How America Killed Transit

Most european cities and countries have government run public transport or semi private monopolies running the transport. Privatization is usually singled out as the root cause of the sorry state of the rail service in e.g. the UK. Basically it leads to companies cherry picking the most lucrative routes and shutting down the rest.

So, I don't think you can blame the shift from private to public for this. It's not that black and white. I think the car lobby has been a much bigger factor in driving both the construction of highways, suburbs, and destruction of local tram networks across most cities in the US. This did not happen in Europe.

I was in San Francisco a few months ago. The public transport there is pretty bad compared to what I'm used to in Berlin (clean, fast, efficient, etc.). The local muni trains are tiny and infrequent and you basically have to step over hords of homeless people to get into them. I was kind of shocked to see a 1 car muni show up after waiting for that for close to 15 minutes at Powel station. It's like they're not even trying.

Gotta be careful talking about private companies in japan.

For example, last october the bank of japan owned 74% of all publicly traded companies. And it has only been buying more since.

Japan is a strange failed-capitalist state sleepwalking into unintentional(?) socialism. Impossible to make a coherent point about a situation like that.

Public roads are a public transit system. A very useful and productive one. Before paved roads and trucks, many towns and farms were only served by a single rail line. If competing water transportation was not available, the private railroads would charge extremely high rates, extracting all excess production of the area. The coming of public paved roads and trucks was blessing.

Many roads are now past capacity much of the time, which makes them much less useful, and many modern cities have been designed only for people in cars (is there a word like bicyclist for a person in a car?) instead of people walking, which is definitely a mistake. But the high speed, point to point, on demand, variable cargo, transit system of public roads is a great thing. Deride and shame it at your peril.

We need to improve the road system in many ways. Some possibilities are congestion pricing, lots of tunnels, and public spaces people can walk to from their homes, but to believe some externally controlled system for transit is what we should shoot for as a society, I think, is mistaken.

By having hundreds of thousands of 5+ seat vehicles with 1 person inside.

Problem is that point to point is not scalable. Automated platoons only work in highway settings, not in urban areas where pedestrians and cyclists need to cross traffic at regular intervals very frequently. (The American experience shows that even erecting large physical barriers to crossing roads does not work.) And you can't build more roads to get out of this mess, because we have tried and tried and tried and even 26 lanes is not enough to decongest a highway [1].

The new thing is congestion management. Schedule deliveries only for off-peak or evening/night hours. Charge tolls to maintain traffic flow, as high as needed (I-66's market clearing price for a single lane was at one point $46.75 [2]). And above all, stop mandating parking with buildings, and disallow bundling of off-street parking with rent.

[1] - https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2016/09/11/braess-paradox...

[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/03/0...