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Buses can be pretty good -- with HOV or transit-only lanes, fewer stops, etc. My city is bus-dominated but creams many train-heavy cities in transit commute share.
The biggest advantage with buses is that a rider heading for the hub (on a hub-spoke system) will usually have a bus within an easy walk at the spoke end, if the local service is any good. Buses can fan out at the end of each route, while collecting into HOV lanes for fast trips the rest of the way in. Each HOV lane can handle several or numerous routes, so any stop on those gets fast, frequent service.
I believe you are from Seattle? It's a fast growing city on a isthmus and doesn't have a large enough black population to have the racial legacy of many cities back east. This is why cities like Denver and Salt Lake City (to a smaller extent Minneapolis) have had little problem expanding their transit systems in recent years compared to say Detroit, Baltimore, or St. Louis cities that are highly segregated with large urban, black populations. I think the role of race and socioeconomics was oddly missing in that video, but it's really hard to talk about the American city and American urbanism without addressing how having hundreds of years of state sanctioned apartheid shaped our cities.
Yes the US has sprawl and most US city's downtowns are rather pathetic for their size and still hollow out at 6 PM resulting in few going there after hours. Service in most US cities is also pathetic and makes transit a near impossibility even at rush hour service.
All that said I think it has more to do with how Americans view public transit in the first place. In the US transit, with few exceptions, is viewed as a SOCIAL service and not an ESSENTIAL one. It is something that is viewed as strictly for the poor and blacks which most do not want to be associated with. With a few exceptions, telling someone you take transit is like telling them you are on welfare.
Taxpayer funded public mass transit should be about helping the poor, not middle class people who can afford to pay for their own transportation.
Most Americans prefer to drive.... that decision has nothing to do with minorities and poor using mass transit.
I guess the vast majority of British, French, Germans, Austrians, Australians, Italians, Belgians, Norwegians, Danes, Singaporeans, Canadians, Japanese, South Koreans, Taiwanese are all dirt poor living under poverty line because they happen to take public transit everyday.
Pretty much every single developing and industrialized country on earth is making heavy investment into their public transit systems today because it is the way of the future. Why does America have to be the sole exception?
We have public mass transit in this country that middle class can use. I'm not sure how you can say there is no investment in public mass transit.
If there is such a high demand for public transit by middle class people, why does it need to be subsidized by middle class taxpayers who don't use it?
Doesn't the free market already provide mass transit to the middle class in the form of taxi cabs and Uber and buses and airplanes?
We have public mass transit in this country that middle class can use. I'm not sure how you can say there is no investment in public mass transit.
If there is such a high demand for public transit by middle class people, why does it need to be subsidized by middle class taxpayers who don't use it?
Doesn't the free market already provide mass transit to the middle class in the form of taxi cabs and Uber and buses and airplanes?
Are you being sarcastic?
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