Comment by glompers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by glompers | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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