America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)

What Hacker News said

Recommends patmorgan23 · 2023-02 · on “Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars”

You don't think those elderly people who are having trouble driving would love the opportunity to hold on a light rail line so they can take a stroll downtown in with their grandkids? There is no good transit system in north America. If you want to see good transit you have to go to Europe, Asia or Latin America, where even small towns can have robust transit with high ridership. North America is comically car dependent because we build everything only focusing on how cars are going to get in and out, and require ludicrous amounts of parking onsite basically everywhere. Our transit systems are almost always an after thought in the land use planning process. We surround places in seas of park

Recommends jodrellblank · 2023-08 · on “Texas could get a bullet train between Houston and Dallas”

There are several talking points mentioned in this thread that are explored more on the NotJustBikes YouTube Channel. - When Canada built a relatively recent urban rail to Toronto, they built it so you have to drive to the train station , and used the high value land right around the station for ... surface car parking. This is absurdly wasteful of valuable real estate and makes the expensive train add much less value to the people. Also the train only runs around rush hours, making it useless for almost anyone who isn't driving to the train for a commute to work. "The Trains that Subsidize Suburbia - GO Transit Commuter Rail" - [LINK] - "Why city design is import (and why I hate Houston)" [

Cites asiachick · 2022-07 · on “Why BART uses a nonstandard broad gauge”

I don't think it's that simple [this video] And just because the bay area average is 431 there are plenty of cities in the bay area with much higher densities and there are comparable cities else where that manage to have great public transportation.

Cites eru · 2022-08 · on “To uncover a deepfake video call, ask the caller to turn sideways”

We can already have congestion free-cities today, no new technology nor public transport required. We had the technology for quite a while now: congestion charging. It works really well in Singapore to control congestion, and also worked well in London when they adopted it afterwards. Public transport also works quite well in many places around the world. It also used to work really well in North America in the past. A past when the continent was much poorer. (I'm mostly talking about USA plus Canada here.) Public transport only works when after you step off the bus or train, you can get to your destination on foot. Density is outlawed in much of the USA and Canada. [this video] starts a good sec

Cites CalRobert · 2025-01 · on “How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?”

Definitely! Here’s a video with some discussion [this video] There’s photos of subway stops in random fields in china that sometimes get laughs but in actuality china is just smart enough to build the subway and THEN the buildings. Meanwhile Japanese rail companies own land where they build rail and can make more money on the land than on the trains