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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

> That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation.

That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re lucky. That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap!

Trains, my friend. We need trains. Busses first, but eventually trains.

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With perhaps the exclusion of the Amtrak northeast corridor/Acela and a couple of the US subway systems (e.g.NYC) most of the train projects in the us seem like they were designed to as an example inferior alternative to driving. There are so many comically bad examples: the air train to EWR, JFK require multiple transfers and are slower than driving at all but the most severe traffic conditions. The Houston light rail that doesn’t really go anywhere convenient, and is in the street going slower than the cars around it (stopping at traffic lights as well).

It seems as if most of the rail networks in the us are built to serve people with no other alternative as opposed to providing a better alternative to driving. Speaking of airport connections it blows my mind that US cities haven’t built trains like the Heathrow express.

Is Colorado building meaningful amounts of trains?

Switzerland has incredible trains and train networks. Just before people chime in with "Trains are good but mountains are too much of a challenge so might work in other places better with a flat geography".

Sounds reasonable until you see how the Swiss do it. Nobody said that but that's where I feel this conversation is going and the previous commenter did say 'buses first'. Probably to exploit the existing road network and achieve ambitious goals in a piece meal manner.

Colorado is five times larger and has a much smaller population.

Which should make construction much easier, faster and cheaper due to lack of expensive private land boyouts.

Almost none of that population lives in the mountains.

Colorado is half Switzerland and half Kansas. Literally everyone minus a rounding error lives on the flat part.

> Trains, my friend. We need trains. Busses first, but eventually trains.

For that, we first need density.

And who is against more density in existing cities where naturally more density makes most sense?

More or less the same people arguing against cars.

https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/03/25/letting-aaron-pesk...

https://www.kqed.org/news/11964754/sf-supervisors-to-vote-on...

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/sf-permitting-paltry...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-drivers-say-war-on...

Do people outside of the weird zoo that is SF do that? Everything I read online that is anti car is also pro density.

So an insane and soon to be dead generation of reactionary former hippie Bay Area boomers.

I’ll give you that. Who else though?

What's silly is to state that we "can't" make things cheaper.

The rest of your statements are relative to the myriad costs of no cars and other transportation. It's narrative.

>That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap!

What? Get a grip.

We already have buses and trains. Trains are great but can't go everywhere a car is required. Buses are a poverty pattern and the working class should be elevated away from their necessity rather than toward. The practical tax is such that it is racist to mean to force people into bus transportation.

Automotive transportation has always been the future. It is not only a form of wealth but a form of anti-poverty and anti-strife, as is freedom of movement that they better facilitate.

I don't think it is mathematically possible to build trains for everywhere people want to go. Fine for extremely dense areas, otherwise inconvenient and dumb.

It's similarly impossible to build roads with enough capacity for everyone to drive. Cars work fine in small towns and low-density areas, but once the population and/or density grows too high, traffic becomes terrible. If you fix the population density and let the city grow, the traffic that needs to cross any particular cross section of the city grows asymptotically faster than the length of the cross section (and therefore road capacity). The traditional solution was lowering the density by replacing houses with roads, but that's no longer popular.

Traffic is a hard problem. There is no single solution that fits everywhere, and you will never be able to go everywhere with your preferred means of transit. At least if you are not a major political leader such as the US president. If you are, you can just stop the normal traffic and let the peasants wait.

Sure. Trains in very dense areas with homogenous travel patterns (e.g, commuting to work) and roads everywhere else. Essentially what we have today in many places.

Of course, commuting to sit in front of a computer all day is pretty absurd. Maybe unnecessary commuting is the real problem.

We have that in very very few places in the USA.

The only reason we have cities with crap density is cars, and their super-wide roads and giant parking lots spreading everything out. So, yes, we can't just put a subway system under Dallas. That's why I said busses first. At the very least stop building more lane miles and making it worse.

Or do keep building more roads. I don't really care. If people love traffic and want to live in their car, there should be a city for them (so long as they are not sucking up federal dollars to do it). The problem is that right now, in NA, all we build are roads. Every city is a shitty carbon copy of the next one. No one is trying anything new.

Cars fit in cities just fine. Just got back from Atlanta. Much nicer and cleaner and cheaper than New York City. The only problem is the pollution, which is fixed by EVs. The other stuff, like a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system.

Trains are not the solution. Even the best train systems are much slower than point to point car transportation. When I go to Tokyo on business, I take Ubers, not the (excellent) train system, because cars are faster and more convenient. In Japan, 80% of households have a car. In Tokyo prefecture, there are about 40 cars per 100 households. In Osaka it’s 65 per 100.

I am sure cars are faster when you can afford to pay a chauffeur and don't have to park yourself.

this is insane. i have never ever taken a taxi in tokyo. the transit system is world class, cheap, and extremely convenient.

You mean even the part where people get stuffed into already packed trains? [1] I get it. Japanese trains are some of the best anywhere but lets not make them into some downside-free experience, not including the amount of walking thats involved trying to get into and out of the maze of levels at some of the stations, dodging salarymen and other straphangers.[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSuU3GOKWAY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCqBlwJy4M8

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Japanese transit system. It’s a marvel. But rich people in Japan usually drive because it’s faster than even an amazing transit system. And the beauty of somewhere like Atlanta is that everyone can live like that.

It’s also extremely inconvenient with three kids, especially if you’re trying to bring a stroller onto the train during rush hour. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every city with excellent public transit is also dying because people aren’t having kids.

Americans have an obsession with strollers that I haven't understood. I took my infants on Caltrain, BART, and light rail using a baby bjorn. When they could walk, they walked or were carried. It's not something you should avoid having kids over.

American babies are heavy.

American babies are about the same or maybe a bit lighter than their European counterparts at birth. Perhaps the issue is that American parents are physically weaker. It's hard not to imagine the SUVs and strollers are components of a negative feedback loop.

Thank you for that lifestyle lecture.

My kids hated the bjorn and so did my (very third world communist country) foreign wife. I liked it.

The stroller also has storage space for, for example, the medicine bag that keeps my last kid alive in case he swallows <insert long list of allergens>. The stroller has everything ready to go except the baby and we don't have to don our various accessories.

Finally, as Europeans, we find those Americans and their various polyester bags (back, front, bjorn, fanny, etc) look ridiculous. One looks like a marine about to assault Fallujah. The stroller has a dignity to it that all those bags lack.

Ah dignity. The reason mass transit will never take hold in America.

? The reason no one wants to take the bus or subway in America is not because they are undignified but because they smell like piss. Unlike the buses in Switzerland which are great.

In fact, despite the smell of urine, I used to love Atlantas MARTA for its brilliant airport exit.

There's nothing inherently undignified of public transportation system. America's indignity comes from our inability to clean.

Try taking three car seats/booster seats on the train because you can’t walk to your final destination from the train…unless you live in NYC/Chicago etc. there are very few us cities where most of your trips can be completed only via train/walking

It's not just that the transit is faster by car but there is less mental overhead. Just get in the car and drive at your pace instead of memorizing schedules (or futzing with an app) and negotiating crowds.

Also, virtually any train system that is good enough to be comparable to driving time-wise will also be busy enough to require standing through the trip during commuting hours.

Then clearly you have not spent much time in Tokyo, the trains don't run between 12 and 5am. That's a lot of the day to not have access to public transit, especially for peak partying hours on a weekend.

Bill Murray takes taxis in Tokyo in Lost in Translation.

In both Singapore and Hong Kong, I never had to wait more than 10 minutes for a train and the stops were pretty much within 3-4 blocks within anything I'd want to get to.

I stayed recently in Askakusa on a family trip and the train was about a 15 minute walk away. Even in the close in districts there are many residential places that are a 15-20 minute walk away, and on top of that you might have to take a bus to the train, or transfer lines, etc. Even in Tokyo the door to door time is usually much faster driving.

I don’t know about Singapore or Hong Kong. But I suspect rich people there drive rather than taking public transit.

I believe you're vastly overselling driving. We're talking saving ~10 minutes on the mean ride, at a huge increase in cost (and IMO, health).

Source:

>>> Differences between cities [public transportation vs car transportation times] mainly concern the magnitude of the ratio, where the car is remarkably faster than public transit in Los Angeles but _not that much in Tokyo and Seoul._ (Emphasis mine)

```

PT travel time (minutes) Min: 9 Max: 121 Mean: 52.8

Car travel time (minutes) Min: 11 Max: 123 Mean: 41.8

PT travel cost (¥). Min: 110 Max: 1290 Mean: 430.8

Car travel cost (¥) Min: 149 Max: 6138 Mean:2102.6

```

Source: Altieri, M., Silva, C., & Terabe, S. (2021). Keep pushing! Analysing public transit and car competitiveness in Tokyo. Case Studies on Transport Policy, 9(2), 457–465. doi:10.1016/j.cstp.2021.02

Are these comparing the exact same route?

Fwiw, my experience is same as OP. In Shanghai, it is far faster to take a Didi than public transit. It's typically a 20 minute door to door vs 40.

Great, so all Colorado needs to do is break itself off into a tiny geography on an advantageous sea route to 1) force density due to this unique geography 2) become a global shipping hub and tax haven for the super rich to get the capital to build mega real estate/transit projects 3) 5X population growth rates for 50 years and 4) force all families out of their comfortable homes and into tiny, absurdly expensive apartments. Easy!

I spent some time in a managed apartment in singapore. Public transport was terrible from the suburbs, took about 1h30 to do a 7 mile commute to my office. I ended up taking taxis every day, which were generally ok out of town, but getting one in the morning was always a bit of a risk - could take 5 minutes one day but 30 the next.

> The only problem is the pollution, which is fixed by EVs.

Unfortunately, EVs do not solve the problem of air pollution from motor vehicles: tires produce a LOT of particulates.

https://theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyres-pr...

ICE vehicles don't have tires? A good way to estimate the environmental cost of a mass consumer product is its price (capex & opex), with the caveat that the unaccounted cost for burning gasoline is probably around 6$/gallon, right now.

100 gallons of gasoline produce ~1 ton of CO2, and it costs ~600$/ton to perform CO2 air capture.

Carbon emissions are not the only type of pollution. EVs and ICEs both have tires, so replacing ICEs with EVs does not fix the problem of air pollution in cities because the vast majority of particulates generated by the car while driving it are coming from the tires, not the tailpipe.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...

>because cars are faster and more convenient

They wouldn't be if everyone was in a car.

In Tokyo, that’s true. A fairer comparison would be average commute times in places that are built around cars versus ones built around trains. Average commute in Austin Texas is 22 minutes one way: https://www.ktalnews.com/news/business/shreveport-has-one-of...

Average commute time in greater Tokyo is double that: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu...

I'm from Los Angeles so excuse my hardy laughter. I'm sure Austin is great but that commute time will surely balloon as the population density continues to rise. Austin has ~3000/sq mi vs Tokyo's ~16,000/sq mi.

Why should population density continue to rise?

Have you ever flown over Texas?

Ever driven through the California central valley? Just because the state has space doesn't mean cities don't get dense.

And that's because Austin is a much smaller city. Of course traffic is much easier if you have 15x fewer people going anywhere. If you go by administrative borders, Tokyo is roughly 2.5x larger by land area, with 5.5x higher population density. And if you look at the metropolitan areas, Tokyo is 20% larger by land area and has at least 13x higher population density.

So don’t build such dense cities. America has plenty of land.

> Just got back from Atlanta. Much nicer and cleaner and cheaper than New York City.

Minor note that 2/3 of Atlanta was destroyed in 1864.

So in contrast to other major American cities, it had the benefit of being mostly planned in an automotive era.

Add in the fact that the surrounding geography doesn't preclude expansion in any direction, and it's essentially a "best-case" city for cars.

Well, 1864 was long before the automobile. However, Atlanta, like most American cities that were getting big around 1900, had lots of streetcars, so it was never going to be walkable in the same way that European cities are. Despite the nostalgia for them, streetcars were definitely not as good as busses and cars - they were pretty slow and got stuck in traffic because they ran down the middle of the street without any barriers. The thing with cars is that they let people spread out much further than even streetcars could feasibly go, and as you said, Atlanta is pretty much the best-case scenario with cars.

Even LA became an automobile city, and it has much more substantial barriers to expansion. Now that it's built out, LA is developing a pretty expansive metro system, but it will take decades to truly cover the region. It would have been nice to at least lay the main lines of the metro when land was cheap. One thing China got right is learning from these mistakes and building out their metros ahead of their city growth.

Atlanta is barely a city compared to New York or Tokyo. New York City is 8 times denser. Tokyo is even denser if you're just counting the special wards, which is what most people think of as Tokyo. You need trains to alleviate the traffic unless if you want to end up with worse traffic than LA.

At what population does a city qualify to discuss transit policy? Atlanta has over 6M residents.

I think mass transit can be great in the right contexts. For ATL, I think it makes the most sense in the few sq miles of city proper, not 20+ mi out.

> a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system.

what in the absolute f** are you talking about? have you ever experienced the sudden death of a loved one? what about the network impact of someone dying? even if you want to look at it through a capitalistic lens, think of the reduction in capability people going through that trauma. the amount of resources it takes in the health care, and public service sectors. you're off loading the immense costs of a person dying onto folks at random like an inverse and more likely lottery.

since you're so confidently in having the empirical measures of what outweighs what, at what point would a public transit system start to be a "good cost tradeoff" in your framework? cause there's a logical end goal you could get to: individualized transport with an experienced driver; and then work backwards from there until you balance the cost of implementation with those tens of thousands of death. would it be $1,000/day/person? $500/day/person?

though more than likely you're speaking like this because you've lived your entire life transported by car, benefiting off of the externalized costs passed off to the less fortunate, and you fear having your subsidized conveniences justifiably going away.

This has nothing to do with capitalism. Quite the opposite, it’s about the needs of the many outweighing the lives of the few. There’s 200 million+ adults in the U.S., who save 5-10% of their waking lives by the US being car dependent compared to transit dependent places. Road deaths amount to 0.015% of that population. For every person who does, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life.

> For every person who d[i]es, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life.

That you see this tragedy as a benefit reveals the grotesquerie of your world view. You also do not address the downstream effects of that lost life in terms of grief, material loss, and reduced capacity. (You’re not even a good capitalist.)

May you never experience the losing end of a “more comfortable and convenient life”.

Again, who said anything about capitalism? My point is exactly the opposite: that the collective welfare outweighs the individual welfare.

i think you forget 2 things:

1. deaths directly by car are not the only deaths to account for. look at the history of lead poisoning from gasoline and the ramifications we're still reckoning with today from that. think of the rubber, heavy metal pollution we are just finding out today is driving critical ecosystems rapidly to extinction (in my neck of the woods: salmon). the death from the resource gathering required only for cars. there are so, so many externalized costs you don't consider even tho i'd argue that due to no experience with it yourself that the violence associated with a death by car is no easily written off as a statistic.

2. the environment built for cars is the only environment that can be. you've been duped by automobile manufactures, oil barons, and the affluent class that needs their chose mode of transportation adopted and subsidized by the masses. i see many more countries with better public transit and less folks living with cars all with better measures of comfort and convenience. you have exact measures to compare number of deaths, population, and road miles, but there's no way to measure whether those miles were worth it for anyone because of the baked in assumptions of no other choice. but what is always measurable is that deaths are directly caused by the existence of cars, and that death impacts people greatly.

rethink your assumptions and misanthropy.

Rethink your misanthropy. We live in a free and rich country, and you hate people so much that you assume they’re being duped by “automobile manufacturers” instead of making their own choices about how they prefer to live. The fact is that Americans live like we do because we can afford to be comfortable. My mom, an immigrant to the US who grew up in Bangladesh, went to Australia recently and came back complaining about how cramped everything was over there and how small everyone’s houses are. She didn’t come to America until nearly age 40–she didn’t grow up being brainwashed into car culture. She just has eyes and can see what’s a more comfortable life.

There’s no country that can afford to be car dependent where most people don’t drive. Even in Sweden and Japan, which have amazing public transit systems, 80% of households own a car.

He’s right, though. There are as many if not more lifetimes saved in aggregate.

You make a decision to get into the car with eyes open and most people are okay with the deal & the odds.

I have a feeling your response is because you’ve lost someone, so sorry about that. Life ends up more or less as a shit lottery and sometimes you get lucky (unlucky)

personally lose someone, no, but i've gotten the chance of being a citizen first responder to a lost of life one. i feel like your's and OP's response are because you've never seen or been impacted first hand what dying by car is like. it is usually horrific and violent that to be able to say those outweigh the time saved traversing the sprawled built environment created for the sake of those very same cars shows a lack of any lived experience. your argument fundamentally relies on the idea "all i know is cars, and there is nothing better". it's uncreative, unrealistic, and devoid of humanity. it's terrifying you and others with your mindset are on the road.

I think that in North America the deal is done, there is no way of going back this far down the path and private vehicles on the road are never going away until the fall of said civilization (or plan B: making the country dirt poor, but this may lead to plan A anyway)

And props for being a responder and seeing it with your own eyes. I actually think it should be more widely spread, showing it on the nightly news, etc. it’s an effective strategy to make more careful drivers.

I can get everywhere I need to go in NYC with a few bucks loaded onto a transit card. In Atlanta I need to rent a car for $100s a day, drive it myself, pay for it's gas, its insurance and parking, prove to the local government that I'm certified to drive it, and also not impaired from driving it at the moment. How do you get "cheaper" from that?

"nicer" and "cleaner" mean the same thing, and I'll give those to you. When you create a transit system that poor people can't afford to use... you don't see poor people anymore. But they didn't disappear, and you didn't solve a problem.

It’s not just the poor people. Even the non-poor people in New York are gross from the sweating and grit.

Okay, if you can't handle being around other people, then don't live in NY. But, what's your point here? Cus I know you hate it, but supply and demand says that waaaay more people like NYs than there actually _are_ NYs. People who can only exist in giant metal boxes, sealed off from the world at all times, can choose to live in nearly any city in America and live their bliss. But not everyone is you. You shouldn't have to be a millionaire to live in a real city. We can make Seattle and SF and Portland and Boston and Philly better without Houston and Atlanta even noticing.

NYC has a net negative out-migration rate. If it wasn't for foreigners moving in the city would be shrinking. And foreigners (like many of my family in Queens) don't move to NYC because they like a city that's just one step up from Bangladesh. They do it because of the access to jobs, people who speak their native language, etc. They tend to move to Long Island (or, these, days, Texas) as soon as they get their feet under them.

My larger point is that public policy is a meta-market. We subsidize the suburbs because the majority of people like the suburbs. The net migration patterns in this country are to places like Dallas and Atlanta because that's where more people want to live.

Well, somehow housing in NYC is up 3% this year. I’m the biggest urbanist shill you’ll meet and even I don’t live there, cus it’s too damn expensive. We build only suburbs, only suburbs are affordable, and that’s where people live. Shocking.

I would love to see an experiment where we make a 1200 sq-ft apartment in a dense, walkable neighborhood, the same price as a 3000 sq-ft McMansion outside Dallas, by actually building the former. I predict… unexpected migration, but who knows. That’s a hard experiment to run.

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