It's not like Tesla engineers can wave a magic wand and reverse a century of automobile based infrastructure
My bad, I will deleting this post in some time because I didn't look deep enough on into this topic. He also works for OpenAI now.
No need! It contributes to discussion regardless if you agree with your original post
e: you can always edit the title :)
Alright, kinda didn't expect for people to want to keep it. I will leave only the "bad take" in the edited title then.
Editing titles! Yay!
This platform got popular only a month ago and is already getting a lot of new features which reddit wasn't able to implement in their 18 years of existence. Open Source FTW!
no delete. i like the post.
It’s just too large
Isnt that a tired bullshit excuse usually pushed by .... well I'm open to suggestions for group descriptors, by this point? As you yourself point out this is about cities (and suburbs), not the somewhat empty space between them.
Definitely a bullshit excuse, the problem with trains in the US is that the ones we do have are far understaffed, under-prioritized, and sometimes unsafe.
With the amount of funding we put into roads of all types we could have potentially had a rail system as well-connected as Japan’s. Instead the rail system we do have is engineered to cater to freight and any passenger cars on the lines are deprioritized.
Not that I entirely disagree, but the tweet above is about cities .
To fix cities think paint, bike/bus lanes, buses. Relatively inexpensive and easy fixes which wouldn't take that long to introduce. Not high speed rail that'll cost billions and years to introduce.
Obviously population density is lower, but you'd solve a lot of urban issues by getting at least some people out of their cars and into a bus which can skip congestion. Maybe get rid of some of the parking spaces, build some more houses and solve that population density issue while you're at it.
Countries like Germany, France or Czechia have plenty of cars too. People park on the outside of the city when they visit, then commute into the centre with public transport.
Obviously, not going to happen any time soon in the US. But that's a choice. Not something that America's forced to endure due to technical limitations. Countries like the Netherlands were also very car centric not that long ago, but chose not to keep going down that route.
It takes a fuck-ton more infrastructure than slapping some paint on the road. Not to mention the ingrained attitude of most Americans that keeps them from using alternatives.
I'm not saying its not worthwhile to make the effort... but its not something you can just handwave into existence.
There's a reason for the lack of widespread public transportation in North America, and that's scale. European countries are literally the size of US states. Texas (the second largest state) is almost twice the size of Germany, and nearly three times the size of the UK. In fact the only European country larger than Texas is Russia.
The more interesting number is population. While Germany is about half the size of Texas, they have almost three times the population. More people moving in the same direction, with less empty space between destinations makes mass transportation not only more practical, but a necessity.
Fewer people traveling to destinations more spread out is what lead to the automobile culture in the US. You could drive through multiple European countries in the time it would take to cross Texas.
Now for an interesting factoid. You could fit the entire world population (8bn) into Texas, and each person would still have ~86 square meters (925 sq ft) to themselves.
Canada? They can do better with mass transportation, simply because more than 85%of their population lives within 100 miles of the US border. Despite being the second largest country in the world, they have population densities similar to European countries.
By this argument, both the east and west coasts of the US should have great public transportation. It also ignores the fact that many american cities HAD great pubic transportation in the form of trams, yet removed them for roads and highways. That decision had nothing to do with density or distance (at the time, when american cities were still walkable and the car had yet to dominate the transportation landscape), and everything to do with policy.
Self aware? You can work on cars while wishing for less car centric cities, the two are not mutually exclusive
Never count on an action when people are getting paid for the opposite. He gets paid to make and sell cars, not to do anything to assist with reducing our dependence on cars.
It’s like a dentist setting up shop next to an ice cream store and giving coupons to their patients for 30% off their next sno-cone. They get paid to fix ruined teeth; actually reducing it doesn’t pay off their Porsche.
Everything else is just PR.
How does that have anything to do with his preferences on city layouts
Join us over at 15minutecity@slrpnk.net if this resonates with you!
Will add this to the sidebar of our community. If you have more communities that focus on moving towards better cities then please share them so I can add them too!
Thanks for that!