There's no public transit in many places because Americans don't want it and don't support it, and refuse to build densely enough to make public transit economically viable in the first place. You can't have a good transit system when everyone lives far apart from each other in spread-out subdivisions.
Yes, exactly. This is not a bug, it's a feature.
Come live in a country where the public transport is excellent. Typing this while traveling on the ICE between Zürich and Basel.
You have no basis for any such presumption. Plenty of Americans, myself among them, have lived in large, dense cities with good public transit--and we have then chosen to not live in such places because we prefer not to. You might believe that living in a large, dense city with good public transit is the best way to live, but that doesn't mean everyone else has to agree with you or be ignorant. Other people simply have different preferences from you. In a free country, which the United States of America is, people with difference preferences for what kind of place to live in can simply live in different places without making presumptuous claims about ignorance.
You have to travel outside of the US to see really good systems. Many European cities have decent systems, but the best systems - by far - are in East Asia. The Shanghai metro is as dense as the NYC subway, but it's clean, safe and modern.
Most Americans have not traveled to these places, so they've never seen what an actually good system looks like. At best, they've seen the NYC subway, which they might view as convenient but disgusting. More commonly, they've only ever been to cities with little to no public transit.
You say that Americans have the ability to choose, but that's really not true, unless they move to one particular city or leave the country. The infrastructure that exists determines what choices people have and what's convenient.
NYC's is, as you say, old and decrepit, but its coverage is pretty good. I don't think it's the best system in the US, however. I lived in Boston for some time; the T was better than NYC's system. I have visited Portland, and at least when I visited, its system was better than NYC's.
> Many European cities have decent systems
I have visited both London and Paris, and both of their systems were comparable to the T in Boston when I lived there in terms of coverage and usability.
I have not visited any cities in East Asia, but I can easily see their systems being better since those countries have made huge investments in that kind of infrastructure.
> You say that Americans have the ability to choose, but that's really not true
By your logic nobody has the ability to choose. Nobody has access to all of the possibilities. So using that as the standard for "ability to choose", which is what you are doing, is pointless.
I could just as well say you don't have the ability to choose anything but a city with public transportation, because that's all that even appears to be on your radar.
> The infrastructure that exists
Is, at least in America, determined by the choices of ordinary people in the past. And choices ordinary people make now will end up causing changes in the infrastructure that exists.
Sure, maybe nowhere in America meets your personal standard for "good public transportation", but why should I care? I have a reasonable spectrum of alternatives open to me and I choose the one that suits me best. I don't waste time agonizing over alternatives that might exist elsewhere but are not accessible to me. Most Americans are the same way. So, I suspect, are most people everywhere, even if what alternatives are reasonably available can vary widely in different parts of the world. Maybe that's a problem for you, but it's not a problem for me, and I suspect it's not a problem for most people everywhere, and I don't see why it should be.
>I don't waste time agonizing over alternatives that might exist elsewhere but are not accessible to me.
But you're happy to waste time arguing against them?
Not at all. There is no such thing in a landscape that is changing on time scales that are visible to people, as our societies are. You can't stay stuck on a local maximum if the landscape changes it out from under you. You have to keep reconsidering things.
> you're happy to waste time arguing against them?
The (pretty limited) time I have spent posting in this discussion has not been wasted. I'm having fun.
There is another local optimum, which is extensive public transit and walkable city centers. I'd argue that that other local optimum is far preferable, but transitioning there is very difficult.
And I'd argue that this might be true for your preferences, but that doesn't mean it's true for everyone's. People have different preferences.
I disagree. It may be that the vast majority of Americans have never been exposed to your particular preferred solution, but that's also true of the vast majority of people who live anywhere except a few East Asian cities, according to you. So I don't see why you are singling out Americans. You should be chastising basically everyone outside of East Asia for being backward. (And then, of course, you would just have even more people ignoring you.)
As for why I'm singling out Americans: this thread began with a discussion about Americans.
> Nobody has access to all of the possibilities.
Most people don't know what's out there, so they can't make an informed choice about what would be good public policy. That's my point.
> Is, at least in America, determined by the choices of ordinary people in the past.
I don't think most people understood the consequences of the decisions they were making. The transition to cars and the building of the interstate system had a huge number of ripple effects, and have completely transformed American cities, and as a consequence, public life. People didn't understand all these changes beforehand, and now they're locked in and taken for granted.
> I could just as well say you don't have the ability to choose anything but a city with public transportation, because that's all that even appears to be on your radar.
The reason I'm saying what I'm saying is that I've spent enough time on the three continents we're talking about to have seen the differences in public transit and how it affects city life.
My experience of the T is some decades old; I understand it has indeed deteriorated quite a bit since then. But when I used it, I had reasonably contemporary experience of the NYC system as well, and the latter, at that time, was not as good. Any such comparison will of course change over time.
> how it affects city life.
Which, again, is all that appears to be on your radar. But not everyone's life is "city life".
> My experience of the T is some decades old
Yes, it's extremely old. The Green Line looks like something out of the early 20th Century, and an important stretch of the Red Line had to be shut down a few years ago for emergency repairs, because they suddenly determined that it was too dangerous to continue operating. The whole system is on life support.
The NYC Subway is the only American system that could possibly compare to systems like the Paris Metro or the London Tube. But as I said, all these systems are terrible compared to the standard metro system you'll find in large cities in East Asia. Mainland Chinese cities have fairly standardized (which is how they keep costs down), very modern systems based on the Hong Kong metro. Taipei has a great metro system with a similar design. Japanese cities also have very extensive metro systems. I've heard great things about the Seoul metro system (though I haven't seen it first-hand).
But my point is that 90+% Americans have no idea about these systems. Without some basic exposure to the alternatives that are out there, it's pointless to say that Americans have made an informed choice. They make due with what they have, and largely don't know what the alternatives could be.
What is your exposure to alternatives other than the one you have said you prefer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA
than I would say no thank you.
Most Americans, including me, who live in areas that aren't large, dense cities with good public transport don't live in gated communities, and our only definition of "undesirable" is someone who commits crimes, which I would have thought would be any law-abiding citizen's definition. Your patronizing description is simply inaccurate.
Have you lived anywhere except where the public transport was excellent? Do you realize that people, like me, who prefer to live in other areas see benefits to doing so that outweigh the costs of having to have a car?
I travel routinely for work(300+ days/year) and I’ve had many different living conditions. I also spend a lot of time in the UK and BENELUX, both regions that are predominantly car first but with mediocre public transport.
Switzerland is the only country I’ve seen who does it right. I’ve heard Japan does it well, I wouldn’t know.
What city was that?
Boston, some decades ago. As I noted elsewhere upthread, I understand that the T has deteriorated quite a bit since then. But at the time I lived there, I never felt any need whatsoever for a car and I never had any problems getting where I needed to go safely and in a timely manner.
Would you describe Bostons public transport (decades ago) as “excellent”, or are you just being obtuse?
Mind you, most of Europe has pretty good public transport, I wouldn’t call it excellent.
And my whole point is that you have no idea what my preferences are and you should not be presuming to dictate to me what I should do. If you like where you live, great, enjoy it. And let me choose where I like to live and enjoy that.
> Would you describe Bostons public transport (decades ago) as “excellent”, or are you just being obtuse?
Get off your high horse. I have already described my experience. I'm not going to describe it again just because you feel like being insulting.
It is demonstrably the correct answer, regardless what the largely un- or just as often mis-informed think, not that they were really "asked" in the first place.
This is a fantasy in any society, not just America. No piece of social infrastructure on the scale of "cars vs. public transportation" in any country gets decided by "the general, informed will" of all the people.
The "mechanism of choice on an individual level" in a free country is simple, and I've already described it: people look at the alternatives reasonably available to them and choose the one that suits them best. And the aggregation of all those individual choices shapes the infrastructure, which in turn of course affects what alternatives are reasonably available to the next generation. That's how free markets and free societies work. But of course such a process does not involve any "general, informed will" of the people as a whole. It just involves a huge number of individuals interacting.
The other possibility, in a country that's not a free country (such as one large East Asian country one city of which has been mentioned, not by me, in this overall discussion), is for some small group at the top to decide how they think things should be arranged, and then just impose that on everybody. In such a country there is no "mechanism of choice on an individual level" regarding large scale infrastructure at all; it is imposed by those in charge. People do of course still make individual choices in such countries, but their choices don't really affect the social infrastructure the way they can in a free country.
The US today is not fully a free country in the sense I described above, since there is quite a bit of top-down imposition of things (and not just by governments--there were of course a number of large corporations pushing car-centric infrastructure in the late 19th and 20th centuries), so it's really a mix of the two possibilities I gave. But neither possibility involves "the general, informed will of Americans" deciding anything.
So, if you try polling a bunch of suburbanite Americans and ask them if they'd favor abolishing their suburbs and turning them into extremely dense and generally car-free (or at least "car-inconvenient", i.e. narrow, slow roads and very little parking) urban areas, of course the vast majority of them are going to say "no". You can see it right here on HN every time this kind of discussion comes up: regular Americans like things the way they are. If they didn't, they'd be voting for something radically different, but they aren't. Sure, there's a minority of anti-car-culture Americans and even some activists, but they're a minority.
As for your characterization of Japan as an authoritarian society, that really seems extremely ignorant and probably even racist. It's a democracy, in case you've never read Wikipedia, so just like any democratic society, if people get angry enough, they'll vote for someone different, which happens from time to time.
So this would include you, right? So what gives your opinions any more weight than anyone else's?
> Americans really do favor cars and the car-based society they live in, because it's what they know and are familiar with.
And you favor other arrangements because it's what you know and are familiar with. So what's your point?
> your characterization of Japan
Japan was not the society I was referring to. The one I was referring to begins with a "C", and the city within it begins with an "S".
Given the characterization of Americans that you gave elsewhere upthread, and which I responded to, you are in no position to make any such accusation, even if I were in fact talking about Japan, which, as I have posted already, I wasn't.
Exactly - most Americans want the car lifestyle. They don't really wake up dreaming of being packed like sardines into public transportation: busses, metro, rail.
I live in the Netherlands, and many people here are increasingly opting for the car lifestyle because of all of the issues associated with public transportation. Sure, it's more cost-effective. But it's not faster. It's smelly, loud, chaotic. And no one wants to stand around waiting for the next bus to be canceled. Or the next protest shutting all transportation down.
So I could see similar HSR car trains saving quite a bit of time, between HSR hubs in appropriate cities in the US, versus spending e.g. 20+ hours driving from Dallas to New Jersey.
>So I could see similar HSR car trains saving quite a bit of time,
There's no such thing as an HSR car train anywhere, nor is there ever likely to be. What you rode on is simply called a "train", not a bullet train. You can obviously transport cars by train, but you're not going to do it at high speeds.
- I saved a lot of time taking a car train, instead of just driving my car through windy roads
- Similarly, I could see a HSR car train, if there was such a thing, saving a lot of time (and of course, freeing up the driving time to be able to do other things, whilst in transit)Why can’t I drive my car on a train and go cross country?
Networks..., tokens..., packets..., switches..., routers..., NOT fixed circuits.
Or just use an effing Über at the destination...
Transport optimization is an established subfield of operations research and theoretical computer science. The algorithms for something like sorting railway cars are quite interesting, as they have to deal with physical constraints not present in networks and software.
And define "very popular". I was reading an article this weekend about some Amtrak line between Chicago and Minneapolis being unexpectedly "very popular", which apparently equated to a whopping 300 passengers per day. Here in Japan, that's about half of one of the smallest bullet trains, and less than a quarter of the larger ones, and those are just single trains, which usually run multiple times per hour, sometimes more frequently than every 10 minutes. In a country of 310M people, 300 people per day doing something is not what I would call "popular".
That seems to be a bit of a stretch, the US lacks many things but a high-skilled workforce isn't really one of them. The issue is more the anti-industrial trend. The systems that China used to get ahead and build things like all that high speed rail are mostly illegal, nonviable or - at best - politically hazardous in the US (massive amounts of low-quality construction, lots of coal fired plants, low wages, ignoring IP laws, experimenting with different legal structures in specific areas to see what works).
Let's not forget that the CCP can force people to do certain things by various methods of "discouragement".
Add on top of this the anti-intellectualism that's been in American society forever, and the more recent terrible state of pre-college education and lack of interest in anything STEM unless it's programming with the goal of getting FAANG salaries and it's obvious why America has fallen behind so far. It's really just coasting on 3 things: 1) a huge population, so at least some minority of people are exceptions to the poor education I mentioned, 2) a lot of immigrant families who actually do believe in education and STEM achievements, contrary to popular culture, and 3) waning economic power that came from past achievements.