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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

If your question was serious you would focus on starting with public transportation in cities, which the US lacks.

Which us city lacks public transit in the city center?

Not trying to be thick but in all american cities ive lived in, there was sufficient transit in the urban core. I understand arguments that it doesnt extend satisfactorily to the suburbs but your claim is much more specific

Compare that to asian/european cities and you understand why even in large cities in the US people prefer to use uber.

I've traveled extensively in Europe. While transit was available in most cities, and usable, aside from the real metros, like London and Paris and Barcelona, and a few gems, like Budapest, transit was often not frequent enough and clearly took longer than a car. The reason I took transit was it was cheaper in absolute terms, and, as a student, my time wasn't worth much. Also, that was pre-uber. I daresay that if I visited those places today -- places like Oslo, Prague, Porto, Rome, Dublin, etc -- I would have taken uber. It would be faster, and my time is worth more.

The only Asian cities I've spent any noticeable time in are Bombay and Hong Kong. Bombay -- I guess it's called Mumbai now -- is a shit show, in every sense of the word. It's one of the largest cities in the world. Transit is awful and dangerous. The only reason my parents took it growing up was because when they were young they were too poor to afford anything else. When we go back now, as rich foreigners, we always take a private driver or taxis everywhere. It's just not worth it.

Hong Kong is a different story of course, due to the British influence and the fact that it was Britain when I last visited. Also, its constraints as a small island mean transit is a must have. And I would agree that it's transit system is better than most American cities.

That all being said, the American cities with densities approaching that of London, Hong Kong, etc all do have rather good transit options. As I stated elsewhere, the issue is the US has no large cities in the European and Asian sense. Our cities are sparsely populated. Yes, a lot of that is due to government policy, but it's also due to the fact that America is -- for the most part -- completely empty land.

The problem isn't that there is no transit in the city center, the problem is that the city center isn't allowed to expand or increase in density, so more people can't actually live there.

Then more people live in the suburbs, but you need a car to get from the suburbs to the city. Then you get more demand for roads and parking in the city and people stop using the public transit even there.

> Then more people live in the suburbs, but you need a car to get from the suburbs to the city.

Your assertion ignores the fact that network coverage means nothing if the time to traverse the network just to get from point A to point B is much more expensive, time-wise and economically, than simply using personal transportation to get to where you want to go.

That isn't inherently true in the city center. If you have the population density to run subways every ten minutes that aren't subject to traffic jams, you can get from one part of the city center to another faster on a subway than in a car. But that only works if both of your endpoints are on a subway line, which requires more people to live in the city center than they currently do.

> the problem is that the city center isn't allowed to expand or increase in density,

This I totally agree with

I agree, the buses are usually empty to half full. Unless you get soldiers marching people out to buses the US to go work for the "greater good" everyone is going to use cars until the traffic jams become simply too long.

I wonder what city you are in. My bus to work is standing room only and double length.

No disagreement there. I'm just curious what this looks like if we advance our infrastructure enough. I'm not suggesting we prioritize suburbs at all. (I wasn't actually suggesting any course of action)

I am curious if the intent here is that people should not live in the suburbs or the country, just in cities where transportation can be most efficient.

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