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Cities outside those 4 are growing. Alternative options to the car are gonna be needed and adding more traffic lanes aren't gonna cut it. This country was just fine prior to WW2 when it came to getting around so we can do it again.
Yeah - those Depression years prior to WW2 were great for travel- that's exactly where we want to go.
All you need to do is close 46,876 miles of interstate highway and ground all the passenger jets. After you get that done, you need to find a few million neuralyzers so we can get the US population to forget about highway and jet travel.
Cities outside those 4 are growing. Alternative options to the car are gonna be needed and adding more traffic lanes aren't gonna cut it. This country was just fine prior to WW2 when it came to getting around so we can do it again.
Outside those big 4 cities, people prefer to drive. You could build Tokyo Metro and drop it into Dallas and it would become a bottomless money pit overnight.
Outside those big 4 cities, people prefer to drive. You could build Tokyo Metro and drop it into Dallas and it would become a bottomless money pit overnight.
I don't think you can accurately gauge that before the options are actually available. If I had the choice of driving 2.5 hours in congestion to go to NYC for the day, or get there in 35 minutes on high speed rail, I'd choose the latter in a second and I think a lot of people would. When people think of public transportation they think of our antiquated, dirty system, not a modern system. Most people I know that have gone, love traveling through Europe because you can take clean, modern trains everywhere.
The US put a lot of money in road infrastructure and freeways as well as zoning for things like parking which made driving more convenient and walking and mass transit less convenient. It also had a lot of money to spare in the post war years and industrial capacity to go with it so cars and fuel were relatively cheap compared to wages for the US compared to most other countries. As people shifted towards cars and suburbia, policy and commerce also shifted along with it and a lot of US inner cities where density was highest and mass transit most effective saw a massive depopulation as well as lost in tax revenue which made sustaining and improving mass transit more difficult. The US does have some pretty decent rail infrastructure for freight still and with a lot of remnants of rail infrastructure within formerly dense US cities, so there are probably ways to relatively quickly improve things if policy and people's perceptions were to shift.
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Originally Posted by accord1999
Because it has a lot of space, lots of wealth and lots of energy to create something even better, a (generally) great road and air system.
Isn't that like asking why the world is mobile phone dependent? Because it's superior to all the legacy options.
Europe has heavily romanticized public transit systems that carry less than 20% of total passenger-km. Despite high densities and high fuel and use taxes, the car is king in Europe too, even if it's not quite North American levels of dominance.
Agreed to some extent, but would like to point out that total passenger-miles or passenger-km is going to skew more heavily towards longer trips that are likely in more suburban areas. The reason behind that is because mass transit is oftentimes in denser cities where the number of miles to things is going to be shorter. Someone who rides rail transit for a few km and then walks a km in total is going to be a blip on total km compared to someone who drives 30 km to work per day. Modal share is a bit better in some ways, but modal share stats usually only show up for larger metropolitan areas so that'll tend to show a greater usage than the country on average.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 04-08-2022 at 01:28 PM..
I don't think you can accurately gauge that before the options are actually available. If I had the choice of driving 2.5 hours in congestion to go to NYC for the day, or get there in 35 minutes on high speed rail, I'd choose the latter in a second and I think a lot of people would. When people think of public transportation they think of our antiquated, dirty system, not a modern system. Most people I know that have gone, love traveling through Europe because you can take clean, modern trains everywhere.
This is just magical thinking about high speed rail.
Amtrak estimates that it would cost $500million per mile turn the NE Corridor into true high speed train. California is currently at $154 million per mile for its high speed train install. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammil...h=1a12f30e108c
Where is the money going to come from? Why would high speed rail ever go to low density areas like SNJ? The cheapest Acela round trip non-refundable ticket between NYC and Philly (about 100 miles) on a week day is $199 for 1 person. A regular Acela ticket is over $300. How much would Amtrak charge for a ticket after spending $500 million/mile to go to true high speed rail?
If by some miracle there was HSR near you in SNJ, would you also be willing to pay $500 for a round trip to NYC? What if you travel with another person? Are you going to pay $1000 for two tickets? If you drive it is going to cost a tank of gas ($60) and tolls ($50) for your round trip to NYC.
With the exception of a few areas in the US, high speed rail cannot compete with cars and jets.
I don't think you can accurately gauge that before the options are actually available. If I had the choice of driving 2.5 hours in congestion to go to NYC for the day, or get there in 35 minutes on high speed rail, I'd choose the latter in a second and I think a lot of people would. When people think of public transportation they think of our antiquated, dirty system, not a modern system. Most people I know that have gone, love traveling through Europe because you can take clean, modern trains everywhere.
Our government is completely and utterly incapable of delivering anything resembling a modern system at an acceptable cost.
If a private consortium wants to risk their own capital and have a go at HSR in this country, I welcome it. It's your money, go right ahead. I don't want a single solitary penny of taxpayer dollars going anywhere near such a project.....Amtrak will inevitably and invariably screw it up and the resulting product will NOT deliver and cost too much.
Frankly IMO we need to let Amtrak fail and hand over rail operations to the states.
Cities outside those 4 are growing. Alternative options to the car are gonna be needed and adding more traffic lanes aren't gonna cut it. This country was just fine prior to WW2 when it came to getting around so we can do it again.
The problem is, there has now been at least 75 years of auto-oriented planning,
leaving the country with huge swaths of suburbs where transit isn't practical.
Some suburbs don't even accomodate walking -- they don't have sidewalks.
And cities suffered too, with neighborhoods chopped up by freeways / expressways,
put in so that commuters could drive to the central business district faster.
Perhaps the best that can be done now is to restore transit to what it once was,
in those places where the density and street layout is still capable of supporting transit.
The problem is, there has now been at least 75 years of auto-oriented planning,
leaving the country with huge swaths of suburbs where transit isn't practical.
Some suburbs don't even accomodate walking -- they don't have sidewalks.
And cities suffered too, with neighborhoods chopped up by freeways / expressways,
put in so that commuters could drive to the central business district faster.
Perhaps the best that can be done now is to restore transit to what it once was,
in those places where the density and street layout is still capable of supporting transit.
I agree.
The reality is that the damage is done. From destroyed neighbourhoods, to downtowns disconnected to adjacent communities caused by monstrous downtown freeways, racial and socio-economic stratification caused by white flight, to malls/big box taking over downtown & local shopping, to endless suburbs with already installed infrastructure, to employment centres being much more spread out and served by freeways, to a population where tens of millions would rather be seen entering a porn shop than boarding a bus, to transit's association with poverty and welfare.
Gentrification of certain neighbourhoods will help restore them to, at least a semblance of, their former glory but even this is extremely limited. The problem is that the older cities that can gentrify also suffer from population decline. Gentrification requires one thing above all else...............fresh blood. They need new residents to help the area grow. This can certainly be done by residents moving from one area of the city/metro to another but then all you are doing is gentrifying one area while simultaneously emptying and rotting out another. The new fast growing cities on the other hand have very few historic and walkable neighbourhoods to begin with.
Certainly areas should try to make their cities more transit friendly but in many ways and in most cities, it's simply too late.
Biggest reason is NIMBYists. Who stop ever single project they don't want in their neighborhoods for whatever reason. Many projects including viaducts were planned in the 60s or 70s but never built. Resulting in an incomplete system that lead to many later headaches. I.e why the porition of LA west of downtown is so underserved by both freeways and metro system.
Other buracracy and partisonship, we couldn't just argue became most Americans don't like to use transit, even more so since COVID with fear, social distancing, and mask mandates, as the road and airport infrastructure is falling behind the rest of the world despite heavy use.
But one other reason is accountability an argument for NIMBYists they don't trust the government who had been known to wiggle their way out of accoutability should some thing go wrong i.e if an entire city blocks caves in due to a tunneling mishap and government refuses to conpensate.
Outside those big 4 cities, people prefer to drive. You could build Tokyo Metro and drop it into Dallas and it would become a bottomless money pit overnight.
Look at the ridership on Dallas's light rail lines. Some of the lowest ridership per mile in the country. And it is mostly grade separated, unlike many of the new rail lines.
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