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Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

As an American I am increasingly jealous of European countries and their public transport (among other things cough health care cough gun control).

It feels like the only way we will ever get there as a country is one state at a time, and even then you see projects like California's high-speed rail that's massively over-budget and overdue. At least the blue states seem to _get_ it, meanwhile those who live in red or purple states will just be left behind as always because of how intensely politics has carved a divide between people and led to so many unfounded lies being propagated to their citizens.

All that to say, good on Germany. Now U.S., get your shit together.

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When blue states show me a viable public transportation network for a reasonable cost I will support them in my red state.

Consider the CA high speed rail a PoC for the nation. Would you endorse copying that model? Is Chicago increasing its ridership/coverage (honest question).

Honestly, I couldn't tell you. I think the U.S. so far has failed horribly on this front. My note about blue states was simply that they are the only ones pushing for public transport like this. But will we ever see CA high-speed rail that's cheap and useful? I'm not sure.

It's obvious that the real cost of things like highspeed rail come from environmental regulation and cost of land purchases from existing land owners. European & Asian countries have obviously figured out a way to streamline this process. They have more lax environmental restrictions and acquire land either through force or by never allowing people to purchase land outright (in the case of China I believe). I don't know if we want to go that far, but at a certain point we have to do something because riding around on congested aging highways everywhere is not the answer.

"Pushing for" is not a strategy. What I'm seeing in various blue US cities here is public transport falling into disuse in 2020, turning into a homeless encampment (often with the concomitant violence and theft) in 2021, and still not recovering in 2023. Philadelphia's SEPTA is still (2022) at half the 2019 ridership. It doesn't help that some lines got almost cancelled in 2020 (reduced to just a few trains per day), which likely caused a bunch of people to buy cars and not look back.

And here I am wondering how I-5 in CA or I-75 in Atlanta having more lanes in one direction than most states have going in both directions even in their busiest of areas is blue states getting it or red states not getting it.

Also, tying in gun control or enforced Medicare-for-all is a good way of convincing people who are on the edge of public transit to not support you politically if they are a package deal, which right now it appears to be.

This is a little bit hyperbole. I-5 through LA county is mostly 4-ish lanes and even chokes down to 2 lanes wide in boyle heights by downtown LA. Its just as wide much of podunk I-75 that serves Toledo, Ohio, with a population of 270k that declines by the year. If anything given the population density, the freeways in socal are underbuilt compared to cities out east from there who seem to have just as sprawling interchanges and number of lanes despite what is sometimes an order of magnitude difference in population.

As soon as we give up our over-sized personal income and pay more taxes we'll be able to have more public infrastructure.

The issue seems to be people don't like the idea of only keeping 50% (or less) of their income + making 50% less to begin with. Most people that work at big tech get their big salaries because the companies profit in data-mining ways that would be more regulated in Europe.

I totally agree, I say TAX ME MORE.

The thing is though, it's not even most higher-salaried tech workers that we need to tax heavier. We need to tax the rich. When I say the rich I don't mean people making 300k/yr. I mean people making a million or more per year. We need to massively increase the marginal tax rate at around $3 million to around 90%. This was how it was as recently as the 80's, and repealing those taxes has led to an increase in wealth inequality this country has never seen.

While the US is investing less in transit than other countries, the projects themselves are silly expensive compared to other countries. For how little transit is used in the US, it's amazing how much (relative) funding there is.

To get the US towards building much more transit (and other infrastructure) there are many hurdles, but one of the main ones is building useful things for non-obscene amounts of money.

yeah, that goes back to us paying people more than other countries. People in the US make a killing managing projects, working in the office, etc... not to mention the huge amounts the C-Suite as salary and bonuses for their leadership on these projects.

At least according to some, this isn't the (only) cause: https://pedestrianobservations.files.wordpress.com/2023/04/t... People get paid similar to other countries, but the whole structure is much less productive. There are also many other issues.

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