I was incredibly lucky the smallish town (40k pop) I went to college in had some remarkably good transportation I had never seen before. There was a bus that cost $.50 per ride circa 2010 and went to about a dozen locations within 20 miles, two different shopping centers (their main attractions being Walmarts but still), the university, the community college, several neighborhoods, and downtown locations, among a few others. Second there was a rental car option through the university where anyone with a drivers license and and a debit or credit card could use it (eg you didn’t have to be 25 or have a credit card). You could reserve time slots in advance online, and it was only $5 and hour or so. There were multiple cars.
The bus eventually went up to $1 per ride but I still think about these two options and wish my town had something like it. With a few small improvements I don’t see why we can’t reasonably subsidize these relatively cheap options in most towns/small cities. The rental car one would be harder, but even the bus would suffice. It notably didn’t stop at any grocery stores, only Walmarts so that’s another thing to improve. But I’d give up my car in a second for that bus back home.
I’m not even sure if this is still their active website http://0060325.netsolhost.com/about.htm but it gives you a picture of what I’m talking about. There’s either another service or a replacement that is $2.00 instead of $1.00 that goes by DCT from what I can tell. I don’t live there anymore so hard to know the current setup. I’m really underselling how good that bus was/is.
I think the biggest problem is attitude; in the US, transit is largely viewed as a welfare program for poor people who are not (yet) able to afford cars. To put it in HN terms, Americans see it like a deprecated API; something you're obligated to support somewhat, but only until your users migrate off of it.
If you look at the Honolulu transit project (Formerly HART, now called Skyline), I think it shows everything wrong with US transit projects:
1. It goes nowhere useful, only going to a bunch of random places on the west side of Oahu where no one really goes.
2. It was pitched as an economic uplift project, not a transit project. "If we build a train in these largely-ignored areas, it will help the people there!"
3. It took years and years to build, full of cost overruns, because it was also pitched mainly as a job creation project. You can't sell a transit project based on that alone, so instead they're pitched as welfare or job-creation programs, which creates the wrong set of incentives. After all, if the project takes longer, that's more jobs!
Seattle-area commuter here. I have to agree, transit seems mostly designed for people who don't value their time. Which don't tend to be the highly paid tech workers with families. I tried so many times to give transit "one more try". The straw that broke my back was when they silently canceled 2 buses in a row for my route, on the coldest day of the year, for a route that has 20 minutes between buses. And my suburb commuter route doesn't even have the big city problems that plague the Seattle buses.
Now I drive my single occupant 6603 lb truck to work once or twice a week, and WFH the rest of the time.
In comparison: my commuter train in Germany comes every 30 minutes (even a bit more often at peak), but travels at 160km/h. Door-to-door, it's about 20% quicker than driving, with no parking stress, no unpredictable highway conditions and I can even get some work done on the WiFi.
Sure, there are issues with those trains sometimes, but it is really an easy decision.
I also experienced the same thing when traveling in Europe. When you're on the line and traveling from one stop to another, it's fast and easy. However, we discovered that most of the things we wanted to visit were nowhere near the transit line for medium distances; it was faster to take a bike and, for long distances, to drive.
Public transit people don't value their time? I wonder about the people stuck on I-76 as I pass over them on the regional rail here in Philly. Sure I deal with a late train now and then. But those people deal with center city traffic every day twice a day.
If the transit is faster that driving for you, then pretty sure you in the minority.
You have to get all the conditions just right for this to be the case
- You have to live next to the train (or next to a frequent bus which takes you to the train)
- You have to have a train going to the approximate right direction
- You have to work in place next to the train (or next to a frequent bus)
- Your work place is OK with you coming in late every once in a while, and your home life is OK with you coming back late every once in a while.
As long as you have a high-demand profession, plenty of potential workplaces and you are not on the fixed schedule, you can be picky and and choose next to transit - but many people don't.
Same goes with place to live - in my region you choose 2 of (inexpensive, next to transit, good public schools). If you have no kids, trains maybe faster for you, but if you want good public school your public transit commute turns super long.
> Some cities do have bus-only lanes, and others have full on subway systems which is great but most do not.
So, er, maybe a first step is installing more bus lanes? They really can make a tremendous difference, and they can transport far more people in a given amount of space than cars can. For instance, look at the picture on this article: https://www.independent.ie/regionals/dublin/dublin-news/priv...
That’s transport for 360 people in the four visible buses, plus 400 in the tram. And, er, four in the taxi, I suppose.
Yeah this is true in my city, Phoenix. We don’t have commuter rail just commuter buses. They take the car pool lane but so does every Tesla so that isn’t as big of an advantage as it sounds. We have light rail but it is a specific route in surface streets and much slower than driving on the freeway.
Yeah in dense urban areas in the US we have transit. Maybe it could be better but we have it. Other places are too spread out. There are not enough people going to the same places at the same times for a really useful transit system to exist.
E-bikes are great in Seattle until they are stolen. Bike theft is the one single issue that is driving down bike ridership in the city, since police and the city government don't really care about it.
This may surprise you, but not every ebike is guaranteed to be stolen. Get a heavy chain or angle-grinder-resistant U-lock, don't leave it out overnight, and you'll greatly reduce probability of theft.
The cops don't do much about bike theft. The perpetrators are the homeless, and they're basically untouchable. They have no assets, they can't pay any fines, and it's too expensive to keep them in jail.
Edit to add: It would be nice if they at least recovered the bikes and returned them to their owners but it seems like if they can't collect fines or put someone in prison they aren't interested. It woudn't be hard. Go to the local homeless hangouts. Any bikes nicer than what you could buy at Walmart are stolen, and most of the other ones are too. Run the serial numbers against theft reports and load them out.
Cops here in Chicago will not do anything about bike thefts. Multiple cases of vigilantes getting arrested after they took the law into their own hands when cops wouldnt retrieve their airtagged bike.
Vancouver, BC's airport Skytrain does this really well, Amsterdam is ok too. Having a train straight to/from international/domestic long distance travel is such a huge deal. I wish Van and Seattle had a fast and more accommodating rail link; as it stands I have to rent a car to get down there for a long winters show. Not really have to I guess, but otherwise I'd have to spend the night in a hotel or hostel. Your new elevated strain that extends 40 miles into the northern suburbs (if I have that right) is pretty wild though. We're lacking om that front for now.
And then them making to along I-90 instead of 520 also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'd LOVE a fast line from the east side to U-district. But I don't understand the logic behind the current scheme.
It's for a few reasons, let's see if I remember them all from the run-up to the Sound Transit 2 vote in 2008:
Mercer Island exists and has political clout (even though they tried to use that clout to force Sound Transit to not use the express lanes on I-90) and would demand a station no matter what.
Running across a floating bridge is hard enough and the Governor Albert Rosellini Bridge (SR 520 Floating Bridge to the Yanks) is the longest in the world. Going across the dual-named bridge that carries I-90 would be shorter and was seen as easier back then.
You don't have to turn around to serve Bellevue and then Redmond. Coming up from I-90 you hit the big part of Bellevue then you turn right and keep going northeast to Redmond. Coming from SR 520 you'd go south into Bellevue then have to U-turn to go back to meet BelRed and Overlake.
At the time, we didn't know when, if ever, the SR 520 bridge would be replaced. The previous span was a nightmare. It had a movable bit in the middle, the road deck sat at roughly water level, and would routinely sway so hard in strong winds that the bridge would have to be blocked off so the midspan section could be opened to relieve stress and prevent the thing from sinking. The I-90 bridges have no such issue (considering the damn thing had already sunk once in the 90s). There was no way to use the previous SR 520 bridge for light rail, though the new one is built to support it.
You also catch a lot more potential riders in station areas around I-90 and South Bellevue. The Points cities are basically HOAs with delusions of grandeur. There's no hope they'll gain more people in any of our lifetimes, meanwhile the areas the 2 Line passes through are already fairly populated by Eastside standards and have room to grow (also by Eastside standards).
Meanwhile, the 542 and 545 are comparatively very fast.
Wow I didn’t know the old bridge was such a nightmare. This also makes me wonder why this line only opened now, if it was voted on all the way back in 2008.
I do usually take the 542 now, and it works well-enough, but it only comes every 30 minutes which is annoying.
ST put priority to going north through Cap hill and up to Northgate (where there used to be a mall). Prepping the I90 bridge took a long time (8 years ago they shut down the express lanes, after adding an HOV to the main bridge) so far from my recall.
It was scheduled to open a few months ago but early this year they found a fault with the rail supports on the bridge that was missed as they were put in during early COVID and didn't have the ability to get them inspected as well as normal. So for the next year you've got Redmond to Bellevue with a missing link across the lake.
On the other side. I think that this month the main line from Northgate to Lynhood is going to open with several more stops so the system is expanding in a couple directions.
I completely agree that the 542 needs more frequency. Sound Transit likely saw the dip from Microsoft wholeheartedly embracing work-from-home and figured they could reuse the service hours. Remember that Metro has been suffering from a bad shortage of workers (drivers, maintenance, and operations) that they've only just started to recover from. This is important because Sound Transit contracts out operation of most of its transit service to the local agencies so Metro operates the 542, 545, 550, and others.
Hopefully now that Metro hiring and training is on the upswing Sound Transit will be able to get more bus service hours.
While attitude plays a part I can’t help but feel like ineptitude and broad corruption play a huge role as well.
In NYC transit isn’t viewed the way you’re describing it, pretty much everyone takes it. And yet NYC’s system expands at a glacial pace. A good part of the reason is because everything costs so damn much. Part of that is everyone wanting a piece of the pie so the simplest, cheapest option is very rarely the one chosen.
NYC used to have Robert Moses backstopping builds. Like him or hate him, he got things built on a scale nobody has managed to achieve since. In fact a lot of the infrastructure and parks people take for granted today were Moses’ handiwork.
I’m not suggesting that we need another Bob Moses, but he does prove there is some way to cut through the glacial movement of politics and bureaucracy
If the only person in 100 years to get things done in infrastructure in NYC was Bob Moses, then I think it’s time to admit that NYC needs another Bob Moses.
Repeating myself, I believe that many countries find a good way to make train stations destinations in and of themsevles
Japan, for instance, many train stations have small/medium/large shopping centers built on them. The train makes money not only by fares by but renting out the shops, running department stores, groceries stores, renting offices, apartments, etc... There's what I think is a positive feedback loop.
That's clearly not the only way to do it but it might be a way in the USA? because treating it as a public service just makes it a political tax burden. Something to be cut, under funded, etc....
Los Angeles used to have one of the largest public transit systems. Over 1000 miles of track (compare to NYC 650 miles?) and tons of stations. Most of it was built commercially to sell housing. According to this documentary it worked, until the deals they'd made with the cities to maintain the roads the trains went down ended up costing too much money.
It feels like in Japan, they kind of solved that issue by letting the train companies run their stations as retail/office spaces and all the other stuff mentioned above.
I think Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong probably have government based public transportation but it feels like they've managed to turned many stations into commerce hubs at least.
>Japan, for instance, many train stations have small/medium/large shopping centers built on them. The train makes money not only by fares by but renting out the shops, running department stores, groceries stores, renting offices, apartments, etc... There's what I think is a positive feedback loop.'
Yes, many of the transit companies in Japan are really more accurately described as real estate companies that own and operate train lines. Most of their profits come from the real estate, not the trains, and the trains are mainly a way to get people to go to the properties.
One big difference you can see between the US and Japan along these lines is the stations: in the US (and Canada from what I've seen), there's absolutely nothing inside the stations, just fare gates and a platform and train tracks. In Japan, the station has vending machines, shops, underground connections to nearby buildings, spaces for vendors to set up temporary stalls, etc. In the high-traffic stations, it's easy to stop in a convenience store, or in a Starbucks, before getting on your next train, and of course the train company is getting money from that in the form of rent. Some really big stations have larger shopping areas attached. But the US seems allergic to renting out commercial space in stations for some reason, and wants transit systems to get all their funding from fares and taxes.
How does Japan deal with the convenience tax, that is, stores within a train station charging more for the same product than stores half a mile away? I remember passing through Portland Airport a few years ago and seeing signs saying the stores in the airport were legally prohibited from charging more than the retail prices found elsewhere in the city.
Every time I go through a retail development in conjunction with transit of any sort, prices are higher, and I make a conscious decision not to spend any money there but instead go to more wallet-friendly places near where I live.
I don't know how much more retail rental prices are but I haven't seen prices of products be higher at station stores. I can only guess, part of it might be culture and part of it might be there's so much competition. If you won't sell at a good prices the stand next to you will or the store just outside?
As for culture, maybe this is also competition but I've always been surprised that vending machines in Japanese hotels cost the same or not more than say 10 cents more than the convenience stores outside. A soda 500ml soda at the vending machine in the hotel is say $1.30 which is the same price at 7/11 or the vending machines outside. Where as in the USA, that same vending machine in the hotel would sell the same soda for $5-$8
I can only guess it's because there's a convenience store usually within a 2 minute walk of most hotels, open 24/7, and they're usually a relatively pleasant walk (vs walking across a huge stroad and giant parking lots like much of the USA). Still, the vending machine is more convenient so I'd expect a price hike but given I don't see one I suspect culture has something to do with it too?
AFAIK, there's nothing legally preventing stores from charging more at more-convenient locations. However, in practice I don't normally see it. I believe (not sure) that major convenience store chains, for instance, have fixed prices for the same reason Walmart does: it's too much trouble to track different prices at different locations. As for restaurants and stuff like that, there's usually a lot of competition, so I just don't normally see obviously-higher prices at locations in stations or airports. Of course, some things are obviously more expensive than alternatives: milk at a convenience store is more expensive than almost any grocery store, for instance, though usually not by much. But for whatever reason, I just don't see such obviously and ridiculously jacked-up prices as I see, for instance, in American airports.
It's kind of a reinforcing cycle. Since public transit is terrible, everyone wants cars. Since everyone wants cars, there isn't a lot of interest in public transit.
Yep. It's chicken and egg problem. You have to invest so heavily before reaching a tipping point of it being a realistic alternative to cars for most American's. Only at that point does it make sense. Where as with cars, we've already made much of that investment. I know it has a high maintenance, economic, and ecologic burden but that's not what we've optimized for. We've optimized for complete freedom and autonomy of movement. We have a number of light rail lines in my city. They mean nothing to the vast majority of our citizens because they either live too far or work too far. And by too far, I mean that proverbial last mile. The other problem is they're not always direct. Just like air travel, this adds time to your trip. People are willing to accept it on air travel because it's rather uncommon, but when your daily commute could be 20 minutes by car or 45 minutes by rail most people will drive. Not to mention, the run times are commonly every 20-30 minutes and are not always consistently running on time. This means even if you plan your day perfectly, a single round trip could leave you sitting for up to an hour at the rail stops just waiting on top of your 45 minute travel time. We have auto traffic, but nothing that severe. We also have sprawled significantly. The implication of which being people drive long distances to work as the status quo. With transportation, long distances means more stops and longer travel time. When driving, most people's commutes see an extra 10-30% of time than non-rush times. But it's fairly predictable and much quicker than trying to get to rail.
All that is also ignoring the other big items: weather & culture. I'm in Dallas, although this applies to many southern cities, where people most people are not used to the weather. Going to speak broadly, this applies to a vast majority of folks. They leave their HVAC home to their HVAC car to their HVAC offices and so on. The women especially get dressed up and do their make-up and hair daily before ever being seen my a non-housemate. Men are often still dressing in clothing that they'd like to keep clean. We don't carry changes of clothes around with us or have a natural style (like I see in European cities where biking is normal). Sweating and being rained on and such is completely foreign to us. We generally wouldn't show up to work after having walked a mile outside. This is why we don't even ride bikes for transportation even when going short distances. It would require a huge shift in perspective and culture around these things.
Weather is even more of a problem in places that are colder. Walking and waiting outside is a tough proposition when it is well below freezing, and the sidewalks are covered in slippery ice or multiple feet of snow, and transit is likely to be cancelled or delayed.
It’s also a matter of politics. No amount of investment in public rail is going to make it so that disruptive elements are effectively removed to the same degree as in my car.
That’s before we talk availability, comfort, etc.
Other than subways, public transportation is always going to be subpar.
In public transit you can sit down and read something during the ride, but not in a car. So the further you go the more public transits advantage grows as the total effort doesn't go up with distance, it is much nicer to sit in public transit for an hour than drive for an hour.
> it is much nicer to sit in public transit for an hour than drive for an hour.
I agree but the vast majority of people i speak to do not. They would much rather listen to a podcast or music than deal with the crazy people on public transit.
I've never dealt with crazy people on public transit and have used it daily for decades, everyone else just wants to mind their own business, although I live in Europe. So that problem is something that isn't inherent to public transit.
In the end public transit doesn't have more crazy people than a grocery store where I live, and I don't see why there would be in USA either except if public transit is grossly mismanaged encouraging vagrants or criminals to live in them. If you throw those out just like grocery stores does then the issue is solved immediately.
>"Saying things are getting better doesn't make you feel better," Hochul said, "especially when you've just heard about someone being stabbed in the throat or thrown onto the subway tracks. There's a psychological impact."
Maybe the balance will change as drivers also get crazier. The roads have been like Mad Max ever since the pandemic. At some point your odds of encountering insanity might be become lower on public transport.
For a adults, sure. As long as there aren't a lot of transfers, and it isn't significantly slower.
If you are traveling with young children though, public transit is terrible. Even if you ignore the hastle of getting the kids on the train or bus on time, and probably having to bring a stroller with you, keeping those children entertained while moderately quiet without disturbing the other riders too much is no small feat.
> it is much nicer to sit in public transit for an hour than drive for an hour.
Maybe to you but certainly not to me. I’ll gladly take a considerably longer car ride in the comfort of my vehicle with my music blasting over sitting next to strangers on a train. I have no problem with public transportation existing but it isn’t something I enjoy.
For Skyline, I don’t think you can discount all of the years of political effort to try to cancel it. All that work did was just to slow it down and make it more expensive and risky for the companies involved.
In theory, starting in West Oahu made sense because it’s cheaper to build out there, and TOD will grow the tax base to support the urban stations, but you have to actually build something for that to work.
Oh definitely, we can't discount the effects of lobbying efforts.
It very clearly should have gone from the airport to Waikiki Beach (or at the very least Ala Monana center), which would have actually taken tourist traffic off the roads. But if it did that, those tourists might not rent cars or take taxis! The rental car lobby and taxi lobby don't like that one bit.
When I was out there The Bus was great. By far one of the best public transit I've seen in the US (clean, mostly on time, seemed pretty safe, fairly priced). I believe I took some sort of light rail for a few trips as well. I suspect a lot of the tourist money helps.
There’s an argument in Atlanta that mass transit hasn’t expanded more outwards because it tends to bring in more problems in terms of people. I think people are starting to change on this, but the cost would now be massive,
Atlanta's one huge success with transit that it doesn't get enough credit for is that it connects directly to the airport. So many other cities with "better" transit have complex schemes of switching between different buses operated by the airport authority and the city before you can get to the main system. In Atlanta you simply go over to baggage claim and the train is right there.
Too bad they screwed this up when they built the International Terminal, which is connected with a bus on surface streets that gets stuck in traffic and at lights. If you're flying an airline with a presence in the domestic terminal, you can use the internal transit system to get to the International Terminal but otherwise you're stuck switching from the train to the bus or vice versa. It's an annoying bit of extra friction that shouldn't exist.
Atlanta’s huge success is that the trains run on time and they have been able to maintain the automated train control. Atlanta doesn’t get enough credit for being a blue city that actually does some basic stuff right.
Portland, Salt Lake City have pretty good connections. Seattle also if you don't mind walking through the parking garage (often security will snake back to the lightrail station, you know you are in for a bad day). SFO has Bart to the airport, Caltrain is also possible but you have to connect to Bart for one station. I admit that I've been to SFO a few times and have never bothered taking Bart (in contrast, I always take Max from PDX).
In the UK anyone who matters lives or at least works in London, which has always had decent transit and has been gradually, incrementally nudging cars out of the centre for about two decades now (congestion charge, ULEZ, gradual pedestrianization of very central parts) as well as improving the alternatives (crossrail, actually decent cycle routes). Part of it is probably simply that London never completely stopped building new transit for too long; as much as UK people complain about transit development happening in fits and starts, there's always been a sufficiently new and shiny line to point to as a success and an example of how transit should be (Victoria, JLE, DLR, crossrail). But I suspect it's mostly just not having your expectations set by a largely LA-based media.
It does apply to the UK. Very little new public transit gets built, what's there is permanently overloaded. Whenever I visit I regularly end up on trains where you have to stand for the entire 1hr journey. Many lines are full and can't be easily upgraded short of massive signalling reworks (moving block etc). Reliability is poor because there's no slack in the system. Root cause is more people + little/no new capacity.
It’s all relative, of course. I live in Dublin, a city not exactly known for its amazing public transport (we are currently on attempt number three to build a proper metro - we’re currently at the planning approval stage, so it’s probably doomed). At some point a colleague from San Francisco who’d been living here a while mentioned how good the public transport was (and this was a few years back; it was worse back then than now). I was quite confused, until I visited San Francisco.
And then on the other hand, every time I’m in Germany I’m amazed at how good the public transport is. But I’m fully aware that complaining about the trains is basically a national sport in Germany.
Like, you’re complaining about the trains being full, but at least the trains _exist_.
I didn't say it doesn't try, I said relatively little gets built. Crossrail is a great project, notable for its uniqueness, and the fact that so much is underground (the only place you can build nowadays, and even then just barely). HS2 has to go above ground and doesn't seem to really be happening.
> transit is largely viewed as a welfare program for poor people who are not (yet) able to afford cars.
In most of the US, transit riders can’t wait to be able to afford a car and get out of transit. For good reason: the transit experience for them is terrible
The article mentions how global cities outside the US are building out urban rail systems.
Here's some more detail about China, which has the two largest transit systems in the world: Shanghai and Beijing.
In 1993, Shanghai had one line running 2.7 miles with 4 stations. Less than 30 years later, the system had 15 lines, 500 miles of track, and 500 stations. [1]
And in that same time frame, the Beijing subway system was expanded, from 2 lines in 2002 to 27 lines and 500 miles of track, with 13 million riders per day in 2022. [2]
Also in that time, 30 other cities in China got subway systems as well.[3]
In 1993, China's per-capita GDP was $537. By comparison, per-capita GDP in the US was 50 times larger (about $23k). Since then, the gap has narrowed. US per-capita GDP is now 5x of China (66k vs 12k).
China demonstrates that, even with small GDP, if you prioritize the needs of the people over entrenched commercial interests, it can be done.
In the US, if you prioritize the wants of the people, you'll just get wider roads. The people there don't want better public transit; you can see this every time these discussions come up on HN and Americans here respond about how much they hate riding on public transit or walking anywhere. And their all-suburban cities aren't dense enough to make it work economically or practically anyway: everything is just too far apart.
Finally, the largest transit system in the world isn't in China, it's in Tokyo, Japan (though to be fair, it isn't really a single system since it's run by many different companies).
> In the US, if you prioritize the wants of the people, you'll just get wider roads. The people there don't want better public transit; you can see this every time these discussions come up on HN and Americans here respond about how much they hate riding on public transit or walking anywhere.
Everybody wants a car because public transit sucks. Do you think that those people would still want a car if they lived somewhere with a good public transit and walkability?
This is a tired meme and essentially an ad hominem "silly Americans never experienced civilization so they don't know better", often repeated by American "urbanists" too. I grew up in Moscow, USSR. With 2 min subway, trams, rail, buses and trolleybuses going everywhere. There was no private car ownership in the USSR until 1950s so nothing was built "for cars". Yet everyone dreamed of owning a car. There were films about people getting cars. The government ran lottery where prizes were appliances and the main prize was a car. The wait list to buy an overpriced (~2 annual average incomes) car was 5+ years. People still bought them at 3x price on the black market. Some people bought motorcycles and drove them with a sidecar as poor replacement for an unaffordable for them car. People went to work in the oil fields in the north for a year to afford a car. So yes, people do want cars even after they experienced the wonders of public transit. People who have anxiety driving or cannot give up their drinking habit are a small minority.
> This is a tired meme and essentially an ad hominem "silly Americans never experienced civilization so they don't know better"
It has nothing to do whit Americans, nor did I imply it. Simply put, as it wasn't already simply put, my claim is that changing incentives changes peoples (not just Americans) wants. I would really like to hear why you think that that isn't true. I didn't even mention the US in my post, GP did. But he isn't making an ad hominem but somehow, according to you, I am. Is that because you agree with him and not with me so I'm making a fallacy and not him? Either way, neither did I nor GP make an ad hominem. If you thing that somebody made an ad hominem show some good faith and show where and why is it an ad hominem.
> I grew up in Moscow, USSR. With 2 min subway, trams, rail, buses and trolleybuses going everywhere. There was no private car ownership in the USSR until 1950s so nothing was built "for cars". Yet everyone dreamed of owning a car. There were films about people getting cars. The government ran lottery where prizes were appliances and the main prize was a car. The wait list to buy an overpriced (~2 annual average incomes) car was 5+ years. People still bought them at 3x price on the black market. Some people bought motorcycles and drove them with a sidecar as poor replacement for an unaffordable for them car. People went to work in the oil fields in the north for a year to afford a car. So yes, people do want cars even after they experienced the wonders of public transit.
It didn't occur to you that maybe back then people dreamed of owning a car because it was a novelty, a status symbol? Are they still making films about getting a car in Russia? Why not?
I'm not saying that nobody wants or needs a car. All I'm saying is that in places with good public transit and walkablity not everybody needs a car for day to day life, and of those that don't need a car majority don't dream of getting a car as you put it.
> People who have anxiety driving or cannot give up their drinking habit are a small minority.
Wow, everybody that doesn't dream of owning a car suffers anxiety or is an alcoholic... really?
Changing incentives does not change what people want, it can only change what people do, IME. And I am pretty sure I described why I think so in my post - the incentives in the USSR were against private ownership of cars yet people still wanted that, even though the vast majority could not afford them and kept using public transportation. It's not limited to cars though, people also want to live in big stand-alone houses but in many countries are forced to live in tiny apartment, for example. Does not mean they want to share room with their grandma and listen to what their neighbors are watching on TV, does it?
>It didn't occur to you that maybe back then people dreamed of owning a car because it was a novelty, a status symbol?
It could be for whatever reason, I am not a psychic to read people minds, for all I care they wanted cars because they liked the sounds they make with the horn. The empirical fact remains unchanged: people wanted cars despite the developed public transportation network and heavy burden of car ownership. Which is contrary to the "urbanists" claim that people only want cars because of the lacking public transportation and as soon as the latter becomes "good" people will abandon cars. Some might, some people still want cars. If you see footage of Tokyo, London or whatever place is touted as the public transportation paradaise, you will still see cars on the streets.
>Everybody wants a car because public transit sucks.
>I'm not saying that nobody wants or needs a car.
These two statements cannot be true at the same time, can they?
>Wow, everybody that doesn't dream of owning a car suffers anxiety or is an alcoholic... really?
Did you notice people on the Internet do these sound imitations in writing if and only if they cannot make a concise argument? It's rather peculiar. You can see somebody writing pretty well and making logical points until they can't and then, suddenly, it's "er,...,hhmmm, wow, ugh" etc?
There was no "er,...,hhmmm, wow, ugh" in the commenter's post. To the extent that rambling and evasive rhetoric is being deployed here, it's coming from you.
First you made a plainly irrational (and basically pretty silly) assertion -- that the only people who don't want to own cars are anxiety cases and alcoholics. Right here, on the internet, in front of all these people. And so you got rightly cornered and called out for it.
You then followed that up by attributing a quote to person that you're responding to ("Everybody wants a car because public transit sucks") that they plainly didn't say, and then put it alongside something they did say, in order to claim they were making some kind of contradiction.
It's difficult to see what you might hope to accomplish with such tactics.
>Do you think that those people would still want a car if they lived somewhere with a good public transit and walkability?
Yes, I really do. You can see it in comments here on HN and any other place the transit-vs-cars discussion comes up and Americans are involved. Sure, there's some Americans who'd really like to live someplace with good public transit and walkability, but don't be fooled: most Americans (IMO) just aren't like this and really do want to stick with their car-based lifestyle. If most Americans were like you say, there'd be a huge exodus of Americans moving to Europe.
So you don't think that people respond to incentives? Quite an interesting take.
> most Americans (IMO) just aren't like this and really do want to stick with their car-based lifestyle.
Because nobody, not just Americans, likes change. I'd like to stick with my public transit/walking lifestyle but if overtime that lifestyle becomes hard to maintain I'd want to get a car.
> If most Americans were like you say, there'd be a huge exodus of Americans moving to Europe.
You've missed the point. I made absolutely no claims about Americans. If I made a claim about people it was about all people, Americans, Europeans, Asians... That claim is that people respond to incentives.
When a person moves from a place with bad public transit and walkablity to place with good public transit and walkablity it is likely that they'll go car free or at least use their care much less. Same applies the other way around.
>You've missed the point. I made absolutely no claims about Americans.
You didn't, but I did. Like any place, Americans have a culture of their own, and car ownership is a big, big part of that culture in most of the country. (Similarly, owning guns is a big part of that culture for a large fraction of the population.)
>When a person moves from a place with bad public transit and walkablity to place with good public transit and walkablity it is likely that they'll go car free or at least use their care much less. Same applies the other way around.
Well, of course: people have to be practical at some point. Someone moving to a car-bound hellscape is going to need to get a car to have an enjoyable life, and someone moving to a dense city where car ownership is extremely expensive and inconvenient is likely to not want a car at all. But people don't just randomly move to these places: they move there because they want to for some reason, and the ubiquity (or not) of cars is probably a big part of that reason for many. People who absolutely love driving everywhere and hate public transit aren't going to move from suburban USA to Manhattan or Berlin or Tokyo, and people who like living carfree in major cities aren't likely to make the reverse move unless there's some huge incentive (high-paying job, family obligation, etc.) and even here they're probably not going to be too happy with the change.
I really feel like a large portion of the pro-dense-city people really think that almost everyone really secretly wants to live this way and only buys into car culture because it's forced on them. While growing up in a particular environment obviously has a huge effect on your personal preferences, and people sometimes change their opinions after seeing or experiencing a different environment, I think they're discounting how many people really do like car culture, even after seeing the alternatives. My view is that car ownership is a luxury, and a car-based society has huge economic and ecological costs and is ultimately unsustainable outside of rural areas, and eventually more-efficient societies are going to outcompete car-based societies (or, they'll both be destroyed in an ecological collapse leading to general societal collapse). I think we're already seeing a lot of this with the US, where labor costs there are absolutely insane compared to the rest of the world.
Absolutely yes. Families with children would want it. People with erratic schedules and demands for travel would want it. The aged would want it. People who highly value their and their children’s personal safety and security would want it. People living in harsh climates would want it. People with last-mile issues would want it. People with certain disabilities would want it. People who value their personal time highly would want it. People whose jobs require carrying equipment, but don’t need a company truck, would want it. People who want personal space while traveling would want it. People who need to get to places reliably, and thus want the freedom to reroute their trip in the event of an infrastructure failure, would want it. People who don’t want to be at the mercy of work stoppages when trying to get from A to B would want it. People providing Meals on Wheels would want it. People whose trips involve several intermediate destinations would want it. People who enjoy day-trips and vacations to off-the-beaten-track domestic locations would want it. And, blessedly, almost all Americans can satisfy those needs with their personal automobile on well-maintained public roadways.
Now it is true that age 18-45 healthy childless commuters living in small apartments in safe neighborhoods who go to the same few locations all their lives (should we call them the privileged ones, the boring ones?)…they may get by comfortably without a car. But they’d still want one.
I guess I'm one of your so-called "boring" ones. I fucking hate cars. They're expensive, they're dangerous, and finding parking is a massive time and money suck. Living life getting shuttled from bubble to bubble in your little bubble car is no life at all.
China's public transit success was because of their small gdp per capita, not in spite of it. Their developing economy gave them labor at slave wages and allowed the government to just bulldoze peoples houses without much backlash. Not having those things are the biggest problems the US faces when it comes to building infrastructure.
The heart of the problem is that cars became popular for the majority of the people due to freedom and convenience, causing most of the infrastructure to focus on them. The existing public transit saw worse service and problems such as crime or cleanliness. New projects become more difficult and costly to build, and were hijacked for political causes. Willingness to fund even the existing projects fell.
Nobody wants to ride public transit that is unreliable/late, has limited service times/areas, prone to strikes, dirty or unsafe, etc. It's easier and/or better to own a car or Uber in most areas. It's not really going to improve since we're stuck in a catch-22.
It's not just market forces though; most municipalities in the US legally mandate a focus on cars. For example, most downtown areas in the US are pre-existing, as they're largely illegal to build today due to mandatory off-street parking minimums among other onerous requirements.
Those mandates are due to the market forces. Go ahead and build a building without parking. Tenants or customers are going to bring their cars anyways and try to find street parking, or they'll go somewhere else. If you make it inconvenient for car and the other option is inconvenient public transit, then people will just look for alternative housing or stores that are more convenient.
If no one is going to go to my shop with no parking, that's fine. Let it get built, and then let it die due to lack of business. No need for any heavy-handed mandates.
This is because of nuisance and the lack of private law enforcement. People will still park illegally if there is no parking in your establishment and the other people who will be affected by the illegal parking, will get upset, will call police, who will tow the illegally parked cars, and the owners of those will, in turn, get upset and, overall, it makes a lot of people unhappy. At the end the upset people will vote again for the current status quo of required off-street parking.
It's not just the "need for parking" it's the regulation that you need a MASSIVE AMOUNT of parking.
The formula used to calculate "required" parking is based on the theoretical maximum amount of customers for said store, resulting in grocery stores having parking lots 20 times bigger than the store itself.
Is this true? This doesn't jive with my lived experience, particularly when you consider walkability/wheelability.
The suburban shopping mall, oddly enough, is something of a counterexample. People in aggregate will easily put up with the agony of walking half a mile from a parking space, and extrapolating to a setting more urban, this is roughly what downtown St. Louis around Busch Stadium is like.
The MetroLink isn't the most convenient thing either, but Busch Stadium and whatever-the-Kiel-Center-is-called-this-time are very well trafficked for Cardinals and Blues games (particularly in light of very limited parking availability), and shopping and eating over on Washington Ave west of Broadway doesn't seem to suffer either.
"Mandate" and "market forces" are two terms directly at odds here.
If this was really a "market forces" situation, then parking price would be what determine the equilibrium, not a zoning law article written by the local government.
Market forces would be nice, but actually the minimums are completely overestimated. Climate Town had a good video about it https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8 Tl;dr old low quality research, bad stats, lead to numbers that don't make sense, but in many places are still enforced; overbuiling led to larger distances incentivising more driving and acting against small commerce areas.
… and building for car-centric zoning and infrastructure makes all of walking, bicycling, public transit, and automobile travel a ton worse and/or more expensive, forming a harmful feedback loop. At first the cars were freedom. Now they’re cages. That you’re forced to buy. And not even for much benefit.
Also, it likely worked better before cars became popular. In Dublin, at peak, in 1928, we had 23 tram lines. By 1949 they were all gone. Today we have two to four, depending on how you count them (some branching is involved), but they were only built 20 years ago.
What happened to the old ones? They were largely replaced with buses. Some of Dublin’s bus lines _still_ follow the path of tramlines from a century ago. And the thing is, _at the time_, this kind of worked. Not many people had cars in 1928. There was no significant traffic, and the buses operated about as fast as the trams, and were cheaper to maintain (and the trams from a century ago weren’t the 400 person capacity monsters you get now; they were similar capacity to buses). A few decades later, when traffic picked up and suddenly the buses weren’t so fine, the tram infra was all gone, and it was far too late to go back.
This seems like a plug for a book than anything with a definitive answer. The pull quote near the end of the article implies that the rest of the world has simply caught up and is pressing forward while the US has simply stopped.
I was in Florence not long ago and they are building out a very impressive light-rail network [1]. Twenty years ago a similarly ambitious network was planned in Cincinnati, OH and it was voted down 2-1 [2].
The tone of the article is one of advocacy rather than reasoned analysis, as I assume is the tone of the book. That is not what public transit needs at this point in the US.
Many urban transportation types and city planners in general give off a culty, can-I-tell-you-about-my-Lord-and-Savior-Mass-Transit vibe that is very off-putting to many, if not most Americans. Their writings gloss over the practical issues of American weather, last-mile, families with children, lugging home shopping, aging…along with deprecating any personal valuations of saving time, spontaneity, avoiding unpleasant interactions, carrying your large purchases with you…. You ignore my real world, lived experience in your screeds, I ignore you. And so they shout into the void.
Not the *real crème de la crème”, unless it is a photo op. Not regularly, and they have access to limos whenever the occasion calls for it. Their staff handles the logistics and staff quite often use automobiles. But an occasional trip to Lincoln Center, sure. Even shopping on 5th Avenue, though the packages will be delivered later by an auto or van or whatever vehicles those sorts of people use.
New York doesn't have good public transit, he was talking about other countries where the top do use public transit since it is clean, comfortable and safe.
America is HUGE... And all of the big cities seem unable to herd their own cats. People often forget that the USA is really 50 small countries wearing a trench coat. Just look the maps linked below. The EU has all its people piled up close where as the US has HUGE tracts of low population areas. That's why you'll never see a high speed coast to coast rail system here. logistically it's just not possible (at least not on the west coast). I live in one of the unpopulated areas and by car it takes over an hour of continuous travel at 70 MPH (115 KPH) to get to a smallish big city. There's just too much empty space.
I could see local areas like California or New York getting some high speed rail but even then, how many people would use it and where would they be going?
> People often forget that the USA is really 50 small countries wearing a trench coat
Then why do all of those 50 countries has so extremely similar problems? Not all have the same level of those problems, but the states with the least murder rate are similar to the EU countries with the highest murder rate etc, or good public transit is like EU bad public transit etc. Police brutality in the states with the least is like police brutality in the worst part of EU etc.
Cleary there must be some very shared culture for that to happen, as there are many such extreme stats compared to the rest of the world. Otherwise you would have a lot of states that were like average European countries.
I've seen a lot of suggestions that there should at least be a high speed rail corridor from Chicago to NYC and one from SF to LA because those are 2 of the most highly trafficked domestic flight paths.
The fact there isn't really high speed rail connections across large cities in the Midwest is kind of silly considering there isn't much terrain to contend with like there is on the coasts. Even the 1 new route Amtrak introduced from Chicago to Minneapolis has seen pretty high demand.
I mean, the EU is 27 small countries barely even bothering to wear the trenchcoat. It is not like the EU has some sort of integrated transport policy, except in the vaguest terms; every country does its own, and they’re often quite different. In many countries it even varies quite a lot between cities.
I lived in New York City until 2020. According to the 2010 census, the majority of households in New York City do not own a car. I got around fine via buses, subway and railroads. If need be I could take a taxi. The subway runs all night, all over the city, as do buses. The city even improved its transit - the subway now goes to the Javits Center. The Long Island Railroad now goes to Grand Central Station.
I was in San Francisco once and the latest Caltrain going from Sunnyvale to San Francisco was before 11:30PM, and the latest Caltrain going from San Francisco to Sunnyvale was three minutes after midnight. In New York PATH trains, LIRR trains, Metro North trains, New Jersey transit trains all leave well past that.
My question is, who is constructing these rail systems in each of the countries? My understanding was that Chinese companies had built a lot of the biggest subway systems in various cities from Kiev to Singapore.
For political reasons that would be untenable in the US. Therefore we have to pay full price to build a thing we’re not good at building and don’t have the ramped up supply chains to support. If there’s only one company left that builds a component you need, guess what? You pay whatever they ask.
>These are the statistics underlying the reality that in San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Boston; Atlanta; and many other major cities in the U.S., not a single mile of rail transit is currently under construction.
Here are some of the current U.S. cities with rail projects under construction:
Los Angeles, California - Extensions to the existing light rail network
As much as I like to see it happening, San Diego is too spread out geographically to make use of their rail projects effectively, unless you're really well situated on the lines. That said, it makes for a great way to explore the city for a day.
Has the author of this article ever driven across the US? It takes days and days. The US is huge; it makes absolutely no sense to build mass transit connecting that many places where people live when it's so uneconomical. The US isn't China; the government can't just decree that something happen.
The states along the coasts aren't huge (they are roughly like large European countries) and there isn't good public transit there either compared to the rest of the first world, and that is where most people live.
No one is really talking about connecting tiny places really faraway from each other. But cities in 1-6 hours drive of each other and sensible locations inside them clearly make very much sense to connect with public transit.
Unless almost everyone who wants to travel already owns a car which they and their family can quickly, safely and directly drive (with reasonable luggage) to the very doorstep of any given 1-6 hour destination. Which is the case in the US. Will be even more the case if cheap Chinese electric cars ever hit the shores. Makes very much less sense then.
San Francisco to LA is about a seven hour drive. It’s about 90 minutes flight, plus getting to the airport and getting through security in the airport and all the general airport-induced slowness. Given a top-quality conventional high-speed line (300km/h) it would be two hours (so in practice faster than the flight).
Exactly. Most Americans have to commute long distances crossing multiple states. Daily commutes between places as far apart as Texas and Florida are common. Lots of people working in New York commute by car every day from Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina, and even Mississippi. There aren't any kind of clusters of people living together in the US, normally called "cities" in other countries, because Americans all live equally spaced apart across the continent, so that's why public transit can't work in the US.
sarcasm aside, most of those have no business being called cities, as they don't have the density to support city services like buses or light rail, and should only be called big towns or suburban sprawl.
This seems to come up once a month or so on HN. Here is a non-ideological take, which I suppose means everyone will hate it because it doesn't echo their pet theory:
The US's basic problem with large building projects nowadays is federalism. There are so many different jurisdictions that opponents can always find some court or legislative body that they can exploit to slow down or stop the project.
Everything else flows from that.
Lawsuits? Too many courts.
Legislative opposition? Too many governmental units. Even if the public as a whole supports it, some jurisdictions will not.
Administrative permit hearings, which go on endlessly? Too many governmental units.
Yes, things used to work better in the US, but things change and all systems decay.
The new York metro has pretty much become a prop location for tiktokers. They might as well make it an official partnership at this point and get some of their fare revenue back
It’s hard in the US because of politics, corruption, favors, contracts for the purpose to burn money, transit other than cars is only for poor people (a US thing), poor people aren’t a priority, reputation for working on transit for people won’t get you reelected by your rich donors and constituents.
It’s kind of a shame because whenever Americans get back from Europe they rave about being able to take the train everywhere.
Context: this is a copy I posted r/boulder some years ago to people's wish for ( long promised) rail to Denver.
I commuted to Denver daily from Boulder, CO for three years and never drove during that time.
My shortlist of why I only want bus service to Boulder County ( for reference I typically pick up the bus at Table Mesa).
I only moved to Boulder in 2009 so I know I haven't carried as much tax burden as some people who "dream of light rail to Denver" but I'm very very happy with the FlatIron Flyers.
1. Buses can adapt to weather conditions
- Frequently coworkers training up from the tech center were 10x more likely to have issues with trains when the weather was icy, during the three years that I compiled this list of why I prefer buses.
2.Buses can adapt to other buses on the same route failing
- the RTD train infrastructure has very few places that light rail can pass one another so it doesn't matter if your train is working if the one ahead of your fails
3. Buses do not have routes altered/closed for maintenance
- when I would take the light rail to the company's Parker office or visiting friends it was surprising to have to get off and catch a bus around a section of rail under repair.
- I acknowledge that sometimes specific stops can be closed or moved but rarely is a whole section down and require alternate solutions (i.e. deboarding the train to board a bus to deboard on the other side of maintenance and board a new train)
4. Buses have express options.
- see the comment above regarding the few places that RTD rails can pass other trains
- note when the W line opened the express bus routes were removed, I think that was also true with another line but I can't remember. My favorite part of this is the coworkers I know who used that route started driving because the train was significantly longer commute times.
5. Buses typically have storage for up to six bikes per vehicle and don't block entries of others
- as an avid bike-the-final-mile commuter having storage for bikes that don't hinder other passengers boarding or exiting is nice (if you want to complain that it sometimes means staying at a few stops longer go ahead)
6. Buses Can turn over quicker at end of the line
- waiting for the E Line to swap directions at union station was comically slow when compared to catching the FF2 that just dropped off people and pulled around to pick up.
7. Buses can reroute around accidents that happen.
- E line and other northbound rail had to stop because of a car accident on the I-25 on the other side of a jersey wall where someone died. But the law says all traffic must be stopped from crossing an area of a certain diameter from the accident scene. So the next train had to stop. No place for passengers to deboard in the middle of the railway and blocked trains behind it.
- See comment above where other trains would be impacted as well
8. IMO, The payment and boarding method is a better User experience on the bus.
- this was more true before the mobile app could hold an annual pass
9. I'm sure I could come up with more reasons.
- oh, I'd rather take the AB to the airport than the A-train (sheesh that is a long train ride for such a short distance)
- oh, someone just mentioned the "rich people lane" yes, the bus uses the HOV lane! How great.
10. Air circulation is better inter city buses
When my office opens I'll return to bike/bus commuting. It is a bummer that during covid the express buses have stopped but understandable. The few times that I have bused in during 2020 the added time of FF1 was noticeable. Typically bike/express-bus takes me 50minutes house door to office door
The bus eventually went up to $1 per ride but I still think about these two options and wish my town had something like it. With a few small improvements I don’t see why we can’t reasonably subsidize these relatively cheap options in most towns/small cities. The rental car one would be harder, but even the bus would suffice. It notably didn’t stop at any grocery stores, only Walmarts so that’s another thing to improve. But I’d give up my car in a second for that bus back home.
I’m not even sure if this is still their active website http://0060325.netsolhost.com/about.htm but it gives you a picture of what I’m talking about. There’s either another service or a replacement that is $2.00 instead of $1.00 that goes by DCT from what I can tell. I don’t live there anymore so hard to know the current setup. I’m really underselling how good that bus was/is.