Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry

If you want to hold America to the same standard as Australia, try finding public transportation between Sydney and Adelaide, Alice Springs, or Darwin. (There isn't any.) In the US you at least can take Amtrak to cross those kinds of distances (even if it's cheaper and faster by orders of magnitude to just take a plane instead). It's fine to point out that America's public transportation is severely lacking (which it very obviously is), but being dismissive and reductive of the pertinent facts and realities isn't a good look, and it isn't helpful to public discourse.

> The US looks "speckled" because there is a lot of empty space, which does not have to be connected. So the others that are all-red have it actually worse. Asia has a lot more people too, so yes, that leads to higher density - but that's hardly an advantage to have to deal with over a billion people instead of a few hundred millions.

There is plenty of research around public transit indicating the opposite: higher density increases transit viability, because public transit requires high demand per kilometer in order to be financially viable. For example, to quote this [1] highly cited paper:

"There are well documented empirical thresholds of density below which transit is unpractical for users and financially unsustainable for operators."

Or even just the opening line of the introduction:

"The counterpoint to the correlation between low-density sprawl and automobile dependence is that between high density and more transit use."

Connecting through "nothingness" is not an advantage: it costs actual money to build transit even through "nothingness" — labor and materials are not free, and even what you term "nothingness" is typically owned by someone and land rights still need to be acquired — and no one wants to go there. It would be cheaper to build transit between Popular Point A and Popular Point B if the vast "nothingness" between them was removed altogether — aka, high density.

> They still are just as distributed

You're taking the "sparse population distribution" argument pretty far out of context. The point is that they're sparse, not the total landmass size.

> I find the effort in many comments to point out how the US is "special" and "different" from all the rest of the world very weird. I would not find it as weird if it looked like a detached analysis, but it seems to be mostly emotional. Why? So strange. What's the big deal, what do you lose, if you come to the conclusion that it's of course true that all problems are local and none are completely the same, the variability and the base problems are not actually different? What's the big deal? Isn't it enough to look for "exceptionalism" in the achievements and possibilities, why does it have to also be true for such mundane stuff at any cost (e.g. suffering quality of arguments)?

Thanks, but I think my posts in here have been pretty data-focused and detached.

1: http://courses.washington.edu/gmforum/Readings/Bertaud_Trans...

Already in your first paragraph you chose to twist everything around. It is NOT more dense overall, there just are more dense areas. I refer to my previous comments, since nothing new was brought up.

> You're taking the "sparse population distribution" argument pretty far out of context.

May I suggest a mirror?

> Thanks, but I think my posts in here have been pretty data-focused and detached.

Not at all, unless you think that going out of your way to find any "data" at all and then pretending that it shows what you say it does (which it doesn't do - at all!) is "data-focused and detached".

There is nothing in the US situation that makes it any more difficult than for the rest of the world. No, the US does not have "special" problems that make transportation more difficult than elsewhere, apart from self-inflicted wounds (another commenter mentioned car-oriented city designs). Of course everybody and everything is "special" if you look deep enough, but this was about "special" (as in more) difficulty compared to other places.

Also you keep moving your target. I still take your ridiculous very first comment as setting the tone - after all, it is what you yourself first brought up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16918557

In response to being called out on that argument you came up with ever more elaborate attempts to disguise what you said and pretend you had a different argument. Own up to having made a very bad "argument" and stop this nonsense. We have a "paper trail" of what you said, stop pretending it ever made sense.

There's BOTH factors, but the master-plans and zoning that require sprawl by forcing major separation between residential, commercial, industry etc. — all that was top down. And by top-down, I mean at the local city planning level, not the federal level per se… except the federal policy helped finance the sprawl…

Also, these big developers are sorta top-down too. They are big powerful entities setting things up for the people who actually use the developments instead of iterative development.

There's a ton of ridiculous patterns built into development that relate to the way it is financed etc. and that along with zoning etc. creates insane sprawl.

https://www.strongtowns.org/ does a remarkable job at addressing all these issues, not taking a dogmatic top-down or bottom-up or whatever view.

I agree, the "nature" argumnets are bollocks (the US is big! That's why we don't have local transit in urban centers - yeah right), and I never understood why people make them (ditto for healthcare - "we can't have it because we are big!").

As for your question:

>are the difficulties any worse than elsewhere in magnitude and complexity?

I firmly think that this is the case - a century of bad urban planning is hard to undo. You don't have that in Europe (cities are old, the layout makes public transport viable and necessary), you don't have in 2nd world countries (a lot of growth happened under central planning that bet big on public transport because it couldn't provide enough cars for its citizens).

Huge cities in the US are different from cities in Europe. Even when a European city has suburbs, taking a train to the city center makes sense because you can get around the city center without a car. That is not the case in Houston or Dallas, for example. You wouldn't want to walk there.

Yes, these problems are man-made - but they are entrenched and systemic to a scale that I'm unaware of.

I guess what I am saying here: we need to understand the scope of the problem. It's not that it's more difficult to make trains running in Dallas than it is in Paris.

It's that we need to rebuild Dallas from ground up for that train to make sense there due to the way it grew in the past 70 years.

TL;DR: screw-ups are hard to undo.