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Comment by nebula8804 | Hacker News Reader

Can you really include uninhabited ice regions? The point is that the size of the country incentivized car based transportation and large distances between destinations. I guess if you flattened the entire contingous european continent(from portugal to Moscow) as one large standardized country and really only developed most of it after cars became a thing, you'd potentially have the same system as the US.

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Can you include the barely inhabited Rockies, the Badlands, the arid low and high deserts, the Sierras?

First of all there are population centers there but I guess if you look at a night picture they aren't large at this time: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2000/geo/popul...

(Keep in mind that picture was taken when the US has 58 million less people or 17% smaller than today)

But we also have to understand that the US continent could grow to a billion people and still only have the density of France. That is not a matter of lack of land, its a matter of political will.

There have been attempts to push this idea: https://ui.charlotte.edu/story/why-not-1-billion-americans-o...

Anyway given that the land is sparsely populated it is still a fair comparison: When you have such a small population but access to such abundant resources that few others have on the planet, you are going to end up in a scenario like what the US has now.

There are only 7 states with more population than Sweden. Only 2 with more than Scandinavia: California and Texas.

The point of excluding inhabited ice regions is not due to lack of population its due to lack of potential developable land. My point is to put yourself in American shoes when they developed after WW2, there was so much abundance of developable land, resources, and wealth plus this new automobile coming onto the scene, it was natural that it was going to develop the way it did.

What makes you think these states only developed after WW2, and how does this explain the US having the world's best passenger rail system in 1920?

Here's a map of it; see how densely it links up this vast country: https://vizettes.com/kt/rta/maps/usa-rr-1920.gif

Meanwhile, the Netherlands was completely car centric just like the USA until the 1990s, when they decided to start redesigning roads to prioritize walking and cycling. Are you sure these things are really inexorably linked to geography?

This really is nonsense but somehow every time this topic comes up people being it up. The size of the country or its population density is not really relevant.

People in Europe dont take a train from Greece to Sweden. They fly. In fact most fly Vienna to Amsterdam.

In the same way somebody from New York would definitely fly to LA. (They are not driving now btw)

That doesn't preclude the existence of public transport connecting NY to Philadelphia. It also does not preclude NY from being walkable! Or bikeable. It doesn't stop NY from having good public transport! It doesn't force you to drive to work in NY.

This is much more about local policy.

Different solutions at different scales!

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