Public transport is not monolithic. Public transport is a complex evolving system of trains, busses, ferries, car sharing systems, car leasing, on demand mobility, etc. This is coordinated, integrated and has a various forms of innovation: technically and service.
The most recent radical innovation is a nation-wide public transport ticket (as a subscription) for all of Germany.
Public transport is a good thing to have, but extolling it as a desirable-in-itself, convenient way to travel as compared to personal transport is simply not viable.
Another fallacious argument.
It is desirable in itself.
It results in human-scale cities, more accessible for all regardless of disabilities.
It makes more efficient use of resources. It uses less energy, emits less pollution, means less space must be devoted to roads and to parking.
It makes streets more pleasant places to be, so one might choose to eat or drink on the street, free of traffic fumes.
It means one can drink alcohol and not have to pay a lot for a taxi home, and thus, reduces the motivation to drunk drive.
Car-free streets are better for cycling, which is better for public health, which is better for healthcare infrastructure.
In fact, there is no real disadvantage to it, as your rather ridiculous attempts to construct negatives show:
> a (logistically) complex system
That's a good thing. More options. E.g. one can choose step-free routes when moving luggage or infants in prams, or if a wheelchair user, versus faster alternatives when travelling unencumbered.
You may not have noticed but most people have smartphones now, which can do the routing for you.
Your claimed disadvantage is in fact a win.
> waiting for vehicles to arrive,
Better than waiting in traffic jams.
> unload & reload
False; cars must do this too.
> transporting large or heavy items
You make it increasingly clear you've no experience of this and the biases of someone to whom it is alien and scary.
I've moved furniture this way. I've moved rackmount servers and 21" CRT monitors this way.
It's cheap.
> where you're exposed to hundreds of strangers' behaviors & germs
You sound like the increasingly deranged and irrational Elon Musk, whom I once admired.
> enforcedly generic environment
Utter lunacy. American cities, covered in freeways, and still congested, are the ultimate example of this.
You seem to think you are making a logical case.
You are not. You are making it plain you are a bigot who lacks experience of the thing they are attacking, though.
Please, can you separate "religious " issues from the discussion if sofrware. Thank you.
Genuinely dismayed to hear that.
I put it to you that it's one of these things the depends entirely on your personal background, specifically including the country (or countries) that you grew up in.
I have been told, to my face, that it is absolutely impossible to live life in a modern American city using a bicycle as your only form of transport. (Let alone as a pedestrian!) This may be true; I don't know, I've never lived in America.
But as an adult, I've lived in London, Brno, and Prague, with bicycles as my only regular form of vehicle, used in combination with public transport, and it's been absolutely fine. Not even inconvenient, not tolerable, not bearable, but pleasant, easy, cheap, convenient, and fun.
I didn't get a car driver's license until I was 37 years old. I never needed one. (I did have a motorcycle license from the age of about 22.)
I have often faced out right incredulity when I told people this but it is not exaggeration.
Similarly, I have often been told that life as a vegetarian is inconceivable. People have cited a multitude of reasons, from lack of ingredients, the lack of culinary skills, the lack of availability of restaurants where they live, to simple inability to face the prospect of life without eating meat... but I've been a vegetarian for over 40 years now. It is not some miserable, puritan, ascetic life of self-denial. I've travelled to many dozens of countries, and never had a real problem, and I've never ever, not once, let it lapse for any reason, especially not because I was abroad. It doesn't mean austere self-denial. I love my food, as my waistline shows, unfortunately.
When I say that somebody's national background is probably a motivating factor in their lack of belief that, for example, designing entire nation states around public transport as the primary way of getting around, that is not an ad hominem attack. It is a plain and simple statement of fact.
Sometimes, people's lifestyles and background mean that they cannot imagine a life that is so radically different to their own… and that can mean even people that have travelled extensively in their own country. I don't think that it is rude to point that out.
> Public transport is a good thing to have, but extolling it as a desirable-in-itself, convenient way to travel as compared to personal transport is simply not viable.
Mobility is an important need of people. Public transport provides a large part of the mobility needs in Germany and Cities compete by providing good services. Whether people prefer it to "personal transport" is their choice. If you personally have problems using mobility services together with "strangers", that's your thing and there are alternatives for you. Many people don't have these problems, which can be seen by the amount of people using public transport. There should now be more than ten million owners (10m was reached after one month of availability) of a Deutschlandticket (which is a subscription ticket) - out of a population of 80+ million. Additionally people use public transport with other tickets. The public transport is also not there in isolation. It is meshed with car usage, flights, long-distance trains, ... people walk and bike...
The reverse is in fact true, as @lispm points out.
It's complex, it's diverse, it's tailored to each individual town and city. Big cities have urban rail or light rail or both, smaller ones have trams or trolleybuses, smaller ones may have just buses. To get to and from the stops, some cities have footpaths, some private bicycles, some public cycle sharing schemes.
And any combinations of the above, of course.
Every system bespoke to that city. Every city's system totally unique.
Outlier cities, such as very mountainous ones, integrate cable car systems into the mix, such as La Paz:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi_Telef%C3%A9rico
And Medellín:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrocable_(Medell%C3%ADn)
Chongqing has a remarkable system because the city spans a set of mountain ranges and valleys:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing_Rail_Transit
The exact reverse of your statement is the case.
The simplistic one-size-fits-all answer is: "get everyone to drive, give them loads of big roads and pave half the city for parking."
https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-are-25-looking-a...
Straw man argument. Nobody is saying they do.
> the personal transport choices made by individuals
Also fallacious; people's choices are constrained by the options available to them. If you live somewhere with excellent public transport, as I have most of my life in the 3 major cities I've inhabited and indeed most of those I've visited for work or pleasure, you have more choice. You can choose to drive, or to ride a bike, or to ride pubtrans.
If there is no pubtrans, or little and inconvenient, then you are being deprived of choice, deprived of diversity of options: the result is a car monoculture.
You are attempting to argue the inverse of the position you claim. I don't know why.
I think you are focusing on the trees and so not seeing the size and the shape of the forest.
Most organisations use C and languages implemented in C, on OSes implemented in C, because they do the job, the people are cheap and readily available, and the dominant OS is free and costs nothing to deploy.
Which can be reduced to:
Most people use the tools most people use.
That's not a very useful observation, but it poses an interesting question:
Why?
That's easier.
Here is the shape of the outside of the answer:
They use them not because they are good -- they aren't very good, measured objectively -- but because they are ubiquitous and cheap.
Other tools are better, and just as free, but then the people cost more, and the associated tooling costs more. (Frameworks, supporting libraries, deployment costs, whatever. E.g. it's very cheap to deploy Javascript because all you need is a reasonably modern browser, and those are free and almost all OSes have them.)
Those are the externalities, in a manner of speaking.
But the other side of the answer is the inside: the area, not the shape.
The mainstream, conventional, software industry is huge, and hugely lucrative.
Writing just-barely-good-enough apps, minimum viable products, gets you out there and making money. Then you can put a share of your revenues into incrementally improving it.
Every now and then you can push out a big new version, with disruptive changes. You can charge for getting the new major releases, but more to the point, once an old version is officially obsolete, you can charge for continued fixes to the now-obsolete versions.
It makes money. It's an ecosystem, a food chain or more accurately a web. Some members are predators, some are prey, but they all work together and if you just eliminate either predators or prey, the system collapses.
In other words:
Most people use the tools most people use, because most people use them, because you can make big money from volume of cheap junk.
But there is another model of making and selling stuff: make small volumes of really good products, using highly skilled workers, and sell those high-quality products in very small volumes but for very high prices, to discerning customers who know they're buying something built to last and who may not come back to you for new versions every couple of years, but that's fine if you made a couple of decades' revenue from them on the original sale.
Because cars are a long standing metaphor in computers and computing:
If you have a mass market for cars, then you get cheap cars, and everyone's cars are much the same because they are built down to a price and mass produced.
These car consumers can be upsold some extra buttons and minor features, and a lot of those combined may double the price of the car.
(This is how different Linux distros survive. Some have more buttons. Some have A/C. Some are fully automatic, others have fully manual controls. Some have power steering, some don't.)
But such a market also supports hand-made sports cars (and, inevitably, superficially similar cheaper sports cars from the mass-producers). It also supports vast tanklike cars that weigh as much as 10 normal cars, but produce 10x the engine power of those cars so they still perform.
Very different products, but they cost an order of magnitude more than the mass-produced cars... and do the same job. Some owners of mass-produced cars aspire to own fancy sports cars, and some aspire to own luxury behemoths. Most never will.
People who don't care much for cars and just see them as a tool for getting from A to B do not see why anyone would pay for fancier cars. That's OK, too.
Some people live in other countries and see more clearly, because for them trains and bicycles are a perfectly viable way of getting from A to B, and are both cleaner, healthier, use less resources and create less waste.
Tools like Lisp are the artisanal hand-made cars compared to the mass market. People who've never used anything but cheap mass-produced tin boxes can't even imagine that there are things that are so much better, let alone that in the long run, you might be better off using them.
As Terry Pratchett put it:
« “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about $10. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a $199 on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” »
Some of us live in countries with really good public transport, and know that it's possible to replace the entire category of personal automobiles with something better for everyone...
But try telling that to an American. They won't even try to understand; they will instead earnestly explain why they need cars, and their country is better because everyone has cars.
More wild generalisation:
In the late 20th century, there was another model of software construction, an alternative to the "Worse is better" model. The WIB model is that one type of software fits all, and build one (or a very few) minimum viable operating systems, from minimal viable programming languages, and make them cheap or give them away for free.
The artisanal software model was more common in Europe and Japan: pick the best language for the job, and build tiny bespoke OSes for each category of device. Have multiple whole incompatible families of desktop OSes, and families of totally different unrelated server OSes, and families of different OSes for handhelds and games consoles and school computers for teaching kids, and so on.
Unify them, minimally, with some standard formats: network protocols, disk and file formats, maybe some quite similar programming languages in lots of weird little nonstandard dialects.
iTron, RISC OS, SiBO/EPOC/EPOC32/Symbian, QDOS/Minerva/SMSQe, Con-Tiki, Symbos, GEOS, Novell Netware.
Keep the complexity are the market level, in which multiple radically different products compete for sales in their market segments. Lots of overlap, lots of duplication... but also competition, evolution, rivalry, advancement.
The software remains small and relatively simple. This aids development, but mainly, it keeps the resource requirements low, so the devices are cheaper. Human brainpower is cheap: spend it on clever software to enable cheap hardware.
The approach I am calling WIB is of vast general-purpose OSes which can do anything, so you only need a handful of them... but you need massive hardware to run it, so devices powered by WIB software are expensive, and very complicated, and the software is vastly complicated, so you need armies of programmers to maintain it, meaning frequent updates, so you need lots of storage and fast connections.
And there is no overview, because it's much too big to fit into a single human head, so improvement is incremental, not radical.
The end result is a handful of vast monoliths, full of holes and leaks, but a vast economic machine that generates continuous income and lots of jobs.
When you live in one of these monoliths, the fact that there are happy accomplished people working in weird tools making weird little products for tiny markets seems incomprehensible. Why would they?
Most people use the standard tools, meaning the ones most people use. So obviously they are good enough: look at these trillion-dollar corporations that use them!
So obviously, there isn't really any point to the weirdoes.