alt Hacker NewsDid 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.
> Here’s a nice video about how small suburbs and even farms don’t need to involve deep car dependence
I’ll watch in detail-thank you.
An important caveat, though, and it’s not about age but density. The Netherlands ex Amsterdam has just under 1,400 people per square mile. That’s still denser than every single U.S. state. (New Jersey and Rhode Island are the only two that break 1,000, and only the former if we exclude each state’s largest city.) The tenth-densest state, Pennsylvania, is still almost 5x less dense than the Netherlands, and again, I’m doing this for the Netherlands ex Amsterdam.
We can absolutely build more transit in our metropolitan centers. But the layout of America, in part driven by history, in part by our embrace of car culture, forces fundamentally different transport optima than almost anywhere in Western Europe.
> there’s zero reason why NJ transit should be a different agency than NYC’s transit authority
Same reason the Dutch and German authorities are separate.