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Comment by vantassell | Hacker News Reader

> Japan is one of the only countries to have privatized parking. In Europe and North America, vast quantities of parking space is socialized: municipalities own the streets and allow people to park on them at low or zero cost. Initially with the intention of encouraging the provision of more parking spaces, Japan made it illegal to park on public roads or pavements without special permission. Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased.

This is got to be a huge factor. Making everyone pay for "free parking" through inefficient use of space is such a waste. I strongly recommend everyone to read Donald Shoup's "The High Price of Free Parking".

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Street parking makes suburbs worse, too. Almost everybody in my neighborhood has their garages piled to the ceiling with junk and parks in the street, which makes it a pain to weave through even for someone driving a compact crossover… I can’t imagine what kind of hell it is for trash and delivery drivers having to squeeze huge trucks and vans through without swiping peoples’ cars.

This is where legislation can come in - when I bought my house, one provision was that I can't change the front to a garden, it has to remain usable as a parking space for a car. Even if I don't have a car. There's limited extra / visitor parking available. Of course, a lot of people have two cars so it's kinda moot but still.

Don't take this the wrong way but to anyone who has read the book "The High Price of Free Parking" this contribution to this thread reads like someone who came late to a meeting and missed half of the discussion and keeps asking questions that would have been answered had they joined earlier.

I can see why you might ask this, but the book very much focused on the idea that a piece of land much preserve space for a parking space. It might sound innocuous but it is the source of many issues within cities, a contributor to housing inaffordability, why so many buildings in the US are surrounded by miles of parking, why some of the lots in your city are derelict, etc.

The book very much addresses why mandated parking minimums even in suburban residential lots are also bad (specially the mandated minimum less so the carpark itself), I highly recommend the book mentioned above.

Here's the preface of the book http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PrefaceHighCostFreeParking.pdf

There's also a good audiobook.

This is crazy car-centric legislation.

Now, instead of letting car owners pay for the public space they use (street parking), you are forcing anyone without a car to waste their own private space, in case somebody wants to park there.

I can't imagine that you have to let someone park on your private property anywhere.

No, that is not the point.

The subtle difference is between American parking minimums imposed on property owners - “you must reserve space on your private property for this many cars whether you own them or not” vs Japanese parking requirements imposed on car owners - “you must reserve space on some private property for your car if you want to own it”

In England, so many people are living at home due to the housing issues that some houses have 3-4 cars and no driveway. Streets are nowhere near as wide as Norther America so two cars cannot pass easily and drivers have to find gaps between cars to pass each other.

my absolute biggest pet peeve about living in "modern" suburbs and a large contributing factor behind why i wanted to (and eventually did) leave them.

imagine having the only well-maintained sidewalk for a good ways out be blocked by cars whose owners have 2+ car garages!

Blocking the sidewalk should be fineable?

Such rules are often not enforced.

In my experience, it's often up to the people in the neighborhood to decide. One of my neighbors down the street a number of years ago was militant about it. Code Enforcement does not routinely drive our streets looking for violations, but if someone blocked a sidewalk, parked facing the wrong way on the street, etc, Code Enforcement would magically appear to give them a ticket. Pretty sure this neighbor had them on speed dial.

I am sure social networks (the non tech kind) help here. Maybe they both play golf or coach each other's kids.

In an ideal world where scrolling and driving would _actually_ be a punishable offense, sure!

In reality: moving away solved the problem.

Note: I grew up in an older (1940s) suburb with a town square that was actually walkable. This problem didn’t exist there. Mostly because the garage was detached and further back from houses, so you had your own proper driveway to park your car onto.

In my area street parking is banned on collection day until 5pm. This is also when they do street cleaning. Somehow everyone finds room for all their cars on this day. Otherwise its similar to how you describe.

Guilty of garage as a storage shed, but its also crazy to me people don't store their second most expensive asset inside their garage.

I have space in garage for car at times of year when plowing may be needed. But plenty of space outside on driveway at times of year when it's not. Live in a very safe area and it's easier to just pull up in front of the garage door. Not sure what's crazy about that.

And that's without mentioning what's like for the lowest of the low (in the USA): pedestrians.

There is an absolute mind-boggling number of garages full of crap in Japan too.

Garages are the easiest way to get cheap storage space attached to or close to your home. Apart from garden sheds.

The issue is really the perverse incentive: if there is free onstreet parking, its usually more useful to put your car on the street and use the garage for something else. For many people that might even hold true if they have to walk a bit to the next parling spot

That's really hard to escape unless you remove free on-street parking from large areas at once

I think it's a corollary of Parkinson's Law: Crap expands to fill the space available for it. It's one reason I've never gotten a shed rather than just depending on my garage to store stuff in the winter when I need to get any cars off the driveway for plowing. Too much temptation to just fill spaces up.

It doesn't help that under-main-roof garages seem to be designed to only just fit small to medium sized cars despite the significant, rampant inflation of car sizes over the past few years.

My family tend to opt for smaller cars, because we're practical and don't have the faulty 'keeping up with the Joneses' gene, which means we can fit two cars in a two car garage.

We may still be in the majority, but it feels like it won't be for long.

UMR garage sizes should be inflating with the average car size. The Ford Ranger, essentially a fucking truck, and completely impractical, is the highest selling car in Australia because of backwards-thinking tax incentives from a few years ago, and then the ensuing Joneses effect.

Sigh... humans.

/rant

Or maybe big vehicles which are inefficient from the point of view of physics (bigger = more energy to move around), take more space and damage the road more (more heavy, more bad for road) should be banned or taxed accordingly instead of having the law change the size of garages ?

I'd be happy with all of the above.

I don't suppose you have Ford F350s in your area? You could put that Ranger in the glove box.

Don't see them very often, thankfully. We're not the US yet - there is still hope!

This is true. Back when I was EV shopping, the number of models that were both proper modern EVs and could fit reasonably in my garage was shockingly small.

UMR?

Under main roof

Apologies, I meant to add the acronym where first said under main roof.

Thanks!

Also makes roads unsafe for cycling

The main low-hanging fruit is just removing surface parking lots in American downtowns and stopping the development and expansion of highways through the same. If you did nothing else that would have a significant positive impact. For almost all communities those surface parking lots are economic extracts from the community. They're woefully underpriced for tax purposes too.

The removed parking needs to be replaced by transit options people actually want to use.

I live just outside a fairly large city. Getting downtown sucks. Driving is the only real option, but parking is annoying and expensive. Even if it was free, it would still be annoying. I almost exclusively take an Uber because of it. Those can add up and be a mixed bag as well.

There is bus service, but it’s infrequent and quadruples the time. In some cases, the transit directions say 1h 20 minutes, where 47 minutes of that is walking. Meanwhile, a car is under 20 minutes.

I used to live outside of Chicago. The Metra could get me downtown faster than a car (during rush hour) for just a few bucks. The train became the pragmatic choice and dictated where I chose to live.

Removing parking doesn’t build a train, it just raises parking rates, keeping people from even bothering to go downtown.

I agree that surface lots are terrible, but they have to be replaced by something.

> The removed parking needs to be replaced by transit options people actually want to use.

Removing surface lots doesn't immediately mean removing parking. You're still free to build parking - you just have to integrate it into the building it is serving. Which gives you a pretty big incentive to only build the parking you actually need, and share it with neighboring buildings to reduce costs.

> Removing parking doesn’t build a train, it just raises parking rates, keeping people from even bothering to go downtown.

Removing surface lots means increasing density, which means the same transit stop can serve more people, which lowers per-passenger costs and allows for higher-frequency running and denser transit networks.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem: you don't want surface lots removed because there is no good alternative, but a good alternative isn't economically viable due to the surface lots enforcing low density.

I agree with you. The person I replied to said, “if you did nothing else that would have a significant positive impact.”

Building parking structures is also something else. They would make parking better than the surface lots, but make traffic worse.

My objection was so the “nothing else” part. Surface lots are bad, but just removing them doesn’t solve the problem they are currently poorly solving. Larger parking structures would be better, and transit options that offer options that are faster, cheaper, and easier than driving/parking would be better still.

If I may clarify, my intent was just to suggest that if we did nothing else with respect to better transit that removing the surface parking lots and replacing them with something else would have that positive impact. Of course, I didn't clearly state that, but I wanted to let you know what I intended. :)

Something that peeves me where I'm at is that the transportation system here (not Chicago) is not coordinated across the systems. Here there's a bus that could take me to where I work, but it stops once every hour and is often late by 20 minutes. Local businesses also sponser a "free trolley" that follows the same route. It's overfull at peak hours and as a form of transportation the seats and setup make it much less safe for passengers. (Park benches as seats, and when the driver breaks you're holding on for life) The worse part is that this "free option" now competes with an existing valid option that cost a dollar. But that means that based on fares it's likely they will reduce stops and reduce hours (they have) it would have been better had the business incentive had just sponsered the existing bus route instead. Additionally comparing to china's awesome bus system (depending on the city), there, there is always two buses that come every 20 minutes. So you're never really ever suffereing. (Major cities anyways) The trolly is poorly managed and often three of them will come at once as they don't sync them when they run late they just all go so often you have three trolleys following each other and a very late bus. So it just... I never understood with the advent of GPS why buses aren't syncing so that they could just be traffic bound instead of time bound That way a bus could always arrive every x minutes instead of well the bus is scheduleed to arrive at x time and it might not arrive due to traffic woes. This should be syncable. ... Like why is the system so... I can't avoid saying it... capitalistically bound instead of populas bound. I mean it would better for capalism if that was more human centric. /political rant blah blah

Buses are a simpler solution. A city should solve the anywhere to downtown is quick on bus or train thing. You need transit lanes and more buses. Ideal is public transit is faster and cheaper. Even someone who already has a car will not use it.

Then once solved, let people get across from one suburb to the next on transit quickly but that is harder to do economically.

Simpler solution but they’re a strictly worse version of your car and they still depend on highway widening projects. In other words, more of the same.

To change the culture in the US we will have to make category changes. Cars and busses are in one category, walking, biking, and rail options in another. We need the latter or we risk just wasting time, effort, and resources.

Busses make more sense and work better as an add-on to rail systems and walking/biking.

A typical commute bus would carry 30-80 people so that replaces probably 30-80 cars. I don't know how a bus is worse than a train in this regard. Both need land to be built. Unless you are talking underground but they are expensive.

If your city is a shit place to commute adding buses and bus lanes can help. Once you are on a bus zooming past all the traffic you can see.

Also important point: I'd do min 300m between stops maybe more.

I would be more pro train and anti bus for "last mile(s)" if the bus is petrol but if all electric I am for the bus! Where I live there are a plethora of places my kids can get to on a bus much quicker than even if we were near a station and they got a train.

It's more about changing cultural habits. We already have busses and bus rapid transit, for example, where I live. And while I generally support the effort, it doesn't and won't have the adoption that something like, say, a street car or tram would have going along other various routes. The issue is the bus is just a worse version of your car. Even today people buy cars, drive them, pay $15 to park, rather than hop on our park-and-ride service that are conveniently located in the suburbs. That should tell you something about how difficult it is to change cultural habits.

But rail is a category change. You walk up to it, it takes you somewhere on a fixed line, you hop off. You continue on your walking journey. You expect things to be a little closer, more dense (but not too dense). You're not thinking much about bus time tables, it's new, it's cool, Europe has it. Japan has it. And those are great places you've visited, right?

That's the main difference.

The bus is way more nice to get suburbs to city than my car though. It is actually quicker. And that is with a walk both ends and leaving at $random time. Make it a better car and people will switch. Part of it is making the car crapper. Bus lanes do that. Limited parking does it.

Of course if there were a train nearby I would probably get it. I'd pay an extra 10 mim commute time for that smooth ride (e.g. if train stops further away as they likely are). But if you are low on trains, buses can do a great job.

And if people won't shift make them free. Might be cheaper than building more roads anyway.

If you remove parking spaces it solves itself because traffic is reduced and transit options become more efficient AND more financially sound.

The person I was replying to said to remove the parking and “nothing else”. To me this means no investment in transit options to compensate. This just kills the city as the money from the suburbs can’t get to the city to spend.

Or people just stop going there.

Exactly. I already don't go into the large relatively nearby city as much as I used to because of both general inclination and traffic/parking hassles. Which is fine.

But if people in the main stop going into the city you'd probably see a drop-off in the city amenities that make many people want to live there in the first place.

This is like that phrase “nobody goes there anymore it’s too popular”. The surface parking lots would be replaced with things people want to go downtown for in the first place, never mind additional residences which mean more customers for businesses.

Nowhere in the world, and I mean the entire world, has the scenario in which surface parking lots are replaced with other productive uses have resulted in a drop off in city amenities - it’s a non-sequitur. The businesses and residences that replace the lots are city amenities. Adding them has the opposite effect that you describe.

Think about it another way - what if we add surface parking lots? What would you drive to downtown to do? There wouldn’t be anything there because the amenities would have been replaced by mostly empty parking lots.

We can also just have multi-story garages. We can actually increase parking (on a social scale) while removing surface parking lots. That would create amenities and allow folks like yourself to easily come to town. Would it cost? Sure. So what?

Nothing against multi-story garages.

Just go (or don't go) to places based on how much of a hassle it is to do so. If enough people--local or otherwise--want to visit good for them. I definitely make choices based on how easy or hard it is to get to the destination.

I hear ya. I'm the same way. Funny enough we actually actively try to avoid going to the suburbs in our metro, especially some of the areas with Costco and such because the traffic and anger and road rage is just so god damn stupid and I think, frankly, things have gotten rather dangerous. Maybe I'm getting old. I find it much easier and less stressful to just walk over to somewhere and grab what we need when that is an option.

This is what the activists think but in reality it just slowly makes everyone's lives worse. There's typically some sort of political or social dysfunction preventing effective transit and reducing parking doesn't magically make that go away. It's analogous to the tired refrain about new technology not fixing social problems.

Not in this case. Traffic and the movement of people are a bit like water. Path of least resistance. Make parking more difficult and folks will take transit, or live closer to work. Both options are better for local economies and save everyone money.

> or live closer to work

Which means you also need to battle the housing problem, too, though, plus changes in settlement patterns take years to decades to manifest. In the meantime, you might have to weather quite some griping about it or even serious pushback.

Generally speaking, not my problem and not something I care all that much about in my city.

I don't think society needs to accommodate that lifestyle so someone can live 30 miles away from work and treat my city like a place you just commute to work to. Those days are increasingly over, as cities realize this is bad for the city and incredibly expensive to operate (surface parking lots are economic extractions and tax revenues low).

You are of course right there is pushback, and things take time to manifest, but we moved to the suburbs at one point there's no reason we can't fix that. I'm not entirely sure why my city council for example cares what suburban voters who don't vote in our elections really think outside of 2nd hand complaining from employers. But they're free to relocate their large downtown offices to the suburbs, we shouldn't cater to them anyway precisely because they can move at any time leaving quite the financial problem as building patterns revolve around this 8-5 white collar commuter scheme to surface parking lots, and if the anchor tenant leaves you're left with, basically, a dead city. It's incredibly fragile and stupid.

Maybe the parking lots, but if you know anything about the major Japanese cities with satisfyingly good train systems then you'll also know they have a lot of expressways running through them.

Yes, I do love the rail system in Japan. Went a few years ago, going back next year most likely. I've also driven in Japan (Osaka). I just meant, in general, a low-hanging fruit we could tackle is making surface parking lots a thing of the past in downtown or urban areas. With actual economically productive constructs there instead, such as business, retail, housing, parks, &c. we could pretty much get to the density where trams make sense, and in some cities we could work on intra-city rail too.

I think where I live (Columbus) is very well positioned for this model if only our civic leaders had courage and stopped thinking of transit as a "blue" thing (also our city council needs to stop suburban thinking). We don't need to build any more expressways or highways. We are maxed out. The only sane option is respecting appropriate density, and focusing on categorical changes in how we move people: walk/bike/rail instead of bus/car/roadways.

> we could pretty much get to the density where trams make sense

That's the key issue. We don't need to launch a war on surface parking to achieve the necessary density. Zoning and mass transit buildout go hand in hand and the problem getting in the way is fundamentally a political one. If the politics is solved and the density increases market forces will cause the surface parking to go away on their own.

Surface parking is a huge waste of space that becomes unusable for pedestrians. You can't apply market forces to it because unpaid roadside parking is effectively a tragedy of the commons.

You do though, because you need a higher level of density to make transit make sense, and you need more interesting places for people to live and walk to. When you have easy and convenient parking, particularly these surface lots in downtown areas, you kill the downtown because there's nobody there to support business outside of 9-5 office commutes.

Small quibble: visits downtown are an uncommon occurrence for many (most?) Americans. The vast majority of their transit is intra/inter-suburb. Where I live, it's relatively simple and easy to hop on a commuter train or bus to get downtown. It's impossible to use public transit to get from one place along the ring road to another, or from one side of a particular suburb to another. Therefore, everyone still needs a car.

> The main low-hanging fruit is just removing surface parking lots

You're pre-supposing that transit is _better_ than cars. It's not. ESPECIALLY the Japanese transit.

I certainly don't want to suffer through this bullshit every day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA

I'm a Tokyo local and yes, this is real. Even I find it uncomfortable. On the Yamanote Line during rush hour, trains come every 2-3 minutes and it can still look close to this.

That said, most people's daily commute isn't this extreme -- it depends heavily on the line and direction. The tradeoff most Tokyo residents accept is: 30 minutes of crowded train vs. hours stuck in traffic with nowhere to park.

The OP is missing that you do the same thing you just do it in a car in a congested highway with your road rage, spend a lot of money, and all of that to avoid the impression of a subway ride that would never happen in an American city except maybe New York because these cities obviously lack population density at the scale of Tokyo. Oh and you get in car crashes and die.

This isn’t an anti-car rant. I’m actually trying to just get folks who don’t want to drive and shouldn’t be driving off the road so we can save money and do more with the infrastructure we already have while restoring economic bases and entrepreneurship to our non-coastal cities. It is quite literally a win for everyone except bloated highway departments and their downstream contractors.

That's because subways are a dead end. They need to be removed entirely, and the dense cities need to be de-densified. That's the long-term plan.

> I’m actually trying to just get folks who don’t want to drive and shouldn’t be driving off the road so we can save money and do more with the infrastructure

Can we PLEASE just stop with the "saving money" and "off the road" nonsense? Please.

Adding transit does NOT reduce congestion (see: .https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/7/does-buildi... ). And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.

If you dream of rail going to every city block like in NYC, then you should think about its other side effects: toxic densification, unaffordable housing, depopulation.

> That's because subways are a dead end. They need to be removed entirely,

I certainly agree subways aren't the way of the future, at least in America. Too expensive and, frankly, unnecessary. We are already de-densified (which is why I find your below comment bizarre)

> and the dense cities need to be de-densified. That's the long-term plan.

Can you point to a single elected official in an American city that has a plan of reducing density in their city? I'm curious.

> Can we PLEASE just stop with the "saving money" and "off the road" nonsense? Please.

> Adding transit does NOT reduce congestion (see: .https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/7/does-buildi... ). And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.

Well, no, I won't stop because it's true and arguments to the contrary are faulty for various reasons. For example, suggesting that transit doesn't reduce congestion misses the fact that you can't count future growth that didn't occur. Every single person riding transit would be driving, if there was no transit. It's just logically false. It's also ignoring the fact that growth and congestion and transit typically go hand-in-hand.

> And it is NOT cheaper than owning a car.

The only way for this to be true is to ignore all of the factors of car ownership. Even then it's probably still false.

> If you dream of rail going to every city block like in NYC, then you should think about its other side effects: toxic densification, unaffordable housing, depopulation.

No I don't. Also NYC is the most populous city in America so depopulation here as an argument yet again makes 0 sense. Housing is unaffordable precisely because of the density and demand, which go hand-in-hand.

> We are already de-densified (which is why I find your below comment bizarre)

The US is rapidly densifying, and this will get _worse_ as the population starts shrinking in earnest. Japan leads the way here, its population has been going down for a while. Yet Tokyo now is in a real estate bubble.

> Can you point to a single elected official in an American city that has a plan of reducing density in their city? I'm curious.

Plenty of cities are resisting the density increases, NIMBYs are holding the line.

> Well, no, I won't stop because it's true and arguments to the contrary are faulty for various reasons. For example, suggesting that transit doesn't reduce congestion misses the fact that you can't count future growth that didn't occur.

Again. Transit does NOT reduce the congestion. This is a simple observable verifiable fact.

You can say that transit enables more density (true), but it does NOT reduce congestion.

> Every single person riding transit would be driving, if there was no transit.

And there would be fewer of these people.

> The only way for this to be true is to ignore all of the factors of car ownership. Even then it's probably still false.

In Seattle, I'm going to end up paying $150k in taxes/fees for the failrail line that will go nowhere near me. This is literally more than a lifetime of owing a cheap car.

But even if we just look at operating costs of transit, a single trip on transit is about $20. This ends up being about equal to the IRS deduction for car depreciation for the average trips.

> No I don't. Also NYC is the most populous city in America so depopulation here as an argument yet again makes 0 sense.

Look at the fertility rate for people in dense city cores vs. suburbs.

> Housing is unaffordable precisely because of the density and demand, which go hand-in-hand.

Indeed. Now think about this: the total US population is shrinking. NYC is growing. What is happening?

Hint: look at Japan.

> The US is rapidly densifying, and this will get _worse_ as the population starts shrinking in earnest. Japan leads the way here, its population has been going down for a while. Yet Tokyo now is in a real estate bubble.

There are a lot of factors that go in to real estate prices, and I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to compare Tokyo to any city in America besides New York in just about any aspect.

> Plenty of cities are resisting the density increases, NIMBYs are holding the line.

Name one. That's not the same thing as NIMBY. No city is actively against growth.

> Again. Transit does NOT reduce the congestion. This is a simple observable verifiable fact. You can say that transit enables more density (true), but it does NOT reduce congestion.

It's the same thing, and it goes very well with your thesis that the US is rapidly densifying. As it densifies congestion gets worse, adding transit takes away additional cars that would otherwise be on the road.

In Seattle whatever transit exists is gone, now those people would drive cars, ergo congestion increases. This seems very obvious.

> In Seattle, I'm going to end up paying $150k in taxes/fees for the failrail line that will go nowhere near me. This is literally more than a lifetime of owing a cheap car.

Ok and do you not see what the problem is with this argument? I could just say, I'm paying $150k more in taxes for a new highway being built somewhere that won't go anywhere near me or I won't drive on.

Second, you're not including the costs for highway construction, maintenance, insurance, gas/oil (why do you think we're in Iran) &c. that goes into car ownership.

Third - Most Americans aren't buying cheap cars.

> But even if we just look at operating costs of transit, a single trip on transit is about $20. This ends up being about equal to the IRS deduction for car depreciation for the average trips.

Weird. I took a "single trip on transit" and it was less than $5 in New York. See I can just pull numbers out of my ass and apply them without any good reason too.

> Look at the fertility rate for people in dense city cores vs. suburbs.

What about them?

> Indeed. Now think about this: the total US population is shrinking.

The US population is not shrinking.

> NYC is growing. What is happening?

People want to live there - that's my best guess.

> There are a lot of factors that go in to real estate prices, and I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to compare Tokyo to any city in America besides New York in just about any aspect.

Yes, it absolutely makes sense. The trend is simple: you build rail transit, you get unaffordable housing. Go on, try to find a counter-example.

> Name one. That's not the same thing as NIMBY. No city is actively against growth.

Princeton, Texas.

> It's the same thing, and it goes very well with your thesis that the US is rapidly densifying. As it densifies congestion gets worse, adding transit takes away additional cars that would otherwise be on the road.

No, it does NOT take cars off. A car that is on the road, stays on the road. Cars are _vastly_ superior to any transit mode on average, so people almost never give them up.

You basically need to make your streets impassable before people start switching from cars to transit.

> In Seattle whatever transit exists is gone, now those people would drive cars, ergo congestion increases. This seems very obvious.

Then people would out-migrate, companies will close dense offices, and congestion will relax.

> Ok and do you not see what the problem is with this argument? I could just say, I'm paying $150k more in taxes for a new highway being built somewhere that won't go anywhere near me or I won't drive on.

Except that I'm _also_ paying for all the highway construciton and maintenance in direct user fees ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ). A transit user does NOT pay for my use of highways, I do.

And to give you some perspective, one mile of this failrail will cost about the same as construction of 1000 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. The entire project will cost about the same as the total highway spending for entire WA for 15 years.

> Third - Most Americans aren't buying cheap cars.

As I sa

> Weird. I took a "single trip on transit" and it was less than $5 in New York. See I can just pull numbers out of my ass and apply them without any good reason too.

That's because transit riders in the US (or Europe for that matter) never pay the full fare cost, it's always subsidized.

And the ~$20 number is easy to get. For example, MTA: 1.15 billion annual rides (2023), total _operating_ budget $19.2B. Divide one number by another. And this does not include all the new subway construction cost, which is harder to account for.

> The US population is not shrinking.

It will within 1-2 years: https://www.prb.org/news/u-s-population-growth-is-slowing-to...

And even before that, the rate of growth for large cities has been outpacing the population growth for the last 2 decades.

> People want to live there - that's my best guess.

They don't. Most people would prefer to live in suburbs, but they HAVE to live in dense cities.

> Yes, it absolutely makes sense.

It doesn't. Tokyo metro is like, 30+ million people. That has very little in common with, say, where I live which is Columbus, Ohio. You can argue this point but I am closed-minded to any difference of opinion here.

> The trend is simple: you build rail transit, you get unaffordable housing. Go on, try to find a counter-example.

That's because the demand for rail transit is so high that people will pay a premium to live next to it. When you say people really want to live in the suburbs, well, the market disagrees and that is reflected in housing prices.

> Princeton, Texas.

Ok so you've found a city of a little under 40k that is opposed to growth? How so? What article are you referring to? Who specifically from Princeton, Texas is speaking out? Why do you have to go to such a small town to find an example?

> No, it does NOT take cars off.

Ok but it does, because those people have to move around and if they're not using a train or something they'll use a car. I don't know why you're disputing this pretty trivial fact.

> Cars are _vastly_ superior to any transit mode on average, so people almost never give them up.

I don't think anyone needs to give up their car. I certainly don't want to. They're convenient and awesome. But I don't need or want to get in a car and drive 20 miles or something to buy a loaf of bread. That's a dumb and expensive transportation model.

> Except that I'm _also_ paying for all the highway construciton and maintenance in direct user fees ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ). A transit user does NOT pay for my use of highways, I do.

Not true in all states. Pretty much untrue generally. You're forgetting about the federal highway dollars that go into this stuff, which comes out of general federal taxes. Either way you pay for all sorts of things you don't use all the time. I don't use Social Security or Medicaid. Guess I should start arguing to get rid of those.

> And to give you some perspective, one mile of this failrail will cost about the same as construction of 1000 miles of modern 6-lane freeway. The entire project will cost about the same as the total highway spending for entire WA for 15 years.

Well to start we should just stop building freeways, we already built a lot and don't need them. Second please cite your source. Third, not applicable to all states.

> That's because transit riders in the US (or Europe for that matter) never pay the full fare cost, it's always subsidized.

Very few people pay the full cost for anything, including highways, or the police who have to ticket traffic offenders, or the fire trucks that have to go scrape dead kids off the pavement. Bad argument.

> And the ~$20 number is easy to get. For example, MTA: 1.15 billion annual rides (2023), total _operating_ budget $19.2B. Divide one number by another. And this does not include all the new subway construction cost, which is harder to account for.

You're just cherry-picking random things to argue about. First it's Seattle, then it's NYC, who knows what city you'll pick next to create an arbitrary data point.

> It will within 1-2 years: https://www.prb.org/news/u-s-population-growth-is-slowing-to...

We already have too many people anyway (earth should have closer to a billion). And we can increase the population if we so desire through immigration or benefits to promote procreation. What does this tie to anyway? Was your argument that because population levels are declining, Americans are moving to cities and driving up housing prices? Who cares?

> They don't.

Well they do, otherwise they wouldn't be moving there.

> Most people would prefer to live in suburbs, but they HAVE to live in dense cities.

If most people preferred to live in suburbs they wouldn't be moving to urban areas.

There is only one truly dense city in America and that's NYC and I guess you could argue Chicago. Other cities have some parts that are kind of dense, but even those are very car-centric (DC, Boston, for example).

Also, for whatever it is worth, I'm not in favor of NYC style development. I live in a single family house with a detached garage, with restaurants, parks, coffee shops, grocery, and more within a 15-20 minute walk and of course I can drive to those things too if I want. Initially what I was talking about was a city like where I live where we have these economically destructive surface parking lots and commuter culture which is bad for the city and bad for the economy. Adding transit to my city, particularly a north/south tram line will alleviate congestion, improve quality of life, and attract more people. Our surrounding neighborhoods can continue to have mixes of apartments, single-family homes, duplexes, and more.

> Tokyo metro is like, 30+ million people.

Yes, and this exactly is the problem. WHY is it a city of 30 million when the country's population is shrinking?

> That's because the demand for rail transit is so high that people will pay a premium to live next to it. When you say people really want to live in the suburbs, well, the market disagrees and that is reflected in housing prices.

No. There is NO demand for transit from people living in the city. None. The demand is from _companies_ that force people to work in/near dense city cores.

> Ok so you've found a city of a little under 40k that is opposed to growth? How so?

Moving goalposts?

> You're just cherry-picking random things to argue about. First it's Seattle, then it's NYC, who knows what city you'll pick next to create an arbitrary data point.

I'm sorry. I can't argue with you in good faith. You have zero understanding of the problem, and when confronted with facts or examples, you slink away from them. Because they are not to your liking.

For what city do you want me to give you the data? I can assure you that I'm not cherry-picking, and that NYC is actually one of the better-run transits.

> Well they do, otherwise they wouldn't be moving there. > If most people preferred to live in suburbs they wouldn't be moving to urban areas.

Spoken like a true privileged dude. Have you ever heard of doing what you hate because you _have_ to? That's exactly what is happening with cities.

> There is only one truly dense city in America and that's NYC and I guess you could argue Chicago. Other cities have some parts that are kind of dense, but even those are very car-centric (DC, Boston, for example).

The problem is that cities are getting _more_ dense. Not the absolute density.

> No. There is NO demand for transit from people living in the city. None. The demand is from _companies_ that force people to work in/near dense city cores.

Am I missing an obvious joke here? Because I've lived in multiple cities with great public transit, and this quote couldn't be further from the truth - the people love their public transit options, and they keep voting to build it out further.

The cost of housing further backs this claim. The market is usually right - and amenities like a tram or great public transit lead to higher prices particularly near the stops or in a certain proximity. With extra travelers you get shops and small business that spring up that corporations like Starbucks can't as readily compete against. That further drives interest and development and you create a positive economic feedback loop.

> Yes, and this exactly is the problem. WHY is it a city of 30 million when the country's population is shrinking?

Because there are better opportunities and amenities in the city? I don't know. Can you elaborate on what your larger point is here? I still don't understand why Tokyo is relevant to this conversation, but happy to chat about it if you can help me better understand the point you are trying to make.

> No. There is NO demand for transit from people living in the city. None. The demand is from _companies_ that force people to work in/near dense city cores.

Or maybe companies are locating to where people want to live? I.e. California or San Francisco specifically.

> Moving goalposts?

You just named a random city, the least you can do is grab an article where an elected official is talking about how they're against growth or urban infill or something.

Then we can talk about why this is a bad example.

> I'm sorry. I can't argue with you in good faith. You have zero understanding of the problem, and when confronted with facts or examples, you slink away from them. Because they are not to your liking.

Or maybe you aren't doing a good enough job explaining the problem. What does filling some crappy surface parking lots and putting a tram through Downtown Columbus, Ohio (for example) have to do with Tokyo or New York City?

> For what city do you want me to give you the data? I can assure you that I'm not cherry-picking, and that NYC is actually one of the better-run transits.

Columbus, Ohio. Let's talk about that since you have the data and I live here and can confirm your data.

> Spoken like a true privileged dude.

Damn right, and I'm not apologizing for it. :)

> Have you ever heard of doing what you hate because you _have_ to? That's exactly what is happening with cities.

I've heard of it. I would categorize commuting as "doing what you hate".

> The problem is that cities are getting _more_ dense. Not the absolute density.

Doesn't seem to be a problem. The increase in density increases tax revenue, allows folks to live closer to where they work, enables entrepreneurs to start new businesses because they have a larger serviceable population, and more. And that can all happen while I still have a 2.5 car garage, car, and single family home.

If you want to talk about density in American cities, I'd suggest not talking about Tokyo or New York City, because those are extreme outliers and no American city is going to look like that anytime soon.

I have a hard enough time dealing gracefully with moderately congested trains in a place like DC. How do you coordinate your positioning so you can get off at the correct stop if the train gets packed this tightly?

From another city where things can get quite packed on some lines at rush hour:

People in front of the door know that people will get out so they step outside to let the flow out and are the first ones to get back in, giving them the opportunity to go further inside so that they don't have to do it at every stop. Might even get a seat at some point (the longer the travel, the most likely to get a seat)

I have been stuck in commute traffic for hours, 30 minutes of that is infinitely preferable.

Also if it's really too packed, just wait 2 minutes for the next one

Thanks for the explanation. Someone else thought my question was impertinent, I'm happy you spent the time to educate me. I've never had to deal with public transit as congested as Tokyo, not even close. Hell, even on Portland light rail I find it stressful to try and navigate my way to the right place on the train to get off at my stop if I started my journey while the train was fairly empty.

> I have been stuck in commute traffic for hours, 30 minutes of that is infinitely preferable.

Can't argue with that. I won't ever have another commuting job again. I go into the office once a month, and after driving 45 minutes each way just because my company felt like our office needed to be in the most congested area of Portland, at the end of that day I thank my lucky stars that it's only once a month.

> Also if it's really too packed, just wait 2 minutes for the next one

Except that the next one will be just as crowded.

No probably a better. Never had to let more than 2 trains go but mostly just one, but even in rush hour the most common though is there is just enough space so I don't have miss any train.

There is ample parking everywhere in Japan, you just have to pay for it.

That is wild, I wouldn't have nearly enough faith in the structural integrity of the doors for that. Not to mention that packing people in like that seems vaguely unsafe.

It would make a difference in dense cities like San Francisco where many people park on the street. A lot of people would have to give up their cars.

Meanwhile, in rural areas and many suburbs, it would be pointless paperwork, because everyone has a big enough driveway for their cars and nobody parks on the street at night.

So it seems like it would be difficult to get enough people in favor to do it state-wide in California? Wherever it would actually force people to do something, it would be unpopular.

Your city/rural distinction is insightful. I think it can be taken into account relatively easily. Name explicitly the cities/locations were the requirement would apply. Possibly based on some objective criteria like population density.

Can such policies be implemented individually by cities?

Not sure about the legal frameworks in the US but that’s exactly how it works in most places in the UK. Cities have restrictions for on-street parking (metered, permitted, illegal) whereas the towns and villages don’t (unless they also bring in bylaws to help with congestion).

In the US it varies a lot based on what state you're in. Some states give the cities a wide latitude for such policies, but some states (notably 'red' ones where the state government is likely to be conservative and the cities are likely to be liberal) do not grant cities the flexibility to make ordinances like this.

Also restrictions such as residents only parking in both cities and towns.

there is middleground: tax / fines, whatever you name them. It will be free if you filled the paperwork, and it start out cheap, while gradually increase yearly. Can be different depending on the density or how heavy traffic an area is. However you should improve the public transport at the same time too.

> A lot of people would have to give up their cars.

You don't have to give up the car, you just park it farther away from the dense and crowded downtown and use some other personal transportation (scooter, bike) for the last mile trip.

In a city with a properly-designed transit system you wouldn't need a car at all.

I think it is quite telling how car ownership is viewed here: it it something you "have to" "give up". Car use has been normalized to such a point that it is viewed as a necessity, almost a God-given right, rather than just another mode of transport to get you from A to B.

Even in bike-heavy and transit-heavy cities you'll be hard-pressed to find trips which are impossible to do by car. Sure, it might not be the cheapest or most convenient option, but (outside of small pedestrian zones) completely banning cars is practically unheard of. On the other hand, there are plenty of suburbs where public transit basically doesn't exist, and any kind of bike infrastructure is met with hostility. For all intents and purposes, you can't live there without a car. That doesn't exactly sound like freedom to me.

> In a city with a properly-designed transit system you wouldn't need a car at all.

That's the wrong argument. People stay in traffic for hours, being frustrated about the waste of time. Yet, when asked why they wouldn't take public transport, you hear a bunch of dumb arguments why public transport is shit.

I experience this all of the time in my city. Public transport is awesome and you get around just as fast as with a car (given there is no traffic, which rarely happens). Yet, people complain about how bad public transport is and how unreliable. But if you point out that car traffic is just as unreliable and slower, then they take their freedom-card. That's some cognitive dissonance, if nothing else.

I wouldn't give a shit about these people. It's just so damn funny to see that - unless public transport is immediate teleportation - it never is good enough for them -- even if it's objectively faster a lot of times. Public transport will never good enough for these negative Nellie's.

I take the subway all the time in SF but usually won’t take buses because they rattle, feel like the cheapest afterthought, are cramped, and make me feel poor. The quality of the experience matters too.

The San Francisco neighborhoods I'm thinking of aren't downtown. they usually require residence permits to park.

In dense cities parking garages (both underground, free standing and on top of commercial properties) works great to give high-density parking space

The difficulty would be in transitioning. Building spots only open up so often

Seems like a poor use of space when you can just work at making things easier for people to travel without a car.

> Meanwhile, in rural areas and many suburbs, it would be pointless paperwork, because everyone has a big enough driveway for their cars and nobody parks on the street at night.

... which is exactly why it can have a huge impact! The default American suburban street is insanely wide due to the assumption that people will need on-street parking. Get rid of the unused on-street parking spaces and you immediately increase a suburb's density by something like 5%-10%.

Just think how much the municipality would save in road maintenance by basically halving the amount of road surface! And it's also a 10% reduction in water/sewer line length, a 10% reduction in area which needs to be covered by emergency services, a 10% reduction in commute distance, and so on.

As an added bonus: the smaller streets will disincentivize speeding, so it'll directly make the neighborhood safer as well.

Of course this won't immediately fix existing neighborhoods, but it'd at least open up the possibility of building right-sized ones in the future.

> Get rid of the unused on-street parking spaces and you immediately increase a suburb's density by something like 5%-10%.

As you say, only for new construction. The lack of new construction is itself the problem.

A problem is that most municipalities require excessively wide streets with on street parking for any new developments.

Japan-width streets, despite their increased safety & land-use efficiency, are prohibited most places.

Wow weird. I've lived there and never knew but now that you've pointed that out I'm realizing we never parked on the street. It's always at the house or the parking lot of the place we're going.

Of course 95% of the time we take the train. Only use a car to go to Costco or possibly go out to the country (even then a lot of remote areas are super accessible in public transit)

It's worth noting that for a kei car (the small 660cc cars that make up most of japan's car sales) you do not actually need to prove you have parking space in some regions of japan (like you do with non kei cars)

Their streets tend to be super narrow, with pedestrians and bicycles sharing the shoulder. And back streets are basically alleys with pedestrians sharing the street with cars. Obviously parked cars there would be a disaster.

Also it tends to cost more via tolls to drive any significant distance than to take the train or bus (or plane for that matter), unless you have multiple people in the car. The car situation in Japan strikes me as more a case of regulatory capture than wise use of land. Because even small towns with vast empty spaces operate this way.

It's significantly more efficient to provide services to compact towns than sprawled towns, so I'm not sure this registers to me as a downside.

It's pretty common for small sprawled towns to struggle to keep up with maintenance of roads/water/power, which is less of an issue with compact towns.

The same applies at the city level, of course.

The lack of sprawl is also a consequence of how mountainous the country is. While not as bad as a lot of western sprawl, the areas of Japan that are a bit wider and less populated do have an element of car dependent sprawl to them. Then of course the villages that aren't covered by the train network and aren't boxed in by mountains have a pretty similar relationship to cars as a small western town.

Where I think the US and Australia both struggle is trying to make the car work in dense cities as populations grow. We do actually have pretty dense cities in Aus, yet cannot give up the car.

“Regulatory capture”? This term means something very specific and doesn’t apply in this case at all.

So in other words… they internalized a number of heavily subsidized externalities of individual transportation by car?

I like trains but the logic is flawed. If we banned hats, or made it so they were very expensive, less people would wear hats. And sure, probably more places would worry about shade because hats are not an option... But it doesn't really prove that's the right thing to do or that hats are inefficient use of cloth.

Hats are pretty objectively an ineffecient use of cloth, here. Roads are incredibly expensive to maintain societally because cars cause so much wear-and-tear; cars, maintenance, and insurance are expensive on the individual; lack of foot-traffic is expensive for business-owners; individual car-use is much more expensive on the planet and power grid; travel is more difficult & and dangerous for children and old-folks… it goes on and on.

Having sprawling towns that require cars to get around is pretty obviously a bad idea from so many fronts. Trains, trolleys, and bikes are better on all these points.

> Roads are incredibly expensive to maintain societally because cars cause so much wear-and-tear;

Actually the wear and tear due to cars is minimal compared to that of trucks. The relationship of wear to mass is nonlinear. Which isn't to say that buttering half the earth with asphalt isn't a seemingly absurd use of resources.

It's not about artificially increasing car ownership price, it's about making people pay for what they use (parking space) instead of having it paid for by the whole society like a socialized good.

But it is. Otherwise we'd just be talking about raising meter prices and not trains.

When all public parking will be metered we'll talk! For now, in US most parking is free.

For example supermarket parking: they are forced by law to build huge parking lot. You pay not those not with your taxes but with your groceries, even if you take the bus or walk to go to the supermarket.

I think it is. You have to prove that you have a space to park your car and if you have space at your house, they come to measure and verify that you do. I don't mind parking for places that you are visiting, but you need to have your own parking and not depend on the street for it.

This only applies to night time, and trains stop early compared to many other places. Also, there are plenty of paid parking spaces for use during the day, and you’ll often find cars parked in the street, even narrow ones, with the hazard lights on like they’re a magic spell, which they are, because enforcement is close to zero. You will even see cars parked on the road next to a car park.

All in all, I don’t think there’s any relationship between Japan’s car culture, parking rules or availability, and its train system.

In which part of Europe is cheap to park?

Romania. Even its capital and the largest city - Bucharest - is still pretty cheap, sometimes even free like in this example on Google Street View https://maps.app.goo.gl/r6TFFtHbj2SELTqY9 If you're willing to take the risk which is pretty low, you can even park it on the sidewalk like here https://maps.app.goo.gl/y6DNVBdR2KvJsA917

But times are changing. Lanes and sidewalks, sometimes even green spaces, are being converted to parking spaces, so there's less spaces for freeloading. They're also becoming more and more expensive. The residential ones have also been hard to get and it will probably become even harder to get as more drivers will need them as the risk of getting a fine increases.

That's probably an exception. Most cities I know in Europe have crazy expensive parking and usually forbid cars from entering the city center. I would say EU cities are really hostile to cars

You should distinguish between residents and visitors. In Belgium, and I believe in many other European cities, street parking for residents is extremely cheap or free.

In Italy parking is free for residents. And street parking in the city centre is usually cheap (2 or 3 euros per hour).

Car culture in Italy is still too strong; but luckily many municipalities are working to decrease parking spots and build more cycle lanes.

Not Paris and especially not if you have an SUV: 225€ for six hours (sic). But unlike Tokyo the average narrow street in Paris is still lined with parked cars from end to end, so apparently the fees are still too low.

I suspect if you live there you can get a parking permit to park relatively cheaply. Where I used to live they introduced paid parking on my street, because people were going out the city center to park in residential areas instead of pay for a parking garage. A permit cost me €75 a year.

I don't park on the street anymore when I go to Paris by car. The private underground garages are cheaper (4-5 euro/hour).

Most of it? Parking is only expensive in dense downtown areas. Go out into the suburbs and on-street parking is almost always free.

True in England for sure. People in towns and suburbs, which is most of the country, think they have a god-given right to park on the street outside their house.

Even in urban London areas there is usually onstreet parking, it isn't free but it is quite cheap, you buy a permit from the council for ~£400 a year. On a square footage basis that is extremely cheap land rent!

One way of reducing the need for parking somewhat is to introduce a 20 miles per hour (32 kph) speed limit. A number of British cities and the entire country of Wales have done this. One guy has been fined repeatedly for doing 22mph. One more transgression and he loses his license. "Keeping your eye on the speedometer while watching the road is tricky". Presumably his car doesn't have a cruise control. Seems this speed limit is quite stressful and may encourage some to use public transport if they can.

https://www.gov.wales/introducing-default-20mph-speed-limits

Makes you consider the cost of anything that is “free”

"free" just means "publicly subsidized" in these cases. Not that this is a bad thing, but that's really all it is. See also: literally anything any nation pays for using tax money.

Sometimes it’s privately subsidized, too, such as when you go out to eat and your meal costs more because the restaurant provides free parking. People who don’t drive often pay higher prices subsidizing the people who do, which is something we should talk about more directly.

A lot of the time the businesses don’t have an option to not have parking as it is enforced by zoning laws/regulations.

Though they can make that mandatory parking paid but often the social norm is for it to be free (at least for the first hour or two)

Yes, the line between public and private policy is blurry but I think our society would’ve gone down a very different path if car drivers were expected to directly pay for what they use as much as transit riders are.

Same with credit cards.

This is the whole point of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

If Japan was a US State, it would be fifth in size.

So you maybe right, who knows, but there is nothing stopping a state adopting these laws and seeing how it works out. California could do it, why not?

That won’t fix the cost of rail in America, which is the main reason America doesn’t have better rail. Look at California high speed rail or light rail in Seattle. They have insane costs per mile, are still very over budget, falling behind schedule, and basically are forever grifts. The availability of parking is unrelated to these issues. It comes back to mismanagement and corruption.

The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.

If you try building a single megaproject, nobody knows what they are doing, everything is inefficient, and mistakes will be made. But you learn by doing. If the individual projects are small enough that there are always multiple projects in various stages, you develop and maintain expertise. Then you can build things cost-effectively and finish the projects in time.

>The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.

This seems backwards to me tbh. Is this a feeling or backed by hard data?

As much as anti-american sentiment is right now, there are still great engineering feats pulled off all the time.

Construction is expensive because we value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] else impacted. Other countries not so much.

Infrastructure construction is more about administration than engineering. If the people in charge have not administered similar projects before, they will make mistakes.

Public insight, health, worker welfare, and environment are pretty universal values in developed countries. What may set the US apart is their particular version of the common law system. A lot of people have the standing to sue someone, causing unpredictable delays and cost overruns for an infrastructure project. In many other countries, most cases related to infrastructure projects are handled by administrative courts. They will determine narrowly whether all the relevant laws were followed, and do so cost-effectively and in a predictable time.

Experience with the decisions of the relevant courts in similar cases is a major component of basic competence in infrastructure projects. If you can predict what the courts are willing to approve, you can plan the project accordingly. If you can predict how much time and money the court process will take, you can include that in the plans. But if you don't have the experience or the courts are unpredictable, you are bound to make mistakes.

    > Construction is expensive because we value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] else impacted. Other countries not so much.

Railway construction in Spain and France is at least half the cost of the United States. Both "value public insight into projects and health factors for workers and everyone [and the environment] else impacted".

I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.

Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it. Your trains should be faster than door-to-door flight time, so people would take that as well. Unfortunately that makes a lot of things more complicated in communities with high income disparity.

Yes, but with caveats.

Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains? In the same way outside (just as inside) the US there’s an age-old divide between farmers and city folk (see Denmark or France for the most recent protests).

In China, >66% of the population lives in urban areas. In the US, <30% live in proper urban areas (a vast majority, 60%, live in historically car-centric suburban areas mostly developed post WWII).

The issue is not that those areas that would benefit the most don’t support it, it’s that the areas that would benefit the most from it are surrounded by areas that currently have no viable alternatives (and thus knowledge that something else is possible) other than a car. They’re already driving >1hr to get to work or an airport. Therefore, of course they think anything that takes away resources from wider roads is a waste of their own time and tax money, as it does not benefit them.

The reason the California HSR, if ever finished, will actually mark a cultural shift is that it’s the only megaproject attempted since the 21st century that actually puts modern alternatives to the car in rural areas: vast amounts of money could’ve been saved by connecting LA to SF and SD by electrifying and tunneling on the current Amtrak route, but that would’ve left out about half the state.

Was it too ambitious? Maybe. But in 50 years, maybe everyone will be talking about how it changed California, and the US’s, entire attitude toward rail.

> Culturally, though, it’s because that over half of the population doesn’t know that they would benefit from trains

No it’s not. Everyone in America goes to Disney World, which was made by a train nerd and you can’t even drive into the parks. Everyone goes there, rides around the trains and walkable areas, and then goes home to Ohio and drives around in their giant SUV.

It’s not because people don’t know about trains. It’s because they don’t value the things you do, and they value things you don’t, like having distance from strangers and being able to buy a lot of stuff and cart it around with them everywhere.

All my family is immigrants from Bangladesh. They’re not steeped in generations of American car culture. But, for some reason, car culture is the thing they assimilate into most easily. My cousin was living in Queens (where all the recent Bangladeshi immigrants are) and moved to Dallas. She’s thrilled about having all the space for her kids to run around, the apartment with a pool, etc. She doesn’t miss having to schlep her kids on the subway around aggressive homeless people, people singing to themselves, panhandlers, etc.

That’s fun, because I’m from a third generation Dallas family :) I hope they enjoy Dallas and all Texas has to offer.

Dallas, TX has continually voted in expanding its DART Rail funding the past 40 years. It has the most miles of intercity rail in the entirety of the South. It has the most light rail, by mileage, built in the entirety of the US. It just opened up an entirely new rail line through the suburbs (and only the suburbs) in March, and is its third(!) line which connects directly to DFW airport, which makes it the most rail-connected airport in the United States, and tied with Shanghai, Tokyo and London for the world.

I also personally currently live on a farm in California, and am an advocate of HSR. I believe many of those in similar areas are afraid of rail because they have never experienced its benefits, and change without knowledge is scary.

So please forgive me if I say that you are incorrect in both your assessment of how the majority of Dallas, Texas supports rail and your assumption of what I value.

And regarding your point about Disney World, I believe you are actually agreeing with me. Disney is one of the only places in the US it makes more sense to use the train or shuttle than a car. It does not in most of the US. Many people go to Disney World and experience for the first time how well trains can work for day-to-day transit, if designed well and intentionally. People will use what is most convenient, immigrant or not — most people (including me) do not take trains out of some principled stance, they do so when it’s more convenient. And my argument is we should make it more convenient, safety and all.

> So please forgive me if I say that you are incorrect in both your assessment of how the majority of Dallas, Texas supports rail and your assumption of what I value.

I'm correct in my assumption about what you value. But you're correct in your assumption about what other people value.

> People will use what is most convenient, immigrant or not — most people (including me) do not take trains out of some principled stance, they do so when it’s more convenient.

Right, and virtually nobody in the Dallas, Texas area actually takes transit themselves. The proof of what they value is right there in their revealed preferences.

> It’s not because people don’t know about trains. It’s because they don’t value the things you do, and they value things you don’t, like having distance from strangers and being able to buy a lot of stuff and cart it around with them everywhere.

But isn't this pretty fungible? Like it can't be that all the people genetically predisposed to like high density neighborhoods and biking to the grocery store happen to be in the Netherlands.

100% This is true.

The only people I hear clamoring for trains in non urban areas are younger online folks (mostly living in urban areas).

I rarely hear anyone ask for it in suburbia.

Frankly, if you've never lived in a place with clean, reliable, fast trains, you probably would be disillusioned and would never go to the train life. Or if your public infrastructure is deemed "for poor people".

Back to my original point, it's a cultural problem.

I go to Tokyo sometimes multiple times a year. It’s not like I don’t know about reliable trains.

Funny enough, Americans are usually happy to use public transportation when the travel in Europe or in Japan. Also most New Yorkers use the subway every day.

It's just their own public transit infrastructure they don't like, and I understand them.

I’ve heard a better idea.

“What you should in fact do is employ all the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. You'll still have about 3 billion pounds left in change and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down.” ~Rory Sutherland

> I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.

That's why America never layed any railroads in the 19th century, and everyone just rode by horse instead. Oh wait, that's not what happened at all.

You are ignoring major cultural shifts - people also lived tightly packed into tenements then too. The tolerance for such space sharing without common purpose has declined.

Which means that culture could easily shift again. It's not like Europe wasn't just as car-obsessed immediately after WWII (and East Asia a few decades after that), they just realized that it was a bad idea and that cars were fundamentally incompatible with dense settlements.

> Another hot take is... if you want any of the infrastructure to be mass-used, you have to make it better than the alternatives, so people with the means would use it as well. Like your subway should be faster than the cars, so even affluent people would take it.

These days cities often achieve this by purposely hurting the alternatives like driving. And that just isn’t the solution. Mass transit has to be fast period. Not just faster than a bad alternative. And it needs to be safe, and 24x7.

> These days cities often achieve this by purposely hurting the alternatives like driving.

The point is not hurting the alternative of driving, it's to ensure that drivers don't actively hurt the more space-efficient alternatives of biking and walking on foot. The people who still have a real need for driving actually have a far better experience as a result due to the reduced traffic.

I support all kinds of transportation. I think everyone should have access to trains, cars, bikes and etc. But I also think each has its own merits. Like the car ownership over here is huge, but most commute to work on trains because things aren’t really invisibly subsidized.

> The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.

The cost of passenger rail is high in America because America has 11% of the population (read: customer) density of Japan.

(For cities, NYC has 25% lower population density than Tokyo.)

Dividing population by total land area is a horribly misleading way to understand density. There are alternatives, like population-weighted density, that give you a better picture: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3119965 Here's a blog post where somebody re-invented the concept and analyzed density in Europe: https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th...

The population-weighted density of the US is roughly similar to continental Europe.

There's this one neat trick where you only build the rail where the people go!

At the same time, the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country.

If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots. The same city losing a train service? Totally expected, trains are supposed to suck.

The sorry state of American public transport is a self-fulfilling prophecy: everybody knows that public transportation sucks, and therefore nothing is done to improve it, because it's a waste of resource.

>the same government, mysteriously, has no problem building a vast network of roads reaching everywhere and spanning the whole country.

Our road-building has slowed dramatically since the 1980s. The Interstate Highway network would be much more expensive and slow to build today.

>If the US government neglects a section of highway until a city becomes unreachable by roads, there will be riots.

Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years. Access to the island/town is through two two-lane roads that get backed up to a standstill every night. There's a running "joke" about how everyone is going to die if there's a major hurricane.

    > Consider John's Island, South Carolina. The highway that was supposed to go there has been delayed for 33 years.

I Googled about this issue. It looks like it is multi-factor: legal battles, lack of funding, and significant conflict over growth management vs. environmental concerns.

In summary: Money and NIMBYism.

That’s maybe the reason today to not build more but not the reason it is bad. America ignored rail for decades in favor of highway systems and now the cost is almost always considered infeasible. We will redo our roads every 5-10 years though.

If it was invested in 50 years ago or more we would be in a different place for sure.

Can you explain how Seattle is an example? They’re opening new lines, Link is packed often, seems like a well used reliable service, but I only visit once or twice a year.

It’s been a while since I read about their system but as I recall, across the entire system something like 100 billion is the total cost. But that’s only for like 75 ish miles. So it’s very expensive. I recently saw a news article saying they’re 30 billion short per their projections and are now cutting lines out of the plan that voters expected when they supported levies, and some surrounding cities where residents have each paid hundreds or more a year for the rail to come to them, now may not get them at all. Even though they’ve been paying into it for a decade or two. Which to me is a form of theft.

The central sections of link were expensive because they're built through the center of the earth with really huge stations, some of this is to avoid impacting cars but much is just to get elevation changes. The connection over lake Washington required a lot of money and work too, as it's a floating bridge.

The less complex sections were mostly on-par with other us cities.

The per mile costs are definitely high in America, for a lot of reasons, often related to laws and policies, but that's not really the issue. At the end of 2025, nearly 20 years since California voters passed Prop 1A, we have spent under $15 Billion on California High Speed Rail. As a point of contrast, the cost of 2025's tax cut extensions is estimated to be $4 Trillion. The fact is that we don't have quality intercity passenger rail in this country because politicians aren't willing to support it and fund it as reasonable levels. Seattle light rail is an interesting example because politicians there are willing to support it and so ... we are building it, despite the relatively high per mile costs. LA Metro is interesting right because the voters passed sales taxes that funded various light rail projects. So LA is building better rail. But the political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project and so we have light rail to Pomona but are struggling to get a subway down Wilshire where it's obviously more needed. Anyways, all this is to say, politics is a big part of the reason why we don't have better rail in America. And blaming "grift" is a right-wing political talking point that probably doesn't help.

You raise some very good points about the expansion of rail in Los Angeles basin. However, this part: "struggling to get a subway down Wilshire where it's obviously more needed". As I understand, it is incredibly complex to build subways in that part of LA basin due to natural gas deposits that make tunnelling dangerous and expensive.

The tunneling in that area is done now so we can see what happened. It was slightly more expensive and slower to tunnel in that area due to the tar sands and methane. But what was really expensive and time consuming was the NIMBY lawsuits and actual laws passed that used the methane as an excuse to try to stop the project.

Thank you for the follow-up. What laws were passed that slowed/delayed the project?

Here's a bill that repealed a previous bill that slowed/delayed the project: https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/4653

I can't find the laws it's repealing immediately, but they must exist.

California is about the size of Japan with the same GDP. They could pass their own funded project for public transportation.

It's a problem with the entire US needs to support it, that is politics 101.

    > California is about the size of Japan with the same GDP.

On the surface, this is true, but it ignores taxation structure when comparing a federal state to a sovereign nation. It would be very hard to get state-level income tax rates above 15% in the US. That cannot compete against federal/national tax rates that normally approach 40% in US and Japan. In any nation, the vast majority of large mass transit project construction costs are paid for by the central/national gov't. I would characterise your comparison is disingenuous.

    > They could pass their own funded project for public transportation.

They could not reasonably 100% self-fund large mass transit projects. They need federal dollars, a lot of them, and it is very competitive to get them. As an example, look at how long it has taken to raise necessary funds to build the Silicon Valley BART extension. There is tremendous support from the public for this project, but it takes a long time to raise necessary local funds. In parallel, they need to "win" federal support for the lion's share of construction costs.

> political process means that every district supervisor gets their own rail project

This is part of what people mean by “grift.” Anyway, I’m not right wing. I just want cheap rail done competently. That’s not “not the issue.” As a voter, that is very much an issue for me.

The availability of parking is inversely proportional to its cost. High cost = lots of availability.

> Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land

Ahhhh yes

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to purchase a car without also showing proof of a reserved night-time space on private land.

A fellow Shoupista!

> Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased.

> This is got to be a huge factor.

If the USA implemented that exact rule, it would change almost nothing. People already need nighttime parking for non-legal reasons.

You are dramatically misinformed. Where I live in Los Angeles, a very large number of people park their cars primarily or exclusively on the street.

Such a change would have a significant impact.

If you tried that your politicians would get tossed out of office the next election.

Your argument totally ignores that all this infrastructure was built around using cars. Doing things like banning street parking doesn't magically reorganize the way everything was built out over the last 100 years. Took a 100 years to build this will take 100 or more years to undo it.

I'm also suspicious the people pushing stuff like that would in a different time and place would be wearing hair shirts and flagellating themselves. All nice but that's not most people.

> Where I live in Los Angeles, a very large number of people park their cars primarily or exclusively on the street.

> Such a change would have a significant impact.

What would that impact be? Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?

There's plenty of contention for street parking in nonresidential areas. But a nighttime parking certificate doesn't do anything about that. Nighttime parking is done in residential areas.

It's not like you have to get waivers to park your cars in front of your house in Japan. Your car MUST have a designated lot, with proofs(more or less a set of simple declaration forms than anything detailed and concrete), to be registered under your name. Otherwise it cannot be registered. A full waiver for parking violations technically exist, but they are reserved for official and/or actually special vehicles only(like actual fire trucks). The vast majority of cars stay in an off-of-road parking lot of some sort, be it a fancy mechanical one or a crude gravel lot next to apartment complex.

I reckon that not many other country do that kind of legal setup. But Japan is among those very few.

But permission to park in front of your own house is trivial to obtain in the US (as the thread has noted, generally not even necessary to obtain, but in some cases it is necessary to get permission) and would satisfy the requirement.

You can imagine a regime where parking in front of your own house is banned as a policy choice, but that's completely different from a regime where you need to document that you have permission to park somewhere at night. The nighttime parking requirement doesn't make it any harder to own a car, because you're "gatekeeping" ownership with a gate that can't bar anyone.

> You can imagine a regime where parking in front of your own house is banned as a policy choice

Yes, I believe that's exactly what's being referred to. A blanket ban on street parking and requiring documentation of a dedicated off street parking space to register a vehicle.

Of course there would be little to no point to such an exercise in a nation where the majority of the streets have wide shoulders specifically intended for parking. What's happening here is that people with a vested interest in a given political outcome aren't making a rational comparison of the differences between the infrastructure in the two places.

My take is that the anti-car movement broadly engages in a disingenuous tactic where they actively attempt to make the experience of using cars worse in order to drive political change while misrepresenting the nature of their actions. It's an underhanded tactic employed by a vocal minority with the intent of fooling the silent majority.

> Yes, I believe that's exactly what's being referred to. A blanket ban on street parking and requiring documentation of a dedicated off street parking space to register a vehicle.

Not at all. I agree with you that that's what they're hoping to express. But it's not what they said. The proposal is just "a reserved nighttime space on private land".

Street parking in front of your house is not necessarily banned by that requirement. The edge of the street can easily be part of the house lot. It can also easily be owned by a private company that owns the whole edge of the street and leases that space to homeowners.

But note that that company wouldn't be worth much, because residential street parking is not in short supply. Which is what I've been pointing out above.

IANAL anywhere, but the actual law[1] is a blanket ban on roadside parking as means of storage. The blurbs around overnight and proofs are just implementation details. Both the spirit and the reality is no one shall leave cars on curbs. I believe this includes privately owned access roads due to technicality combos with building codes that require roads adjoining properties for fire safety reasons(but sort of inexplicably not driveways).

Anyways, the point is, it actually is a nationwide prohibition of curbside parking as a car ownership strategy, and vast majority do comply with it.

1: https://laws.e-gov.go.jp/law/337AC0000000145/

Not the person you're replying to, but I see the same thing happen in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Dense neighborhood with a lot of nightlife, but many of its residents exclusively use free street parking to park overnight. There is a lot of contention for spots after about 7pm.

>Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?

In the Hudson Waterfront of New Jersey, yes.

Neither LA nor NYC are even vaguely similar to the rest of the nation, so invoking their names when talking about national effects is pretty useless. They're insanely, unbelievably dense locations. The extreme majority of Americans do not live in anything near that dense.

The idea that LA is an unbelievably dense location is puzzling. My Spanish hometown is significantly denser than Los Angeles. Even large parts of NYC are not in any way dense by global urban standards.

As for people parking in the street in the US, you will find them in many smaller cities. Look at random pictures of south St Louis: Plenty of neighborhoods built before every house had a 2 car garage, and therefore with a lot of on-street parking used every day. And that's with single family homes. Hell, you find this in deep suburbs too, where someone decides they want 4 cars, and have the garage full of crap. I could take pictures of at least ten cars parked on the curb, and at least 40 outdoors in driveways if I went for a one mile loop around my 4th ring suburb.

Now, not that this is the main reason Americans still use cars to go anywhere right now, as the rest of the infrastructure around me also makes car mandatory. Suburbs with houses 3 miles from the nearest business, shops inaccessible on foot, streets that, while supposedly crossable, are extremely unsafe to pedestrians... In a world where, say, we limit each household to one car, my entire suburb becomes abandoned, and most businesses collapse, kind of like a place like Madrid collapses if one didn't run any public transit for 4 months.

Over 1/20 Americans live in LA or NYC. Cities in LA county don't show up in a density ranking until 15th with Maywood. WEHO is 20th and its gets less dense from there. Like 80% of Americans live in metro areas.

Right, 19/20 people do not need the same solution as the highly specific ones you would need for some place as dense as Manhattan or LA. You can do things in Seattle that you cannot do in Manhattan - MUCH cheaper things.

Have you actually been to LA? It's not that dense. Miami, Boston, Detroit, Chicago are just as or more dense depending on the neighborhood.

I totally agree about LA county. I don't think many people comprehend its size. It is fuckin' enormous, like the size of a small nation (it is one third the size of Belgium)!

You changed the goalpost...

If LA or California wanted to enact these laws, they could. Passing at a federal level is a non starter.

Perhaps you’ve never lived in a large American city? In many cities you can’t even park on the street overnight in residential neighborhoods because the parking is permitted for people who live in that neighborhood. Without the right sticker (or a guest permit from a resident) your car is getting ticketed or towed, formalizing the usage of overnight street parking for residents.

In Chicago, for example, many neighborhoods are full of former single family homes that at some point (often long ago) were converted into 2 or 3 unit residences, but there is still likely only one garage that maybe fits two vehicles. If you’ve got units filled with 2-3 roommates each, there might be 9 cars for a building with only 2 spots.

Obviously I’m not arguing this is good, but that’s the way things are for now.

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