When public transit is done right, last mile is more like last 500 feet, and a walk.
Maybe for S-bahns far out it's a mile, but bikeshare should cover that.
Maybe for S-bahns far out it's a mile, but bikeshare should cover that.
Why not? Buses are cheap and can operate on existing infrastructure. Sure there are places like Seattle where the buses are congested and more expensive rail infrastructure is needed, but that is not true in majority of American cities. Quite often the bus lines are even already there, but run so infrequently that they are unusable for the majority of people (think El Paso).
For most of Americans the problem could literally be solved over night.
Though if cities actually did put for that investment, in a few years there would be enough riders as to pay off the investment. I'm not hopeful though: most cities have transit executives who don't care about transit, and so if given a ton of money will instead invest in transit art - things that look good but don't improve transit.
Also we can do it much faster if we accept we need to make driving worse. See https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/09/18/cars-and-train... cars and trains are fundamentally opposed, so every time build American-style light rail and yet continue widening highways we shoot ourselves in both feet.
Accepting the reality that we need carets and sticks to radically reform our material culture, demolish highways, shred zoning laws, crank up the gas tax, and then suddenly find your trains full, bikes all in use, people clamoring for more, the private sector helping with the easy stuff, and more growth in general.
Suburbia on the other hand makes us all worse off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ...
I don’t think dense living energy usage is only marginally less due to the extra distance all the mass has to travel. And with current technology, the energy used is basically a proxy for pollution.
The more mass you move (water, sewage, gas, waste, supplies, people) longer distances, the more you pollute. I.e. the more space you use, the more you pollute. Just like using most other material resources.
It's not marginal at all, but a huge difference. Rich inner suburbs ("Democrat suburbs" you might say) are the worst polluters per capita, and urban and some truly rural areas the best, but the truly rural case absolutely doesn't scale.
I'm sorry, but your boats-the-shed fantasyland is slowly killing us all.
Getting rid of cars would solve that problem regardless of density.
> large public parks
Denser everything else frees up more space for parks. (I sometimes think of a "fractal density" which is high on average but has tons of variation to keep things beautiful.)
You are saying at best make them less bad, but used just as often? Forget other universe, what about the other countries that successfully do what I speak of?
If your lifestyle is inherently non sustainable or non scalable, then you only get to live it because you're at the top of a pyramid scheme.
But we're already running over budget on the resources we do have, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/past-earth-overshoot-d....
Unless we want to accept some kind of extreme depopulation events (either by choice or by systemic failure) then we have to learn to live a lot more efficiently than we do now. And the long term costs of running suburbs are not fully internalized to the people choosing to live like that.
Expecting perpetual economic growth without densification is equally absurd.
A good example is ST3 in the Seattle area. Seattleites and their neighbors overwhelmingly supported the expensive and radical expansion of the rapid transit system in the area and were more then willing to pay the increased taxes for it... Opposition came mostly from the eastern parts of the state even though the taxes are only to be collected in the proximate areas to the expansion.
In fact I can’t recall any examples of people calling for the cancellation of existing public transit. The backlash is usually against planed expansions from distant areas.
I’ve seen a few places on the East coast where voters resonate with political candidates that decry the subsidies to public transit, and call for increases in fares or decrease in frequency of bus/train service.