> 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.