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Comment by xnyan | Hacker News Reader

>I don't know about that. ...Might require political action of some sort.

Wow, ok. I live in the raleigh-durham metro area. What is timeline for significant non-car travel for us of literally any kind outside of 40 years and hundreds of billions of dollars? If your answer is "there is none", everyone here already knows that. We are chained to cars with no way out.

>Wouldn't even consider moving somewhere that wasn't walkable.

Not joking: I am really proud of your opinion. Never change. There's not even close to enough of you to intact real transportation change in the US. I wish I was wrong about that, but it's not been my lived experience living in the US.

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Yeah...my brother lives in Nashville, and they handily voted down a public transit bill recently that would have extended bus services.

While that is a pain, I get it. Extending bus services is a band aid on a systemic problem. People don’t want to take the bus unless they have to because buses take forever compared to cars. Buses take forever because they have to stop so often. They have to stop so often because 99% of the US is totally spread out with very low density. And that is the fundamental problem. You can’t just tweak the buses or trains or walk more in a city that has built $100 billion of infrastructure around driving cars. Walkability and public transit just aren’t viable alternatives in a country built around the suburb and the highway.

Buses also suffer from the problem that when road traffic is high and public transportation might be a great alternative to gridlock and sitting in traffic, the buses themselves suffer from the same traffic issues. Most people seem to prefer to sit in traffic in a car they control than public buses.

Buses are an incredibly bad public transportation option because they sit so well in a local maxima trap because they look like a viable public transportation and "share" the road infrastructure costs of cars leaving them "cheap investments", so much that cities don't think they need to invest in anything more expensive. But they also share all the detriments of investment in car infrastructure, and thus through self-fulfilling-prophecy expectedly never grow the ridership to encourage cities to push for more investment in public transportation over car transportation.

From that perspective bus services aren't even a band aid on the systemic problem, but a symptom/perpetuator of the systemic problem.

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