alt Hacker News> a band-aid to bad regional transit connectivity
Maybe. American suburbs are already spread out. It doesn’t make sense to run subways to every corner the way we do in urban centers. Doing last mile with shared transport—versus cars which park idle for most of the day around train stations—makes sense.
Did I say we should run subways to every corner?
Here’s a nice video about how small suburbs and even farms don’t need to involve deep car dependence:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
Meanwhile, Arlington, Texas has over 200,000 people with no bus system.
And before you say “oh it’s Europe it’s old” I will point out that the Netherlands had a huge car dependency problem in the mid-century and deliberately moved away from it during/after the oil crisis.
You can see multiple single family home developments that would be right at home in a US suburb in this video. The author even reaches a rural farm without a car.
What about if American transit authorities just did basic stuff like work together and perform actual regional planning rather than working in silos and having conflicts with each other?
For example, there’s zero reason why NJ transit should be a different agency than NYC’s transit authority. They should be the same agency that works toward a comprehensive regional transit system focused on the metropolitan area rather than arbitrary state borders.
Instead, they’re forced to do things like sell $100 World Cup train tickets because they haven’t been empowered to reap the rewards of the economic development they enable.