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The government invests money in roads instead, which is why those other places don't have the population density.
The roads are needed to get goods from one place to another regardless of density. i.e. I love trains but they can be rather inflexible for cargo. Trucks are able to get the item to the door and are able to transport smaller amounts farther.
No mass transit where I live. It's totally unnecessary. I live in a town with 3,200 people on a good day! There's more livestock here than people. When we do travel to the larger cities in NY, we drive or take the train. Depends on the purpose of the trip and timing. When I go to Boston, I drive to the outer edges and take the T. Kind of pain when I go shopping though, but it sure beats driving in Boston and attempting to find a place to park.
Which serves to undescore the point that not everybody equates politics and social conservatism with attitudes toward mass transit. I divide my time between a rural community (pop 25000) to which I'll retire soon, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania exurbs, which had some rail service until SEPTA cut back in the 1980's. I try to park-and-ride when going iinto New York or Philadelphia, but it's not as easy as was once the case, and people back in the rural areas aren't fully cognizant of the potential savings.
There are also markets where natural demographic factors are weiging more heavily in favor of transit in recent years, For example, there are places on Long Island where it would cost me much more to bring the car today than when I was a college student years ago,
And the same was true for a company truck I had to drive across the Narrows and Staten Island ($18 in daily tolls) while doing contract work in Brooklyn and Queens. But the sacrifice in flexibility for the job intended was something my employer at the time didn't want to face. I was inclined to suggest leaving the truck at the client's site Monday through Thursday and taking the subways and PATH back to the motel in Jersey that was our main base of operations, but the plan fell through.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 03-10-2014 at 09:00 PM..
I would take mass transit to school but there isn't any form of rail anywhere close by and the buses are too damn slow! I do walk to work though (if that counts as mass transit?).
I love rail, but you can't build rail everywhere and any sane public transit system is going to be bus heavy.
It's flexibility and speed. Even for commutes in and out of NYC where mass transit can win for speed, driving wins for flexibility. Only within a very dense area (like Manhattan and the closer parts of the BX, Queens, and Brooklyn) can mass transit match for flexibility.
Usually mass transit advocates don't bother trying to compete; instead, they try to sabotage automobiles by making it hard to drive and hard to park.
This part struck me as really silly and indicative of the amateurish nature of the essay
Affluent Customers Will Not Use Mass Transit. It's not that they're selfish, or that they don't care about the environment. It's not cost-effective. The higher your salary, the more wasteful mass transit is. The only significant exception is commuter rail provided the fares offer a savings over driving and parking and the comfort and privacy allow relaxation or work en route.
This basically says "affluent customers will not use mass transit except when they do."
The correlation between higher incomes and commuter rail and ferry service has been well known for decades.
Obviously this writer didn't see the map of how people travel to downtown SF. There were plenty of transit routes with people that have $80k+ income. My own bus route to downtown SF was mostly accountants and lawyers who worked in posh Financial District skyscrapers. :P My portion of the bus route has an average income of about $70k. The other part has an average income of $120K. They were doing fine! And the bus goes through neighborhood-land...no park and ride, so they walk and wait at the bus stop with the "commoners" hehehe.
My bus only transit system has commuter buses to SF. There are several bus lines in my bus system that go through very affluent areas of Berkeley and Oakland (where finding a house for under a million is a miracle.) Not all of the buses are the nice ones, a few neighborhoods (the ones where the ride is about 30 minutes) have fancy buses with Wifi. But plenty, like my own route only have standard city buses, and the average income on the route is still $100k give or take. In this case, the bus is actually faster than the train for most people. (I save 10-15 minutes, other people save even more time not having to transfer to the train station)
This was an argument against the RiverLine in NJ that connects Camden and Trenton (passing through suburban Burlington Co. along the way). Hilarious.
I posted this in a different thread
"OK, dude from the ghetto is gonna take the bus out to some upper middle-class neighborhood he doesn't know very well and walk around casing the joint. He won't raise any suspicions at all.
Then he's gonna back and do it a few more times until he gets people's patterns down. No one will think it's weird to see some thug they've never seen before walking around the neighborhood for a few days in a row. No one will call the police.
Then he'll come back to burglarize. He'll time it perfectly. Since the bus only runs once an hour he'll wander the neighborhood for 50 minutes then he'll break in giving himself just enough time to get what he wants and run back to the bus stop.
He'll steal your desktop, your jewelry and your flat screen tv and he'll run down to the corner with it (this won't tip anyone off) and, as we know, buses that only run every hour are always on time so he'll hop on the bus with your schwag and the bus driver won't think it strange at all. Then, because no one notices, he'll continue on back to the 'hood with all your stuff on a bus with a radio link, a security camera and maybe 10 other passengers. " . . . and the cops will never be able to ID him.
Exactly. It is not practical to commit crime via transit. You need a car! Besides, as everyone says you can't carry stuff on transit...so clearly that LCD TV won't fit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wburg
Occasionally there is a high-profile news story about someone getting arrested on the bus or light rail because they were caught on security camera after committing some crime, and people use it as an excuse to talk about the danger of public transit, but forget that the guy got caught because he took public transit! If he had a car, he would have gotten away without witnesses.
Based on the odds, most criminals have cars in the US.
The roads are needed to get goods from one place to another regardless of density. i.e. I love trains but they can be rather inflexible for cargo. Trucks are able to get the item to the door and are able to transport smaller amounts farther.
Then let the shippers pay for the roads instead of shifting the burden to the taxpayer, the way they pay for railroad shipping (a private-sector solution.) Trains are far better for long-distance shipping, local shipping is the strong suit of trucks. But even delivery via delivery truck is more efficient in higher-density residential areas vs. car-centric sprawl, which is part of why everyone has to pack stuff home from the mall now, instead of stores having delivery service--or even delivery as prosaic as milk trucks! The cost is shifted, again, to the consumer/taxpayer.
I have an extreme case of misanthropy so I won't because I want
- Privacy
- Space and "walls" between me and everyone else
- And I'm way too independent to directly depend on anyone else for transportation.
If you like riding mass transit good for you; it's not for me. To each their own. I rode it in my teens and twenties but I don't ever want to step foot on it again. I paid my debt to society, moving on with my life. I did my time...
Then let the shippers pay for the roads instead of shifting the burden to the taxpayer, the way they pay for railroad shipping (a private-sector solution.) Trains are far better for long-distance shipping, local shipping is the strong suit of trucks. But even delivery via delivery truck is more efficient in higher-density residential areas vs. car-centric sprawl, which is part of why everyone has to pack stuff home from the mall now, instead of stores having delivery service--or even delivery as prosaic as milk trucks! The cost is shifted, again, to the consumer/taxpayer.
Oh, not this nonsense again about how roads and subsidized and railroads aren't. You've been absent a while. We've pretty much covered that.
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