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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

The real blunder in this country is the lack of viable alternative transportation options in a majority of the nation.

Visited NYC recently and didn’t need to rent a car. Primarily took the bus, ferry, and rail car/trains. In some cases I just walked from my hotel to the destination. Could have rented one of the e-bikes as well. Transportation costs for just 1 week were less than $100 (a quarter of this was because of LIRR usage). Didn’t have to deal with traffic, or some dumbass rear ending me because they weren’t paying attention. I could effectively multitask while traveling by alternative means.

Unpopular opinion: heavy investing in “EV infrastructure” is a waste of time and money.

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... but a small apartment costs $4000 in NYC which would cover the payment, gas, insurance and everything on two or three big SUVs. Without some revolution in the cost structure of urban life, "transit friendly" is going to look like going from the frying pan to the fire for most people.

According to AAA, the average cost of owning a new car is $12k per year [0], and that's just for one car. So New Yorkers can put that extra $1000 per month towards housing. As a New Yorker, $4000 is pretty high. You'd typically see that in hot areas for 1br's with in-unit w/d. Most people, including myself, do not pay that much.

Also, interesting phrasing to make it seem like a "small nyc apartment" is a bad thing. I don't pay for expensive repairs, yard maintenance, or big ticket appliances. Most renters don't pay for heat either (at least not directly). Not to mention interest on a mortgage or property taxes. All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.

[0] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2023/08/annual-new-car-ownership-co...

> According to AAA, the average cost of owning a new car is $12k per year

You're not forced to pay the average if saving money is important. My primary driver costs me ~2K a year total.

> All costs totaled, living in NYC isn't strictly more expensive than living in a suburb.

As someone who beat my head against the wall of trying to afford to live in NYC for several years and eventually gave up and moved to the suburbs, I assure you it's far cheaper to live in the suburbs.

(Sure, there are exclusive luxury suburbs that'll cost as much as living in NYC but you wouldn't move to those if affordability matters.)

True. But I'd say that all that proves is that there's so much demand for not needing to own a personal automobile! And yet, cities aren't like private businesses; they don't do what's in demand. Instead of spending millions on public transportation, they spend billions on more roads to suburbs because that's what they are used to, and why the hell not? What good will come to elected officials from millions of car-free millennials streaming in from all over the country? That will just jack up rents, because, let's face it, no one city can absorb the demand anyway. My home city, Portland, put in modest light rail and painted some bike lanes, which caused some new people to move in. That pissed everyone off, and all transit development abruptly stopped. Desirable city == pissed off locals, and the locals vote!

So we have shitty apartments in Manhattan where the land is 99% of the cost and countless, cookie cutter suburban hellscapes.

>But I'd say that all that proves is that there's so much demand for not needing to own a personal automobile!

It really doesn't. NYC isn't $ARBITRARY_SUBURB except without obligatory car ownership.

A better comparable is to consider rents in an outlying section of Queens that is far from transit and compare that to Manhattan.

For that matter a person could very much live car free in a minor city like Binghamton or Ithaca NY if they work at a place that is well served by transit.

I totally disagree. Density and transit are the defining traits of NYC. What's something else NYC offers that you can't find in a similarly sized, but spread out, population? Keeping in mind that the population of NYC is about that of the entire Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area, or the entire state of Washington.

UN HQ, Wall Street, potentially one's family, etc. Cities just aren't fungible. There are way more reasons someone might prefer or be pushed towards one or another besides the traffic or transit.

Hell, if you're listing off important US map pin-points, you can't beat DC. But people would still rather live in NYC (according to the market). But even if NYC had the most destinations, that's just another way of saying "density", which is my entire point.

And I'm not talking about personal differences, like family. Paris isn't a world class city because my mom lives there. I get that individuals have reasons to live places. I'm talking about populations, not people.

quick, someone tell that small rural community of 600 people they need public transportation!

When people express opinions like this you immediately know they live in the city and think everyone else does too.

What percentage of Americans live in a community with 600 or fewer people?

There are very few policy decisions that will be universally good for everyone. That doesn't automatically make them bad policies.

Doesn't exactly answer your question, but 20% of the US population is living in settlements with no more than 5000 inhabitants. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru...

The real question you're asking is what percentage of people live in areas where public transportation isn't reasonable.

it's a lot larger than you think, especially if you're a city dweller.

Most Americans are city dwellers. It's not even close. And the trend has been consistently towards increased urbanization since the country's founding.

I'm not arguing we should ignore rural communities, just that we shouldn't rule out ideas that work in cities because they don't work outside cities.

most people are not disabled, and yet somehow catering to the disabled is written into law.

this is not an argument for why we should be ignoring EV's in lieu of transportation, which is what I originally responded to.

This discussion is about public EV charging. If you live somewhere rural or suburban and can afford a car, you can probably afford a garage for it. The push for public EV charging is in more urban places, where public transit would be a better investment.

the thread is about EV charging, this particular branch of the discussion is about public transportation.

In my experience in Canada, small rural communities typically do have public transportation. Small rural communities generally have a lot of elderly people, so most small towns provide a wheelchair accessible taxi-like service.

Rural New Yorker here, we also have low intensity public transportation (contract taxis, bus lines). As a busy professional, it would be too inconvenient for me to use, but as a busy professional I can afford to drive.

Walkable cities sounds nice, but I like having space. At this point of my life, living in a suburban community is desirable.

while retirement communities exist, that certainly isn't what I was describing.

I'm not talking about retirement communities. I'm talking about normal small towns where >50% of the kids move to the cities where the jobs are.

ooooh, you're not talking about retirement communities.

One wonders how the hay gets baled if most of the population is elderly people.

you don't actually understand what a rural community is.

In my experience, farmers don't live in rural communities. They live on farms. And 90% of them are over the age of 50.

Unless it's a Hutterite colony, in which case your point is entirely moot because they have 0 private transport.

now you're getting it. they drive into town because these areas don't have the density that cities do and the towns themselves aren't large enough to justify public transportation, especially considering that even the non-farmers typically will live many miles from where they purchase their groceries, etc.

My home town has public transport, called the Handi-Van.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redvers,_Saskatchewan

Population 1,000.

https://sk.211.ca/services/town-office-43/handi-van-transit/

> Eligibility

> Elderly individuals and those with special needs.

which is what I expected when I went looking, calling that public transportation is against the spirit of what we're discussing here.

My further guess is that the majority of the people in this town are elderly (retirement community).

So the town can afford dedicated transport for people who don't produce anything and your assumption is that it isn't feasible for those who do produce economic value? And it is somehow more feasible for each of those individuals to privately pay the costs?

old people pay taxes, try again.

Unless you look back 70 years and realize that many small towns only existed because they had rail (passenger and goods). (and/or private bus service). Turns out, getting your goods to market before every person had a car was a requirement.

Exactly! People say, "rural communities need cars". And sure, new sprawl does need cars, like whatever shat itself over the Front Range. But a lot of old towns had trains. Or stage coaches. Or, later, busses. You see this all over the Old West, and New England, and the Rust Belt. These little towns grew up before there were cars.

You still see this in rural Europe. There will be some little village in the middle of nowhere. But the shops and (now I'm picturing the north of England) a pub will all be in a cluster, and there are country lanes that you can actually walk on, and in that village center there's a bus stop, from which you can get to Carlisle or Newcastle and thence to Durham, or wherever.

Some developing countries too actually. You couldn't backpack around these places if they didn't have busses. The "third world" is often a better place to be a pedestrian than America is. Because everybody else is a pedestrian too.

America's problem is that all the private investment in railroads has been displaced by public investment in highways. It's Eisenhower's fault. It makes sense that the US would invest in dual use technologies for mechanized warfare, but it sucks to have to live with.

And now -- I like bike paths, but -- rails-to-trails efforts are just an admission of defeat. But they're what we're getting instead now.

> These little towns grew up before there were cars.

they used horses...

I think it's hilarious how people are trying to argue that a single train stop in a town is somehow public transportation for the citizens of that town to get around said town.

It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Your comment reminds me of this cartoon: https://i.imgur.com/aVpP0t6.png

It's interesting how quickly we forget about how things used to be. My grandparents were subsistence farmers in my lifetime, and they did not use horses to get around town. I don't think they ever owned a horse.

For regular everyday travel, they walked.

They'd sometimes need to go work out in a field. On those days, they'd hitch up the cows to the wagon and spend the day working there. This is a slow process, so they'd need to have enough work to spend the whole day there.

Horses were never a transportation method, except for the extremely rich. They were agricultural tools. Looking at France, because data is easy to get there, the population of France was about 40 million in 1900[2]. Around that time, France also had about 3 million horses, or about a horse for every 13 people. Of these 3 million horses, 2.5 million were "draft horses" used for pulling plows.

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-horse-p... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France#Histori...

oh yeah, that's why saddle's weren't invented.

Autonomous vehicles will obsolete passenger rail. The highway network is expansive, interconnected, and hyper-local in a way that railways can never reproduce. Rapid transit in EVs is conceivable in the near future as Autonomy takes over more safety critical processes. As safety critical processes are automated the speed limits can be lifted, allowing very inexpensive travel on-demand.

I think that puts the cart before the horse. Why build a railroad to no-where? Surely the small towns pre-existed the railroad.

The two end stations existed, and enough in between the make the railway feasible. Then the existence of paths to two big cities made some villages grow, and grow, and grow.

the two end stations exist because people were already there, they didn't build that railway across the US before these areas were settled.

What you're arguing is that there are towns that would pop up around these railways after the fact, and while that's true, they would also pop up around water, gold, and other natural resources.

It turns out there's lots of reasons why communities form, but one thing we know for sure is that railways require demand FIRST, not second.

The USA has several many towns and cities which were built because of railways.

Railways induce demand, both for work for the railway (moving trains, moving goods between trains, services for passengers), and for the excellent transport connections they provide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_towns_in_the_U...

please re-read my post, you misunderstood it.

Some demand has to be present first, sure. But "not second" doesn't follow. No law prevents the planners from expecting demand to grow, and basing their decision to build on that.

yeah, because second doesn't necessarily come after first!

From one big town on a navigable waterway to another big town on a navigable waterway. The small towns in the middle came later.

is this a serious response?

before they had cars people used horses.

Most of the country is not as dense as NYC, and the less dense the area, the less public transit makes sense.

This is true from both an economic and an environmental standpoint: not only is it expensive to run public transit when fewer people use it, it’s also less environmentally friendly because you have big heavy buses and trains spending a lot of time driving around with few people riding them.

That said, I would certainly like to see better public transportation in many areas, but it’s not a silver bullet. The idea that EV infrastructure is a waste of money because we just need more public transportation is pretty preposterous, IMO.

Id like to see the US focus on walkability too, but the reality is most Americans disagree. Most Americans want to live in a SFH with a big yard in suburbia. Public transit does not really work with those constraints. Public transit is great for the people that want to live in cities, but there are more than enough that dont to make electrifying cars an important goal. NYC is great but its obvious to me that I would not enjoy living there, and Im more city postiive than the vast majority of americans.

The question here is how many people don't have a garage but still want a car. The rural and suburban folks are out - plenty of room for garages and charging. So any discussion of public charging infrastructure is focused on places where public transit would be a better investment.

This is what is always said, but for what reason can it not work?

We already spend an ABSURD amount of money to create and maintain car infrastructure. These roads are not cheap and commonly are not maintained well in part due to costs. That's not getting into externalities not covered by the cost of car ownership/usage. And where does this money come from? Generally the places where there is more density.

It just doesn't make sense for each person to have a several ton hunk of metal and for it to sit there taking up space 95+% of the time. This solution is not scaling well at all. People want to have a big suburban home, but at the expense of many, many others. It's just not right.

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