Comment by buuyytp
21 hours ago
No one is talking about spread out areas. This conversation is about US cities.
Pick a US city, then pick a neighborhood within that city you feel is emblematic of the pattern you observe. We've selected a few -- Seattle, Minneapolis -- go ahead and you pick one where a US city would not be able to support it. Then we can look at that example together.
> This conversation is about US cities.
Yes, exactly. Massachusetts; specifically the area around Boston, has this problem. There's plenty of land set aside for public transportation, but it's significantly underused for the reasons I described a few posts above.
When I started going into Boston one day a week, I tried the commuter rail twice, but it was so horrible I decided it was easier, and more comfortable to sit in traffic. (Even though it costs about 1/3rd to take the commuter rail into Boston.)
I was expecting an experience like Caltrain, I used to take it between Palo Alto and San Francisco and it was delightful. Not only are the trains more reliable, the seats are comfortable too.
Can I assume you were taking the new electrified Caltrain? It feels a lot nicer than the old diesel Caltrain, including, I think, the comfort of the seats.
Can you define city for me first? Not being a jackass. I'm defining them more broadly than you are, perhaps.
In order to be considered a city, it has to be dense enough to support a bus network. If no bus, then no city. Sprawling town.
I'm thinking predominantly urban area, probably at least 100k people in a non seasonal capacity. Eg. Pullman Washington is a small rural town that becomes huge during college and quiet in the summer as the students leave.
I tend to think of city limits as the boundaries of a city -- not the broad metropolitan area. Shorline is not Seattle, neither is Bellevue or Renton.
Edit: That said, we used to have streetcar suburbs as a prevailing model. Spokes that radiated out to the suburbs on relatively fast, uncomfortable streetcars. A similar model with trams or BRT could function.
Okay. The type of city I'm talking about would be like Aurora, Colorado.
I'm specifically not making any claims about cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, etc. Other than to say I think most of them already have all the transit that is economic for them to construct given each city's layout, makeup, climate etc.
Taking Aurora[1] there are almost 400,000 people and a median car ownership of 2 per household. This is the type of city where a lot of Americans live, and where no amount of BRT, Light Rail, etc. will convert them to a place where people can rely on transit for most of their trips, or even to decrease that car ownership figure to one per house.
[1] https://datausa.io/profile/geo/aurora-co/
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