> 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.
Not true. In DC, the Purple Line is currently under construction to connect DC's Maryland suburbs to one another. (OK. This is technically just over the border in Maryland, but it is clearly part of the DC metro area and it interconnects with lines in the District proper.) And DC just finished (in November) adding another new line, the Silver Line, out to Dulles Airport and some of the further flung Virginia suburbs. (Similarly, I think a major project was completed in San Francisco last year.) And isn't the K under construction in LA? And what about East Side Access in New York? And the Skyline in Honolulu? I'm sure another 2 minutes of Googling could uncover more examples.
The general story might be true — cthet ities outside the U.S. are investing more in rail infrastructure — but this makes me question the research. The metric "mile of transit" is also probably misleading. Many U.S.cities (though not enough) already have robust mass transit systems. The primarily challenge in many places is therefore not just to build new lines, but to expand the use of what is already there. (A particular challenge after Covid wiped out ridership.)
In other countries, the amount of rail you already have is not really indicative of stopping new rail construction any time soon. Seoul, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Shanghai etc. all have very large metro networks and are not stopping any time soon.
The problem is not really dollar amounts but effective spending. East Side Access ended up costing $12B for one additional station and a few km of track, where some of the tunnels already existed. Consider that in Paris, they just opened a 15km extension with 8 stations for about 3B EUR.
You kind of point to the reason why its so expensive to build in the US: we stopped building. Any new projects are unique which requires special orders on everything. When you're constantly building and upgrading, your overall costs keep dropping.
There’s that but there is also a lot being spent on the wrong projects. East Side Access has not really moved the needle on ridership, which is a very big contrast compared to say Crossrail in London which was built in the same time frame.
There's also a lot being spent on things that are not even transit, but are required/customary of transit projects. The consultant-class has to get their 10 pounds of flesh, and every project is needled to death by outreach, impact studies, environmental reviews, delays, more environmental reviews, etc. We pay a lot more for the stuff, sure, but we've already blown half the spend before we've even started the job of putting stuff together.
This is of course an over-correction to an equally bad world where you can just get some dopes together to slice up your city like a Christmas ham, usually by demolishing the poor and non-white parts, to build highways.
They aren't in Japan. Why would they be anywhere else?
Many subway-trains in Japan are trains for the first 20 stations, then "subways" for the next 10, then trains for the 20 stations after that. Same cars. They may have been 3 separate lines at one time but they got connected.
In the US, outside of a few special cases, if you're operating on the national rail network, you're operating on rail owned by a freight company, and they have priority. Amtrak often struggles to operate more than 1 or 2 trains an hour as "guests" on these routes. This is very UNLIKE Japan where the freights run on almost a totally different set of tracks.
Also, from a regulatory standpoint, freight and intercity railways (e.g. not subway/light rail/metro/trams) are subject to full FRA regulations, compliance with which would add even more costs, for little real benefit at the speeds they travel at.
Plus, in practice subway/light rail is electrified, and anything else (again with few caveats) is not. In towns with both it is very rare for them to use the same stations.
Rail freight and passengers mostly share the same tracks in Japan with the exception of the Shinkansen network* which is passenger only. The big difference is Japan sends way less freight by rail than the US and freight that does go by rail is scheduled at night when there are no passenger trains running.
*There’s probably an exception to the exception for the Akita / Yamagata branches that partially run on regular train lines.
Subways can be non-rail, as seen with the Montreal subway, but subways are usually a type of rail transit. Also, once you read the article, you'll see that the author is referring to subways.
>Subways can be non-rail, as seen with the Montreal subway
Yes, and it's terrible. The Montreal subway is by far the noisiest subway system I've ever used. Even standing on the platform is a terrible experience because it's so loud when the cars are moving.
London's system is very old so basically it's loud because it's built with much tighter curves than a modern system would be built with today, plus there are few platform doors isolating noise away from people on the oldest lines.
Oh, I see. That sounds like the Oedo line here in Tokyo: it has several very tight curves, so it's extremely loud inside when the train goes around those curves.
But that's not really what I'm talking about with Montreal: in Montreal, the subway system is loud for the people standing inside the station. (The trains are noisy inside too, but that's just in addition.) Every time a train enters or leaves the station, it's deafeningly loud, because of the rubber ties. You'd think it shouldn't be this way (after all, cars have rubber tires and are very quiet at low speeds; it's only at freeway speeds that rubber tires get loud on cars and trucks), but it is. It seems to be caused by the trackways: the tires are constantly rubbing on the sides of the track, so the cars are very noisy any time they're in motion, and it's really miserable just standing on the platform.
The rail situation in California is so bad, the company in charge of building rail packed up and moved to Africa - because they thought they’d have better luck there.
I'm a huge proponent of building more rail of all kinds, but in the end we have to accept that traditional public transit options can only solve part of the problem. For the low and medium density parts of this country we should leverage the infrastructure we already have, which is a comprehensive road system. Automated shuttles and taxis remove the most expensive and dangerous part of driving - the human driver - and they already have all the infrastructure they require. I see it as only a matter of time before automated transit services on public roads outnumber individual drivers.
The article makes some questionable statements. BART is building more miles of its network extending to downtown San Jose. It also refers to it as San Francisco's metro, but that's certainly not the case (That would be MUNI), and that fact is stated right in its name: Bay Area Rapid Transit.
This distinction isn't some pedantry, because BART is funded by the many counties it serves, not just SF. Those counties are on the board and get a say on where it extends to as well.
Somewhat off topic but: How difficult is it get get between SF and San Jose via public transportation? I ask because I'm looking at jobs and initially wasn't considering San Jose; however, I would if it was fairly easy to get to SF's amenities.
I flew into SFO recently and got a BART to Milbrae (a few minutes, regular) and from there a Caltrain towards San Jose to Mountain View. From an outsiders perspective (living in London) if you live/work near one of the Caltrain stations I guess it's not too bad. The Caltrain feels slowish (and looks like something out of Mad Max), but does the job. You better be sure you have some way of getting from the Caltrain station to wherever you want to go on the other end though. I thought I'd walk to my hotel as it didn't look too far on the map but was actually a 1h30 walk!
Highly depends on where in SJ<>SF you'll be, but over all I'd say it's pretty difficult for a few reasons:
- Caltrain currently terminates at 4th & King, not exactly a prime spot in SF, so you'll likely want to transfer to MUNI, so add that to your commute time and expense.
- The Caltrain ride itself is over an hour between SF/SJ.
- Caltrain lead times are't great outside of rush hour.
- I live in the middle of SF and it's 2hrs door to door to Diridon (SJ).
It isn't difficult if you're looking at the occasional trip to SF, but as a daily commute I would not recommend. I know quite a few people who do it and it's not pleasant spending that much time on a commute.
For a fuller picture, I think it's also important to consider taking the BART around the East Bay to Berryessa station. It can be better depending on where you're located.
To complete the picture, it's also unreliable schedule-wise. And it's in poor condition, your car might be insanely noisy (bring ear plugs), and bone jarring (give up on that one and move to another car.) For all that, it's not cheap either.
And the last trains are extra slow (so are all weekend trains) and not very late. So going to a club and then taking the train back home is not a good proposition.
We'll have to see about that. This claim was used before for the "baby bullet" service. What actually happened is a few trains each day skip a number of stations and so achieve quite a bit faster trip. ... When they are not delayed for other reasons which is often, or don't revert to stopping at every station.
According to the link, the local service trains will see the biggest improvements from electrification (100 minutes -> 75 minutes). This makes sense because my understanding is the the electrified system is quite a bit faster in accelerating which really helps when station stops are only a couple miles apart [0].
The difference on the express service is much less (65+ mins to "under an hour"), presumably since the trains can spend more time at or close to top speed due to longer distances between stops.
It depends on what you're used to. SF to San Jose, unless you live next to a station at one end and the place you're trying to go is next to a station at the other I'd expect 2 to 2.5 hrs one way.
A quick search shows SF to SJ to be 1hr to 1hr 23 mins but then you'll likely need 20-30 mins at each end to get where you're going.
The tail wags the dog a little in this case; you could equally say that America’s chosen mode of transport forces lower density: large parking lots and wide roads take up a lot of space where people could otherwise live and work. Wide roads also make it harder to walk around locations, making transit less inviting since walking itself is less inviting.
In my opinion, it's largely because American cities are new.
If you are building a new city, you do not start with high density. Individual developers start with the cheapest build out because no one will pay a premium for a multi-level structure until cheap single-level builds are exhausted. Then as centuries pass, because there is no more undeveloped land, the city is forced to redevelop existing plots and increase density.
Many Asian and Western cities are hundreds or thousands of years old.
America's transit woes is because we live in a new country with new cities in previously mostly uninhabited land.
Due to smallpox spread from Mexico, 90 percent of the native population was gone in most areas at least a half-century before Jamestown was settled. A lot of what white people 'stole' was genuinely uninhabited.
The interstate highway system is largely to blame. As it expanded, It usurped rail travel that only effectively served a smaller number of established cities. It is more convenient to drive shortish distances within a region than to hassle with train schedules and the problem of getting transport from the station to the final destination. This then assisted the growth of post-war cities that were mere backwaters 75 years ago.
Not in the northeast. NYC, DC, Philly, Baltimore, Boston, New Brunswick, New Haven, Newark, etc -- I-95 forms a spine of density sufficient to support anything western Europe has -- if we were willing to do it.
You're comparing a vast corridor connecting half of the Atlantic Seaboard [0] with individual cities.
The US East coast between DC and Boston has 3x the population density of France (and has a larger total population). Yet France has the TGV, with many long stretches of 300 km/h traffic, and all the Northeast US has is Acela.
A big difference you're missing is the I-95 corridor is linear, so you have huge pockets of density all close together along just one single highway / train line, which makes it easier to connect than randomly spread out. Philly is kind of a podunk city for the northeast yet it is denser than metro London, which is arguably one of the top 3 cities in the world. You are kind of proving my point!
Australia and Canada have similar urban densities and slightly better transit options. I mean, we can definitely do better even if we can’t be Tokyo exactly.
Right. That and the fact they'll want to connect two cites that are 2-3 hours away by car and neither city is walkable. So it takes longer to get there and then you have to rent a car when you get there anyway.
Italy and Spain, in particular, do not care about the quality of ridership on their metro lines outside of tourist heavy areas. So, if you plan to ride the train, in particular if you are alone, have a plan to deal with pick pockets and gropers.
People that can convince politicians to build nice mass transit, are the ones unwilling to ride it.
The US is heavily bifurcated socio-economically. It's quite simple and nobody much likes to talk about it (admit it): the top 50% do not want to ride on mass transit with the bottom 50%. And even more so, the top 1/3 absolutely do not want to ride on mass transit with the bottom 1/3. The top 1/3 pay most of the taxes in the US.
In the US the top 50% are relatively well off, affluent by Western standards. The top 1/3 in the US is equivalent to Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway - highly rich, highly educated.
The bottom 1/3 is not well off. The bottom 1/3 is poor and uneducated by Western standards, with extremely high rates of violent crime, murder and untreated mental illness. The murder/violent crime/rape rate in the bottom 1/3 is truly terrifying in the US. Nothing is done to address (improve) any of it.
edit: The same premise largely applies to the top 1/3 blocking the construction of new housing, because they don't want to live near the bottom 1/3. The people that can make new construction happen (financially, politically), are the ones that don't want it to happen. This goes on in blue cities, it goes on in red cities.
I'm in the 1% and so are most of the people around me. Many of them want to ride good public transit.
Good public transit = London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam, Berlin, Seoul. It does not equal LA, SF, NYC. LA's got dismantled and is slowly being rebuilt but it's crap. SF's is stinky slow and gross. NYC's is well used but it's not nice by any definition.
> I'm in the 1% and so are most of the people around me. Many of them want to ride good public transit.
Agreed. The point the GP is trying to make though is that "good public transit" isn't /just/ about infrastructure, it's also about the society around that infrastructure that produces the people who ride it with you. I happily ride public transport while I'm in Europe and even in Latin America, I won't ride it in the US. It's not that I'm opposed to public transport, in fact the opposite, it's that in the US I am likely to be violently accosted, murdered, or robbed while that's basically never going to happen to me in Europe or even in Latin America.
Thats a pretty ridiculous claim. While public transit in the US could absolutely be improved, suggesting it is "likely" to have a crime committed against you is obviously untrue.
For example, NYC's subway had 2 billion riders last year. How many of them do you think were victims of a crime while riding?
Either you're claiming that a quarter of the world's population at some point rode the NYC subway last year, or they're counting ridership non-uniquely, meaning that's a much smaller number of people riding multiple times a year (much more probable).
> How many of them do you think were victims of a crime while riding?
Assuming the latter interpretation, the absolutely most charitable interpretation of the metrics (including the assumption they're complete) says a crime happens every million rides[1]. But that greatly depends on what you mean by a "crime", as only the most severe crimes are counted, and they are only counted if reported.
As someone who's actually ridden public transport several times in the US and doesn't anymore, the reason why is that I observed crimes happening almost constantly. I made the mistake of riding the RTD after moving to Denver and found people openly smoking fentanyl in the train cars, and saw a fight break out. I have been able to personally avoid the consequences of this because I take precautions when I am in public and now actively avoid public transport in the US. FWIW, it's bad enough in NYC that crazy things (most of which are crimes) happening on the subway is a running joke in New York City that's considered relatable enough outside NYC that it's a regular gag on SNL.
> NYC's subway had 2 billion riders last year. How many of them do you think were victims of a crime while riding?
I ride it daily to get to work and there absolutely is a crime problem down there. Even if you're not the direct victim you'll see things and thus know that the crime is real. The NYC subway crime thing isn't just some made up thing that people don't have experience with.
I'm still alive, so zero. Meanwhile, I've been accosted on public transport in the US multiple times. It's part of why I avoid public transport in the US.
Then get the zoning fixed so density and design that support that transit. The transit in the places you mention directly stems from the zoning and density that is basically illegal in north america
NYCs public transit is better than London's except in terms of cleanliness in my experience. But I don't think that's an issue with the transit system specifically, it has to do with the city as a whole.
At least here, the problem is absolutely not the "bottom 1/3" but the mentally deranged and the outright violent. Completely different category. You seem to conflate the two and that doesn't represent the situation on the ground. The 1st category is poor but civil.
Even then, the system is slow, sparse, unreliable. Most of the time this wouldn't be a desired transport, more like one of the rare ones available.
Exactly. Nobody is avoiding public transportation because there are poor people riding it. They're avoiding it because there are mentally unstable, violent people, and pickpockets riding it. It's a totally different set of people, totally different reason.
The rates of violent crime, murder, and untreated mental illness directly correlate in the US with the rate of poverty. In locations where poverty is very high, the murder rate is very high (and that combo is amplified by population density).
That's due to the exceptionally mediocre social safety net in the US, among numerous other causes.
If you're in the bottom 1/3 you have very limited access to quality+sustained mental health treatment. If you're in the top 1/3, you have nearly unlimited access to getting treatment for a mental illness.
It's not millionaires roaming the streets of US cities looking like zombies, blasted out on drugs, hauling around untreated mental illnesses.
It’s mostly fentanyl or some other kind of drug abuse, not mental illness. Seattle made the mistake of trying to treat drug abuse as a form of mental illness and got burned badly since you can’t really treat it without getting rid of the drug abuse aspect first. Decriminalizing hard drugs definitely hasn’t helped, and you can’t really force any of these people into drug treatment because they prefer cheap drug fixes instead.
The top 99.9% don’t want to ride with the bottom .1%, I mean seriously, during the pandemic Seattle light rail and buses seemed to have turned into mobile day centers for unhoused neighbors. Rule of law is lacking in the USA in a way that isn’t lacking in Europe or Asia. I feel safe even on the paris metro, but definitely on a metro in Switzerland or subway in Beijing or Tokyo, in a way that I don’t on Seattle light rail.
You’re either lying, and have never actually been on the Paris metro. Or you’re lying, and you saw plenty of SDF and mentally ill, but just wanted to take a jab at the US.
There is crime on the Paris metro all the time. Fights. Mentally ill people screaming. Open theft. And heaven help if you’re a woman. Maybe a guy comes and sits down next to you and pleasures himself.
Paris Metro is better (but not a lot better) than NYC in this regard. The thing the two cities have is that there are millions of law abiding people who ride them. The crazies and criminals are like 1% of the people in the system at any given time but there are so many normal people that it's not as noticeable. You go somewhere like SF's BART though and you'll sometimes find there are more homeless than normal people on a train.
Is the graph showing that only China and South Korea are actively growing their rail networks? It kinda looks like that. Also apparently Istanbul has a train under the Bosporus.
The graph is scaled per inhabitant, which means that eg. India's apparent minor bump is actually massive. Here's the Delhi Metro, which has gone from 0 to 350 km in 20 years:
The graph doesn't account for population growth. Which is why India's growth is not looking great, but in reality, India has built almost 900 km (560 miles) of metro rail in the last 20 years, making it the third largest metro rail system in the world. (After US and China) They have additional 779 km (484 miles) under construction, which on completion will put them ahead of the US.
UK is still building we’re just struggling for space and already have a tonne of railways. The issue here is more about getting extra capacity with what we have.
Long distance a lot of trains run through Birmingham. If you pick a journey between two of the top 20 urban areas cities by most direct rail routes very few go though London.
For China, you'd expect that to skew the data in the other direction, though. Since China has over 4x the population of the US, the number of metro lines is apparently over 4x higher (since China has more metro lines per capita than the US, according to the chart).
China has a decreasing population and is just building a ridiculous amount of everything. It is however now running into the opposite problem – entire cities and transit systems are sitting empty. A lot of development over there is happening for development's sake without trying to reasonably match actual demand.
It's reasonably matching short/medium term demand. Actual demand is PRC increasing urbanization from current 65% to 80/90% in next 10/20 years = need infra+housing for 200m-300m people. Utilization rate of HSR increasing every year. Current excess housing sqft is enough for ~100m (persons not household), ~5-10 years of urbanization headroom. This is without accounting for depreciated housing stock, QoL upgrades. For reference 80% urbanized US is short on ~6M homes, that's 2% relative to population. PRC gunning for 80% urbanization = PRC is net short 7-10%. Realistically much higher since a lot of people in rural stuck in very shitty housing stock. Of course there's some misallocation when building so much, but few under (yet to be) occupied developements / ghost cities or 50-60m empty units reasonbly matches demand/what can be absorbed over 5-10 year horizon. Population decrease doesn't factor much until after 2050/60s, by which time need to start factoring deprecated housing stock / end of life for concrete buildings. Other "demand" consideration is demographics aging out blue collar workers, might as well as build now while labour is plentiful and cheap, better to leave future with too much built capita than too little, as many developed economies with insane building costs are finding out.
There is just no way farmers from the villages of China are going to be able to afford the million dollar apartments speculators are buying up anticipating this continued movement from rural to urban areas. Add to that a still inflexible hukou system where even if you buy the apartment, you still can’t put your kids in local schools, it makes me think that the cities are still in for a hard time.
Many buildings are never going to be actually lived in before being torn down. The construction techniques they use to soak up unskilled labor results in concrete buildings that will only last 20-30 years.
Farmers (really the poor/underclass) directed o T3/4+ surplus that aren't worth $$$, where RE price declining. Also see central gov recently spending 300B rmb (imo just start) to transition vacancies into social housing. T1/T2 vacancies for more affluent/educated gen. Hukou likely self correcting problem (they'll keep reforming), lots of education surplus resources =going to free up YoY relative to trend of decline in past births. It's a big challenge - but IMO it's a easier problem to fill housing when you already have it then try to build enough housing when you don't/can't. Broader urban policy - central gov trying to distribute growth, urbanize/move ppl to less developed interior 2 tier cities with higher % vacancies with new industries. Big coastal hubs likely has soft upper bound in population (look at post 2014 population stalling for big T1s), I'd expect them to slowly settle 10% higher where they are by soaking up surplus to leave vacancies at healthy range, higher than 5% in hot western markets, lower than 15-20% in PRC. It's definitely a hard problem, but it's a problem where most of the physical pieces are are there.
>The construction techniques they use to soak up unskilled labor results in concrete buildings that will only last 20-30 years.
Unskilled gets trained by skilled, and do not remain unskilled. Bulk of building stock was built in last 15-20 years by migrant construction lifers already with 10+ years experience (entire demo skews old) with a lot of concrete pouring and steel welding experience. You don't build as much as PRC and have unskilled construction workers, half the world is built by diasphora migrant workers drawn from even less developed countries.
TLDR on China collapse meme narrative of PRC construction, for what it's worth my previous field. The chinese buildings have 30-40 years life spans (no one credible guestimates 20) narrative conflates PRC construction standards in last 20 years, where vast majority of new building stock was accumuluated, and is fine for 50-75+ years (as in the concrete structure is durable), with not affluent at the time PRC choosing to cheapen out on building systems that can be easily retrofit up to modern standards. TLDR is concrete/structure/frame is FINE, "short" lifespan is really about shittier/lower quality mechanical systems, not ecological, expensive to maintain etc, and until recently because PRC so good at building fast, the answer is just to tear down and rebuild. Now PRC richer, can still choose to rebuild or retrofit (both of which they're still good at), new HVAC, facade etc, to meet performance standards now that vastly richer. This got twisted into PRC concrete last 30 years. Quality of towers being put up in CAN are comparable (and frequently worse) as stuff I see in PRC where the entire process of erecting hires has been optimized to death.
There are some legit shit tier construction pre 90s (and much older) builds, i.e. all the gross mid rise you see in left behind township/village level admin divisions, exactly the kind of bad/poverty building stock reaching end of life that urbanization drive is designed to move people out of (stuff that's still all over SKR/TW). But even then, they're not collapsing out of nowhere in any numbers that actually matter, other than in event of natural disasters (i.e. Sichuan earthquake scandal), which is a real consideration, in some geographic areas. But most of building stock, built in last 20 years after - again we're really talking about the frame/structure - are fine for 50/60/70+ years like west. Also important to note vacant towers mostly not abandoned projects, there's still basic maintenance happening because they're on someone's portfolio. They're not sitting derelict for 10+ of years getting killed prematurely by elements -> they're not going to come falling down. Yes some will, but rounding error.
Regardless, IMO broader consideration is RE surplus was 1-2% of GDP for ~15 years where boom was happening. Even if they sit idle/unproductive indefinitely, you're looking at in aggregate ~1 quarter of misallocation at current GDP over ~60 quarters. That's not too bad of inefficiency relative to how much was built, and inefficiency of too much > too little, especially when any solution to urban housing / infra congestion starts with having enough.
All if the 30 story concrete apartment blocks are designed to soak up as much labor from rural areas as possible, so they aren’t the same people building 100 story sky scrapers in Shanghai. They use more concrete, the walls, floors are thicker, and so in, because this occupies a sweet spot where China is able to leverage migrant workers. This style of construction has also been exported to the rest of Asia (eg Singapore) and even the Middle East (Dubai), where you might just substitute Indian for Chinese migrant worker in the latter case (not completely unskilled of course, but we aren’t talking highly skilled either). And it’s not really wrong, if the buildings are used this is a good value, but if you wait even 10 years to fill them, I don’t think it makes financial sense anymore. 20 years is a good guesstimate if the buildings aren’t maintained very well, which will be true if they aren’t used and/or lived in.
Anyways, even if the buildings are torn down before used, this is seen as additional GDP so officials don’t care so much. You record GDP on construction and GDP on destruction, so the building longevity is a feature rather than a problem.
Pouring reinforce concrete is a entry level skill, the same migrant workers can do the work on 30 story res towers and 100 story prestige office towers (latter also has more skilled teams for steel skeleton / complex building systems etc). RoR also has to factor in wage inflation and access to labour, building out with known demand (per projected urbanization trends) in 2010s when wage was 25/50% of now and surplus pool was large. And of course return will depend on lifespan of investment, which is where I contend the 20-30 year meme number, since that's the only context where lol PRC quality bad, these investment are trash/obviously negative analysis makes sense. The entire narrative breaks down if it's understood these buildings are fine for 50+ years and can be easily retrofitted to modern standards. Lots of shitty USSR Khrushchevka from 60s/70s are going 50+ years, and will likely go past 70+. 20-30 years is an aggressive guestimate if (old) buildings are fully abandoned, left derelict to elements in particulalry harsh environs (i.e. Detroit), but they're not - these projects are managed / on someones portfolio, and have ppl going in doing very basic maintainence even if building underutilized/vacant. I think longevity becomes political liability - the worst kind of PRC problem - if building stock has to be demolished in 20-30 years, within life time of most people, that's within CCDI cracking skulls territory. Underperform by 10 years, and have 50/60 years lifespan, and it'll be someone else's problem because original planners are likely dead. Yes local gov builds to hit GDP numbers but try not to build in ways that spectacularly blows back within their life times because the one's that do don't have happy endings.
To build (more of) a subway, you need density and wealth. So NYC or Shanghai or Moscow have extensive subway systems and keep extending them. OTOH Houston does not (lacks density), and Kinshasa does not (lacks wealth).
If anything I think this underlines how backwards public transit in the US is. If Istanbul is a "sci-fi movie", then Shenzhen or Singapore would be utopia.
They’re not exclusive and a good network will likely have both (and more), at least in a somewhat large city: trams are much slower and compete with others for above-ground space. Their frequency is also limited by the need for other users of the above ground to use the share space.
Trams are also not able to deal with high gradients, unless they’re hybrid rack rail, or they’re trolleys rather than trams.
Finally, metros commonly have above ground sections or lines (which is why that’s a better name for urban rapid transit in general).
The advantage of trams for cities is that they impede cars on the narrower smaller streets, which helps to enforce speed limits and flow. On the wider streets trams will have dedicated lanes wherein they can just pass the vehicles stuck in traffic.
I disagree about trams for local transit. A metro system is sufficient, the issue is the flat-rate pricing model of most public transit systems in the US. It prevents the casual short hop usage of public transit, needlessly subsidizing longer distance travel. Trams are just unreliable trains, with an inflexible route as compared to a bus. Notably, Tokyo only has 1 operating tram.
Have you been to Zürich? It is by far the best public transport system I’ve ever used, with Stockholm a distant second. It’s trams all the way down
0) trams are hardly unreliable
1) tram lines are routinely changed around
2) in Switzerland, there is no distinction between local and remote public transport. This has the advantage that you can use the regular trains for short hops. Zürich itself has 20+ railway stations.
Zürich has really opened my eyes for what a good tram network can do.
Subway/Light Rail is fantastic for highly congested areas, even if you only need to move a few miles. There’s nothing like looking out of a light rail window moving peacefully to your destination and seeing stop and go highway traffic.
There is an observation that if you replace a bus line with an equivalent tram / light rail line, the rail line will attract more passengers. The reasons are not fully understood. Comfort probably plays a role. Another reason might be that rail lines are easier to understand. Buses are almost universally confusing, while tracks make it obvious where the rail line goes.
Trams also have a capacity advantage, because the vehicles can be larger. And operating them is cheaper in the long term, because the vehicles are much more durable.
Seattle’s SLU Tram has similar problems, but it is more of the route it takes not being very useful. The first hill tram gets a lot more riders since it’s route actually goes between populated areas.
As someone who lived in NYC all their life and took public transit to school - buses suck. You have to stand in whatever weather is present: pouring rain, freezing cold, sweltering heat. Maybe there's a shelter, maybe someone is sleeping in it, maybe it's already full because it can only shelter a few people. No matter how "big" the stop is its always the same fucking pathetically small shelter. The ride is substandard with poor HVAC and in the colder months when it rains its miserable and very uncomfortable - damp and cold. Then the drivers have to deal with morons on the road so you get jerks and sudden stops from braking. As soon as I could I bought a car and to this day avoid buses like the plague. Thankfully I only have to take the subway to get to Manhattan as I live 2 blocks from the A train.
Somebody should put out a "Dummies Guide to Durable Trams" for the MBTA. The T is so bad that even transit advocates would rather drive when they need to be somewhere on time.
Also higher efficiency due to being rail, and some amount of grade separation & dedicated infrastructure which makes them less flexible but more reliable: it takes a high amount of driver incompetence to stick a tram in traffic.
Alongside the other reasons mentioned (comfort, right of ways, dedicated corridors), it's blatantly obvious where trams run due to the tracks in the ground.
With a bus, there's always the potential the route has changed, or your specific bus is skipping over your stop for some reason. With a tram, even if you've never been to that city or part of the city before, you know there's going to be a tram along those tracks, and you simply need to walk along the road till you find the stop.
Yeah, I am somewhat baffled that the city I live in (Ostrava), a rust-belt city which lost 15 % of its population since 1990 (and a nontrivial share of that loss were high earners who moved to adjacent suburbia, taking their tax money with them), somehow has much cleaner, nicer and safer public transport than the richest metropolitan areas of the US, with their massive GDP advantage.
The passengers may be a bit uncouth (the upper half of the society tends to drive here instead of riding public transport), but the system is still unflinchingly reliable and comfortable.
> There’s no easy answer, though there is a growing consensus around certain factors that are holding America’s transit systems back. In a future post, I’ll describe these factors in depth.
> High-quality transit is the only way to facilitate upward growth without causing unbearable amounts of congestion. It’s the only way to speed up trips through crowded neighborhoods
This is the primary reason why. Subways/rail is fantastic for dense cities. The US is much less dense than the rest of the world. So we don’t feel the need for subways. Seattle and LA care about this, so they are expanding. Seattle is geographically limited and can pretty much only expand up. LA doesn’t have the same geographic limitations, but it becoming the first city to maximize the amount of sprawl available. As other regions lose their ability to sprawl and are forced to expand up we’ll see more US regions build subways.
It's always funny how people like this start from the assumption that Americans want mass transit, such as this.
Take a look around - I don't want my tax dollars spent on a transit project full of graft in NY. It's really that simple. And I don't want mass transit where I live.
This also belies the writer's condescension and hubris. I've been on many city mass transit systems, in the US and abroad, contrary to the story posted here, they aren't all "like star trek to (ignorant) Americans".
No, cars are still very space inefficient which is a big problem in the densest cities in the world. A train carrying a thousand passengers past every three minutes is much better than the capacity of a road, especially during congestion
Driverless cars could easily boost mass transit use by efficiently handling last mile problems. Although driverless short jaunt tuktuks might be better.
Bicycles (or e-bikes if you prefer) are far more efficient than cars for this purpose. Bike-share is also really helpful here, so you don't need to have your own personal bike.
Not if you have packages and such, you really need a cargo bike or something. Weather would also play a role. I don’t see bike share as very successful, but I guess with better security and places for the bikes to hangout it could work out better.
Bike-share works extremely well here in Tokyo. I see people on the red Docomo bikes every time I go almost anywhere.
For cargo, people generally pay for a delivery service if it's something too cumbersome to carry. In large cities like this, people don't buy a month's worth of groceries all at once; they only buy as much as they can carry.
San Francisco just built a short subway to Chinatown. Not quite clear why.
SF's Chinatown is stuck in the 1950s. It's not modern China. No black-glass skyscrapers in exotic shapes. No outposts of Shenzhen manufacturers. It's mostly a retirement village.
> Chinatown is stuck in the 1950s. It's not modern China.
This is a really weird complaint. SF Chinatown is a neighborhood settled by mostly Cantonese speaking immigrants in the mid 19th century, and still mostly inhabited by descendants of Chinese immigrants who moved to the US generations ago. Why would you expect it (or want it) to be "modern China"?
>San Francisco just built a short subway to Chinatown. Not quite clear why.
Largely to set the stage for service to the Richmond.
>It's mostly a retirement village.
A testament to the resilience of the community in the face of an ongoing housing supply shortage. There is no doubt immense pressure from our typical economic processes to displace retirees from the place that they've lived their entire lives. You'd rather see old folks trapped in car-dependent suburbia, eventually unable to drive themselves to their basic needs?
I agree with other commenters: it's not "the rest of the world". It's China.
For regional transit, China's high speed rail buildout [1] is truly breathtaking. If you look at the miles of track [2], China has 45000km with 25000km under construction. Number 2 on the list is Spain (with 4000 and 1000 respectively).
For urban transit, China again completely dominates [3] by like a factor of 6-7 to #2. The US actually fares better here bu that's skewed by a handful of outliers, most notably NYC.
It makes me so mad because of the concerted effort made to dismantle and derail (pun intended) public transit efforts in the United States. The Koch brothers (well, brother) spend a fortune fighting these projects [4]. Elon Musk famously only propsosed the Hyperloop in the hopes of killing the California High Speed Rail ("HSR") [5].
Look at Las Vegas, a huge tourist destination. What Las Vegas actually needs is a subway line between the airport and the major Strip hotels. This would require probably less than 20 miles of tunnels. It could even be a mix of light rail in the suburbs and to the airport and tunnels under the Strip. You could extend it to key parts of Las Vegas to include all the people that need to work on the Strip through Park and Ride stations. It would be incredibly cheap for the benefit.
But instead we got the idiotic Tesla tunnels by The Boring Company, which I'm convinced was only proposed to kill the idea of any public transit infrastructure in Las Vegas.
It's all so short-sighted because public transit scales and it would make life easier for anyone who actually wants or needs to drive. But instead we get idiotic infrastructure like the Katy Freeway in Houston [6].
Gonna chime in with the "why" that goes unspoken (except for on The Site Which Shall Not Be Named, where they are quite vocal), as far as public support goes: poor people and minorities. That is, the middle class, upper middle class, and elite who are influential enough to make-or-break these projects (usually by killing them with a number of phone calls, emails, dinner conversations, and lawsuit) are either afraid of poor people and minorities and don't want to ride public transit with them, or else don't want to give them a "free lunch" (never mind that the realities of car dependency mean that these people are actually subsidizing the complainers, by having to put a large portion of their own income into maintaining the means of transportation by which they get to the businesses that enrich the wealthy).
And, yes, I know, I know, the source; however, the consistency of their (incredibly profane and offensive) sentiments, squared with the ongoing reality of our public transit systems (SIDS: Sudden Infrastructure Death Syndrome), leads me to believe that there's a non-zero chance that they're merely expressing a more crass version of a shared belief among the more well-off and less incel-adjacent.
I post this not to inflame, but to raise an issue that has to be addressed in order to make these things happen. Not poor people and minorities, but the irrational attitudes towards any public good that is perceived as benefiting them. I dunno if you have to solve racism/classism, or merely convince the top 20% that public transit is a benefit to them, too, but you're going to have to do something wrt this matter if you want to see improvement in public transit infrastructure in this country (and preferably before a multi-billion-dollar quasi-FSD boondoggle ends up in the federal budget).
> never mind that the realities of car dependency mean that these people are actually subsidizing the complainers, by having to put a large portion of their own income into maintaining the means of transportation by which they get to the businesses that enrich the wealthy
Why would you never mind one of the most important features of the American way of life?
Crushing the poor to enrich the rich. It's the American Dream.
Maybe you can help me understand: Why would Elon Musk go to such lengths to kill HSR and public transit in Vegas? Is it just that he sells cars? The impact of these projects on Tesla sales doesn't seem like it would justify such an elaborate scheme to derail them.
Elon Musk has spoken on this [1]. It's such a silly argument too because nobody is forcing Elon Musk (or anyone else) to take the subway.
Elon is really unexceptional here in terms of being of the billionaire class. The US billionaire class is relatively unified in trying to collect as much wealth as absolutely possible.
So the likes of Koch fought public transit because of the idea of taxes. Billionaires in general simply want to reduce how many taxes they pay to collect more wealth. They'd rather people pay for their own cars rather than the government building a subway.
Health insurance, high housing costs, cars and high education costs are wealth extraction from the government and ordinary citizens to the ultra-wealthy.
It's exactly the same whenever you hear anyone talking about "small government" or otherwise reducing regulation. It's nothing more than wealth extraction by the ultra-wealthy.
I'm sure there are a lot of people who agree with this, and maybe it's right. But I don't really find this to be a persuasive explanation.
First: Why would the billionaire class be especially concerned about taxes? They are famously lightly taxed in the U.S. and one would think that the marginal effect of taxes on their quality of life would be virtually zero.
Second: What's going to be more expensive: Elon Musk's share of the tax revenue required to build high speed rail, or standing up the Boring Company to offer a fake alternative? Doubly so in Las Vegas, in a state where he doesn't even live.
It does make sense to me that he'd rather have people buying Teslas than paying someone else for mass transit—which is the point I originally posited. But it's still not clear to name that the math remotely works out here, unless he thought that the Boring Company also had a real shot at succeeding and capturing some of that public transit revenue. But that, of course, would make it something other than pure sabotage.
I suspect a part of Elon's issue is pure ideology. However, I am a railfan (I even ride long-distance Amtrak for fun) and a Texan advocate of building HSR from Dallas to Houston, and I have to say he at least has a point about California specifically. A French contractor involved in that project famously pulled out saying that North Africa was far less politically dysfunctional.
The Katy Freeway seems idiotic, unless you actually need to drive in Houston, and then it's great. It's great that I have space between me and my neighbors. It's great that I can stay cool in my car and avoid the heat and rain from my garage to my destination (often, an HEB with a parking garage). It's great that I can get anywhere in the city outside of rush hour in 30 min or less. It's great that I can fill up my battery from the comfort of my home at off-peak hours. It's great that Tesla FSD takes me the whole way and only tries to kill me once or twice.
I've lived in a tiny apartment in a super-dense European city with Japanese levels of extent and service, and yet now for less money I live in my house like the European upper class, in a house bigger than theirs and with the same car they drive. I could never have afforded this in Western Europe (or Europe-like SF, NYC, etc). But freeway-loving America makes it possible.
A few videos on why this is (and I apologize for my language) incredibly selfish and idiotic.
tl;dw Owning a car in an American suburb is extremely expensive, and (especially if you disagree) your pleasant commute is likely being heavily subsidized (particularly by less-well-off Texans who you are forcing to live in worse conditions, and to pay proportionally more of their income to cover their own car dependency).
This is what makes the US economy interesting, in that despite being a leading producer of oil, unlike other large producers of oil, it does not come close to being reliant on the industry. In comparison, almost all other large producers of oil are petrostates, in that much of their economy is dependent on oil and gas. The US oil and gas industry could cut its production in half and it would change the GDP by a percentage point at most. US oil production is more important for natural security, so that the country is not reliant on other countries for production, than it is for the GDP.
While yes, a planned economy is inefficient, the provision of public goods is inefficient when left to private markets. Essentially, the private market is inefficient for any type of "market failures".
Hmmmmmmmm the places where riding the subway means obeying social norms, continue to build subways. The places where riding the subway does not require any social norms be obeyed, have stopped.
What’s the status on the Boring company? That seemed promising. But I recognize that, in America, the issue is not a lack of technology but rather the political will.
> What’s the status on the Boring company? [...] the issue is not a lack of technology
Iterative hardware development can take time. A brief search suggests: Using the Prufrock-2 version TBM, the Las Vegas Convention Center loop has picked up a couple of nearby hotels, and work has started on the first long extension, 3 km south along Paradise Rd to near the airport (1-2 years). Prufrock-3 is being exercised tunneling around the Tesla Giga Texas factory[1]. Prufrock-4 is nearing completion, and -5 is in design.
I wouldn't say it's lack of political will. It's more that we are so excessively bureaucratized and regulated that it just takes more political will to get the same thing done because it will be stuck for years getting regulatory approval.
That is the epitome of lack of will. After the last major earth quake on LA,major highways were destroyed into and around down town LA. Those were repaired in less than a month.
When there's a will to get it done, it gets done. When her isn't, planning and permitting takes a butt load long time.
Bureaucracy is universal. American issues arise from the idea that public transit is for the poor, and from the loss of expertise.
If you want good transit, it must be for the people who vote. Otherwise they will vote to make it bad to save tax money. Branding public transit as the affordable option is a guaranteed recipe for failure.
Transit projects must also be small enough that the entity responsible for them always has several projects running in parallel. Once you stop building, you will quickly lose expertise, and subsequent projects will be more difficult and more expensive.
Too much bureaucracy is often at fault, but seems very unlikely in this particular case. Are all the other countries mentioned in the article less bureaucratized or regulated? There seems to be a strong correlation between countries that have good public transit and invest heavily in public transit and countries that are perceived as having too much regulatory red tape (EU, East Asia). If that's the case, how could this possibly be the problem here?
According to the chart in the article the EU seems to be building at about the same pace as Russia, so I'm not sure it is a great example for the success of bureaucracy. And is East Asia particularly bureaucratic? The idea that I get is that building a train line over there isn't going to be held up for years in environmental review and lawsuits, but I could be wrong.
Never moved beyond "mars tunnel research" or "excuse to delay subways," depending on how cynical you are. It's on life support in the form of totally necessary tunnel projects at other Elon Musk companies.
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.[1]
He knew it would delay CA-HSR and political will for it nearly died.
I was curious whether this was true but it seems made up. The source is this part of his biography by Ashlee Vance. The actual quotes only support that he thought CA HSR was mediocre, which is what made him want to suggest something better. The idea that it was a tactic to delay HSR independently of a better project existing is just the biographer's speculation and isn't supported by his words.
Note also that the excerpt in this tweet omits the subsequent page, which discusses how Musk began taking the project more seriously after being surprised by the amount of public interest. You can find the biography on libgen.
That's sorta Musk's primary operating mode. See also: the whole Twitter purchase fiasco (for a recent example), or the expensive lawsuit against the actual co-founders of the larger, more-successful tech company that bailed out his failing startup as a favor to him but didn't stroke his ego enough on titles (for a "this has always been his way" example)
Well, I'm from EU and I think the article's claim is exaggerated, beside that metros are good to move people in a dense city, but they are economically untenable, of course with public subsidies in abundance they operate, but that's still some absurd as absurd are dense cities in the modern, present world.
So well, if USA invest less in metros is a very good thing for them. It's about time to massively understand that dense cities are needed now ONLY BY FINANCE capitalism to rule over gazillion of people owing nothing, tied to their services, but it's a nightmare for everyone else, environment included since they consume an enormous amount of resources, much more NOW than spread homes (modern buildings and modern homes, with energy performances, anti-seismic design, fire safety, HVAC etc) and can't evolve while being a big on-ground thermal mass to be heated by the Sun much more than spread green areas.
Cities aren't going anywhere. Building and maintaining roads and cars is expensive. Essentially you can either pay for endless freeways, or pay for a subway system. People need to get around.
Not quite. You will have to pay for endless freeways and you can pay for a subway system on top. You see, even in the most European and sophisticated cities in the world they don't have cargo subways. All the shops need stuff to sell delivered and apartment buildings need trash taken away. The building construction needs materials. Building maintenance needs things like appliances and big HVAC parts taken out or put in. Etc. etc.
None of this works with subway. Subways are for people without much luggage (statistically, I am sure someone here will destroy me with facts how he hauled a sofa and a refrigerator on subway in Amsterdam and has not broken a sweat). You still need roads for cargo and using them for people too seems pretty straightforward and rational to me. If my city was flooded with money and everything else was in top shape (roads, parks, schools, utilities, police) then and only then I would not mind spending money on transit.
You need roads for trucks, but not highways. And without much private car traffic, you can make both the roads and the intracity freeways much smaller.
I am not sure what does this mean. You want unpaved roads for trucks? And when there are rains and they become impassable you just go without cargo in your dense cities?
> you can make both the roads and the intracity freeways much smaller.
How much smaller? Narrower? The lane width is determined by the width of the truck, not the private traffic. Less lanes? You need at least two lanes in either direction so a broken truck does not leave your city without food and three lanes so you have a chance to get around a collision or can do road work without stopping all traffic. Which is the regular width of freeways.
It is not unusual from "urbanists". Whenever things they've heard from notjustbikes or read on Strong Towns clash with reality, they go into first two stages of grief: denial and anger. Hopefully you will reach the other three eventually.
Try start with https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... observing the strange title where the authors seems to be more preoccupied about how to convince people switching to such system than it's technical feasibility and economical feasibility on scale. Than observe that's declared "urban" but obviously it's best suited for spread areas, as ALL demos of the few commercial tools on sales show (start with the oldest on sale, the "Jetson one") try skimming news to discover that various actor have bought small lot of them, meaning there is a nascent even if so far very small market and yes it's possible. So far the main issues we have are:
- classic planes are on par with cars for very short flight, offer much bigger fuel economy for longer ones, but obviously need MUCH space for practical use, even for the "shortest" STOL, otherwise;
- ...choppers and alike consume MUCH more than cars. Enough to be too much to use for all on scale.
However many observe that the immense and largely ignored costs of big buildings and their infra + renewable progress and nuclear comeback will offer enough to sustain such system and flying stuff last for 50+ years (except the battery of eVTOL so far). Long story short: we are switching form a heavy society to a light one, able to do most of the move by air, goods included, and as much as local productions as possible, knowing that in a changing world we can't maintain roads and rails because no one know what happen next in a relatively short timeframe not only in climate terms but also in human wars terms. Essentially we need to be much more resilient, semi-autonomous, and that's incompatible with cities and their needed infra.
Of course to be realistic those who have realized that needs, also understand that so far we have no general solution, so they prefer having the people partitioned in "disposable factory units", disposable also in humans, used to create such new world while being tied in 15'-cities without any personal means able to move them for longer distance.
So far most call such crude distopic scenario a fantasy but a small step at a time the fantasy will be reality. People in many moment of the history have not moved at all except traders and ruling class or soldiers for a war. So yes, people need to move to live well, but not to live. Only goods need to move: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/trade-and-travel-time-epidemi... and https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/commute-time-savings-when-wor... also people aggregated in small not much dense areas still need a dentist, to eat and so on, meaning that such non-remote activities could be done in such areas from home anyway, the dentist have hes/her clinic on one side of hes/her land, the home on the other, the public laundry similarly it's in the basement while the owner live at the first floor. Accidentally this is the very same description of efficient cities by Strong Towns, only for moving in the modern world instead of in the ancient one. If you really try to compute such scenario you'll see that we are probably much far than the McKinsey report BUT not that far and yes it's perfectly feasible. The point is where you want to be, between the disposable humans in modern lager-camps named cities or between the Citizens outside.
No, they don't. They can just stay at home all the time, working at a work-from-home job and socializing entirely online while getting deliveries from Amazon. /s
I've left the big city for the Alps and well... I never had in any city as much social life as here. In cities you cross countless of people you ignore, you have just made few friends and you go with them mostly to consume some service, while in low density areas "home parties" are the norm, having less neighbors you tent to frequent almost all, so instead of being in a bubble you meet people of a variety of background and wealth all together with their ideas, experiences etc. From home many works without a desktop, farmers, laundry with the shop in the basement and the home upstairs, medicine doctors and so on. So well...
I see you scenario much more in a dense city, goshiwong alike, than in spread area of single family homes intermixed with works buildings like EU Rivieras.
With this lifestyle you get:
- much more in-person social activities
- much better environment
- much more personal space
- much less to spend in consuming services, from ready made foods to fast fashion, mobile smart macrobugs devices and so on.
This last point is the reasons why big tech and in general finance capitalism hate such model.
For the discerning reader: every single expert disagrees vociferously with this take.
The economics simply do not work to make this sustainable. Let's not forget how expensive basic infrastructure is just because it's normalized. Water/power/sewer/trash/roads/lighting is a massive expense that just keeps getting more expensive, not to mention that you have to factor in maintenance costs.
> For the discerning reader: every single expert disagrees vociferously with this take.
They actually don't. Go on, try to find anything in my words that is factually incorrect.
I'll wait.
A simple verifiable fact of life: density increases do not result in cheaper housing prices. Scholarly literature is unambiguous on that point. The best positive result for new construction was a one-time 5-9% decrease in _rents_ immediately near the new construction.
Experts, who made their career in pushing urbanism, try to dance around that point.
This has never made sense to me because it is essentially arguing that, say, the fifty year period between 1960 and 2010 doesn't exist.
I don't care if maintaining large roads and power and water is expensive. I'm happy to pay for the increased quality of life.
I don't see how this is unsustainable at all. It might need higher taxes or some other way of ensuring that ongoing maintenance actually gets paid for. So what?
If you've heard any hubbub about "infrastructure bills" in the past couple decades that's because a lot of the maintenance for the infrastructure we built then is coming due. Things age. But money today is not as cheap as it was in the good old days. So we bear heavier costs on more widespread failures. Our age of unbridled growth is coming to an end.
Seems like a bastardization of the concept of "planned". Obviously pricing and subsidies come into play but that doesn't prevent the result from still being a market-based approach.
You will not find a single capitalist who doesn't do some market research to determine a price for their product. Utilities are largely the same.
I speak 5 languages and lived in many countries, and I got my first car at the age of 30.
Here's another fact: not a single large transit-rich city in the _world_ has faster commutes than the US average. And car-rich Greater Houston Area has faster commutes than ANY other megalopolis.
Not even the slightest bit, the odds of the parent's sole life experience being "car infested suburbia" is ~1.0 Chalk it up to narrow context us centric hip view myopia.
The US has a fantastic transit system, for rural areas, independent movers, and to move massive distances in short periods of time. Highways and cars, and passenger airplanes are fantastic. Just the other day the president went from Las Vegas to DC in under 4 hours, for anyone who is unaware how impressive that is that's like going from London to Cairo. If you need to be able to move around freely unscheduled, need to be able to go basically anywhere in north america, even remote places, or need to go far fast, you can't beat the US.
Unless you live in an urban or suburban area. I agree with the author particularly about densely populated areas, the US is not just lacking, it is basically undeveloped. If I were inclined to live in such a place, I would pick a foreign city over the US. The congestion is probably the number one factor for me in deciding not to, although it isn't the only factor. There is not one single good reason why, if you live in a tightly packed place, you cannot get around your immediate environment with just the shoes on your feet. Especially considering that such places are supposedly designed exclusively for human habitation. It is downright shameful.
He’s in a private plane. You can fly Helsinki to Madrid which is about the same distance in about the same time with slightly less hassle than flying Vegas to Washington.
There’s nothing particularly special about the US, and highlighting the insane logistics of moving someone from one part of the country to another doesn’t really say anything one way or another
You don't know that for sure. There's a bunch of city-hating pro-suburbia people in this discussion who might be downvoting you because they're angry you're calling the US "basically undeveloped". But there may also be many downvotes from the walkable city lovers who read your lengthy first paragraph and didn't get to the second one.
Personally, while I agree with your overall point, I think you shouldn't write that way. Expecting people to read a somewhat-long post before getting to the "twist" on an internet forum full of hundreds of posts is a bit much; people aren't reading everything fully here. You need to make your main point in the beginning, then expand on them in the subsequent paragraphs if any.
Yeah youre probably right, I said something everyone likes and something everyone hates, and so everyone decides they hate the part they hate more than they like the part they like.
It doesn't really bother me though. What I said is true in my estimation. I can get to a mountain top in Colorado within a day from a thousand miles away with the last leg of the trip in a two wheel drive Toyota, but I can't get to the taco joint across the highway without getting in my car and driving a half mile to get to a u turn lane. The former is unbelievably fantastic, the latter is inexcusable.
In America most everyone can afford a car and most families have many and the roads are generally excellent. People have large homes single family and prefer less density and the country is more than large enough to support this. Most people don't want to live in cramped quarters, on top of each other, and having to take mass transit. Not everyone wants a NYC lifestyle. I can't understand why a small minority of people are so intent on convincing people that living in stacked boxes with a walls separation to whoever, with communal spaces for outdoor space, and mass transit, is a better life.
I think globally nearly everyone would prefer to have a single family home with a private yard and with automobiles for getting around in most cases. I'd agree train access into the big city for a day out is nice. But most "big cities" aren't big enough or dense enough to require them.
You make the wrong conclusion from a correct observation. "Most people prefer X" does not imply that there is enough not-X.
Housing is particularly expensive in dense cities. That's the market's way of saying that Americans want more dense cities than there are currently available.
Housing has always been expensive in cities. But the vast majority of people don’t want to live in them. The proof is how people left the cities after WW2 because technology made suburban living viable.
Of course some people want to live in the city. I did for years and paid good money for a prime address. But like hundreds of millions of people I don’t now because priorities change.
I think I’m far from alone from in preferring car-free urban living if the cost of housing were even close and if the schools were as good (they are in a few places! But the cost of housing…)
I don’t like cars and sprawl. That’s not why I “choose” them.
Exactly, you want space and a community that shares your values. And car ownership makes that possible and you’d rather that than the trade off. This is how most people feel.
I agree with you, but it is an unpopular opinion here. Many commenters either fancy themselves to be city planners or take a "tragedy of the commons" view of infrastructure. The latter is not wrong ... but it doesn't mean we all want to live in stacked boxes.
I think a plurality of people here are single and young and can’t possibly imagine not living in a city with all the social advantages and lifestyle perks being in one has. I did too when I was younger.
But you quickly find there are better options when you want certain things and have options.
Amusingly the unpopularity is almost universally originating from the same young white upper middle class suburb childhood people. Something pathological about rejecting their parents lifestyle rather than anythign to do with urban planning.
Private transit is universally superior to public transit, which is why the take rate of the former to latter correlated with things like income.
"This is one of the central questions underpinning this newsletter and my book."