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Comment by merry_flame | Hacker News Reader

Paris commute times are much higher than in the rest of the country. France's average commute time is currently at 25 min, which lower than US average. Ergo… Also excellent transit-oriented cities are just that, excellent. Had a 20 min commute in Singapore a while, it was just terrific – excellent flow, perfectly convenient, great selection of hawkers to start the day with a curry puff or whatever suits your fancy before popping into the ultrareliable and silent MRT… Beats driving any day, and especially what you get in a bad car-based city like Jakarta with its average driving speed on weekday mornings of 5 km/h…

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No offense intended, but the second leg of cyberax’ point still stands — quoted below — higher percentages of the total jobs in a metro area are within the average range of an average US metro dwelling household also, as long as they don’t have to worry about costs of car repair and insurance.

If Paris’ airport built two new runways and they both filled up with international flights immediately, would this be taken as evidence that their construction was an irresponsible waste of scarce public investment? It would rather be celebrated as a validation of forecast utility to the public and to the economy. Same for urban condo buildings filling up. Yet American traffic jams are gross and different from runways? How so?

> Affluence definitely followed [as well as preceded; but, in any case, a set of feedback loops, not simply affluence preceding networks’ construction —-Ed.] the conscious policy decision to build a network of freeways and highways, with a focus on suburban lifestyle.

> To expand a bit on that, car-oriented cities allowed US citizens to:

> 1. Have shorter commutes than Europeans. This _still_ holds true!

> 2. Be able to access more businesses within the "reasonable commute" range.

> No offense intended, but the second leg of cyberax’ point still stands — quoted below — higher percentages of the total jobs in a metro area are within the average range of an average US metro dwelling household also, as long as they don’t have to worry about costs of car repair and insurance.

I don't think it does though? Figure 4 on their link shows the transit-oriented cities in Europe and China doing a lot better on that metric than US cities.

> I don't think it does though? Figure 4 on their link shows the transit-oriented cities in Europe and China doing a lot better on that metric than US cities.

The axes have different scales, look again. The Figure 4 shows that the US cities cluster around 500000 jobs accessible by car. And cars are the main mode of transportation in the US.

Figure 3 shows that European cities cluster around 100000-200000 jobs accessible by public transit.

It's also true that many European cities are actually competitive when you do use a car. But we're looking at transit vs. car use.

> The axes have different scales, look again.

Within each graph the scale is the same, and the European/Chinese cities do significantly better (are higher up the graph) than the US cities. (I do wonder why London and Paris are missing from Figure 4).

> It's also true that many European cities are actually competitive when you do use a car. But we're looking at transit vs. car use.

They're better than competitive; their trendline for job accessibility is 2x or more better than the US one. Car-oriented city design results in much worse job accessibility, even for car users.

> Paris commute times are much higher than in the rest of the country.

Do you think urbanization cancer will spare you, if you have an Eiffel Tower in your country? Paris metro area is about 1/6-th of France in population, and it's growing. That's why commute times will keep getting worse, while commutes themselves are going to get more and more miserable.

The US average commute time is weighted down by large coastal cities, that are growing like a cancer, following anti-human urbanist policies. If you look at smaller cities in the US, then it's basically a commute heaven. E.g. Salt Lake City is at 20 minutes, Boise ID is at 15 minutes.

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