It appears to be quite successful in terms of ridership, too (warning: local news website, but you can get all you need from the URL slug): https://www.fox9.com/news/6-months-in-minneapolis-e-line-nea...
i’m arguing that this is not a chicken or egg situation because the costs involved to bring that chicken to life (especially when starting today - at least the 19th-century head start NYC got allowed them to build quick and cheap!) would be so high that your farm is going to be bankrupt before anybody lays any eggs.
Pick a US city, then pick a neighborhood within that city you feel is emblematic of the pattern you observe. We've selected a few -- Seattle, Minneapolis -- go ahead and you pick one where a US city would not be able to support it. Then we can look at that example together.
Yes, exactly. Massachusetts; specifically the area around Boston, has this problem. There's plenty of land set aside for public transportation, but it's significantly underused for the reasons I described a few posts above.
When I started going into Boston one day a week, I tried the commuter rail twice, but it was so horrible I decided it was easier, and more comfortable to sit in traffic. (Even though it costs about 1/3rd to take the commuter rail into Boston.)
I was expecting an experience like Caltrain, I used to take it between Palo Alto and San Francisco and it was delightful. Not only are the trains more reliable, the seats are comfortable too.
I tend to think of city limits as the boundaries of a city -- not the broad metropolitan area. Shorline is not Seattle, neither is Bellevue or Renton.
Edit: That said, we used to have streetcar suburbs as a prevailing model. Spokes that radiated out to the suburbs on relatively fast, uncomfortable streetcars. A similar model with trams or BRT could function.
Local. Because of all the stops buses average 25 mph. Long runs, this adds up considerably. It can't be fixed without a lot more buses and a lot fewer stops.
Shanghai. Buses stop much less frequently. More walking, but a bus is not that much slower than a car. And the subway doesn't have traffic jams, long runs you'll almost always get there faster with walking/subway than by car. There is also a climate factor--they get more rain but much fewer extreme days.
Transit works well in dense areas. For the median transit trip, even a city with very shaky and inefficient transit like SF, you might be required to take two vehicles (hopefully one is a train or a limited/express bus) and walk 2-4 blocks at each end. Maybe 30 minutes of riding and 30 minutes total of waiting or walking. Driving might be faster, only 25-35 minutes, but it costs a lot of money or frustration to find parking, and cars themselves are expensive so a lot of people don’t even want to have them. Transit is working.
Transplant this pattern onto a suburb and it breaks. Driving is a 25-minute trip in climate control, there’s plenty of room to park on both ends, and roughly everyone has a vehicle already. Assume a very expensive short-headway BRT or Light Rail network appears overnight. The average person checks their trip and sees that they’ll have to first walk 20 minutes to get to the nearest stop, then wait up to 8 more minutes (we’re being very lavish with our spending to keep headways down to 8), ride for a few minutes, hop off and transfer, waiting up to 8 more minutes, then ride for a few minutes, then walk 20 minutes at the end. These are not the result of a terrible transit system design — they are just inevitable for most people who aren’t incredibly lucky in how their frequent trips match up with the routes. 1-2 story suburban density means that it would be cheaper to just subsidize the cost of an Uber for every trip than it would be to provide headways and bus stop spacing that would make transit a close value proposition to driving a car.
Plus, you will still need to keep your car, because if you live in 80% of the country, it sometimes is a type of weather that you really wouldn’t want to walk 40 minutes in each way. And lugging groceries the distances required is also a massive pain. So your depreciation and insurance cost will remain the same, but you’ll trade gas cost for bus fare. It’s presently about $4 for me in gas to drive my kid to elementary school 12 miles away, but it would cost 3 bus fares (two for me, one for her) to make that trip, so about $9 in typical transit systems.
No one in a democracy will ever choose this. Right now in the Bay Area even one of the best transit systems there is (BART), is finding itself on the brink of insolvency, just from the loss of white-collar commuting brought about by remote work, going from a system that needed a light subsidy to one extremely dependent on government funding.
10 mins walk to railway station, 15 min on train to train to city centre. Faster and easier than driving. Cars were for short trips in the area, luggage, and out of town trips.
Even in a small town my kids used busses quite a bit.
"Transplant this pattern onto a suburb and it breaks." Well, we're talking about the city, aren't we?
Let's pick a city, I'll let you choose, and tell me which suburb within that city is a classic example of the pattern you feel is commonplace. Then we can discuss a concrete plan.
No one made this claim.