Comment by socalgal2

When you say most places, I assume you leave out most of the world in this? The number of countries with broad complete train networks is small compared to the land mass of the earth inhabited by humans. Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.

Most urban US cities have some attempt at an urban train network, and most significantly more useful than Seattle. The issue is typically more of funding and willpower - major infrastructure in an established city is expensive and disruptive to the point most don’t want to deal with it. Additionally the feeder transit infrastructure tends to be weak enough that the daily practicality is low because you have to live right on the line and your destination must also be. Otherwise you’re driving in. Finally the urban planning for surface roads has been well enough structured that the trade off for time saved in public transit doesn’t make sense. You spend time walking and doing transfers in excess of double a driving time.

Is that a flaw? If you electrify the cars to minimize pollution, automate their driving to reduce risk, ensure they collaborate to improve efficiency, I’m not sure I buy the argument any more.

Cars are one of the most wasted expense all over the world. People buy cars suited for what they want 1% of the time. With electric mobility options available today I think public transport makes more and more sense. Asia and Europe with the dense cities should start optimising their roads for 1 passenger electric transport.

There's no practical reason we can't have good public transit AND better cars.

>Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind.

A former member of the Pinellas County[0] Sheriff's Department related a relevant story to me many years ago. It was the practice of sheriff's deputies to park near bars around closing time and wait for drunk folks to leave the bar, get into their cars and drive away. And these folks were almost always intoxicated.

One night, they waited outside the bar and a patron exited, stumbled a bit, dropped their car keys a few times, then got in their car and drove away.

Cue the lights and sirens and the deputy pulled the driver over and prepared to arrest them for Driving While Intoxicated (DWI). However, a field sobriety test[1] and a breathalyzer[2] showed the driver to be stone cold sober. When the deputy returned to the bar, all the other patrons had made their exits.

So, rather than having a designated driver, they had a designated decoy!!!

Good luck fixing that sort of attitude.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinellas_County,_Florida

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_sobriety_testing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathalyzer

A lot of the Netherlands was rebuilt postwar in the 50s with exactly the kind of car-centric design you're talking about. But then in the 70s they realized their mistake and started to reverse it.

What I'm saying is-- don't be defeatist about this. In places where density is high enough (maybe not LA sprawl), you can fix this.

I dunno. Brasilia is the epitome of a city built by 50s urban planners, was highly structured around the car - and yet they managed to build a metro.

You put the trains where the people are, not in the middle of vast unpopulated stretches. Comparing land area is misleading and unhelpful.

Yeah thats a useful factor for all those "visiting mom in Portland" trips from Washington DC that a train is obviously meant to replace, not any of those "100 mi or less visits to mom" that de facto MUST be taken in a car regardless of the population density of the surrounding 100mi radius.

Also we should ignore the fact that the US already had a national rail network and STILL DOES for freight and had frequent regional rail service to even incredibly small podunk nowhere towns for decades. It's clearly impossible! We're too big! IT CAN'T BE DONE!

The vast size of the country sounds like an argument for trains, rather than against it? Trains are a comparatively cheap way to provide fast transportation between places where people actually live.

Now do China.

In most places where train travel is an option, you'll probably be a 10-15 min walk from a station, or a 5 minute cycle, or a short connecting trip on a bus or tram. Multi-modal trips and short walks are normal in a lot of places - I know this isn't the case in America because of how American owned mapping apps like Google Maps go out of their way to hide routes with more than a 5 minute walk involved.