In most cases it is unrealistically difficult to beat the convenience and speed of private cars. If you are in a very dense urban environments, maybe. Otherwise, no.

That's why making public transport very cheap or even free does not make everyone let their cars at home.

Actually, in most cases it is unrealistically difficult to beat the convenience of public transport over private cars without MASSIVE infrastructure investments favoring cars.

Being able to get places with cars requires a lot of things: roads, parking, traffic measures (signs, crossings, stoplights, onways, offramps, freeways, more parking at destination, etc etc etc). If you only build for public transport, bikes, and walking, the savings in both space used and money spent become ridiculous.

Basically: the world looks a lot different without every building having a huge car park. In my view: a lot better.

The point is that the infrastructure investments required for public transports would be even higher, taking into account that roads are also required for public transports...

If I want a bus or a train to be right in front of my house any time I need one and I also want that bus/train to drive me exactly where I want to go, obviously the cost will be ridiculously high.

You set unreasonable expectations/ demands on public transport. There will always be some walking / biking to/from bus/tram stops. That has never been a problem.

You are likely trying to compare the USA car-centric suburbs and frankly that choice makes distances larger but that’s life. USA has a tremendous disadvantage due to the car-centric nature.

Yet even that can be changed, it will be costly, but there is no technical issue. It is all about politics. As long as taking a bus is seen as for “poor people” it will be an uphill battle.

I am in Europe and I am replying to a claim that public transport can be made so good that it is people's first choice... and so the point I am making is that this is indeed setting an unrealistic expectation on public transport!

If you need some biking or walking just to reach public transport, then wait, then travel through the network then there is always a level of inconvenience that you may not face if you use individual private transport instead.

Even in Europe most people live is suburbs. Even if they are not car-centric (and they are in most cases) that increases inconvenience and cost of public transport.

> that you may not face if you use individual private transport instead.

Only if you assume that individual private transport can get you door-to-door. Which is a rather unfair comparison. "cars are better because unlike public transport, you can drive up to basically any building and park there" is only true if you build roads and parkings to basically every building.

Streets have to access all buildings due to fire fighting reasons, unless you also plan to rearchitecture the firefighting infrastructure to use pipelines branching from a huge central fire extinction station.

Firefighting vehicle doesn't need parking space

It is obvious that a building requires road access. The issue of emergency services access has already been mentioned but there is also obviously the issue of deliveries, including large items like appliances and furniture.

I did mention the caveat that sometimes private transport (which includes bikes) may be inconvenient. That includes issues with parking space.

I'd argue that making private transport very impractical is not the same as making public transport "so good it becomes the first choice"... it's making private transport bad enough that it becomes more inconvenient than public transport...

I'm not so sure about that. The subsidies that a functioning public transport requires every year are massive as well. I wouldn't be surprised if they exceeded the cost of extra infrastructure (roads, parking etc.) required by private cars.

Public transport would obviously need much less space and would be much more efficient. It’s the car sprawl that is unsustainable in every way.

In a dense city centers? Probably. Everywhere else? I'm not so sure. An average person will is bothered by wait times longer than 10 minutes and wants the stop to be within 5-7 minutes from their door. So, you'd have to run a bus/tram every 10 minutes through a ton of sleepy suburbs, which may not even see a car every 10 minutes. It's just not rational.

I disagree and it’s quite wrong for many European countries, for instance.

The whole idea is that public transport would be preferable in terms of time, comfort and cost. It can be done, there is no technical challenge whatsoever, it’s all politics.

In many cases traffic is so bad that cars are just as bad. But the key thing is to sacrifice / build lanes exclusive to public transport (busses) because those lanes effectively are so much more efficient.

We have a ton of electric busses already, which makes such transport even more ideal.

I am in Europe and at country level public transport will never beat individual transport overall. In specific dense urban environments where cars can be extremely inconvenient (including because all the offices are packed in a few towers all at the same location), yes but again in the general case a bus will never be able to be as convenient as my own vehicle parked right outside my front door.

And yes this is a technical and practicability challenge on top of being prohibitively expensive to run.

Trading some convenience for a much better world in every conceivable metric is just more important.

Every conceivable metric except convenience, then... That sounds like a regression to me.

You know that a ton of people do exactly this: travel to a train station or bus/tram stop and they are fine with it. Lots of people don’t have cars.

You seem to argue in bad faith as I have to point out the obvious to you.