“ I love Disney and I love Dolly Parton, but it says something deeply broken about our national priorities when their theme park trains outclass public infrastructure in billion-dollar economies. Be serious.”
Europe has lots of train infrastructure because it was very poor after WW2, and its people could afford nothing but train fare.
America has lots of car infrastructure because it was very rich after WS2, and its people have the freedom to choose personal transportation.
Over 90% of American households have at least one car. It’s not because American government doesn’t invest in public transit. It’s because Americans, even poor Americans, overwhelmingly choose personal transportation.
Certainly there's an element of personal choice. I currently live in a town of 3,000 in a rural state that was previously served by trains. Once cars became accessible to the masses, that train service was no longer sustainable.
But in actual US metro areas where much of the country lives, land use choices were made to enhance moving cars at the expense of other modes of transport. Urban areas were bulldozed to funnel cars into downtowns from far-flung suburbs. Amsterdam, on the other hand, was once a car-loving city, but has chosen to redevelop streets for transit and active transportation. Personal choice matters, but how much is driven by incentives?
>its people have the freedom to choose personal transportation.
A lot of American choice is an illusion. The national expressway network was created to serve national security purposes. Beloved trolley systems in medium density cities were unceremoniously ripped out. Car and tire companies pushed the bus-ification of public transport in order to kill any notion that it should offer comfort and reliability.
The American government refuses to invest in density because its sees sprawl as a deterrant against nuclear threat. (A threat that it takes an active role in escalating, mind you.)
>It’s because Americans, even poor Americans, overwhelmingly choose personal transportation.
If you take notice, much of the most expensive and valuable property in this country is in dense regions where it is possible to live without a car. If Americans truly had a choice, they'd pick the kinds of walkable communities they can only experience now on university campuses and in theme parks.
> It’s not because American government doesn’t invest in public transit. It’s because Americans, even poor Americans, overwhelmingly choose personal transportation.
If there is no usable public transit then people have to use cars. But if they have cars then there isn't the will for the public transit. A vicious circle.
Public transit does need to be built somewhat on a "if you build it they will come" philosophy, which is hard when people want immediate returns on investment.
Again, you have it backwards. Penn Station went bankrupt in the 1960s because rail passenger volume didn’t match the projections made in the 40s and 50s. Most American, even poor Americans, could afford cars, so they bought them. The only way mass transit (it doesn’t have to be public) works is either in dense urban environments or with a society too poor to afford alternatives. I’m not making a pro car argument or anti transit market. I’m just pointing out the actual forces that influence the creation and usage of all transit.
It is built in major metro areas, and requires endless subsidies to stay afloat in all but one of those areas.
Public transit cannot compete with private transit outside of cost unless you have a very, very high population density, which makes it unpopular with people who can afford alternatives (i.e. almost all Americans).
> It is built in major metro areas, and requires endless subsidies to stay afloat in all but one of those areas.
So how do you thing roads are build? Is that not a subsidy? Especially out in rural areas where people always complain the loudest that public transport doesn't work because it requires subsidies. If you would make people pay for their road use, rural living would very quickly become unsustainable for most.
Let's not even talk about all the externalities like land cost of those roads especially in metropolitan areas.
> So how do you thing roads are build? Is that not a subsidy?
No? In my area, new local roads are normally built by developers and maintained by HOAs, with fuel taxes covering most state and federal road work (I think it should all be covered by fuel taxes personally).
> Especially out in rural areas where people always complain the loudest that public transport doesn't work because it requires subsidies.
Public transportation makes absolutely no sense in rural areas, so I'm not sure what your point is here.
> If you would make people pay for their road use, rural living would very quickly become unsustainable for most.
People do pay for road use, via fuel taxes, so again I'm not sure what your point is here.
> Let's not even talk about all the externalities like land cost of those roads especially in metropolitan areas.
Feel free to talk about it in detail, instead of playing the usual "Oh, the externalities! Why won't anyone think of the externalities!" game I see over and over from public transit advocates.
> > So how do you thing roads are build? Is that not a subsidy?
>
> No? In my area, new local roads are normally built by developers and maintained by HOAs, with fuel taxes covering most state and federal road work (I think it should all be covered by fuel taxes personally).
>
> > Especially out in rural areas where people always complain the loudest that public transport doesn't work because it requires subsidies.
>
My point is, even if roads are build and maintained by fuel taxes only (as you point out they usually are not, and in most countries much of the road network was build using other income sources), those fuel taxes are a not local (happy to be corrected though), i.e. rural roads get massive subsidies from metropolitan areas.
It absolutely can compete with cost, we just have to not cheat.
Often when we compare transit to automobiles we don't take into account the cost of roads (???). Interstates have cost us over 25 trillion by now. That's just the interstates.
First of all, I don't know who is comparing the two and ignoring cost, so you can put away that strawman.
Secondly, road costs are mostly paid for by fuel (i.e. use) taxes, and I think the fuel tax should be increased to pay for all of it personally. What percentage of public transit costs are covered by use taxes? In my area (which is a major city that is not NYC), it's around 10%, and it still makes little financial sense to take public transportation if you value your time at all or are traveling as a group (which families do regularly) and look at out of pocket costs.
Third, you (as with other transit advocates, which I will assume you are based on this comment, feel free to correct me) completely miss the point even though I explicitly stated it. Even if roads are significantly more expensive, Americans can afford it and are willing to pay for the massive increase in convenience. If that changes, then spending patterns should change as well.
And I say all this as someone who prefers living in a walkable area and lives close to a public transit and uses it when it makes sense (which is not often, despite my work also being very close to a stop on the same line I live on).
Use taxes cover about 36%[1] of road construction and maintenance, the rest comes out of the general budget. If they were raised to cover all of the costs driving would be unaffordable to many people. Or at the very least Americans would suddenly be interested in small cars again. Some other countries do push more of the burden of road maintenance onto drivers and those countries tend to have far more robust public transit systems.
That's only for state and local government from what I can tell, and they could offset increases in fuel taxes by reducing things like property taxes if desired. Federal highway spending has almost entirely been covered by federal fuel tax revenue, but a recent ramp up in spending without increasing revenue now has the put the trust fund at risk of depletion.
Americans would suddenly be interested in small cars again, which seems like a win to me, because there's almost nothing that will make them desire public transit despite what some hope for.
There is another monkeywrench in road funding. Use taxes are mostly from fuel taxes, which electric vehicles don't pay. As the vehicle fleet electrifies that gap will need to be covered somehow.
It's a bit more complex than "Americans were rich". Whether they were rich or not:
* the US Federal Government gave returning servicemen a lot of money, including low-cost mortgages and loans, which resulted in huge housebuilding programs that created huge suburbs and exurbs (because it's much cheaper for the housebuilder): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill
* huge swathes of the USA enacted zoning laws so that the only type of house that could be built was single-family homes with huge gaps between them, creating the lowest possible density neighbourhoods, effectively requiring a car to get around (whereas higher density housing could have the same number of residents and be walkable) -- there's a strong likelyhood this was done to allow white flight to neighbourhoods that keep the socioeconomically deprived out, and until the 1960s it was completely legal to say "you can't rent or sell this house to black people" (it was only made illegal in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act):
These components very much add up to incentives to build widely and sparsely and to rely on cars to make it work. It didn't happen because Americans were rich, but because rich Americans wanted to exclude poor people from their lives
I don't know why public transit nerds can't accept that their preferences are wildly unpopular with the American public at large, why they can't understand that public transit is a substandard option for anyone who isn't a single, healthy individual of limited means in a relatively urban area (which in case it's not clear, is a tiny percentage of the US population), or why they ignore that almost every human on Earth chooses to buy a private vehicle as soon as they can afford it.
Europe has lots of train infrastructure because it was very poor after WW2, and its people could afford nothing but train fare.
America has lots of car infrastructure because it was very rich after WS2, and its people have the freedom to choose personal transportation.
Over 90% of American households have at least one car. It’s not because American government doesn’t invest in public transit. It’s because Americans, even poor Americans, overwhelmingly choose personal transportation.