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Comment by vwoolf | Hacker News Reader

Then you are evidently not paying attention: https://www.vice.com/en/article/884kvk/why-the-us-sucks-at-b... or https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgym5j/heres-how-the-us-can-....

Costs are currently prohibitive and we're suffering terrible, self-inflicted wounds in the form of costs.

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So the solution is to build a system with all the same flaws, but loses every benefit offered by traditional public transit systems?

The US is obviously bad at public transit, but the solution isn't to build tunnels for cars.

You say that like it's obvious, but to Americans who can't imagine life without cars, it just isn't.

I think that is not entirely true. I'm sure everyone in Chicago, Boston or New York understands how many cars it would take to replace public transit.

And how much space they'd need to clear in their cities to make room for those cars.

Even in San Francisco. The amount of people the Bay Bridge serves in congested rush hour traffic (14,000 people one direction) is just half the people the Transbay tube serves inside BART trains (27,000 one direction).

Without the Transbay tube you’d need 2 more bay bridges to accommodate the additional traffic, and there is no way you could fit all those cars on the San Francisco streets, not even if they rebuilt the waterfront highway.

https://youtu.be/HbZXtSnabWc?t=226

Those people are a very small minority of Americans, and I never said "all Americans", but rather "Americans who can't imagine life without cars", which is probably most of them.

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