
If So Many People Support Mass Transit, Why Do So Few Ride? (2014) - merraksh
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/09/if-so-many-people-support-mass-transit-why-do-so-few-ride/380570/
======
Karunamon
There's a simple explanation for this that neatly fits the questions raised in
the article: public transit sucks.

It's dirty, it's crowded, it's noisy.

I rode on BART a grand total of four times in my entire life, and don't really
have any desire to do it again. Were I a native of the area, you bet I'd be
willing to throw money at it to make it suck less. But in the meantime, I
wouldn't be riding it because, as mentioned before, it sucks.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
It is so much more than that: I rarely lived somewhere in the states that had
public transportation outside of a cab service - in one city, that cab service
was unreliable if you needed to make an appointment. No pre-ordering and
service times could be 15-120 minutes. In addition, in-town mass transit often
wouldn't be enough in places like Indiana - most cities need transport between
cities as well. To actually serve the population that benefits the most
initially from public transport, it should run nights and weekends as well.
Most smallish (40-50k people) stop service during these times.

Add some mistrust in the government to design it correctly.. and it is no
wonder people don't want to raise taxes for it. The solution, it seems, is to
build it regardless because it is good for the nation.

~~~
fphhotchips
The article says that people _are_ willing to raise taxes for it. They're just
not willing to use it.

> Recently, transit scholars Michael Manville and Benjamin Cummins analyzed 21
> local transportation funding ballots from 2001 to 2003, and found that, on
> average, these tax increases were approved by 63 percent of the vote. Yet a
> decade later, the share of commuters who drove alone in these places had
> fallen just 2 points, from 87 to 85 percent, while the share of transit
> commuters had stayed the same, at 5 percent.

~~~
majormajor
It takes a quite high level of traffic to make taking public transit—which
usually, at rush hour, means standing in a hot uncomfortable crowded bus or
train car. Compare that to your own private comfortable seat with noise
isolation and entertainment. There seems to be very little support for
increasing the number of busses to run every five minutes instead of ten, for
instance.

Frankly, most cities in the US don't have that level of traffic in that many
places. If it's not even going to make a difference to drivers in LA it's not
going to be many current drivers' first choice in the relatively traffic-free
(and much less dense) car-oriented cities _outside_ of LA. (But then, there
are network effects here too, and so the question is how much that changes as
the LA network continues to be built out over the next 15 years. And LA is
planning on also making road driving significantly more annoying in many areas
too ("road diets") which is a probably-good but obviously controversial plan.

Unless, in the meantime, self-driving cars are the final nail in the coffin
for non-NYC US mass-transit...

------
erobbins
It's inconvenient.

My car takes me from right where I am, to exactly where I want to go, exactly
when I want it to, in a minimum of time.

Public transportation takes me from sort of where I am, to the general area I
want to go, slowly, on their schedule and not mine.

~~~
dllthomas
If you drive everywhere, and everywhere you go has convenient parking, that'll
be the case.

I find that often the best my car can offer is to take me from where I might
be (home) to somewhere in the general area I want to go (where I have to pay
for parking, if I can even find it), marginally faster than the bus and often
slower than BART (unless traffic is clear). If I've walked to any of the many
attractive destinations within 20 minutes of my apartment, it's then
substantially faster to get on the bus at any of several nearby stops than to
return home to get my car. (Generally, the need to return to where I parked is
something that I find quite inconvenient in situations where interesting
destinations are dense.)

Of course, circumstances differ.

~~~
marknutter
If you live in SF or NY, you're exempt from the conversation.

~~~
dllthomas
I live in Oakland and currently work in SF; I grew up in Santa Cruz, and spent
years in Ann Arbor. In all these places, I found _many_ trips more convenient
by public transit than by car (in no case was that all; currently it's close).
I certainly recognize there are places where public transit is even worse, and
even in these places there are people for whom it works out less.

------
marcoperaza
I live in a city with great public transit. I take the bus to work (~15 miles)
every day. I don't have a car because it's expensive (car payment +
maintenance + parking) and I can't justify the expense.

 _But_ cost aside, I'd much rather have a car. With a car, you go where you
want when you want. No bus schedule to plan around, no multiple connections.
You can play whatever music you want at whatever volume. You can easily
transport items larger than a backpack. You don't have to sit next to a smelly
or rude stranger. Much to the chagrin of social-engineering city-planner
types, Americans value their freedom more than they care about some
environmental cause. And let's face it, public transportation will not solve
America's gas consumption and pollution problems. Most people live in
sprawling suburbs that can never be adequately served by public
transportation.

~~~
hackuser
It's sad that instead of talking about what works best and how to solve
problems, ideology is injected into the discussion by attempting to make it an
issue of 'social-engineering' / 'environmental cause' vs. 'freedom'.

I always thought any ideology was dangerous, something to be shunned. It's a
primary cause of wars and suffering, and of paralysis like the what we see in
the US Congress now. Like anger, often part of current ideologies, it
innoculates humans from thinking rationally by ruling out any discussion or
thought, and thus it enables people to do dangerous, irrational, and bad
things. (Often those effects are the intent of the ideological leaders, to
manipulate their followers.) Once upon a time I thought we all learned that in
school; if we did, many seem to have forgotten.

~~~
PopeOfNope
_I always thought any ideology was dangerous, something to be shunned._

Same here. It's a great way of not having to think for yourself, though. The
success of ideologies throughout history makes me think it exploits a mental
vulnerability that exists in most of the human population[0]. How do we make
that work in our favor, though? At one point is history, we built a great
western civilization. There must have been great incentive to do that, despite
the ideologies at play over the past several hundred years. How do we recreate
those conditions?

[0]: "Normal" human brains react to cognitive dissonance by releasing small
hallucinogens to counteract cortisol and ignore conflicting information.
[http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/4/404.full.pdf](http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/4/404.full.pdf)

~~~
hackuser
> At one point is history, we built a great western civilization. There must
> have been great incentive to do that, despite the ideologies at play over
> the past several hundred years. How do we recreate those conditions?

The conditions were no different; likely they were worse (much worse depending
on how far back you go). Read a detailed history of some past era and you'll
see much that is similar to what you see today.

It's a very conservative notion that we are somehow worse today, and that our
ancestors were somehow greater. That pessimism, which includes pessimism about
our ability to act as a community (i.e., about government), keeps us from
moving forward: Many people buy it and won't even try. We can't build mass
transit because people are sure we can't do anything.

Our ancestors were very human (again, read that history), corrupt, confused,
political, just like we are, but in many ways worse off because they didn't
have the institutions they and their descendents built over the centuries,
from democracy to civil rights to education. They did it; so can we. They had
plenty of naysayers too.

We've been given all that; handed it on a silver platter. What are we building
for our descendents?

------
PLenz
Being a native of New York City I didn't own a car until I was 30 and my wife
and I bought our first house north of the city. It gets about 3 miles a day
between Metro North and home.

I'm still taking mass transit everyday and probably will be until I retire
some decades from now. To me NOT taking public transit is abnormal.

~~~
noobermin
For the rest of us across the US, the opposite is abnormal. I bike primarily
and use the bus the rest of the time, so I'm definitely abnormal. It probably
has a lot to do with the costs of owning a car as well as the insane traffice
in NYC vs. the rest of the US

~~~
hackuser
I don't agree. Other cities have good public transit, and especially other
countries have shown it to be viable. I don't think NY's traffic has as much
to do with it as their excellent public transit.

~~~
noobermin
By "excellent" I'm assuming you mean timely and pervasive. I didn't find it
very welcoming or clean vs., say, Singapore's public transport. Both are well
used...so here, I claim that this is not due to quality as much as it is due
to the cost/convenience of using it.

I live in Columbus, OH. It's pretty much one of the most poorly dense, large
(800K) cities in the US. COTA, the public bus system, I use frequently because
I pay for a bus pass in my tuition. Their buses are generally clean, drivers
are friendly, and I feel safe for the most part (people in Columbus are pretty
friendly). However, given the poor density the service times are _terrible_ if
you're traveling to somewhere other than along the main street. The city is so
large for its population that most stops are far and in between. As a result,
ridership isn't high at all.

I think convenience...and cost have a lot to do with it.

------
lisa_henderson
If so many people support government regulation of the drug industry, why
aren't more people taking drugs?

If so many people support the government regulation of debt, why aren't more
people running up debts?

If so many people believe our society should have hospitals, why aren't more
people going to hospitals?

If so many people support national parks, why aren't more people hiking in
national parks?

If so many people support government regulation of the radio spectrum, why
aren't more people listening to radio?

If so many people support conservation efforts for lobster, why aren't more
people eating lobster?

If so many people support the public good known as _______, why aren't people
making use of ________.

The reality is most sane people support a very broad range of policies which
do some public good, even if the people themselves don't expect to directly
benefit from that good, especially over the short-term. We can all support the
existence of hospitals, even if we have no plans to go to a hospital this
year. But we want hospitals around just in case we might need them, this year
or at some future time.

Likewise with mass transit. I bike to work whenever I can, but if the weather
is especially awful, I take the subway.

------
siliconc0w
I live in Los Angeles and would have seriously undervalue my time for a bus to
compete with the costs of driving (or even Uber). And I live near a stop.

------
coldtea
Depends on where you live. In Europe, tons of people ride. In NY's or Chicago
subway too.

If your city has crappy mass transit, and is designed for car driving with
office areas and places of interest being several miles apart each, it's no
wonder people don't ride mass transit.

~~~
largote
European cities, and NYC, and some parts of Chicago; are much denser than the
average US city making public transport far more viable.

~~~
gwright
Not just European cities, but Europe in general. European population density =
269 people/mi^2, US = 91 people/mi^2.

Another often overlooked fact is that the US rail network is designed for
cargo/freight not passengers and is outstanding in that regard.

------
coroutines
Maybe I'm weird.

I take BART quite a bit in the bay area (California). I find it timely and
reliable - I've never been inconvenienced by the few moments where operators
strike. It's just happened that I didn't need to ride BART that day.

My best experience was when I got on the wrong BART train (to Richmond) and
had to double-back to a transfer station to go to Livermore. I was only late
by 10 minutes. I got off the from-Richmond train and transferred to the train
I wanted and it was off in literally less than 15 seconds. BART is incredibly
efficient (imo).

That said - it would be a much better experience if it were cleaner, people
could eat on it (and not be dicks with their garbage), and if we had a guard
in every car to keep aspiring artists from performing and then asking you for
money for their impromptu show.

I guess I have perfected my resting bitch face - I don't get asked for
donations that often. :-)

In college I also rode the RTD buses out of Stockton. Now that was a poor
experience. Frequently late drivers, and I witnessed 3 homeless men stand up
and urinate on the floor - on separate days over the same semester. Oh and the
bus they usually sent was too small for the neighboring town I'd get picked up
at - I'd often have to stand for the hour-long ride on that route. (think
short-bus for special education - standing + no room)

------
liveoneggs
the end of the article gets it right: make driving more expensive. I started
seriously choosing the train over driving during the Bush gasoline shortages
where taking the train was, roughly, about the same cost as gas + toll for a
round trip.

I would advocate for massive tax breaks on commercial development locating a
door within 1/2 mile of a train station's walking exit for office space. The
residential developments will follow suit.

Another part is that most cities do not place jobs or residences near public
transit. In atlanta you get off the train and walk through parking lots to get
to your office building, which is located on its own little island of parking,
water features, and roads. It's ridiculous and the situation I describe is
practically a best case since many (most?) job centers are located miles away
from the train.

Taking the subway and not driving to work is one of the best parts of living
in nyc. You don't really realize how much commuting in traffic sucks out of
your until you just don't do it for a few years and then try to do it again.

People don't like the bus because it's slow, often comes to your stop very
infrequently/unpredictably and is stuck in the same traffic as your car.

------
blindgeek
I'd love to be able to use more public transit. After all, I'm blind, in case
the username didn't give away my secret. However, my city does not offer bus
service on nights and weekends, and frequently places that I wish to go are
not even served by the bus system, even though they are definitely within my
city.

I try to walk to as many places as I possibly can. For the rest, if I'm going
somewhere during the day and it is reachable by bus, I do that. Otherwise, I'm
stuck taking a cab. In reality, what this means is that I try to limit the
things I do outside of my home. That's kind of easy for an agoraphobic anti-
consumerist nerd. But still, I'm grateful for online shopping when I need it.

As an aside, the ideal city for a blind person in the United States is
Portland Oregon. I don't live too far from there, and I visit it occasionally.
The Max is beautiful. Portland has obviously made a huge effort to provide
great mass transit, and from what I saw, it was very heavily used.

------
marknutter
The easy solution to all this is to start encouraging companies to promote
work-from-home days. If you do the bulk of your work on a computer, there's no
reason you _absolutely_ need to go into the office every single weekday to get
your job done. If every company that allowed their employees who could work
from home to do so at least once per week and worked together to evenly
distribute those days throughout the work week, we'd see a massive drop in
traffic. This could easily be done by providing tax incentives for doing so,
and the money saved on road maintenance alone would likely pay for it. I can't
get over how insane it is that we all insist that we need to work face to face
when our faces are buried in a computer screen for the vast majority of our
work days. It's absurd.

------
Mz
I have lived without a car for several years. When I gave up my car, there was
a bus stop on my street and a bus stop in front of my office. It was a 7
minute trip by car. It would have taken two hours by bus to go to the down
town central transit center and switch buses and come back. Walking to my
office only took an hour and did not involve paying a fare. With walking
daily, I rarely walked more than 15 minutes before being offered a ride to
work.

I now live in Califoirnia where public transit is substantially less crappy. I
don't use it frequently, but I do use it.

Maybe a better question would be about why the hell you can't get there from
here when so much money is apparently being thrown at the problem.

~~~
dublinben
I'm amazed you would walk an hour to work for any significant time, and not
buy a bicycle. You would have been at work in fifteen minutes, no hitchhiking
necessary.

~~~
Mz
I wasn't hitchhiking. I did look into getting a bike and, in fact, bought a
skate board at some point. It didn't pan out that way. Those details are not
at all relevant to my point. The point is that even if you choose to live
without a car and are willing to use public transit, the system can be so
broken as to be functionally useless to you. Even saying "Well, you should
have gotten a bike." as some kind of completely unnecessary personal criticism
of me lefthandedly acknowledges that the bus system was functionally useless
to me. So, build a better system and you may see ridership go up.

------
crazy1van
In most cities, driving -- although it comes with its own frustrations -- is a
completely viable way to commute. Sitting in traffic and maintaining a car are
negatives, but being able to travel whenever you need to and going directly to
your destination are huge pluses. So public transport must be competitive with
driving. It must win in convenience or value or both. In some places like
Manhattan, driving is so painful that public transport usually wins out. But,
in many cities driving is more convenient and sometimes even cheaper. Of
course, comparing cost is not easy since roads and buses and rail are usually
all funded by an amount of general tax revenue.

------
dennmart
When I moved to the Bay Area (Berkeley), I had to take the bus to work, and I
hated it because it was so unreliable. The AC Transit bus was never on time. A
bus was supposed to arrive at my stop at around 8:15 AM, but instead it
arrived anywhere between 8:00 AM and 8:30 AM. It also was supposed to pass
once every 30 minutes but oftentimes I waited a full hour before another bus
came. The last straw came when AC Transit went on strike in August 2010 -
that's when I decided to buy a car.

When I had to commute into San Francisco from Berkeley a few years later, I
took BART into the city, and didn't fare much better. While the trains were on
time more often than not, there were way too many delays when we were en
route. Since the underwater tunnel between Oakland and SF is a choke point -
just two tracks - whenever there's a delay in there and you were behind it, it
would take at least an extra 15 minutes to get us moving again. The BART
strike from 2013 was also pretty bad for commuters.

I lived in New York and have been to Osaka, Japan many times, and I don't mind
public transportation at all in those cities - they cover a lot more ground
than the Bay Area, have plenty of trains and buses and aren't too affected by
delays when it happens.

------
hackuser
Two thoughts:

1) Maybe this is a conversion problem, as in converting shoppers into
customers. In my experience, public transit is difficult to grasp the first
few times you use it, and complex even after that. Think of all the steps
involved, and the uncertainties. Think of running out the door and using mass
transit in a new city (NY if you haven't been there, or DC). Mass transit
systems require users to acquire expertise to use. Signage, just as a start,
is awful; identifying routes based on their endpoints is meaningless
information. It's not hard to imagine how the user's interface with the system
could be made much simpler, so no matter where I am I can easily and
confidently learn the fastest way to get someplace else, and pay and use the
system simply.

2) People deriding public transit as impossibly unpleasant or who say
government couldn't possibly execute it should see how well it works in places
where it's funded. New Yorkers generally love their mass transit. European
cities have much better and more popular systems. It's widely done; the
question is why you think the U.S. so much less competent to do it than all
these other countries.

------
shermanyo
No one has mentioned what I see as the obvious answer:

People support it for _other people_ so the roads are clearer for _their car_.

~~~
acheron
Yes. The Onion called it several years ago:

"98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others"

[http://www.theonion.com/article/report-98-percent-of-us-
comm...](http://www.theonion.com/article/report-98-percent-of-us-commuters-
favor-public-tra-1434)

------
buses_suck
Buses are the dumbest idea on earth, and we all know this intuitively, because
we rode them to school as children, and something inside us swore to never let
that happen again.

Have you tried riding the bus as an adult? Is their a slower form of suicide?

------
carsongross
Two major reasons I can think of:

First, most U.S. public transit, particularly in the west, is inconvenient.
Cars have dictated our urban layout and it's almost impossible to build a city
that works well for both modes of transport. (e.g. cars mean large parking-
lots and, therefore, spread out establishments, which means public-transit
stops cannot be located near a walkable area and must drop you off in a
concrete desert, with a quarter-mile walk to anything.)

Second, the behavior of riders on U.S. public transit is nearly always
uncivilized and frequently atrocious.

------
ocschwar
Because everyone who rides the train makes my car commute easier.

------
vorg
> People believe transit has collective benefits that don't require their
> personal usage

People with cars still want to live close to the subway station so they can
use it on Sunday afternoons when there's no parking 5 kilometers up the road.
When new subway lines and stations open, the property developers build
apartment complexes over them with 2 carparks per apartment and sell them to
the rich. The people without cars have to catch a bus to the subway station.

------
joshuaheard
People want door-to-door personal transportation (car), not fixed mass transit
along select major routes (bus, rail), and they have ever since the car was
invented.

~~~
WildUtah
"People want door-to-door personal transportation... and they have ever since
the car was invented."

Really?! Byzantines didn't want door-to-door personal transportation? Spanish
conquistadors? Ancient Greeks? The Han Dynasty?

It is and has always been simply too expensive in personal and social costs
for everyone to have personal door-to-door transportation.

------
superskierpat
I live in Montreal so I might be an outlier, but if more people took the
public transport system, you'd need way more buses at rush hours.

------
code_sterling
My commute in is about 40 minutes by car and 80 by bus with walking from the
stop. Double that for the return trip, and my bus commute is almost 3 hours
out of my day. And the bus pass costs $130. So it's not even saving me a lot
of money. It works out to just shy of 2 weeks of my life that I loose per year
taking the bus. That's not insignificant.

------
WildUtah
It's impossible to design a community at any reasonable cost where a large
fraction of people are expected to drive cars unless you make all other forms
of transportation impossible or impractical.

The space needed for most people at an office or business to park free is
greater than the total space the buildings will occupy. The buildings need to
be father apart to limit traffic density. The roads need to be wider and run
faster and therefore be louder and more dangerous than pedestrians will like.
the walking distances increase and increase to accommodate the buildings
farther apart and the empty space needed to control traffic. Transit routes
and stops cannot get close enough to destinations in those conditions and
transit times explode. Denser centers surrounded by less dense land uses
become impossible when parking is necessary; density has to even out and that
makes efficient transit routing impossible while hub-and-spoke systems
drastically increase wait times.

Transit stinks in America and it's not the result of bad transit planning or
lack of effort to build more or bad maintenance and operation practices.
(Though we do also have those problems.)

On the other hand, a transit oriented community will have land values to high
anywhere you want to go that ordinary people will never be able to afford to
pay to park even with massive parking subsidies. The transit community makes
widespread driving as impossible as individual car-oriented design makes
transit.

In the USA, personal motorcars are the rule everywhere because it's the law.
The (second) Roosevelt administration propagated rules to the banks and
communities that required car-oriented development everywhere in the nation.
Then traffic engineering and urban planning and zoning 'professions' emerged
to implement and force those rules on every property developer. It became an
iron triangle: drivers won't pay for parking, city planning councils won't
upset drivers, engineers force pure car-oriented development on both to keep
the peace, and transit users don't have political power by definition or
they'd have used it to get themselves cars already. Today you can't build in
America unless you can prove that even on the busiest hour of the busiest day,
there will be extra free parking for every person that might want to use or
visit the property. You can't build unless you can prove that the roads are
big enough to accommodate every single person who might come in a car or pay
to expand the road.

The result is that quality transit, outside areas built up before Roosevelt,
is impossible and cannot develop.

This is the essential reason that San Francisco and New York are so expensive.
Car oriented space is awful to live in. [0] There is a limited amount of
legacy walkable urban space grandfathered in America. They aren't making any
more of it. Millions more people want to live there than ever can.

If it were allowed to redevelop Peninsula or East Bay cities at low urban
density like SF (75 people per hectare), then developers would do it and it
would be possible to rent a spacious apartment for US$1500. At medium urban
density like Tokyo (150) or high urban density like famously liveable Paris
(300), you'd only need one or two cities to change the rules to relieve the
regional problem. You'd have to build a transit system and accept the lack of
free parking, of course.

The reason most of the world doesn't have the same problem is that the
American system demands extreme Soviet-style centralized command-and-control
dictation of land development. Parking minimum requirements are the most
powerful rules making things bad [1] but floor-area-ratio maxima, separate use
zoning, wide feeder streets and traffic engineering, and 'green area' buffers
hurt, too. More free-market oriented development patterns prevail in less
regimented societies without such dense thickets of rules and car-oriented
development cannot gain a foothold against free organic urbanity.

[0]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=pkmluwVdwx0C](https://books.google.com/books?id=pkmluwVdwx0C)

[1] [http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf](http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf)
See also Shoup's The High Cost Of Free Parking book.

~~~
Turing_Machine
You're assuming that high population density is a desirable thing.

Most Americans disagree.

------
antimatter
I live in Los Angeles. Where is this mass transit they speak of? There are
exactly zero mass transit options for me to use to get to work (San Fernando
Valley to Santa Monica) within a reasonable time.

------
sharkweek
I support mass transit, but I ride my bike to and from work. _shrug_

------
IkmoIkmo
Public transportation is one of those 'if you build it they will come' type of
things. But as it requires massive, long-term infrastructure investments that
disrupt the city and can bankrupt companies or even municipalities if it goes
wrong, it's usually built in a subpar manner on a small scale trying to fit
into an existing city, and then tries to iterate on that every few years by
scaling it up and modernising it while having to work with old permanent
structures. So a lot of public transport really sucks, either they're buses
that are less flexible than your car but adhere to the same space and speed
limits, thus making a car a better idea, or they're small rail projects that
don't get much coverage or frequency.

But now imagine the corollary... a city with just small sidewalks, bicycle
lanes and public transportation lines, and absolutely 0 roads for cars, and no
real local car industry. Now imagine the cost of breaking down buildings,
laying massive amounts of road, manufacturing new cars and teaching everyone
to drive. It'd be just as tricky.

There's nothing inherently wrong with public transportation but implementing
it right into existing cities isn't trivial. It's supported so much because we
long for a good implementation, public transportation done right is cheaper,
more efficient, reduces congestion, improves equality & access to affordable
transport, is safer and more environmentally friendly, while also giving all
of its occupants the ability to do something else than paying attention to not
getting into an accident. We long for that and support public transportation
not because it's so fantastic but because it could be better than what we
have, and should.

It's not like that everywhere. Take Belgium for example, expanded its
infrastructure and its public transport use doubled between 2000 and 2012,
doubled (!) in half a generation. Beijing's subway alone, a city of 12
million, delivers around 9m trips per day, forget the bus lines. There's
already a ton of congestion, the mass transit system is hugely popular and
hugely important.

Anyway I feel it's distinctly an American (and say an Australian) issue. Most
of the developed world (take Europe or say Japan) consists of very dense urban
areas, and a whole bunch of nothing. The US is like that, too, but there's
still a ton of urban sprawl and even extremely urban areas like LA have lots
of low-density living. Public transport's economics are essentially usage /
investments, and building infrastructure to reach large areas of low-density
(and thereby low-usage) living is not really worth the expenses. So you get
this sub-par network where you have to wait half an hour for a bus that takes
you to the centre where you have to move to a different one, it just isn't
feasible. But take New York City, 8 million people and more than 5 million
daily trips on the subway alone. It's extremely well used and hugely
important, just like it is in Beijing, or in London or Paris. I've either
visited or lived in all those places and the subway was indispensable, a part
of life. But most people in the US or say Australia don't live in density like
that.

Anyway the article felt a bit thin... It spends about an entire page on the
notion that 'despite a half-cent sales tax increase to pay for transport
[doesn't mention this money goes to both public and non-public transport and
isn't necessarily always earmarked, either] public transport actually declined
by half a percentage point'. I mean that's not analysis, it's just a tiny
little fact that could mean anything. Again, for one we don't know how those
funds are spent. And secondly, those funds may be a tiny fraction of the
necessary budget for maintenance and scaling infrastructure with a growing
population.

Anyway I think self-driving cars will nail public-transportation first. The
type of investments necessary to set up rail, tram, rain or even bus service
aren't trivial, but a fleet of self-driving cars and people inside working in
privacy and comfort on their laptops in comparison is. For new cities, or
countries where insane projects can still get done without decades of
bureaucracy (I'm looking at you Beijing metro line) massive public
transportation is a huge deal. But trying to reinvent the American city to
accommodate public transport (and cycling infrastructure) done right (which in
a dream world would entail destroying a city like LA and magically spawning a
denser version of it in its place so that public transport works), in the
context of American politics... I give self driving vehicles a much better
shot of working around that problem.

------
ronnier
Depending on which city you live in, the other passengers can be a threat to
your life. For that reason alone I don't think public transportation will ever
be very popular in the US. It might work in a few places, but most places the
threats of random violence just isn't worth it.

~~~
hackuser
I find this fear of city denizens exists almost exclusively in people in rural
areas, who spend little time in cities. People in cities generally are pretty
cool about any risk and used to rubbing shoulders with all types. Also, having
spent a lot of time with those people, they know the risk is very small. (Of
course both groups are self-selected to an extent.)

To go off on a tangent, but it's ironic that gun control is the same way:
People in much safer rural areas insist guns are necessary for self-defense;
people in higher-crime cities generally favor gun control.

~~~
WildUtah
"I find this fear of city denizens exists almost exclusively in people in
rural areas"

I saw Deliverance, a documentary about life in rural America, and have the
same worries about that part of the country. I don't want to squeal like a
pig.

