Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

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When you say most places, I assume you leave out most of the world in this? The number of countries with broad complete train networks is small compared to the land mass of the earth inhabited by humans. Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.

Most urban US cities have some attempt at an urban train network, and most significantly more useful than Seattle. The issue is typically more of funding and willpower - major infrastructure in an established city is expensive and disruptive to the point most don’t want to deal with it. Additionally the feeder transit infrastructure tends to be weak enough that the daily practicality is low because you have to live right on the line and your destination must also be. Otherwise you’re driving in. Finally the urban planning for surface roads has been well enough structured that the trade off for time saved in public transit doesn’t make sense. You spend time walking and doing transfers in excess of double a driving time.

Is that a flaw? If you electrify the cars to minimize pollution, automate their driving to reduce risk, ensure they collaborate to improve efficiency, I’m not sure I buy the argument any more.

> Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.

By raw population numbers, most people worldwide does live in large cities with a lot of coverage by some type of public transport, not necessarily trains or subways. Buses exist.

Only about 1 in 8 people globally lives in a large (> 10 million people) city.

Most people who live in cities are in cities with < 250,000 people.

Exactly how many live in cities at all is determined by where you drawn the cutoff at which it's no longer a city.

I'm not disagreeing with you but there tons of cities with 250k to 10 million people with great transportation options.

    Amsterdam   : 1m
    Antwerp     : 0.6m
    Brussels    : 1.2m
    Barcelona   : 1.7m
    Copenhagen  : 0.7m

That said, places like the SF Bay Area and Southern California, are unlikely to get a large enough train system to be an alternative to cars anytime in the next 50-100 years. Adding 1-2 lines every 10 years is not enough. You need a extensive system. It needs fast express lines so that people making trips from one side to the other can do so in a reasonable amount of time. AFAIK the LA system they are sssslllooowwwlllyyy rebuilding, has only slow every-stop lines. It's, on average, door to door, going to be over 3hrs from the west side of LA to the east side of LA. Even if you live directly next to the station and need to go so some place next to the station on other end it will be 2hrs.

And my answer to that is, if your area where people live isn't able to support a bus line, it's not a city. That means there's a lot of reality big towns out there.

Why does "supporting a bus line" mean the bus needs to make enough revenue from riders to pay for it but the area can have roads, traffic lights, roadsigns, etc. subsidised by the taxpayer without needing to make a profit from vehicle drivers paying for it? The deck is stacked by moto-normativity in favour of cars.

Highway 401 in Ontario is the largest highway in North America, up to 18 lanes wide. It moves 500,000 cars per day; fewer than a single subway line.

The incredible cost of building and maintaining it, the cost of 500,000 cars and fuelling them, the enormous land use, the environmental cost of the concrete, the idea that you could have a pleasant place to live or work near it... but we can't have trains which move more people, less pollutingly, less dangerously, in less space, are nicer to be around, and overall costs less, because it isn't profitable? As if Highway 401 is profitable?

It's quite amazing then how cities didn't exist until buses were invented.

And here we get into details. The problem with buses is their rubber tires. The awesome thing about buses is also their rubber tires. Need to move the bus line around? No need to run new tracks, just have the driver drive a different route. But all the negativities to buses aren't small details. Because you can just up and move the bus route, it means that the cafe owner right by the stop is at the mercy of the city planning department to exist, which leads to obvious power issues aka corruption. After everything else is greenified, rubber tires are the biggest source of pylori pollution from buses.

With respect to tire pollution, buses are far less bad than cars. Providing a bus is not nearly empty, while the per-vehicle pollution is worse than a car, it's per-passenger pollution is much less.

Yes but they're worse than trams and trains.

Except the thread is about trains

It is perfectly possible to live in these places without cars as the primary means of transportation.

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