America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)

There are several talking points mentioned in this thread that are explored more on the NotJustBikes YouTube Channel. - When Canada built a relatively recent urban rail to Toronto, they built it so you have to drive to the train station, and used the high value land right around the station for ... surface car parking. This is absurdly wasteful of valuable real estate and makes the expensive train add much less value to the people. Also the train only runs around rush hours, making it useless for almost anyone who isn't driving to the train for a commute to work. "The Trains that Subsidize Suburbia - GO Transit Commuter Rail" - link - "Why city design is import (and why I hate Houston)" [it's not walkable] - link - How American urban transit is built misunderstanding the way transit needs to work to be successful, notably trying to build transit as a bandaid over car problems, but not making it regular, frequent, reliable, fast, convenient, instead plonking an isolated transit connection from nowhere to nowhere which runs once every couple of hours and then pointing to it as an example of how transit doesn't work in America - "America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)" - ▶ this video - Addressing the "America is too big and spread out for rail" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities" - link

You don't think those elderly people who are having trouble driving would love the opportunity to hold on a light rail line so they can take a stroll downtown in with their grandkids? There is no good transit system in north America. If you want to see good transit you have to go to Europe, Asia or Latin America, where even small towns can have robust transit with high ridership. North America is comically car dependent because we build everything only focusing on how cars are going to get in and out, and require ludicrous amounts of parking onsite basically everywhere. Our transit systems are almost always an after thought in the land use planning process. We surround places in seas of parking and put transit stops on the edge of them or put transit stops on highway access road with no sidewalks. The transit systems are often viewed and built as a charity service provided for the poor that no respectable person would use daily. The schedules rarely have sufficient frequency to make the service actually usable. Our zoning codes make building walkable places that could support and be supported by transit illegal or restrict them to only small specific TOD projects. Here's a great video essay on what north America gets wrong when building transit ▶ this video

We can already have congestion free-cities today, no new technology nor public transport required. We had the technology for quite a while now: congestion charging. It works really well in Singapore to control congestion, and also worked well in London when they adopted it afterwards. Public transport also works quite well in many places around the world. It also used to work really well in North America in the past. A past when the continent was much poorer. (I'm mostly talking about USA plus Canada here.) Public transport only works when after you step off the bus or train, you can get to your destination on foot. Density is outlawed in much of the USA and Canada. ▶ this video starts a good section about Fake London, Ontario. At great expense, they built a new train line. But approximately no one uses it, because you can't get anywhere when leaving the stations. The video shows an example of a station where the closest other building is about 150m away. And that's just a single building. The next ones are even further. Land use restrictions and minimum parking requirements are a major roadblock. And just throwing money at public transit directly won't solve those. Shared car ownership is an interesting idea. Uber can be seen as one implementation of this concept. It can be done profitably, but I'm not sure it has much impact on the shape of cities? In the grand scheme of things, there's not much money being put into self-driving cars so far. A quick Googling gives a Forbes article that suggests about 200 billion USD.