Sweden and the US have almost exactly the same population density (22/km2 vs 24/km2) and GDP (50K vs 56K). The only reason that Sweden has substantially better public transportation infrastructure than the US is because it chooses to.
Similarly, the Nordic countries are not homogeneous: most of the population lives near their southern borders (on the Baltic Sea), while their northern areas are barely populated at all. It's very similar to Canada: most of the population there lives within 100 miles of the southern (US) border.
So you can't compare population densities like that: you have to focus on specific areas. What's the population density of Malmo versus Philly? Stockholm vs. DC? And even here it's hard to compare, because for instance "DC" could mean just the District itself, or it could mean the much larger metro area around it, and all parts that are reasonably commutable. Most of the "DC" population lives outside of DC.
Offhand, I'd say Sweden has substantially better public transportation because most of the population lives in a few large cities, and also because it's a better-managed country that invests more in infrastructure for the common good.
"The United States has terrible public transport" doesn't hold true for pocket regions which have very reliable public transport. You just can't very reliably go across the country because some of our states are larger than many, if not most, European countries. Not to mention geographical differences. Compare a topography map of Sweden with California.
This is such a weird argument. I can take a train from London to Paris to Zurich to Berlin, despite them being entirely different countries. You're telling me travelling between US states is somehow massively harder?
> Compare a topography map of Sweden with California.
Switzerland has a) some of the most challenging topography in the world and b) one of the most extensive, heavily used train systems in the world.
The US is 3.797 million mi². Europe is 3.931 million mi².
I think this has to do with the frequency of rest-stops/ tourist destinations.
There are many places to stop and see if you were to have a track going through all of the EU, but if you do that with the U.S, you're just going through "nothing" for hours on end. There's no site-seeing, sparse and isolated rest-stops, etc.
This is if we assume coast-to-coast travel, not just state-to-state. If we do, it's just not worth it to spend that much money.
2 hours 16 minutes.
Of course, as always, this is from station to station, not your real total journey because you don't live at the station.
A train from New York to Miami, Florida is around 2057 km leaving from Penn Station. From Paris to Zurich and Zurich to Berlin is 1622~ km. Although a tad larger going back to Paris from Berlin, a total of 2676 km.
So for comparable distances and from [Tourist Attraction] --> [Tourist Attraction] things are comparable.
Take a train around all of Germany, Switzerland, and France. The entire countries - and not just the capitals! You've still only covered a small portion of the US [0].
Things don't work when there is large amounts of nothing between areas that need to be connected. This is also why the US has laughably bad internet connections in most of the nation. It isn't worth laying down fiber in towns with populations <5,000 nor is it worth laying down rail.
Size isn't the only issue but it is, in my opinion, the largest issue. Pun not intended.
>Switzerland has a) some of the most challenging topography in the world and b) one of the most extensive, heavily used train systems in the world.
My understanding of it is as coredog64 said in their reply, but also Switzerland is yet-another-tiny-country. It'd be more fair to compare it with a 3rd of New York. Does a third of New York have an extensive, heavily used train system? Yes. It so happens to have one of the most extensive rail systems out of any state in the US even! Why? My guess is the size: it's a smaller state with more concentrated populations.
New York (State): 141,300 km² Switzerland: 41,285 km²
Does anyone have information on how extensive and heavily used public transport is in, say... Russia? Then we'd at least be closer to any size comparisons. I'm only familiar with Moskva and Sankt-Peterburg (Moscow and Saint Petersburg) which is the capital and the second largest city, so I'd expect them to be well connected - so that isn't exactly saying much. Looking at the rail map on Wiki [1] doesn't tell you which are public transport lines and which are freight lines. So it's hard to get a good idea.
[0] http://i.imgur.com/uwOnbWY.png
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Russia_R...
That we have any American cities with decent transit seems to be largely thanks to the restrictive geography of those cities, as well as some excellent activists (Jane Jacobs being the easiest example.)
Smaller countries or countries where half the country isn't populated (due to geography such as frozen tundra or large mountains), focusing population in a smaller region of that country don't have to deal with as many pockets of low density populations.
Because they're small.
No. It's a lack of "populated" regions at all. The problem being described is that the population density is too even.
The issue is not the spacing of our metro areas in relation to one another (interregional distances). Rather, we have bad geometry withinour metros (intra-regional distances.) To me, this seems to stem largely from the many ways we've subsidized automotive transit and low density, single family residences since WWII.
The difficulty created by our development pattern is that you can almost never gather enough people into one place to justify building a train station, subway station, or even a bus stop. When you can gather them, it's normally by those people driving to the stop, and the disappointing crowd that shows up often doesn't pull enough weight to get reliable, frequent service to those stops. And as long as those people are going to get in the car anyway, and then have to wait a long time to catch the next bus/train, a lot of them are just going to say "the hell with it" and drive to their destination instead.
Alternatively, maybe you live in a downtown area where there actually are enough people in close proximity to justify transit stops with a high level of service. If you're in a typical American city, you'll run into the problem at the other end of your journey. Sure, you easily walked to your stop, but maybe when you get off at your other stop, several miles from the center of town, you're still several miles from the store, or the restaurant, or your friend's house. And it's typically not on streets that are pleasant to walk, because they're not very interesting and the cars may be quite fast. So you'll have to make your friend pick you up, or pay for Ubers both ways, or walk anyway in an act of defiance against the place you've ended up. None of that sounds great, and if you even did it once, you're probably thinking seriously about driving your car next time.
And so it turns out that what you really need are at least two places, neither of which really require cars, for transit to be all that helpful. And in the US, we seldom have that, because we have a single center of intensity, with the density decreasing radially in all directions.
These places don't have to be huge, either. A compact outlying town of 30,000 or so could reasonably have hourly bus service to the major city an hour away. The key is that the town needs to be walkable enough that people can easily get to the bus, and the big city also needs to be navigable without a car.
As to intercity: I'm not saying NYC and LA should have a dedicated rail line between them, but it would certainly be reasonable to have SF, LA, and SD all connected by rail, perhaps high-speed. But at the same time, given the spread out development of those three cities, it doesn't surprise me at all that that's not feasible.
If that's true, so what?
Split it into 20 separate jobs, each equivalent to Sweden in terms of landmass, population, and budget.
Or maybe 48 separate jobs.