Public transport is so inconvenient, even in the best cities. Your life revolves around transportation schedules. We walk several miles in our neighborhood every day. Yet we love the freedom a car gives us.
For trains that is great but you still have to get to/from the trains. Heck even bus stops require a 5-10 minute walk some times. So it's the walk to the bus stop, planning if the bus doesn't show up, the transit time which could include a lot of stops, and so forth. It really adds up to a lot of time lost.
When we talk about “frequent enough” 15 minutes is an eternity, honestly it is the bare minimum for what could be considered frequent.
Frequent is every 5-6 minutes. I’ve had commutes where the headway was 2 minutes. It doesn’t matter if the train/bus is late or doesn’t show up at that point.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...
There is this really strange mythology that persists around this. America is not built on small towns or cities any more than other countries, in fact it is generally much less so.
80% of the US population lives in urbanized areas. [0]
Your citation is counting towns, but that doesn’t reflect the way Americans actually live, and if you think about it, that makes sense, the US can’t have millions of million plus cities. City population size is going to follow some sort of geometric/power law distribution.
To answer your question, no one is advocating banning all cars outright.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
For comparison, look at India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_India?wprov=sf...
Urban could mean anything and is not defined in the wikipedia article explicitly ("definition needed"). The article even says it's changing constantly. So it's not very useful when they give %'s without even saying what it means.
Edit: Whether these boundaries are arbitrary or not is irrelevant as that is the tax base paying. Also the MSAs are defined as 10k or above. That's a really small tax base for such large infrastructure. Even my city of 250k would struggle a LOT providing any level of service like you are talking about. You need a 1M+ metro area to even consider it, and then providing full coverage is going to be difficult.
If you look at this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area?...
226 million people live in the 108 metro areas over 500k as of the 2020 census.
Fairview NJ may “only” have a population of 15k, but that doesn’t mean it is too small for public transportation.
Don’t be disingenuous, that was never my point. As stated in my other comment, 223/331 million people lived in metro areas over 500k as of the last census, aka 67%. most people live in reasonably large cities.
>Whether these boundaries are arbitrary or not is irrelevant as that is the tax base paying.
I’d recommend you look a bit deeper into how public transit is funded, because this is patently false. The largest transit agency in the us, the NY MTA is a state agency. Public transit systems are generally funded by a combination of federal, state and local funding, often that local funding is a county or some other metropolitan transit funding district.
>You need a 1M+ metro area to even consider it, and then providing full coverage is going to be difficult.
Easy example of a city that has good public transit and is less than 1 million: Bern, metro population of 660k (just checked google maps and saw multiple bus routes with ten minute or less headways, along tram and trains networks).
I don't think you can compare the U.S. to Germany. Germany has like 6x to 7x the population density and is a much smaller country.
Edit: Generally state funded projects benefit everyone in the state, including the interstate system. A local transit project that only affects one city not so much.
Funding services at the county/state level is stealing? That’s frankly an unhinged take.
How do you think roads get funded?
>I don't think you can compare the U.S. to Germany. Germany has like 6x to 7x the population density and is a much smaller country.
1. Bern is in Switzerland 2. Size of a country doesn’t matter, what matters is settlement patterns.
The bus system in LA isn’t impacted by the existence of Nebraska.
15 minutes is not frequent enough.
BTW I'm talking about diesel buses and electric trolley-buses. They're all loud.
The sirens from the emergency vehicles on the other hand, those are probably part of the reason why I'm tired all the time.
Unfortunately I don’t know of an easy solution to this. Perhaps vehicles should be required to rebroadcast emergency sirens internally? Or maybe it will solve itself when electric cars reduce road noise.
Further, in those other cities, public transportation is clean and something everyone uses. In USA cities outside of NYC, public transportation is largely considered a service provided to those too poor to own a car. As such it's always shit.
There are places where a car is nice, or even necessary (sports requiring large equipment for example, trips with the family), and then there is over using cars and building cities that require cars even if it can be done differently.
There's also several stories (I believe SimCity might be one?) of video game developers attempting to make representations of places in their game - and then removing all the parking lots as they realized it would make a boring experience.
To make more parking, they'd have to tear down buildings or take away roads. Combined with a poor bus system, it ends up being a bad experience.
I'd much rather have a better public transportation system in my city, it'd be much easier than having to tear things down. More people in the city are pushing for this, so hopefully it'll get better.