Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

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Remember, the United States already built a full train infrastructure with excellent times almost a hundred years ago, and removed it because at the time cars were a good alternative. I've seen that many rapidly developing countries are seeing massive increases of car purchases by a new middle class. So I figure we just are about 50-75 years ahead.

To me 15m with a 1m variance is pretty usable. A typical trip on BART (it's intercity) is going to be 30-40 minutes, and in many parts of the system you have multiple train options, which also reduces the wait time.

To build some new train that works in SF, here's what you gotta do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway Now that is about $1B-2B in building prices to go underground 1.7mi. Oh, that was built to replace a freeway that was torn down in 1989 after an earthquake. So we're just about to see the infrastructure replacement about 30 years later.

You can stop nearly any public transport project by using the state's EIR (IIRC the BART extension to the airport was slowed because of some endangered frogs).

Another issue is that many PT projects are pork-barrel. The route of the "high speed train from LA to SF" is a nice example of this; the train will not be high speed for the popular sources and destinations, because the central valley obtained concessions about the routing. It will probably never see ridership to justify its costs, and major contribution to that is that it can't bring people from downtown LA to downtown SF quickly. I dunno. does the shinkasen make a detour to rural agricultural areas? What about high speed trains in China? Do they go through second-tier cites?

My point is that while the US/SF is a first class city in a developed country, it lacks the political will to make great public transport, has trouble raising the funds to pay our very expensive building costs, and the alternatives are "just good enough" that the populace isn't super keen on large amounts of spending of PT without seeing some sort of benefit from it. Addressing all three of those and making change that makes the US a better place seems pretty implausible at this point.

The alternate take on "the US is ahead by enabling car ownership by a huge chunk of the population earlier" is that the US tried it and is a cautionary tale for how it breaks down once the population gets large enough. It's still "good enough" for now that it would be extremely hard to justify the cost of undoing it - though Lagos would be the even more extreme version of that tale, if US cities ever want to get significantly denser. I'd say no other country would want to follow it, but it's not like it's purely a planned thing there either (see Lagos again). But the more developed places that already/still have the trains are unlikely to decide Atlanta or Los Angeles traffic is what they're missing.

Can you explain your point about Lagos to this poor soul who knows virtually nothing about it?

>> does the shinkasen make a detour to rural agricultural areas?

They generally follow the natural route between large cities. This route is in the valleys which are already relatively populated because they are not the mountains which comprise most of japan. There are two, three or more types of high speed rolling stock on the same lines. The older, slower trains are cheaper between cities and have more local stops.

US rail transit infrastructure was intentionally destroyed by automotive, oil, and tyre companies, as determined in an anti-trust suit.

The fine exacted: $5,000 against General Motors, and $1 against its treasurer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

> it lacks the political will to make great public transport

It has enough space to continually and affordably reduce population density. I'm sure other countries make greater public transit investments because they do not have this convenience at their disposal.

Er, that's not really true. Lots of places that have good public transportation are not short on landmass. And the U.S., despite its large landmass, developed its own cities in very dense styles right up until the car became dominant. You can see this in every American town that has a "historic downtown". Prior to the car, the development pattern was large numbers of fairly dense developments, which were internally navigable by streetcar if they were large enough to require it, and which were connected to each other by railroad.

American cities _did_ make large public transit networks in the past - L.A. once had the largest streetcar network in the world - the thing was that it subsidized cars and made preferential rules for cars to the point of bankrupting the alternatives and then ripped them up. Those streetcars also supported lower-density developments on the periphery - "streetcar suburbs" - which today are still valuable and prized places to live because they are far more walkable than your typical cookie cutter car dependent suburb sprouting up today.

I feel that almost every city that has an "historic downtown" is now also quite a bit larger than what that area defines, and that prior to the car, most cities were developed to take advantage of geographical features that could make certain types of business more profitable or even just possible. If the density was mostly a function of timely access to these features, then it's entirely understandable why we abandoned it as soon as we had the option. And why city boundaries started to grow around the same time.

In what years was that system operating? Los Angles wildly expanded in size from 1912 to 1915, and it looks like most of those systems struggled to be profitable before this point and were only further hampered by the expansion in size and the low ridership of rural lines. It seemed they were unable to accurately match rail with demand in most cases.. and most rural/suburban people were already beginning to prefer cars.

> prior to the car, most cities were developed to take advantage of geographical features that could make certain types of business more profitable or even just possible.

Isn't this self-evident for any town? If the local geography offers nothing in the way of convenient mobility, natural resources, easy access to trade routes, or anything else worth taking advantage of, there's no point founding a town there. Towns need to build wealth to survive and grow. One distinct drawback of ripping up streetcars and making everyone depend on the car is that you have to level massive portions of your downtown to create parking, and you have to take away tons of public space from people to make room for all the traffic. LA did both of those things and it's why it's unique among U.S. cities of its size for being horrifically sprawly and difficult to navigate.

You also need to bear in mind that car-centric development is incredibly, wildly unprofitable, and is subsidized by taxpayers. Modern low density suburban developments require absolutely enormous quantities of expensive infrastructure - pipes, asphalt, power lines, waste collection, wastewater treatment, fire, police - massive upfront capital expenditures with massive long-term liabilities. The U.S. has collectively spent many hundreds of billions of dollars building and supporting infrastructure for the exclusive use of cars. The local taxpayer base rarely if ever is actually able to offset that cost which is why A) much of the funding is from state/federal grants and B) public debt is increasing without end.

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