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Comment by guessmyname | Hacker News Reader

I get sad every time I return back to America from Asia because of how small the public infrastructure is in many parts of America compared to Asia.

If anyone has lived or at least visited places like Tokyo, Japan or Shanghai, China, you probably understand what I am referring to.

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I have maintained that any US Public Transportation employee with any amount of agency/authority should be required to go to SEA (singapore, HK, Shanghai, Tokyo) and be required to go to meetings which are far from their hotel but they must get there via public transport only...

This will make their requests for more money/raises/etc seem absolutely insane when you compare what these countries/cities/agencies do WRT to transporting millions of people efficiently every single day - and not to mention just how clean such systems are.

When you go through stations in HK - you see well-uniformed cleaning folks all over the place.

HK has an interesting business model in that the MTR is majority owned by the government and the government grants the land on top of train stations to MTR. MTR then generally builds shopping malls, offices and residential developments e.g LOHAS park, there making it a property company which operates (very profitable) rails between its properties. Hence, the average person not only travels on the MTR but also spends money at MTR Malls and may live and/or work in an MTR property. MTR corporation also provides consultancy services and even runs other railways in other countries e.g the Elizabeth Line on the London Underground.

Population density makes a huge difference. The more people live in a city, the more funds the government has to invest to get a better transportation system.

In general, population density in East Asia is far higher than in the US.

This is a chicken and egg problem, stop making excuses for Western governments. Nearly all US cities had streetcars and dense walkable downtowns. There are pictures of this. They were destroyed in the 1950s due to pressure from car/oil lobbies, as well as eager house buyers who wanted cheap FHA loans. (Only available to whites)

Europe is not immune either, they would've followed the US's footsteps entirely if it weren't for the 1973 oil shock, which hit them harder than the US.

> They were destroyed in the 1950s due to pressure from car/oil lobbies

Popular explanation but largely false. They were destroyed because people quit using them.

But it's far more satisfying to blame some change you don't like on $EVILCORP than a more complicated narrative that revolves around people as a whole preferred something different so it didn't really make sense for government/a company to keep pouring money into a pit to keep a small minority happy.

The story often goes that someone destroyed a fully operational system for profits when in fact the system was badly deteriorated and not really used a lot.

Do you REALLY think gasoline subsidies and government backed 97% LTV mortgages is a free market? People were coaxed out of cities with very generous subsidies as well as race baiting (redlining)

People moved out to the suburbs for a lot of reasons--not least of which was the post-war baby boom. The US government certainly didn't discourage it (though they were arguably pursuing policies the majority of the population wanted) and the exodus added fire to a self-reinforcing cycle of urban problems (including race-related ones)which lasted at least through the 1980s. And arguably we could see movement out of at least some cities again.

I'm not especially pro-suburbia--I live in an exurban/almost rural location. But I think it's perfectly understandable why many people wouldn't live in a city given a choice which they increasing had post-WWII in the US.

A decent article on their demise. https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demis...

Why and how did people quit using them? Suppose you're in a world where the interstate highway system hasn't been built and subway trains are the dominant mode of transportation, and you would like to stop taking trains to get to places, what do you do? Walk? Bike? Ride a horse? Drive offroad in a car with a manual transmission and no seatbelts or airbags, with no gas stations in between?

Seems like you'd be S.O.L. unless the government kindly free-markets a continent-wide network of paved roads, with conveniently placed roadside stops along the way where they sell gasoline. Can't imagine why they would undertake such an exorbitant public works project when the transcontinental railroad already exists; it's not like the government is disproportionately influenced by any industries that would very obviously materially benefit from such a thing.

People use e-mail more than snail mail nowadays too. Funny, that.

I know you didn't name a city, but since everyone says this about Los Angeles due to Roger Rabbit, I'll zoom in on LA. The LA street cars, Pacific Electric and LA Railways, were operated by Henry Huntington to sell real estate and were increasingly unprofitable over time. This definitely wasn't helped by increasing competition from private automobiles, the 1910-20s version of rideshare called "jitneys", and local buses, but the streetcars weren't there as a charitable public service and rarely reinvested in itself. In 1925-1926, they proposed having LA city fund expansion and rapid transit, but the public and press at the time were very against elevated lines and increased taxes. There was no shortage of racism (as evidenced by voters destroying half of Chinatown to build Union Station), and LA Times infamously called elevated lines "four miles of hideous, clattering, dusty, dirty, dangerous, street-darkening overhead trestles." That basically sealed the streetcars' fate, and what the car industry did decades later was picking apart their corpses.

I'm sure that Roger Rabbit might be more true for some cities, but I dislike that LA and other cities cling on to this. It excessively absolves everyone else -- politicians, press, homeowners, and PE/LARy themselves -- of their own fault. They could've saved their transit system like London did in the 1920-30s. Even today every SFR owner seems to prefer pointing at the Roger Rabbit story rather than looking in the mirror. Thank god for AB2097 and other new laws that address low density.

Sources -- basically any source that's not Roger Rabbit will tell you the same thing:

* http://scsra.org/library/rapid-transit-history/

* https://laist.com/news/entertainment/union-station-history

* https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demis...

* This entire book; the preview pages have a lot of pertinent parts: https://books.google.com/books?id=OfTlph3cXoQC

There’s not much correlation between density and quality of public transit.

If you look at a top 10 list of best transit systems, you’ll see medium density cities like Oslo and Helsinki right beside Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Or within the USA, compare Miami to Seattle. The only difference is that one city decided to build mass transit and the other didn’t.

It’s entirely possible to build an appropriate transit system for any type of city.

Past a certain density point probably. It also helps if there's some degree of concentration where people want to go even if the city as a whole is only medium density.

However, things get too spread out and it breaks down--including that transit runs on a sufficiently spaced-out schedule that people with a choice just don't want to take it.

I was just in Paris. It was a major eye-opener for me to observe people on the Métro when there was a train approaching while I was a little ways away from the platform. Very few people rushed to make it! It initially made me doubt that I understood how the train worked—did they know something I didn't, and this train wouldn't actually stop where I needed? But no, it was just that they knew that if they missed the train, they would only need to wait a whole 3 minutes for the next one.

Coming from the SF Bay Area, if you miss a train you'll probably have a minimum 15 minute wait (at least at the stations and times I use), often 2-3x more. People run down the stairs to the platform, shove their way in, and often block the doors from closing if they're squeezing in at the last minute (which extends the last minute, making the train later for the next stop.)

Also, "taking the train" doesn't just mean showing up at the train station. It means checking the schedule and timing it so you show up at the right time. I don't just walk from place to place, using the train as a way of getting around as needed. I plan it out. Or I don't, and use a car instead, which everything subtly encourages.

I agree, frequency makes a huge difference in actual practice.

For all its recent problems, the Boston subway isn't too bad. I certainly don't check schedules.

But the commuter rail out to me only runs about once an hour. I can deal with that for a "9 to 5" work thing where driving would have to deal with horrific traffic anyway. But it's a total non-starter for an evening event where I would have to time my return including possibly dealing with subway variance to a commuter rail station. (And it takes significantly longer than driving at that time of day anyway.)

And frequency is related to density.

The denser the population the better mass transit works and the more burden having one's own car produces.

Last time I went to Japan, they had announcements of apologies about severe delays. The delay was less than 5 minutes.

Today I'm stuck on a tram for an hour and the tram company did not even tell us what happened or when would we be unstuck.

Asia is also home to cities with some of the most congested sprawl with mediocre (at best) public transportation in the world. Tokyo and Shanghai are great. Somewhere like Jakarta less so.

I hope you are not comparing American suburbs to Asian urban communities. This is a common misconception among immigrants that they compare commuting opportunities of suburbia to urban cities in Asia.

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