Meh, depends what your priorities are. While the opportunities for insane white collar income are much fewer cities in the Midwest are pretty great for quality of life.
I'm in Florida now, and most of Florida is horrible. Sprawl on top of swamp. Everything is so spread out, the roads have so much traffic, and there's too many people driving agressively or not paying attention. Every hour on the road is a roll of the dice in my $30,000 vehicle versus some asshole swerving through traffic because he was raised on Fast and Furious or something.
Houston is the same, just so many cars and everything so spread out. Atlanta leaves that impression, also. And much of Charlotte. Two-thirds of Austin is jam packed with traffic and nowhere to park. These places were all mostly built in an era of car-centric urban planning.
My impression of Indianapolis, and some of it's suburbs, a booming midwest city, is that they are on their way to the same situation - Driving miles back and forth from housing developments to box stores for every need with only hundreds of cars for company. It's inhumane.
Yuck. This is a fail for so many people. I have working poor friends and it sucks that they have to spend several hundreds of dollars per month each for a non-shit car, insurance, and gas. It keeps them in the hole. I blame zoning and selfish property owners who won't allow more density.
Residents in both places pay for their housing units but share the costs for roads, sewers, etc. Denser cities have an advantage in this regard.
I like the Melbourne area. I'm to the east, out on the barrier island. I have a coworker out to the west, with canal access to a lake so he can go shoot alligators from his airboat. There was a coworker who got 11 acres. He got sheep, chickens, and goats. He can shoot in his yard. Somebody got a low-rise condo right on the Atlantic Ocean beach. Somebody bought a McMansion.
The last time this came up I described the culture a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17271199
People who want to walk to work can do that, but road traffic is insignificant. The public transportation here is called SCAT. (supposedly the Space Coast Area Transit) The word "scat" fits it very well. I don't think anybody cares.
I've been mostly around Jacksonville, and there are spots that I like. The three blocks along the beaches if you can swing it! Or on the beach side of the ditch (inter-coastal). Or the hipster neighborhoods near downtown (Riverside, San Marco, Springfield, Murray Hill, maybe uptown proper). I would be impractical to live on the beach and work downtown. Cost of living is a good deal. It's got everything, you just might need to look for it a bit!
I've been through St. Pete, and some spots, including some of the small towns on the coast of the peninsula, left a good impression (Tarpon Springs, for example). As long as you avoid the sprawl on 19 and don't have a killer commute off the peninsula.
I thought St. Augustine was interesting, I've been there multiple times. It's a small city, and has a lot of tourists - and a lot of the things that tourists like to do. I lived in a similar tourist town, and you find the good stuff and learn you way around. I haven't lived here but know people that do.
I've been to Gainesville. It's a college town. The unique and interesting stuff is tied to that. But I do like small cities, it's easy to be close to everything and not have the hassles of a bigger/busier place.
I've been around Orlando. Nothing I saw caught my eye. Avoid I4 during rush hour, during the day if you can! I've been though some of the suburbs south of Miami, didn't like the traffic, nothing I saw caught my eye.
I've visited Key West and South Beach Miami. Both were interesting and unique in their own way. I'd spend more time in Key West if I had the chance. (and money!) My visit to South Beach was a while ago. Neat place to visit. I stayed at a hostel that had valet parking :-)
I think it's a problem the way that cities have grown via sprawl over the past few decades, and a lot of southern cities have grown a lot during that time. Apparently it's more profitable to build further out instead of infilling, and build housing developments instead of integrated neighbourhoods. It's depressing to see apartment complexes with sidewalks to nowhere and nothing to do but drive a couple/few miles to the nearest applebees or whatever.
I think the problem with crazy drivers comes with the amount and density of traffic, the long commutes, the divided highways with people driving well over the already fast speed limits while people are pulling in and out of plazas, etc. This can be brutal for the people who need to deal with that every day.
The neighborhoods in older cities, or older parts of cities, tend to be grids of various sized roads dispersing traffic as opposed to cul-de-sacs funnelling everyone in and out of their complexes and developments onto a couple of congested main roads.
I've lived in a northern city, much of it built before the automobile, but not anywhere as crowded as Chicago or NYC.
I'm not personally bitter, except for maybe zoning laws that don't allow for more density. I've had a work form home job for quite a while, and haven't had to deal much with bad traffic. I do feel sad for the people I know who have to commute more than an hour in bad traffic, I feel sad for the working poor who struggle to keep a car on the road, I feel sad for the kids in some of these places who need a ride to see any of their friends, the teenagers with nowhere to hang out besides the Waffle House parking lot, etc.
Also, I'm sure that the HOAs so many people live in wouldn't allow anyone to convert their single into a double, or build an auxiliary dwelling in the backyard.
I wonder if areas of the city not under an HOA regime would allow stuff like that?
Trying to get to Circular Quay from western suburbs for instance is not all that nice.
Good times.
In the US only high COL cities do so this makes it seem like a subway raises real estate costs. But there’s no logical connection.
Buses too but they’re not as dominant as in north america. Trams are generally quieter, prettier and less obtrusive. And with quite frequent service. Also easy to know your way around without knowing the routes as they’ll have lines on a map.
This is actually a negative. Build a train, and it's really hard to move. This actually spurs investment. A bus line can be taken away with the stroke of a pen.
I think it's more the tunnel that makes these lines less likely to be discontinued, rather than the train. Tunnels are just expensive to move whether they're for trains or for busses.
For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_New_York_City...
All save one of the defunct lines in NYC went defunct because they were demolished for other stuff--because they were elevated or at-grade lines. (The one underground line that went defunct was split into three lines in active use today.) Putting it underground definitely increases political and budget survivability.
Maybe driver-less buses would be a new sweet spot? Maintain detailed road maps for the driving software instead of tracks?
Would be a political nightmare. One of these autonomous busses hit a passenger and it becomes a policy nightmare. Public control center gets hacked, its a technical nightmare.
To problems like this, sometimes the solution isn't tech.
Compare that to a subway that just goes below most obstacles in a straight line, travels at >80km/h and usually has no places to yield whatsoever. Fast travel in a predictable way, independent of traffic, weather, whatever. Maybe rush hour will make getting into the subway a little slower, but that's about it.
Subway is far superior to everything, including trams and trains for urban environments. It is expensive to build however, which is why in Europe it is usually supplemented with trams and busses for outlying routes or to fill the gaps between tunnels. Flexibility is rather a minus actually, because it leads to bus routes being subject to "snaking" through neighborhoods to satisfy the occasional political whim. Planted 5 trees and a bench? Call it "Mayour Mueller Park", add a bus stop with a 5min detour. Lather, rinse, repeat. Subways are somewhat immune to that.
Bus/Taxi-only lanes are pretty common actually.
In this case, Buses can drive in the underground tunnels that were built for this subway, can't they? Seattle did it for many years until they replaced it with trains: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=etT_wVuKy_I
In that case, the only thing slowing down the bus is speed limits, which are probably a bit lower than a train, since train would be safe on rails, but still I wonder why they didn't use that given that the tunnels are here and in good condition
I think running buses in subway tunnels is just someone's creative idea to attempt to sabotage having reliable mass transit so that ridership doesn't get too high and they can argue that the whole program should be cut a few years down the line.
The tunnels and their exits next to interstate highway already exist per the article, so at this point the construction costs are assumed to be negligible (compared to a "$2.6 billion and take thirty years to build" system quoted in [1])
it would be used exactly like it was in Seattle: as a shortcut through the city for some routes. The bus retains all its advantages outside the tunnel, it's basically an underground dedicated bus lane.
If really popular then it can get upgraded to a real train, like it was done in Seattle.
Some built other alternatives to buses or shared-grade trams, for example by putting fast local trains under same ticket system (train-based local transit was very popular in UK till Beeching Axe, too), others experiment with things like separate-grade trams - cheaper than proper train-line, but still achieve separation from car traffic.
Because the same thing that gives buses flexibility and cheap start, is the thing that makes the biggest problem - sharing space with car traffic.
If there's a traffic jam, buses stop too. If something takes out part of car infrastructure, the dedicated lanes might be lost for a time, too. When Lazienkowski Bridge burned down in 2015 in Warsaw, figuring a connection that allowed one to take train or subway became crucial, as previously very fast buses (bus/taxi lanes!) would give me a commute longer than commuting from Amsterdam to London by train.
Something no one brought up is the recent-ish idea of bus rapid transit (BRT), which solves the problem of not having exact change, because who does these days? BRT gives some of the advantages of rail like fare machines and dedicated right-of-ways. Albuquerque (which is far too small for a subway) just put in its first line.
I think maybe you make too many assumptions. Michigan, for example, has any of these within driving distance (albeit their definition of ‘mountain’ is a bit different than out West)
It isn't all corn and wheat out here.