That's 1½-2½ commuter rail lines or about 3-4 subway lines.
Such interchanges are truly a monument to stupidity.
We're in a catch 22 trap that will cost trillions and likely a century to get out of.
We've actually had similar issues in many post-war suburbs in Germany when trying to convert them to transit in recent years.
The solution isn't to remove all driving, just driving in areas with too much traffic. So park & ride concepts were created. You build train stations at major hubs and at locations at the edge of town and connect them.
e.g. my mum's commute changed from "drive for 45min in traffic" to "drive 5min to the neighborhood train station that shares its parking lot with the hypermarket next door, wait 10min, ride the train for 5min, arrive at the train station next to her office".
Her commute was cut in half, the business can collect revenue from their mostly unused parking lot during the week (it's sized for saturday shopping traffic), the train station doesn't have to build their own parking lot (the operator pays a few cents per train ticket to the business), and every person using this line is one less car on the road.
This model is already profitable (!), but you can expand further.
You can set up bus or tram routes that offer cross-connections between train stations to further connect schools, university dorms, malls, etc.
You can then improve connectivity within of suburbs. Introduce cross-connections between cul-de-sacs for pedestrians and cyclists, connecting suburbs, apartment complexes, local businesses and train stations.
The density won't be high enough to make walking to the train station viable, but cycling to the station certainly will be. That's not a solution for everyone, but it increases freedom of movement for teenagers and retirees.
So far, all of this is possible in the US today.
But we can dream beyond that:
You'd really want to change the zoning around these hubs over time.
Ideally you'd want to build 5-over-1s with an underground parking garage, shops and stores on the bottom floor, and apartments on the higher floors.
For businesses that need more space you can give the bottom floor a larger footprint and add a green roof which provides something of a community backyard for the occupants of the apartments. Bonus points if you build it as a courtyard in the middle with balconies facing the courtyard.
You'd really want to avoid high rises to ensure you get a growing circle of mid-density development around these hubs, somewhat reminescent of what main streets used to look like (or Disney's Main Street USA with two more floors ontop).
A few cities in the US have actually gotten this far already!
European cities, which suffered more destruction from post-war car-centric city planners than from the war itself, have been using these steps to slowly recover.
These steps are also how cities around the world grew during the industrialization, and how the US got the main streets of old in the first place.
Getting this far will take a whole generation, but where do we go from here?
While this would be the end for solving local commuters, it'd only be the beginning for inter-city journeys.
HSR is 2×-3× faster than cars and can be faster than flying for journeys below 1500-2000km, but it only works if you've already got local hubs with a dense transit network connecting them to the rest of the city.
How many years is the break even point before profit is generated charging riders even 100$ per trip?
Some of these highspeed rail projects proposed across the USA have a 1-2000 year break-even excluding maintenance over 2000 years @ 100$/rider/trip
Assuming every single commuter is coming from and going to the same place, sure.
The "homes" part is distributed, true, but guess what, once you have a good rail network, it provides decent coverage for that (which you can complement via walkability/bikeability/scooterability :-p, which makes for more liveable environments). And "train commuter rage" is much less frequent than "road rage" plus a lot more people die or get maimed driving a car/getting hit by a car than they do because of trains.
Not in the slightest in DFW. That High 5 is going to service people coming from many dozens of square miles of suburbs to many dozens of square miles of offices. People are going to be coming from Plano, McKinney, Princeton, Wylie, Garland, Richardson, Sachse, Rowlett and heading to Addison, Northwest Dallas, Carrolton, Irving, Coppell, and Grapevine. That's just the traffic from the Northeast going to West.
It's not like most of these people in the suburbs of Dallas work in Dallas. They mostly don't, they live and work all over the Metroplex. And given its expensive to sell and buy land, people will often buy a house once and stay there even though their jobs might bounce all over the Metroplex.
That used to be true in the US. But over the past 50 years, the dominance of the automobile combined with traffic patterns (and related real estate trends) have incentivized the opposite to happen. Suburban commercial development facilitates easier parking, and quicker commutes over secondary highways rather than the traditional congested main arterials into city centers. Many cities in the US already have or are starting to "doughnut". While post-war suburbanites absolutely did commute into the city, many contemporary suburbanites live, work, and shop in surburbs.
I remember a time when shopping at an American department store meant you had to "go into the city" to a place like this:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/dc/99/a2/dc99a2e79cac5ab0fe5f...
Now, when they want to go to a department store, many Americans drive to somewhere like this, closer to their homes:
https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/11/60/12/19333814/3/1200x0.jpg
The same trend has also happened to many other industries across the board.
Department stores are fewer and fewer now. Most of the big malls around the Washington, DC, area are gone.
This isn't as true in Dallas as in other places. The QoL associated with some of these problems in Dallas is part of the reason I left, so you're preaching to the choir, but the sprawl is intense.
This is not true and is one of the problems with getting mass transit to work in the US.
Most of the employment in the US is now smeared across the city. I'll give Austin as an example.
Austin employment has spaced out clumps. Downtown. The UT campus. The Domain (old IBM/NI area). The Arboretum. Oak Hill. The "new" airport.
Austin housing has similar clumps, generally dictated by how much you earn. You're probably further out than you would like since the real estate in the center is ridiculous. So, Leander, Hutto, Garfield, or Dripping Springs.
Now, plot the flows on a map. Note the massive pileup in the center as people attempt to change sectors across the city. Most modern cities are like this. There are not two or three obvious points that would get a big chunk of the traffic.
I chose Austin, but San Diego, Pittsburgh, Nashville, etc. all look similar.
And, the news is worse than that. The "white collar" jobs that could be concentrated have also been the most displaced by surburban office parks or by WFH. The types of jobs that most people are employed in (service and warehousing--Walmart/Amazon/FedEx/UPS/etc.) are generally specifically positioned where real estate is cheaper which is almost by definition off of any mass transit connector.
This is incorrect due to the size of land parcels that Americans aspire to. The typical 0.1+ acre size lot makes it so people are so spread out, no public transit will ever make sense.
These are people coming from several dozen square miles and dispersing into several dozen square miles, flowing through these chokepoints. They're commuting 40, 50, or more miles. You'd need these people to change several bus lines and several train lines. Those busses would be snaking through messy suburbs for them to be actually useful. Those neighborhoods to pick them up are sprawling with poor walkability and a 15 minute+ walk just to the major road bus stop for a lot of those people. And when they get off the train, they're probably going to need a bus to navigate the sparse fields of giant empty parking lots to their actual workplaces.
In fact, for a certain group of people this path practically already has a train service. US-75 runs parallel to the Red/Orange line. Assuming the person starts from Plano to go to their office job in Las Colinas/Irving (a massive assumption here, but practically best case), they won't even need to change trains. Let's ignore how they get to Parker Road station for now (Park and Ride? 15 minute walk through their neighborhood + same time as the park and ride?) and start the clock from there. They're going to commute to the Microsoft offices. They need to get in by 9:00 AM. So they instantly warp to the Parker Road Station, hop on the orange line at 6:46 AM. They get to North Lake College station at 8:07 AM. They then wait for the 229 bus at 8:21, take that 8 stops, hop off, walk a half a mile (~11min), and get there at 8:40. Nearly two hours and they only had to change once. And once again, that's instantly warping to Parker Road Station. Add another several minutes of drive or even more for a bus to connect to the train.
Next, they're going to take the highways, including toll ways. They leave from Parker Road Station, head down US-75, hop on Bush Turnpike, and it is an ~30min trip on average.
Or they want to avoid tolls. They take US-75 to 635 (taking this High Five talked about here), and it takes 30 minutes to an hour.
Now, theoretically this should get a little bit better. There will be a new train line with more of an East-West path that would be useful here. But it'll be a train change at Bush Turnpike Station, and service on this new Silver Line won't be great at first. Potentially a 30 minute wait for the next train at peak times. And it'll still take 50ish minutes after that transfer. So you'd look at maybe a 5 minute train ride from Parker Road to Bush Turnpike, wait 15 minutes for the next train, then still 50 minutes. Plus the 30 minutes for the bus ride and walk. Over an hour and a half, magically warping to Parker Road immediately when the train was about to leave and hopefully only waiting 15 minutes for the Silver Line train. We'll see that it is really like when it opens in late 2025 (hopefully). I'm still excited for it, I'm looking forward to not needing to drive and park all the way out to the airport for travel and having another way to Addison Circle for things like Oktoberfest and other events there will be great.
But this is also kind of a best case of someone taking the train versus driving. This is assuming someone lives close to the train lines in Plano. Their office is one bus line away from the station. Tons of people live even further out from there. Lots of people work at places which would require multiple bus transfers. The train doesn't even go halfway out into the sprawl, and the surrounding cities don't want to join DART.
But honestly, it makes little sense to me to have people living in Fairview, McKinney, Prosper, and Melissa trying to commute to an office job in Dallas/Irving/Grapevine/Westlake/etc. It's insane to me, but people choose it.
But a lot of people here just have a big aversion to taking transit. You're seen as an oddball to many for acknowledging it exists. We live right next to a bus stop that goes to a nice train station. My wife was looking at taking a job that would be immediately outside a train station. She looked at me like I was insane for suggesting she think about taking the train. I usually take it when I go into Dallas and people think it is incredible I survive. I take the bus to the city park with my kids and people wonder what happened to my car.
I do understand the problem in the way the infrastructure is build in the area and that it isn't easy to just change and go to trains, that's not what I was suggesting.
I was specifically responding too:
"Assuming every single commuter is coming from and going to the same place, sure."
And that if of course nonsense. The whole point of a network is that you can route from one place to another. I didn't propose a whole new transport plan for the whole area. And I am not pretending that within 1 year you can change all of Texas infrastructure. I was simply pointing out a fundamentally flawed argument.
> But this is also kind of a best case of someone taking the train versus driving.
Well, this is the best case in particular situation you are describing where that kind of infrastructure has been under-invested in for 100+ years. Its not the best case for public transit.
It should NEVER take 30 min to swap from one train to another. In all of Switzerland you 90% of all connections are 10min or less. That's for the whole country including buses. If the train infrastructure was more modern and electric, trains could likely be faster. If the buses had their own lanes (not like Texas doesn't have enough lanes) the avg speed of the bus could likely be improved quite a lot.
This is just about infrastructure choices, apparently Texas can build tons of super complex incredibly expensive highway interchanges but an electric train that leaves every 15min is apparently impossible.
DoT in Texas is still on that 1960 highway building mania and is still destroying black neighborhoods so that subburban wight people can get to their office jobs at the oil company or whatever. The first step is recognizing the problem, and they are still working on that.
The whole area seems like its pretty dense with a lot of people, I don't see why it couldn't have good transit. Even just with buses on existing roads. As long as you make some room for them and give them the appropriate priority and so on. A lot could be done for not that much money, if people actually wanted.
On of the biggest problem in the US is that your tax system if fundamentally unfair and massively subsidizes suburbia. That's arguable one of the most important things that need to change. I strongly suggest looking at the work done by Urban3 and Strong Towns.
> infrastructure has been under-invested in for 100+ years.
This isn't some subway built in 1920 that has barely even had a new train in the past 50 years. The Orange Line opened in 2010. The Red Line in 1996. Some of the stations opened in like 2014. The rolling stock is mostly stuff purchased post-2008. And with the Silver Line, those are all totally new stations on a totally new path with totally new rolling stock. Clearly, you don't know what you're talking about if you're thinking this is stuff that hasn't been invested in for nearly 100 years. But hey, you watched some YouTube videos, so you know exactly what the realities are like living in DFW and know precisely what would solve it.
> more modern and electric
The train in my example is pretty new and electric. Once again, you clearly don't know what you're talking about here.
> an electric train that leaves every 15min is apparently impossible.
The Orange Line and Red Line at its peak is like 7.5ish min intervals. Once again, you clearly don't know what you're talking about here.
> If the buses had their own lanes (not like Texas doesn't have enough lanes) the avg speed of the bus could likely be improved quite a lot.
What, we're going to have 100mph busses going on surface streets or something? Dedicated bus lanes make sense in areas where there's lots of traffic and gridlock, they can do a lot of good there. The bus in the example isn't in one of those places. That road isn't normally very crowded. Forcing the light cycles for the bus would probably save a minute or two, but once again the overall trip is losing by well over a half hour. The overall trip time is worse because you're going to stop that train several times along its path, that bus is going to stop and pick up people. Whereas the car, even if it goes a bit slower because of traffic, is still keeping its average speed at like 50ish mph.
> The whole area seems like its pretty dense with a lot of people
That's the thing. It really isn't. Some people have a several minute drive jus to leave their neighborhood, just to get to the first place where a bus stop would even remotely make any sense to be. Some parts are decently dense, and those are the places where people can and do reasonably take transit as their primary way of travel. But it is definitely not the norm. But hey, once again, you're someone that's watched a few YouTube videos and poked around on Google maps, you definitely know more than the person who's actually lived in it for over a decade.
> It should NEVER take 30 min to swap from one train to another.
Sure. But those trains are going to be largely empty even with the 30 minute service interval. Running them every 5 minutes is burning billions of dollars and lots of energy rolling empty trains. And in the end, look at the math. Shave 15 minutes off the trip. Shave 30 minutes off the trip. The highway path still beats out on time.
> This is just about infrastructure choices
Its far more about city design overall than just "infrastructure". You could replace all the highways overnight in DFW with trains that run every 30 seconds. It'll just increase the overall transit times for all these commuters. Do the math. Look at actual average speeds for whatever design you might propose. It is a fundamental issue with how the cities are laid out and designed from the very foundations. Those average commuters would end up changing trains several times on their commutes. That train is going to have to roll through a bunch of stations and stops in order to actually be useful to the riders. Because its not "mostly people in this area going mostly to that area", its people from an absolutely massive area going to an absolutely massive area.
> Even just with buses on existing roads. As long as you make some room for them and give them the appropriate priority and so on. A lot could be done for not that much money, if people actually wanted.
The thing is, once again, the density and overall design of where I'd want to go. There's a bus stop right outside my house. The routes from there make a decent bit of sense, they go along through a few shopping areas and to the nice downtown Plano area and that bus station there. But I don't often shop at those shopping areas. I go to slightly different ones. So now there would need to either be yet another bus line that goes to each of those different shopping areas, or so much bus service the next bus is just a couple of minutes behind. Otherwise, each of those changes really adds up in time, and suddenly I'm spending 2-3x as much time taking the bus than just driving.
And I'm lucky, I live literally on the edge of my neighborhood. Someone deeper in the neighborhood, it is a 15 minute walk to the main road where the bus is. With the weather right now having a heat index of like 110F. That walk alone is longer than what their drive would be to that store. So then what, we have busses snaking through all the small curvy neighborhood roads? Gee, that'll really make the overall travel time higher. This is why I just completely ignored the travel time for that person to Parker Road Station, you include that and for a lot of people it really blows the travel time up.
And to think, I'm in kind of a small and compact neighborhood for DFW. There's a lot out there with much bigger lots and more separated from the main roads.
So you see how its not just a matter of "well, if only we had more modern electrc trains, and more busses, maybe dedicated bus lanes." It is the fact that person is weighing a 15 minute walk in 110F heat versus leaving their house in an air-conditioned car and getting to their destination in the same amount of time as before they even got on the bus. That bus wait could be 0 minutes, that bus could go practically right where they wanted to go, the bus isn't really stuck in traffic for their route, but because of the layout of their neighborhood and the sprawling nature of all the places they might want to go taking the bus just didn't make sense.
Its far more than just "invest in the infrastructure!" It is changing the mindset. Its building new forms of housing, shopping, and working. And yes, actually building the trains and buying the busses. But we could quadruple the bus fleet of DART and change the train service interval to 10 seconds tomorrow and we'd still have roughly the same ridership. In the end though, I do vote for that more modern city design. I do vote to expand DART. I do vote for bike lanes and better traffic calming. And I do ride transit when it makes sense. I just wish it made more sense more often.
See, that's already an issue. Even in small European cities, you'd expect the trains at peak time to arrive every 5min, in larger cities even every 1-2min
A train every 30min is what I'd consider "3am on easter sunday" level of service, not peak service.
Sure, right now there's not enough demand for that. But as they say, if you build it they'll come.
But change that wait, do the math, and compare it to the drive time again. Ok, we shaved a 15 minute average wait to 2 minutes or so. 13 minutes saved, awesome. We're still comparing a well over an hour public transit trip to a 30 minute drive on the tollways.
In the end you'll need to convince people the costs of the drive (all the many different types of costs there) are worth the trade for more than doubling the commute time.
By combining train and car you can usually end up faster and cheaper if done well as trains won't be stuck in traffic and commuter trains can reliably run at 120-160km/h.
See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41309489 for examples and details on how to solve this long-term.
These DART LRV trains do >100km/h peak speeds. But in the end if you halved the stations you'd really crush the ridership because there's just not enough stuff or people at any particular station.
> But in the end if you halved the stations you'd really crush the ridership because there's just not enough stuff or people at any particular station.
Of course there's enough people left.
First you build train stations near destinations. That's business parks, universities, airports, downtown areas, malls. Then you build train stations with lots of spacing into the suburbs so you can still hit peak speeds between them.
Typical station spacing depends on train speeds, but you can estimate with: 50km/h at 500m spacing, 90km/h for 2km spacing, 120km/h at 5km spacing, 160km/h at 10km spacing.
So you'll want to have 5km-10km spacing between the stations. That's not close enough for walking. But you can set up free parking at the station for anyone with a train ticket. At the same time you'll set up congestion charging for the destinations with stations.
Now the fastest and cheapest way to travel to these dense areas is to drive to the nearest station, park your car, and take the train. For the rest of the city the car remains the fastest option.
Nonetheless, at 2-5km average distance to the nearest station cycling becomes more viable, which primarily benefits teenagers and students.
Later on you can improve upon this by:
· creating bus and tram lines with cross-connections between the larger train stations to serve as distributor lines and connect more people
· changing the minimum setbacks for properties near the bus and tram lines to allow semi-detached and terraced housing. This makes cheaper housing available, increases density, makes transit more viable and still keeps the suburban lifestyle
· changing the zoning near the station to develop 5-over-1s, with 1 level of businesses, 5 levels of apartments and an underground parking garage. This would allow creating something resembling the "main streets" of foregone eras.
Overall you can make these changes over the span of a generation. This is how cities grew during the industrialization in the first place (including in the US) and how european cities have recovered from the post-war car-centric urban design which had destroyed more cities than the war.
Take a look at the route for the Red/Orange lines on DART. Tell me which stations get the axe to make that spacing. Do we kill Downtown Plano or Cityline? Do we kill the stop with the easy bus transfer to the Richardson library and city hall? Do we kill the station next to the massive apartment complexes and the concert hall and office park at Galatyn? Or all the mixed use at Spring Valley? Do people lose access to the hospital and medical facilities near Forest Ln? No more shopping at all the stuff at the Shops at Park Lane and NorthPark mall? Do SMU students lose access to the network by taking away Lovers Ln? Forget all the mixed use at Mockingbird? Tell me, who gets the axe? And you really think we're going to keep ridership up if we eliminate the stop at the hospital or eliminate half the apartment complexes on the path?
The only easy stops I see to eliminate are the ones downtown where it's acting like a streetcar. There were plans for a "D2" project to move these lines underground and change the number of stops.
And all of this is also still assuming there is the bus connections to take you East/West, because there's still so much you miss at each stop on just the train alignment a few miles either direction.
My in-laws live in Irving, near the Ritz (ex-Four Seasons). The only thing they would ever consider using DART for would be the Texas State Fair (including the UT/OU game), and only because the parking is so expensive and so far away if you drive down there that the time penalty is much smaller.
Then you have the facts on the ground that probably are older than DART: the North Lake College station is a perfect example of bad transit design, as the station is at the edge of the property while the buildings are centered. You could just as easily (with perfect foreknowledge) have put the buildings right next to the station and used the back of the property for parking lots, which adds almost no time to driving but makes transit much more appealing (as it is, those who disembark there have to walk across the entire parking lot to get to the school).
Even worse, the University of Dallas station that has almost no pedestrian access at all. It would take ten minutes walking just to get to the other side of the highway because of the convoluted route you would have to take.
Traffic has to be really bad before public transit with a lot of stops is faster than door-to-door in a car, assuming there's parking at the other end.
You can do many things to make cities more transit-friendly, pedestrian-friendly, bike-friendly. But drivers aren't epsilon-minus semi-morons, and while a car in central Paris or Amsterdam is a liability, in most of Dallas it's at best a minor inconvenience to find parking. And there's absolutely nothing that can ever beat the convenience of a private conveyance. There's a reason really rich people fly private. It goes where you want, when you want.
I took my wife to the airport the other day. There is no public transit that goes to our local airport; you have no choice but to get in a private car or taxi unless you've got serious stamina for walking on fully-exposed public roads (no shade, no rain shield) with no sidewalks and 60+ mph (100 km/h) traffic for tens of miles. On the plus side (for the passenger), I dropped her off more or less right outside the check-in counter and security. She didn't spend more than a minute or two, tops, for all her indoor walking around to the gate.
While the plurality of vehicles could be single-occupant passenger vehicles, a good chunk of those vehicles are freight, multiple-occupant passenger vehicles, and some are even busses.
There's a few trucks hauling freight, but they try to miss the cities during rush hour.
There's a lot of trucks hauling freight. The US has the largest train network in the world, it notoriously handles primarily freight, and still, more than 70% of freight in the US goes by truck.
If these roads are the average urban interstate highways, then about 10%ish of the traffic is heavy truck traffic.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/v...
In fact there are so few people in the HOV lane that I always feel like I'm doing something wrong when I take it, like I misunderstood the rules. It can't be this easy.
Nah, I really am the only person on the highway with more than one person in the car.
But that could probably be handled by a US Highway and a diamond interchange instead of multiple interstates and a 6-layer interchange.
Depends on what you are optimizing for.
I can drive to work in 15 minutes, door-to-door. I used to ride the bus and sometimes I would be waiting that long just for the bus to appear.
The other factor is weather. Not many of the bus shelters around me (I’m in Austin) are air conditioned. Right now it’s 103F / 39C with a feels-like temperature of 107 / 42. Depending on your health, just walking around can be dangerous.
But I do think you are on the right track. I think public transportation in the form of buses doesn't make a lot of sense. But if Musk had been able to deliver on his promise of self-driving cars, then a giant city operated (or at least funded) fleet of small autonomous vehicles offering door-to-door service and route flexibility could change everything.
Cars are low to medium density transport, at best.
That wasn't true in the past. My father used to carpool with other teachers for 20+ years. I remember a lot of carpooling through the 1980s and into the mid 1990s where it fizzled out.
I would suggest, however, that self-driving cars would be fine for carpooling. Most people would have no problem carpooling with a self-driving car if it always picked up the same bunch of people every day. If I can commute in 35 minutes or take a self-driving carpool for 45 because it stopped to pick up 3 other people from my department along the way, that would be fine.
In a bus-optimized city, you'd be saying something like "Sure I can drive to work in 15 minutes, but it takes 5 minutes to park, costs $20 a day, and it's ten minutes walking from the parking lot to the office. Much better to take a bus that stops right across the street."
I used to think like you, that having car was a necessity, even freedom. Now I see it for what it is, a ball and chain.
Numbers taken from wikipedia.
It is really is quite remarkable. However, I think this is enabled by expensive high density apartment housing.
Americans would consider the apartment sizes inhumane and a supermajority of the population are locked out of our owning a home.
I don't know why you think there are fewer amenities here than in the US. What specific amenities do you think are lacking?
a 15 minute walk from me there are public baths(free, including the amazing Limmat river with crystal clear water), hiking(free), amazing bars, night clubs and restaurants.
That said, US Metro cores are denser than anything in CH but have worse transit, demonstrating the importance of door to door analysis. Nobody wants to commute via mixed private and public transport.
Texas alone is twice the size of Germany - which is really crazy.
When an American says, "that is a three-day drive", they don't mean it will take three days of six hours a day with breaks every hour or two. They mean it will take three days of driving 12+ hours a day with 10-minute breaks every three or four hours. NY to LA is around 41 hours of actual driving per Google. So three consecutive 14-hour days just in the car, not counting getting a hotel room along the way, eating, using the bathroom, showering...
That many American cities are these monstrosities where car travel is the only way to navigate is because of poor design not out of necessity. The American car industry managed to halt the installation of public transport to a more effective degree than their European counterparts in the 50-60s.
This is not because Los Angeles is bigger than Zürich, or that it takes twice as long to cross the US compared to Europe by car.
In Zürich and Switzerland, they have highly effective trains. The US could do the same, but choose not to.
Everytime(without fail) I mention how fantastic public transport can be using Zürich as an example, Americans mention that the "US is simply too big".
But that is not an argument! Build more lines? London also has a pretty solid public transport system(though not as great as it could be, due to how car centric the country is).
Car culture builds car cities. Once you have a car city it's nearly impossible to fix it... it's too big and expensive and low density to fix.
Allow higher density housing to be built without opposition (for example up zoning 1 level should be automatically approved: single family home can be torn down to build a duplex, etc). Then reduce and remove parking requirements.
Once that's done density will just go up on its own and... cars don't scale. Traffic will absolutely murder everyone and they'll start demanding public transit.
However this whole path is killed via NIMBY.
I see so many new residential projects with small lots or apartments. That's great! But still the zoning forces just housing, so its just homes on homes on homes for miles.
Where does the bus go? If you have dense city cores with business, commercial, and shopping it makes sense.
Living near Austin, I could take a bus to a place like the domain and have shaded walkways where I could walk to most shops without dying of heat stroke.
If I'm not going to the domain, I'm looking at businesses with huge parking lots strung along stroads. Walking from the bus drop off to a store might just kill you on a day like yesterday where it was 108F, and parking lot temps are closer to 130F.
Also getting to where you want to go over the huge spread out cities may involve waiting for 5 or 6 different busses.
And then hopefully your park and ride is being watched and you're windows aren't broken out.
Truly pitiful numbers for a project of this scale lol.