Public transportation is a luxury. It assumes that you can live in a dense area and that your travel needs coincide with bus/train routes.

It's very practical for many, and very impractical for many too.

I ride the bus and I can promise you I don't do it because of luxury. Even if that was true, it would only be true in North America. In the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas.

>In the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas.

I have spent a lot of time in Europe and, once you get away from population centers and even larger towns, public transit can get very hit or miss. OK, maybe there's technically a once or twice a day bus to that rural hamlet but lots of Europeans own cars and, while it's generally easier to get by without cars in areas of Europe, it's not like you can hop on public transportation everywhere.

It varies of course. Somewhere like Switzerland (as another poster notes) is generally easier to get off the beaten track by bus or train than a lot of coutries.

> the rest of the developed world, public transport extends out into rural areas

Are you by chance referring to Europe with this comment? I ask because Europe's idea of rural and North America's idea are quite different.

Switzerland has villages with only hundreds of people that regularly receive train service. There are states with similar GDP, size and density as Switzerland that do not have any train service. Don't think of the US as a whole, think of the individual states who easily have the budget equivalent of European countries.

Yeah, if by "extends out" you mean "you can get there, eventually". Not if you mean "you can get there in a reasonable amount of time and you don't need to time it perfectly because you only get two chances a day".

What a hilariously American comment. Nearly all American cities were built by train networks that existed in the 1800s. These train lines were ripped out to make way for car infrastructure in the mid-1900s, which was designed to segregate neighborhoods and give giant profits to GM. Even famously car-centric LA with their massive freeways once had the best public transit in the world.

https://www.segregationbydesign.com/

I don't think we're talking solely about cities here; suburban and rural areas can never be sustainably and cost-effectively served by public transit, at least not the kind of areas with densities you'll find in the US.

Certainly US cities are very weak on the public transit front, and there's a lot of improvement that can be made there. Even then, though, there are a lot of municipalities in the US that technically are considered "cities" but don't have enough density to make pervasive public transit feasible.

Switzerland has villages with only hundreds of people that regularly receive train service. There are states with similar GDP, size and density as Switzerland that do not have any train service.

Sprawling suburbs are a giant scam - the cost of providing urban amenities (power, internet, sewage) to these neighborhoods is much higher than it appears. The lines of pipes and power lines in sprawling burbs cost wayyyy more than it would to maintain a transit oriented development full of townhomes and condos.

The US has counties with larger land areas than the entire country of Switzerland. Also, we largely don't want to live in townhomes and condos.

Update: San Bernardino County is 33% larger than Switzerland with 25% of the population. America is a big place.

The first things hip urban europeans do when they can afford it is buy an Audi wagon and move to the suburbs.

I worked in Mainz for many years and one of my German coworkers was so happy the day he finally had moved up enough and saved up enough to move out of town. Bought an M5 Wagon and a cute little Haus with a yard and a shed. He was so excited to be able to go to the hardware store to buy garden tools to fill up his shed and furniture that wasn't apartment-sized. He was finally living the American dream.

Name any country, any country WHATSOEVER, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, with more than 500,000 residents (small pacific island nations don't count lol) and I will find you an America-style suburban neighborhood full of station wagons and SUVs and single-family homes. Europe is easy. I lived in them. South America is easy. Asia is easy. Even Africa experiences this phenomenon.

You don't believe me. I know you don't.

Here's a suburban neighborhood consisting of fenced-in single family homes with manicured lawns and (most likely) a Range Rover in every driveway in Bujumbura, Burundi. The poorest country on earth: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Burundi/@-3.3707605,29.392...

Living somewhere where you can't smell your neighbors is what nearly every single human being who can afford it wants.

I'm an American who has lived in Germany, Nigeria, Kenya, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and Ecuador. They are all connected by the same thread: you got the choice, you get the fuck out of the cities.

The cult of urbanism has brainwashed you.

Lol no. All the most desirable suburbs in Japan, South Korea have train access. Who the hell wants to find parking anytime you go to the city for arts and fine dining? Who wants to be at risk for DUIs? Most people in these suburbs cannot afford a driver, thats reserved for the ultra wealthy.

Even in Canada, the most desirable suburbs of Toronto are the "streetcar suburbs". People put a premium on having public transit, because it is easier to get on a train to go enjoy a night out than it is to drive there. If you're a loser that stays home all the time and has no friends, then that's on you.

It's a luxury IFF you live right next to a station and need to go right next to stations and your trains/busses/whatever aren't too crowded.

Otherwise it's a necessity for those for whom private transportation is a luxury, and often not a pleasant one. Crammed standing into a crowded box, or transferring a couple of times to take 2 hours by bus to go somewhere you could get to directly in 30min, etc.

"Invest in public transportation" is a hard sell in a country where a huge portion of the population is able to afford private vehicles and space to park them, because the level of investment required to even equal the convenience factor of that is very, very, very high.

EDIT: even in Europe you don't have to travel that far outside of city centers to find quite a bit of private car ownership. All those European car companies aren't just doing it for shits and giggles, after all.

You must be American.

In fact, insane car and highway infrastructure is actually a luxury. Funny how roads just magically spring up everywhere and they are 'required to live' but god forbid a bus that uses that road, that is luxury. Public subsidy of car infrastructure is far higher then for public transport.

> coincide with bus/train routes

There is this thing called planning. They put public transport where it is actually needed. Its not like 'ohh luck, they just so happened to build a train here'.

If your country has a serious imperative of doing public infrastructure correctly, then the amount of people who can reasonably be reached is very, very high.

And good urbanism isn't just density. Look at some railroad towns in the East, they have walkable rural urbanism. You don't need a car to live in such places. Or maybe one car for a whole large family.

Sure yes, there is some people who that doesn't include. But lets be fucking real, most people live in cities or in suburban areas. Or in sprawl town loosely attached to some larger metro area.

> You must be American

> But lets be fucking real

My friends in Germany complain about how taking public transportation to work takes 2 hours, or 30 minutes by car.

And in even more places trying to go threw or across the city takes longer with a car. Public transport is just fundamentally more efficient as a society.

If you had said 'some people need cars' that would be one thing, but to act like cars are normal and car infrastructure is standard and normal, and public transit is some sort of luxury that only fancy societies can afford and even then only once they have built their highway infrastructure.

A big problem with German public transport for example that right when they wanted to implement West German High speed rail, the unification with East Germany happened and new highway for cars took priority. And after that the EU believed the most important thing was building lots of highway all threw Eastern Europe.

Walking, biking and public transport should be the baseline, and if money is left over you can have fancy car infrastructure and parking is the luxury.

It'd be far worse to have scheduled bus routes and train tracks cutting across the vast wilderness than the occasional electric vehicle cruising through.

Huh, as opposed to the roads and highways cutting across the vast wilderness that we have now?

Not really sure what (if any) claim you're making here. I'm defining wilderness above to be "those areas without sufficient road infrastructure to support heavy vehicles like busses", if that helps clarify.

Depends on how much energy the train uses. I would guess that the maintenance and supporting infrastructure for the 'occasional' car would dwarf the cost of a railway.

It would be difficult to eliminate the road, however, so that infrastructure is going to exist either way.

A double track train line can move orders of magnitude more people than a 30-lane highway can. Cars and highways are space inefficient, and highways cause property values surrounding it to decrease due to the pollution and noise.

You're not really responding to what the parent poster said. We're not talking about 30-lane highways, we're talking about a small one-lane road that only needs to serve tens of people per day. A train route for that is absurd.

Because of the space inefficiency of cars, you end up building and widening way too may roads, destroying the countryside. Trains allow you keep development contained without spoiling the countryside. Forgot where I saw this, but a Swiss women used to see lines of trucks in her village until the government heavily promoted electrified freight rail. Now there's little to no trucks in her village.

Basically anywhere in Europe (Switzerland especially) is incomparable to the "vast wilderness" I described above. I speak of roads where a "busy day" is more than (say) 3 light vehicles traveling.

I don’t particularly disagree but that’s for governments (local or larger) to do.

Car companies are obviously going to produce cars, and the cleaner they can do it the better.

One of their biggest plays are EV delivery trucks (and I see them on my streets). I'm sure someone will chime in about the environmental concerns of Amazon - but Rivan's strategy seems like a decent environmental message to me.

you clearly don't live in suburban or rural areas. I've tried to take public transportation in Phoenix. They put stops every 1/4 mi. it takes longer to ride a bus than ride a bike. public transit is just not remotely reasonable.

It isn't an either or scenario, and you're providing an unrealistic expectation.

Rivian is making "lifestyle vehicles", pick-ups and SUVs that are off-road capable, but are not not work trucks. There is no public transit out in much of these areas.

They also make Amazon delivery vehicles, so you can't expect Amazon deliveries to be made via public transport.

In the US, total cost per passenger mile for public transportation is higher than private vehicles. All that extra cost has environmental impact in the form of extra steel, concrete, and salaries.

The entire vehicle fleet needs to be electrified, period. There are areas of the United States where a private 4WD vehicle are a necessity to get to and from home. The only way to eventually retire the vast infrastructure required to deliver fossil fuels to rural areas, and everywhere else, is to electrify the entire fleet.

Climate change is a chemistry and engineering problem. You can solve some of the chemistry and engineering problem upstream, through social and cultural changes, but insisting that those changes are the only way to solve the problem is flat-out false, and absolutely repellent to many people that, ultimately, will need to be brought along in the transition away from fossil fuels.

Nothing is stopping you from working on the myriad issues that prevent greater adoption of public transportation, and you and the world would be better served by getting to work building the future you want instead of trashing the efforts of people working the problem from a different angle.

Delivery vans are environment saving.

The carbon footprint for delivery is less than going to the store. https://sustainability.uw.edu/news/grocery-delivery-service-... and https://www.washington.edu/news/2013/04/29/grocery-delivery-...

https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/ctl.mit.edu/files/library/public/D... looks at the total carbon footprint which takes into account packaging too.

For buying something from Amazon, the largest part of the carbon footprint is the cardboard boxes and overall, its still more efficient than traditional shopping.

I agree with you that investment in public transit is preferable to private vehicles in many cases, but the primary purpose of a pickup truck is not personal transportation, it's hauling a bunch of bulky, heavy stuff that isn't feasible to bring on public transit.

Regardless, public transit cannot go everywhere. Rural and light-density suburban areas can never be adequately and cost-effectively served by public transit. Sure, you can run trains or buses into areas like those, but either you'll have excessively low per-route ridership and unsustainably-high operational costs, or you'll have routes that require people to travel several miles in order to get to a station/stop, which means people need private vehicles anyway.

In these cases, you often end up with an overall trip that takes several multiples of the time it would take to drive your own private car. I get that many people might find it acceptable to impose that kind of situation on people (in the name of the environment or whatever reason), but I wouldn't want to live in that world. I use public transit whenever feasible, and only drive when I have to, but there are limits to what I will accept.

You will eat the bugs.

It's the only environmentally friendly option.