Driving 8 hours round trip today to pick up one person, and I’ll never understand why Americans think this is more convenient than my colleague taking a train.
#FuckCars #WarOnCars #TheWarOnCars #Urbanism #CarBrain #PublicTransportation #lightrail @fuck_cars #PublicTransit
Yeah it’s not that we don’t want to use the train, it’s that the train has been successfully turned into an objectively worse option in every way thanks to decades of lobbying and underfunding. If there even is a reasonable train route between your destinations, it would likely take 2-4x as long as driving, be 4-10x more expensive than the gas for the drive, and would be an uncomfortable and unpleasant experience that would still require a pickup and decently long drive (or further use of the barely functional public transit system) to get to the final destination.
If you’re not a shipping container, there basically is no public transit infrastructure in the US. It only exists in cities that have chosen to make significant investments in it, and even then in most places it’s like one arterial light rail and then some busses with crappy coverage. For anything between cities or states, it’s nearly the same price as flying to get a charter bus or train ticket.
The only thing that would solve this problem is extremely aggressive and unpopular legislation, or some benevolent trillionaire to actually do a hyperloop type project without immediately coopting it into just a shittier highway. Market forces and city governments will never create real interstate transit networks. Less aggressive legislation making it more expensive to keep and especially buy/make new cars would help, but it’s political suicide to say “I’m going to tax the good that almost every voter, and especially the ones with money and influence, have and use every day”.
Intercity rail is being built and improved on in CA, TX, FL, and the north east. The main issue is the terrible city planning in every city. City planners need to be brave enough to build non-car-dependent neighborhoods, and zoning restrictions need to be brought into the 21st century to allow that.
Intercity rail is only really useful if you have good public transport in both cities. It does defeat the purpose if you need a car to get to and from the train station.
@verdigris
@fuck_cars @DontMindMe Market forces cannot give you a good transit network as the market needs to compete against roads which are essentially free. Adding insult to injury, if you try you will discover that your taxes are going to support the road network you are trying to compete against.
Private transit did very well in the US until regulations (NYC didn’t allow subways to charge market rates and thus they went bankrupt) and the highway system messed things up. So long as things like that are a risk you would be a fool to invest in private transit.
Simple solution: full statization of public transport infrastructure. Look at Europe (or even Brazil, ffs) - the state can afford to freeze prices or make the service free, if taken as a priority (which it is).
@Gabu
@fuck_cars @DontMindMe @verdigris NYC did that, but they didn’t invest at all into maintenance beyond the minimum. Thus their subways are over crowded, and use obsolete systems that are unable to run modern service.
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