> Driving everywhere in Houston results in a hell of a lot higher quality of life than riding public transit everywhere in Boston.
I'd really like to see how you come to this conclusion.
I'd really like to see how you come to this conclusion.
There are downsides like traffic, car maintenance, and parking, but in general, cars are probably more comfortable than public transit in the US. I'm also ignoring externalities like pollution and unsustainable suburban sprawl growth. I'd rather take the subway Mon to Fri in NYC, but if the roads are empty, the streets are faster and more comfortable.
Unfortunately, public transit is awesome if everyone has to take it, but if enough people opt out, and we give them an option like a personal car and pave roads over where we could have had public space, then cars become optimal for the individual.
It would cost me approximately $23/day to drive to work accounting for gas + parking, even more if I wanted to pay to use the HOV lane. Instead I drive to a park and ride and take an express bus. The total estimated cost is around $6 including my gas costs.
Somebody pays for the cost of your parking. If you're parking at work, it's your boss. If you're parking on the street, it's taxpayers at large. If you're parking in a park and ride, it's you.
Park and rides are generally built in areas where the cost of parking is much lower then it is downtown, so the overall cost of a P&R + bus ticket will often be lower then driving and parking the whole way yourself.
Public transit is generally safer and less costly when you start taking into account accidents and injuries resulting from them. There's also the immense value of being freed from having to focus on the road, which gives you the ability to multitask and read, write code etc.
I used to do just that back when I rode the bus to and from college.
you don't have this in your car.
Don't get me started on people suffering from road rage.
In personal terms, I sought a new job where I could take the T or bike to avoid driving as the extreme antisocial behavior of other Boston drivers was taking a serious toll on me.
You misspelled "creating previously non-existent middle manager positions for powerful people to place people in as political favors"
I find being in close quarters with that many people way more stressful then driving.
In European cities the most common unpleasantness is drunk people late at night coming back from clubbing, at all other times it is as pleasant as it can be. It was certainly a shock to discover the reason for empty Muni carriages during rush hour so after moving to SF. To give people from outside the bay area an idea, elevators on the stations now have a person in them at all times to avoid them turning into public bathrooms. The area of the city all the underground lines go through have historically been the congregation area for the homeless, and there are a lot of homeless here.
But everything you listed there, except people and AC, doesn't apply to commuting, which is the main transportation people in suburbs rely on.
30 minutes sleeping in mean I've just added one hour to my car commute time (we joked that the difference between leaving at 6:30 and 7am is getting to work at 7am and 9am), whereas I just catch the next train and get there exactly at the same time as I would have before... plus 30 minutes. If I want to pick up beer, I just grab some from the liquor store on the way to the train or whatever, and carry it, no big deal. Re: rain, traffic accidents go way up in the rain and everything slows way down on the freeways, but the train doesn't feel it at all and still gets there exactly at the same time. It's got AC on it so I'm not uncomfortable on hot days.
Public Transit generally sucks in America so yea, driving is better because the above reasons don't apply when the train comes once every 3 hours, is unreliable, and the AC is broken. But the option does exist to have good public transit, it just needs the funding. Other cities and countries have figured it out, it's possible.
So given that good public transit is an option, is better for the environment, is cheaper in real costs, why not seek that out?
Our public transit is actually very well funded. London’s Tube spends half as much money per passenger mile as New York’s subway. (And the New York Subway or DC Metro get half their operational funding from the government, while the London Tube pays for its own operational funding with fares.)
Just because non-Americans have figured out how to do something doesn’t mean Americans can’t. (For example, we spend among the most on public education per student, but get worse results.) Good, well managed, public services is something that appears incompatible with our culture.
Culture, or system of governance? Culture is too wishy-washy a term. It seems to easy to give up - ah sorry, Americans are just too stupid/lazy to figure it out. Nah. I want to figure out what specifically about the structure of our infrastructure development is, and fix it.
Right now, folks in our county are trying to shut down three light rail stops that have already been built and are operating. (Transit is a “conduit for crime.”) If we do that, we have to pay the federal government back a bunch of money we got to build those stops in the first place. Americans hate infrastructure. And they don’t particularly like each other, so they have built a distributed society that doesn’t require as much centralized coordination.
It’s not stupidity or laziness. Americans are too individualistic to build infrastructure. Nobody can put the needs of society over their own needs. That’s why every infrastructure project is a disaster of inefficient self-serving union workers[1] and endless litigation. (I have an acquaintance who is ethnically Japanese, and moved back to Japan after growing up in the US. She remarked to me: “Americans don’t really go around thinking about how what they’re doing affects other people.”)
Once you really internalize all that, it’s pretty fine. I kinda like the suburbs. I like being able to roll right up to a chain restaurant and park, instead of having to shlep a stroller up and down stairs. In my old age, I’ve realized that if you’re living in New York or SF, you’re doing the whole America thing wrong. That just forces you to constantly confront all the things Americans do poorly (transit, zoning, social services). Kansas City! You can drive everywhere, traffic isn’t too bad, cost of living is super low, etc.
[1] In the NYT piece on why the Second Avenue subway costs so much, there were French transit managers pointing out how ridiculously over staffed the project was. The French were pointing out how inefficient we were.
Maybe you're right that America as a whole can't. I think the younger liberals though, at least from my experience with them, willing to put forward the needs of society. I think many of them have no choice, because the individualist option just isn't available anymore like it was in the past.
Thank you for your words on this.
One of the things I've noted is often the opposition is basically insane.
From voters in the Santa Cruz mountain blocking construction of a sewer up HWY 9. Needed because everyone's septic systems are polluting the ground water and streams. Blocked after all the planning had been done. The Feds, State, and Country would have paid for most of it. But blocking construct meant all the planning costs had to be paid for by the home owners. Total $1000 each.
To suing to block the construction of the California high speed rail. Because they might run a tunnel 3000 feet under someones toy horse ranch in the San Gabriels.
It's that a car-heavy culture takes the choice away for everybody for any other transportation.
I'm sure driving around Houston is great, but say I don't want to, for whatever reason (I want to drink a lot to celebrate something)...or say I can't, because of a health condition...
because of the car culture, I now have no choice.
There should be a way to structure cities to return choice to people, instead of giving up 35% of our usable land to streets that force people to move about in personal vehicles; freedom should mean the freedom to choose one's transportation, not just the freedom to own and maintain a vehicle.
I disbelieve. If you don't want to be caught up in nasty traffic, you have to check the reports, and have knowledge of when rush hour gets bad. So you're still on somone else's schedule.