> America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.

This isn't a movie. It's real life. In the movies, sure, you can have a wizard reshape entire cities, power distribution, roads, sewers, potable water production and deliver, move entire neighborhoods kilometers away, move businesses, factories, airports, etc.

In the real world, once a city is well established, while your ideas might be commendable, they are simply not realizable. It's a fantasy. It will not happen. And this isn't because we are some kind of a horrible society who do not want these things. It's because reality. Nothing less. Nothing more.

The other reality is that we can't build anything here any more. My favorite thing to point to is the California high speed train project. I think it has been over a decade now and at least 10x over what they promised it was going to cost. I don't think we have a single mile of usable track built, much less moving trains.

The other one is the Los Angeles International airport's automated people mover (SkyLink) which is indefinitely delayed and $1 billion over budget. The project started in 2019...and we are still waiting for it to be usable. Oh, and it's just 2.25 miles of low speed overhead monorail (I think) track like they have in Las Vegas (might be a different design).

So, like I said, I love your ideas, but, in the real world, they are fantasy. Sorry.

The California highspeed rail project is 33(!) years old.

Even better. I didn't remember. It's a suppressed memory!

Busses. I rode on a public bus once while visiting Columbus Ohio.

I knew a bus ride was in my future and I'd not done that before, so I asked questions of the various people I know who live there.

Not one of them had ever had a ride on the bus in the city they call home, or knew how the bus worked, and all of them made a point of telling me that they were sure that it would be filthy and awful somehow.

The COTA website didn't set clear expectations for a new rider and wasn't very helpful.

I eventually posted on the local subreddit asking for direction, and got exactly 1 useful response out of many non-useful responses.

I don't know if it's just a Columbus thing or what, but it seems clear from this experience that folks there hate the bus. Is there a place in the US where they're appreciated?

(Anyway, other than having to walk mile or so to get from the airport to the nearest bus stop because WTF, things went perfectly fine. I had a great chat with some random dude who was waiting a different bus. My bus showed up exactly when Google Maps predicted, I had exact change ready, and the transfer ticket for the next bus on my route was easy to deal with. They were clean, comfortable-enough, and I was the only rider.)

Your experience isn't uncommon. Lots of cities in the US have pretty limited transit, and a lot of the people in those cities don't use it. It's usually seen as a last resort kind of thing for those who can't get private transportation, as opposed to just yet another option.

Boulder Colorado has a public airport bus route that is pretty widely used - it takes one hour and is well liked by the general public.

It seems that Columbus has one today, but they didn't back when I needed it in 2021 or so.

(Need is relative, I suppose. I don't mind walking and I pack light; I was able to spend a couple of weeks out of town with a backpack that counts as just a personal item; getting to the bus stop wasn't a big deal for me.)

> The most recent being when we built all these urban highways.

What? Clarify please, because if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. Today all all of that you are talking about would solidly fit in the "fantasy" category.

You must not be from Los Angeles. Come drive our highways for a few months. I've had better experiences in third world countries.

> to run bus routes

That only works in certain locations and do absolutely nothing for the largest sources of traffic. Nothing.

Just like carpool lanes, which area massive joke on us: nobody carpools to use those lanes, so the traffic reduction they deliver, expressed as a percentage and rounded to the nearest integer is, zero.

The US, in general, was not built for the kind of mass transport Europeans are used to. And that will never happen here. In the US, self-driving cars will be our solution to the problem. Give it about ten years and we are really going to start to see adoption and the benefits of it. In a sense, virtual mass transit using existing infrastructure. That might work, slowly, but it could work.

In ten years I hope that the only human-drivable cars I will own will be my race cars, which get towed to the track. Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent.

Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. Driving in Los Angeles absolutely sucks.

>> Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports.

> And you think I live in fantasy land.

Yes, you do.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/uber-air/

> So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again.

You must be a software guy. Moving atoms is very different from typing words into this textbox. Also, in the US, the 1950's to 1970's was a very, very different time. That was probably the peak of our industrialization phase. You had millions of men who came back from WW2 ready to work all kinds of jobs, an industrial based that had exploded due to WW2, massive entrepreneurial drive at every level and the ability to get shit done without the nonsense that kill even the most basic projects today.

Yes, a few decades can change things radically. In the decades since the period you use as the reference for this fantasy the US, Europe and other nations have deindustrialized to an alarming degree and China has become the world's factory. We make nothing here. To be able to to things you have to make things. On top of that, our political system has welcomed bat-shit-crazy ideologies, like the current push for down-right socialism/communism who's only recorded history is the destruction of nations.

So, yeah, yours is a fantasy. This is not the United States of the 1950's, 1960's or 1970's, not by a large margin.

To understand things at this level you need contact with reality. I've you've never tried to get a non-trivial project done in the real world, moving atoms, not bit, I can see how waving a magical wand and thinking we can do what was done five to seven decades ago might be possible. It is not. I've been in manufacturing my entire life. I assure you this is not the 1950's.

> This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments

Sure, but that's a different problem, isn't it? What we can change --over time-- is the relationship between where people work and where they live. If you take the greater Los Angeles area, the massive concentration of job centers in centralized "hubs" as I call them is tragically destructive. You have people driving into these hubs from every possible angle and you end-up with shit like the 405 freeway being a parking lot all day, every day.

This isn't about public transportation. It's about politicians being politicians (which I use to mean: incompetent) wasting decades of valuable intelligent planning. In the town I live in they absolutely refuse to grant permits for the kinds of job magnets that would have people from this town work here. As a result, if you are unfortunate enough to not have found work in this area, you are eating a one to two hour commute every day.

So, if you want to solve the housing and congestion problem, you need a long term intelligent planning policy that will incentivize businesses to build in areas that will reverse some of the flows.

To use a company I am very familiar with, SpaceX, just look at where they are in Los Angeles. It's probably one of the worst locations one could choose. And like that, probably hundreds of large employers in that area and a few miles north, south, east and west. A good policy would have looked at the concentration and created intelligent plans to incentivize companies to find locations that would balance flows and spawn new housing developments surrounding these centers of employment.

Instead of doing that, what you end-up with over time are companies leaving for other states where they have more favorable financial climates as well as the ability to, in some cases, build what they need and where they need it.

Moving atoms isn't easy. Some things we can do. Others we cannot. Public mass transportation is not likely to be some thing that will take over the US. Exceptions here and there, sure. I've completed non-trivial construction projects that don't even begin to approximate the zoning and political complexity of the kinds of things you are talking about, and every single one of them has been an expensive nightmare purely because our system has devolved into something that prevents progress rather than encouraging it.

Note that I am not at all opposed to the image you paint. I have travelled and worked in European and Latin American cities where public transport is wonderful and love it. I am just being realistic about who we are and we can actually accomplish in the US. We can't build a single new nuclear (or whatever) power plant while China is building a hundred. That should tell you something.

This is a lot of words to ultimately agree with my core point. If we have the political will to do so, we can. It pretty much all boils down to that. If we don't have it, we can't do it.

I agree, in most parts of the US we do not currently have the political will. I agree, building things and changing minds often takes time.

But instead we've elected people who put people into power who thinks bike lanes are woke and need to be destroyed. So I guess it'll take a bit longer before we start making real progress on these issues.

You flying on that Joby tomorrow? I hear They've been saying their air taxi service is coming next year for so many years now and are only supposedly just now starting FAA testing. I wouldn't hold my breath for actual useful and anywhere near affordable service anytime soon.

> I agree, in most parts of the US we do not currently have the political will.

This isn't about political will. Politicians are whores, it doesn't matter what side, they respond to money and votes. This is worse than that, this is about people not being intelligent enough to vote with a view towards future benefits --decades away. Politicians buy votes by promising crap that the masses eat-up and never get. This nonsense is as old as time. This is precisely the kind of thing that destroyed nearly every nation in Latin America. And now idiot voters are pushing the US in the same direction with these bat-shit-crazy socialist/communist politicians gaining ground in various places. Americans will eventually learn, however, and sadly, this might require a few decades.

In that context, the whole mass transit conversation is so utterly insignificant it isn't even worth the bits we have wasted in this chat.

> bike lanes are woke

No, they are not woke, they are stupid...in certain cities. Some of the things I have seen are truly horrific. One of my own kids, who decided commuting to work on a bike was a good idea, nearly got killed twice. A year later he bought a car.

Once again, there's reality and fantasy. They are not the same.

>You flying on that Joby tomorrow?

If I could, absolutely. I've talked to people who would never get in a Waymo. I have, many times, also through Uber. Great experience. Progress.

> I hear They've been saying their air taxi service is coming next year for so many years now and are only supposedly just now starting FAA testing.

If you've never been involved in product development, manufacturing, testing and certification within a regulatory environment you don't have a real sense of just how hard and detailed these processes can be. Could it go faster? Sure. The point is, we probably don't really want them to in a case where safety is the top consideration. It will take as long as it will take.

> I wouldn't hold my breath for actual useful and anywhere near affordable service anytime soon.

Sure, but it will happen and affordability is relative. For example, it costs me $120 each way for an Uber to the airport that could take one to two hours to get there. If I drive my own car, I still get to eat two hours on the road and spend about $300 parking it at the airport. So, if I can buy a 30 minute Joby ride for $300 to $500 round trip, with Uber car pickup and drop-off included, sign me up!

Also, people use helicopters today and they are not at all cheap to fly. So this isn't like comparably-priced options are not out there. In fact, a Joby solution integrated into Uber is far more likely to democratize short-range air transport than anything else.

It's important to understand the history, wherein:

There was a time when we had all of those things that you mention. But cars quite clearly won; the others lost.

Towns and cities then continued to grow. They did this in car-centric ways because that fit the transportation style of the time.

And now, it is stuck this way.

> And now, it is stuck this way.

Unless this is sarcasm, isn't it kind of strange to decide that history just happened to end in this moment?

Let's talk about trains.

We tore out the light passenger rail lines that once quite commonly connected cities and towns together, and to points within those places. These cities once grew around (and because of) these features, but now it is like like they never even existed.

We can't just put them back where they used to be. The landscape has changed.

In order to do something different, we'd need to have new routes that are built through cities that have been designed for cars for a very long time. That's a quagmire of nightmarish proportions.

Every now and then, someone makes some noise about changing it somewhere -- and almost every single time, it goes nowhere. Where new light rail does get built in a place that had none, the ridership tends to be limited because...sheesh: Folks with jobs and places to go already have cars to use, so they keep using them.

So we have cars, because we need cars. And since we need cars, we might as well use them -- which reinforces the issues. Call it what you will (I'm a fan of "self-perpetuating fallacy"), but that's what we've got.

And yes: It is stuck this way. It'd be fantastic if it weren't this way, but we don't have an undo button.

At this point, we're ~4 score and 7 years too late to preserve what we once had.

See how politically difficult it is to build queenslink in NYC, a transit project using ab existing right of way in the most transit-oriented city in the US. Even there, the unholy alliance of NIMBYs and the degrowth/rent-control left have managed to shut it down for now.

They exist but not as a continuous empty space. Every few miles something else is in the way and blocks the whole route not just that few meters, the entire route). If not that means it is a bike trail and the bikers won't give it up.

Man, I wish I could say that this seemed true for me.

I don't feel like pinning down my location in public, but it is sufficient to say that I'm very familiar with a place in Ohio that was once a booming with every kind of rail.

I can walk around and see where things used to be, and sometimes it's very clear.

But mostly, it seems like it has been transformed. Whereas people used to build around the paths of the rails, they've now built atop of where they used to be. It was once a straight shot with an occasional (and very deliberate) bend, but now there's a house and a factory and a substation in the path.

Or, Columbus Ohio again. :) That place used to have a very diverse passenger rail network, with a somewhat grand Union Station right in the middle where it counts. Rail was such a thriving and important thing that at one point they raised the level of the main drag, High Street, to help reduce conflicts between trains, pedestrians, and the various horsemobiles. For some of the old buildings that still remain, what was once the first floor is now the basement.

And in what seems like something that real libertarians would dream about, these railways were built privately and were self-sustaining.

Things changed.

In ~1979, they finally tore down the old Union Station just weeks before it was likely to be ruled a protected historic site and then put a very immobile convention center in its place instead.

Columbus has been expanding pretty rapidly (by Ohio norms) for a couple of decades now. The old rail paths are hard to find at all while walking around or in aerial shots, never existed in newer neighborhoods, and whatever was there has been further decimated by the batshit highway network that is in a continuous process of changing.

It's possible that it could all come back again, but the cost would be intense beyond imagination.

And even if it did come back again, who would ride the things, anyway? They've already got busses that they hate. Folks would still have cars, and they'd still drive them. I guess people might eventually be able to adjust to using trains to get places, if that became practical for them, but I'd also guess that this transition would take multiple generations to really take effect.

Cars clearly won… or did the car industry use its monopolistic powers to acquire and shut down our train networks while also relentlessly lobbying for more (and permanent) car infrastructure?

Also, just because things are one way today, doesn’t mean they can’t be a different way tomorrow. It’s all a what we we make of it and decide to fight for

Both things are true.

Cars won _and_ and it wasn't a fair fight.

This was almost certainly not an isolated incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

i know multiple developers with public dollars to build housing $800k-$1.2M per unit. so i don't know, maybe come up with a better solution I'd be happy to hear your idea that is realistic and will deliver more units at a lower cost.

Have you tried "building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods"?

Buyers aren't willing to pay for it. Its not really up to the developers anyways.

[Edit] I am serious. Homebuyers dont want to pay US construction prices for a 500sqft walkable Parisin style apartment. Nor do they want a xx billion dollar metro cost tacked onto their property tax.

I can't tell if this person is joking or actual serious. It's sad, because this is exactly the kind of ridiculousness developers experience day to day by the general public.

No, a private citizen does not have the ability to demolish entire neighborhoods to create a new New York City with a beautiful Central Park.

Maybe if they own a home, maybe they'd donate their home to some developer to make a community garden. You and I know, that many people would love to do such a thing. But, 99% of people, would reject doing this or demand an infeasible amount of money for this.

You seem braggy too much

Eh, the more details they’re willing to reveal the better. It’s probably their reality.

Self driving cars are public transportation and make areas much more walkable and bikeable.

> Self driving cars are public transportation

Waymo is literally a private company.

> make areas much more walkable and bikeable.

How so? Autonomous car companies have every incentive to continue lobbying for car only infrastructure? Why would they want infrastructure that increases competition?

If they are owned and operated by mega-corporations like Alphabet, they are not public

I get what you're saying, but in this particular case we're talking about Texas. The people down there think that bike lanes and walkable neighborhoods are a plot to send in UN soldiers who will forcibly vaccinate them with 5G nanobots. I'm only slightly exaggerating.