American crime caused the lack of public transportation. Most would rather drive than get mugged.
A good public transit system would be great in the urban and surrounding areas. But out here in wide-open Texas the ROI would be too little. A good F-150, a full tank of gas, and a decent road is all you need to drive into town for shopping, dinner, or the Friday night football game. If you have animals (not the support kind), you may need a hitch and a trailer from time to time.
The stage coaches and horse and buggies went out centuries ago. Many railroads have shut down due to lack of business or public interest (Remember in Texas you ain’t a town unless you have a Dairy Queen, railroads don’t count anymore). Even the bus lines who stopped at every drug store in every podunk town and hole in the road along their route to deliver mail and pickup packages and a few desperate passengers have had watch their costs and make some adjustments to stay in business. Factor in the oil patch boom and bust cycles which frequently occur, and transportation can get pretty dicey at times.
But the 18 wheelers are still gettin’ it done. Grandma can still hitch a ride to LA or Chicago if she knows the right people or diner (Dairy Queen) to look for these opportunities.
Amtrak, you can forget it because it never runs on schedule and you still have to get to the train station to catch the next train or wait two days for Grandma to arrive from LA or Chicago.
Need a taxi or Uber service you’ve got to be kidding...
So if you’re moving to Texas, plan ahead according to your location and transportation needs. Check out the the Internet access and snake mail delivery in your area too. And find out if electricity and water is available too. Texas can be heaven or hell. Wouldn’t want you to experience any surprises when you get here.
/s
I’d say that this article is still focused on transit being a “good” thing.
The idea that transit companies cut services to cut losses instead of raising services to encourage ridership is false on it’s face. Your transit company is loosing money, so you spend more money on more frequent trains and more modern cars, and somehow enough more people will abandon the convince and flexibility of automobiles for train service? The reason other western countries still have functioning transit systems is that until recently people could not afford private automobiles, and the governments highly subsidized transit systems.
In the US, wide availability of private automobiles, coupled with major employers moving to the suburbs drove public transit ridership into the toilet.
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this, but many many years ago, suburbs around many cities grew along with the extension of transit lines.
Some cities called them “streecar suburbs”, in that, nearby rural land was developed but had access to the streetcars to allow travel into the city.
But then, especially after World War II, suburban development occurred in open land without regard to access to public transportation. It was a given that if you bought a home in those suburbs, that you needed a car or more than one car in the family.
Someone mentioned suburb to suburb commuting, and Washington, DC. There is a great deal of such commuting there along the “Beltway” corridors. The Metro subway in Washington links downtown with some nearby suburbs, but that system will not work for someone who works in Fairfax County, and lives in Montgomery County, for example.
I think I’ve heard that most commuting to work nowadays, is not commuting into a central city from suburban areas. Huge numbers of people live in suburbs, and go to work in another suburb.
I think public transportation will make a comeback.
When I was young, people couldn’t wait to get their licenses at 16. I was a laggard at 17. Getting your own car was everyone’s dream.
My older son didn’t get his license until he was 21. My younger one, now 21, has no plans to get his license. He lives in a large urban area, and takes mass transit everywhere.
They both went to college in a large urban area with lots of mass transit. Many of their peers didn’t have driver’s licenses either, and were glad they were accepted to a school in an urban area where they didn’t need it.
With the rise of Uber to fill in the gaps in mass transit, lots of younger people are very happy to rely principally on mass transit.
My wife and I have three vehicles between us. We’re dinosaurs.
Today it's far too dangerious… Unless your packing and willing to whack somebody it's the last place you want to go....
Several comments:
1. Public transport does not work in the vast majority of the US because we do not have the population density of Europe or Asia. Europe is about the size of America.....east of the Mississippi (1/3rd of our land) and has 500 million so more than 1 and a half times our population. In addition to that, Americans like detached single family houses with yards. If a lot of people are going to have that, public transport is a nonstarter. If we chose to live packed in like sardines in apartment block towers (like Gaia Worshipers want) ie like Yurps’ live, then it would make sense. We do not choose that.
2. As more offices and companies relocate from city centers to suburbs, that obviates the need for expensive public transport to bring so many people from suburbs into city centers. Move the offices to the people - not vice versa.
3. Public transport also makes more sense in Europe because they tax the bejeezus out of gas. Its effectively 3 times the cost it is in America. Americans will never tolerate that and will immediately vote out of office any politician who tries it.
4 Americans also don’t want public transport because being individuals, we prefer to have more control over our own comings and goings. We are also not nearly as beholden therefore to public sector labor unions which can paralyze transport in Europe by going on strike. If the bus drivers or light rail drivers went on strike in most American cities, we wouldn’t even notice. We don’t use public transport anyway. Ergo, they have no real power over us. We like it that way.
It’s called FReedom because the greatest Nation ever put on God’s Green Earth allowed so many to afford their own personal transportation instead of having to wait in lines for someone else’s time schedule to move them like cattle...
Even in the mountains of West Virginia this was true, but the costs of these systems was huge.
These systems were largely driven by business wanting to get workers to work. Workers weren’t paid enough to buy a car and had to use these services and when the cost of a car was reduced and income crossed the cost line this destroyed public transportation.
Public transportation became political as well, where the old public transportation was worker focused; today’s public transportation is focused on the a population that largely doesn’t work. Requiring frequent stops to enable people to not walk to a more concentrated pick-up / drop off point slowing transit times.
In short, THEY (the elites) quit using it so it no longer mattered if it was useful to the population or not.
I live in a city that has buses large enough to hold eighty people running around town holding 5 people. Add political correctness and the buses run places no one wants to go and no one wants to leave AND routes are created to make politicians ‘look inclusive’... If public transportation REALLY didn't have a market, Uber would have failed the first day...