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Why Is American Mass Transit So Bad? It's a Long Story. (citylab.com)
Jonathan English, writing for City Lab: One hundred years ago, the United States had a public transportation system that was the envy of the world. Today, outside a few major urban centers, it is barely on life support. Even in New York City, subway ridership is well below its 1946 peak. Annual per capita transit trips in the U.S. plummeted from 115.8 in 1950 to 36.1 in 1970, where they have roughly remained since, even as population has grown.
This has not happened in much of the rest of the world. While a decline in transit use in the face of fierce competition from the private automobile throughout the 20th century was inevitable, near-total collapse was not. At the turn of the 20th century, when transit companies' only competition were the legs of a person or a horse, they worked reasonably well, even if they faced challenges. Once cars arrived, nearly every U.S. transit agency slashed service to cut costs, instead of improving service to stay competitive. This drove even more riders away, producing a vicious cycle that led to the point where today, few Americans with a viable alternative ride buses or trains.
Now, when the federal government steps in to provide funding, it is limited to big capital projects. (Under the Trump administration, even those funds are in question.) Operations -- the actual running of buses and trains frequently enough to appeal to people with an alternative -- are perpetually starved for cash. Even transit advocates have internalized the idea that transit cannot be successful outside the highest-density urban centers. And it very rarely is.
This has not happened in much of the rest of the world. While a decline in transit use in the face of fierce competition from the private automobile throughout the 20th century was inevitable, near-total collapse was not. At the turn of the 20th century, when transit companies' only competition were the legs of a person or a horse, they worked reasonably well, even if they faced challenges. Once cars arrived, nearly every U.S. transit agency slashed service to cut costs, instead of improving service to stay competitive. This drove even more riders away, producing a vicious cycle that led to the point where today, few Americans with a viable alternative ride buses or trains.
Now, when the federal government steps in to provide funding, it is limited to big capital projects. (Under the Trump administration, even those funds are in question.) Operations -- the actual running of buses and trains frequently enough to appeal to people with an alternative -- are perpetually starved for cash. Even transit advocates have internalized the idea that transit cannot be successful outside the highest-density urban centers. And it very rarely is.
Powerful people don't use mass transit, therefore there is no priority on mass transit.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
They are behind it for decades.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...
I live outside of Los Angeles. In my case, there's a rail station about five miles from my house. There is also a train station a block from my office. I *could* ride a bike there and then take a train. I honestly would like to. However, the total commute by car is about 40 minutes (17 miles) door-to-door. The MINIMUM commute by rail would be three hours door to door.
Thanks, I'll take my car.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Our current city / suburb design does not allow proper public transportation, but requires us to drive everywhere in personal vehicles. The place where people live, where they work, and where they spend their times are too far away, and not coordinated.
Back in time, the malls were actually designed to solve this problem by having enclosed living spaces. However given tax incentives that business had there, malls are currently (almost) always used by shopping, and not a tiny city as initially envisioned.
Also cities, especially here in Bay Area, want to have business offices built without supporting housing inside their limits. This causes a big unbalance. Also public transport are a patchwork of uncoordinated systems, where even biking to a place can take much less than using public transport. People voted for this system, and people got what they asked for.
Many US cities had streetcar lines up until the 50s/60s. They were by and large privately owned, later bought by GM/Firestone, and went bust to be replaced by busses, which required tires. So the cities tore out miles and miles of track.
Stupid right? It's a failure of government that just wanted to move on to cars, and didn't see any value in buying this infrastructure (already on the publicly owned and maintained streets).
The US has long had this fantasy that everything can just be done by private enterprise. For some things it's true. I'm not a fan of government telecom owned telecom monopolies or the government owned energy monopoly in Mexico. But some things provide positive externalities like transit, or roads or bridges really should be owned and operated by the government.
Most other countries figured this out long ago. We still thought we could give short shrify to transit, and hope people just get along with cars, and move further and further away (some weird obsession with wanting more property).
Transit Utah is surprisingly good for mountain state.
I used it to commute for several years. The problem was the increased time spent in the commute.
Using the trains my commute was 1.5 hours from my door to my office. On motorcycle it is 45 minutes. In a car it was someplace in between. They offered wifi on the train, but the quality was too poor to do anything beyond a git push, email or basic browsing. Forget using a VPN. To make the train time useful I had to save work for the train. If I didn't have that kind of work to do, then the extra hour and half was coming out of my personal time. (my quality of life)
Now I work closer to home. Self transport is 15-20 minutes now. Mass transit is 50 minutes but only runs twice a day. But even if it was every ten minutes, I wouldn't do it because I want to be productive.
Self transport (Automobile/Motorcycle) equates to freedom in the US; go where you want when you want.
Mass transport puts you on someone else's schedule instead of your own.
Mass transit can't seem to function in the US because there is just too much space to cover. For densely populated areas there is enough mass to make it work. Without the population density, it cannot make enough money to pay it's own bills, so it naturally fails unless it is propped up by a government.
When I was a teenager in NYC, one could walk up to a subway platform and count on a train showing up in 3-5 minutes.
Today, that time is more like 10-30 minutes, depending on how broke the MTA is from it's monthly pension obligations that month.
The reasons ridership is down is because it's faster to simply walk or to take a cab.
Mass transit suffers from the Amtrak problem. It is unable to provide adequate service because 80% of its budget is spend paying the unsustainable pension promises of yesteryear, and paying absurd salaries to current employees. Seriously, clerks working in MTA token booths get a compensation package worth well in excess of $100K per year, just to change US currency into subway tokens.
Fix that problem, and you fix mass transit.
Does "cheaper" include the thousands for driver's ed (in countries and subsovereign regions that require 100+ verifiable hours of supervised driving before licensure), thousands for a car, and thousands for required insurance?
That statement presupposes that "improving service" could ever have allowed mass transit to keep up. How do you "compete" with personal transit that takes you from door to door, on your own schedule, day or night, from the convenience of your own home, without having to worry about being assaulted or robbed by someone riding with you? It was inevitable that mass transit would lose out when automobiles came on the scene.
The problem with the mass transit debate is two-fold:
(1) It is dominated by people who moan and moralize about what other people "ought" to be doing, rather than what they choose to do as a matter of personal convenience and time savings.
(2) Many of the people doing the moaning and moralizing don't believe in eating the dog food being served to the plebes; they drive their own vehicles. You see, their personal time is extremely valuable, even if they don't consider yours to be.
There is no "conspiracy" against mass transit. Commuters are quite capable of making their own choices about the quickest, safest, most convenient way to getting from point A to point B. Mass transit just can't compete with personal transportation, except in the very densest urban environments.
Most large European cities were large long before the advent of the automobile. This meant their transit infrastructure was designed at most for horse and buggy. To build roads to accommodate automobiles would mean tearing down buildings to widen roads. America by contrast grew up with automobiles and wide open spaces so except for the North East coastal cities the roads are at least big enough for most passenger cars. Several other factors contributed to make mass transit less of a necessity leading to low ridership.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Last Choice method in the USA.
Only the Homeless and Criminals use it.
It is a NASTY dirty way to travel with lots of chances to get robbed or raped.
Any POS car is FAR better and cleaner.
We are told we need single-family houses to make us happy and wealthy - so we buy single-family houses. We are told we need cars to make us happy and productive - so we buy cars.
Mass transit has no effective marketing. It's just there, like municipal water service. You can use it or ignore it. And as we keep telling people that the "good life" is outside the city - and hence outside the reach of many transit systems - they don't invest the effort in using them.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
As people switched to cars, mass transit agencies cut service to save money instead of expanding service to compete.
If we want to make mass transit really work, we need to invest in it. In Boston, the infrastructure is ancient, many of the trains are extremely old, the service schedule is awkward, and the subway lines don't go far enough.
After all these years of neglect, making a system that people really use is going to take a huge amount of money. That means new taxes, probably focused on car drivers, such as a tax on parking and a tolls for driving. That's not going to be popular, so the plan needs to have significant public support.
Offhand, the changes needed would include expanding the various lines to run through several more towns. (The red line should go out to 128 and possibly then split to several routes heading out towards 495.) Consider new subway lines such as one running along 128 (meeting up with the green and red lines among other connections). The commuter rail needs to have more frequent trains so that people can just use it and not have to carefully plan travel around the train schedules. The user price of all this needs to be kept under the price of driving; I would argue that it would be worth considering making it free to use.
Of course, the above outline for fixing the existing system might not be the right approach. Perhaps we should scrap the current system and build an entirely new one based on the Boring Company's model.
I haven't studied the issue extensively, but there are plenty of solutions. The only question is whether we as a society value fixing the problem highly enough to pay for it.
If you have to take a bus that makes 20 stops before your stop then it's not worth it to ride. More express locations would help. I ride the bus. I drive my car 4 miles to an express pickup location with security monitored parking. That express goes straight downtown where I work in 17-20min, half the time it would take me to drive. (plus I don't have to deal with other drivers, can read a book, and get free wifi on the bus) If I had to take a non-express it would take about 2 hrs. Ain't nobody got time for that.
As the article explained, the long times and poor scheduling are a result of poor transit policy in America.
Other places have done much better, and American transit could rival them if we choose to invest in it appropriately.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I work with transit agencies, city planners, major employers, and the commuters themselves. Here's what I know to be the causes:
1. Low population density - If you go to the denser parts of LA, you get good transit. Same with SF, NYC, etc. If you head out to the land of single-family homes, population density drops to the point where you need massive subsidies to keep a route going. But then, you're fighting against...
2. Suburban Road Network Design - When you have mile-long block-faces along arterials, you guarantee that transit riders will need to walk .5-.75 miles on average to a bus route... not even likely the route they need. Then there's the whole issue of...
3. People Don't Live Near Work - Most people have to balance housing affordability, proximity to work, and living in a home they like. Part of that is because those who can afford to buy a home typically want a back yard, front yard, and a two car garage (see #s 1 and 2) and the other part is that given the demand to live near major work centers, the cost per square foot to live near work is pretty damn high. And then there's the issue of people buying up homes for investment (rentals) instead of living in them thereby exasperating the "drive til you qualify" problem, but that's a whole other discussion.
4. Free parking and ignorance of the cost of commutes - People don't want to pay for public transit they're not using, so they vote down funding. That increases user fees and thus makes it unattractive to use because most people don't have separate parking fees. Instead, employers underpay their workers to fund parking costs. Moreover, people assume that "gas need to be bought" so they don't factor the cost of fuel into their commutes and thus can't accurately compare the cost of a monthly transit pass to the cost of a drive-alone commute.
5. Transit Fare Interoperability - Transit systems are typically city-wide or county-wide. Very few cross county jurisdictional boundaries. They are thus, in effect, silo'd. They have their own fare/rate structure (cost per boarding, discounts for multi-boarding passes), pass structure (monthly passes vs. 30-day passes), and absent a multi-jurisdictional agreement (Like Clipper in the Bay Area), many people need to purchase and maintain multiple bus passes for daily commutes. State SHOULD pass laws that require that each county get onboard with multi-jurisdictional pass/pricing schemes by 202X and then set another deadline to have groups of neighboring counties merge their pass/pricing schema until we have statewide transit passes. After all, it has taken over 20 years for the SF Bay area Clipper Card to get to where it is and it still only includes 22 of the local transit agencies. There are over 164 transit agencies in California alone.
I could go on....
My employer is willing to deduct the cost of a monthly transit pass (in Portland, OR) from my check *pre-tax*, so they are showing their support by offering this incentive and convenience. (The pass arrives by mail each month)
That pass is good for; bus lines, train lines, streetcars, and the buses that run between Portland and Vancouver. It's quite convenient. (easy)
That ease of access should never be underestimated. Even though I got the pass for commuting to work, I have used it to travel to concert venues - I then don't experience that right-after-the-concert-crush of people trying to drive out of a huge parking lot.
Yes, using transit takes longer. There are many instances where I would not dream of using it because of the total transit time involved. But for a lot of reasonably-short-distance travel, it's great.
If more employers installed more bike racks, offered convenience in buying transit passes, encouraged telecommuting, etc. we would all benefit in many (some subtle) ways.
There's an old but good documentary called "Taken for a Ride" which has a few things to say about the topic. Namely that the plot of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" is more true than you'd expect from as story involving coerced human on cartoon pattycake.
This is also why public transportation is still prevalent and highly utilized in the denser urban city centers in the U.S., but mostly absent in the less dense surroundings and suburbs. Even when it's present in those areas, you're usually looking at 30-45 minute wait times for the next bus. Increasing funding for public transport doesn't solve any of these issues (unless you're willing to accept increased waste - more buses and subway cars traveling empty).
Cars are not very efficient when considering the personal transportation equation. Do you really want to 'ship' 1000s of pounds of plastic/steel/rubber everywhere your 200 pounds of flesh wants to go?
Imagine if CA canceled their stupid bullet train project and dumped a fraction of the money into a SkyTran system for LA/SD/SF. The potential is huge but it needs a billionaire champion or something to get it going...:)
Those in prison are **not committing any crime** outside it.
No, but by being imprisoned they are both (a) loosing much of their ability to make a living through non-criminal means when they get out (because people generally don't hire ex-cons) and (b) getting the connections and skills that set them up for committing more crime when they get out. That's why most of the data indicates that, when all other things are equal, people who are given custodial sentences are more likely to re-offend than people given non-custodial sentences. That in turn is why America having one of the largest prison populations in the world is a cause of, as well as a symptom of, America's relatively high crime rate.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
What is the mean cost per rider mile across all the systems? What is the mean price paid by the rider per rider mile across all the systems? And, of all the mass transit systems in the U.S., how many would break even without subsidies?
Passionately Indifferent
I was a teenager in NYC in 1975 commuting from the city into Brooklyn for school and the MTA was preposterously awful. For you to make that statement makes me think that you are fudging your personal history.
Still here. Trains have gotten worse recently especially after the flood. But 70s level MTA service? You're lying.
The US used to have the best mass transit in the world.
Then cam the streetcar conspiracy:
>>
Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California through a subsidiary, Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.
The companies were sued for their conspiracy, but mass transit never recovered.
Oops. Forget the link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
in North America we don't require 100+ verifiable hours of supervised driving.
You are correct. The State of Indiana in the United States required 50 hours last I checked. But at least a couple states in Australia require 120.
Insurance for $850 a year
Or a lot more, I've read, for an unmarried male who enters the workforce before age 25. And is that minimum coverage or full collision coverage, as some banks require until the loan is paid off?
Total: $794 a month
Somehow your city's transit is overpriced. How does Citilink in Fort Wayne, Indiana, get away with offering a $45 per month pass? The only things I can think of are that Citilink does not operate at night or on Sundays or six major holidays.
Probably not. But I find it interesting.
Motorized folding bicycles, and skateboards, and what have you, could conceivably help public transportation because they help solve the last two miles problem.
The transports are getting better, and cheaper, all the time. Fun to watch them on youtube.
Yes, stories of corruption in large Massachusetts transportation projects are legendary, and that's another aspect that has to be taken into account in any reform.
Every kind of profit in this country is about money. Since that is the only way the powers that be see profit we don't get to have decent public works. Its not just the powers that be though. Those that operate the public transit only do it for money and many care little about who get where. Those that do often don't get the support they need to make it happen. They don't plan for the future except in terms of cost and will not spend money to prevent things from breaking down. They only put a band aid on what they have to.
Mass transit requires people to hang out together.
Societal trends are for people to avoid each other, unless it is on-line.
These trends are incompatible - mass transit is doomed to continued failure, so long as transportation that does NOT require strangers to co-mingle is an option.
See an earlier post in this comment section by someone who did the math: public transport can easily cost MORE than using a car.
It really depends on locality to locality, and also on where you live chose to live that locality. There are places where having a car is unnecessary, and it's expensive to own one, and others where it is highly necessary.
Where I live now you really need a car. There is mass transit, but it stops 3 miles or so away from my work, and also three miles away from my house.
On the other hand, I've also worked places where the nearest parking space is a mile or more away from work, and the cost of parking would have been more than the cost of a car.
Annual per capita transit trips in the U.S. plummeted from 115.8 in 1950 to 36.1 in 1970, where they have roughly remained since, even as population has grown.
per capita is inherently independent of the population, so one wouldn't expect it to change with the population.
... on the commute.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Interesting, I've never heard of this in the US.
I've never lived in a state that required ANY hours of supervised training.
At 16ys, you can take your driving test (written and practical which is usually drive out and back and park in an empty parking lot)....and if you pass, you have a license, there is no proof of anything you have to show.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
For cities like LA, with a few exceptions, there's no practical solution involving public transport as it's impossible to cover either a) the large distances required without making several stops and/or transfers and/or b) the last mile (in reality two or three) to get to one's destination. What's left is to encourage policies that reduce the need use roads regardless of the means of transport. Not as simple.
It's run by governments, be they local, state or federal. Amtrak is a mess, bus lines in cities are a joke.
As a percentage of the pump price:
42%: oil
27%: transportation, refining, retailing and profit
13% state excise tax
6%: federal tax
4%: cap and trade tax
4%: other state and local tax
3% cleaner-burning fuel (what the hell does that mean?)
1%: low carbon fuel source (what the hell does that mean)
That's at least 27% tax. Might be 31% tax, depending on what "cleaning-burning fuel" and "low carbon fuel source" mean.
https://www.mercurynews.com/20...
American culture is pure selfishness. It's all about "me me me" without any consideration to their community, municipality, country, state, or even country.
Because SANE people realize that they don't exist to serve the State, the State exists to serve them.
Let ensure everyone working at the transit is an illegal alien who doesn't care about anything. Benefits are for losers, no one in a government job should make more than minimum wage without benefits to ensure all government employees are the absolute bottom of the barrel. We can save even MORE money using prisoners for drivers, I suggest we hire from the sex offenders.
Let make sure if an driver is sick they have to call and 800 number to call in sick and there is no one to replace them on the route. Cause management of any kind is highly overrated
So your idea is to only provide service during the commute and anyone that needs to use the bus when it's not commute time can just go fuck themselves.
Lets ensure least used areas now have a subsidy that will entice ride sharing services to game the system and increase costs for their own profit at tax payer expense. Lets just give big piles of cash to Uber and Lyft, I'm sure it won't be abused.
Do you have a subscription service for these ideas of yours? They are so good I'm sure they could win some sort of award.
But almost all public infrastructure in USA are in very bad shape. USA got a D+ rating in 2017 from (ASCE) American Society of Civil Engineers https://www.infrastructurerepo...
From Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles:
This can become a lot more difficult (read: expensive) if your parents don't drive, if your parents don't live in the same state, or if you are a member of a set of twins, triplets, or more (NSW, Australia):
Exactly, but don't expect much support on /.
The article mentions the Boston subway system frequently, but does not mention that ridership is way, way up since the Great Recession (almost 25% on the heavy rail portion of the subway, source: MBTA "Ridership Trends Final 022717", also see http://www.t4ma.org/boston_is_...). While there are plenty of reasons to dislike the subway system in Boston (including rampant corruption, gross ineptitude, poor management, inadequate maintenance, etc.), it is working at capacity during rush hour, and there are well-publicised plans to expand capacity. It's not clear how much more room there is for expansion, however, as, for example, the Red Line trains run every 3 minutes during rush hour, and need to maintain a minimum separation.
But declining ridership? Not in Boston.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
In the popular history of postwar urban development, blame for the decline of the streetcars and interurbans is often placed at the feet of National City Lines, the company owned by General Motors, Firestone, and others in the auto industry that bought out many local streetcar companies to convert their operations to rubber-tired, GM-made buses. But the main issue was not the technology change—it was the decline in transit service, which happened everywhere, whether or not NCL bought the local company.
A few other good articles:
This accusation [GM killed the streetcar], however, ignores fundamental problems that the streetcar system in Los Angeles had been facing for years. The dirty secret about the streetcar lines: they were wildly unprofitable and were quickly losing riders. In Transport of Delight, Jonathan Richmond points out that the Pacific Electric line managed to turn a profit in only two years between 1923 and the end of World War II. Meanwhile, between 1945 and 1951, the number of riders carried each year fell by nearly 80 million.
Cheaper to operate and requiring less maintenance, buses began phasing out the streetcars very early. In 1926, 15 percent of the total miles traveled by Pacific Electric riders was along bus routes; that number would more than double by 1939.
By the time that National City Lines entered the picture, the dismantling of the streetcar system was well underway. As The Guardian puts it, "one can confidently accuse General Motors and their National City Lines of nothing worse than scheming to profit from a trend already in motion."
Fail. The person you responded to said:
most people drive, and everyone else takes a bus that goes on the same road, the cost is carried by the drivers
The link you provided is bitching and moaning that the general tax payer is picking up the slack and it's not tied to miles driven.
Most people drive or make use of public roads. Thus having taxpayers pay for them, while not ideal, is not a refute of the other AC's claim. (He should have said drivers & riders, but that was clearly the intent with the mention of buses.)
Quintuplets? Who gives a shit? The cost we care about is per person.
Further, why not negotiate a bulk rate with a driving school at that point? 5 for the price of 4? Maybe 3?
Or maybe just lie about the hours like everyone does. Or get one of them a license and let them share. Oh, they're not identical quintuplets? Too fucking bad.
And that's the answer: transit systems are not economically self-sufficient; they require massive government subsidies to stay afloat. In the US, there is less appetite to levy the taxes required to support transit systems. In Europe, people are taxes accordingly. And "people" is "the middle class", not "the wealthy"; middle class income taxes in Europe are generally roughly 50% higher than in the US, and in addition to that, there is a high VAT.
So, if you want European-style transit systems and other government benefits, it's simple: raise taxes on the average American family from 25% to 35%.
?
Things that move on tracks, accelerate and stop with far better behavior. A electric street car basically move like a high end electric car, where it can change speed in really elegant and powerful ways. The same with elegant stops. And a greater loading space versus how much padding the exterior adds.
These are on top of things like priority in right of way. Or being simpler mechanism means cheaper unit cost.
Basically: This isn't about cars per intersection anon, but people per intersection instead. Where working public transport means people can use bikes/trams/street cars or trains to go somewhere, and they will because its actually possible. So instead of 200 cars per minute it could be 3 buses, which means there is more space for everything else.
Put some city money back into supporting and improving transport.
Make US transport networks great again.
Clean up cities. No more crime.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Smaller, more efficient cars make more sense for America.
No one was born with a 4800 pound SUV strapped to their ass.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Mass transit needs to reliably take me from where I am to where I want to go, when I want to go there, and it needs to do so without taking grossly longer than it would take me to drive there.
I've taken mass transit to work a few times when I had a 50-mile commute. One hour driving, or about 3 hours driving to the train station + train + walking to the office. Four... dang... hours... out of my life, every work day that I used it.
Now, I work 12 miles from home. Driving time, about 35 minutes according to Google Maps.
Oh, let me click "Transit". Two... Hours...
Not happening.
In many of those cases all that money for licensing and road taxes to get a car is sent straight to the public transportation enterprises which are largely failing or underfunded.
In the US you can get a drivers license, a car and enough gas to drive cross country under the $2000 yearly tax you are levied just to own said car.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
When I travel in Europe I never use a car. It's really rather liberating and I can stay longer because I'm spending less money. (Admitted minor point)
After that, I spent a good while being lower income when I was younger. Oh lord would it have been nice to live in a country where public transportation was widely available and I didn't have to spend such a significant portion of my income on a car and all of it's associated bills. When I go shopping or out to eat literally anywhere the vast majority of those people operating those stores are in the exact same boat as I was back then. The extra money saved by these masses would likely be spent elsewhere contributing far more to job growth then buying and maintaining a car whose construction is largely automated.
And then after that, I remember when I had to commute by car at a slightly older age. What a garbage fest it is commuting by car. I'd have a traded a slightly longer commute by mass transit where I could read, work, or just plane space out the entire time over stop and go traffic where I'm just stuck sitting there having to focus on the road.
And then after that, in all my travels in the US, our highways are never wide enough during high traffic periods and likely never will be under our current transportation model.
In summary, a car is a major expense for most Americans. Sure the convenience of car ownership is nice and I currently thoroughly enjoy it but for many Americans it's an absolute burden.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
The money that the US spends to protect Germany and Japan allows Germany and Japan to spend money on infrastructure.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
In general, Democrats would rather spend money on social services than maintenance, and most large urban areas in the US are run by Democrats. Eventually the infrastructure crumbles away, and you're fucked.
That's pretty much been the trend in all Democratically controlled cities.
Correct. And I want the State to serve me and my community by providing reliable public transport at an affordable cost. Which, here in Sweden, it does.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Disclaimer: German citizen here.
I live in NRW and have never owned a car. I think it's safe to say that in urbanised and semi-urban/suburb areas in Germany it's nigh pointless to own one these days. Germans love their cars, but standing at an intersection at 7:30 on a regular morning will show you that this private owned ICE car thing is little more than some German mass psychosis or something.
20 years ago people would call me crazy for not having a driver's license - it's somewhat of a regular rite of growing up in Germany - but that has changed in the last 15 years. Today's generations are pretty much where I was 25 years ago: many really don't get the point of owning a car.
As for PT it's basically what you would expect smack center in Europe on German soil: I can fall out of bed and land at a bus-stop. The tram is 10 minutes away and I can travel the entire state on my PT subscription. For me that comes for free, as I'm a college student and a state wide PT ticket is included in being that.
With the ever increasing mega-sprawls PT will be the way to ride for most people in the future, no doubt about it. Regular motorised traffic is at the beginning of collapse in Germany, and I expect it to get worse.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Last time I was in the US, about 15 years ago, there were lots of yellow buses carrying school kids. Assuming they're still there, don't they count as Mass Transit?
> Guess you missed the part where they say it's likely just a conspiracy theory.
Guess you missed the part where the companies involved in the conspiracy were successfully sued. The courts found it was more than a conspiracy "theory"
I have better things to do with my life during the week than stopping to shop multiple times during the week after a full day of work. It is much more convenient to spend 1-2 hours tops on weekend to go and shop and buy all I need for the week and weekend....I also like to buy in bulk at Costco and Sam's....and it would be a PITA to carry that stuff on a bus and to/from the bus stop.
This is where cultural differences lie. Most definitely in part caused by the different development of our transit systems.
I lived in a Rome for a semester and it took a little while to get used to the idea of using transit everywhere and grabbing groceries on the way home, rather than stocking up once. It’s simply a different way of life. I didn’t find it offensive; on the contrary! It was quite refreshing.
There, you had three different small grocery stores within walking distance of your building. Food was much fresher, and tasted better in home cooking. You were exposed to more people as a result of needing to interact more often with your environment.
America has a much more independent culture. Here, it’s possible to live alone in a house you bought, walk through the yard you maintain to your car that you bought and drive by yourself, arrive at the office after listening to your own curated Spotify playlist, sit at your desk, put some headphones on, and code away for the rest of the day, even eschewing personal meetings in lieu of Slack. Then, at the end of the day, you do it all over again. Maybe you stop at the grocery store along the way home, plug in some headphones so you can listen to a podcast instead of the overhead music, use the self-checkout, and head home to play a single player video game.
Whether this way of life is any better or worse than the one I described in Rome is dependent upon your values. Objectively, the American way of life is more taxing on natural resources; resource usage is delineated among individuals rather than shared. I’d argue that the insulation of individuals also contributes to our current political and economic climate, where it’s easy to ignore those you disagree with, or go without seeing the plights of the less fortunate.
After having spent time in a Europe, my value system places the European model above the American one. I couldn’t believe the waste I witnessed upon returning. The idea of 3+ empty seats in all the cars I saw coming down the road wasn’t just wasteful, it was downright selfish.
It’s not easy to suggest this due to the cost, but I think if you have the means, it’s worthwhile to spend a couple weeks vacation in one of these places to see the difference. Exposure to other ideas is how we grow as people, and might help you decide if your values are really where you want them.
(CW)MW out.
So, on average three trips per American per month. That's actually quite high. Higher than I'd have expected.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
GM paid to have trolley car tracks ripped out.
The truth is that most trolley lines were in deep financial trouble before World War I.
The economics were roughly this. The Model T Ford cost about 5 cents a mile. 24/7/365 unscheduled point-to-the-point transportation for a family of four plus dog and cargo. 40 MPH on paved roads, but serviceable on the most ragged and rugged of dirt tracks. Light truck, bus and other conversions available almost from the start.
One thing I keep hearing is how mismanaged and abused they are. Crap like a DC metrobus stopping at a convenience store for the driver to stop and pick up beer, other stuff. I knew a woman that her job was to bust those guys. Then hear the officials talking (about metro rail) and they'll say we have 30 million in repairs to make and only 5 million in the budget. Some of the items needing replacement are 40+ years old. Electrical components that aren't meant to still be in service. Yet we find out about how they blow all kinds of money on stuff they didn't need (and I'm sure someone got a hell of a kick-back for).
Seems like a lot of corruption.
Commuter highways get built, which encourages sprawl, which clogs commuter highways, which results in more commuter highways construction, which encourages sprawl. Repeat, A bit of an oversimplification, but that's the gist.
Road- and bridge-construction companies like getting paid to build highways and overpasses. And they like getting paid later to widen them and to add new ones Owners of farmland outside suburbia like it when highways and bridges make their land more desirable to developers, and so suburbia expands. And so on.
So farmers and others owning land not (yet) suburbanized are given subtle property value increases by construction financed by the general taxpayer. Construction firms get government contracts. Subdivision developers get an expanded supply of suitable land. Existing suburbs decline, and the people in them are taxed to pay for commuter road construction.
All because commuter highways are "free".
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
American cities had good transit systems at one point. The auto industry basically went city to city and destroyed it. If you didn't know this, ask yourself why. Hint: corporate media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
Which is all fine, until you demand that those who do NOT want it participate in paying for it.
It is also horrible in Canada.
Without getting into it, I'll just share one story, that sort of made me pretty embarrassed as a Canadian.
Years ago I went on a trip to Europe, though mostly Italy and Greece. As such I was in Rome and Athens a fair bit, used the public transit, and most importantly (at least in terms of this story) arrived in Rome and left from Athens. The bottom line, is without too much hassle with very little money, I could take their rail system to their respective international airports. This was novel to me because at the time (and for years after), Canada's largest international (Pearson Airport in Toronto), had no such thing. Once in TO, your options are a bus, cab, or car to get to the airport. The buses take forever, the cabs ridiculously expensive, and cars were also expensive to park, but that was all the options you had.
Fast forward many years later, they finally built a rail service from the TO airport to the rest of the rail system in TO. However upon completion, they decided to price it out of existence making it only slightly less expensive than taking a cab. A couple years later, I believe they have lowered the price somewhat, however it is still a far cry from jumping on the subway someplace urban, and stepping off at the airport for what amounted to peanuts.
Also Union Station in TO (main hub) is a POS confusing mess. I had an easier time finding my way around Rome and Athens, and not only do I not speak the language, but when I actually left Athens, my closest station was closed because they decided to have that 1st huge protest about the Euro and Debt in front of their legislative building (which pretty much says exactly when and where I left Athens...watched it all unravel on the rooftop patio of my hotel).
As for 50 hours of supervised driving, in Indiana it appears to have zero cost if you know anyone with a license over 25. Having spent a little time in Indiana, I know it's a rarity to find someone without a license there, so that is not a tall bar to leap over. Well, I guess you could have a total jerk for a friend who charges you for you to drive him places.
Then the question becomes how to find local friends in the first place, as online friends are not useful for this purpose. What are the most effective ways for someone with a diagnosed social interaction disorder (Asperger's/HFA) who does not or cannot drink alcohol to do so?
"Low carbon fuel source" appears to be a CO2 cap-and-trade program specific to motor vehicle fuel (source: Wikipedia). "Cleaner-burning fuel" comprises refining methods and additives to reduce sulfur, alkenes, benzene and other aromatic hydrocarbons, and other exhaust components that contribute to smog.