There's also only been one subway line opened this century.

We seemed to do better at facilitating growth last century, particular in the first half. Since then we've struggled, mostly for political reasons.

It hit that point long before it reached a population of 20 million.

The population isn't the main factor, it's the density and percent who commute by car that matter most.

Indeed, that's what I was alluding to.

Given the right infrastructure, we can probably scale cities up to incredible populations.

Instead, we stopped building that infrastructure, and everyone started commuting by car. Then we wonder why cities are struggling to expand and usefully located housing has become so expensive.

We're trying to watch 4K YouTube over 28.8k dialup, and wondering why it's buffering all the time.

It is interesting that you did not mention Los Angeles (and Orange County) and the special hell of car traffic in that region. The places that you picked have world-class mass transport that provide viable alternatives to driving.

Don't look at the population look at the land area - and also look at the available public transit options.

Toronto has a laughable subway / train network given the urban sprawl and distance that people are commuting.

If I pay to take one of the most expensive toll highways in the world I can get from my home to the office in just under an hour.