I think it’s more of a result of the time countries developed and the needs of the time. Old European cities were developed before cars. They’re dense with narrow roads. Retrofitting mass transit/trains makes sense, as the alternative would be destroying all the buildings and building a new city to support the space needed for cars.
The US on the other hand was really being developed and built up along side the automobile. There were vast areas of land being settled with no preexisting infrastructure. The only option was horse, wagon, and later… the car and truck. Because land was so plentiful it didn’t make a lot of sense to create dense cities, especially as transportation became easier. As a result, the US is the way that it is now. Just like it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to rip down a European city just to change the transit system, it’s hard to justify ripping down entire US cities to better support rail, to the point where people can get rid of their cars.
I don’t like owning a car and I wish I could just walk a block, hop on a train, and get to wherever I need to go… but that’s not reality. And changing that would take decades of frustration and cost trillions of dollars. Even then, it would only cover major metro areas and connecting them. The idea that rural America is going to get on rails is not possible, just like rural areas in Europe aren’t accessible by rail either. Even if the city I lived in had protected bike lanes, mixed use spaces, and rails to get to other nearby hubs where people gather, I’d still need a car, because I have family members in a rural area that doesn’t even have a highway within 10 miles. I think there are a lot of people in this situation.
Large swaths of the US were populated around the railroads. The cities had old style walkable centres before they were demolished to make way for cars. Even LA was built up around a streetcar network which was at the time the largest in the world.
Boston is one of the few places I’ve been in the US that has that small feel still. I think the water, preventing sprawl, and the age and importance of a lot of the areas are the reason for that. But it’s a good case study for what it takes to keep that. The Big Dig took 25 years and $22B dollars. For cities that weren’t that old and didn’t have land constraints, why would they go through that?
I do have to wonder how much of the removal of things like streetcars were a result of urban sprawl. Once the area grows and cars service that new area, how do they handle the original city? Do they have large parking lots around the edge and force people to switch over to a street car? Generally if someone is driving to a city from an area not served by mass transit, they are going to want to take their car all the way to the finial destination, rather than switching to something else and paying money (for parking and the transit). The younger a city, the easier it is to make that change.
Regardless of why it happened, it’s where we’re at. So we need to accept we’re here and figure out the best way forward. Is that electric cars? Is that spending decades and billions and trillions of dollars to build new cities and hope the people of 2150 don’t think we made the wrong call, because now they have some crazy new way to get around and different problems? Is it something else? I don’t think anyone in the past was trying to screw over people in the future. They were making the best decisions they could based on the information they had, the needs of the people at the time, and technology available. We’ll make similar choices and people of the future will have their opinions about it.
The big dig was replacing an urban highway that already demolished much of the city and shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and it shouldn’t have been replaced. When you have land constraints the answer is easy: don’t build for the car.
The way forward isn’t that complicated. Electric cars don’t fix most of the problems with ICE cars, and they’ll need vast amounts of lithium and other materials to produce. We’ll spend just as long replacing every car with an electric one as it would take to build out a decent amount of non car dependant infrastructure. And the way to do that isn’t difficult either, just stop building new car dependant places, remove euclidean zoning codes, and start adding some transit and bike lanes. The dutch didn’t get their bike infrastructure overnight, it was done by redesigning roads whenever they needed to be rebuilt anyway. The same can be applied elsewhere.
How do we handle rural areas where the population is too low to justify a rail and the distances are too large for bikes to be practical? For the US, I think that is the big question for those not in a population center, or who knows people not in a population center.
In terms of replacing stuff when it’s due to be replaced. I think that’s great, if everyone is onboard. I see that starting to happen. A city I used to live in just put in their first protected bike lane a few years ago. Where I live now there is 1 semi-decent bike lane, but it’s still not protected. I think it’s really a “build it and they will come” situation, which it needs to hit a certain critical mass before it becomes useful. For that, we have to. hope politicians stay the course long enough for that to happen.
A big city near me has started putting in a 27 mile greenway to connect 20+ neighborhoods around the city. I’m hoping they do something to connect some of the surrounding cities, because as it stands I’d have to drive to the greenway. If I could get to a protected bike lane that would take me to the greenway and let me get around the city, I would go down there significantly more than I do now. It’s only about 10 miles, but with traffic, construction, and parking, it’s just not worth it for me to take my car. They put in a light rail but it doesn’t really go anywhere. They’re doing things to help people move around the city, but not doing anything to keep people from needing to bring their car into the city in the first place.
Another thing I’ve seen (in that city that got their first protected bike lane) was during the COVID lockdowns they put up construction barrels all over the places. I think everyone thought construction was starting. I didn’t find out until months later that the idea was they were using those to make bike lanes. All they ended up doing was constricting car traffic and turning the whole city into grid lock. A few signs would have gone a long way. Attempts are being made, but a lot of mistakes are being made along the way as well.
Small towns can be super walkable, since you can easily walk anywhere in town. But yeah at some point cars do make more sense, and at that point it isn’t much of a problem since most people live in urban areas anyway.
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}
I think it’s more of a result of the time countries developed and the needs of the time. Old European cities were developed before cars. They’re dense with narrow roads. Retrofitting mass transit/trains makes sense, as the alternative would be destroying all the buildings and building a new city to support the space needed for cars.
The US on the other hand was really being developed and built up along side the automobile. There were vast areas of land being settled with no preexisting infrastructure. The only option was horse, wagon, and later… the car and truck. Because land was so plentiful it didn’t make a lot of sense to create dense cities, especially as transportation became easier. As a result, the US is the way that it is now. Just like it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to rip down a European city just to change the transit system, it’s hard to justify ripping down entire US cities to better support rail, to the point where people can get rid of their cars.
I don’t like owning a car and I wish I could just walk a block, hop on a train, and get to wherever I need to go… but that’s not reality. And changing that would take decades of frustration and cost trillions of dollars. Even then, it would only cover major metro areas and connecting them. The idea that rural America is going to get on rails is not possible, just like rural areas in Europe aren’t accessible by rail either. Even if the city I lived in had protected bike lanes, mixed use spaces, and rails to get to other nearby hubs where people gather, I’d still need a car, because I have family members in a rural area that doesn’t even have a highway within 10 miles. I think there are a lot of people in this situation.
Large swaths of the US were populated around the railroads. The cities had old style walkable centres before they were demolished to make way for cars. Even LA was built up around a streetcar network which was at the time the largest in the world.
Boston is one of the few places I’ve been in the US that has that small feel still. I think the water, preventing sprawl, and the age and importance of a lot of the areas are the reason for that. But it’s a good case study for what it takes to keep that. The Big Dig took 25 years and $22B dollars. For cities that weren’t that old and didn’t have land constraints, why would they go through that?
I do have to wonder how much of the removal of things like streetcars were a result of urban sprawl. Once the area grows and cars service that new area, how do they handle the original city? Do they have large parking lots around the edge and force people to switch over to a street car? Generally if someone is driving to a city from an area not served by mass transit, they are going to want to take their car all the way to the finial destination, rather than switching to something else and paying money (for parking and the transit). The younger a city, the easier it is to make that change.
Regardless of why it happened, it’s where we’re at. So we need to accept we’re here and figure out the best way forward. Is that electric cars? Is that spending decades and billions and trillions of dollars to build new cities and hope the people of 2150 don’t think we made the wrong call, because now they have some crazy new way to get around and different problems? Is it something else? I don’t think anyone in the past was trying to screw over people in the future. They were making the best decisions they could based on the information they had, the needs of the people at the time, and technology available. We’ll make similar choices and people of the future will have their opinions about it.
The big dig was replacing an urban highway that already demolished much of the city and shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and it shouldn’t have been replaced. When you have land constraints the answer is easy: don’t build for the car.
The way forward isn’t that complicated. Electric cars don’t fix most of the problems with ICE cars, and they’ll need vast amounts of lithium and other materials to produce. We’ll spend just as long replacing every car with an electric one as it would take to build out a decent amount of non car dependant infrastructure. And the way to do that isn’t difficult either, just stop building new car dependant places, remove euclidean zoning codes, and start adding some transit and bike lanes. The dutch didn’t get their bike infrastructure overnight, it was done by redesigning roads whenever they needed to be rebuilt anyway. The same can be applied elsewhere.
How do we handle rural areas where the population is too low to justify a rail and the distances are too large for bikes to be practical? For the US, I think that is the big question for those not in a population center, or who knows people not in a population center.
In terms of replacing stuff when it’s due to be replaced. I think that’s great, if everyone is onboard. I see that starting to happen. A city I used to live in just put in their first protected bike lane a few years ago. Where I live now there is 1 semi-decent bike lane, but it’s still not protected. I think it’s really a “build it and they will come” situation, which it needs to hit a certain critical mass before it becomes useful. For that, we have to. hope politicians stay the course long enough for that to happen.
A big city near me has started putting in a 27 mile greenway to connect 20+ neighborhoods around the city. I’m hoping they do something to connect some of the surrounding cities, because as it stands I’d have to drive to the greenway. If I could get to a protected bike lane that would take me to the greenway and let me get around the city, I would go down there significantly more than I do now. It’s only about 10 miles, but with traffic, construction, and parking, it’s just not worth it for me to take my car. They put in a light rail but it doesn’t really go anywhere. They’re doing things to help people move around the city, but not doing anything to keep people from needing to bring their car into the city in the first place.
Another thing I’ve seen (in that city that got their first protected bike lane) was during the COVID lockdowns they put up construction barrels all over the places. I think everyone thought construction was starting. I didn’t find out until months later that the idea was they were using those to make bike lanes. All they ended up doing was constricting car traffic and turning the whole city into grid lock. A few signs would have gone a long way. Attempts are being made, but a lot of mistakes are being made along the way as well.
Small towns can be super walkable, since you can easily walk anywhere in town. But yeah at some point cars do make more sense, and at that point it isn’t much of a problem since most people live in urban areas anyway.