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It’s hard not to choose a car based lifestyle when outside of cities there is basically little or no public transit in many places. On top of that, when many people’s experience with travel by train is the outdated and slow infrastructure that already exists, why would they support more of that experience? I’m not anti- these things, just adding to the context.

Well they could just look at how many other countries do it... I know, Americans hate to look outside their own borders for examples on anything.

There's no public transit in many places because Americans don't want it and don't support it, and refuse to build densely enough to make public transit economically viable in the first place. You can't have a good transit system when everyone lives far apart from each other in spread-out subdivisions.

> There's no public transit in many places because Americans don't want it and don't support it

Yes, exactly. This is not a bug, it's a feature.

It's not a feature.

Come live in a country where the public transport is excellent. Typing this while traveling on the ICE between Zürich and Basel.

Americans don't want to live in one of those countries. They don't want to risk having to sit next to one of "those people". It's why they like driving everywhere, and living in gated communities where they can keep out the undesirables.

The vast majority of Americans have no idea what those countries are like, and have never visited a city with good public transit. It's a matter of ignorance more than anything else.

> It's a matter of ignorance more than anything else.

You have no basis for any such presumption. Plenty of Americans, myself among them, have lived in large, dense cities with good public transit--and we have then chosen to not live in such places because we prefer not to. You might believe that living in a large, dense city with good public transit is the best way to live, but that doesn't mean everyone else has to agree with you or be ignorant. Other people simply have different preferences from you. In a free country, which the United States of America is, people with difference preferences for what kind of place to live in can simply live in different places without making presumptuous claims about ignorance.

Being generous, there's only one, maybe two or three cities in the US with good public transportation. NYC has the best system in the US, but it's old and decrepit.

You have to travel outside of the US to see really good systems. Many European cities have decent systems, but the best systems - by far - are in East Asia. The Shanghai metro is as dense as the NYC subway, but it's clean, safe and modern.

Most Americans have not traveled to these places, so they've never seen what an actually good system looks like. At best, they've seen the NYC subway, which they might view as convenient but disgusting. More commonly, they've only ever been to cities with little to no public transit.

You say that Americans have the ability to choose, but that's really not true, unless they move to one particular city or leave the country. The infrastructure that exists determines what choices people have and what's convenient.

> there's only one, maybe two or three cities in the US with good public transportation.

NYC's is, as you say, old and decrepit, but its coverage is pretty good. I don't think it's the best system in the US, however. I lived in Boston for some time; the T was better than NYC's system. I have visited Portland, and at least when I visited, its system was better than NYC's.

> Many European cities have decent systems

I have visited both London and Paris, and both of their systems were comparable to the T in Boston when I lived there in terms of coverage and usability.

I have not visited any cities in East Asia, but I can easily see their systems being better since those countries have made huge investments in that kind of infrastructure.

> You say that Americans have the ability to choose, but that's really not true

By your logic nobody has the ability to choose. Nobody has access to all of the possibilities. So using that as the standard for "ability to choose", which is what you are doing, is pointless.

I could just as well say you don't have the ability to choose anything but a city with public transportation, because that's all that even appears to be on your radar.

> The infrastructure that exists

Is, at least in America, determined by the choices of ordinary people in the past. And choices ordinary people make now will end up causing changes in the infrastructure that exists.

Sure, maybe nowhere in America meets your personal standard for "good public transportation", but why should I care? I have a reasonable spectrum of alternatives open to me and I choose the one that suits me best. I don't waste time agonizing over alternatives that might exist elsewhere but are not accessible to me. Most Americans are the same way. So, I suspect, are most people everywhere, even if what alternatives are reasonably available can vary widely in different parts of the world. Maybe that's a problem for you, but it's not a problem for me, and I suspect it's not a problem for most people everywhere, and I don't see why it should be.

The way you define Americans making a choice sounds a lot like a simple hill climbing algorithm. Once you're on the path of your nearest hill you're stuck there until conditions change, even if you can see a mountain in the distance you would have our whole society ignore it and stay on our little hill? That's why China is and will continue lapping us at transportation. Yes you should care, or at least be able to expect someone to care, or at LEAST not try to talk someone who does care out of it.

>I don't waste time agonizing over alternatives that might exist elsewhere but are not accessible to me.

But you're happy to waste time arguing against them?

> a simple hill climbing algorithm

Not at all. There is no such thing in a landscape that is changing on time scales that are visible to people, as our societies are. You can't stay stuck on a local maximum if the landscape changes it out from under you. You have to keep reconsidering things.

> you're happy to waste time arguing against them?

The (pretty limited) time I have spent posting in this discussion has not been wasted. I'm having fun.

You can get tightly boxed into one solution. In the US, car culture has caused a fundamental transformation of cities, which makes it extremely difficult to reintroduce public transit. Roads are very wide and there are massive parking lots everywhere, so it's difficult to reorient cities towards walking and public transit. You would have to eliminate those huge parking lots and reduce the number and size of roads in city centers, but because everyone already owns one or two cars, most people are dead-set against such changes.

There is another local optimum, which is extensive public transit and walkable city centers. I'd argue that that other local optimum is far preferable, but transitioning there is very difficult.

> I'd argue that that other local optimum is far preferable

And I'd argue that this might be true for your preferences, but that doesn't mean it's true for everyone's. People have different preferences.

But because the vast majority of Americans have only ever been exposed to one solution, they have no idea if they would prefer the alternative. That's my point.

> the vast majority of Americans have only ever been exposed to one solution

I disagree. It may be that the vast majority of Americans have never been exposed to your particular preferred solution, but that's also true of the vast majority of people who live anywhere except a few East Asian cities, according to you. So I don't see why you are singling out Americans. You should be chastising basically everyone outside of East Asia for being backward. (And then, of course, you would just have even more people ignoring you.)

Most Europeans have a decent idea of what good public transit looks like, and the "few East Asian cities" include almost every large city in China and Japan.

As for why I'm singling out Americans: this thread began with a discussion about Americans.

The Boston T is not anywhere near as good as the NYC subway, but this is really beside the point: both systems are decrepit, and in no way stack up to modern public transit systems. Yet these are the best systems the US has to offer.

> Nobody has access to all of the possibilities.

Most people don't know what's out there, so they can't make an informed choice about what would be good public policy. That's my point.

> Is, at least in America, determined by the choices of ordinary people in the past.

I don't think most people understood the consequences of the decisions they were making. The transition to cars and the building of the interstate system had a huge number of ripple effects, and have completely transformed American cities, and as a consequence, public life. People didn't understand all these changes beforehand, and now they're locked in and taken for granted.

> I could just as well say you don't have the ability to choose anything but a city with public transportation, because that's all that even appears to be on your radar.

The reason I'm saying what I'm saying is that I've spent enough time on the three continents we're talking about to have seen the differences in public transit and how it affects city life.

> The Boston T is not anywhere near as good as the NYC subway

My experience of the T is some decades old; I understand it has indeed deteriorated quite a bit since then. But when I used it, I had reasonably contemporary experience of the NYC system as well, and the latter, at that time, was not as good. Any such comparison will of course change over time.

> how it affects city life.

Which, again, is all that appears to be on your radar. But not everyone's life is "city life".

They obviously don't have metro systems in Chinese villages. But Chinese cities do have great metro systems, while American cities are lucky to have any metro at all, or even a decent bus network or a few tram lines.

> My experience of the T is some decades old

Yes, it's extremely old. The Green Line looks like something out of the early 20th Century, and an important stretch of the Red Line had to be shut down a few years ago for emergency repairs, because they suddenly determined that it was too dangerous to continue operating. The whole system is on life support.

The NYC Subway is the only American system that could possibly compare to systems like the Paris Metro or the London Tube. But as I said, all these systems are terrible compared to the standard metro system you'll find in large cities in East Asia. Mainland Chinese cities have fairly standardized (which is how they keep costs down), very modern systems based on the Hong Kong metro. Taipei has a great metro system with a similar design. Japanese cities also have very extensive metro systems. I've heard great things about the Seoul metro system (though I haven't seen it first-hand).

But my point is that 90+% Americans have no idea about these systems. Without some basic exposure to the alternatives that are out there, it's pointless to say that Americans have made an informed choice. They make due with what they have, and largely don't know what the alternatives could be.

> Without some basic exposure to the alternatives that are out there, it's pointless to say that Americans have made an informed choice.

What is your exposure to alternatives other than the one you have said you prefer?

I've lived in various American cities with different levels of public transit. As I said, I far prefer the typical city layout in Europe and East Asia.

If this is superior public transit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA

than I would say no thank you.

No, that looks pretty bad to me.

> living in gated communities where they can keep out the undesirables.

Most Americans, including me, who live in areas that aren't large, dense cities with good public transport don't live in gated communities, and our only definition of "undesirable" is someone who commits crimes, which I would have thought would be any law-abiding citizen's definition. Your patronizing description is simply inaccurate.

I've lived in a large, dense city where the public transport was excellent. Having had that experience, and having also had the experience of living in a less dense area where I used a car to get around, I prefer the latter.

Have you lived anywhere except where the public transport was excellent? Do you realize that people, like me, who prefer to live in other areas see benefits to doing so that outweigh the costs of having to have a car?

I have. I lived in Dubai for two years. I drove a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I suspect they have modelled after a (rich) American city traffic, except they have had a green slate.

I travel routinely for work(300+ days/year) and I’ve had many different living conditions. I also spend a lot of time in the UK and BENELUX, both regions that are predominantly car first but with mediocre public transport.

Switzerland is the only country I’ve seen who does it right. I’ve heard Japan does it well, I wouldn’t know.

What city was that?

> What city was that?

Boston, some decades ago. As I noted elsewhere upthread, I understand that the T has deteriorated quite a bit since then. But at the time I lived there, I never felt any need whatsoever for a car and I never had any problems getting where I needed to go safely and in a timely manner.

Ok, so you consider your experience decades ago riding public transport in Boston to be comparable to modern day Swiss?

I have said no such thing. SInce I have never been in Switzerland I obviously can't compare the two. Can you?

My whole point was that you should try to live in a country with excellent public transport. I have been tried many places, and I would only consider Switzerland to fit that description(maybe Luxembourg, which has fantastic _free_ public transport).

Would you describe Bostons public transport (decades ago) as “excellent”, or are you just being obtuse?

Mind you, most of Europe has pretty good public transport, I wouldn’t call it excellent.

> My whole point was that you should try to live in a country with excellent public transport.

And my whole point is that you have no idea what my preferences are and you should not be presuming to dictate to me what I should do. If you like where you live, great, enjoy it. And let me choose where I like to live and enjoy that.

> Would you describe Bostons public transport (decades ago) as “excellent”, or are you just being obtuse?

Get off your high horse. I have already described my experience. I'm not going to describe it again just because you feel like being insulting.

I don't think the idea that the general, informed will of Americans somehow chose cars over public transportation holds water. What was the mechanism of that choice on an individual level, free of influence from car companies, between a future with car infrastructure with all the impacts understood (including the land space costs preventing density and efficiency) and other solutions?

It is demonstrably the correct answer, regardless what the largely un- or just as often mis-informed think, not that they were really "asked" in the first place.

> the general, informed will of Americans somehow chose cars over public transportation

This is a fantasy in any society, not just America. No piece of social infrastructure on the scale of "cars vs. public transportation" in any country gets decided by "the general, informed will" of all the people.

The "mechanism of choice on an individual level" in a free country is simple, and I've already described it: people look at the alternatives reasonably available to them and choose the one that suits them best. And the aggregation of all those individual choices shapes the infrastructure, which in turn of course affects what alternatives are reasonably available to the next generation. That's how free markets and free societies work. But of course such a process does not involve any "general, informed will" of the people as a whole. It just involves a huge number of individuals interacting.

The other possibility, in a country that's not a free country (such as one large East Asian country one city of which has been mentioned, not by me, in this overall discussion), is for some small group at the top to decide how they think things should be arranged, and then just impose that on everybody. In such a country there is no "mechanism of choice on an individual level" regarding large scale infrastructure at all; it is imposed by those in charge. People do of course still make individual choices in such countries, but their choices don't really affect the social infrastructure the way they can in a free country.

The US today is not fully a free country in the sense I described above, since there is quite a bit of top-down imposition of things (and not just by governments--there were of course a number of large corporations pushing car-centric infrastructure in the late 19th and 20th centuries), so it's really a mix of the two possibilities I gave. But neither possibility involves "the general, informed will of Americans" deciding anything.

Sorry, but this is just wrong. The simple truth is that people's opinions are usually a product of their upbringing and experiences. People raised in a warmongering society tend to favor warmongering, and people raised in a peaceful society tend to favor peaceful societies, for instance. In the case of cars, Americans really do favor cars and the car-based society they live in, because it's what they know and are familiar with.

So, if you try polling a bunch of suburbanite Americans and ask them if they'd favor abolishing their suburbs and turning them into extremely dense and generally car-free (or at least "car-inconvenient", i.e. narrow, slow roads and very little parking) urban areas, of course the vast majority of them are going to say "no". You can see it right here on HN every time this kind of discussion comes up: regular Americans like things the way they are. If they didn't, they'd be voting for something radically different, but they aren't. Sure, there's a minority of anti-car-culture Americans and even some activists, but they're a minority.

As for your characterization of Japan as an authoritarian society, that really seems extremely ignorant and probably even racist. It's a democracy, in case you've never read Wikipedia, so just like any democratic society, if people get angry enough, they'll vote for someone different, which happens from time to time.

> people's opinions are usually a product of their upbringing and experiences

So this would include you, right? So what gives your opinions any more weight than anyone else's?

> Americans really do favor cars and the car-based society they live in, because it's what they know and are familiar with.

And you favor other arrangements because it's what you know and are familiar with. So what's your point?

> your characterization of Japan

Japan was not the society I was referring to. The one I was referring to begins with a "C", and the city within it begins with an "S".

> that really seems extremely ignorant

Given the characterization of Americans that you gave elsewhere upthread, and which I responded to, you are in no position to make any such accusation, even if I were in fact talking about Japan, which, as I have posted already, I wasn't.

> because Americans don't want it and don't support it

Exactly - most Americans want the car lifestyle. They don't really wake up dreaming of being packed like sardines into public transportation: busses, metro, rail.

I live in the Netherlands, and many people here are increasingly opting for the car lifestyle because of all of the issues associated with public transportation. Sure, it's more cost-effective. But it's not faster. It's smelly, loud, chaotic. And no one wants to stand around waiting for the next bus to be canceled. Or the next protest shutting all transportation down.

> ...the anti-intellectualism that's been in American society forever...

That seems to be a bit of a stretch, the US lacks many things but a high-skilled workforce isn't really one of them. The issue is more the anti-industrial trend. The systems that China used to get ahead and build things like all that high speed rail are mostly illegal, nonviable or - at best - politically hazardous in the US (massive amounts of low-quality construction, lots of coal fired plants, low wages, ignoring IP laws, experimenting with different legal structures in specific areas to see what works).

> The systems that China used to get ahead

Let's not forget that the CCP can force people to do certain things by various methods of "discouragement".

Rail and cars aren’t mutually exclusive. Amtraks car carrier service seems to be very popular despite how badly they manage it.

Why can’t I drive my car on a train and go cross country?

Because it doesn't scale. A single car takes as much space as 10-15 passengers, and station times are much longer if you need to load/unload cars. Popular passenger rail systems often operate at capacity, with delays sometimes cascading into network-wide disruptions. It's often impossible to add more trains without building new sets of parallel tracks, while train length is limited by the size of the stations.

Make the rail cars intelligent and autonomous. Arrange them behind the engine in a way that the first car(s) behind the engine are filled with automobiles for the terminal destination. The following cars for intermediate 'stops', and the last car(s) for nearer stops. Let the train pass through, while decoupling the last wagons automagically shortly before the station, switching them onto some side track with on- and off-ramps, engaging their brakes, or use some system which does that in switching yards after they roll off the 'hump', let the automobiles roll off, collect the wagons and send them back with any another train travelling in the opposite direction, or whereever there is demand.

Networks..., tokens..., packets..., switches..., routers..., NOT fixed circuits.

Or just use an effing Über at the destination...

But people want to board the train at any station, not just at the point of departure. If your train is a stack, you can't support arbitrary trips without excessive delays.

Transport optimization is an established subfield of operations research and theoretical computer science. The algorithms for something like sorting railway cars are quite interesting, as they have to deal with physical constraints not present in networks and software.

You can afford hundreds or thousands of dollars for transporting your car by train? Putting a car on a train isn't free, or even remotely cheap. Even regular Amtrak tickets in coach class are quite expensive.

And define "very popular". I was reading an article this weekend about some Amtrak line between Chicago and Minneapolis being unexpectedly "very popular", which apparently equated to a whopping 300 passengers per day. Here in Japan, that's about half of one of the smallest bullet trains, and less than a quarter of the larger ones, and those are just single trains, which usually run multiple times per hour, sometimes more frequently than every 10 minutes. In a country of 310M people, 300 people per day doing something is not what I would call "popular".

In support of HSRs; I recently took a car train in Switzerland. They have - I think - 5 of these, which take a shortcut tunnel through various mountains, and saves you quite a bit of time, as well as angst driving through narrow and windy mountain roads.

So I could see similar HSR car trains saving quite a bit of time, between HSR hubs in appropriate cities in the US, versus spending e.g. 20+ hours driving from Dallas to New Jersey.

>In support of HSRs; I recently took a car train in Switzerland

>So I could see similar HSR car trains saving quite a bit of time,

There's no such thing as an HSR car train anywhere, nor is there ever likely to be. What you rode on is simply called a "train", not a bullet train. You can obviously transport cars by train, but you're not going to do it at high speeds.

Maybe I didn't communicate this properly?

  - I saved a lot of time taking a car train, instead of just driving my car through windy roads
  - Similarly, I could see a HSR car train, if there was such a thing, saving a lot of time (and of course, freeing up the driving time to be able to do other things, whilst in transit)

I did say you can't have an HSR car train. It simply isn't possible: it would take far too much time to load and unload cars. Also, the weight of the cars is probably too much for HSR tracks. There's a reason HSR can't share rails with freight trains.