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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Because places like America are so spread out (by design) that rail networks, especially in the Great Plains and Southwest, are viewed as impractical unless all of their population moved to cities or towns in close proximity to rail lines, and Americans tend to take up a large chunk of the bandwidth.
Yeah there is zero chance the poster is from the US or anything that isn’t a major city. Electric cars aren’t perfect but they are a hell of a lot better than an ICE.
There once was a time we built rail first and the cities appeared along it. The early rail capitalists knew that transit seeds development and that's what built MOST of the major cities in the Americas. Somehow we forgot that and have instead come to believe that transit only makes sense if it connects dense, fully-developed places that already exist. It's insipid, but unfortunately makes it past peoples' bullshit filters routinely. It's just part of the trend of cities in North America to give no shits about their future development.
It's total bullshit, though. Most city downtowns can justify small transit easily. Play with the Tom Forth tool and see for yourself. I recommend looking at bus stops per capita for any place you click; that tells a hell of a story about how over or underinvested a community is in car infrastructure. In most of the world, it's something like 200-400 people per bus stop in a city. In the US, you're lucky to see 1200 outside of a few edge cases.
The fact is, most trips are within a few miles of home. There's a lot of space in the world for cars. They're needed to fill in the edge cases. The truly rural areas. The niche needs of a profession. An unusual living situation, or to provide accessibility, or for so many other reasons. But the default should be transit and bike-ped, as it was for virtually all of human history and as it still is for most people in most cities in most of the world.
When we entertain this "The US is too big for transit" stuff, we're reversing the victim and offender and substituting the solution with the problem. To start with, intercity transit isn't even that important a kind of transit. It's useful and nice, but the kind of trips that happen within a few miles of home are the fundamental ones.
Hmm I couldn't reproduce this, which places did you check? I've checked most of the larger cities in Europe and the US. They all seem to have similar numbers, around 800-1000 people per bus stop.
I've also noticed that larger population densities usually have less bus stops per population. Which makes sense, as rural areas tend to rely more on buses because they don't have access to trams or subways. Plus, for higher population densities you need less stops per population, because doubling the amount of bus stops only reduces walk times to the nearest stop by 30%, assuming an equal spread (Circle Area = Pi * Radius²).
I was looking at French cities to get that number. I admit, it was not a comprehensive survey.
https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
I think the link below compliments the video above. It it from the same channel. This seem to be a compounded issue. https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0
Yup. And the worst part is, most people do not realize that this is even in issue, let alone how many other problems or creates. Especially ecological ones.
From the end of the video:
In case it's not clear, I'm not against trains, buses, trolleys, trams, and bikeable, walkable cities. Far from it. But regardless of whether cities used to be connected by rail and were bikeable, as stated in the video, they aren't anymore, and haven't been for generations in many cases. So what's the solution in the meantime, while we wait for the slow churning bureaucracy to get its head out of its butt?
A start could be a similar method to the Netherlands. It took them a few decades to get their cities car free again. Whenever a city road was due for resurfacing/redevelopment, instead of just slapping down the same road and calling it a day, other options are considered like adding bus lanes, trams, or bike lanes while reducing the total number of car lanes.
The best part here is it can be done locally. The municipality can decide they want change and commit to a redesign.
That actually sounds reasonable. Are these options and methods being considered in America already? I want to see something like this happening in places like the LA metropolitan area and the Bay Area, the most notoriously gridlocked areas in California, which seems like the most car-centric state in the US.
To find more info about the push for this kind of redevelopment in America I would look to the movement Strong Towns.
https://www.strongtowns.org/
You'd think. But the truth is throughout the West and Midwest, almost every town has or has had a rail line.
So what's gone wrong? Pretty much the same thing that's gone wrong with America in general, big corporations realized shipping to big cities is way more profitable than carrying passengers from small towns. Particularly because most people prefer a car over the train.
We have a ton of dead rail lines just waiting to be revitalized.