The US needs to drop the contractor model and just directly staff labor for public works. If there is enough work going around to maintain a contracting company, then there’s therefore enough work to staff a public rail building division, and build out some standardized and therefore cheaper designs for this infrastructure.
For example: most car oriented American suburbs simply require a car for anything other than visiting a neighbor, whereas in a transit oriented city you might use transit to commute to work, but be able to walk to some local shops and services.
I think many people who are familiar only with car dependent lifestyles make the mistake of imagining a car-free lifestyle that involves replacing all of the car trips they make one-to-one with bus or train trips, which would indeed be really cumbersome, but isn’t really how things work (at least in my experience growing up in a rural small town in the US and having lived in a couple of European cities and NYC).
'Improving' car-oriented development has been observed to make things worse:
> It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if they shift investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox
Improving things for non-car users can actually make things better for drivers:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k
If you can't imagine how public transport can work in a big city, just try to visit a big city where it works (there are plenty outside the US). Seems more constructive to me than being extremely vocal about how you think it cannot exist.
* If you assume that public transport is only for those who can't afford driving, you basically guarantee that it's going to be bad. If you want good public transport, you must design it for the middle class.
* 15 minutes of walking is a very long distance to the nearest station. If you are in an area served by reasonable public transport, you should be able to reach the next station in at least one direction in that time.
At least in most cities. The one in NY has slow driving trains compared to any other cities I've seen.
With the train I need to transfer to another train. This could be a 10 minute wait at the platform before the train arrives, plus its an end of the line stop for this particular line so it will sit for another 5-10 mins while it changes operators. Then once it gets moving, another 15 mins since there are a few at grade crossings with this line and then a 10 min walk. I do it over driving because I can zone out half asleep in the mornings.
The transfering and frequencies are where transit enters a world of pain and these are expensive, complex issues to fix compared to an interchange ramp. Anytime I bring someone unfamiliar on the train, they basically swear off the system for good and moan why we didn’t just pay for the surging uber.
EU's metros are a bit dated compared to that, but still very useful.
In the NY one, I was sometimes thinking walking is about as fast if you add up the slow train speed with the waiting time. In SF, there is none?!
singapore: https://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltagov/en/getting_around/publ...
beijing: https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/beijing/beijing-...
Some grid patterns and some circles. Of course not truly everything is close to a station, but the stations tend to be at important points, and points of interest / desirable living locations will appear around the existing stations.
I just don't understand this whole argument of "A lot of car drivers today probably wont accept that". Sitting in non-moving traffic in a car is truly horrible, I mean it's absolutely the worst, there's nothing fun about it, you're standing still, wasting time, taking 30 minutes for something that can be biked in 10 minutes. When you can instead just walk a few minutes, sit in a train, walk a few more minutes, sit in another train, walk to destination, all in 20 minutes, and you can do stuff on your phone in the meantime.
Even if you love the car so much, having a subway will maybe make driving a car acceptably fun again, since more people taking subway means less cars on the road so a chance you can actually drive instead of stand still all the time.
It is fine to say that US has evolved for the individual car, and it's very hard to change. But I don't get why you say that it's the same everywhere else...
2. I don't know anyone that leaves their home for three separate trips on transit a day. Two tops, and usually it's just one. It's rare to leave the home three times in one day with a car if one of the trips is an eight hour workday. Usually people combine trips.
3. Again, walking is good. We should be walking. It's fantastic to have places to walk to. This isn't a bad thing or a chore.
And no, going to gym is not easier. It costs money, it is time consuming and it does not have the same effect as normal walking.
Is not this the problem with transit? Your traveling is so cumbersome that you seem to be restricting yourself to the bare minimum. Of course, you can also claim "that's a good thing!" but can you talk from the both sides of your mouth and claim that transit is faster and more convenient while also limiting your travel options?
> Take just three trips and your day just turned into a 22 and a half hour one only factoring the walk on the home side.
The exact same thing goes if you go to the same place with a car. But, first, you did not had that healthy factor of walking. Second, if you are tired, overworked, have troubles you need to think about or want to listen some educational tape, you are becoming hazard on road as a bonus.
Just look at 248 mi of track in NYC vs 17.4 in LA.
There's also the consideration that all those point to point journeys and parking at each end is a fairly inefficient way to enable a city's worth of people to move around. There's no way a city like NYC could exist at all if everyone relied on cars for transportation. A point-to-point personal car journey in NYC may in theory be faster than taking public transit, but it would be impossible for everyone to do that as the car transit times would trend towards infinity as everyone is stuck in traffic. And because of the increased density a non car-centric city allows, you can actually shrink public transit times too because things can be closer together and transit can run more often and have more routes. And the increased density also allows point to point personal transport other than cars to be practical, like walking or cycling.
The same with most big Chinese cities (smaller cities have taxis, so you still don’t need your own car). Tokyo’s system works ok as well, although I’m not sure if taxi would be faster since it is too expensive for me to try. The subway/loop lines are good enough to get places as quickly as I don’t think taking a taxi would save much time.
You’d be hard pressed to lay rail based transit so densely where everyone in the metro area has a 15 min walk to a station much less one going somewhere relevant for them. Simple bussing upgrades are much more realistic for us to see comprehensive transit in our lifetimes. Things like signal priority and a protected lane would go a long way for little cash and time. Too bad the bus is invisible to most people and politicians.
Unfortunately, in the US, we let a bunch of politicians who claim the government is bad at everything run the government. They have a vested interest in making sure it's not well run. For goodness sake, we had a president who said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." A sitting US president, who according to Wikipedia, is part of the government. We should have demanded his resignation then and there, and got someone who wasn't terrified of the organization he was a head of.
The most immediate solution to this is stop relying on contractors and let the government at every level build up public planning departments and a construction workforce that doesn't get let go when the project is finished.
This is how improving public transportation is actually one of the most effective ways to benefit drivers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
You said "most places, not just in the US", I suppose they were included?
GP said Boston.
actually there are snow plows, like everywhere else on earth where it snows.
Sidewalks and bike paths will take days to be down to pavement and some bike paths aren’t salted or plowed at all so become safe to use again when the snow naturally melts.
This is a choice, not an inevitability.
So does Finland. See "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Also "Why Winter Cities Need to Reconsider Car Dependence":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFkI3eglT1M
If things can be taken car of so cars can operate in winter there's no reason why they can't be for bicycles (as someone who lives in Toronto, Canada).
The standards of snow removal needed to permit 2 wheel vehicles to operate safely are quite a bit stricter than those for 4 wheelers.
Boston is great for recreational biking for part of the year, sure. There are lovely bike trails.
But it is not great for commuting on a bike, nearly ever. And definitely not during winter.
There is oodles of parking at the office (was built for commuters) and I already have to park the car near home. Eliminating a parking space on either end won’t move any of the existing buildings closer.
My e-bike is significantly cheaper to maintain than my car. It uses something like .7KWH for a full charge which handles over 30 miles. Thats less than 10 cents for a full charge at my rate. Other consumable goods like tires, chains, tubes, break pads are all similarly 10x-100x cheaper than their car counterpart. The only expensive wear item is the battery pack, which admittedly cost $550. I'd estimate my personal usage of the device to be around $0.05/mile.
It's cheaper to own both and maintain both if you are going to use both. Using simple linear math, the ebike will save you over $2000 in ongoing costs (initial price) within 3850 miles or 235 commutes. A pretty good ROI.
It's not like it's the natural state of things that 25% of the Atlanta city center is dedicated to parking so we just have to accept the downsides.
There's a reason everything is so spread out and so it's difficult to walk places or design efficient public transit, and it's the same reason driving and parking your car is the most efficient transportation method.
As soon as they proliferate at scale, the risk profile changes such that you can bike everywhere safely, and parking is no longer a major urban issue, because the fleet is going to have a more flexible usage pattern whether or not individuals own the vehicles: instead of one space per vehicle per destination, it's going to be compressed down to parking space for the neighborhood plus drop-off zones.
So to me, it's obvious that the market is going at the problem just about as fast as it can, and once the adoption S-curve hits, "need to drive" relaxes because other potential uses aren't being suppressed. You'll still have many instances where mass transit and active transit present a lower cost structure than taxi, and they'll have a lot of leeway to grow.
It might be nice if they deliver on this promise though.
There's places elsewhere in the developed world where there's no public transportation, and everyone uses a car for longer trips.
You can usually still cross the street safely as a pedestrian, and expect to reliably find a sidewalk next to the road.
US roads, intersections, parking spots etc. are also absurdly large by the standards of most other countries, it all adds up.
Public transport is not a self-goal, but it’s the best way by far to reduce the spatial requirements for transportation. In particular subways and commuter trains can move an absolutely insane amount of people for even the largest metropolitan areas, without obliterating the ability to walk.
Others include having motorcycles and bicycles for individual transport. That can work in small cities but usually impact walkability anyways. If you look at south east asia for instance, often lacking in good public transport, but having a lot of motorcycles in large cities making pedestrian movement hard.
The big problem there was the lack of sidewalks for pedestrians so you kinda had to go into traffic even if you were just following the streets.
Crossing even the busiest boulevards was actually easy, if a bit nerve racking. The flow of scooters just parts around you as you cross, giving you the “I am Moses” feel - you only have to be visible and consistent with your movement.
Honestly they should just get rid of all the zebra crossings and pedestrian lights - those don’t work anyway, and just build lots of pedestrian islands everywhere and they would be golden, oh and ban cars.
The amount of people those scooters move throughout hanoi is just staggering - even if they are a bit slow, they make up for it being like an organic flow that doesn’t stop for anything as it can just ride around it.
The problem is that people need a place to store their single-occupancy-vehicles. which means that each individual with a car takes up a permanent ~100 Sqft. They also need places to put that car. If you remove the parking lots, and the roads, admittedly, you'll create a more walkable city that means people don't need cars. But people will still want something for longer distances. And that something is public transit.
Your private taxi cab is never going to compete with the people-moving capacity of a bus, or a train. A road with 100s of cars on it, is a demonstration of how many people are heading in a common direction. If you want them to move faster in that direction, find a denser form of transportation that doesn't take up the space of 100s of cars.
Is parking an unsolved problem? I think in most cities it's a solved problem, and the consequence is traffic. But I would be curious of your take given that it's the question you asked. What is there to solve for parking?
edit: Also, Public Transportation, arguably, fixes both traffic and parking.
But ya, if we could eliminate parking, we have some more space for some nice things, but having lived it, it doesn’t solve the main problem at all if private transportation is still viable.
I'm having trouble parsing that sentence, could you clarify?
"[A developed city isn't one where poor people take cars but where rich people take public transit.]"
Do folks realize that walking somewhere in a city is like running a gauntlet to some of the population?
Which is more of a reason to have more people walk: the more people in area going hither and thither the less isolated and vulnerable a person will feel.
People often feel most vulnerable when they feel isolated, which is what happens on a lifeless street. If a street has a sidewalk cafes, bars, restaurants, and people waiting in lines to get into clubs, then there is a feeling of community.
My wife and I a couple years back moved to the very edge of the suburbs. Like, across the street is forest preserves, and behind us is a river. We have only spoken with fewer than 10 neighbors since we moved in 2 years ago.
Her, and her sisters all talk about it being like a "serial killer neighborhood". Even my fishing buddy nextdoor sort of rolls his eyes about how his wife says similar things sometimes.
But I tell my fishing buddy: You'll never understand how vulnerable women feel. Ever. Honestly, being afraid of a place where nobody is around is statistically safer - people don't lock their doors in my neighborhood. I've started also not locking doors. It's that kind of place. That has been a point of friction for my wife and I too - I have been really diligent prior to this, because I always lived in really populous areas.
My wife, thankfully, has never been a victim of any kind of violence. But she has had experiences where she avoided that. Once time some big guy late at night followed her into her apartment building asking to use her phone to call for a tow truck or some nonsense. She knew it was BS, but gave it to him anyways. He ran away.
Men will never be able to understand how vulnerable women feel. We simply do not experience the world in the same way. I'll give another example to help anyone still reading get it: I once went to a haunted house (the Rob Zombie one in Chicagoland) with my buddy and his wife. Probably 10 times, actors working there tried to jump-scare her, and not me or my buddy. Every goddamned time. Whether she was in front, or behind, or between us. She does not scare easily, so she was just really annoyed. Predatory men see women as easy victims in ways they do not other men.
> females
They prefer "women", just FYI.
I live a city and neither do I, at least during the day. Only when I go to sleep I try to remember to check it to make sure it's locked.
And cities are often measured to be safer than suburbs:
* https://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-i...
* https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-your-children-ar...
* https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/130724-su...
There's no slam dunk case for either.
Ouch! That bit ruined a good read.
Domestic violence is not a reason why our cities should be filled with 1-ton death machines that spew soot, carbon monoxide, and nitrous oxide. Cars don’t solve that problem.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americas-deadly-epidemic-vi...
The idea was for the Hyperloop was to do the 400 miles straight shot from LA to San Francisco at speeds up to 300mph. I don't see how a subway could do anything comparable.
https://www.hyd.gov.hk/en/road_and_railway/railway_network/x...
Ever see that monorail episode of The Simpsons? Yeah that's where we're at. There's a strong desire from many people to slow things down and be more deliberate and careful before any more big changes. There's a sense of disillusionment about "progressivism" amongst even those who crave the most righteous of vibes. This is a weird time to be alive and people just don't want to wake up to construction crews ironically destroying their cities to make way for yet another wave of gentrification pretending not to be.
Because the majority of the people in the US don’t actually want to ride public transportation and they like houses. It’s not that difficult to grasp.
It's very nearsighted to think our model is the penultimate in structuring society. Plenty of people are happy, fulfilled, and productive living in apartments & townhouses while taking trains to work.
People can be happy in an apartment but most would trade that in for a house they could afford it.
Unnecessarily inflammatory wording. (Don't use the popular "shoebox" either.)
> Moving from a large place with a forest backyard
Most Americans live in suburban houses and over 90% of suburbs don't have a forest backyard. You're painting a sunny caricature.
> tiny apartment
Apartments come in a range of sizes, easily from 300 sq ft to 2000 sq ft. You get what you pay for. With houses, the minimum size is so large that many people have no choice but to overpay for space they don't need.
> lower standard of living
Being in proximity to people, shopping, and businesses, as well as having a shorter commute to work, contribute to a higher standard of living.
I live in a suburb. I'm in proximity to people, shopping and businesses. In fact, I'm in closer proximity to shopping and businesses than most residential areas in the closest city. Most of the large employers in my area are also in the suburbs so, commuting would be even longer living in the city since it would involve taking public transportation or driving from the city to the suburbs. Even if I lived and worked in the city walking, taking a bus or the subway from residential areas to the employment centers would take longer than my 15-minute commute.
You give up space by living in a dense city but gain walkability and more public amenities, and on the other hand if you lived in the suburbs you would give that up for more personal space and - at least in the case of the US - better school districts. If you're rich you can have the plusses of all.
Why would someone prefer to live like a snail?
> Moving from a large place with a forest backyard to a tiny apartment is a lower standard of living. You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space.
A house does not imply a large backyard. Suburbs are the bigger problem, and they don't usually have much forest.
And apartments don't have to be tiny. If you're comparing against a house in a similar location, that buys a lot of apartment space.
Living in an apartment is a compromise. Unfortunately, most apartments in the US do not have much to offer.
Most are not well insulated, particularly for sound. The overwhelming majority are rentals; and most of those are managed by landlords who charge an arm and a leg, only to be less than helpful.
Public transit relies on good apartments, and good apartments rely on public transit. It's symbiotic. The US has largely failed at providing both.
People don't choose what is available in the market. They choose from what is available in the market.
You have a limited view of 'urban living'. Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was built pre-WW2, and there's no reason why it couldn't be again:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&t=1m8s
The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided) idea that "urban living" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E
Examples (Streetview) of urban tree-lined streets which can support transit and where cycling is practical (and where a car is an option versus a necessity):
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON
See also:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s
Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.
Pharmacy - seconds (right in the next building)
Bar - seconds
Supermarket - 1 minute
Bakery - 1 minute
Greengrocer's - 1 minute
Children's playground - 1 minute
Beach - 1 minute (OK, not representative of every apartment dweller, I'm privileged) :)
Stationery shop - 2 minutes
Bookshop - 2 minutes
Bank branch with ATM - 3 minutes
Amazon locker - 3 minutes
My son's school - 4 minutes
High school - 4 minutes
Health center - 6 minutes
Park - 7 minutes
Library - 7 minutes
Theatre - 13 minutes
Cinema - 15 minutes
Commute - 3 minutes walk to bus stop, buses every 5 minutes, 15-minute trip
Train station - 25 minutes
For me, moving to a house where I would need a car or much longer walks for most of those things would be a huge downgrade in standard of living, not an upgrade. Sure, I would have more space. Not worth it at all.
I think you're underestimating how nice it is to have space.
> I think you're underestimating how nice it is to have space.
This isn’t a trade we need to make. You can have space and be able to walk to things if we just build right. Take the suburb you live in now. Pick 5 houses randomly and turn those into some of the things the OP mentioned. Now you have your space and walkability. Throw in an apartment and some variations of housing so young and old and people with various incomes can live there too and there you have it. Now we’ve reduce car usage so you aren’t driving 5 miles in a 2,000 lb machine to get a loaf of bread and you still get to keep your car and your space.
Also, I would like to point out people don't drive 5 miles to get a loaf of bread. They buy stuff for the whole week/month in one go, which you just can't do by foot.
Yes and I’m keenly honing on on the benefits they highlighted and how those benefits don’t have to be unique to (as they are describing) a dense urban center with apartment only dwellers. Also the OP could just live in an apartment in a mixed-use, medium density neighborhood. They could be your neighbor even!
> Also, I would like to point out people don't drive 5 miles to get a loaf of bread.
Hey there! Yes it’s me. Fellow suburbanite for many years who can tell you first hand as a 100% fact that people do in fact drive distances like this for a single loaf of bread. You can to it for other items too. “Whoops forget sour cream for taco night”, “oh I’m going to make a beer run”, “better grab milk and eggs for that snow storm!”. Etc.
> They buy stuff for the whole week/month in one go, which you just can't do by foot.
You don’t need to do that and they likely do that (most make multiple trips) because you have to go drive a while to make it to the grocery store and deal with traffic. There’s nothing wrong with walking 10 minutes to grab a few things a few times/week. It’s better and healthier. You’re describing “how things are” and not using your imagination to understand how things could be.
Saving this for last:
> What you're proposing (making 5 random houses into apartments), would probably still have most people living in apartments
I just told you that you can take an existing neighborhood and modify it by transforming a few houses so that they have different functions. This is only limited by zoning. Why in the world would that result in “most people living in apartments”? No apartments would be required!
My building is reinforced concrete/steel construction. There's proper insulation. The issue in the US is that construction is poor. Construction of single family homes is actually considerably worse than apartments, but you have the benefit of distance.
Better construction is the right answer here, rather than more sprawl.
I think this is well said. The other dimension is public schools since US school funding comes from property taxes so more expensive areas have more funding for their schools, which usually means a higher quality education.
1. Does school funding come mostly from property taxes?
The answer here in Seattle is yes having seen some breakdown chart in some government document a while back.
2. What determines the amount of property tax?
Thanks for sharing that link about how in Canada the tax collection amount works backwards from a goal amount.
My understanding is that in the US, your property tax is assessed annually and the person doing it presumably uses market comparables to determine the taxable price - I don’t know if they work backwards from a target, but that sounds odd to me.
In my county they will definitely work back from a goal. The county will determine the budget for the coming year and adjust the tax rate to meet that budget. If assessed values go up 8% but the budget only goes up 4% the board of supervisors will lower the tax rate so the increase in property taxes only meets the 4% needed. This is politically easier than doing the reverse, but they have at times increased the tax rate when assessed property values have not risen enough to bring in the funds needed for the desired budget.
No they don’t. People consistently give up better commutes for more space.
> It's very nearsighted to think our model is the penultimate in structuring society. Plenty of people are happy, fulfilled, and productive living in apartments & townhouses while taking trains to work.
100% agree. But Americans want houses more than a public train ride. Figure out how to solve the issue of living in shoeboxes with people still getting space to have a personal garden, a wood shop, etc and you’ll be onto something.
We have shared wood/etc shops, even in small towns. "Makerspace" is one common name for them. Major issues include: storage, tool quality/maintenance, limited hours, staffing, high cost, clashing personalities.
In either case, you'd likely need to drive to get to them. Some apartment complexes have shared gyms, but most of my landlords have been pathologically worried about insurance risks. I'm not sure they would be eager to go along with installing a communal lathe. As for gardens, I once lived somewhere that had small tin beds on the roof, but the landlord rented them out for $300/mo each...there were people who paid to use them, but I thought it was a ridiculous ask for a couple sqft of soil.
There's a reason we call our abode our own "neck of the woods" :)
Wood shops are pretty expensive but not crazy so. The quality of the tools leaves a lot to be desired though
That's a sign there ought to be larger units with better soundproofing in multi-family buildings.
I don't want to force a lifestyle on anyone, but for me it is glorious just popping on a skytrain or a subway, listening to my music, and watching the world go by. I don't have to buy a car, pay for insurance, get gas every week, change the oil, repair it when it inevitably breaks down or things wear out, thus easily doubling the initial cost, find parking, and wash and clean it. I don't like dealing with different vehicle sizes, pedestrians on their phone, and drivers who think their time is worth my safety.
“They made the best of a shit scenario, which is way too many people living in one place. It’s better than the way the US dealt with the people that have to live like that, but it’s still worse than being able to have an acre to yourself in the middle class.” The US optimized for people who are in that camp.
Americans not liking public transportation, and not willing to fund public transportation are two different things.
If you live in a large suburban area (like many Americans), then biking distance is a huge problem.
Sure, making an actually tractable amount of public transit in every suburb would resolve that problem, but that's a huge investment, and the overwhelming majority of Americans can't even imagine what the result might look like.
And how long for a car? 5min? 15min?
If you have a car, then you will likely use it for some percentage of trips. That's a pretty serious motivation to not become "a fit cyclist".
All of these problems work together. This also works in the inverse: a good solution would do something to resolve all of these problems.
Bicycles are neither safe nor efficient enough for a daily commute in the US.
That's because you are looking from the outside in.
Every person who has grown up in the US has grown up in this situation. Having to drive nearly everywhere is our version of normal.
Public transit in the US sucks. In practically every city that even has it, it's the worst way to get anywhere. It's often a last resort: a tool for the desperately poor.
On top of that, most of the US is made up of small towns that public transit wouldn't make any sense for. A significant percentage of Americans must regularly travel between a major city and a small town. That means they must have a car, and a place in the city to park it. It's a fool's errand to convince most people that they should drive and take public transit all in one trip, even if it would save them time and gas.
There is more to this situation than the vicious cycle that perpetuates it. If we can be clear about how we intend to accommodate that reality, we might be able to do something about it politically.
Hang on though: I can't tell my neighbouring city to push for more housing because, while I want to live there in the future, the people that live there now like their lack of housing. Similarly, why can't the people that currently live in the city tell their local politicians that spending all this space for parking the residents don't need is stupid?
Ironically in a "you are the problem" sort of way, the demographics doing most of the complaining about parking lots and a general lack of density are the same demographics who are in favor of fine grained management and regulation of what people do on their land that causes this situation. You reap what you sow.
Big structures are expensive. Who is going to fund them save for the people who are incentivized not to?
"Yup, this big country was spread out by parking lots."
I will say that public transit in the US could be a lot better. However, over about forty years it has largely been how I got to work. (Washington, DC, area.)
And you think other other countries are not the same?
The story the other day about GM dropping CarPlay and AA support was alarming for their reason why. They want to know everything about how you use your car, so they can make you "subscribe" to things like climate control and power seats/windows. The future of the automotive industry in consumer hostile. In another decade or so, it's going to be really hard to find parts for the "dumb" cars of old and Americans are going to be screwed.
I can dream all day about having enough buses and trains to replace 90% of city commutes. That dream includes more work than simply emulating an island nation's infrastructure.
Suburbs became a thing after the car industry worked very hard to make sure subways and train cars can't be used. And this was also after the great interstate highway project and explicit city planning meant to mitigate the fallout of a nuclear attack by having a huge urban sprawl. All of this in the 50s and 60s.
What outsiders don't see is the massive scope and efficiency of the US interstate highway system which is the artery of the US economy. Discussions about public transport don't consider freight. You can't have freight trains to every big store and warehouse but you can get 18wheelers from any part of america to any other part of america (continental) within a day or two at most.
At the same time, explicit effort was made to make cities difficult to drive or bike in. A lot of this again goes back to the sentiment of the 50-60s where "white flight" was still a big deal and making suburbs inaccessible to certain types of people who live in cities but occupy the lowest social classes was also important.
It's expensive to be poor but cars means mandatory insurance and car payments, gas, repair bills and parking fees. And if you manage to overcome all that, cops can pull you over and search you without a warrant because you are driving and of course traffic fees and all that is nothing compared to one's safety. Childcare, food or rent? Which one should you sacrifice for that court fee? And somehow you must maintain mental fortitude to not use drugs or alcohol to cope with all that stress. Take out cars and suddenly so many problems are solved (including crime rates).
My point is, much of this is by design decisions made at a different time and era and the hostility is intentional. It is possible to have both a walkable and drivable city with much less parking lots, especially by having less single family housing concentrations (condos instead of large communities of houses that require cars to access).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2015/5403... skip to page 15, and section 4
In the US everything international (except americas) comes by ship and you have large distances between population centers. It isn't just the size and the amount of freeways but the way they are interconnected that allows all kinds of truck routes between ports and production centers (e.g.: veggies and fruit in cali or florida) to not just big cities but middle of nowhere montana or dakotas as remote and underpopulated as they may be, they all have easy access to the same interlink.
If this was networking, europe would be like a very large campus network but the US would be a metropolitan area network with a similar physical size but connecting all types of buildings.
Honestly, I think you just have to drive around and see what I mean. Many americans also don't get this. I don't mean just the roads but go to random walmarts or targete in the middle of the desert or mountains that get the same goods as big city stores and they're just as large. You can easily spend half a day shopping in a walmart.
Can you understand why I avoid public transport at all costs and don’t wish to expose my family to it?
The space needed for these parking lots basically guarantees you can not walk or bike to get anywhere. I believe that unless there's big investment in public transportation, there might be no way for these cities to break out of this vicious circle. And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me.
The hyperloop, a ridiculously bad alternative to a subway, garnered so much attention even with its obvious downsides, so having actually useful public transportation should be a no-brainer imho.