Part of the reason is that public transit for whatever reason appears to be unusually sketchy in many places in the US. For example, a few years ago, there was an incident with a man with two chainsaws threatening passengers [1] in the local transit system.

In contrast, the transit systems I've seen in Europe and Asia appear well maintained, clean, and relatively safe.

Biking is also safer in European cities that have proper bike infrastructure.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/man-armed-chainsaw-threatens-bart-r...

? Japanese subways were infamously the site of a nerve gas attack in the 90s. 33 people were killed in mass knife attacks in Kunming, China in 2014. France has had a handful of subway and train attacks.

However, the point is that these incidents, along with the BART one, are unusual. Avoiding public transit because of them would be like avoiding flying because of air accidents or avoiding going to a theater or musical event because of the various massacres that have happened at them over the years.

That’s rare enough to not keep people away from public transport. Speaking from experience in Portland OR, it’s more the daily low level stress of having to keep an eye out for the meth crazed lunatics around you. There always seems to be one and they’re wildly unpredictable.

That's another way of saying that we need more public investment (in addiction intervention programs, for one), not less.

BART crime is up over the past decade. People don't avoid BART because of that headline with the chainsaw man. They avoid it because of everyday crime and violence.

I'm sure it's similar for many other metro transport options in the USA. California in particular has a rough go for many reasons.

It doesn't even have to be something bad or happen to you. One "my buddy had his bike stolen off the light rail" and several people will be turned off of ever trying to use it.

The "crime" story has been so twisted by propaganda and lies-by-statistics that you'll have to forgive me for saying that I can't take your word for it and will need numbers. Truthiness certainly can drive people to make poor, (unfounded) fear-based decisions.

> Part of the reason is that public transit for whatever reason appears to be unusually sketchy in many places in the US.

Police and policing culture is heavily biased in the United States to the protection of property and the interests of capital, so it makes complete sense they wouldn't give a fuck about keeping public transit or spaces that aren't highly trafficked by the wealthy very well protected. Maybe a little tinfoil hat, but if you take that into account, I think it makes perfect sense.

It’s funny how the one time it has ever happened that someone wielded a chainsaw on the subway it’s memorable news, and becomes evidence of a narrative that all of public transit is ‘sketchy’. That article’s from 7 years ago, and nobody got hurt and the guy was arrested. (BTW, I wonder why they used a photo from 2009?)

In the mean time, the number of shooting deaths by private car drivers in the US has more than doubled since 2018, to more than 1 per day. That doesn’t count threats with other weapons, nor any other kind of road rage, nor does it count accidental crashes. There are more than 120 deaths per day in the US in cars (the vast majority of “private transit”), and more than 2 million ER visits by injured riders per year.

And public transit is sketchy? Not compared to driving cars it isn’t.

As an outsider (Australian) living in the USA there's non stop propaganda for anything that could make a dollar if privatised. To the extent that many don't believe public run systems can function at all.

Anything disparaging public transit is played up to the extend even sitcoms will have disparaging scenes that are essentially "you took public transport? Are you poor?". The tax system is basically privatised, it's a pain to do anything without paying for tax software now with a lot of lobbying and propaganda that it's the only way. A lot of US citizens actually seem to believe that anything government run is inefficient (despite the lack of academic data on this) and demand the dismantling of all government institutions (see DOGE). Even utilities are often privatized with no competition (you just pay what you're told).

It's a bit crazy coming from a country where i had fibre internet at my regional home (the recently rolled out national broadband network) which is faster than the best connection i can get in the middle of silicon valley, i had affordable public transit with a universal tap on/off card that worked for all of them so no change/cash needed. Universal healthcare. A free online tax system that would start pre-filled by the numbers my employer+stockbroker entered in, i just had to quickly check through any federal or state specific exemptions i might qualify for. Etc.

Like it's madness the level of propaganda for this viewpoint that privatization is better and it's blatant why that propaganda is there - you privatize something essential like healthcare and you can leach vast amounts of money from everyone.

To this day my home country pays a fraction of US salaries yet the median wealth per capita is more than double the USA (Australia's 261k wealth per capita vs USAs 112k wealth per capita) since we don't get leached at every turn by privatized essential services. Yet in the USA they are clamouring for more of this as if that makes them wealthier.

Fairly recently: https://nypost.com/2025/04/15/us-news/cause-of-death-still-a...

A man died while riding the train, one person robbed the corpse, then another had sex with it..

I heard about that one too, very unique and weird for sure! But we could go through the stories of each of the few hundred fatalities that happened on public transit last year, and it wouldn’t even be a blip compared to the tens of thousands of people killed in gruesome accidents in cars. Incidentally I still remember the description of Paul Walker’s death for kinda the same reason that subway chainsaws and necrophilia are so memorable… it was freaky.

Except that wasn't a fatality. How often do people get robbed while driving in the highway.

For that matter, how many who came to harm on the highway were speeding vs random subway assaults.

People get robbed at gas stations, convenience stores, parking lots, and streets at fairly high numbers. I’m not sure what we’re comparing or debating here, but does your example actually count as a “robbery” if they died first? Would it not have happened if they hadn’t died? The anecdote you brought doesn’t seem to reflect on safety at all, it’s unclear what relevance it has.

Speed is absolutely a huge factor in driving injuries, one of the biggest. Again not sure how or even why to compare that to assaults on the subway, but googling briefly, the result I got suggests there were around 2k reported assaults of any kind. It’s a drop next to the nearly 3M ER visits, which may leave out large numbers of unreported, uninsured, or less serious injuries.

> People get robbed at gas stations, convenience stores, parking lots, and streets at fairly high numbers

Not where I live. the comparison/debate is:

> In contrast, the transit systems I've seen in Europe and Asia appear well maintained, clean, and relatively safe.

I think the point is, although (public) necrophilia is rare, so presumably is access to dead bodies, so the fact this happened is telling.

> does your example actually count as a “robbery” if they died first?

Of course it fucking does. picking someone's pockets is also robbery even if no confrontation is involved, and I'm pretty happy this guy is being charged with "attempted rape"; the fact the guy was dead doesn't make it not rape.

> The anecdote you brought doesn’t seem to reflect on safety

you don't see a correlation between safety, and the presence of people you cannot trust to be around?

> speed is absolutely a huge factor in driving injuries, one of the biggest. Again not sure how or even why to compare that to assaults on the subway

Speed, or speeding i.e. inappropriate levels of speed. The comparison is that an individual can control their speed, and the authorities can police it. There's not much you can do if you run into the wrong person on the subway.

Sure people have the option to control their own speed, and authorities can police speeders. The accident rate we have already accounts for that. Speeders are still dying, and they’re taking out more non-speeders with them than the total number of public transit deaths, by multiples.

Still not sure what the argument even here is. You’re being pretty forceful about one single, weird incident. Fine, but the fact of the matter is that driving in cars is causing a lot more injury and death than public transit, by several orders of magnitude.

>IMHO the real problem is cars. The US still can't imagine itself without cars.

All of the US except NYC. In NYC 45.6% of households own a car. In Berlin it's 49%.

https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/u-s-cities-with-th...

https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/car-free-berlin-li.113268

You’re kind of proving the point here. NYC has fewer car owners and yet NYC doesn’t have a single pedestrian street or street closed to through traffic. Sounds like a city that can’t imagine itself without cars even though it’s completely realistic.

There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one.

Broadway has had large expansions to its curbing from the flatiron building to union square.

Its a slow process but its getting there.

Which one? Berry is semiclosed, but people routinely remove the wooden barriers so they can drive on it and delivery app e-bikes/motor bikes routinely blast down it at speeds that make it uncomfortable to walk.

Broadway has expanded the sidewalk but it is definitely not closed to traffic. Also 2 partial closures in a city of 10 million kind of proves the point.

> There is a street in Williamsburg that has been pedestrianized. I cant remember which one.

One street in a city the size of NY?

I thought you were joking when I read that reply. I thought it might have been straight out of a Monty Python sketch. ;)

On that note, if you want to get an idea what pedestrianization does to cities, enter "Barcelona Superblocks" into your fav. search engine.

GP's premise was there "Are none" -- I shared the progress I'm aware of.

NYC needs more, but I think the tide is turning the right way.

You’re either exaggerating or don’t spend much time in NYC. Half of Broadway is closed to cars now, same with Wall Street. We have summer streets where they close many on weekends. Lots of dedicated bike lanes and a few isolated paths throughout the city. Could there be more? Sure. Are they completely absent? No.

I think we just have a different idea of what it means to be closed to cars. I live right by the stretch of Broadway you mention, so I’m very familiar. This is what it looks like: https://flatironnomad.nyc/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/4.2-Pla...

There is no restriction of through traffic. Effectively pedestrians are still confined to tiny and overcrowded sidewalks.

By comparison, here’s what a pedestrian street looks like in the non-US city I grew up in: https://sana.ae/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Corso-Italia-Stre...

Keep in mind that cars are still allowed for emergency services and (night time) deliveries. But the difference is night and day.

This is exactly what “the US can't imagine itself without cars” means to me.

The entire country of Italy is only twice the size of the state of New York.

And they can manage it, why can't New York?

New York City has more people in it than the 4 most populated metro areas in Italy. Italy has ~3x the population of the state of New York, half the population of the state lives in NYC area.

So they need it more than Italy. You can handle wayyy more traffic without cars on the road than you can with.

in context, i am specifically talking to “the US can't imagine itself without cars” point here and in my other reply upthread. I live ~36 hours from Los Angeles, driving at legal highway speeds, assuming no stops or delays. It's all about perspective. California is larger than germany. New York isn't a small state by any stretch of the imagination, unless you're comparing it to texas, alaska, or california. The car/public transportation stuff in the US is partly because of the ruralness of the country in general, plus culture. A lot of people have the idea that public transit is for the poors.

I live in Canada, a bigger country with less people and better public transport. A bunch of provinces are bigger than Texas, doesn't stop the public transport from being decent inside the cities.

The obvious answer is more public transport infrastructure & bike lanes.

If you think population density is an excuse for public transport infrastructure not coping or need for more people owning cars I suggest taking a long hard look at e.g. Japan to have that hypothesis reality-checked.

I'm btw. not saying you did, just reading between the lines.

As I wrote in an earlier reply to parent, NYC hasn't managed to even build ring Metro lines around its city center – since a century!

And that is for one reason and one reason only: not nearly enough (political) pressure from the public to improve public transport infrastructure.

And that in term gets us to the root cause again: the US can't imagine itself without cars.

This is not a critique. It's just an observation that is very plain to see if you grew up in Europe (and possibly many other places, too).

When/if that changes, ever, the above things will just happen naturally.

What would a ring metro look like in NYC? Manhattan is an island. Directly west of it is a body of water, then land that is not NYC, in fact is not NY.

It doesn't have to be a closed ring. Or resemble a ring.

Many metro systems in other big cities with comparable topological constraints have metro lines that are orthogonal to those going out in roughly a star pattern from the center.

But NYC almost only has the latter.

Underwater sections are not an issue, really. There are many cities that have metro lines going under bodies of water.

And even the length or depth required is not an issue if you want to build it.

That's why you can go from England to France, by train, in roughly half an hour, under the English Channel.

That is a seriously hand-wavy response to a complex task.

Man, there are street that are closed to traffic, and you just are either lying or being dumb.

They just don't look like streets anymore, as they are turned into plazzas or parks.

EG: E25st at Lex, Baruch College is truned into a plazza/walkaway. No cars. 8th/st Saint Marks, by A Ave, is off cars, (It is part of the Tompkins park). Irvin Avenue is part of a park (gets interrupted by Grammercy Park)

etc...

There are plenty of places like that, but over time they turn into plazzas or parks, and you think they were not streets at some point.

Ps https://maps.app.goo.gl/Df6U3DkPpUxirG5B9

https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZivSNhiEnn2Q4pjr6

You can see throw time that it used to be a street at some point.

Anyways, there are plenty of examples like that. Just stop exaggerating.

Those photos say it all. The NYC reduced street still manages to park a Chevy Silverado smack in the middle of it all, and all those planters aren't there for the sake of having plants, but rather as crash barriers protecting the patios from traffic.

Also, many of the cars we see in the city are bound to be from outside the city (like New Jersey). Just look at the traffic in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels at rush hour.

A less abrasive approach than congestion pricing might just be pedestrian streets or narrower streets/wider sidewalks. If you make the city unattractive for cars, there will be fewer of them, and I am willing to bet that programs like these are less likely to trigger the outrage congestion pricing has, because it doesn't target car owners directly and en masse. You can sort of pick away at it, street by street. There will be less of a show of solidarity, because, hey, it's not my street.

The only thing that seems silly is penalizing delivery trucks. This only raises the costs of goods and services. This is one reason I would favor narrower, one-way streets over pedestrian streets. You still want vehicles. The issue is that many if not most vehicles in NYC are a luxury item and do nothing but negatively impact the common good. They don't even make transportation easier for their owners, on the whole. Of course, this should be combined with other policies that improve public transportation and improve availability of good and services in the city to reduce the burdens that cars alleviate.

I feel like that’s the path San Francisco has been on. Over the last decade they’ve made it more and more painful to drive anywhere in the general downtown area. Market street and a few others are closed to cars, more and more streets don’t let you turn, many of the traffic lights have been replaced by insanely inefficient pedestrian-favoring traffic lights that seem hell-bent on making the traffic worse.

That being said, it takes me nearly an hour to take public transit between my home near Forest Hill and my office in the dogpatch whereas it takes 20-25 minutes to drive (plus an extra five minutes to park and walk from the parking lot to the office). This is not a long distance, on a map it looks like it should take me 10 minutes but San Francisco is so incredibly inefficient.

I would love to not own a car but it’s just not realistic. Also when going to Costco or when the weather is bad, public transit becomes a lot less of a fit as well. I got a bike, only to find out that you’re not allowed to bring bikes on the Muni train which is frustrating, and in the end means my commute isn’t any faster than not involving biking at all. I tried a scooter, and I got in an accident because apparently the brakes don’t work well in the rain, especially when there’s an intersection at the bottom of a hill, so I’m not doing that anymore. I guess they’re trying to make driving as bad as all of the other bad options. I wish instead we could make some good options.

I don't know about elsewhere, but here in Ireland pedestrianised streets are usually open to deliveries in the early hours of the morning. I think they open to one-way traffic some time after the pubs and clubs close, and late-night foot traffic is reduced. Then the bollards go up at the entrance end at around 7am, and go up at the exit a little later.

Certainly I've seen delivery vehicles on Grafton Street in Dublin and Shop Street in Galway in the early hours.

I don't think they were trying to disprove the point. They admit that the US is largely car centric EXCEPT NYC, which is why congestion pricing has worked well. Also, car ownership rates are probably extremely correlated with density/efficiency of public transportation.

There is probably no other city in the US where you can truly eschew car ownership (this includes metro "dense" regions like San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston). Maybe you could include Chicago where there is a heavy amount of density/walkability in most of central Chicago neighborhoods.

You could eschew car ownership in NYC because the public transport network is better than in the rest of the country but it's still shite compared to what is considered 'barely ok' outside the US.

E.g. I. Berlin metro timing is about 5mins between trains and that is long compared to Tokyo metro timing.

But when it comes to density/how direct a public public transport connection exists between two arbitrary points in the city, Tokyo and Berlin are very close (and far ahead of NYC btw.).

What I'm saying is that the feasibility public will be seen as a real alternative or even improvement over using a car only if both topological as well as temporal improvements are blatantly obvious to commuters.

Not true. E25st by Baruch college has turned into a plaza. There are some more, that I can think off. (8th/St Marks by A Ave, is a park) etc.

This used to be a regular street at some point https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZivSNhiEnn2Q4pjr6

There are plenty of other examples, just now they look more like plazas, and not streets.

This only showcases how bad the US is in this area, when the city that most relies on public transportation still has such a bad service.

It's not the only reason, but in general in American history, "why is this weird thing this weird way?" is usually answered in part by "racism".

Avoiding public transit has historically been one way affluent white people avoided contact with poor people in general and black people specifically; underfunding or shutting down public transit in turn disproportionately hurts those populations.

Again, not the only explanation, but it's the simplest for a number of things.

In northern cities, the black population is quite recent, and urban renewal programs predate much of the Great Migration. The Great Migration was itself weaponized by WASP elites against the European and very often Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in northern cities (who were out-procreating the WASPs given their stance on contraception, for example, which differed from the Protestants who had began to accept its use in the 1930s).

To disguise the project, terms like "white flight" were invented in order to frame the disintegration of these European neighborhoods as a racist reaction. This worked especially well during the Civil Rights movement, because it played on black/white categories in the forefront of everybody's minds. But were these European ethnic groups "white"? We already know that the Irish and the Italians weren't considered "white" until recently.

Perhaps you've seen videos of "white people" in Chicago throwing rocks at black marches led by MLK into these ethnic neighborhoods? These were people, like Lithuanians, who were defending the integrity of their neighborhoods from an invasion. That the marching masses entering their neighborhoods were black is completely irrelevant: any mass migration of another cultural group into a host population harms and destroys the integrity of the host population. And that was the point. White flight destroyed the ethnic neighborhood through mass migration and the subsequent dispersal of them across the newly created suburbs. This process hastened their assimilation into an amorphous mass shaped by the mass media. These assimilated groups formed a buffer between WASP neighborhoods and the neighborhoods of the new black arrivals from the South. The construction of highways played a similar role by erecting psychological or physical barriers between these neighborhoods. They were also used as excuses to demolish "undesirable" neighborhoods.

> That the marching masses entering their neighborhoods were black is completely irrelevant

LOL. sure it was.

Oh, that's very much so. In new york, several bridges were explicitly designed by Robert Moses so that they were too low for buses in order to prevent public transit from getting to certain parks and beaches. In Chicago, several expressways were routed to separate "black" areas from other parts of the city.

I claim it's normal to hate public transport. Online, there are some loudmouthed public transport enthusiasts. To them, everyone who isn't doing public transport is a racist, boomer, redneck, luddite, and whatever aspersion you've got.

The real reason America has so many cars is people like cars better, and America developed in a time where people were rich enough to make it happen. People don't like public transport. I asked someone who grew up in another country, in a huge city with only public transport--and reputedly good, clean public transport at that--what they think of public transport, and they said it's gross and for poor people. (It wasn't a code for racism, their country was ethnically monotone.)

People like that don't visit threads like this though. You just get this echo chamber of young, childless, cosmopolitans who only care about a certain kind of efficiency in transport.

Yet your example purposefully sabotages cars by blocking streets to cars, and by not having city planners enforce enough parking spots for cars.

The system can prioritize either method of travel. It's no surprise that when this happens, one is faster than the other.

You can never build enough parking spots if the cost of parking is $0. Optimally managed parking charges variably so that there is always about 10% of spaces free in a block.

The entitlement of drivers to think they have a right to park a metal box wherever they want for free in the middle of the most expensive real estate in the world is staggering.

As an anecdote about any amount of parking winds up being used if it's free: there's a guy a block over from where I live in dense, transit-connected Brooklyn who has, at any given moment, at least 6 cars parked on the street, that he tinkers with and seems to occasionally buy and sell. The houses on that block sell for around $3-4 million these days, but the parking is free.

The neighborhood is also quite clearly full of cars that basically never get used—given there's no cost to store them, the owners save them for an occasional trip and in the meantime they accumulate snow/leaves/pollen etc the rest of the year, in proportion to how long they sit without being used.

The dysfunction of this system is particularly aggravating when you have an actual need to park nearby your home, e.g. if you're loading/unloading heavy things, and there's never any space. I would love if every block had temporary loading zones, but people freak out about the idea because it requires taking away some free parking.

Ring lines around which center? Midtown? It's already a criss-cross of lines, NQR does a semicircle..

The decline public transportation, in my view, reflects a shift in priorities within the Democratic Party. Back in the 1990s, Democrats were more focused on tangible public services—things like infrastructure, roads, transit systems. Today, the emphasis seems to have moved toward issues like environmental policy, DEI, and gender identity.

As someone who’s deeply frustrated by the lack of progress on projects like high-speed rail between SF and LA, completing the BART loop around the Bay, improving public schools in San Francisco, and addressing homelessness, I find it maddening. These are real, urgent issues, and yet they often seem sidelined.

Of course, Republicans generally oppose these kinds of initiatives altogether.

Trying to push for change within the Democratic Party has been incredibly difficult for me. It often feels like the space is dominated by highly educated, well spoken, intellectually confident people (far more so than myself) which can make it hard to even participate, let alone influence policy.

So I just think: screw it, I’m a Republican now. And that is not going to make public transport any better.

So this is why…

This whole comment is insane but I’ll just say the last administration helped fund transit, but is of course being rolled back by the new one.

https://www.transit.dot.gov/about/news/biden-harris-administ...

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/biden-harris-ad...

So what should I do?

How can I blame Trump for what is happening with public transport in SF and CA? Both CA and SF are 100% democrat for last 20 years.

Wasn't Musk's whole hyperloop project determined to be just a way to sabotage the SF-LA high-speed rail?

California's so-called Democrats are in love with the idea that private industry (i.e., Silicon Valley) will swoop in and do the government's work for them. And they'll sideline any government project if they think someone else might shoulder the burden. LA almost elected a real estate billionaire as mayor whose solution to homelessness was to build a bunch of "housing" out in the middle of the desert.

How can any political party get anything done when they have one hand tied behind their backs as they fend off attempts by other parties to undermine them.

Also the average voter is a flip-flopping idiot who throws temper tantrums when they don't get low or no taxes, when costs rise for them right now even if lowering them is at the expense of later generations, etc.

Also US politics are a lot more complicated than who held majority within and area or state. As far as I can see if senate/congress has a huge bearing and those lip between majorities constantly.

I mean keep propping Trump up though, as a foreigner it's interesting to watch the show. It's a shame that countries are making deals with the US now, I would've loved to see us ban export of pharmaceuticals, weaponry, rare earths to the US just to educate Americans on why we should all be working together.

Don't get me wrong, China & Russia are much worse for it. And NK is an absolute disgrace, all those millions of people...in a thousand years we're going to look back on this period of history as "they had the means for peace but chose oppression and violence". Future humans will look at us as barbarians as we do many of those who lived hundreds of years ago.

Ezra Klein talks about everything bagel liberalism where the left tries to layer every cause (diversity, unions, low income housing) onto a core good idea like building more housing or transit infrastructure. It gets in the way of the goal. housing is good because otherwise people would be homeless.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/opinion/democrats-liberal...

> So I just think: screw it, I’m a Republican now.

Complain and vote all you want but the best way to fix the government is to become the government.

What a stupid self centered excuse for supporting fascism.

The Democratic Party of 2025 is the Republican Party of 1992.

Not every city needs a ring line, or has a geographical shape where it would be practical.

Manhattan is a long rectangle, whilst Berlin has a more rounded shape.

Its faster to cross the small width of the rectangle than to go all the way around.

It's perceived as a problem around NYC that a lot of people might want to go from Brooklyn to Queens or to Harlem and the Bronx but public transit funnels everyone through downtown or midtown Manhattan. NYC doesn't need a ring but it could use a supplementary arc.

Yes! I'm going to see Underworld[0] play tonight in Brooklyn, exactly 7500 feet from my house, and according to google maps the options are a 14 minute taxi ride or 53 minute train + bus journey. I think it's insane that we don't have efficient intra-boro public transit outside of manhattan.

0. https://www.underworldlive.com

In the 1990s the RPA proposed reviving an abandoned rail line connecting Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx into the Triboro X line as a supplementary arc. The truth is the boroughs were well connected. In the postwar era the many of light-rail lines connecting Brooklyn and Queens were demolished. As were three elevated lines in Brooklyn/Queens and four elevated lines in Manhattan.

The MTA still has a gap in the funding for the 2020-2024 capital plan due to Andrew Cuomo's raiding and Kathy Hochul's incompetence, so I wouldn't expect much from the 2025-2029 capital program! It is $48 billion short of maintaining existing levels of service, "with a focus on areas in need of urgent investment".

its hard to really get how culturally tied to cars Americans are. Politicians in NYC essentially act like 'a car' is the unit of citizenship in the country, and not 'a person'. We make laws so cars dont get offended, we prioritize them over lives and safety. Its honestly pretty crazy.

I live ~33 miles away, round trio, from the nearest grocery store. No trains, no uber, no bus. The US is massive. It doesn't look like it on the mercator projection, but the US is massive. It takes days to drive across it at highway speeds.

I tire of "you guys just love your cars too much". I've lived in several states and only when I lived in Los Angeles county was there ever a bus within "walking distance" - but still that was a 25-30 minute walk.

Oh, and in case you were curious, California is about 60,000 square kilometers bigger than Germany.

And I live 36 hours away from California in the United States. At highway speeds.

That's why we "love our cars"

Most of the US population lives in metro areas of large cities. You are an outlier, that’s fine for rural areas.

I would not call ~20% of the US population an outlier. It's a very different situation from urban areas, but just as valid

And even cities in the US are vast sprawls compared to organically grown very old cities in other parts of the world. That makes a huge difference for walkability.

Furthermore, the 80% urban stat from the US census gets routinely misinterpreted. Just going through some property line details with a couple neighbors on collectively about 75 acres plus adjacent conservation land. The census considers this urban.

And, as you say, Urban != dense city downtown.

yes, the cutoff for "urban" to not is 2000 housing units in an area. I don't consider that urban, 2000 homes is a decent "town". This is just "othering" of people who live more than 25 minutes from a metro which is what i consider "urban". i am 25 minutes from my nearest metro, and the metro population is smaller than the city i grew up in in california, population-wise.

my point is, talking about Berlin and then carrying that thought over to "americans just love cars" is silly. Germany is smaller than CA, and double the population of california. Most people "in california" live in the "san angeles" range or in the "bay capital" area. a half hour outside of any of those areas and it's either sand or farms or mountains.

and i wish i was "rural", there's ~600 houses within 6mi radius, that's not very rural. It's rural compared to Manhattan, i guess.

Without looking it up, I think it's also related to adjacency to a significant metro. But, yeah, the US census uses a binary classification that makes a lot of people assume "urban" means a big walkable city when, in reality, it often includes very dispersed exurbs (including places many would consider basically rural) that are never going to be serviced by public transit among other things.

So a lot of people tend to translate 80% urban into 80% cities which is manifestly not true, and even less dense cities.

> Consistent with previous decennial censuses, changes were made to criteria classifying urban areas following the 2020 Census. Key changes to the Census Bureau’s urban area concept and criteria include:

> The use of housing unit density instead of solely population density. The minimum population threshold to qualify as urban increased from 2,500 to 5,000 or a minimum housing unit threshold of 2,000 housing units.

> The jump distance was reduced from 2.5 miles to 1.5 miles for 2020. Jump distance is the distance along roads used to connect high-density urban territories surrounded by rural territory.

> No longer distinguishing between urbanized areas and urban clusters. All qualifying areas are designated urban areas.

We agree (i think), i'm just quoting the census bureau document.

I hadn't looked in a while and, yeah, the definition seems to have switched a bit though the overall result seems to be fairly similar. The bottom line is that "urban" in the census has a lot broader definition than what a lot of folks think of as urban colloquially.

Yes, designing a city for cars will make cars the most convenient way to get around. That is part of the whole "americans love their cars" thing.

You "love" your car because you live in the middle of nowhere. There is no "we" in that sentence.

> when I lived in Los Angeles county ... bus within "walking distance" ... a 25-30 minute walk.

> I live ~33 miles away, round trio, from the nearest grocery store.

So you've explicitly chosen to live far away from everything, in effect you've chosen to have to own a car. What bearing does this have on anything?

> The US is massive. It doesn't look like it on the mercator projection, but the US is massive. It takes days to drive across it at highway speeds.

Unless you drive across the US on a regular basis, this point has precisely zero relevance.

Everyone knows the US is massive lmao. Outside the US people are relatively educated about the world.

The topic was about public transit in cities, where many millions of people gather. Nobody has said that the US needs to ditch cars and only use public transport between states or cross-country.

> The most flabbergasting thing was the absence of Metro ring lines around the center. The fact these have not been built, in 2025, when Metro transport networks in most cities are now over a century old, is telling.

I'm having trouble imagining where a useful ring line could exist in the New York metropolitan area or within the city itself, given its geography, longstanding commuter movement patterns and other characteristics. Maybe you could have a relatively small ring just in midtown Manhattan?

The Interborough Express is one example. Going from southern Brooklyn on the water up to queens. Previous proposals had it also connecting to the Bronx. If you want to be really ambitious, connect Bayridge to Staten Island and continue on with branches to Elizabeth and Bayonne. Up north, it's surprising there isn't rail from the Bronx, through Manhattan, across the GW Bridge to NJ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Express

That's not what I'd understand as a "ring" though. I guess something like that could be useful in providing an alternative to what's mostly been car options for travel between Brooklyn and Queens. Edit - your more ambitious idea could be a "ring", yes, but I'm not seeing how it would be especially useful. Why would it be helpful to provide a single line allowing someone in Bayonne to get to Jackson Heights, for example (given what are probably more pressing transportation improvement needs)? As a visionary means of facilitating a longer term integration of eastern New Jersey communities to New York City, maybe.