Is legally enforced train dependence better?

City centers are already viable places to live without a car.

Unless the US had a waaay higher population density, we would have a hard time arriving at another system.

I don’t even think it’s just that. Seattle is dense enough and we have an ok public transit system. But it’s just not used that much. There is benefit in privacy and comfort, the ability to move groceries and goods, the ability to get to parts outside your direct transit corridor in a reasonable amount of time, and the fact people enjoy leaving the city for nature regularly. I spent a decade commuting by public transit without a car in Nyc and left to seattle both for work and location but also because I loathed public transit. I know I’m the equivalent of a baby killer, but I hated every moment I spent on public transit with a passion. I just don’t like being in crowds and I hated how long it took to go anywhere not on my subway line, and I barely left the city in my 10 years because there wasn’t public transit (more or less) to the parks.

Seattle had pretty high public transit use prior to the 2020 pandemic, which made it much more unpleasant (both in direct Covid risk/fear and in state response to the virus). See e.g., https://seattletransitblog.com/2022/06/13/transit-ridership-... or https://www.seattle.gov/images/Departments/SDOT/Streetcar/20... to see the crater 2020 made in Seattle transit use.

Here is a nice graph from back in 2018: https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/d... (from https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/tra... ). Transit was the plurality of downtown commuters (and growing).

Yeah the downtown commute part of transit was high use. But the intra/intercity movement was car based for everything else. Obviously with the downtown being a tumbleweed wasteland of hammer crazed people that’s not as much used. My impression of seattle public transit is a lot of double length buses with zero people inside, over provisioned because progressive transit folks thought the issue is not enough seating on the bus and it would go from empty to transit utopia with a doubling of seating capacity. Instead it’s just a bunch of absurdly large vehicles crowding small roads

What a terrible straw man. There are only a handful of tiny places on earth where cars are banned and there is no way to buy property in most of them because noone wants to leave.

Being able to technically survive in 2% of the land if you never leave, pay a great deal more in rent, accept much greater inconvenience, suffer poor air quality from all the people driving, and endure constant abuse and threats to your life that are wholly unnecessary (such as right on red) isn't non-car-dependence.

Spending 20% of the space cars use on dedicated transit right of ways and active transport and having a handful of areas where you might have to park and walk or use a mobility aid for 1km isn't the authoritarian dystopia you're pearl clutching about and will make driving easier for you. It literally helps everyone.

The US had a better system. It was systematically destroyed at great taxpayer expense and done so in a way designed to cause as much economic harm on the people living where the highways went as possible. There are at least eight separate regions smaller than Switzerland with higher population. Even if the rural transit system the US used to have were impossible to build you could at least service those regions as well as the Swiss serve their tiny rural towns.