'For me, this is paradise': life in the Spanish city that banned cars - Sensationalist Headlines

But that's wrong. Los Angeles and other major cities in the US were built from the ground up to accommodate cars. You can't just slap a public transport fix on the cities, every little thing is stretched so far apart that you literally need individualized transport if you want to ever get anywhere. I'm not saying it needs to be specifically cars, but without individualized transport that's easily accessible, US infrastructure would fall apart in large cities.

Again with the "massive space"? Look, I never said that you shouldn't need a car in rural or remote areas. But the reason you're having a hard time without a car has nothing to do with the size of your country and everything to do with the way your cities and towns are set up. If you had a few dense, concentrated cities instead of lots of small ones spread around, public transportation would be much more efficient within them, regardless of your country's geography. The same goes for the US, the low density sprawls have nothing to do with the size of the country, and everything to do with the automotive industry. As for why they don't bother to run decent trains, I have no idea. I suppose that has to do with a lack of demand, since everyone is used to cars.

Yes, USA's PT sucks, because of the goddamn massive size of it. Because we had all this virgin space we were able to build cities with room for cars and shit, and you what, in our situation they are the most goddamn useful thing here. I transplanted myself cross country, all I did was throw everything in the back of the Volvo, pick up my cousin from the airport, and started West. With PT that would've been an expensive, logistical nightmare. You cannot apply a European mindset of PT on North America, just like you can't apply an American mindset to Euroland.

But we do have that, and that's how it's likely to stay. This was my whole point dude. How do you fix this without a "Decree" that those people cannot make the decision to live there? How do you control the population so that they only condense into cities, and big towns(which become cities)? How do you incentivize those who want to live in rural, or non centralized areas? I think my whole point is that you're basically saying we need to pick up whole fucking towns, and cities, and move them closer to each other to fix the problem. We can't do that, so your insistence the solution is as easy as you think it is, is what's being disputed here.

proboardslol said nothing is more convenient than a car, he didn't specify locations where a car isn't the most convenient, he made a general statement. Which I demonstrated to be false. By "shit PT system", I was referring to your overall infrastructure, that includes the way your cities are built. And I frankly don't see why such design completely prevent US cities from turning things around. Yes, you have wide-ass roads that means things are further apart, but you also have grid-like structures that mean that you can simply plop down bus stops every kilometer and have bus lines run perpendicular to each other. That way you can get basically anywhere with only 1 change, and you don't walk more than 1km. I'm not sure why one would need individual vehicles? What exactly is the problem here?

It has to do with our entire rail system being private.

To build off of that, our entire rail system is based around commerce/shipping. And since they are private, the owners can giver higher priority to the trains that ship goods, not people.

What the hell do you not understand in this sentence: I am not. I did not offer a solution. That has nothing to do with my point.

Because not everyone lives in cities.

What? This thread is about cities, as I said before, rural areas are irrelevant here.

when we're talking about cities in the US or Canada we're talking about wide distances between them. Chilliwack, a suburb of Vancouver is a 2 hour drive(direct) from Vancouver, yet people make that as a daily commute to work. Why? They literally don't have a different, faster option to do so. We've been expanding our PT system so that it reaches further and further out into those areas but it's massively costly, and not very time efficient. It's just not as easily solved as we'd like it to be, and we're happy to be looking into alternatives but it requires a historical re-write of our cities and where they were put down to truly fix.

Sorry, let me rephrase. Not everything is in the city. You can't wall of one from the other when it comes to American infrastructure.

When I went to LA (from Florida) last year, I rode a train for the first time from LA to SD and back. I was actually kind of shocked to see they didn't have any high speed options.

I don't know, you tell me? I'm not French, I don't know how they've done it and California can't. From what I'm reading, there's public opposition to the project, they're having trouble securing private land, have to plow through a mountain, and have started with only 30% of the required 100 billion dollar budget.

So? What does that have to do with this question: That talks about public transportation inside the city? Still has nothing to do with why PT wouldn't work in the inner city. It doesn't matter that you need to go outside the city sometimes. You should still have decent transportation inside it. So essentially the only difference I can see with France is the political opposition and anemic funding. Doesn't seem to have anything to do with geographical specificities.

The larger distances you have to commute are both a product of your main transportation method and solved by it. Living in an enormous country doesn't mean everything in your city is farther apart. NYC is largely very navigable by foot (and the public transit system is pretty good), whereas Houston is probably a pain to live in without a car. I called proboardslol lazy for not wanting to bike ten minutes to get to the grocery store, but the fact of the matter is that it wouldn't take ten minutes to bike to the grocery store here in Copenhagen: I have four or five within five minutes biking. When more people own cars, you're gonna end up with fewer, larger stores with big parking lots that are obviously gonna be further away from each other as a consequence. In NYC, where public transit is big, grocery stores are about as close together as they are where I live. It's a bit of a chicken and the egg problem, but I don't think "Canada is really wide" is why people commute further - it's because people have had the ability to do so, firms now expect you to do so, and stores along with everything else has been spaced out accordingly. It's all well and good that you have family far from where you live, HumanAbyss, but I have family in Sweden, my brother lives in London, my girlfriend lives in NYC, and most of my vacations have been by car - clocking up more than a thousand miles, sometimes multiples. My girlfriend has family in Atlanta, Houston and Seattle, but it's not like these trips are made by car anyway; they take the plane, talking about how it would take several day by bus is irrelevant when basically the same is true for the car - these trips are different; they're rare compared to your daily commute, and the car isn't exactly the ideal method of transport in these cases anyway. And in this respect, I'd argue that Europe and and America aren't so different - many people have family living hundreds of miles away, sometimes thousands, on both continents. These distances aren't the reason why your daily commute is longer or requires a car.

American (and now Canadian too) exceptionalism strikes again.

The conversation here is about making cities car free environments, not making rural areas car free environments. Designing cities to minimise the use of cars doesn't suddenly ban use of cars in all situations. This entire thread is a microcosm of the way Americans respond to anything that even sub-textually paints their country in a bad light: either insist nothing can be done or that you're unique and special in some way, usually both at once. Same with gun control, government spending, racial relations, poverty and even democracy itself. Every country has their own historical or geographical nuances in their relationships to human issues, but apparently only the USA's make them exempt from even trying to improve?

Nope.

The reason its so fucking difficult is that even our colonial cities had carts and horses in mind. If you look Philadelphia's original construction, it was a long grid that required long walking. You can see it in the Old City in Philly. We've just designed our cities this way. And we're now 3 centuries in and there really isn't any turning back because the costs of redeveloping everything would be trillions while we still have failing infrastructure. Additionally, no one ever factors in the sheer distance between our cities and the fact that the only profitable rail line is the one that goes from DC to New York. Every other rail-line is run at a massive loss.

The USA is far from the only country with cities that were made with carts and horses in mind. We've all designed our cities one way or another, we all need to change them. For the millionth time, cities being far apart is irrelevant to this conversation. You can drive from city to city if that's the best option, but this entire article and thread is about travelling inside of the same city not travelling cross country. As for the only profitable rail line being the one from DC to NY, maybe the fact that the rail line's validity is defined by its profitability is a problem? Maybe to work on your transportation issues you need to work on your neoliberalism issues too? This situation doesn't exist in a bubble. American exceptionalism. Again.

And how do large grids prevent things like proper bus lines from existing? As I said, you can just set up perpendicular bus lines that follow the grid pattern, and are spaced 1km apart. That means you don't have to walk more than 500m, or ~5min, when you leave your stop. And you don't have to make more than 1 change to get anywhere on the grid. That doesn't seem unfeasible or inconvenient to me.

I wasn't even talking about city distances between eachother, I was saying that distances within cities were designed with long form travel and heavy industrial usage. They were colonies of production first, not colonies of residences.

"Why can't the US have good public transport?" "Because US public transport is fucking garbage." ???????????????

Its that kind of cycle. Let me put it to you this way, SEPTA saves money by sharing rail lines with Amtrak. But the two never communicate, they've both promised they'll communicate more every year but the amount of lateness the SEPTA trains are getting has been progressively worse and worse as the two never communicate.

Well this thread was an emotional rollercoaster. I can't speak on public transportation as I've never traveled by bus in my life (apart from school) since it's never been a practical option for me. I live outside of Concord, NH and there's very little in the way of grocery stores around me. Infact, the conveniently located bank nearby has shut down, so it's now a fun one hour drive to and back just to make a withdrawal. Even still, there's a bus line that goes between me and Concord, so there's always the option available to me if I ever needed to take one. I'm not sure if some of this comes down to state funding or not, but the fact that there's a dedicated bus line between a "larger" city and bumfuck nowhere shows that even state funded public transportation can easily exist. The quality of said transportation is questionable, but it's still a thing.