yes and no, we also HEAVILY subsidize roads via federal grants and until recently passenger train infrastructure didn’t have any kind of federal backing.
This means elected officials with tight budgets will ‘address’ transportation with new roads even where its a bad solution because its cheaper and it looks like they’re doing something. By the time people realize it didnt fix anything the elected official has moved on.
We’ve also built cities (and especially suburbs) around cars which means that they’re not very centralized, especially in the Western half of the country. In most places this means busses are a more practical form of public transportation than things like subways or light rail.
as somebody who has worked in the field, the word is not as much “design” but “attempted to design” but the problem comes down to sprawl and effeciency, and we have many places in the US that have passed the maximum density that cars+ parking can effeciently accomodate even in small cities. This is one of the reasons that economists see big box stores (wal mart), strip malls, etc as net drains on local economies.
One of the reasons the US is stagnating economically is the lack of medium density infrastructure that is simply not built because roads, oil, and cars are so heavily subsidized
Take out those subsidies or match them with similar subsidies for trains and similar, and you’d see a shift where trains become cheap to small cities which would ease pressure on large ones.
No, that’s a myth. America had extensive train networks – both within cities and between them – and deliberately destroyed them because of a combination of misguided modernist city planning and corrupt lobbying from corporations from oil companies and car manufacturers.
There is nothing special about America that makes it inherently unsuitable for trains.
Keep in mind that trains are not popular in the US because much lower population density means that it is harder to plan efficient routes.
yes and no, we also HEAVILY subsidize roads via federal grants and until recently passenger train infrastructure didn’t have any kind of federal backing.
This means elected officials with tight budgets will ‘address’ transportation with new roads even where its a bad solution because its cheaper and it looks like they’re doing something. By the time people realize it didnt fix anything the elected official has moved on.
We’ve also built cities (and especially suburbs) around cars which means that they’re not very centralized, especially in the Western half of the country. In most places this means busses are a more practical form of public transportation than things like subways or light rail.
as somebody who has worked in the field, the word is not as much “design” but “attempted to design” but the problem comes down to sprawl and effeciency, and we have many places in the US that have passed the maximum density that cars+ parking can effeciently accomodate even in small cities. This is one of the reasons that economists see big box stores (wal mart), strip malls, etc as net drains on local economies.
One of the reasons the US is stagnating economically is the lack of medium density infrastructure that is simply not built because roads, oil, and cars are so heavily subsidized
Take out those subsidies or match them with similar subsidies for trains and similar, and you’d see a shift where trains become cheap to small cities which would ease pressure on large ones.
No, that’s a myth. America had extensive train networks – both within cities and between them – and deliberately destroyed them because of a combination of misguided modernist city planning and corrupt lobbying from corporations from oil companies and car manufacturers.
There is nothing special about America that makes it inherently unsuitable for trains.