zlacker

>>amathe+(OP)
I find this article to be too high-minded. Most Americans don't own cars or support car-friendly policies due to some notion of car=freedom or some other culture wars nonsense.

Americans own cars because most of them live in single-family houses on large plots of land, and that doesn't make public transit for daily commuting a realistic possibility. In Paris car ownership is very low, maybe 1/3 of adults, but in rural France the car ownership rate is easily 95%+. I haven't seen a single developed area in the world that has violated the rule that low density = high car ownership and vice versa.

The other rule that I have never seen violated is that the large majority of middle and upper income people do not want to live near low income people, due to crime or other reasons. In Europe, poor people live in the suburbs, so the middle income live in the city with high density housing. In the US and some other places (south asia), low income people live near the business center, so the middle income live in low density housing in the suburbs. These are for historical reasons and cannot be easily changed.

>>poomer+le2
America actually has a huge public transportation system servicing most homes in the US. It’s the bus system for public schools. Running local loops to pick people up in moderately high density neighborhoods with 1 acre per house or less every half hour or so is actually pretty easy. Just read up on the old trolly networks before cars took off.

The real reason Americans own cars is because we’re rich enough to afford a more expensive and more convenient system. Public Transit at scale is surprisingly cheap when compared to all the costs associated with car ownership * 10’s of thousands of people in even a fairly small community.

>>Retric+Ef2
Public transportation operated by public entities in the U.S. outside of a handful of large, dense cities always sucks. The reason lies with the "operated by public entities" bit. Heck, even in NYC, private companies built the lion's share of the subway system, then the city "nationalized" them and very little additional development was done.

Around the world governments "nationalize" what they allow themselves to, and at each level they nationalize the most salient and notable industry that's not too small to be small potatoes. In the U.S. the federal government doesn't allow itself to nationalize anything, the States do allow themselves but they can't bring themselves to hurt their industry as they compete with other States, but cities don't see themselves as competing with other cities, and cities allow themselves (and the States allow them to) to nationalize public transportation.

Take Argentina where a strong national government has at times nationalized steel production, oil production, etc., but they wouldn't deign to bother with nationalizing bus service -- it's like it's beneath them -- and so Buenos Aires has one of the most fantastic privately operated public bus systems in the world. You never have to wait more than a few minutes for a bus during business hours. But in the U.S. you're lucky if buses run more often than every 30 minutes at rush hour.

Do you want Americans to not drive their cars so much? Fine, it's easy: allow private companies to operate all public bus services, and also to operate small buses without set routes (a sort of Uber of buses). If you insist on the cities running public transportation then you can be sure that the public transportation system will never ever be good enough that Americans will be happy to relinquish their cars.

It's that simple.

And no, trains won't cut it. Laying tracks down is unbelievably expensive, will never pay for itself, and you can't ever change them afterwards, and you won't be able to place them where people can use them because that would be way too disruptive unless you make it subways, and that's even more unbelievably expensive.