There is also the not so small matter that a certain population density is required to make public transportation viable.
One concept I read about frequently is the “15 minute city”. Essentially laying out communities so people don’t have to walk more than 15-20 minutes to most day to day services - school, shopping, recreation, public spaces, etc.
Sort of like the town I live in just over the river from Manhattan. Or when I lived in Waltham, MA outside of Boston. Or maybe a moderate sized collage campus.
The thing is, it’s a lot harder to create that sort of carless city than people think. Unless it’s literally a company town where the residential areas are an extension of the office park, most people are not going to be working within walking distance of home. It works in places like NYC but anything less dense that that, you’re going to need a car. I always ended up driving everywhere in Boston and Boston is like the worst city for both driving AND public transportaiton.
The county I just moved to, which is wealthy overall, shot down a flexible spending millage for the local public school. When I went to vote there was a lady who apparently felt strongly enough about it she was holding a sign.
I read in the paper interviews with people who were like, “I just paid taxes for this other thing, I don’t want to pay any more taxes. I don’t see how this benefits my community.”
You don’t see how improving the school system benefits your community? Really?!
I used to commute via NJ Transit by train to the PATH because I worked in midtown Manhattan. I had to pay out the nose for it though. I have to believe if this stuff was better funded it wouldn’t be so unpleasant in certain areas. There are countries with clean and beautiful public transit because it’s an investment priority.
I think it would be better for a lot of reasons, but I’m a pragmatist. I know people are in love with driving.
That may change in the future, though. Today’s youth are driving less and less. They might see the logic in making public transportation more widely available.
It’s a bit chicken and egg. Other countries made driving more expensive through policy as part of their public transit plans. It works.
In the US, it’s more laissez-faire, to put it politely. Much of the reason today’s youth are driving less is simply expense. So, the same factor present elsewhere but haphazardly, so the increase in the cost of owning/operating personal vehicles is not paired with funding for alternatives nor planned at all. Many of them would choose to drive more but do not have that as a viable option.
Basically, the same point as the OP - people, especially younger people, increasingly find personal vehicles difficult to afford.
Except people often are opposed to things that do serve the whole community, just not them in particular. They don’t want taxes going to pay for libraries, because they don’t use libraries.Or they object to the library spending money on ebooks because they only use paper books or vice versa. They oppose spending more money on education because they don’t have kids/send their kids to private schools/their kids are grown.
You want expensive, you should try living along the PATH. My neighborhood garage is full of BMWs, Mercedes, Cybertrucks, Audis, a Porsche or two.
The inherent irony that to enjoy the benefits of living someplace where you don’t NEED a car, you have to make enough money to afford a pretty nice one.
I hate to break this to you but it’s never going to change. It would take a fundamental and radical redesign of American cities and I’m not sure it’s even physically or economically possible. Unless you force people to live in some sort of megastructure, cities just get too spread out. I have access to all the public transpiration in the world (including PATH) and I still need a car from time to time.
Yeah we had to keep our cars even then to get around in New Jersey. We lived first in New Brunswick for my husband’s grad school, then Maple Shade (near Camden) so I could attend school in Philadelphia, then back to New Brunswick after I graduated. Then we moved to Gainesville, Florida, which was very pedestrian friendly but it was so humid in the summer I never wanted to go outside.
I’m not saying I enjoyed commuting 1:45 hours into NYC, but it was okay. At least I could read. And I’d much rather ride than drive that distance.
I believe it cost about $400 a month combined in 2008 to ride NJ Transit and the PATH. Which was, for a couple of grad students, very expensive.
I do agree it’s unlikely to change on a massive scale. But I will continue to support efforts to make travel more accessible for people who cannot drive.
Agreed, it is the absolute worst for driving. I lived there 13 years, quite a few of those without a car. The public transit (MBTA primarily subway) I thought was darn good and affordable compared to the woeful to nonexistent public transportation when I lived in cities in Iowa and Missouri. I’d love to have that kind of public transit available to me now in Nebraska where I live in the capital city and the busses are useless for what people need to do and where they need to go. Apparently no where at all on Sunday for instance.
There are a LOT of people whose general attitudes toward public education are basically centered around two basic concepts: 1. Parents should foot the bill, not childless people. 2. Teachers whine and are if not overpaid, compensated fairly because they get “3 months of vacation every year for the same pay.”
It’s hard to rationally discuss the topic with people who hold one or both of those viewpoints.
For #1, are they saying they should get to live in a community of well-educated people without paying for it?
Talk about freeloaders!
But yes this is a big attitude around here. This city is where people move to send their kids to private school. So they think they shouldn’t have to pay for public school.
I’m not particularly surprised by any of this anymore, it just seems like it’s getting more extreme. “Fire departments? On my dime? My house never catches on fire!”
Maybe they should try the ancient Roman firefighting system: for-hire fire brigades would show up and start haggling with the house owner on how long he wanted to let his house burn.
Or, for that matter, somebody who wants to stay not-impoverished by not making a huge financial commitment to a personal vehicle that they can get along without.
I figured out once that over my forty-plus years of adulthood so far, I’ve saved on average over five thousand dollars a year by not owning a car. The cost/benefit seems to work out as follows:
Sacrifices:
A little extra time each week on transportation planning and excess trip duration (which however has also furnished opportunities for working, reading, knitting, texting and similar activities because I’m lucky enough not to get carsick in vehicles).
Some extra physical effort for walking and bicycling (which however has also provided significant health benefits in additional exercise and maintaining physical robustness).
Some higher-than-average limitations on where it’s functionally possible for me to live (which haven’t stopped me from being happy and safe in all the residences I’ve had so far).
Benefits (besides the personal-time opportunities and exercise benefits mentioned):
Zero ownership worries about maintaining, repairing or protecting an automobile.
An extra quarter-million dollars or thereabouts.
I’m also fortunate that I haven’t been burdened by as much (and/or maybe am just not as sensitive to) public-transit discomfort as @bump and @msmith537 describe. (Boston “the worst city for public transportation”??? Huh? I lived in the Boston area for years and always got around just fine. I agree it’s not as transit-forward as several more major cities like New York and Chicago, but I can’t imagine really preferring to drive there, at least if I weren’t having to haul around a bunch of baggage.) In particular, I encountered a far, far smaller percentage of fellow transit passengers whom I would describe as literally smelly. As in, maybe one every few months or years, though I agree they tend to be memorable when you do encounter them. The persistently loud talkers and device-users are kind of annoying, true, but they don’t really bother me when I have earplugs or earphones of my own.
Back to the “luxury” concept: I admit to being a little bit gobsmacked that @bump, for example, seems to set the bar for “not impoverished” at the level of “can easily afford to spend an extra five-plus thousand dollars per year over an entire adult lifetime”. I mean, I have never thought of myself as “impoverished”, but I’m damn glad to have that extra quarter-mill I saved by never (so far) owning a car. And now that cars (and more recently, fuel) are getting seriously more expensive, is it reasonable for a society to expect that almost all adults will commit to that kind of financial burden for literally almost all their lives, just in order to be able to get around like a normal person?
But don’t most Americans actually have that much population density where they live? Says here that 80% of Americans currently live in urban areas, which have over 2500 people per square mile. AFAICT, a minimal public transit system (such as hourly buses in a fairly sparse transit map) starts being viable with about 2000-3000 people per square mile. Obviously the US is never going to be as transit-friendly as densely populated small countries like the Netherlands, but we could definitely move more in that direction from where we are now, ISTM.
And there’s also the issue of the US population increasing in age demographically, and consequently having a higher percentage of people who are no longer able to drive safely. Nowadays we mostly “deal with” that issue by expecting old people to suck it up and resign themselves to always letting other people be in charge of whether and when they go anywhere. But it doesn’t actually have to be that way in a lot of cases.
The ‘density’ thing is about regional transit, anyway, not local. You are absolutely correct that most American urban areas have sufficient density for better local public transit, if it was a priority.
But even for regional transit, there are several corridors where population density for intra-city transit matches or exceeds that of other countries that do have regional public transit. Like the northeast in general, coastal California, or the Houston-San Antonio-Dallas triangle in Texas. And a few others. Wyoming doesn’t have to be packed with people for regional transit between cities to make sense where there are more people. Neither does it require long distance public transit between East and West coasts. It didn’t have to be this way and it could have been prioritized decades ago. But because we didn’t, now it would be hideously expensive, even if the public weren’t against it.
It’s like there’s this gigantic something, perhaps a “middle”, that is excluded.
Mass transit is more difficult for physically challenged individuals such as the elderly. Get from your residence to the nearest transit stop, wait in whatever weather conditions, make transfers (because it’s seldom possible to go where you need to on one route) which often involve a notable amount of walking, and do all this while coping with any loads you need to transport such as groceries. One could make the case that (chauffeured) automobiles should be a priority for the elderly.
The buses I was talking about aren’t for general public transportation, they are specifically for the disabled and the elderly. So they are smaller vehicles and wheelchair accessible. That’s what people didn’t want to fund.
More difficult than what, though? [ETA realization: Oh, you probably meant “more difficult for the elderly than for other potential transit users”.] If somebody is really too frail and/or incapacitated by age even to be able to walk down the street to a bus stop and board and ride the bus, then they’re highly likely to be incapable of driving a car safely, as well.
As you suggested, the ideal system for people in that situation is door-to-door car service, which may be where rideshare and/or paratransit (the non-fixed-route, non-fixed-schedule trip services run by municipal transit systems) come in.
However, there are plenty of elderly people who are capable of using public transit, and who are physically benefited by doing so because it gets them outdoors using their bodies. A lot of them might not have the eyesight or the reflexes to be safe drivers anymore, but they could still be competent transit (rather than paratransit) users.
I think urban design plays at least as much of a factor as density. If people’s destinations are scattered all over the place, it makes it hard to run an effective mass transit system.