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Comment by ju577ry | Hacker News Reader

American here. Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction. You will never see executives or politicians taking trains to work like you do in European countries. Except in NYC.

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A lot of executives and politicians take the train between DC and NYC/Boston. The reason they do it is because the trains in the NE Corridor don't suck. This whole thing is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: build crappy trains, people hate them. Build nice ones, people like them.

The NE corridor doesn't suck compared to the rest of the US but it's pretty dismal compared to the EU and EA.

A favorite experience of mine was waiting at South Station and watching the train get delayed 5 minutes at a time for two and a half hours.

This is a common misconception. Overall US transit riders earn about the same as drivers. In metro areas like Chicago, SFBA, or Washington DC, the median income of transit users is significantly higher than drivers.

>Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction. You will never see executives or politicians taking trains to work like you do in European countries. Except in NYC.

I disagree. This is a chicken-or-egg problem. Nobody is inherently against public transit. Having commuted in a few cities in North America, it's far more comfortable than sitting in traffic. If you have a good system, i think people would use it. The GO Train in the Greater Toronto Area is a good example; it's filled to the brim with white-collar city workers.

> Nobody is inherently against public transit.

I knew plenty of people in the suburbs of Dallas who were against public transportation and any expansion of DART out to their towns. It was usually accompanied by talk of "that element" coming up from the city to rob their houses. It was fucking ridiculous, but unfortunately these people exist and need to be dealt with in order to get transit projects through.

Option seems simple, don't give them a choice in the matter. Say we're building X, it will be done to improve public transit.

The problem is DART needs the outlying towns to join it in order to run anything there. The NIMBYs simply pressured the town into not agreeing to join, so there was no way to do this.

Speak for yourself. In Chicago, we've got the metra [0] which goes to the far out suburbs (L goes to close ones [1]) and there are plenty of upper class people that ride it for their daily commute.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metra#/media/File:Metra-System...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_%22L%22

> American here. Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction.

American here. I do not think your class argument is correct with regards to commuter rail (though it probably is true for bus transit).

Other, and actually main, reason is that good public transport decreases cost of land, it is basically designed to do so: it makes more places liveable/jobs reachable, so there is effectively more land for the same amount of people. So everyone will vote against or they lose their pensions.

Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.

More and better public transport in EU? For same reasons: less democracy and less market economy. More government-owner land, larger fraction of renters who just want cheaper rents (and public transport gives it to them), and they vote in the right direction, less legal opportunities for NIMBYsm.

Public transportation has a complex relationship with land value, but saying it decreases it across the board is blatantly false.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/04/transit-stati...

I'm not convinced that, as you say, decreasing cost of land is the main reason. A simple counterexample would be London which has great public transport and ridiculous prices of land. On the contrary, public transport projects like Crossrail actually increase prices of land and property in affected areas.

Now try to force Americans survive in the abysmal living conditions of the average Londoner. That city is absurdly overregulated, and expensive as hell.

> Now try to force Americans survive in the abysmal living conditions of the average Londoner. That city is absurdly overregulated, and expensive as hell.

I assume you don't live in San Francisco?

“Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.“

Ever been to Japan?

Er, no. Public transport usually increases the price of land, and the rest of your post is just a bizarre totalitarian rant.

> Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.

I'm just going to assume that you've never been to major Asian cities.

Very interesting conclusion there, "all countries with good infrastructure are not democratic" , it also contradicts the fact that you have public roads, you logic applies perfectly for that too.

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