Yes, but Australian, (and Canadian, and New Zealand) cities are all in the same range as many similarly sized American cities. Maybe Auckland has transit as good as Seattle with half the population, but it's not the order of magnitude difference that US vs European or US vs Asian cities do. All of the Anglo settler-colonies have rather lackluster transit compared to the Old World, and one of the first things I tell anybody who wants to come to New Zealand is to plan on having a car.

I jest, but not completely. The US is more dense but more distributed too. You can’t realistically link someone in a rural West Virginia holler up to a regular bus schedule, nor can you build a train between Morgantown and Pittsburgh that gets ridership.

America doesn’t do badly at public transit in places like Florida where private companies can fill the gap and the communities are within a reasonable distance and the geography is flat and simple. See the Brightline trains for proof of concept. But it’s kind of ridiculous to imagine Australia and the US to be comparable in that way.

Cool, so if you have the numbers or graphs, paste a link

I of course believe you're lying. Probably out of the standard xenophobia.

It wouldn't make sense considering average US household infrastructure vs average EU household infrastructure so I sincerely doubt you're able to prove it, or whoever you're going to cite as proof.

Think about it.

I'm just making a note about life expectancy in the US and in Europe (which are both calculated the same way). I admit I was in teaching mode, and should have been explicit instead. If heat deaths had an oversized effect on Europeans, you should be able to see it in the graphs in summer 2023 and 2025, and not in the US (to a certain degree: US have to catch up like 5 years, so it's not an apple to apple comparison, but close enough)

[citation needed]

Not an expert but it seems trivial to me that a road full of cars each carrying one or two passengers will take up a lot more space than trains or buses carrying the same number of people.

> . If we could modulate form to meet demand precisely, like Uber but for all transit, it would be far quicker and more efficient.

Efficiency is not the only or even the primary goal. The primary goals are to "Get people from where they are, to where they want to be, when they want to go, in a reasonable amount of time, for a reasonable price.

Your modulate demand fails at that. A fixed route bus is predictable. I know in advance when it will be there to pick me up and where/when it will drop me off. That means I can plan my day. With Uber or any other demand/response system you don't get that and have to hope every time that it will get you there in time.

Quicker is much harder to quantify. A bus can connect to a faster rail (which potentially can go 300 km/h - only a race car can do that). A bus can be given signal priority while the uber needs to stop and wait more. However a bus will stop to pick up others on the way. (but if your "modulate to meet demand" does that it is worse than either a bus or uber because you can no longer predict when you will get there). A bus network done right is also likely to drive changes in your city such that most of the places you go are where the bus is going and that makes it just as fast.

If only we could build a network of high speed, maglev trains covering the span of the entire planet, from the southern tip of Chile, through the Darien Gap, across the Bering Strait, all the way up to Paddington Station and down past the Suez Canal all the way to Johannesburg; that, plus airplanes and modular autonomous transit, should cover 90% of transit needs, and anything more than that will be served by older technologies, off-road vehicles, horseback/camel, and of course for the most treacherous environs, on foot is still best. But I cannot imagine a world where a traditional bus system would be superior to a highly coordinated system of autonomous modular transportation.

Cars are the very bottom, by very considerable margin. You need to prove otherwise.

That said, Waymo is indeed not the right tool for the actual inter-city trips.

Cambridge Dictionary (UK): "A system of vehicles such as buses and trains that operate at regular times on fixed routes and are used by the public."

Collins Dictionary: "A system of buses, trains, etc., running on fixed routes, on which the public may travel."

Is the city and county provided point-to-point transit for disabled people[0] not "public transit"? Is Line 0[1] not public transit? Most people say yes; the dictionary should be updated to reflect actual usage, not the other way around.

[0] https://www.mta.info/accessibility/access-a-ride

[1] https://fairtiq.com/en/blog/line-zero-the-public-transport-e...

It's not like there isn't _fabulous_ public transit in every other developed country. All they had to do was make healthcare and education low cost/free.

Density first, very good transit second. Or at the very least, wait for zoning and incentive decisions that will bring infill to those locations in less than 5 years. But we sure aren't doing that.

I lived in the area for many years. At one point, I lived in a house, basically at Belt Line and highway 75, and worked at an office on Midway Road across from Addison Airport. About 13 kilometers on side streets. With traffic, about 20-25 minute drive on side streets, or about 15 minutes if I took the highway, which included a toll road. There were reasonable bus stops near both my house and my office. So I looked into what it would take to use public transportation if I had car trouble.

All bus routes went through downtown Dallas. So the most optimal route getting me to the office took almost 2 hours. And the earliest I could get there was 9:30am. Why did all routes go through downtown? Because in order to get the routes approved they had to serve areas that were considered 'disadvantaged'. And this makes sense - there probably wasn't enough potential traffic to make loop routes break-even.

Now I did use public transport regularly - I had Dallas Stars season tickets, and I'd ride the train downtown rather than park all the time. But if I didn't need to go downtown it was useless. And the reason is just math - half the population of greater London over 15x the area.

In the typical suburb there is enough density for a good static network to work. Note that I said "good", and "network". A suburb cannot support a bus every hour, the service is too bad - but it can support a bus every 10 minutes or better because the service is acceptable. Also: network, not route - the important part is you need to be able to get to all the places you would normally go and that means the entire network matters and the ability to quickly/easially transfer to other routes is critical to success.

Also we should not assume only the bus. A train is a useful part of any large transport network. There should be a train between Dallas and Fort Worth that makes the trip in 10 minutes - you can't do that in a car (a race car with a professional driver could beat that if we block all traffic, but no normal car or driver can even if traffic is blocked). Sure the current train takes an hour, but we can make is faster with existing technology.

I really think this is completely wrong. You will convince approximately 0 people in Dallas to use a bus if this is what you are offering them.

The places where people want to live have no land or archaic zoning laws.

I wouldn't want to live two hours away, but if I could sleep/work during my commute, and pay $400/month for it, I might do it. My housing costs would be like less than a third of living in the metro where I work.

Supercommuting becomes slightly more palatable.

tax payer sources needs to be allocated to a project that can be administered, tracked, and iterated on.

Plus the public should pay for services servicing more people than less, which your idea services a small population.

cities grow in capabilities in direct proportion to the number of people who have access to it and their capabilities. it might be cheaper labour leading to better roads, plumbing etc

I pay for taxes that help run schools, and it is an good setup even if I dont have any kids.

I want a Ferrari. It would be good for me. Should taxes pay for it?

I, and people like me create wealth. Some of that wealth is pooled at an administrative level that makes sense across a town, state, or nation. Its still wealth I created; and I expect it to be used to benefit me, ideally proportionally to the tax taken.

Unemployment can be justified as crime prevention; Disability and healthcare systems limit individual worst-case outcomes (especially if due to chance). Super-commuter subsidies do what?

I fully intend to pay my transportation costs myself.

It’s not about getting a free ride, it’s about being able to get to work while sleeping, saving money on housing, and pocketing the difference.

but anyways, texas does not have the same cost of living issue as other metros like most of CA. that's up to local jurisdictions to do this. just like any city can build rail or bus.

That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.

It’s the same reason many people will prefer a chain restaurant to an unknown mom & pop. By knowing what you’re getting, you’re willing to give up the potential for something nominally better to avoid something much worse.

    > car[s] are always clean

Maybe they'll kill Uber first and then drop the quality.

Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their intended product/market.

    > Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints

    > Waymo is not subject to a regulatory cap or hard limit on the number of cars it can operate in San Francisco.

But since you asked in kind of a flippant way: who tips on Uber? People who aren't sociopaths, I'd say.

Non-americans don't. To me, being socially expected to tip for a Taxi feels like a parody from a sketch comedy. ditto for tipping barbers or expecting tips over 10%. The only time I've tipped a Uber was when me and my friends were at risk of losing a train. The driver (unprompted) went pedal to the metal to make it on time, so afterwards I gave him a couple of bucks.

Tip culture is bad for rideshare drivers in aggregate anyways. The apps carefully manage the pay of drivers on each market so necessary supply is guaranteed at minimal cost. If a expectation of tipping exists, the platforms simply pay less. Now drivers also have maximize for tips instead of just driving the goddamn car.

FWIW, the real problem isn't tip culture, it is the power imbalance between labor and the company that is using that labor (without employing drivers), but I dunno how much of an audience that kind of argument has on this particular site.

The US will never fix the externalization of salaries until the public refuses to tip at ridiculous percentages and situations. You'll see a 40% tip expectation at restaurants, your local dentist will install a tip screen. Just tip 10% at sitdown places and refuse emotional blackmail. If you feel any guilt, just make the habit to tally the dollar amount of "normal" tips and make monthly donations to your local food bank.

EDIT: My point is that tipping culture is unrelated to worker rights. Many countries with large informal economies (i.e minimum wage isn't enforced for most people) have no expectation of tipping. The reason Norwegians don't tip drivers isn't because they have a wonderful safety net, it's because there's isn't a social pressure to do so.

Mixing charity and payment of services is stupid and a moral hazard. Servers have shit wages in the US by law because people tip and the same is true (via algorithm) with rideshare drivers.

I don't think that's why there is little tip culture in eg east Asia. It's just... the price the business expects you to pay is mostly advertised upfront, it's known to everyone involved, why would you pay more if you got exactly the service you have ordered? It simply does not make sense.

You could not efficiently run a bus service in most US cities at a level of “good service”. Now I absolutely agree you could probably get there with some sort of 10 seat ride share setups that optimizes pickups and dropoffs but I don’t see that happening yet and Waymo is at least a nice step on the potential direction.

Even with great service it’s an uphill battle to get enough ridership.

Last mile is an incredibly hard problem in the US. If you have the option to someone to commute by bus with a single transfer or to take their car I think most folks would opt for a car. That is why I say it’s not feasible to run a bus service because you would need to get it down to zero transfer and effectively door to door service.

Only because you can never get the political supported needed to get there. If you somehow got the needed support people would start using it and it would turn the US city into a transit city. Note that political support needs to last for at least 5 years, in the real world there is an election every 2 years and so before you can get your bus system working for 5 someone will win an election on "lets stop wasting all that money on the bus system" platform and kill the whole thing.

> Now I absolutely agree you could probably get there with some sort of 10 seat ride share setups that optimizes pickups and dropoffs

We we cannot. you cannot optimize a 10 set ride share that much. They would be even more expensive at that scale. Nobody likes busy ride shares - you have a deadline of when you need to be there and flexible routes mean that some days you are late because the rideshare decided to take a detour to pick up (or drop off) someone else.

> Last mile is an incredibly hard problem in the US. If you have the option to someone to commute by bus with a single transfer or to take their car I think most folks would opt for a car

Because the bus nearly everywhere provides terrible service. Sure some people can take a few trips via bus, but then the car they need for the rest is just sitting around while you still make payments (including taxes and insurance).

> That is why I say it’s not feasible to run a bus service because you would need to get it down to zero transfer and effectively door to door service.

You don't need to get there. You just need to get "close enough". If you give people a situation where they can REASONABLE do nearly everything on transit most will give up the car. However if there is even one semi-regular trip that needs a car they may as well use the car for everything.

- if you give someone the option of a bus with a transfer or taking a car they will almost always take a car (thinking of Dallas)

- if you can get me a bus that very nearly gets me door to door with low to no wait people will consider taking it over a car. Very nearly to me is 5-10 mins of walking at most. That’s like a single section of a frontage road in Dallas at best.

- I don’t see how you build that kind of service. Maybe you do live in DFW but it’s massive. Just walking from one intersection of a frontage road to the next would take me at least 10-15mins and thinking of job density there it’s pretty low and then thinking of those folks and how many are commuting from similar places is even lower.

You are arguing that if you could create a great bus service that people would take it and I am trying to point out that a great bus service in a place like Dallas is not economically feasible. It has nothing to do with politics at least from the upfront problem of it not being feasible.

I disagree. It is not politically feasible and so we won't get there, but the economics work out: a great transit network even in a place like Dallas could get enough riders to sustain itself. Problem is we need 50% of the families in Dallas Fort Worth to pay $200/month to pay for it, and nobody will stand for that - even though nearly every family in spending more than that per car.

I will say it was super nice. However, I would prefer a regular and a direct bus any day. Being able to just walk into a bus, scan my transit card and get on with my day is a much preferable experience then to order a ridehail via an app.

So if a transit agency can just increase their bus frequency, they should. They should not however pass the limited funds they do have over to a private company.

All housing on the market is by definition "affordable". If someone buys it, then somebody can afford it. The proper term is _subsidized_ housing.

Anything subsidized is destructive in the long run.

Fortunately, self-driving cars and mild carpooling (3-4 people per car) will eliminate road congestion and allow comfortable suburban living while still having access to the dense city cores. And mild carpooling does not have the main disadvantage of transit: turtle-slow average speed.

At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly.

The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of accidents, this is probably the #1 source of traffic jams on the highway. I don't know what it is with some people (and it doesn't take but a few to cause a mess). Are they not paying attention? It's a chain reaction, once a few cars slow down, traffic coming up at speed log-jams behind them. And, of course, because in the US (or, at least, in CA) nobody has the courtesy to move over the right if they want to go slow, you easily end-up with 4 to 6 lanes of perfectly good highway absolutely jammed. Once over the crest every seems to drive like Max Verstappen. It's both tragic and hilarious to observe.

So, yeah, self-driving cars --at scale-- can absolutely reduce congestion by driving far more intelligently than most humans do.

That said, at a scale that approximates a rounding error they probably can't materially affect traffic.

Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.

The point of this idea is that housing is expensive to build and one way to significantly reduce that cost is by eliminating parking. Add to the cost of car ownership and the cost of living is substantially higher.

Most people still will need a car to get around. Bus rail and carpooling are not real solutions for most people in urban USA cities. Some feel offended by this notion, but it's reality.

I imagine that the concept of cities leasing waymos and being able to allocate them around to particular nodes will increase the avg. passenger capacity as well, because it can be modeled and tracked to figure out where the nodes need to be to create an effective network with high utilization.

But yes, traffic is indeed an impact.

The government can also lease vehicles with more capacity, like mini-busses if that's the policy objective. Doesn't have to be cars. The government would be in the driver's seat to drive this driverless policy as well, no pun intended

The nodes have been calculated and modeled, the gains round to zero. What you get instead is higher demand for moving around in cars, because it's now cheaper and less annoying. Lower prices increase demand, therefore more congestion, not less. This component obliterates said minor savings from earlier in any reasonable model.

You've got more vehicles on the road driving to move the same number of people. What does that do to traffic??

This will obviously change in future, once they start a truly mass rollout.

And remember, the alternative is even worse: buses.

We're not willing to enforce basic safety on buses, let alone other norms. If Waymo is willing to do that, that will make it available to many more people. Even just not having to wait at the bus stop before sunrise can be a game changer.

It's not that people refuse to ride busses. In most places in the US this is either a non-existent or extremely impractical option. It's just reality.

The overwhelming majority --overwhelming-- of cars, SUV's and trucks on the road have exactly one passenger, including the guy commuting to his office job in an F-250.

An autonomous vehicle doing a deadhead drive has a passenger count of 0. 0 < 1. You start tossing in a lot of miles with 0 in there on top of the vast majority of your trips being 1, and suddenly now you're less than the cars you're theoretically replacing.

A lot of these AVs at the moment at least are still roughly minivan/midsize SUV. On top of that, with safe distances adding another foot of the car to a highway scenario really doesn't increase the percentage of the total space that much. You need a lot of follow space ahead/behind the vehicle.

Maybe if they were like single person pods that teleported to their pickups and managed to group tightly together in packs on the road, but until then they're just another SUV on the road driving around sometimes with zero people in the car.

Whatever this will become, it will be a matter of decades and a real modernization of our traffic laws and other infrastructure. I will not pretend to know what form that will take, my crystal ball stopped working a few decades back.

There are so many questions. Just looking at a place like Los Angeles, I regularly drive right next to massive trucks moving containers and all kinds of cargo. Can we be more intelligent about this? An automated cargo monorail operating down the middle of every highway? Sure, as an idea and a fantasy. In the real world you'll have to contend with myriad issues spanning a range between our inability to build anything anymore in this country with how you are going to deal with millions of people losing their jobs if you automate cargo transport and clear large trucks from the highways. Etc.

It's nice to have these visions about the future. What will actually happen is a different matter. I am placing my bet on self driving cars as the first practical phase of a transition into something more sensible that will likely require three to five decades. The equation is very simple: Atomos are expensive and hard to move. Conventional cars and trucks manufactured and purchased today are going to stay on the roads for at least a decade. A mass transition to a different paradigm is measured in units of decades after the last conventional vehicle is manufactured and sold. Hence my five decade estimate for transportation utopia.

> An automated cargo monorail operating down the middle of every highway?

There's already cargo freight rail practically all across the country. Loads on trucks are on trucks because of the desired flexibility and point to point response time as opposed to having to load/unload rail.

Also, unless you're talking some really long distances, having rail in the middle of a highway doesn't always make much sense. You're not going to have the depots or stations in the middle of the highway after all. The train then needs to weave back and fourth across the highway to get to the places its routed to. Far better to just figure out its own right of way rather than stick it in the middle of a complicated place.

No car platooning, flock routing, car trains, or anything similarly exotic is needed. Just mild carpooling. People are not doing that now because it's a logistics nightmare that removes most advantages of owning a car.

It's also not clear to me why routing self-driving cars would be more efficient than what Lyft Line did which ended up super slow. The slowness want just the additional route but also other passengers getting in and out and in some cases waiting for them.

Ultimately the argument against lower congestion is even easier. Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion. Now Timmy can go to his activities by himself, so mom goes elsewhere. Again, when we make something cheaper, we increase demand.

> Self driving cars for individuals make traveling less annoying than driving. So what we get is more tolerance for long commutes, and ultimately more miles traveled, with ups congestion.

That's fine. I did some modeling for that :)

Most of the optional commutes happen outside the rush hour, and the US roads have more than enough capacity for that. The true problem is the congestion due to low occupancy during the rush hour.

And if we want to speculate a bit more, self-driving cars offer an option of more flexible mass transit for truly bottlenecked cities. They can the make transfer from a larger bus into 2-seater local vehicles completely seamless. This is a more distant possibility, as it will require new infrastructure.

Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to? Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?

The issue with cars, self driving or not, is that they fundamentally use up too much space in urban areas, and cannot efficiently navigate crossings. The problem with traffic isn't (only) that cars are not full, but that in dense, high demand areas where paths/modes cross (i.e. intersections), cars make it extremely difficult to efficiently navigate that shared space. People and bikes can navigate without stopping, bus and trams move such high volumes of people that it significantly reduces the number of vehicles on the road (factor of 20x-40x). Heavy rail (and some light rail) is usually grade separated, and thus doesn't need to worry about intersections at all.

Self driving cars solve almost none of these problems. Unless you're imagining a future where existing outside of a car is illegal (and driving a car manually is illegal) and cars just autonomously speeding through intersections by choreographing perfectly in sync without crashing, AVs will still have to negotiate with everyone else, and thus they still have to navigate the intersection in much the same way they do now. Increasing the diameter of the pipe means nothing if the spout (the intersection) is the same.

So basically, increasing road capacity doesn't matter that much. If you still have a massive amount of individual vehicles trying to navigate the slow capillary network in an urban core at the end of the pipe, you're still going to have traffic on the highway into the city.

The sharing the bus with murder hobos argument is only relevant for daily commuters with relevantly decent transit routes that aren’t 3X longer than a car would be. Most people don’t get that far in the argument against transit.

Partially. Shitty people with zero manners usually end up in low-paying jobs (or in finance), so they tend to concentrate in transit that provides subsidized commutes to them. But the majority of people in transit are normal.

The real reason for not using transit is its slowness. Drop two points on a map of a large city randomly and plot the route between them using cars and transit. Transit will end up on average requiring 3-4x the time by car, even during the rush hour. Of course, people tend to optimize their commutes by choosing the workplace accordingly (this results in a toxic density-misery spiral), so on average transit is not _that_ terrible.

But it totally breaks down when you add more constraints. Like having several kids. Try to plot a route using transit between your workplace, a grocery store, a daycare, and a school. You'll find that it's impossible unless you package everything non-work-related into one spot.

> Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?

Transit is WILDLY inefficient. It's amazing how inefficient and polluting it is.

There's also a problem with the way this term is used in practice. It now ended up meaning _subsidized_ housing. An average person would NOT be allowed to buy this housing.

To continue the analogy, real estate developers have to build some Lambos and give them out for free. But only to the right people.

The only reason sprawling suburbs can exist is because they are subsidized by inner cities.

Building and maintaining miles of roads and utilities is not cheap and the number of people in these areas makes it impossible for them to cover these costs unless they're astronomically wealthy.

There was a time when we had all of those things that you mention. But cars quite clearly won; the others lost.

Towns and cities then continued to grow. They did this in car-centric ways because that fit the transportation style of the time.

And now, it is stuck this way.

Also, just because things are one way today, doesn’t mean they can’t be a different way tomorrow. It’s all a what we we make of it and decide to fight for

Cars won _and_ and it wasn't a fair fight.

This was almost certainly not an isolated incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Unless this is sarcasm, isn't it kind of strange to decide that history just happened to end in this moment?

We tore out the light passenger rail lines that once quite commonly connected cities and towns together, and to points within those places. These cities once grew around (and because of) these features, but now it is like like they never even existed.

We can't just put them back where they used to be. The landscape has changed.

In order to do something different, we'd need to have new routes that are built through cities that have been designed for cars for a very long time. That's a quagmire of nightmarish proportions.

Every now and then, someone makes some noise about changing it somewhere -- and almost every single time, it goes nowhere. Where new light rail does get built in a place that had none, the ridership tends to be limited because...sheesh: Folks with jobs and places to go already have cars to use, so they keep using them.

So we have cars, because we need cars. And since we need cars, we might as well use them -- which reinforces the issues. Call it what you will (I'm a fan of "self-perpetuating fallacy"), but that's what we've got.

And yes: It is stuck this way. It'd be fantastic if it weren't this way, but we don't have an undo button.

At this point, we're ~4 score and 7 years too late to preserve what we once had.

A lot of old train right of ways still pretty much exist. For many areas it often isn't too outlandish for those lines to be brought back, if there was a will to do so.

I don't feel like pinning down my location in public, but it is sufficient to say that I'm very familiar with a place in Ohio that was once a booming with every kind of rail.

I can walk around and see where things used to be, and sometimes it's very clear.

But mostly, it seems like it has been transformed. Whereas people used to build around the paths of the rails, they've now built atop of where they used to be. It was once a straight shot with an occasional (and very deliberate) bend, but now there's a house and a factory and a substation in the path.

Or, Columbus Ohio again. :) That place used to have a very diverse passenger rail network, with a somewhat grand Union Station right in the middle where it counts. Rail was such a thriving and important thing that at one point they raised the level of the main drag, High Street, to help reduce conflicts between trains, pedestrians, and the various horsemobiles. For some of the old buildings that still remain, what was once the first floor is now the basement.

And in what seems like something that real libertarians would dream about, these railways were built privately and were self-sustaining.

Things changed.

In ~1979, they finally tore down the old Union Station just weeks before it was likely to be ruled a protected historic site and then put a very immobile convention center in its place instead.

Columbus has been expanding pretty rapidly (by Ohio norms) for a couple of decades now. The old rail paths are hard to find at all while walking around or in aerial shots, never existed in newer neighborhoods, and whatever was there has been further decimated by the batshit highway network that is in a continuous process of changing.

It's possible that it could all come back again, but the cost would be intense beyond imagination.

And even if it did come back again, who would ride the things, anyway? They've already got busses that they hate. Folks would still have cars, and they'd still drive them. I guess people might eventually be able to adjust to using trains to get places, if that became practical for them, but I'd also guess that this transition would take multiple generations to really take effect.

No, a private citizen does not have the ability to demolish entire neighborhoods to create a new New York City with a beautiful Central Park.

Maybe if they own a home, maybe they'd donate their home to some developer to make a community garden. You and I know, that many people would love to do such a thing. But, 99% of people, would reject doing this or demand an infeasible amount of money for this.

This isn't a movie. It's real life. In the movies, sure, you can have a wizard reshape entire cities, power distribution, roads, sewers, potable water production and deliver, move entire neighborhoods kilometers away, move businesses, factories, airports, etc.

In the real world, once a city is well established, while your ideas might be commendable, they are simply not realizable. It's a fantasy. It will not happen. And this isn't because we are some kind of a horrible society who do not want these things. It's because reality. Nothing less. Nothing more.

The other reality is that we can't build anything here any more. My favorite thing to point to is the California high speed train project. I think it has been over a decade now and at least 10x over what they promised it was going to cost. I don't think we have a single mile of usable track built, much less moving trains.

The other one is the Los Angeles International airport's automated people mover (SkyLink) which is indefinitely delayed and $1 billion over budget. The project started in 2019...and we are still waiting for it to be usable. Oh, and it's just 2.25 miles of low speed overhead monorail (I think) track like they have in Las Vegas (might be a different design).

So, like I said, I love your ideas, but, in the real world, they are fantasy. Sorry.

It turns out you don't actually need to tear up sewers and electrical infrastructure to run bus routes. Who knew. Density can change when you change zoning laws.

I knew a bus ride was in my future and I'd not done that before, so I asked questions of the various people I know who live there.

Not one of them had ever had a ride on the bus in the city they call home, or knew how the bus worked, and all of them made a point of telling me that they were sure that it would be filthy and awful somehow.

The COTA website didn't set clear expectations for a new rider and wasn't very helpful.

I eventually posted on the local subreddit asking for direction, and got exactly 1 useful response out of many non-useful responses.

I don't know if it's just a Columbus thing or what, but it seems clear from this experience that folks there hate the bus. Is there a place in the US where they're appreciated?

(Anyway, other than having to walk mile or so to get from the airport to the nearest bus stop because WTF, things went perfectly fine. I had a great chat with some random dude who was waiting a different bus. My bus showed up exactly when Google Maps predicted, I had exact change ready, and the transfer ticket for the next bus on my route was easy to deal with. They were clean, comfortable-enough, and I was the only rider.)

(Need is relative, I suppose. I don't mind walking and I pack light; I was able to spend a couple of weeks out of town with a backpack that counts as just a personal item; getting to the bus stop wasn't a big deal for me.)

What? Clarify please, because if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. Today all all of that you are talking about would solidly fit in the "fantasy" category.

You must not be from Los Angeles. Come drive our highways for a few months. I've had better experiences in third world countries.

> to run bus routes

That only works in certain locations and do absolutely nothing for the largest sources of traffic. Nothing.

Just like carpool lanes, which area massive joke on us: nobody carpools to use those lanes, so the traffic reduction they deliver, expressed as a percentage and rounded to the nearest integer is, zero.

The US, in general, was not built for the kind of mass transport Europeans are used to. And that will never happen here. In the US, self-driving cars will be our solution to the problem. Give it about ten years and we are really going to start to see adoption and the benefits of it. In a sense, virtual mass transit using existing infrastructure. That might work, slowly, but it could work.

In ten years I hope that the only human-drivable cars I will own will be my race cars, which get towed to the track. Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent.

Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. Driving in Los Angeles absolutely sucks.

And you think I live in fantasy land.

> if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country.

So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again.

It seems like if we have the political will to change how we move, we can change how we move at least on the scale of a few decades. It wouldn't happen overnight, I agree, but it's not like it couldn't ever happen.

> Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent.

This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments: traffic (due to low density of vehicle utilization) and land use/parking. We still end up sacrificing massive expensive public spaces for parking, we still end up with massive traffic issues with the amount of road space required per traveler, etc.

I've lived in some of the most sprawly places in the country, trust me I know it's not entirely just "buy busses and it'll figure itself out". But things can change, and judging by history things will change. The way people move, live, and work in a lot of the US will probably be pretty different in 30-40 years than what it looks like today. Things already look different today than what they did 20 years ago for a lot of metro areas.

> And you think I live in fantasy land.

Yes, you do.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/uber-air/

> So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again.

You must be a software guy. Moving atoms is very different from typing words into this textbox. Also, in the US, the 1950's to 1970's was a very, very different time. That was probably the peak of our industrialization phase. You had millions of men who came back from WW2 ready to work all kinds of jobs, an industrial based that had exploded due to WW2, massive entrepreneurial drive at every level and the ability to get shit done without the nonsense that kill even the most basic projects today.

Yes, a few decades can change things radically. In the decades since the period you use as the reference for this fantasy the US, Europe and other nations have deindustrialized to an alarming degree and China has become the world's factory. We make nothing here. To be able to to things you have to make things. On top of that, our political system has welcomed bat-shit-crazy ideologies, like the current push for down-right socialism/communism who's only recorded history is the destruction of nations.

So, yeah, yours is a fantasy. This is not the United States of the 1950's, 1960's or 1970's, not by a large margin.

To understand things at this level you need contact with reality. I've you've never tried to get a non-trivial project done in the real world, moving atoms, not bit, I can see how waving a magical wand and thinking we can do what was done five to seven decades ago might be possible. It is not. I've been in manufacturing my entire life. I assure you this is not the 1950's.

> This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments

Sure, but that's a different problem, isn't it? What we can change --over time-- is the relationship between where people work and where they live. If you take the greater Los Angeles area, the massive concentration of job centers in centralized "hubs" as I call them is tragically destructive. You have people driving into these hubs from every possible angle and you end-up with shit like the 405 freeway being a parking lot all day, every day.

This isn't about public transportation. It's about politicians being politicians (which I use to mean: incompetent) wasting decades of valuable intelligent planning. In the town I live in they absolutely refuse to grant permits for the kinds of job magnets that would have people from this town work here. As a result, if you are unfortunate enough to not have found work in this area, you are eating a one to two hour commute every day.

So, if you want to solve the housing and congestion problem, you need a long term intelligent planning policy that will incentivize businesses to build in areas that will reverse some of the flows.

To use a company I am very familiar with, SpaceX, just look at where they are in Los Angeles. It's probably one of the worst locations one could choose. And like that, probably hundreds of large employers in that area and a few miles north, south, east and west. A good policy would have looked at the concentration and created intelligent plans to incentivize companies to find locations that would balance flows and spawn new housing developments surrounding these centers of employment.

Instead of doing that, what you end-up with over time are companies leaving for other states where they have more favorable financial climates as well as the ability to, in some cases, build what they need and where they need it.

Moving atoms isn't easy. Some things we can do. Others we cannot. Public mass transportation is not likely to be some thing that will take over the US. Exceptions here and there, sure. I've completed non-trivial construction projects that don't even begin to approximate the zoning and political complexity of the kinds of things you are talking about, and every single one of them has been an expensive nightmare purely because our system has devolved into something that prevents progress rather than encouraging it.

Note that I am not at all opposed to the image you paint. I have travelled and worked in European and Latin American cities where public transport is wonderful and love it. I am just being realistic about who we are and we can actually accomplish in the US. We can't build a single new nuclear (or whatever) power plant while China is building a hundred. That should tell you something.

I agree, in most parts of the US we do not currently have the political will. I agree, building things and changing minds often takes time.

But instead we've elected people who put people into power who thinks bike lanes are woke and need to be destroyed. So I guess it'll take a bit longer before we start making real progress on these issues.

You flying on that Joby tomorrow? I hear They've been saying their air taxi service is coming next year for so many years now and are only supposedly just now starting FAA testing. I wouldn't hold my breath for actual useful and anywhere near affordable service anytime soon.

This isn't about political will. Politicians are whores, it doesn't matter what side, they respond to money and votes. This is worse than that, this is about people not being intelligent enough to vote with a view towards future benefits --decades away. Politicians buy votes by promising crap that the masses eat-up and never get. This nonsense is as old as time. This is precisely the kind of thing that destroyed nearly every nation in Latin America. And now idiot voters are pushing the US in the same direction with these bat-shit-crazy socialist/communist politicians gaining ground in various places. Americans will eventually learn, however, and sadly, this might require a few decades.

In that context, the whole mass transit conversation is so utterly insignificant it isn't even worth the bits we have wasted in this chat.

> bike lanes are woke

No, they are not woke, they are stupid...in certain cities. Some of the things I have seen are truly horrific. One of my own kids, who decided commuting to work on a bike was a good idea, nearly got killed twice. A year later he bought a car.

Once again, there's reality and fantasy. They are not the same.

>You flying on that Joby tomorrow?

If I could, absolutely. I've talked to people who would never get in a Waymo. I have, many times, also through Uber. Great experience. Progress.

> I hear They've been saying their air taxi service is coming next year for so many years now and are only supposedly just now starting FAA testing.

If you've never been involved in product development, manufacturing, testing and certification within a regulatory environment you don't have a real sense of just how hard and detailed these processes can be. Could it go faster? Sure. The point is, we probably don't really want them to in a case where safety is the top consideration. It will take as long as it will take.

> I wouldn't hold my breath for actual useful and anywhere near affordable service anytime soon.

Sure, but it will happen and affordability is relative. For example, it costs me $120 each way for an Uber to the airport that could take one to two hours to get there. If I drive my own car, I still get to eat two hours on the road and spend about $300 parking it at the airport. So, if I can buy a 30 minute Joby ride for $300 to $500 round trip, with Uber car pickup and drop-off included, sign me up!

Also, people use helicopters today and they are not at all cheap to fly. So this isn't like comparably-priced options are not out there. In fact, a Joby solution integrated into Uber is far more likely to democratize short-range air transport than anything else.

Waymo is literally a private company.

> make areas much more walkable and bikeable.

How so? Autonomous car companies have every incentive to continue lobbying for car only infrastructure? Why would they want infrastructure that increases competition?

... in the US

> Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing

Because of completely broken land use, transportation polices, building regulation in the US, they are very feasible in many other parts of the world.

> if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units

Or some kind of vehicle that comes by every 15min and connects to a network of other transports that are time interval based.

Or have car share vehicles attached to the property. Something that is routinely done in Europe for decades.

> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.

Except it doesn't last that long and is not that expensive unless you are incompetent and live in a broken society.

Cities in China added 100s of miles of metro since 2010. Making bad excuses and doubling down on car dependency are a big part on why its not happening.

And btw. the US has so many fucking roads already (btw they are also very expensive, but I guess that money doesn't count), if the were competent they could spend 6 month and few 100 million and build absolutely amazing bus transit system. But of course taking a lane away from cars wouldn't be acceptable, better give money to waymo so people can sit in traffic in a Waymo vehicle.

It is not about cost, its about political will and the societal believe that public transit is for the unwashed poor and racially inferiors, spending money on it is charity, not transportation policy, and that any upstanding citizen in a car needs to have unlimited freedom to drive everywhere and never get into trouble.

> That car can be full time serving 4-10 units daily?

This has been done for many decades with carsharing already, its standard practice in many developments. What exactly does Waymo or self driving change here from an investor perspective? Ok maybe if its really close buy the Waymo can go back when you don't need it anymore. So maybe you need half as many. But of course the Waymo vehicle is also much more expensive and has capacity you don't need.

But of course, even with that carsharing concept, the far better solution that almost everybody in the developed world does, outside the US, is to simply have good public transport, you build it first, and then build the new housing around those transport links. Car sharing is only for very niche situations and that's a good thing, because more cars in cities are bad.

You're hilariously wrong on most of your points because just spend 5 minutes researching how CA fails to build rail. Not even worth responding to further.

Building arrangements that would rely on them are mostly illegal anyways.

Allowing driverless cars to serve buildings without parking would be a huge step forward for those reasons alone.

For what it's worth, it's mostly illegal to build a housing that's the only served by buses too.

Last, the US has passed the point where it has the cheap labor and government competency for mass transit. Faster to do something now than wait for a new government or robotics that can replace all the construction workers and designers

Dallas in the United States.

$346 million gets you utility improvements and 2 miles of bus lane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Ness_Bus_Rapid_Transit

Translation: Poors are allowed to exercise their freedom of movement iff they stay in a huge corpo's good graces.

If waymo is willing to ban people for shitting or smoking meth in their shared cars, that's purely and advantage over government run transportation

Would it placate you, if we did it for non-poors instead then?

I am a non-poor, and I would like a free/subsidized waymo with priority mode set for sharing with my neighbors. My belief is that it would help the poors more than me, but if doing so is oppressive or freedom-restricting or smth like that, I would gladly take that burden off their hands.

Back to the topic, why should I not be allowed a choice of having a subsidized/free waymo that prioritizes me and my neighbors (given I would be participating in this fully out of my own volition)?

If I am allowed to make that choice, do you believe that poors should have access to the same service and be allowed to make the same choices as non-poors in that regard? If no, then why not?

plus, the government needs to solve for affordable and workforce housing. The market can deliver plenty of market rate units if you don't be stupid and over regulate it.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426...

Total liabilities and stockholders’ equity: $595281000000.

How big to they have to be before they count as ‘big’ to you? In your ideal world, getting your Google account banned not only means losing all your photos, documents, contacts, conversations, and access to all your other accounts (GMail) but now also means you can't go anywhere besides what you can reach on foot, via whatever anemic local transit exists, or via similarly-expensive Uber/etc. Super cool; sign me up.

A bus could serve 40-100 daily. The infrastructure already exists - the same as for cars. It's pretty low cost also - especially electric buses that have lower maintenance costs. The problem is that you have to ride with other people.

Imo, the biggest problem is that of convenience. Convenience (time), cost, comfort, and (perceived) safety are the factors people use to make transportation mode choices.

If buses aren't prioritized in traffic above single occupant vehicles via dedicated bus lanes, signalling, etc. then they'll always be slower than a car because of the additional stops. Frequency is also a consideration that factors into timing, as well as transfers.

If any US city wants to get people onto transit, they need to prioritize transit above less efficient modes, amongst other things.

Trying to keep using something that is comprised by fixed routes, schedules, and stops makes n little sense.

We don't need to optimise for space, we need to optimise for cost of transport, and door to door duration.

At a slightly smaller scale, think about rush hour. The passengers on a single bus could fill up the entire block if they were in individual cars instead.

And that's not even considering empty AVs driving around looking for a fare. Locally we're thinking about assessing a mileage fee to discourage this behavior, which is a good start, but at some point you inevitably will have lots of empty cars heading to the stadium or whatever when the game is about to end, clogging streets.

I'm definitely not anti-Waymo. I want them to be legalized here. I'm just realistic that they will basically serve the role of taxis/Ubers, not replace the concept of buses.

> it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build.

What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just underground now!)

I don't think the average person realizes how little typical non-New York states spend on transit. Ohio's ratio on highways:public transit spending is approximately 8:1, and that includes federal public transit money. Oh yeah, and Ohio outspends all its bordering neighbors per-capita.

I am here to tell you about this cutting-edge science-fiction technology that is cheap, efficient, highly flexible, and requires almost zero infrastructure investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus

As a bonus, instead of funneling public money out of state to Waymo who then dumps into cars manufactured by Zeekr in China, the city bus actually employs local people!

It's so fascinating that Arlington, Texas, a city with over 300,000 people in it, hasn't yet been able to master the deep intricacies and mystical technology of the bus.

I've also noticed that you are talking about the impacts of transit and vehicles on real estate prices, e.g., a lack or excess of parking spaces. I think you can do something similar the other way around and investigate the real estate impact of permanent rapid transit stations being built. That paradigm is how Japan funds its entire public transit system as a profitable enterprise: allow the rail company to own and develop real estate in close proximity to the stations.

Genuinely and not trolling.

Where I live we have non-autonomous car-sharing (that I barely use). Patterns are always the same in the morning all cars go from suburbs/"sleeping" districts to downtown. In the evening all cars go from downtown back to outskirts.

My point is - I don't see any improvement by Waymo here apart from marginal efficiency gains. Every morning in city outskirts/suburbs at the same time a lot of people go downtown that refuse to ride-share (hence autonomous taxi, not a bus/tram/metro), every evening - the opposite happens.

If 80% of white collar workers go to office at 9AM and rent all Waymos - then if I go from suburb at 9.30AM , there are no Waymos in my area, I will need to wait until they come back from downtown until 10-11AM.

Where's the efficiency? Everyone is going to same locality at the same time and demand private chariot. Everybody needs to get a private Waymo - same as private car.

With american car-brain being prelevant - I don't believe those suburbanites will gladly give away their private cars to Waymo subscription instead.

Even in an office, there are plenty of people doing a 10-6, or an 8-3 then the school run... That's before you consider that many people are not office workers only going between the burbs and the city...

Though still, I wonder, what gains could be from such model (car sharing instead of cars or public transit)?

As far as I understand this model must support (with some room) demand at peak. So how many times less cars would be on the road then? How many streets and parking areas could be returned to people as pedestrian/recreation areas. How would that compare with proper public transport setup in terms of land use, cost, environment impact.

I don't think it would be that much, because I cannot imagine such car sharing model working in places like London, Tokyo or other big developed cities.

Things like WalkScore show up on real estate listings as a value add.

I really don't get it. Pretty much everywhere outside of US buses work no matter the city layout. Just add some stops and run some buses.

I guess you don't want to stop more times than needed, so maybe you'd want to cluster the demand somehow into "virtual stops", and you may lack some amenities like shelters.. so maybe the traditional bus route is good enough. Though it feels like it's ripe for optimisation (you know the classic no buses come for 30min then 3 arrive at once, or these buses are all full whilst others are roaming empty)

1. Cul-de-sacs and surburbia lack through-streets. So it forces heavy long buses to navigate winding narrow loops. This makes your routing complex and slow.

2. When commuters travel suburb-to-suburb instead of hub-and-spoke downtown, origin-destination pairs are too scattered to support fixed routes with meaningful frequency.

3. Low passenger volume per mile makes fixed-route bus operations financially unsustainable.

4. Disconnected street networks and long setbacks force residents to drive just to reach a bus stop. Like seriously pull up google maps. There are a million suburbs in the greater DFW area where you need to walk 15 minutes just to get out of your neighborhood to the nearest main road where a bus stop would be placed. When it's a thirty minute round trip of walking, (not to mention what the walking situation looks like at your destination), and you throw in stopping at every bus stop on the route, every commute takes several hours instead of 20-30 minutes driving.

2. You either create loops or hubs where people transfer. The hub can be just a regular bus stop where lines meet.

3. Looking up the density of Dallas suburbs I can tell you that buses can work well in far less dense places.

4. The math doesn't add up, if you can get somewhere by car in 20 - 30mins driving then even with 15 minute walk on either side the bus will take you there in less than 'hours'. And walking 15 minutes to the bus stop is not the end of the world. There would also be plenty of people living/working closer to the stop.

From your original comment I got the idea that you think buses need to be these massive heavy vehicles, but that's not really the case either. I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats. I don't think they were actually much bigger than american pickups. But I think a regular bus would work alright.

Many bus stops are up to 1:45 away.

Can and implemented are often worlds apart.

A 12 seater is not a microvan. That is in full size van territory.

Right-sizing the vehicle is smart. Why not also allow 4 person buses that run on demand to and from any point?

A larger bus is needed for useful transit.

And I doubt that 4 or 12 is the ideal bus size in that place.

You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot; so you need a stop or two in the zone.

Now you have a short walk to the stop; but if you want this to be a viable alternative, you need some frequency of service.

And that means that the routs need to be active across the whole week, not just the hypothetical peak (otherwise everyone needs a car anyway).

So how do you actually get a high average number of riders per bus? More stops?

But if each stop needs to go in and out of a cul-de-sac, the travel time goes up.

Eventually people stop tolerating the extra time, and get cars.

So you end up with a case of empty busses running... Seems much worse than a waymo.

Holy shit, you have to walk a mile from a cul-de-sac just to get to a street with an intersection?

Who the hell designed these streets? (I guess Big Auto?)

Basically trying to retrofit busses to a development built around cars is stupid.

It isn't big auto that designs these places. Big auto likes them, but the people like it because they don't know anything other than cars, and they know they hate living on a busy street with lots of cars. Those are the only two options they know about so don't bother replying with all the others you know about, they don't exist as options.

I am pretty pro transit and urbanism but it really annoys me in these discussions when people (not you specifically) just wave their hands and go "add more buses, ez, problem solved", completely disregarding the physical realities of how we have constructed our civilization.

So people are using public transit in Germany not because they love to but because they are forced to.

And the system is far from perfect, Germans are complaining because public transportation is having a lot of delays. You can't reach every point you need, you have to wait and some times public transportation is dirty and filled with dirty, rude, violent people, drug addicts and drunks. Not a lovely way to travel.

When the bus is once per hour nobody uses it except those who have no other option and those are people who likely have 'issues'. Those people exist in every city but they a rarely seen anywhere else because they are a tiny minority of all people unless you look for a place they concentrate.

Build a useful bus system and people ride it. However a useful system is expensive and so you can't get the money. In car cities 'liberals' support transit for other people not themselves and so they object to the costs that good transit would cost. Of they had good transit it would save everybody money over their cars, but even 'liberals' can't see that that and so won't support it.

The faster you get out of the bus, the faster you liberate grandma and kids from a fall, being mugged, or from freezing to death while waiting, and instead you promote an active lifestyle.

Waymo-like transport is incredibly liberating for low middle class parents, that cannot be trust their young kids to ride a bus alone and take time off blue collar work to take their kids to X practice.

Plus, they are much cheaper and safer to operate long term

Buses are a solution today, but only for upper class americans & soccer moms, who don't realize the issues that low income or limited fixed income seniors face in their everyday life.

We could go a step further and tax automobiles in such a way that they covers the negative externalizes that their use results in so that again, the users of them don't unfairly burden others with the cost of their choices?

The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas as well as things like high speed rail to connect those regions allowing the people who chose to live in those areas an easier and cheaper day to day life as well as the access to distant cities and all the economic opportunity that this encourages both in the destinations and in the economic corridors that arise along them?

Places like the US and Canada may be able to stave it off a bit longer because of relatively open immigration policies but the demographic collapse is coming. That means that cities are going to start fighting to attract a dwindling pool of people and cities with less debt, be it financial or infrastructure will fare better than those that have suffered under decades of perpetual growth mindset based policy making.

Many suburbs are a rot on a city's finances and will inevitably need to be amputated. The sooner the better I say.

I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities where dense american urban centers are overflowing with revenues. The opposite is the case almost everywhere you look. Or that suburbs are only surviving by pushing costs unfairly onto cities. Most suburbs (in the case of Dallas being plano, irving, frisco, southlake/westlake) are self governing municipalities with their own school districts, police, city management, and credit ratings. Sometimes people say it's just that suburbs are new and have yet to pay the piper, but even in america's (and Dallas') oldest suburbs, many of which have replaced/renovated infra several times over at this point, they are indeed stronger financially than the urban centers they surround.

After decades of ignored negative externalities from unchecked suburban growth and car-culture are coming to an end. As populations decline and temperatures increase places like Dallas and the wealthy suburbs around it that you mention will have less and less relevance.

There isn't going to be a future where the citizens of suburban Dallas are enjoying Starbucks coffee in single-serving cups delivered to them in Waymo vehicles. It isn't viable to just paper over unsustainable nature of these places with self driving cars and ignore urban environments and mass public transit as the comment that started this thread suggested.

The only places that are going to survive what is coming are ones that are dense, well managed, and sustainable.

Because from the 70s onward the former industrial northeast and miswest was actively de-urbanized and suburbanized with environmental and zoning law (don't blame this all on the locals, a lot of this rolls downhill from the states). This obviously coincided with de-industrialization. So basically all these former market and mill towns basically wound up underwater because they not only kicked out their economy but wound up in a situation where every stupid sidewalk repaving costs a bajillion bucks because pursuant to state law whatever it needs to be brought up to code which means some BS green space buffer, etc, etc.

Source: Live in one.

At the end of the day you're basically right it's a lie when it comes to some random Dallas suburb.

I don't know where your flaws in logic is coming from, but I have seen the numbers enough different places to know there is one someplace.

Also, governance isn't like manufacturing, it doesn't get easier at scale, it gets so much harder.

Living in a perfectly planned super dense urban utopia where I can quickly walk wherever I want is extremely appealing to me. I would also like living in the wilds where once a week I drive to the general store and back as the full day's task. Suburban living is my least desired outcome. But everywhere there is room for it, it happens, even without a city to latch onto. There are good reasons for that.

I'm prepared to be wrong though. The question is, are you?..

I don't know how they managed to do the above. However we know that they have done it, and the costs must have not been excessive.

When you show me facts I'll change my mind. Until then the above facts are compelling.

Basically you are making correct observations but only for part of the picture. And if the discussion is about finances and economics, I would say that the part about where money comes from is pretty damn important, no? :)

Also, even from across the pond, I also saw historical photos of the old USA. Those suburbs from before WW2 were way closer to the Europe really. There were more small businesses everywhere, there were commerce blocks etc. And pre-WW2 infrastructure was much cheaper and less complex that contemporary one. So sure, old suburbs were probably much healthier economically.

As for the moderns suburbs (from 50s and up) you can view more knowledgeable people than me if you really wish to uncover facts and truth. I won't post spoilers, but you may guess them from the context easily.

>The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas

So you still want to tax some people to subsidize other people. Why?

My impression is Waymo is used as taxi replacements: people who normally take transit but there is one trip that it won't work for; or travelers who don't live there and don't want to rent a car; or people who plan to drink. They make perfect sense to anyone in Dallas for these reasons. However nobody is planning on giving up their own car and it doesn't make sense for them to do that.

Working transit would be a paradigm shift of course.

Cookie cutter developments where each street is a culdesac or horseshoe with it's own HOA is the only economically sane way to any serious volume of detached single or multi unit detached housing development thanks to federal environmental regulation.

Who screeches bloody murder at even the mere hint of making some adjustments there? Why nearly the same people who complain about the current copypasta suburban sprawl paradigm of course.

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

After that, grab a pint and watch how your neighborhood transforms.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/car-industry/uber-lyft-traffic...

In the end you waste long enough time to defend it to delay investments in affordable housing and public transit, both. You then funnel that money into road construction and fuel subsidies.

A bus would simply never work. Busses, trains and other modes of group transport or hard or near impossible to get right in a sprawling suburban metro. It would be amazing if it was possible but folks are going to work in so many directions (there is not a single workplace hub) and after work they may be going to an entirely different location for dinner. I think it would be incredibly hard to get that problem right and you would still be fighting an uphill battle that people don’t like to take the public bus.

Obligatory repost of this video about small towns and cities in the Netherlands being easily accessible by public transit and cycling:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

I will also point out that a large proportion of suburbs in the US are comparatively brand new developments. While we might not be able to retrofit existing developments, fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented.

Your comparison to Netherlands is rough because you are talking about a country that has a fairly mild climate and older cities that generally have density and not much sprawl. I don’t comprehend these examples.

Also those cities are incredibly tiny with probably a concentration of employment. Keep in mind the Netherlands is about 115 miles wide and maybe 180 north/south diagonally. That’s roughly the size of the Dallas metro area.

Someone who lives in Arlington might commute to downtown Dallas, an office building in Plano or downtown Fort Worth. You multiply that by millions of people and it becomes a very hard problem that a typical city bus cannot handle.

Now I do think there is probably opportunity for a Waymo like solution with 10 seats that could do driverless ride sharing but I don’t see how a city can build a bus system that works, people don’t want to take a bus unless it has zero transfers. The last mile problem is incredibly hard and places like Texas are hot. I asking through a strip mall parking lot is further than most of the cities in the Netherlands in that video.

If the Netherlands is the size of the Dallas metro area, then why isn't the Dallas metro area like the Netherlands? Dallas-Fort Worth has over 8 million people in it, it's not like it's a drastically smaller population than the Netherlands. This argument of "America has a bunch of empty space outside of metro areas" is irrelevant to the conditions inside of those metro areas.

Most Americans by population live in metropolitan areas. They don't live in the middle of nowhere. Yes, some people do, but 80%+ of Americans live in very much urban areas. So we can exclude the <20% of Americans from this "we should have decent public transit" debate if you would like, I am fine with that.

The Netherlands actually built out a lot of car-focused infrastructure in the mid-century just like the US. The difference is that they have since pushed that development mindset out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTSNWDTE888

This idea that America "can't go back" is a farce, because it makes an incorrect assumption that other countries never grew in population and therefore never built any new suburbs after the spread of the automobile.

The Netherlands grew from 11 million people in 1960 to 18 million people today. Do you think the Netherlands never built a new neighborhood in that time period?

This doesn't mean that people in the Netherlands or Japan don't own cars. Far from it. What it does mean is that driving a personally owned car in a one-person-per-car paradigm isn't necessary to survive and thrive in those places. Transit-oriented development means that they have other options.

You are concerned about how difficult the climate is, here is how Singapore stays walkable despite hot and rainy climate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_SJ1NBMrH0

Here is how people use public transit in Yakutsk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvtnToQyi0

I will also inform you that buses are indeed air conditioned and have heaters, just like a car. You can think of a bus as a car but much larger and fits more people inside.

Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses? I transfer buses all the time in my city, or transfer from bus to train. That doesn't mean it takes me a long time go get around.

I will tell you why: because demand is induced. There isn't some innate human nature where we all automatically prefer cars and have decided by evolution that anything less than a car is less ideal. No, demand is instead induced: if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.

Induced demand is especially prevalent in the US because personal vehicles are heavily subsidized over other options. The US government engages in forever wars to secure low oil prices, subsidized by federal tax dollars. Gas taxes are underfunded and don't keep up with inflation to ensure driving is offered below the real cost. Society subsidizes traffic deaths as nobody, not even insurance companies, compensate society when a 19 year old dies in a drunk driving crash and all the economic activity they would have generated over their lifespan evaporates.

Personally owned cars at a ratio of one car per person are literally the most expensive way to get around on this planet until you get into stuff like private jets and helicopters. They're even more expensive than buying a plane ticket between many destinations. You say that people in Dallas don't want to take the bus, but if it was available, reliable, had a frequent schedule, and got them to everywhere they needed to be, they probably would be very excited to ditch the $5,000-10,000 annual total cost of vehicle ownership.

And, while public transit in Texas has a long way to go, Dallas Area Rapid Transit has ridership of 52,823,800 annually. If you are saying that people in Dallas don't want to transfer buses, I'd have to ask where those 52 million rides are coming from?

- Dallas is much much hotter than the Netherlands.

- Overall Netherlands population density (including rural areas) is higher than DFW metro.

- For most of the cities in the YouTube video shared they are a few miles by a few miles. The length of a typical Dallas frontage road. It makes sense to walk and bike in those small hamlets.

Going back to density, you are right the Netherlands moved back from a car centric life but that did not change population density before or after. Most cities in the Netherlands are a multiple of DFW so you have this tough argument. What works in the Netherlands is not necessarily a solution for DFW. You would need to rebuild the city to be denser, have more businesses located together and then build out transit while ignoring that it’s too hot for a good portion of the year to ride a bike or walk around outside.

My back of napkin math ended up with 30k sq ft per person in DFW compared to 20k sq ft per person in all of the Netherlands.

I think Waymo is a great step in the right direction.

EDIT: Your statement of "its not like its drastically smaller population" is also just not true. 8 is not about the same as 18. I ended up replying thinking they were closer without realizing this as well. So less than half the population on about the same area. Having half the average density before even thinking about how dense the clustering is really makes quite a difference!

Density of where people actually choose to live, which you've already alluded to with the things you're saying. Similar population, similar kind of area. But look at both on a satellite image. One actually has a lot of farmland for that area. Where people actually live its often a good bit denser.

Why is it like that? That's what people have voted for, that's what they've supported. Try actually talking to the people who live there and suggest to them they should live in a zero lot line home or a townhouse with shared walls.

> Why don't people in Dallas want to transfer buses?

I wouldn't mind transferring busses if there was good service. But instead transferring busses around here usually means sitting in the baking hot sun on a concrete bench in >100F heat for a half hour. If the next bus was in like 5 minutes, I probably wouldn't care.

It also often means you're probably taking a very suboptimal route instead of a direct route to the place. So not only do you have an additional wait to change busses, you then also have a much longer path to ride. And you're likely going to end up going a slower average speed, as you're having to stop to pickup/dropoff people along this longer route as opposed to just continuing on. For instance, it'll take me over an hour to go to where the new Dallas Stars arena will be in Plano as I need to make 4-5 bus changes. Its a 15 minute drive although it will probably be way more than that once 20k people try to leave at once.

Now, obviously, busses can change routes. They can get more busses and do more routes. They can get more busses and offer faster service. There's a lot of potential solutions to this. It doesn't have to be that way. But in the end getting people to put more funding into it is pretty challenging.

> if there's a place for me to ride a bike or walk or take a bus/train to my destination, and it feels safe and comfortable, I might just choose that just because it exists.

Its often not very comfortable riding a bicycle in 110F heat index when you've got this air-conditioned box you could ride in sitting in your garage.

Literally what I'm advocating for is good service.

Because taking a bus there is much more inconvenient compared to driving. And not all people take a shower, someone undesirable sits next to you and so on.

The thing is that different countries have different cultures. I live in a country where big cities have public transport and relatively narrow roads. I wish we had bigger roads where everyone drove its own car. I can do whatever I want in my car as opposed to sitting in a crowded bus.

Practically all of those towns have had a focus of building walkable/bikeable spaces with dense mini-downtown areas for at least decades if not longer.

Its not impossible for this to eventually happen to these already built US suburbs, but a lot of these places were explicitly designed around everyone coming and going by car. A lot of these suburbs weren't even planned with the idea of pedestrians ever leaving the neighborhood. They'll have few actual entrances and exits, with those rarely connected to any kind of infrastructure outside other than busy roads.

> fast-growing suburban locations like those in Texas can change course right now and decide to build in a way that’s transit-oriented

A lot of those fast-growing areas are in cities with zero transit and often don't even neighbor a city with any real transit. Look at places like Princeton, Celina, Melissa, Anna, etc. They border towns like Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, and more which also aren't connected to DART. All of these towns actively shun public transit. A lot of home buyers in these areas just don't care about transit access at all, with many actively opposed to transit. So what, maybe Princeton does decide to make some transit. Ok, where do I go with that? From one suburban house to another without a car? A bit easier time getting to Little Ceasars, Taco Bell, and Walmart? Its entirely disconnected from practically any other place the people there actually need to go, because its not like many people actually work in Princeton or Celina.

So it'll take a lot of additional development and rethinking of what these places are and how they ultimately function for transit to actually make sense there.

I'm not saying public transit and walkability/bikeability can't possibly happen in North Texas. I like biking around, I ride DART when it makes sense, and I do push for expansion of bike infrastructure and good DART access. But I also see the heat index for today is 105F, it'll be about 110F on Friday. I don't think I'll be riding a bike to get the groceries. I don't think the Netherlands often gets weeks where the heat index is >100F practically every day. And finally, it will take changing a lot of minds about public transit to get buy-in from a lot of the population to actually do it.

Cold weather transit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKvtnToQyi0

Transit is small towns and suburbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas. In 1960, 8 million fewer people lived in the Netherlands, and cars definitely existed and were mainstream back then. This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind.

It's never too late to change course. It's not a black and white choice where we must suddenly give up our vehicles and never drive, it's more like a gradual increase in the number of trips that are feasible and enjoyable without a car.

I know people who lived in Cleveland who started using the bus to get to work when the HealthLine BRT line was completed. They still drive basically everywhere else, but that one bus line changed their daily habits dramatically.

There's a huge gulf between doing absolutely nothing and accepting the status quo and refusing to change at all.

Go watch the ignorance of the Addison City council on how transit operates, and realize this is one of the allies of supporting transit in this area! Makes muh teeth itch!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dallas/comments/1qdywz5/addison_cit...

Go see how the Dallas Mavericks and the Dallas Stars move away from their fine stadium right off a train station that's serviced by several different lines by multiple transit agencies for places with just limited bus services, and darn near everyone cheers it on as a good thing.

Things won't change if the people won't change.

This might be news to you, but it doesn't cost $130k to drive an old Toyota Camry around in DFW. Every home is pretty much guaranteed to have parking for 1+ cars.

If the average Singaporean could buy a car for $5k, the government mandated their apartment had a parking spot or two, and gas cost $0.79/L you think they'd all still want to be in the heat all the time?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying transit can't possibly work in hot places. But you're needing to convince people to leave a nice comfortable air-conditioned space to willingly go be outside in the heat. Singapore did that by making cars incredibly expensive to own. I can't imagine making a Toyota Corolla cost $130K to be a popular policy in the US.

> I would remind all of us that our built environment is not an inevitability, it is a continuous choice, especially in a rapidly expanding state like Texas.

I 100% agree with this. People are choosing to ride around in air-conditioned boxes instead of being in the heat. People choose to live in these sprawling suburban neighborhoods with zero walkability. People choose to prevent overturning parking minimums, people choose to expand highways and people choose to vote against bonds to build bike infrastructure. That is the choice tons of North Texans are making. I do think their decisions are rather short-sighted and often disagree with them, but those are the choices being made.

> This idea that the Netherlands is special and this magical thing they've done can't be done anywhere else is a weak one in my mind.

I never said this. You're literally making a straw man here. In fact I'm saying the opposite of that. I agree its not impossible. Just a lot harder as people's mindsets are extremely different and the climate is very different.

If I had the weather of a lot of Germany or the Netherlands or UK or Norway I'd probably be outside a good bit more. I really don't mind riding a bike in the cold, exercise warms you up. If I was taxed like Singapore, I'd probably eschew the car.

Waymo is a step in a direction of an interesting future. If you can take the current blueprint and make it more efficient that sounds like a win to me?

While we're experiencing tons of growth in the far-flung suburbs with practically zero walkability, we're also seeing a good bit of redevelopment of places like Richardson, Garland, Carrolton, some parts of actual Dallas, and even some parts of Plano like the old downtown. A lot of these towns are trying to rebuild their downtown areas and more to be far more pedestrian, bike, and transit friendly.

Its entirely possible to live a car-free life in some places in DFW. There are definitely pockets where one can comfortably live without a car. I spent a bit of time without a car and got by with just a bicycle and motorcycle after my car was destroyed in a hailstorm. Because I had purposefully chosen bikeable places with decent transit to live near where I worked it really wasn't that big of a deal. But in the end you pretty much have to give up going to large parts on any kind of regular basis.

And yes, I do hope things like AVs can solve a bit of the current cost of operating bus lines. Nearly half of the cost to operate a line is the cost of the driver. We could run so much more capacity and really rethink a lot of the economics.

I still think it’s really hard because even with that self selection, what happens when your work changes. Probably some of my Silicon Valley bias of swapping companies every few years but it can throw a wrench in your commute easily.

I have never lived in Amsterdam but my obeservatiob is that these are older cities already baked in with density. So it’s much easier to switch back to bicycle and share infrastructure.

You can build a new city in Texas with transit in mind but people are still going to be commuting 30mins or more in every direction.

To give a clear answer that others have beat around: it is the network. Transit works when you can get places. When you can get many places it doesn't work.

The real question is how can Dallas get there - which is a hard problem is you need a massive network investment before it becomes useful to many people and so there is a lot of upfront investment needed first.

The US has a poor history with getting a good return on investment for transit. In general even where the investment does get good ridership, the amount spent was way out of line from what anyone else in the world would have spent for that system.

Good luck though! Just sharing as a member of the DFW community has taken dart and bikes a lot. The metro is absolutely not dense.

We did that though!

It's just so much more profitable to sell of the real estate and then let the government run the rails at a loss.

Ex. Penn Station's real estate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%...

I suspect this will only work in the US if the "rail company" is actually public.

- https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod

- https://www.wmata.com/business/real-estate-and-development.h...

They also have a highly regarded school system... Turns out that is only the case as long as you don't have any special needs.

It's far easier to add additional capacity to other forms of transit. But the end result of Waymo is that it will just converge into being a bus network that took decades to get to.

I lived in one of the most walkable neighborhoods in Chicago for 30 years before moving to suburbia with 0 walkability. It is completely untrue that walkability is secretly better than suburbia and those suburbanites don’t know what they’re missing.

How about if autonomous cars would be bigger, so from same apartment block people could ride-share to same office downtown?

What if those cars would be on rails - imagine how simpler the autonomous part would be? Lower friction and fuel costs savings will be a bonus.

/s on my part obviously.

The problem is rush hour. You still will need some kind of minibus that can serve 4-8 people efficiently, and take up way less space. An added benefit is that if you cut peak traffic volume by 3/4th, you can eliminate congestion.