It is strange that you chose China! Have you seen how many kilometers of urban freeways they built in the last 30 years? It is crazy. Look at the Beijing ring roads -- a traffic clogged hell space.

No, but I have you seen the Beijing metro:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Beijing+metro

and it sounds like it got a lot better than car transport during the same period.

China has built out both while the US has let both crumble.

The Netherlands also has both amazing public transit and amazing highways.

The US would rather argue over slashing the already meager social safety net and buy some more fighter jets, nuclear aircraft carriers, and modernize the obsolete ICBM force than invest in infrastructure these days.

Dozens of billions are being poured in. That’s we got the California high speed rail connecting nowhere to nothing and BART just barely making it to San Jose.

None of that still fixes the last mile problem of suburbia, and buses aren’t a solution. They are slow, too infrequent, and generally uncomfortable.

> They are slow, too infrequent, and generally uncomfortable.

Uh, make them more frequent, more comfortable and faster?

I spend the last 15 minutes of my commute on a bus. Driving vs. bus + train = 3 minutes. I can drive, probably get stuck in traffic, get pissed at angry drivers ... or just chill on a bus and train for 45 minutes.

The only time it is worth driving is when I need to-the-minute exactness of when to arrive, which is rarely ever. IOW, I show up 10 minutes early to work (and also leave 10 minutes early) to be on the public transportation schedule.

Trains come every 10 minutes, busses every 15. I've never had any issues. Sure, I walk a whole 300 meters (1000ft) from the bus to my house, and again from the bus to work. But that is probably good for me since I don't get enough exercise as it is.

Uncomfortable is harder to fix than it looks.

Chairs in our bus stops are designed to be uncomfy to make sure people don't sleep in them, especially not when laying down.

There were too many drunk people sleeping in them, making things messy. The bus company gave up and decided low-comfort chairs were better than puke-filled chairs.

The bus stops around here don't even have seats usually. However, they run every 15 minutes on weekdays, and every 30 minutes on weekends. So, you usually just walk or bike there a few minutes before the bus shows up. You maybe wait 3 minutes for the bus. Google Maps is awesome for knowing exactly when the bus will show up too.

> Uh, make them more frequent, more comfortable and faster?

This is a spot-on description of self-driving cars.

I’m not convinced that self-driving cars is faster than a bus with a dedicated lane.

Still significantly fewer billions than are being invested in road infrastructure.

Have you been to Switzerland? Their public transport system is a mix of busses/short trams and long trip trains. They aren't precisely a high density urban country. They have suburban sectors. The difference here is that they don't make walking a punishment. You can count that everywhere you want to go there's a walking path, even when going off-road. Yes, it's not 100%, but it doesn't need to be. If you can reach 70% of all the places you will ever want to go using public transport, that is enough.

I've been to Switzerland and it was _great_. Only had to grab an Uber a handful of times. However, Switzerland is like the size of the Houston metroplex. Getting to the corners of Switzerland seems like a problem on a different scale from the US.

Switzerland only has a bit more population than the Houston metroplex and is about the same size - why can't the Houston metroplex be great like Switzerland? I wouldn't be moving away from Houston if they could accomplish that.

Switzerland is significantly smaller than the US, even ignoring all of the other countless differences. Why can't a startup do the same thing as Google infrastructure and be successful?

Do you know the density of Switzerland? People in the US like owning homes.

Public transport infrastructure at a national scale is not a dozens of billions project, it's a hundreds to thousands of billions project. The current investment in Waymo is less than the investment in the (still underfunded) NYC metro alone

Didn't they do that to themselves? IIRC, it's like that because (A), they were the first to do underground rail so lots of things were done "wrong" (with what we know today), thus requiring lots of money to fix it. And, (B), any changes they make (even small ones) require redoing significant infrastructure because of (A).

Pour out gazillions of money into American public transit and it won’t get you far.

The reason why China and other Asian nations have amazing public transit isn’t financial or technical. It’s cultural and social. And by that, I don’t mean anything to do with cars - I’m referring to just a public willingness (or enforcement) to enshre nice public things stay nice, which is often lacking in the US.