> No offense intended, but the second leg of cyberax’ point still stands — quoted below — higher percentages of the total jobs in a metro area are within the average range of an average US metro dwelling household also, as long as they don’t have to worry about costs of car repair and insurance.
I don't think it does though? Figure 4 on their link shows the transit-oriented cities in Europe and China doing a lot better on that metric than US cities.
> I don't think it does though? Figure 4 on their link shows the transit-oriented cities in Europe and China doing a lot better on that metric than US cities.
The axes have different scales, look again. The Figure 4 shows that the US cities cluster around 500000 jobs accessible by car. And cars are the main mode of transportation in the US.
Figure 3 shows that European cities cluster around 100000-200000 jobs accessible by public transit.
It's also true that many European cities are actually competitive when you do use a car. But we're looking at transit vs. car use.
Within each graph the scale is the same, and the European/Chinese cities do significantly better (are higher up the graph) than the US cities. (I do wonder why London and Paris are missing from Figure 4).
> It's also true that many European cities are actually competitive when you do use a car. But we're looking at transit vs. car use.
They're better than competitive; their trendline for job accessibility is 2x or more better than the US one. Car-oriented city design results in much worse job accessibility, even for car users.
I don't think it does though? Figure 4 on their link shows the transit-oriented cities in Europe and China doing a lot better on that metric than US cities.