As an expat living in Zurich, I can say that it is difficult to explain to American's what they're missing.
It's death by a thousand tax cuts.
Obviously that analogy is far from perfect, as Seattle has its own set of infrastructure problems, but extrapolating from most European countries doesn't seem particularly useful.
Is it though? I would assume NYC falls in that category and the subway is crumbling. The cars are old, and some of its subway stations have not only not been remodeled in years, they haven't been painted or cleaned recently either [1].
Manhattan is an incredibly rich and dense area, I'd say in theory the city is just as, or better setup for success in terms of public transport than Tokyio, Paris, or Mexico City. Yet, public transport in these cities seems to overall be of better quality than New York's.
Reading a bit into it, it seems clear that it's a matter of corruption, inefficiency and lack of will to fix things [2], not just "the way things have to be" due to external forces.
[1]: https://www.amny.com/transit/nyc-subway-stations-garbage-dum...
[2]: https://ny.curbed.com/2017/12/29/16829746/mta-nyc-subway-con...
And I don’t think your point about Manhattan necessarily refutes my point. Just because a place is wealthy doesn’t mean it will have great infrastructure, but there are wealthy places in the US with good infrastrcture.
I also don’t dispute that it’s not a priority in most of the U.S. I just take issue with the idea that it’s easy to figure out what to do and we just need to look at a place like Zurich.
The U.S. is huge. It’s certainly more homogenous than Europe, but it’s big enough and variable enough that a lot of people deign to call the middle 2,000! miles fly-over country. Zurich and Istanbul are only like 1,400 miles apart, and are such drastically different places, but people expect the whole U.S. to have it’s infrastructure together when 1,500 miles gets you just halfway across the U.S.
You're going to have to tell me what those are, because I've been all over the US and I have absolutely no idea what places these might be. All the wealthy places I've seen in the US either have crumbling infrastructure (northeast), terrible public transit, or no real public transit at all and expect everyone to get around in cars (e.g., suburban DC area).
>but people expect the whole U.S. to have it’s infrastructure together when 1,500 miles gets you just halfway across the U.S.
No, people expect the US's major metro areas to have their infrastructure together (i.e., subways), and they just don't.
I think the commenter was referring to the fact purchasing power is not dense (ie, dense areas don't have as high a purchasing power)? A little confused by this too.
I like looking at purchase power in general, rather than GDP - the absolute numbers don't matter so much as long as your domestic market is large enough to produce most things people need.
Secondly, the density of savings and taxes per square kilometer is giving you an idea about how much potential for development a current settlement has. That's the capital that can be drawn from directly. Density of spendings (train tickets, consumer goods etc.) is the driver for outside capital to come in trying to get a dividend. Taken all together (savings + spendings) you get the density of PPP adjusted GDP per square kilometer as a figure that matters. As you can see in [1], US and China is actually quite similar in this metric, and it's probably also still similar if you just take its coastal regions. I also think that this metric is very similar for the population belt between London and Rome, and the East Coast corridor in the US.
[1] http://mecometer.com/topic/gdp-ppp-per-square-kilometer/
It's hard to use "they are different" argument when your country is objectively worse than Switzerland and China.
It also helps that the topography forces development into mostly linear shapes (following the valleys), rather than radiating in all directions as normally happens in flatter terrain. Linear corridors are much easier to serve via public transit, because everything is "on the way".
Check out Switzerland on Google Earth and these features will jump out at you: https://earth.google.com/web/@46.8131873,8.22421005,1311.812...
E.g., San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, at the center of Silicon Valley, have population density of 663 and 580 per km^2. And of course San Francisco has a whopping 7249 per km^2. They also have a string of connected cities, thanks to being constrained by the pacific and the SF bay from either side.
I don't think I have to repeat on HN what the infrastructure looks like in the Silicon Valley.
* Besides, your argument can be paraphrased as "Of course it's easier in Switzerland, because it's filled with mountains!" Think about it.