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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

It does apply because just like America NL is still divided up into provinces so 'Federal' level in the United States is the same as 'Country' level in NL.

You can't compare 'New Jersey' with the Netherlands (though, you could compared it to say the province of Utrecht) they are at different levels in the 'org' and that has massive effects for things like public transport. In order to get coast to coast public transport you'd have to take the whole of the country (the United States) into account and then you'll find that that average population density suddenly matters a lot.

Of course you can always chop up that big country into many small pieces and then focus on the few that are above the average of any other country but that's not a useful thing to do.

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>In order to get coast to coast public transport you'd have to take the whole of the country (the United States) into account and then you'll find that that average population density suddenly matters a lot.

Sure, but coast-to-coast is not what matters. Moving people between where they need/want to go is what matters. I suppose a very large portion of all trips people in NJ makes on an annual basis is not coast-to-coast. It is within New Jersey or adjacent communities.

People in France will happily hop the TGV and be in Marseille (or Amsterdam... using the Thalys) a few hours later. Similar connections exist in and between other EU countries, for instance, Germany with the ICE. In the United States, almost without exception anything like that would be an airplane trip. And maybe it's me but I don't see aircraft as 'public transport', though I guess you could lump them in by some definition.

So even if you zoom out from let's say NL to all of Europe and you compare Europe with the United States you still end up with a difference in how public transport is arranged. There simply isn't a nearly empty heartland.

You're looking at the very rare long distance journeys. People don't travel from Paris to Marseille (400 miles) any more than people travel from Washington to Boston (400 miles). They typically would travel from Paris to Athens by jumping on a plane, just like you'd get a plane from New York to Houston (about the same distance)

Compare public transport in the Berlin metro area (6 million, 500 per square mile) with the bay area (7 million, 1100 per square mile), or the Rhine-Main region (5 million, 1000 per square mile)

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