I still find it borderline criminal that a few nations continue to be ruled by the hegemony of the automobile market. EVs have a place in the world. But there should be ten times fewer of them, because we should have cheap and plentiful public transit for most of our transportation needs. How long will we simply sit and wait for that future, complacent and docile? When will we do what's necessary to progress our society? (if we ever do)
> How long will we simply sit and wait for that future, complacent and docile?
The people who don't want to sit and wait have bought personal vehicles. Mass transit can be great, but when it isn't, there's no sense of agency. At least with a personal vehicle, if it's not working, I can try to fix it or get it to someone who is more likely to be able to fix it.
When transit isn't running, I just have to wait. If it can't get me to where I want to go in a reasonable time, sucks to be me. If my stop is removed from service, I guess I better move.
In the last year, the number of times my car owning friends have not been able to make it to an event because their car is broken is surprisingly high. While I have never not been able to get somewhere because public transport is not working. If the train is down I can take the tram, if somehow both of them are down there will be replacement busses scheduled.
And if somehow everything stops working I can book an uber which is still massively cheaper than owning a car.
> While I have never not been able to get somewhere because public transport is not working.
Oh man, when I first moved to Austin and used the bus as my only method of transport, getting to work was usually straightforward, but whenever I wanted to go somewhere on the weekend, I prepared for the fact that there'd be a detour around downtown, where I normally make my transfer. I'd have to get off the bus somewhere new and try to figure out where to catch the bus for the next leg.
There were also a few occasions where there was over an hour between the "every 30 minutes" bus. Rare, but it happened. Buses naturally tend to clump together, so they need careful, intentional management to prevent this.
Public transit is great, and we need more, but it's not as reliable as I'd like. Cars are far more reliable, at least for moderately wealthy people who can afford to buy new-ish and keep them well-maintained. Bikes, too, if you're able to bike in rain and snow. (I ended up switching to almost 100% bike travel after about three years, and just kept a change of clothes at work, and at least dry socks, shirt, and underwear in my bag. Spare pants added too much bulk to lug around.)
This is all highly dependant on the specific city. In Melbourne, Australia trains to the city during work hours are around every 5 minutes, dropping to around 15 minutes for off peak. Going to work by train is faster than driving.
Buses that share roads with general traffic are always the worst solution and should really only be a temporary option to cover for downtime on rail.
Modern cars tend to be very reliable in the early years. As they get older they get less reliable. I suspect your friends issue was budget, they were not willing (likely able) to spend the money needed to have a reliable car)
My coworkers car is still in its warranty period and just suffered an engine issue that is going to take ~5 weeks to resolve and would have cost $10,000 if it wasn’t otherwise covered.
You know what would solve that sitting and waiting? More public transit. I know the American public isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but we can introduce them to the concept of better, faster public transit, like other nations have. (And having enough money to buy a car + being impatient/unwilling to schedule your time shouldn't be a license to make society worse)
Public transport is only efficient at scale, requires up front investment, and carries lots of assumptions about population density and other aspects remaining static. Then it doesn't work for whole categories of people (families with small kids, etc) especially because it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great for mass transit, but I can't wait to see the future with autonomous vehicles arrive, especially if they can cooperate in centralised networks to optimise traffic flows. I'd love to step off the train into a capsule that then whisks me home.
It's actually more efficient at scale, because it increases the economy at a lower cost. Poor or rural communities can be connected to more places with jobs, schools, etc. Those people can then grow more capital by not having to pay for expensive personal transportation. Meaning more people working, making money, contributing that money back to the economy, less cost to things like ERs, crime, etc. It lifts up the whole society, so it costs much less in real terms.
The last mile has more options than ever. E-bikes, sit-on scooters, golf carts, or that crazy trend of "walking" that I hear is good for your health. There's even the option for smaller, local mini-buses to serve the elderly and disabled. Those same vehicles could be combined with other services, like postal mail, food delivery (for elderly/disabled/infirm).
Where I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, we have the mini-bus to serve vulnerable people. The mail is delivered by local people with Subarus and Jeeps. But there's no other public transit. The closest thing to it is a charter bus, which only runs through a town 45 minutes from here, once a week. There's thousands of people out here, disconnected from the rest of society. And they're poor, so the few vehicles they have are always falling apart, and mechanics shops are always full. There is a taxi service in a nearby town (45mins away), and it has a 1.5 out of 5 star rating, because no alternatives means you have no choice but to deal with how terrible they are.
Autonomous vehicles are a good idea, but it's unlikely they will pan out in the long term, unless via "corporate welfare" or similar funding. The cost to develop, maintain, insure, etc them is just way more expensive than a dude in a driver's seat. They are being floated by SV money in rich cities; they won't scale.
The Scottish Government provides free at the point of use bus service for under-22s. I wish we could have had that 25 years ago when I first moved here. As it is, it's an ideal way for the teens to get around and makes it the sensible option when taking children into the city during the daytime.
Driving is prohibitively expensive for young people, and in the UK you can't drive cars on public roads until you're 17.
> Then it doesn't work for whole categories of people (families with small kids, etc) especially because it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.
That's bullshit. My whole childhood I went everywhere by train and bus. You can walk the last mile if the bus stop isn't close enough to where you need to go.
I know some (embarrassingly rich) countries are incapable of designing a halfway decent public transit system, but the problem isn't with public transit itself.
I take my small kids on public transit often. Why can't kids ride a bus or a train? Don't we even have special forms of mass transit for little kids (school busses?)
How are cars better with little kids? If I'm in the car with my kids and one kid suddenly really wants a snack, there's nothing I can do. They're strapped in the back, I'm in the front driving. On the train, I just grab a snack from my bag and give them a bite. Or if they're bored I can play with them, etc.
> it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.
I live in a suburb in North Texas. I walk out my door with the stroller and my kids. There's a bus stop super close by that can easily load a stroller (all busses are wheelchair accessible). I take that to the train station or the bus goes to the library or several other parks and rec centers. The train stops a very short walk to several museums, the convention center, the airport, the zoo has its own train station, the hockey/basketball arena has its own stop, etc. And this is all in an area where the mass transit isn't even that great.
The transit doesn't go everywhere we want to go. I agree that's the biggest pain point. But I truly don't understand the logic that it's bad for kids. My kids ride often, and they love it. What kid hates trains?
America used to have fairly everpresent public transport. Every city, including tiny ones, had public transport because the very concept of industrialization requires cities with lots of people in a small area that can easily get to work.
This absurd notion that it "doesn't make sense" for america is propaganda. Not only does it make plenty of sense in America, it was essential to the development of America!
We had robust, reliable, used by everyone public transport before we had trains! Our local agricultural fair shows off horse drawn busses that used to run in a microscopic but 300 year old agricultural community every single year! They even had instructions about how to behave to not upset the poor woman sitting next to your dirty worker self!
Public transport was essential to the north being industrialized enough to defeat the south in the civil war. Every former mill town in new england had robust public transport to keep the mills full of labor.
It was only with significant lobbying and marketing from GM and Ford that America suddenly decided that all this public transport infrastructure that we had for generations "doesn't make sense here" and they even helped rip it all up!
Read a history book.
It's frankly laughable. If public transport "didn't work" in the US, we would never have been able to industrialize before the car. But we did. We did it before the train
Its laughable to think the cities of America in 2025 still look the same and function the same as the cities of America in 1925. "Cities" weren't nearly as sparsely populated and highly zoned as many suburbs are these days. You didn't have neighborhoods with seemingly fractal patterns of roads ending in cul-de-sacs the size of several city blocks with only a couple entrances and exits like what seems to be common these days. The average American urban household in 1920 didn't live on a quarter acre lot multiple miles away from the nearest food source. So yeah, there were streetcar suburbs as well as the denser city apartments and rowhouses, they were largely grid patterns with a major boulevard. They didn't sprawl anywhere near as far. They weren't nearly as insulated.
> Every city, including tiny ones, had public transport
I can point to dozens of cities around me that never had actual public transportation throughout their entire history, and that's just a small part that I happen to know off-hand. Few places actually had any kind of real public transit.
Rural communities often still had an expectation of some amount of private transportation accessible. What, are you really tiling the soil by hand? No, you've got horses.
Look, I'm not saying public transportation can't happen in the US today. Obviously it can. There are lots of places where it does today. There are even more places that could have it tomorrow if the voters decided to do so. There are also lots of places that require quite a bit of urban redesign to actually make transit make sense for those communities.
I'll give you an example. I used to know someone who worked in Dallas, around I-635 and US-75[0]. They lived someplace like this. [1] How does public transit serve this person effectively? How would you have a bus service with both decent ridership and good service times in a town like Forney here, while not just having the bus snake through the mazes of neighborhoods? How do you convince someone to ride the bus to work when its probably going to have poor service intervals, require multiple changes, and ultimately likely to take considerably more time than the average day in the car?
Then copy and paste that same issue hundreds of times over. How does transit make sense in Seis Lagos or the rest of Lucas for that matter? [2] These people likely work in West Plano or Dallas. How do you convince them to take the bus?
If it's just the free market then why do we need to regulate single family zoning across the United States? And why can't the suburbs pay for their own infrastructure?
Suburbs do pay for their infrastructure. Strongtowns keeps spreading the myth that they can't, but the numbers they use don't add up. They choose not to pay for transit because they don't need it.
A lot of people prefer living in financially affordable environments, and in a functioning market, dense towns/cities will always be more affordable unless you literally work on a farm.
Everyone prefers to live in a giant sprawling mansion (with personal private forest) in the middle of the CBD. But preference is useless data unless it includes their pricetag preference too.
> dense towns/cities will always be more affordable
In my experience, that isn't true. At the very least, it depends on what your preferences are. If I moved my home from outside Austin to inside the city, I couldn't afford it.
Densifying a city will make it cheaper than if we don't densify, but we usually densify because of high prices, so high density correlates with high prices despite being a counter-force against it.
And, yeah, living in a dense city definitely tends to cost more than the suburbs, especially per-square-foot. There might be exceptions (high crime urban areas with wealthy suburbs), but you're usually getting a pretty nice house in that suburb.
Density is more expensive. Not just because of demand for the area (though that doesn't help), but because density requires different building methods. Your single family house can be built so cheaply because it doesn't have to support the weight of many floors above; nor does it need to be fireproof because in the rare fire you can evacuate. (density means more people are displaced, fires are more likely, and longer distances to get away)
Density is also more expensive because higher costs are worth it. A rural area cannot afford things like library in walking distance of every farmer (every farmer would have to pay for a personal librarian), but in a dense area it is only a couple bucks for each one - but that all adds up to hundreds of dollars in extra costs that less dense areas do without. (you decide if it is worth the cost)
Speaking as a big fan and avid user of public transit, I say: not gonna happen in many places.
Public transit works in densely populated areas, like in NYC where I live. Digging and operating a tunnel costs a lot, and only pays for itself if you can run many trains with many passengers, who live close enough to their nearest station. Buses are less expensive (though still are expensive), and require a driver per 50-100 passengers, not per 2000.
As long as many people prefer to live in suburbia (which may technically be considered a part of a city, like in Houston), they are going to use cars (or technically trucks), because it's the most economical way to get around. As long as the destination of their travel is not an utterly dense area that does not require a car (like commuting from NJ to lower Manhattan), people won't leave their cars mid-way and change for a train or a bus.
It's not the car lobby. It's people wanting to live quite separately from their neighbors, in detached houses that they fully own. Or maybe cities that enforce low density for a number of reasons (mostly NIMBYs who want to keep the price of their house and land high).
Suburbs are dense enough to support transit as proven in a small number of cities around the world (mostly not English speaking). However suburbs can only support great transit, since anything less and driving is enough better as to be worth it.
NYC has a real cost problem. Digging a tunnel costs a lot - not anywhere near what it costs in NYC. You can also build bridges over the top for a lot less than digging a tunnel. Modern subways should be 100% automated saving the cost of a driver. (I keep hoping we see self driving buses since drivers are the large share of the costs)
NYC tunnels have outsized cost, but even tunnels that cost 10% of that would not be cheap. Most of the NYC subway was built quickly and relatively cheaply by digging trenches and covering them later, not by boring tunnels. NYC used to use elevated trains a lot, and still has plenty of those outside Manhattan, but they have other downsides, such as noise.
NYC subway has two drivers per train due to the trade union resistance. Very understandable, even though not really necessary.
Self-driving buses could be also remotely driven in situations that require special handling, by a smaller number of drivers.
As usual, it mostly takes a political will, the technology is not rocket science; one of the poster kids of that is Curitiba in Brazil.
