It's a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop: Public transport needs riders to fund / justify it; and people drive because the public transportation sucks.

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xp84 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People already take transit everywhere it has been economic to build good transit. You’re simply not going to have a good system in any area outside the built-up urban areas, because you would need to hire an army of drivers and buy many thousands of vehicles, at absurd expense, to provide a rider experience that would be even close to acceptable in spread-out areas. Transit works due to many origins and destinations being concentrated in small areas. Blocks full of five story apartment buildings. Stadiums. Airports, ferries, commuter rail termini. Tall office buildings, colleges, hospitals. Applying the same model to cities that aren’t big enough to have professional sports teams, the only kind of transit you can afford to build is buses that run every hour or so, and which require you to walk a mile or two at each end for the privilege of using it.

i’m arguing that this is not a chicken or egg situation because the costs involved to bring that chicken to life (especially when starting today - at least the 19th-century head start NYC got allowed them to build quick and cheap!) would be so high that your farm is going to be bankrupt before anybody lays any eggs.

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buuyytp 3 hours ago | parent [-]

No one is talking about spread out areas. This conversation is about US cities.

Pick a US city, then pick a neighborhood within that city you feel is emblematic of the pattern you observe. We've selected a few -- Seattle, Minneapolis -- go ahead and you pick one where a US city would not be able to support it. Then we can look at that example together.

	▲	gwbas1c 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> This conversation is about US cities. Yes, exactly. Massachusetts; specifically the area around Boston, has this problem. There's plenty of land set aside for public transportation, but it's significantly underused for the reasons I described a few posts above. When I started going into Boston one day a week, I tried the commuter rail twice, but it was so horrible I decided it was easier, and more comfortable to sit in traffic. (Even though it costs about 1/3rd to take the commuter rail into Boston.) I was expecting an experience like Caltrain, I used to take it between Palo Alto and San Francisco and it was delightful. Not only are the trains more reliable, the seats are comfortable too.

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supertrope 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When the Federal, state, and local government direct 97% of transportation infrastructure spending toward making driving easy, we should not be surprised when 97% of people choose to drive their daily trips.

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LorenPechtel 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a big problem with transit in the suburbs: speed. I'm going to compare the two systems I have some reasonable idea on:

Local. Because of all the stops buses average 25 mph. Long runs, this adds up considerably. It can't be fixed without a lot more buses and a lot fewer stops.

Shanghai. Buses stop much less frequently. More walking, but a bus is not that much slower than a car. And the subway doesn't have traffic jams, long runs you'll almost always get there faster with walking/subway than by car. There is also a climate factor--they get more rain but much fewer extreme days.