America’s Transit Exceptionalism
benjaminschneider.substack.com
benjaminschneider.substack.com
"This is one of the central questions underpinning this newsletter and my book."
Not true. In DC, the Purple Line is currently under construction to connect DC's Maryland suburbs to one another. (OK. This is technically just over the border in Maryland, but it is clearly part of the DC metro area and it interconnects with lines in the District proper.) And DC just finished (in November) adding another new line, the Silver Line, out to Dulles Airport and some of the further flung Virginia suburbs. (Similarly, I think a major project was completed in San Francisco last year.) And isn't the K under construction in LA? And what about East Side Access in New York? And the Skyline in Honolulu? I'm sure another 2 minutes of Googling could uncover more examples.
The general story might be true — cthet ities outside the U.S. are investing more in rail infrastructure — but this makes me question the research. The metric "mile of transit" is also probably misleading. Many U.S.cities (though not enough) already have robust mass transit systems. The primarily challenge in many places is therefore not just to build new lines, but to expand the use of what is already there. (A particular challenge after Covid wiped out ridership.)
The problem is not really dollar amounts but effective spending. East Side Access ended up costing $12B for one additional station and a few km of track, where some of the tunnels already existed. Consider that in Paris, they just opened a 15km extension with 8 stations for about 3B EUR.
This is of course an over-correction to an equally bad world where you can just get some dopes together to slice up your city like a Christmas ham, usually by demolishing the poor and non-white parts, to build highways.
Many subway-trains in Japan are trains for the first 20 stations, then "subways" for the next 10, then trains for the 20 stations after that. Same cars. They may have been 3 separate lines at one time but they got connected.
Also, from a regulatory standpoint, freight and intercity railways (e.g. not subway/light rail/metro/trams) are subject to full FRA regulations, compliance with which would add even more costs, for little real benefit at the speeds they travel at.
Plus, in practice subway/light rail is electrified, and anything else (again with few caveats) is not. In towns with both it is very rare for them to use the same stations.
*There’s probably an exception to the exception for the Akita / Yamagata branches that partially run on regular train lines.
There are few rail networks that manage to serve both well.
Yes, and it's terrible. The Montreal subway is by far the noisiest subway system I've ever used. Even standing on the platform is a terrible experience because it's so loud when the cars are moving.
Both seem to come in around 80dBA average, but some of the tube lines peak at 90 or 100+dBA.
But that's not really what I'm talking about with Montreal: in Montreal, the subway system is loud for the people standing inside the station. (The trains are noisy inside too, but that's just in addition.) Every time a train enters or leaves the station, it's deafeningly loud, because of the rubber ties. You'd think it shouldn't be this way (after all, cars have rubber tires and are very quiet at low speeds; it's only at freeway speeds that rubber tires get loud on cars and trucks), but it is. It seems to be caused by the trackways: the tires are constantly rubbing on the sides of the track, so the cars are very noisy any time they're in motion, and it's really miserable just standing on the platform.
Meanwhile California has yet to start service.
This distinction isn't some pedantry, because BART is funded by the many counties it serves, not just SF. Those counties are on the board and get a say on where it extends to as well.
- Caltrain currently terminates at 4th & King, not exactly a prime spot in SF, so you'll likely want to transfer to MUNI, so add that to your commute time and expense.
- The Caltrain ride itself is over an hour between SF/SJ.
- Caltrain lead times are't great outside of rush hour.
- I live in the middle of SF and it's 2hrs door to door to Diridon (SJ).
It isn't difficult if you're looking at the occasional trip to SF, but as a daily commute I would not recommend. I know quite a few people who do it and it's not pleasant spending that much time on a commute.
And the last trains are extra slow (so are all weekend trains) and not very late. So going to a club and then taking the train back home is not a good proposition.
Beijing wasn’t much different before they went crazy on subways, but you could pad your endpoints with cheap taxi rides.
https://www.caltrain.com/projects/electrification/project-benefits/caltrain-electrified-service-plan
The difference on the express service is much less (65+ mins to "under an hour"), presumably since the trains can spend more time at or close to top speed due to longer distances between stops.
[0] You can see a list of stations and mile markers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Caltrain_stations
A quick search shows SF to SJ to be 1hr to 1hr 23 mins but then you'll likely need 20-30 mins at each end to get where you're going.
US cities have very low density compared to other cities in other countries.
New York is the exception, and their transit isn't that bad. But it's still lower than other major cities.
If you are building a new city, you do not start with high density. Individual developers start with the cheapest build out because no one will pay a premium for a multi-level structure until cheap single-level builds are exhausted. Then as centuries pass, because there is no more undeveloped land, the city is forced to redevelop existing plots and increase density.
Many Asian and Western cities are hundreds or thousands of years old.
America's transit woes is because we live in a new country with new cities in previously mostly uninhabited land.
Due to smallpox spread from Mexico, 90 percent of the native population was gone in most areas at least a half-century before Jamestown was settled. A lot of what white people 'stole' was genuinely uninhabited.
Paris metro is 1,800/sq mi
London metro is 7,430/sq mi
Philly is 11,749/sq mi
Paris is 52,000/sq mi
The US East coast between DC and Boston has 3x the population density of France (and has a larger total population). Yet France has the TGV, with many long stretches of 300 km/h traffic, and all the Northeast US has is Acela.
0. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boswash.png#mw-jum...
No one ever really addresses this trade off.
The US is heavily bifurcated socio-economically. It's quite simple and nobody much likes to talk about it (admit it): the top 50% do not want to ride on mass transit with the bottom 50%. And even more so, the top 1/3 absolutely do not want to ride on mass transit with the bottom 1/3. The top 1/3 pay most of the taxes in the US.
In the US the top 50% are relatively well off, affluent by Western standards. The top 1/3 in the US is equivalent to Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway - highly rich, highly educated.
The bottom 1/3 is not well off. The bottom 1/3 is poor and uneducated by Western standards, with extremely high rates of violent crime, murder and untreated mental illness. The murder/violent crime/rape rate in the bottom 1/3 is truly terrifying in the US. Nothing is done to address (improve) any of it.
edit: The same premise largely applies to the top 1/3 blocking the construction of new housing, because they don't want to live near the bottom 1/3. The people that can make new construction happen (financially, politically), are the ones that don't want it to happen. This goes on in blue cities, it goes on in red cities.
Good public transit = London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam, Berlin, Seoul. It does not equal LA, SF, NYC. LA's got dismantled and is slowly being rebuilt but it's crap. SF's is stinky slow and gross. NYC's is well used but it's not nice by any definition.
Agreed. The point the GP is trying to make though is that "good public transit" isn't /just/ about infrastructure, it's also about the society around that infrastructure that produces the people who ride it with you. I happily ride public transport while I'm in Europe and even in Latin America, I won't ride it in the US. It's not that I'm opposed to public transport, in fact the opposite, it's that in the US I am likely to be violently accosted, murdered, or robbed while that's basically never going to happen to me in Europe or even in Latin America.
For example, NYC's subway had 2 billion riders last year. How many of them do you think were victims of a crime while riding?
Either you're claiming that a quarter of the world's population at some point rode the NYC subway last year, or they're counting ridership non-uniquely, meaning that's a much smaller number of people riding multiple times a year (much more probable).
> How many of them do you think were victims of a crime while riding?
Assuming the latter interpretation, the absolutely most charitable interpretation of the metrics (including the assumption they're complete) says a crime happens every million rides[1]. But that greatly depends on what you mean by a "crime", as only the most severe crimes are counted, and they are only counted if reported.
As someone who's actually ridden public transport several times in the US and doesn't anymore, the reason why is that I observed crimes happening almost constantly. I made the mistake of riding the RTD after moving to Denver and found people openly smoking fentanyl in the train cars, and saw a fight break out. I have been able to personally avoid the consequences of this because I take precautions when I am in public and now actively avoid public transport in the US. FWIW, it's bad enough in NYC that crazy things (most of which are crimes) happening on the subway is a running joke in New York City that's considered relatable enough outside NYC that it's a regular gag on SNL.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/nyregion/nyc-subway-crime...
I ride it daily to get to work and there absolutely is a crime problem down there. Even if you're not the direct victim you'll see things and thus know that the crime is real. The NYC subway crime thing isn't just some made up thing that people don't have experience with.
Even then, the system is slow, sparse, unreliable. Most of the time this wouldn't be a desired transport, more like one of the rare ones available.
That's due to the exceptionally mediocre social safety net in the US, among numerous other causes.
If you're in the bottom 1/3 you have very limited access to quality+sustained mental health treatment. If you're in the top 1/3, you have nearly unlimited access to getting treatment for a mental illness.
It's not millionaires roaming the streets of US cities looking like zombies, blasted out on drugs, hauling around untreated mental illnesses.
We just don’t get nice things I guess.
You saw no criminals, nor SDF nor mentally ill?
You’re either lying, and have never actually been on the Paris metro. Or you’re lying, and you saw plenty of SDF and mentally ill, but just wanted to take a jab at the US.
There is crime on the Paris metro all the time. Fights. Mentally ill people screaming. Open theft. And heaven help if you’re a woman. Maybe a guy comes and sits down next to you and pleasures himself.
I feel confident calling BS on your comment.
People who only think in binary like you are really annoying and aren’t very interesting to talk to though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjG0quY5uoI
And the rest of the country is following:
There’s certainly a capacity issue though.
If you look closely at a particular flag stone on platform 2 at Pen Mill station it doesn't have "TylerE is a wanker" chiseled into it.
I can make a change.
This is all rather silly. We don't engage. Bloody kids.
No it doesn't.
Yeovil is still a junction with only two stations these days. It used to have four or five. Its also the confluence of the A30 and A37 roads.
I don't have a problem - you clearly are not from these parts. That's fine and you will be welcome.
It's reasonably matching short/medium term demand. Actual demand is PRC increasing urbanization from current 65% to 80/90% in next 10/20 years = need infra+housing for 200m-300m people. Utilization rate of HSR increasing every year. Current excess housing sqft is enough for ~100m (persons not household), ~5-10 years of urbanization headroom. This is without accounting for depreciated housing stock, QoL upgrades. For reference 80% urbanized US is short on ~6M homes, that's 2% relative to population. PRC gunning for 80% urbanization = PRC is net short 7-10%. Realistically much higher since a lot of people in rural stuck in very shitty housing stock. Of course there's some misallocation when building so much, but few under (yet to be) occupied developements / ghost cities or 50-60m empty units reasonbly matches demand/what can be absorbed over 5-10 year horizon. Population decrease doesn't factor much until after 2050/60s, by which time need to start factoring deprecated housing stock / end of life for concrete buildings. Other "demand" consideration is demographics aging out blue collar workers, might as well as build now while labour is plentiful and cheap, better to leave future with too much built capita than too little, as many developed economies with insane building costs are finding out.
Many buildings are never going to be actually lived in before being torn down. The construction techniques they use to soak up unskilled labor results in concrete buildings that will only last 20-30 years.
>The construction techniques they use to soak up unskilled labor results in concrete buildings that will only last 20-30 years.
Unskilled gets trained by skilled, and do not remain unskilled. Bulk of building stock was built in last 15-20 years by migrant construction lifers already with 10+ years experience (entire demo skews old) with a lot of concrete pouring and steel welding experience. You don't build as much as PRC and have unskilled construction workers, half the world is built by diasphora migrant workers drawn from even less developed countries.
TLDR on China collapse meme narrative of PRC construction, for what it's worth my previous field. The chinese buildings have 30-40 years life spans (no one credible guestimates 20) narrative conflates PRC construction standards in last 20 years, where vast majority of new building stock was accumuluated, and is fine for 50-75+ years (as in the concrete structure is durable), with not affluent at the time PRC choosing to cheapen out on building systems that can be easily retrofit up to modern standards. TLDR is concrete/structure/frame is FINE, "short" lifespan is really about shittier/lower quality mechanical systems, not ecological, expensive to maintain etc, and until recently because PRC so good at building fast, the answer is just to tear down and rebuild. Now PRC richer, can still choose to rebuild or retrofit (both of which they're still good at), new HVAC, facade etc, to meet performance standards now that vastly richer. This got twisted into PRC concrete last 30 years. Quality of towers being put up in CAN are comparable (and frequently worse) as stuff I see in PRC where the entire process of erecting hires has been optimized to death.
There are some legit shit tier construction pre 90s (and much older) builds, i.e. all the gross mid rise you see in left behind township/village level admin divisions, exactly the kind of bad/poverty building stock reaching end of life that urbanization drive is designed to move people out of (stuff that's still all over SKR/TW). But even then, they're not collapsing out of nowhere in any numbers that actually matter, other than in event of natural disasters (i.e. Sichuan earthquake scandal), which is a real consideration, in some geographic areas. But most of building stock, built in last 20 years after - again we're really talking about the frame/structure - are fine for 50/60/70+ years like west. Also important to note vacant towers mostly not abandoned projects, there's still basic maintenance happening because they're on someone's portfolio. They're not sitting derelict for 10+ of years getting killed prematurely by elements -> they're not going to come falling down. Yes some will, but rounding error.
Regardless, IMO broader consideration is RE surplus was 1-2% of GDP for ~15 years where boom was happening. Even if they sit idle/unproductive indefinitely, you're looking at in aggregate ~1 quarter of misallocation at current GDP over ~60 quarters. That's not too bad of inefficiency relative to how much was built, and inefficiency of too much > too little, especially when any solution to urban housing / infra congestion starts with having enough.
Anyways, even if the buildings are torn down before used, this is seen as additional GDP so officials don’t care so much. You record GDP on construction and GDP on destruction, so the building longevity is a feature rather than a problem.
Not in the period shown in the chart, which seems to end in 2021.
The subways seemed to be closer in quality to a NYC than a London.
Very capable, but didn't seem cutting edge.
Trams are also not able to deal with high gradients, unless they’re hybrid rack rail, or they’re trolleys rather than trams.
Finally, metros commonly have above ground sections or lines (which is why that’s a better name for urban rapid transit in general).
In which case cars also impede trams on the narrower smaller street.
0) trams are hardly unreliable
1) tram lines are routinely changed around
2) in Switzerland, there is no distinction between local and remote public transport. This has the advantage that you can use the regular trains for short hops. Zürich itself has 20+ railway stations.
Zürich has really opened my eyes for what a good tram network can do.
There is an observation that if you replace a bus line with an equivalent tram / light rail line, the rail line will attract more passengers. The reasons are not fully understood. Comfort probably plays a role. Another reason might be that rail lines are easier to understand. Buses are almost universally confusing, while tracks make it obvious where the rail line goes.
Trams also have a capacity advantage, because the vehicles can be larger. And operating them is cheaper in the long term, because the vehicles are much more durable.
This was the thought here in Atlanta but the streetcar has really struggled. Less than 20% of the predicted daily riders.
As someone who lived in NYC all their life and took public transit to school - buses suck. You have to stand in whatever weather is present: pouring rain, freezing cold, sweltering heat. Maybe there's a shelter, maybe someone is sleeping in it, maybe it's already full because it can only shelter a few people. No matter how "big" the stop is its always the same fucking pathetically small shelter. The ride is substandard with poor HVAC and in the colder months when it rains its miserable and very uncomfortable - damp and cold. Then the drivers have to deal with morons on the road so you get jerks and sudden stops from braking. As soon as I could I bought a car and to this day avoid buses like the plague. Thankfully I only have to take the subway to get to Manhattan as I live 2 blocks from the A train.
With a bus, there's always the potential the route has changed, or your specific bus is skipping over your stop for some reason. With a tram, even if you've never been to that city or part of the city before, you know there's going to be a tram along those tracks, and you simply need to walk along the road till you find the stop.
The passengers may be a bit uncouth (the upper half of the society tends to drive here instead of riding public transport), but the system is still unflinchingly reliable and comfortable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELtfOekhkcw
So what are these factors?
This is the primary reason why. Subways/rail is fantastic for dense cities. The US is much less dense than the rest of the world. So we don’t feel the need for subways. Seattle and LA care about this, so they are expanding. Seattle is geographically limited and can pretty much only expand up. LA doesn’t have the same geographic limitations, but it becoming the first city to maximize the amount of sprawl available. As other regions lose their ability to sprawl and are forced to expand up we’ll see more US regions build subways.
Take a look around - I don't want my tax dollars spent on a transit project full of graft in NY. It's really that simple. And I don't want mass transit where I live.
This also belies the writer's condescension and hubris. I've been on many city mass transit systems, in the US and abroad, contrary to the story posted here, they aren't all "like star trek to (ignorant) Americans".
Spare me.
For cargo, people generally pay for a delivery service if it's something too cumbersome to carry. In large cities like this, people don't buy a month's worth of groceries all at once; they only buy as much as they can carry.
SF's Chinatown is stuck in the 1950s. It's not modern China. No black-glass skyscrapers in exotic shapes. No outposts of Shenzhen manufacturers. It's mostly a retirement village.
This is a really weird complaint. SF Chinatown is a neighborhood settled by mostly Cantonese speaking immigrants in the mid 19th century, and still mostly inhabited by descendants of Chinese immigrants who moved to the US generations ago. Why would you expect it (or want it) to be "modern China"?
Largely to set the stage for service to the Richmond.
>It's mostly a retirement village.
A testament to the resilience of the community in the face of an ongoing housing supply shortage. There is no doubt immense pressure from our typical economic processes to displace retirees from the place that they've lived their entire lives. You'd rather see old folks trapped in car-dependent suburbia, eventually unable to drive themselves to their basic needs?
https://www.transittalent.com/articles/index.cfm?story=SF_Ce...
For regional transit, China's high speed rail buildout [1] is truly breathtaking. If you look at the miles of track [2], China has 45000km with 25000km under construction. Number 2 on the list is Spain (with 4000 and 1000 respectively).
For urban transit, China again completely dominates [3] by like a factor of 6-7 to #2. The US actually fares better here bu that's skewed by a handful of outliers, most notably NYC.
It makes me so mad because of the concerted effort made to dismantle and derail (pun intended) public transit efforts in the United States. The Koch brothers (well, brother) spend a fortune fighting these projects [4]. Elon Musk famously only propsosed the Hyperloop in the hopes of killing the California High Speed Rail ("HSR") [5].
Look at Las Vegas, a huge tourist destination. What Las Vegas actually needs is a subway line between the airport and the major Strip hotels. This would require probably less than 20 miles of tunnels. It could even be a mix of light rail in the suburbs and to the airport and tunnels under the Strip. You could extend it to key parts of Las Vegas to include all the people that need to work on the Strip through Park and Ride stations. It would be incredibly cheap for the benefit.
But instead we got the idiotic Tesla tunnels by The Boring Company, which I'm convinced was only proposed to kill the idea of any public transit infrastructure in Las Vegas.
It's all so short-sighted because public transit scales and it would make life easier for anyone who actually wants or needs to drive. But instead we get idiotic infrastructure like the Katy Freeway in Houston [6].
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xszhbm/chinese_hig...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lin...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems#List_by_...
[5]: https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1571628269555826688
[6]: https://b93.net/widest-freeway-in-the-united-states-is-in-te...
And, yes, I know, I know, the source; however, the consistency of their (incredibly profane and offensive) sentiments, squared with the ongoing reality of our public transit systems (SIDS: Sudden Infrastructure Death Syndrome), leads me to believe that there's a non-zero chance that they're merely expressing a more crass version of a shared belief among the more well-off and less incel-adjacent.
I post this not to inflame, but to raise an issue that has to be addressed in order to make these things happen. Not poor people and minorities, but the irrational attitudes towards any public good that is perceived as benefiting them. I dunno if you have to solve racism/classism, or merely convince the top 20% that public transit is a benefit to them, too, but you're going to have to do something wrt this matter if you want to see improvement in public transit infrastructure in this country (and preferably before a multi-billion-dollar quasi-FSD boondoggle ends up in the federal budget).
Why would you never mind one of the most important features of the American way of life?
Crushing the poor to enrich the rich. It's the American Dream.
No, because this would be bad for the taxi companies, and we can't have that.
Elon is really unexceptional here in terms of being of the billionaire class. The US billionaire class is relatively unified in trying to collect as much wealth as absolutely possible.
So the likes of Koch fought public transit because of the idea of taxes. Billionaires in general simply want to reduce how many taxes they pay to collect more wealth. They'd rather people pay for their own cars rather than the government building a subway.
Health insurance, high housing costs, cars and high education costs are wealth extraction from the government and ordinary citizens to the ultra-wealthy.
It's exactly the same whenever you hear anyone talking about "small government" or otherwise reducing regulation. It's nothing more than wealth extraction by the ultra-wealthy.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...
First: Why would the billionaire class be especially concerned about taxes? They are famously lightly taxed in the U.S. and one would think that the marginal effect of taxes on their quality of life would be virtually zero.
Second: What's going to be more expensive: Elon Musk's share of the tax revenue required to build high speed rail, or standing up the Boring Company to offer a fake alternative? Doubly so in Las Vegas, in a state where he doesn't even live.
It does make sense to me that he'd rather have people buying Teslas than paying someone else for mass transit—which is the point I originally posited. But it's still not clear to name that the math remotely works out here, unless he thought that the Boring Company also had a real shot at succeeding and capturing some of that public transit revenue. But that, of course, would make it something other than pure sabotage.
https://www.businessinsider.com/french-california-high-speed...
I've lived in a tiny apartment in a super-dense European city with Japanese levels of extent and service, and yet now for less money I live in my house like the European upper class, in a house bigger than theirs and with the same car they drive. I could never have afforded this in Western Europe (or Europe-like SF, NYC, etc). But freeway-loving America makes it possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2rI-5ZFW1E
A few videos on why this is (and I apologize for my language) incredibly selfish and idiotic.
tl;dw Owning a car in an American suburb is extremely expensive, and (especially if you disagree) your pleasant commute is likely being heavily subsidized (particularly by less-well-off Texans who you are forcing to live in worse conditions, and to pay proportionally more of their income to cover their own car dependency).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/248004/percentage-added-...
Iterative hardware development can take time. A brief search suggests: Using the Prufrock-2 version TBM, the Las Vegas Convention Center loop has picked up a couple of nearby hotels, and work has started on the first long extension, 3 km south along Paradise Rd to near the airport (1-2 years). Prufrock-3 is being exercised tunneling around the Tesla Giga Texas factory[1]. Prufrock-4 is nearing completion, and -5 is in design.
When there's a will to get it done, it gets done. When her isn't, planning and permitting takes a butt load long time.
If you want good transit, it must be for the people who vote. Otherwise they will vote to make it bad to save tax money. Branding public transit as the affordable option is a guaranteed recipe for failure.
Transit projects must also be small enough that the entity responsible for them always has several projects running in parallel. Once you stop building, you will quickly lose expertise, and subsequent projects will be more difficult and more expensive.
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.[1]
He knew it would delay CA-HSR and political will for it nearly died.
1. https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...
https://x.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990
Note also that the excerpt in this tweet omits the subsequent page, which discusses how Musk began taking the project more seriously after being surprised by the amount of public interest. You can find the biography on libgen.
So well, if USA invest less in metros is a very good thing for them. It's about time to massively understand that dense cities are needed now ONLY BY FINANCE capitalism to rule over gazillion of people owing nothing, tied to their services, but it's a nightmare for everyone else, environment included since they consume an enormous amount of resources, much more NOW than spread homes (modern buildings and modern homes, with energy performances, anti-seismic design, fire safety, HVAC etc) and can't evolve while being a big on-ground thermal mass to be heated by the Sun much more than spread green areas.
None of this works with subway. Subways are for people without much luggage (statistically, I am sure someone here will destroy me with facts how he hauled a sofa and a refrigerator on subway in Amsterdam and has not broken a sweat). You still need roads for cargo and using them for people too seems pretty straightforward and rational to me. If my city was flooded with money and everything else was in top shape (roads, parks, schools, utilities, police) then and only then I would not mind spending money on transit.
I am not sure what does this mean. You want unpaved roads for trucks? And when there are rains and they become impassable you just go without cargo in your dense cities?
> you can make both the roads and the intracity freeways much smaller.
How much smaller? Narrower? The lane width is determined by the width of the truck, not the private traffic. Less lanes? You need at least two lanes in either direction so a broken truck does not leave your city without food and three lanes so you have a chance to get around a collision or can do road work without stopping all traffic. Which is the regular width of freeways.
- classic planes are on par with cars for very short flight, offer much bigger fuel economy for longer ones, but obviously need MUCH space for practical use, even for the "shortest" STOL, otherwise;
- ...choppers and alike consume MUCH more than cars. Enough to be too much to use for all on scale.
However many observe that the immense and largely ignored costs of big buildings and their infra + renewable progress and nuclear comeback will offer enough to sustain such system and flying stuff last for 50+ years (except the battery of eVTOL so far). Long story short: we are switching form a heavy society to a light one, able to do most of the move by air, goods included, and as much as local productions as possible, knowing that in a changing world we can't maintain roads and rails because no one know what happen next in a relatively short timeframe not only in climate terms but also in human wars terms. Essentially we need to be much more resilient, semi-autonomous, and that's incompatible with cities and their needed infra.
Of course to be realistic those who have realized that needs, also understand that so far we have no general solution, so they prefer having the people partitioned in "disposable factory units", disposable also in humans, used to create such new world while being tied in 15'-cities without any personal means able to move them for longer distance.
So far most call such crude distopic scenario a fantasy but a small step at a time the fantasy will be reality. People in many moment of the history have not moved at all except traders and ruling class or soldiers for a war. So yes, people need to move to live well, but not to live. Only goods need to move: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/trade-and-travel-time-epidemi... and https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/commute-time-savings-when-wor... also people aggregated in small not much dense areas still need a dentist, to eat and so on, meaning that such non-remote activities could be done in such areas from home anyway, the dentist have hes/her clinic on one side of hes/her land, the home on the other, the public laundry similarly it's in the basement while the owner live at the first floor. Accidentally this is the very same description of efficient cities by Strong Towns, only for moving in the modern world instead of in the ancient one. If you really try to compute such scenario you'll see that we are probably much far than the McKinsey report BUT not that far and yes it's perfectly feasible. The point is where you want to be, between the disposable humans in modern lager-camps named cities or between the Citizens outside.
No, they don't. They can just stay at home all the time, working at a work-from-home job and socializing entirely online while getting deliveries from Amazon. /s
I see you scenario much more in a dense city, goshiwong alike, than in spread area of single family homes intermixed with works buildings like EU Rivieras.
With this lifestyle you get:
- much more in-person social activities
- much better environment
- much more personal space
- much less to spend in consuming services, from ready made foods to fast fashion, mobile smart macrobugs devices and so on.
This last point is the reasons why big tech and in general finance capitalism hate such model.
The fix? Don't do dense cities. 80-85% of the US population prefers single-family houses to apartments.
We need to promote remote work and BUILD NEW SPARSE HOUSING. Do not do the nonsense "upzoning", instead build new suburbs.
Remote work can be promoted by giving tax breaks for remote positions or by taxing dense office space.
The economics simply do not work to make this sustainable. Let's not forget how expensive basic infrastructure is just because it's normalized. Water/power/sewer/trash/roads/lighting is a massive expense that just keeps getting more expensive, not to mention that you have to factor in maintenance costs.
They actually don't. Go on, try to find anything in my words that is factually incorrect.
I'll wait.
A simple verifiable fact of life: density increases do not result in cheaper housing prices. Scholarly literature is unambiguous on that point. The best positive result for new construction was a one-time 5-9% decrease in _rents_ immediately near the new construction.
Experts, who made their career in pushing urbanism, try to dance around that point.
I don't care if maintaining large roads and power and water is expensive. I'm happy to pay for the increased quality of life.
I don't see how this is unsustainable at all. It might need higher taxes or some other way of ensuring that ongoing maintenance actually gets paid for. So what?
One mile of Manhattan subway now costs more than 1000 miles of new 6-lane freeway.
20yrs with a car in car infested suburbia and then 18 without in a city with amazing public transportation. Without was way better.
Here's another fact: not a single large transit-rich city in the _world_ has faster commutes than the US average. And car-rich Greater Houston Area has faster commutes than ANY other megalopolis.
Surprised?
Not even the slightest bit, the odds of the parent's sole life experience being "car infested suburbia" is ~1.0 Chalk it up to narrow context us centric hip view myopia.
Unless you live in an urban or suburban area. I agree with the author particularly about densely populated areas, the US is not just lacking, it is basically undeveloped. If I were inclined to live in such a place, I would pick a foreign city over the US. The congestion is probably the number one factor for me in deciding not to, although it isn't the only factor. There is not one single good reason why, if you live in a tightly packed place, you cannot get around your immediate environment with just the shoes on your feet. Especially considering that such places are supposedly designed exclusively for human habitation. It is downright shameful.
There’s nothing particularly special about the US, and highlighting the insane logistics of moving someone from one part of the country to another doesn’t really say anything one way or another
Personally, while I agree with your overall point, I think you shouldn't write that way. Expecting people to read a somewhat-long post before getting to the "twist" on an internet forum full of hundreds of posts is a bit much; people aren't reading everything fully here. You need to make your main point in the beginning, then expand on them in the subsequent paragraphs if any.
It doesn't really bother me though. What I said is true in my estimation. I can get to a mountain top in Colorado within a day from a thousand miles away with the last leg of the trip in a two wheel drive Toyota, but I can't get to the taco joint across the highway without getting in my car and driving a half mile to get to a u turn lane. The former is unbelievably fantastic, the latter is inexcusable.
I think globally nearly everyone would prefer to have a single family home with a private yard and with automobiles for getting around in most cases. I'd agree train access into the big city for a day out is nice. But most "big cities" aren't big enough or dense enough to require them.
Housing is particularly expensive in dense cities. That's the market's way of saying that Americans want more dense cities than there are currently available.
Of course some people want to live in the city. I did for years and paid good money for a prime address. But like hundreds of millions of people I don’t now because priorities change.
This is just objectively false.
You cling to false beliefs to make yourself feel better about your selfishness.
I don’t like cars and sprawl. That’s not why I “choose” them.
But you quickly find there are better options when you want certain things and have options.
Amusingly the unpopularity is almost universally originating from the same young white upper middle class suburb childhood people. Something pathological about rejecting their parents lifestyle rather than anythign to do with urban planning.
Private transit is universally superior to public transit, which is why the take rate of the former to latter correlated with things like income.