Well they could just look at how many other countries do it... I know, Americans hate to look outside their own borders for examples on anything.
There's no public transit in many places because Americans don't want it and don't support it, and refuse to build densely enough to make public transit economically viable in the first place. You can't have a good transit system when everyone lives far apart from each other in spread-out subdivisions.
> because Americans don't want it and don't support it
Exactly - most Americans want the car lifestyle. They don't really wake up dreaming of being packed like sardines into public transportation: busses, metro, rail.
I live in the Netherlands, and many people here are increasingly opting for the car lifestyle because of all of the issues associated with public transportation. Sure, it's more cost-effective. But it's not faster. It's smelly, loud, chaotic. And no one wants to stand around waiting for the next bus to be canceled. Or the next protest shutting all transportation down.
Americans don't want to live in one of those countries. They don't want to risk having to sit next to one of "those people". It's why they like driving everywhere, and living in gated communities where they can keep out the undesirables.
> living in gated communities where they can keep out the undesirables.
Most Americans, including me, who live in areas that aren't large, dense cities with good public transport don't live in gated communities, and our only definition of "undesirable" is someone who commits crimes, which I would have thought would be any law-abiding citizen's definition. Your patronizing description is simply inaccurate.
The vast majority of Americans have no idea what those countries are like, and have never visited a city with good public transit. It's a matter of ignorance more than anything else.
> It's a matter of ignorance more than anything else.
You have no basis for any such presumption. Plenty of Americans, myself among them, have lived in large, dense cities with good public transit--and we have then chosen to not live in such places because we prefer not to. You might believe that living in a large, dense city with good public transit is the best way to live, but that doesn't mean everyone else has to agree with you or be ignorant. Other people simply have different preferences from you. In a free country, which the United States of America is, people with difference preferences for what kind of place to live in can simply live in different places without making presumptuous claims about ignorance.
Being generous, there's only one, maybe two or three cities in the US with good public transportation. NYC has the best system in the US, but it's old and decrepit.
You have to travel outside of the US to see really good systems. Many European cities have decent systems, but the best systems - by far - are in East Asia. The Shanghai metro is as dense as the NYC subway, but it's clean, safe and modern.
Most Americans have not traveled to these places, so they've never seen what an actually good system looks like. At best, they've seen the NYC subway, which they might view as convenient but disgusting. More commonly, they've only ever been to cities with little to no public transit.
You say that Americans have the ability to choose, but that's really not true, unless they move to one particular city or leave the country. The infrastructure that exists determines what choices people have and what's convenient.
> there's only one, maybe two or three cities in the US with good public transportation.
NYC's is, as you say, old and decrepit, but its coverage is pretty good. I don't think it's the best system in the US, however. I lived in Boston for some time; the T was better than NYC's system. I have visited Portland, and at least when I visited, its system was better than NYC's.
> Many European cities have decent systems
I have visited both London and Paris, and both of their systems were comparable to the T in Boston when I lived there in terms of coverage and usability.
I have not visited any cities in East Asia, but I can easily see their systems being better since those countries have made huge investments in that kind of infrastructure.
> You say that Americans have the ability to choose, but that's really not true
By your logic nobody has the ability to choose. Nobody has access to all of the possibilities. So using that as the standard for "ability to choose", which is what you are doing, is pointless.
I could just as well say you don't have the ability to choose anything but a city with public transportation, because that's all that even appears to be on your radar.
> The infrastructure that exists
Is, at least in America, determined by the choices of ordinary people in the past. And choices ordinary people make now will end up causing changes in the infrastructure that exists.
Sure, maybe nowhere in America meets your personal standard for "good public transportation", but why should I care? I have a reasonable spectrum of alternatives open to me and I choose the one that suits me best. I don't waste time agonizing over alternatives that might exist elsewhere but are not accessible to me. Most Americans are the same way. So, I suspect, are most people everywhere, even if what alternatives are reasonably available can vary widely in different parts of the world. Maybe that's a problem for you, but it's not a problem for me, and I suspect it's not a problem for most people everywhere, and I don't see why it should be.
The way you define Americans making a choice sounds a lot like a simple hill climbing algorithm. Once you're on the path of your nearest hill you're stuck there until conditions change, even if you can see a mountain in the distance you would have our whole society ignore it and stay on our little hill? That's why China is and will continue lapping us at transportation. Yes you should care, or at least be able to expect someone to care, or at LEAST not try to talk someone who does care out of it.
>I don't waste time agonizing over alternatives that might exist elsewhere but are not accessible to me.
But you're happy to waste time arguing against them?
Not at all. There is no such thing in a landscape that is changing on time scales that are visible to people, as our societies are. You can't stay stuck on a local maximum if the landscape changes it out from under you. You have to keep reconsidering things.
> you're happy to waste time arguing against them?
The (pretty limited) time I have spent posting in this discussion has not been wasted. I'm having fun.
You can get tightly boxed into one solution. In the US, car culture has caused a fundamental transformation of cities, which makes it extremely difficult to reintroduce public transit. Roads are very wide and there are massive parking lots everywhere, so it's difficult to reorient cities towards walking and public transit. You would have to eliminate those huge parking lots and reduce the number and size of roads in city centers, but because everyone already owns one or two cars, most people are dead-set against such changes.
There is another local optimum, which is extensive public transit and walkable city centers. I'd argue that that other local optimum is far preferable, but transitioning there is very difficult.
But because the vast majority of Americans have only ever been exposed to one solution, they have no idea if they would prefer the alternative. That's my point.
> the vast majority of Americans have only ever been exposed to one solution
I disagree. It may be that the vast majority of Americans have never been exposed to your particular preferred solution, but that's also true of the vast majority of people who live anywhere except a few East Asian cities, according to you. So I don't see why you are singling out Americans. You should be chastising basically everyone outside of East Asia for being backward. (And then, of course, you would just have even more people ignoring you.)
Most Europeans have a decent idea of what good public transit looks like, and the "few East Asian cities" include almost every large city in China and Japan.
As for why I'm singling out Americans: this thread began with a discussion about Americans.
The Boston T is not anywhere near as good as the NYC subway, but this is really beside the point: both systems are decrepit, and in no way stack up to modern public transit systems. Yet these are the best systems the US has to offer.
> Nobody has access to all of the possibilities.
Most people don't know what's out there, so they can't make an informed choice about what would be good public policy. That's my point.
> Is, at least in America, determined by the choices of ordinary people in the past.
I don't think most people understood the consequences of the decisions they were making. The transition to cars and the building of the interstate system had a huge number of ripple effects, and have completely transformed American cities, and as a consequence, public life. People didn't understand all these changes beforehand, and now they're locked in and taken for granted.
> I could just as well say you don't have the ability to choose anything but a city with public transportation, because that's all that even appears to be on your radar.
The reason I'm saying what I'm saying is that I've spent enough time on the three continents we're talking about to have seen the differences in public transit and how it affects city life.
> The Boston T is not anywhere near as good as the NYC subway
My experience of the T is some decades old; I understand it has indeed deteriorated quite a bit since then. But when I used it, I had reasonably contemporary experience of the NYC system as well, and the latter, at that time, was not as good. Any such comparison will of course change over time.
> how it affects city life.
Which, again, is all that appears to be on your radar. But not everyone's life is "city life".
They obviously don't have metro systems in Chinese villages. But Chinese cities do have great metro systems, while American cities are lucky to have any metro at all, or even a decent bus network or a few tram lines.
> My experience of the T is some decades old
Yes, it's extremely old. The Green Line looks like something out of the early 20th Century, and an important stretch of the Red Line had to be shut down a few years ago for emergency repairs, because they suddenly determined that it was too dangerous to continue operating. The whole system is on life support.
The NYC Subway is the only American system that could possibly compare to systems like the Paris Metro or the London Tube. But as I said, all these systems are terrible compared to the standard metro system you'll find in large cities in East Asia. Mainland Chinese cities have fairly standardized (which is how they keep costs down), very modern systems based on the Hong Kong metro. Taipei has a great metro system with a similar design. Japanese cities also have very extensive metro systems. I've heard great things about the Seoul metro system (though I haven't seen it first-hand).
But my point is that 90+% Americans have no idea about these systems. Without some basic exposure to the alternatives that are out there, it's pointless to say that Americans have made an informed choice. They make due with what they have, and largely don't know what the alternatives could be.
I've lived in various American cities with different levels of public transit. As I said, I far prefer the typical city layout in Europe and East Asia.
I've lived in a large, dense city where the public transport was excellent. Having had that experience, and having also had the experience of living in a less dense area where I used a car to get around, I prefer the latter.
Have you lived anywhere except where the public transport was excellent? Do you realize that people, like me, who prefer to live in other areas see benefits to doing so that outweigh the costs of having to have a car?
I have. I lived in Dubai for two years. I drove a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I suspect they have modelled after a (rich) American city traffic, except they have had a green slate.
I travel routinely for work(300+ days/year) and I’ve had many different living conditions. I also spend a lot of time in the UK and BENELUX, both regions that are predominantly car first but with mediocre public transport.
Switzerland is the only country I’ve seen who does it right. I’ve heard Japan does it well, I wouldn’t know.
Boston, some decades ago. As I noted elsewhere upthread, I understand that the T has deteriorated quite a bit since then. But at the time I lived there, I never felt any need whatsoever for a car and I never had any problems getting where I needed to go safely and in a timely manner.
My whole point was that you should try to live in a country with excellent public transport. I have been tried many places, and I would only consider Switzerland to fit that description(maybe Luxembourg, which has fantastic _free_ public transport).
Would you describe Bostons public transport (decades ago) as “excellent”, or are you just being obtuse?
Mind you, most of Europe has pretty good public transport, I wouldn’t call it excellent.
> My whole point was that you should try to live in a country with excellent public transport.
And my whole point is that you have no idea what my preferences are and you should not be presuming to dictate to me what I should do. If you like where you live, great, enjoy it. And let me choose where I like to live and enjoy that.
> Would you describe Bostons public transport (decades ago) as “excellent”, or are you just being obtuse?
Get off your high horse. I have already described my experience. I'm not going to describe it again just because you feel like being insulting.
I don't think the idea that the general, informed will of Americans somehow chose cars over public transportation holds water. What was the mechanism of that choice on an individual level, free of influence from car companies, between a future with car infrastructure with all the impacts understood (including the land space costs preventing density and efficiency) and other solutions?
It is demonstrably the correct answer, regardless what the largely un- or just as often mis-informed think, not that they were really "asked" in the first place.
> the general, informed will of Americans somehow chose cars over public transportation
This is a fantasy in any society, not just America. No piece of social infrastructure on the scale of "cars vs. public transportation" in any country gets decided by "the general, informed will" of all the people.
The "mechanism of choice on an individual level" in a free country is simple, and I've already described it: people look at the alternatives reasonably available to them and choose the one that suits them best. And the aggregation of all those individual choices shapes the infrastructure, which in turn of course affects what alternatives are reasonably available to the next generation. That's how free markets and free societies work. But of course such a process does not involve any "general, informed will" of the people as a whole. It just involves a huge number of individuals interacting.
The other possibility, in a country that's not a free country (such as one large East Asian country one city of which has been mentioned, not by me, in this overall discussion), is for some small group at the top to decide how they think things should be arranged, and then just impose that on everybody. In such a country there is no "mechanism of choice on an individual level" regarding large scale infrastructure at all; it is imposed by those in charge. People do of course still make individual choices in such countries, but their choices don't really affect the social infrastructure the way they can in a free country.
The US today is not fully a free country in the sense I described above, since there is quite a bit of top-down imposition of things (and not just by governments--there were of course a number of large corporations pushing car-centric infrastructure in the late 19th and 20th centuries), so it's really a mix of the two possibilities I gave. But neither possibility involves "the general, informed will of Americans" deciding anything.
Sorry, but this is just wrong. The simple truth is that people's opinions are usually a product of their upbringing and experiences. People raised in a warmongering society tend to favor warmongering, and people raised in a peaceful society tend to favor peaceful societies, for instance. In the case of cars, Americans really do favor cars and the car-based society they live in, because it's what they know and are familiar with.
So, if you try polling a bunch of suburbanite Americans and ask them if they'd favor abolishing their suburbs and turning them into extremely dense and generally car-free (or at least "car-inconvenient", i.e. narrow, slow roads and very little parking) urban areas, of course the vast majority of them are going to say "no". You can see it right here on HN every time this kind of discussion comes up: regular Americans like things the way they are. If they didn't, they'd be voting for something radically different, but they aren't. Sure, there's a minority of anti-car-culture Americans and even some activists, but they're a minority.
As for your characterization of Japan as an authoritarian society, that really seems extremely ignorant and probably even racist. It's a democracy, in case you've never read Wikipedia, so just like any democratic society, if people get angry enough, they'll vote for someone different, which happens from time to time.
Given the characterization of Americans that you gave elsewhere upthread, and which I responded to, you are in no position to make any such accusation, even if I were in fact talking about Japan, which, as I have posted already, I wasn't.
There's no public transit in many places because Americans don't want it and don't support it, and refuse to build densely enough to make public transit economically viable in the first place. You can't have a good transit system when everyone lives far apart from each other in spread-out subdivisions.