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Comment by wireprotocol | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of practical challenges here because this country was already built for cars as the universal form of transport.

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Over the last 50 years American exceptionalism has morphed from: "We are the greatest country on earth, unique in our ability to achieve." to "We are the most special snowflake country in the world, unique in our inability to improve healthcare, public infrastructure, or reduce deaths by firearms." It's really quite sad, I hope you guys get our of your rut soon.

Hyperloop, if it isn't just hype, is a step in the right direction.

Hyperloop is another private service for the wealthy. It won't help connect communities like locally-owned public transit does.

Electricity was also once only for the wealthy.

Cars also.

Considering actual firearm violence has actually shrunk a lot in recent decades, I feel you have just a hint of bias based on a political agenda there.

It's shrunk a lot relative to the US peak [1]. Relative to other western powers it's still in a league of its own [2]. I think your comment is more indicative of a political agenda than mine.

And for the record, if the United States as a society decides that gun ownership is important enough to let the mass shootings continue that's OK with me. What bugs me more is the perennial argument that gun control wouldn't solve anything or that it's impossible for the US to address its gun violence problem even if it wanted to.

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

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/upshot/compare-these-gun-...

There is no USA (only Zuul). The USA is a country of states each with various characters, economic sizes and problems (Miami and Minneapolis are vastly different environments).

No one holds Germany responsible for EU partner Croatia's outcomes, yet USA wide outcomes are - despite massive local variations. In a lot of areas of US policy (excluding defence) local budgets will dictate results much more than federal ones.

That's the real challenge for the USA, how to cope with inequality that is as much a factor of geography as politics.

As someone who has grown up in the South, and who has visited San Francisco, Philadelphia, DC, NYC, Boston and other places, I agree public transport is amazing, and I wish cities in the South could pull it off. I also recognize it's incredibly difficult, and expensive, to do so. And even if we had the money and ability to build rail along freeway lines, and build stops at popular social and residential hubs, how do people get to the rail station? Vehicle. And for many people, the question will then be, "Why drive to the station, wait 15 minutes, take a train with multiple stops, etc. when I can just drive?"

At which point you talk about incentives against driving, at which point you piss off millions of people, and potentially punish those who legitimately couldn't use rail due to work or scheduling circumstances.

You're really blowing off something incredibly difficult, more difficult (politically and financially) than putting someone on the moon. And your snark isn't even conceptually consistent; we thought we were a snowflake in the 60s, we just really were one of the greatest countries in the world. Firearm issues are there but over hyped/more complex than you want to admit, and if anything, we really should let states take the reins at healthcare, because it'd be a lot easier for regional governments to pull something off and get the ball rolling than to constantly fight at our crippled-by-two-national-parties Congress.

> And even if we had the money and ability to build rail along freeway lines, and build stops at popular social and residential hubs, how do people get to the rail station?

In places that have good rail systems, most people get to the rail station by walking. In the other places, it is usually because they have disallowed dense construction near transit stations through zoning.

> You're really blowing off something incredibly difficult, more difficult (politically and financially) than putting someone on the moon.

You're probably right, but I also think that the main roadblocks are political, not financial. The US has one of the highest GDP/capita in the world but consistently fails to apply this economic power to helping its own citizens or does so in extremely wasteful ways like creating jobs through military spending.

Edit: Also public infrastructure isn't just transport. There are cities in the US that do not have safe drinking water. It's shocking.

Isn't part of the problem that the appeal of the south is different to the north? SF and NYC are very different climates to New Orleans, with very different amounts of living space per person. You can either have a lot of living space, or a lot of good public transit options, but not really both.

Boo hoo. Do you think Medieval cities like those in Europe were built for public transport as well?

They certainly weren't built for widespread individual use of automobiles.

I think it fits better with public transit. They are much more walkable and people scale.

> Boo hoo. Do you think Medieval cities like those in Europe were built for public transport as well?

That’s actually a pretty great point. They also weren’t devised for internet, flight, or dna sequencing. Time to roll those back as well.

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