What viable alternatives are there to cars in large countries like the United States, where it is not feasible to create the infrastructure for public transportation?
What does size have to do with anything? This is a discussion of density. It's a foregone conclusion in discussions like this that the proposed changes probably won't apply to places like Wyoming, but that's not the kind of environment that most Americans live in.
I understand that this is mainly a discussion about density, but the US is super diverse in its population densities. I was just curious because I happen to live in a very rural area, but if you travel 30 minutes you would be in the most densely populated area of my state. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of these increased fees would be implemented at the state level and could seriously impact those that live close to dense population centers, but have no available transportation other than cars.
If you live close to the population center but not actually in it, then you're probably highly reliant on its services. How far do you drive to buy groceries? Aren't you contributing to the congestion and pollution of the city every time you make the trip into town? Why shouldn't you have to bear some of their infrastructure costs, instead of just leeching off the city's tax base?
Where I live (East coast) the counties are too small to cover the whole region of people who make daily use of the city. We don't really have an appropriately sized regional government to fully address the matter with any methods other than toll roads.
> Aren't you contributing to the congestion and pollution of the city
Obviously it would be better if no one came to the city, right? They should be deserted with no people?
> Why shouldn't you have to bear some of their infrastructure costs, instead of just leeching off the city's tax base?
You keep acting like people going to the city are hurting it, they are not. They are helping it - cities should do all they can to attract people from all over, not just those inside the city.
To the city, the roads they build to make it possible are well worth the investment.
> You keep acting like people going to the city are hurting it, they are not. They are helping it - cities should do all they can to attract people from all over, not just those inside the city.
Take a look at a typical suburban shopping center. The stores are single-story buildings and yet there's still significantly more acreage devoted to parking than to the store itself. Yes, it's good for the economy of a city when people from outlying areas commute in for work and shopping. But there's a huge opportunity cost when you size all your infrastructure to accommodate a car for every commuter and then render the city so inaccessible to pedestrians that most of the city's residents also need to get cars and the roads and parking lots need to be expanded even more to accommodate that. If those commuters were coming in to the city by public transit or driving their cars to a parking deck and carrying out their business mostly on foot, they'd provide the same economic benefit to the city as a whole without making the urban lifestyle impossible and requiring even the minimum-wage shop employees to own a car.
The stores geared for pedestrians are usually much much smaller, and people buy a lot less at a time and have less selection.
I personally never shop in such stores, I hate them for being overpriced and never having what I want. They have them in my area - a whole street of them, and I could walk to them, but I never do. I prefer to drive to the larger stores that I find FAR more useful. I fill up my car with FAR FAR FAR more groceries than I could possibly carry by any other method, except perhaps taxi.
> But there's a huge opportunity cost
Hardly. The stores are not interchangeable. I find the stores you like to be useless, and I would never live in a place where that's all they had.
> they'd provide the same economic benefit to the city as a whole
They would not. Typical purchase amounts are not even close. And you would need a lot more stores to cover the same amount of merchandise as those large stores, but of course a lot of small stores is far less efficient than a few larger ones.
I would have to shop every day in your world (no thank you), and I would spend more since I could not buy in bulk. I would probably have a smaller house, so I could not store in bulk either.
> Their cars are.
So your plan is for people to take public transit for 2 hours, every day, to buy small amounts of groceries, only what they could carry home on public transit?
And what kind of public transit could serve rural areas anyway?
I hear you. I think places like Phoenix, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio.. Well, just about most of the US would absolutely blow the minds of a lot of the commenters here. The way a lot are talking is like they have no concept of the massive suburban sprawl of the DFW metroplex with very few "downtown" areas to speak of.
Aside from the other problems people have been discussing in this thread, it sounds like there'd be a good case to re-draw the county lines in your area to simplify administration of the region.
Nobody suggests that you take public transport from New York to San Francisco. The size of the country doesn't have anything to do with the distance between your home and your workplace, or the grocery store, or the cinema. The problem is urban sprawl, not the size of the country.
The size of the country absolutely has something to do with how far apart things are. Macau and Singapore are incredibly dense, by necessity. Singapore as a country is almost as dense as New York City.
The United States is incredibly less dense overall, which is reflected in part in the local density of city areas (because there is a viable alternative in the US). These viable alternatives mean that not everyone has to pay Manhattan real estate prices for their warehouse business or office park business, and so you see businesses choosing between Manhattan real estate for certain businesses and White Plains real estate for other businesses. In turn, this means that not everyone has the luxury of having their job and their spouse's job continuously within a short city commuting distance for the entire 6 years someone typically owns a house in the US.
Urban sprawl is enabled, in part, by the size of the country and the fact that viable alternatives exist to ultra-high urban density.
> The size of the country absolutely has something to do with how far apart things are.
> Urban sprawl is enabled
"Enabled" is the key word here. The US has enough space to sprawl out if it so chose, and indeed, we chose that. We didn't have to, though, and we could choose differently for the future.
If we want better transit in the future, we could start choosing, via policy, regulations that encourage communities that are more walk- and transit-friendly. Other countries have little suburbs that still have decent transit, that don't require people to own a car to do normal errands, and we could have that too, if we wanted.
Right, I'm not saying we have to. But I do think it would be beneficial in a bunch of ways: more environmentally friendly, physically healthier, cheaper, safer, etc.
And I think lots of other people agree those are good outcomes, the biggest issue is that people in the US have trouble imagining it working for them, because car-dominant sprawl is all they've known, and transit wherever they live is either non-existent or very bad.
1. It's not about forcing people to choose one way or the other(a). It's about being honest about two things:
a) That it WAS a choice, not some geographic inevitability, as is often suggested; we could've chosen differently, and we still can today.
b) That this particular choice has some very real costs in terms of finances, health, safety, etc.
My belief is that if Americans were more aware of the costs and the possible alternatives, many more people, possibly a majority, would probably support those alternatives. But there's a ton of cultural momentum behind driving in the US, and most people have never even lived anywhere where walking and transit were viable ways to get around, so they don't consider it a realistic policy option, even though it is.
2. My ideal is having a variety of transportation options be viable. Does being able to choose from walking, biking, transit, and driving sound like being 'forced' more than having no choice but to drive? The status quo restricts our choices much more than my ideal would.
A - Although since we're talking about government regulations, it's true that no matter what happens, people are going to be 'forced' on some level, since you don't get individual choice over your built environment.
It's completely feasible to create infrastructure for public transportation, we've just chosen not to. Having a large country means we had the choice of favoring car-oriented sprawl, it didn't force us to choose that.
What we could do, is change zoning regulations such that more compact cities (even smaller cities) were allowed or even favored, much like other countries, so that transit became more viable.
I live in Munich now, and even the little suburbs have good rail connections to the city center because they're still of moderate density, rather than the super low density generally seen in small towns in the US.
It would be nice to see an article comparing public transportation and automobile transportation in another geographically large country (Russia?) and the US.
