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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> This means I’m required to drive into the urban center for work where parking is already expensive and difficult to find.

Do you mean you literally drive into a city centre at rush hour, park there, and go into an office?

It blows my mind that people are even able to do that. It actually says something perversely positive about US roads and cities that it's possible!

I would not attempt to drive into the centre of a city in the UK for any reason at any time of day ever. You would not make it to your office before the day ended and when you got there you'd simply find there was no parking anyway and you'd have to go home again!

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There's a bit of hyperbole in your answer. Plenty of people commute into UK cities by car, even in London. That's why there's a rush hour.

Commuting by car into central London would be foolish (I have a colleague that tried it once - it took him an hour and a half from the M25 to Kings Cross). However, there's a lot of cities in which it is feasible (if slow) and a lot of businesses close to the centre of cities which do have parking available (or you could just pay for private parking).

I sometimes drive through Central London in the evenings - it is slow, but it's not that slow. At certain times of day it's no slower than public transport (it really depends where you're going to and from).

US doesn't have nearly the public transport infrastructure that the UK does, unfortunately. I think the issue here may be that cities aren't necessarily building infrastructure to compensate for their reductions of car access.

It's the richest country on earth. What's the excuse?

> It's the richest country on earth. What's the excuse?

Car lobby, brainwashed citizens.

The answer nobody wants to hear, but knows is true. There is propaganda from all sides with big lobbying interests. Media is completely in the pockets of those interests which only further pushes the propaganda model.

Just watch TV around an election. It's complete and total doublespeak and propaganda every few minutes.

Ah yes, no one could possibly like driving of their own accord, they must be brainwashed.

If you think you like driving into the city anytime near rush hour, then yes, I think you’re definitely brainwashed. :)

In the hundreds of US cities that aren't NY/SF/etc, traffic flow at rush hour is perfectly reasonable. The average speeds are much faster than BART, anyway.

> Ah yes, no one could possibly like driving of their own accord, they must be brainwashed.

To think that you need:

- A 5000 pound machine to take a 200 pound human to work

- Workplace is 60 miles away

- On a road with many other rush hour drowsy 200 pound humans

- Said humans, then spend 30 mins and $30 for parking, in which the 5000 pound machine is just lying around empty

- All the above effort just to bring back the person from work in the evening and leave that car back on the street, lying around?

That doesn't sound insane to you? There's no reason for this for a rich country.

If you want proof that there are better, efficient and human friendly transportation systems, you need to visit HongKong and Singapore. (NYC doesn't count)

Yeah, no thanks. Images of Asian megacities' subway systems at rush hour are nightmare fuel. No opportunity, relationship, or life could possibly be worth spending time in crowding like that every day. Hell is a crush-loaded train.

> no one could possibly like driving of their own accord

That's what weekend cruising and trackdays are for.

Sitting in commuter traffic is to driving as being a passenger on a low-cost airline is to flying.

Once a city is built around cars, it can be VERY expensive to reconfigure. Things are built too far apart.

Also? We’re not good at infrastructure spending, it’s not sexy enough. And many cities are having trouble just keeping people living/working there.

A very expensive 15-20 year project that may help with that can be a VERY hard sell.

And it’s only to build a few miles of something, so just a tiny piece of what’s needed.

Or you’re NYC and already have an existing subway. But instead of 10s of millions it needs HUNDREDS of millions (or more) to ‘fix’, minimum.

>Or you’re NYC and already have an existing subway. But instead of 10s of millions it needs HUNDREDS of millions (or more) to ‘fix’, minimum.

Remind me how much money is in NYC?

The fact that money exists they are does not mean that it’s accessible. If it was there wouldn’t be new stories about how the subway system is about to fall apart every 12 months.

SV would have the best public transit on earth and wouldn’t have any homeless or housing problems.

>SV would have the best public transit on earth and wouldn’t have any homeless or housing problems.

They should. All that would be required is raising municipal taxes.

It’s where it is because of happenstance. It’s not a city that needs some specific natural resource that’s only produced right there.

There’s nothing stopping Silicon Valley companies from migrating to other areas in California or even other states. I’m sure there are more than enough places that would be willing to throw out ridiculous tax advantages to lure big companies there.

Won't let me reply to you. A tax on housing is different than a tax on business. You've got the priciest real estate in the U.S. If you can afford that, you can afford to pay more in taxes.

If you can afford pricy real estate, that doesn’t mean you can afford more taxes. That means that you are spending more on real estate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton%27s_fork

They built vta and no one uses it.

I have a bunch of issues with the VTA light rail. Mostly it’s slow and doesn’t always come at the “right time”. If the choice is not to go somewhere, or take the light rail, I’ll almost always choose not to travel there, or take a taxi. Sitting in a light rail for an hour vs 20 minutes in a taxi just doesn’t make sense.

I mean this is my issue with public transport throughout the Bay Area really, except BART at commute hours. I'm visiting NYC right now and taking the subway, and the difference is night and day.

If only NYC got to keep all that money. NYC is part of NY State so the money largely lines the state coffers where it is used for pork-barrel projects in far flung places most NYC residents will never even visit.

The state is very enthusiastic about taking the money out of the city but not so interested in investing much back into any transportation infrastructure to support its' cash cow.

Norman Mailer once ran for Mayor of NYC and part of his platform was for NYC to secede from NY State:

'New York City would be split off from the rest of New York State, and achieve independent statehood as the 51st State of the U.S. The campaign sought to free the city from the control of "upstate legislators who don't care about the city but control our schools, police, housing, and money."'[1]

And perhaps more topical is that part of that platform was also to ban all cars from Manhattan except Taxis and buses. And this was in 1969 :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City:_the_51st_State

It actually isn't very expensive when the same country spends more than the next couple of countries on defense contractor salaries^W^W national defense. The hardest thing is a change of mind and priorities, nothing actual or tangible in terms of cost.

Considering that a local government can't just spend the money allocated to "national defense" even if they wanted to, I'd consider that a pretty tenuous argument to make.

It's not that tenuous. Taxpayer dollars go from the fed to military contracts. Instead, the fed could fund local government projects through per project funding schemes or increased budget allocations.

How do you think the national road network was built in the first place?

> How do you think the national road network was built in the first place?

part of the justification for building it was national defense.

Our country is a lot bigger with barely anything in the middle. Cities without adequate public transit can be blamed directly on the voters.

Or maybe the fact our country is huge, and infrastructure cost is ghastly compared to say, all of europe. But sure, blame the voters.

This is an excuse for no transit options between metros, but not an excuse for no public transit inside the metros.

> "barely anything in the middle"

It's amazing how many people think this. There are metro areas in "the middle" with populations greater than European countries. And Texas, right in the middle, has a population that would put it at #10 in Europe.

   #3 Chicago 9.5 million
   #4 Dallas 7.4 million
   #5 Houston 6.9 million
   #14 Detroit 4.3 million
   #16 Minneapolis 3.6 million
   #19 Denver 2.9 million
   #21 St Louis 2.8 million

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...

The Chicago metro would be the 20th largest country in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

How widely spaced are those cities though? US population density is 33 people/km^2 compared with 112 for the EU.

Far, but almost everyone does not commute outside their local city so I don't get your point.

Let be kind to the GP and assume he meant "space between metro areas" rather than the simplistic "coastal and flyover" meme.

Look at Texas. 200 miles of between Houston and Dallas and Austin. This largely empty triangle itself is half the Texas population. But its barely 10% of the Texas area.

So yes. The US metros are isolated compared to Europe.

That isolation means that people travel to airports to go to other metro areas, rather than train stations like in Europe.

It doesn't explain the lack of transit inside the metros.

Metro population density is far more important.

US metro population density is low in most places that are not constrained by oceans or mountains.

Same with Canada, and yet Metro is better in most big Canadian cities than any I've been to in the U.S.

Aren't Canada's biggest cities along borders with rivers?

> It doesn't explain the lack of transit inside the metros.

That is because whites moved out and systematically starved the cities of a tax base and state funding for infrastructure projects that would benefit minorities.

Many of these cities were more densely connected by train stations prior to Europe's rail network, yet America's co-dependent dreams of the automobile and of flight derailed that and sold the rail network to the lowest bidder for terrible, slow cargo usage only.

Which absolutely does start to explain the lack of transit inside many of these metros: at the same time the rails were converted to mostly cargo only a lot of the suburban commuter lines were themselves "lost" to time or destroyed. It's utterly depressing to see the old passenger train maps in America and compare to what some of those passenger lines could be serving today if like Europe they'd been kept up/maintained.

A lot more of the suburbs in every American city than people realize were served by trolley and passenger train in their infancy that they grew around, and just because many of the lines have been "lost" over the years doesn't mean that their skeletons don't still show in the overall growth pattern. (Until you get into the entirely car-dependent exurbs and "suburbs of the suburbs", of course.)

America outsourced public transit to the lowest bidders, they got bored serving people directly and went with focusing solely on cargo, and people were too busy driving everywhere to notice what they lost.

> Our country is a lot bigger with barely anything in the middle

That's a positive for public transport, you can cover more people cheaper because almost everyone live in big cities.

Maybe it’s rich because it has lower public expenditures relative to economic output?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending

Americans prefer the convenience of owning cars and driving, at least they have for the past several generations though this may be changing.

If you go to cities like Chicago or New York City, many people do use public transport. I did when I lived in Chicago, generally hated it, but it was cheaper and faster than driving downtown for work in that situation. To get anywhere else in the city or suburbs it would be faster and more convenient to drive.

I have a commuter stop within 500ft of my apartment to ride in and out of NYC. I rarely use it because I can beat the train by driving, it's unreliable, I don't have to plan around the schedule, and it's cheaper to drive. On street parking is not a problem for the time and place that I go into the city.

It's the richest country on earth - that's the reason

Politics.

Adding a bike lane or adjusting road speed to reduce car-pedestrian fatalities is enough to get city council members unelected the next cycle.

That's basically everyone in all but the top ~5 cities. In a mid-sized metro area, there might be a bus system with hourly or worse frequency as a handout for the destitute. The working poor drive beaters.

Even in New York's non-Manhattan boroughs, 35-75% drive.

Hilariously enough, the working poor in Europe wish they could afford to drive beater cars.

Mhh no they don't. Working poors in Europe have vars because they live in suburbs with bad connections and have to work far outside city centers. People without cars are mostly richer households living close to city center and working inside the city or not far around.

I know lots of people who commute by car into the centre of Birmingham every day. My train commute is only 30 minutes door to door, but I'd be quicker driving. Do you live in London?

I used to work shifts in London, drove in. When I lived west it took 2 hours in the morning (10am arrival), took 30 minutes at night (10pm departure)

South east was worse, at night is drive through the mall and grafalger square on the way home, took an hour or so. Again 2 hours in morning.

Not everyone is based in the centre of London. Not everyone works 9-5.

> I would not attempt to drive into the centre of a city in the UK for any reason at any time of day ever.

So are there any cars in the city and where do they park? Or is it mostly taxi cabs and city buses?

Taxis, busses, delivery vehicles, chauffeured cars, police. Very few private drivers.

Thanks, makes sense. That's how it should be. Also a testament to functioning public transportation system.

I mean there's still millions of them clogging the roads and polluting, they're just not private vehicles.

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