except that one big car is not controlled by you, and you have to schedule your trip around it, rather than have the convenience of any-time availability. Not to mention you can't really carry much onboard.
Japan, many european cities, etc are all comfortable with the provision and use of widespread public transport.
Where it's a problem is those locations where people such as the Koch brothers [1] invested 50 years (1970 - present) and tens of millions of dollars to bend both public opinion and state and city representatives against public transport.
It didn't take much to have the land of the free muttering in lock step about freedumb's, liberty, and their right to roll coal.
From a distance it was like watching lemmings march over a cliff [2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
and this is what i dislike about discourse about public transport.
It is woefully inadequate in the majority of the US. Until the day it is fixed, car will always be a superior mode of transport, but then if car is so often used, there's no public incentive to build out more PT.
And by now, the suburban sprawl has made it such that building out the necessary PT with sufficient quantity and quality to replace cars is prohibitively expensive.
The best solution, imho, is a fleet of auto-driving cars that do not need to be parked, but is available at one's beck and call. Think uber, but is available 24/7 on demand.
Infrastructure is built upon intentional decisions with agendas, not following laws of nature or something.
And yet, they have many many cars.
Please, tell us one country in the world that doesn't need cars.
Many, may be less dependent on cars than the U.S. . But no country is independent of cars. Using such hyperbole doesn't help the conversions. It just deepens the trenches.
That's not the same kind of scheduling. You can miss a bus, and be forced to wait for the next one (which will at 15 minutes minimum), but your car departs exactly when you're ready to leave whenever that is. After that, then you add the 15-30 minutes drive time (or more for a bus, if it's not an express bus and makes intermediate stops or if it takes an indirect route for your itinerary). This is so obvious I'm surprised I have to point it out.
On the rare occasions you have more stuff than you can carry, you can just pay for delivery. It's far cheaper than the ongoing total-cost-of-ownership of a car.
aka, you've just qualified your use of public transport with the condition that you would not ever need to wait more than 3-5mins. What if you had to wait 30mins or an hour?
In the majority of cities in the US, esp. slightly more rural areas or smaller towns, this is clockwork public transit is highly unlikely to be the norm.
I wouldn't live in such a shitty, broken, mismanaged shithole. Properly managed places are able to provide good public transit.
>In the majority of cities in the US, esp. slightly more rural areas or smaller towns, this is clockwork public transit is highly unlikely to be the norm.
Right, because the US is broken and doesn't know how to do this stuff properly. It's like complaining how Eritrea isn't able to provide efficient public transit.
So you don't want to live somewhere near forests or lakes. Somewhere, where is still some for of nature present. You only want to live downtown in a major city. Let me guess, you don't have children. Because many people change their opinion about that when they become parents.