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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Something the article completely skips over is that European cities have significantly better and safer pedestrian infrastructure than their US counterparts. American streets are built to prioritize cars and cars alone. Sidewalks are often unmaintained, bumpy, and sometimes missing altogether. Crossings are often unmarked and dangerous. Stop signs and signals are routinely ignored, especially when turning. This is why in countries like Germany pedestrian deaths per mile walked is 8 times lower than the USA (and these numbers continue to move in opposite directions year after year).

Unless you can address this fundamental problem "just walk more" isn't a viable option for transit users.

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In many places, yes, US pedestrian infrastructure is worse.

In other ways - wheelchair accessibility for example - the US is miles better than many European cities.

Wheelchair users are a subset of pedestrians. If your pedestrian infra is shit, your wheelchain infra can't be much better. (Sure, only if you count whatever remains of pedestrians infra, it might look acceptable).

Sort of but not entirely. While bad pedestrian infrastructure sucks, usually I can get around it.

But I’ve been in crutches and a wheelchair many times in a life —- if the actual place is not wheelchair friendly, it is much harder to get around.

A vast majority of wheelchair users in the US are car users.

On public transport this does not seem to be the case at all. Low floor buses, trams and trains are much, much more common in Europe. And bike lanes and better overall pedestrian infrastructure is much better.

So I really interested how you are getting to this 'wheelchair accessibility' is better in the US. I would love to see some data, and not just 'we have X more ramps', but actual people in wheelchair going into their experience.

The bus lines in the US tend to be spread out enough that riders often have to walk a long distance anyway as many/most destinations are far away from the route itself and would require substantial non-bus travel even with infinite bus stops along the route. Given that reality, the density of bus stops along routes seem inefficient for a very small real world improvement.

Similarly, the article also glosses over the issue of disability. Perhaps because the US tends to treat its bus system as welfare, it is adapted heavily to people with disabilities and limited mobility. I'm sure there are solutions to this, but at the moment removing bus stops tends to disenfranchise people who can't walk longer distances.

This is true for everywhere tbh, and thr solution is to make the last mile walkable by people with disabilities.

I see a lot of idolization of NW Europe from the US, but this is still a problem in Europe too. True, it's better than most of the world, but not every NW European city is as walkable or as accessible as people think it is.

> but at the moment removing bus stops tends to disenfranchise people who can't walk longer distances.

So those categories of people just can't use public transit in places where public transit is more popular?

There's also a feedback loop here: if stops are too close, buses are slow and unreliable, which reduces ridership, which makes it harder to justify investing in either the stops or the surrounding pedestrian environment

Yep.

Just one thoughtless example: Austin TX downtown is actively hazardous to non-motor vehicle users. One example is worn down and effectively camouflaged pucks the same color as the roadway about 10 cm wide by 6 cm high sticking out the middle of the road randomly that once represented bike lane merge path markers. Ask me how I know. :/

So..fix that?

I might have missed it (tbh I started skimming at a certain point) but I was disappointed to not see any counter arguments or even downsides addressed.

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