![1441258955308[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/WRKoBDK.jpg "1441258955308[1].jpg")
Why did America historically have such poor public transportation policies? Because of fears of socialism?
>>386895
I dont know if its true but I heard that the detroit motor companies deliberately sabotaged plans for streetcars, trams etc
>>386895
Because look at a map, you stupid fucking yuropoor. You guys have five cities within 200 miles.
We have two cities within 500 miles. Our public passenger train system constantly operates at a loss because it can't compete with the airlines. Just, Jesus Fuck, stop thinking that we're like you.
>>386931
What about high density areas like the northeast?
>>386895
A little of bit of geography a little bit of auto corporation conspiracy.
>>386931
You are now aware that, in some countries, Public Transportation actually works inside cities too.
>>386931
Yet Australia has amazing public/mass transit infrastructure in an area comparable to the US. Are you dumber than Australia?
>>386954
Australia's population is almost entirely clustered near the ocean in a thin band you dumb. Fuck. Head.
>>386963
So is America's.
>>386931
Public transport is within cities as well :^)
Seriously, though, American city planners have come up with great, simple layouts for their cities, which, as it seems to me, could only be extremely beneficial for the development for public transport. But as someone from Amsterdam, whose city layout defies logic but which has great PT, I've never personally heard of Americans using PT except the NY metro. Could just be me, of course, but in my chance few visits I've seen only ever seen something like tramtracks in SF, and even then I'm not sure hoe much use they are.
Solid public transport was straight ripped out of cities like Detroit. Because money. It's the mover of all things.
![Bay-Area-Rail-combined[1].gif](https://i.imgur.com/qFWbkcT.gif "Bay-Area-Rail-combined[1].gif")
>>386969
Some of the more populated areas of America have decent mass transit systems, like the SF Bay Area and the Northeast. Most of the country is garbage for anything but cars and planes, though.
>>386963
>>386969
Chicago has the L and New Orleans has streetcars. That's all I know though besides what you said.
Sidenote Japan's PT would be god tier if all transport didn't stop before midnight.
>>387010
Pretty sure they don't want to enable and encourage more drunk gaijin to wander around at obscene hours of the night causing havoc and mayhem.
>>386895
LA used to have electric streetcars until a Detroit conspiracy crippled them.
>>387018
More likely to stop business men from drinking too long and actually go home to their wives.
>>386931
Why're you so mad
Except for NY, LA, Portland,Seattle or SF we have pretty awful public transit
>>386996
>New York City
Babylon pls
>>387041
>Babylon
That's Rome though
>>386996
Yeah, I'm from LA. We've been trying to build an effective mass transit system for decades.
It's a massively spread out cluster of cities that all grew together with intervening hills and mountain ranges. To get anywhere, you need to switch between subways and above ground rail. Bicyclists have literally beaten the train system between destinations. The California high Speed rail system is such an over budget boondoggle, it's doubtful as to whether or not it will survive the current governor.
So, taking into account your status as a product of your country's over rated educational system or possibly an Australian, I'll say this to you a third time: Look at a fucking map.
>>387051
>The California high Speed rail system is such an over budget boondoggle, it's doubtful as to whether or not it will survive the current governor.
Considering Gavin Newsom will be the next governor, I'd say it'll probably endure, even though everyone hates it by now.
>>386969
ratings for city public transport systems:
1 New York, NY 84.1
2 San Francisco, CA 80.4
3 Boston, MA 74.4
4 Washington, DC 70.6
5 Philadelphia, PA 66.8
6 Chicago, IL 64.7
7 Miami, FL 59.4
8 Baltimore, MD 57.8
9 Minneapolis, MN 57.5
10 Seattle, WA 57.0
most of these are on the east coast or have a populace that is more welcoming of public transportation compared to others (yes, it's a political thing in the US)
What was public transportation like before the engine?
>>387086
also cities on the east were built differently compared to out west and in the desert
>>386954
>Yet Australia has amazing public/mass transit infrastructure
lol
t. australian
>>387093
>>387182
the steam engine and stirling engine existed before that m80
Could it work?
>>386895
Because limiting public transportation helps contain the poor in their neighborhoods.
>>386954
>Australia has amazing public/mass transit infrastructure in an area comparable to the US
Lol compared to India maybe.
>>387417
Do you know how much of Australia is habitable?
>>387526
I am quite aware of how much of Australia is habitable as I live there.
I also know that the public transport situation here is a fucking joke, especially in NSW.
>>387233
Yea it could. But it would never get funding. Hell Florida couldn't even pass through a bullet train from Miami to Orlando.
>>386967
No, no its not.
>>387182
Damn that's a tough looking horse.
>>387051
>muh topology
oh yeah, how horrible, it's like a second Rome. oh wait...
>>386895
Most of the country has low population density, not to mention the lack of demand for public transit because of the low cost of fuel and high amount of vehicle ownership in America. I'll use my area (the bottom tip of Texas) as an example. The largest cities here (Harlingen, Brownsville, McAllen, Edinburgh) all span hundreds of miles, and unlike European cities which are tightly packed, everything is spread out, so much so that you can see farmland right next to shopping centers. Since a walk to downtown would take a few hours here, people purchase vehicles for their convenience and low(ish) cost. Since everyone has cars, there is no need for public transit, and if there was public transit, there would have to be a lot of buses in order to cover the large urban sprawls here.
>>387789
Yeah, American city planning is pretty atrocious. there is a severe need for completely mixed zones with everything from highrises over single houses to light industry allowed. That's how European cities stay compact and why they have such high livability ratings.
Ok so, let's try to return this topic back from /int/ to /his/
this is mostly semi-educated conjecture though, don't hold me by my word.
One factor is that European cities initially developed in tightly packed environments because feudal landlords were sparing when giving out land to cities/giving city rights to areas.
The second is that the late 18th century and industrial growth (both economic and demographic) caused a big wave of urbanisation in Europe, inreasing still more the tight-packness of the cities.
On the other hand, between the smaller initial population, the land rights granted to new settlers and the unconstrained development of new cities, the city limits (and individual properties) where much larger initially.
While this would explain the central USA regions as compared to europe, it still doesn't explain the New England and Lakes areas or the fact that the 20th century urbanisation wave happened in a similar manner in both USA and Europe.
>>387858
>the city limits (and individual properties) where much larger initially.
meant for USA, obviously
>>386895
Simply due to size.
City bus service in the US isn't bad. Often very good. But it's simply too big for trains to make sense in most places.
>>387233
Most of this is a pipe-dream. Distances are simply too far to compete with flying, and many of these cities are simply un-navigable without a car.
Even lines within California, which on the surface seem to make some sense when you consider population, really don't since who wants to navigate LA on foot.
But the Boston-DC and Montreal-Chicago corridors really should be serviced by regular fast rail. The population is dense enough there, and public transportation good enough once you 'land' in the city.
Something like pic related.
i sort of remember reading that there were some shady deals, lobbying by car industries and politicians involved in basically killing any chance of mass transit in several americans cities?
living in a big city without a good public transportation network seems ridiculous to me
I've seen interesting proposals to bring back gas turbine trains for passenger service. You'd still need to make sure the rails themselves were in really good shape (straight and smooth to get up to high speed), but you wouldn't need to electrify the whole thing, and it could still share the same lines with freight to come extent. Back in the day turbine trains were killed because of noise, but I gather they could get it down to a reasonable level with modern tech (still louder than diesel electric, let alone all-electric, of course).
>>387942
useful reference
>>386925
>detroit
If it was during the 1960's, it was likely the DGI, cuban KGB.
>>387966
In Detroit and LA yeah, that's essential what happened.
In the East Coast that wasn't going to happen, the Transit system is too developed to simply abandon. Part of the reason so many people want to live in cities like Boston and NYC is precisely because the transit system is top notch.
>>386954
>Yet Australia has amazing public/mass transit infrastructure
M8, what are you fucking smoking? Australian public transportation is utter garbage tier. Same thing here in Canada.
>>386895
For most areas, it's because people are so spread out that having extensive public transportation services for small, spread-out communities often proves wasteful.
On the other hand, you also have corporate lobbying which played a massive role in defunding and reducing the existing scale of public transportation. Especially from the automotive industry, which public transportation directly undermines. In places like Europe, it's not uncommon from my understanding for people to not have cars or drivers licenses simply because public transportation gets them virtually anywhere they'd need to be. That does not go well with the American standard (in most places at least) that every individual should own a car (not one per family mind you, one per person).
Demographic changes.
>>388006
>muh red scare
much more likely lobbying from the motor industry
>>386895
America had great public transport when it was used to open new towns and suburbs to rich white settlement. These settlements clustered on tram, inter-urban and rail lines.
The motor-vehicle's class impact on urban architecture killed public transport.
car culture baby.
>>389865
McCarthy was right.
>>386925
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
>>387033
As someone who uses Seattle public transit every day, it is fucking terrible. Maybe better than most places in the US, but not a model system by any means. Portland has a much better system.
>>386931
>public airlines are not possible
this is what americans believe.
Suburbanization after WW2.
Before then we had excellent public transportation. Almost everyone lived in a city/town. Only people who just lived well outside a city or town, did so for work.
Then all the white people in the cities moved out to the suburbs. The blacks moved from the rural areas to the cities. White people owned cars and had the political power. So they didn't want to put tax money towards something they don't use.
The Great Depression also hurt all the private mass transit companies. Government took over a lot of them. Prices went up and quality suffered.
>>391932
Who are you quoting?
>>386925
This. We actually had pretty good public transit in the early 20th century.
I think consumer preferences play a big role as well. We're a little more individualistic and put a lot of value on privacy (which creates a direct pressure against using public transit) and that sanctity of the home (which tends to encourage lower population densities and therefore greater difficulty for public transit).
>>386954
Australia is one of the best-run countries on the planet. "Not being quite as good as Australia in some respects" isn't something to lose sleep over.
>>391940
This. When wealthy/upper middle class people all still lived in the big cities, we had excellent infrastructure - street cars, trolleys, etc. Then when white flight to suburbs began in earnest after WWII as poorer economic groups moved into the cities to find jobs, the infrastructure collapsed and everyone had to drive cars from their suburb town to the city for work.
Why don't we connect all the suburbs to cities with a rail system? As someone from a suburb town near Atlanta - it's because we don't want the poor people in the inner city slums to be capable of easily reaching our towns. Seriously, that is why. We even have "anti-vagrancy" laws so that if any of them somehow make it here, we can legally take them to the city limits and tell them to fuck off.
tl;dr rich people keep public transportation shitty so that poor people can't get to where they live
>>386895
"The Interstate system was a mistake." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
>>387033
LA used to have good transport, before GM tore up all the railcar lines.
Are East Asians the rail master race?
Japan and (South) Korea both managed to get their entire country connected through high-speed rail. As for China, it's a much much larger country with much more difficult terrain.
But China still managed to get 70% of the country connected by rail.
>>393873
Fuck I posted the wrong map
Pic related is the most recent map
>>386895
Because who wants niggers being bussed into actual communities?
>>393873
The rail system in America puts all others to shame.
The US has a busy freight rail system, no?
>>393920
Yeah we still use trains to ship freight everywhere. Most of our modern big cities outside the North were originally train hubs, like Kansas City, Atlanta, Denver, etc. etc. and are full of history from the era.
>>386895
Because we have these things called planes and cars, I know it's a hard concept for you yuropoors
>>393937
Thanks for destroying the ozone layer, fuckface
No, it's because a bunch of automobile manufacturing corporations bought public transport companies and then abolished them.
RAILWAY
UBERMENSCH
>>386937
There's around fourteen thousand taxis servicing about half a million people a day, four thousand buses that transport almost two million people each day, and five and a half million people ride the subway each day in NYC. MTA totals for bus, train, and subway riders each day is about eight and a half million passengers.
How much more do you want?
>>393937
Driving cars everywhere fucking sucks. My summer internship requires me to drive an hour both ways in heavy rush hour traffic. Imagining people doing that the rest of their lives - essentially spending 1/12 of their entire life just driving to and from work - makes me realize why the U.S. needs to rethink public transportation. Our interstate system is fucked in cities with huge suburb sprawls, like where I am from (Atlanta). EVERY exit is a huge bottleneck, and exits to other interstates can back up two lanes for miles. It's horrendous.
>>393965
And who's going to pay for it?
>>387942
>too far to compete with flying
And flying is to expensive to compete with driving, you bourgeois fuck. I could damn near install a new transmission on an obscure classic car and then pay a chauffeur and not spend as much as flying. Realistically though, assuming I'm not driving a literal military vehicle, the price of gas and cappuccino will always be cheaper than a plane ticket, especially considering the price of getting to an airport which may be 50 miles or more away from my residence.
Anyone who's ever experienced a rush hour in LA should realize how awfully do we need to scrap our reliance on cars.
>>393972
Taxpayers? Government subsidies? Public Works Projects a la the Hoover Dam? There are a lot of ways to finance a massive public project, but it requires the population to be behind it first, which we still are not.
This doesn't seem like an extremely /his/ topic if you ask me...
>>387677
If you're talking about modern Rome, it has shit-tier PT.
No demand. Most people have cars and people who can't afford cars or gas (both are cheap as hell in the US) don't count anyway.
/thread.
>>388343
>every individual should own a car
God I hate that of all the developed nations I could have been born into, it had to be this corporate aristocratic hellscape. Behind all the public facilities (which are deliberately ineffective), air conditioning, 42oz soft drinks, monolingual culture, and political correctness hugboxes is the lack of substance and inadvertent hedonist ideology which reinforces the sole division, ignorance, and pacifism of the working class (to prevent its uprising) and the inability to escape economic conditions due to necessary spending on luxuries (cars and taxes of every facet of their ownership, soda instead of septic/fluoridated tap water, mandatory private health care, and drugs to soften the reality that no amount of work will enable one to achieve satisfaction through personal development or significant experience).
you can't fuck with it yo
>>394103
>using the word aristocratic when talking about America
Keep wishing, pleb.
>>393965
An hour's not so bad. With an average public transport system there's a good chance you wouldn't get to work there at all, and it almost certainty wouldn't be any faster.
American "cities" are nothing more than massive sprawled out suburbs with no center.
>>394318
>with no center
Have you ever been to America?
>>394328
Yes and the cities don't have a centre but every city has genetic tall buildings.
>>394340
Try to describe what a city center is to me, because apparently we're using different definitions.
>genetic
uwotm8
>>394298
>lobbying is by definition aristocrats using money to satisfy their interests via legislation
>When American aristocrats are caught practicing fraud and bribery such that they deliberately collapse two entire markets and critically wound the economy, they are rewarded with personal stipends on $100 mil + each, paid for by taxpayers who also pay the $700 bil for their damages without having said taxpayers' personal damages affected at all
The republic is dead, nigga.
>>394369
Basically this. Just because they're not Old Blood doesn't mean they're not aristocrats.
>>394369
No, there's no such thing as a "de facto aristocracy". Aristocracy has to be entrenched in the legal system, otherwise it's just a shitty oligarchy.
It's like when you faggots got rid of the monarchy and then some plebeian southern faggots started cosplaying as aristocrats just because they had a big farm and owned a bunch of niggers, kek. Overcompensation galore.
A country for plebs by plebs.
>>394103
Feel free to pack up all your shit and get the fuck out as soon as possible, you bratty little moron.
>>394413
Motherfucker, as I have just demonstrated, citizens hemorrhage money. I'm fucking trying to get out, but I ain't got the dough. Hell I gotta drive hundreds of miles just to apply for my visa.
>>394404
Semantics. If aristocrats paying coincidentally very rich (and typically old money) technocrat niggas to run they gubbament is denoted by "oligarchy," then I'm sorry I gotta spell dat out ta ya. You a shit you still think that shit ain't fucked. Go on wank to Thus Spoke Zarathoustra an' the Fountainhead Iffn you support greedy twats justifyin they subjugation of tha yeoman farmer, fukkboi
>>394440
It's not semantics. You're basically saying that legally paying for a service and bribing someone is the same thing. Or that having sex with an adult is the same as having sex with a 13 year old. Legality is everything.
>Go on wank to Thus Spoke Zarathoustra an' the Fountainhead Iffn you support greedy twats justifyin they subjugation of tha yeoman farmer, fukkboi
What are you even on about you fucking retard?
>>394440
You hemorrhage money because you're a moron incapable of self restraint or forethought. The rest of us are just fine. If you can't even be bothered to leave this horrible dystopia we call home, the least you can do is fucking kill yourself.
>>394440
Only in a pleb country like America would retards think that rich people are synonymous with aristocracy.
>>394460
>What are you even on about you fucking retard?
Ruling by right being directly contradictory to democracy, Jeffersonian or otherwise.
Whether you legally pay for something, pay for someone else's success (I.e. correlation between expense of campaign of attainment of office), or do it yourself, you still get it. Like if I make my kid do the laundry, take it to the laundry, or do it my damn self, I get clean clothes regardless. Replace me with a corporate entity, my kid with the government, and clean clothes with an inefficient republic which fails to implement the will of its population as representative governments are obliged to do.
>>386895
Car companies you moron.
Cars are a huge part of the US. Also the US is fucking huge compared to most other places.
>>394503
>entering a house with owner's consent gets you in the house
>entering a house without owner's consent gets you in the house
>thus invitation = burglary
>>394485
My education costs thousands of dollars a year and I have to pay for transport to and from as well. If making myself marketable in a global economy isn't forethought, what is? My food is taxed ten percent and insurance is required by law. Must I be a starving ascetic monk to have restraint?
>>394499
Rich people using the government to satisfy their interests exclusively isn't?
>>394539
>Rich people using the government to satisfy their interests
No. That's oligarchic cronyism, not aristocracy. In fact aristocracy has nothing to do with wealth as in the monarchies of old poor nobles existed as well as rich peasants.
>>394531
I'm not saying the means aren't different you illiterate imbecile, I'm saying the ends are the same. If sugar convinces someone to do something and so does vinegar, the person remains convinced despite sugar and vinegar being different. If wealth enables someone to use process x to achieve control of the government, what difference does it make if x is direct control via constitutional right or if it's indirect control through corrupt technocrats?
>>394544
Thank you. I apologise for being unawares to the distinction. You have reduced my level of ignorance.
>>393965
Listen to /his/ audio books and university lectures.
>>393873
Nope. America doesn't move people but look at cargo. Home of the hobo and road trip, #1 baby!
>>394539
College is free for poor people in America.
>>394103
Sounds like you're just being a little bitch lmao
>>395251
Every large American city has a "center" then.
>>395251
>american cities don't have town halls
is this what Europeans actually believe?
>>388343
>the American standard (in most places at least) that every individual should own a car (not one per family mind you, one per person)
We have that here in Australia too. God how I hate it.
>>394031
You need to check your math. I find flying becomes the cheaper option if I'm going more than six or seven hundred miles.
Wasn't public transportation a BIG thing before the Great Depression?
I remember reading that authors who went to America in the 1890s to 1910s usually praised the fact that a large public infrastructure existed in the American cities.
USA did after all get the first transcontinental railroad.
Which turned out amazing for overland transportation, and basically made the flyover states places where commerce could happen at a larger trade level.
At some point it got depriortized, which fucked up many classes of people.
>>394404
>Aristocracy has to be entrenched in the legal system,
You could just have a small lawyer army to do that.
