> more efficient

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.

I don’t live in a place where just walking around can be dangerous to my health.

well, aren't you special then. what's the point of this comment?

You need to compare not against what you currently have, but rather what you'd have if there was political will and budgets comparable to what was spent on the existing car infrastructure. Otherwise is saying that no-one wants a bridge to cross a river because no-one swims across.

Well that's a problem. I'm not willing to pay anywhere near as much for public transportation as I am for a private vehicle and everything that goes with that.

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.

Self driving cars don't solve high traffic volumes. Cars just can't move enough people per hour, I think the average lane can move about 1800 cars per hour and most people don't share rides unless forced to. So that means about 1800-2500 people per hour per lane. A decent subway moves about 20 000 people per hour per line, I think.

Cars are low to medium density transport, at best.

> most people don't share rides unless forced to.

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.

People got into carpooling because of the oil crises. Then the oil glut happened, things got cheap again, those carpool groups broke up, and it became uncommon again.

Sounds like you experienced car vs. bus in a car-optimized city and liked the former, which is pretty understandable.

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."

Also, very few US cities have the balls to give buses their own lane. So any time you take the bus, you sit in the same traffic as everyone who took their car instead of zooming past traffic like you should be doing.

Have you been to a city(and country) with a good public transport system? I live in Zürich(not from here) and it blows my mind how convenient it is to walk 25 meters to the nearest tram stop and easily get to anywhere in the city.

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.

- The municipality of Zurich has an area of 91.88km² - The Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, urban area (excluding huge swaths of land where people live and presumably need commute from) has an area of 4,524.44km²

Numbers taken from wikipedia.

To be fair to the parent poster as well, almost everyone within the 5000km2 around Zurich is within a couple minutes walk of public transport.

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.

You are making the argument that Americans would consider it inhumane to live in Swiss apartments because they are too small?

I was being hyperbolic, but yes, I think they would consider them too small and too old. Many would simply be illegal in the US due to their lack of amenities.

Sorry, but the Swiss are excellent builders. I would guess there is a big cultural difference between where Americans and Europeans(in general) spend their days. I would guess Americans spend their days at home watching television while Swiss in particular are more outdoorsy and do a lot more activities.

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.

Switzerland in its entirety is less than 10% of California and smaller than San Bernardino county.

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.

I think it's difficult for Europeans to grasp the size of the US.

Texas alone is twice the size of Germany - which is really crazy.

Why would that be difficult?

An intuitive grasp of the size of the US eludes a lot of Americans, let alone a lot of Europeans.

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...

It was said specifically while in this discussion, directed at me. I travel world wide for work, 350 days a year. I know exactly how big the globe is. That I would drive across a continent is ludicrous.

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.

What's the argument here, it's not possible to make train/metro/tram-lines long enough?

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).

Hello, texan here. No busses would do nothing for these people... pretty much the entire DFW area is surrounded by huge areas of low density suburbs. The busineses and locations these people are going to covers hundreds of square miles.

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.

Well, there are solutions but then you get into even uglier politics.

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.

Careful what you wish for. You have to wish the whole wish otherwise the monkey's paw will get you. Wishing for higher density without also pushing for better zoning policies overall will just make the traffic another level of pain, which is something seen in a number of cities. Sure, we'll then just build massive apartment complexes, one right next to the other. Where's the grocery store though? Where do these people work? Oops.

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.

Park + ride

Vel0city's reply kind of covers why this doesn't work, but I'll expound on it.

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.

Admittedly, P+R is only a (kind of) solution for people of suburbia commuting into the office towers etc of the city. Pretty common scenario around the globe, but maybe not in Texas. Escooters are nice to cover the last mile.

Now imagine you've designed said trains or buses lines. Where did you put them? How much money did it cost? How many people use them now that they are built? Please, enlighten us with how much better you are than those that are currently in place that have tried and failed.

That’s 500k vehicles, not people. It includes freight.