I’m getting a lot of ‘but my car is more convenient’ arguments lately, and I’m struggling to convey why that doesn’t make sense.
Specifically how to explain to people that: Sure, if you are able to drive, and can afford it, and your city is designed to, and subsidizes making it easy to drive and park, then it’s convenient. But if everyone does it then it quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons situation.
I thought of one analogy that is: It would be ‘more convenient’ if I just threw my trash out the window, but if we all started doing that then we’d quickly end up in a mess.
But I feel like that doesn’t quite get at the essence of it. Any other ideas?
If you indeed systemically invest in x as a way of addressing a question while undressing alternatives to x over the course of 70-odd years, then you should not be surprised that your facilities for x are comparatively amazing while alternatives are trash. Imagine if instead of a Federal Highway Act, they passed a Federal High Speed Rail act? The US high speed railway network would have looked better than any European network and you could travel between any two even somewhat decent cities in the 48 contiguous by very fast train. Instead, the US high speed rail network right now is worse than Uzbekistan’s. The country with the highest GDP and they cannot figure out how to make a train without a combustion engine, or how to make one go faster than 130 km/h without importing French and/or Swiss experts.
Fact is that making cars the most convenient way of getting about was, and is, a deliberate policy decision. Cities don’t just make space for cars, it’s given to them. Look at any neighbourhood in Amsterdam built in the sixties and you see six lane dual carriageways. And also, their bicycle network is a separate transport layer and the most convenient way of getting about in most places built both before and after the sixties.
Point is: the car is as convenient as it is because someone with authority decreed it has to be. And someone else may very well have decreed something else.
There is no way a US federal high speed rail would look anything nearly as successful as ones in europe or other highly populated locations. I think people fail to realize that for the most part the US is very sparsely populated. with the exception of maybe 2-3 ‘regions’ that might look close to the population density and public transportation feasibility of Europe, there just wouldn’t be enough people going between each individual point to make it profitable, even if subsidized. Imagine putting up 300 miles of high speed rail that cost many millions of dollars to build, millions of dollars a year to maintain, and thousands of dollars to run each round trip, and then finding out there are only a few dozen people that need to go between those particular terminals each hour. Trying to adjust by running less often just makes things worse because running less often means fewer people yet will find it convenient…running more often makes it less profitable…so you end up like the US and basically don’t bother making routes and stations without enough traffic.
Here’s a few problems with that take:
A) This railway network being discussed is going to be built sixty odd years ago. That is enough time for areas of value to form around the nodes, turning the rail network into an investment into future cities.
B) What is the direct revenue of the US interstate highway network?
No seriously, how much money enters the US budget from the Interstate highways directly? I don’t care about facilitated development n stuff, I care only and purely about the direct revenue. If profitability is the point, or the measure of success of transportation system, then freeways - which are, by definition, free at the point of use - are a terrible return on investment and are better off never built.
Meanwhile, for one, railway is in this interesting position that as you go faster, it becomes more profitable. And for two, if the US were to invest in high speed rail at the level at which it has in highways, then they would probably run it in a way where, similarly to the highway network, availability and service are more important than profit.
C) Nobody commutes from Bumfuck, VA to Nowhere, OR. Even in the US, commuting is a regional affair.
A NYC - Chicago - LA high speed rail is not for those major cities exclusively. It is for all the city pairs of places between those cities. It would chain together decent city pairs with a continuing railway line. NY - Chicago would at least stop in Philly, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Fort Wayne. Many of those appear to be a good rail distance apart. In fact, Chicago and Cleveland are a great distance for HSR. Too far to comfortably drive to do anything in a day before returning, and so close that a flight would still be dominated by stuff on the ground. That is the sweet spot for high speed rail.
D) The US is quite literally built by the railways and bulldozed for the car. Many places in the western half of the contiguous 48 exist because the railroads bought out huge tracts of land to their west, developed some space into towns, and sold that land, now valuable thanks to the connections offered by the rails, to interested buyers. Then shit was torn down because facilitating parking for a small city centre requires about three quarters of the land being dedicated to storing cars. Houston, TX in the '20s had a great city centre. In the '70s, downtown was a parking lot and little has fundamentally changed since.
E) Speaking of land made valuable, the US manages valuable land terribly. Single family housing is notoriously expensive to run, yet it’s practically the only housing being built. Big box stores are fickle and could become worthless to city budgets at the whim if one business, while the same area of multiple small businesses is both more resilient and more financially productive.
Add to that the fact that if a big box store goes out of business, too many US places just leave it there to gather dust while building something new down the road. If land was used more productively, the store would be torn down and the new thing would be built in its place.
All of that is to say that “tHe UsA iS tOo BiG” is restating the problem. You cannot take the problem, put it into different words, and then say that as the gotcha as to why structural problems cannot be solved.
Re: commuting:
The average commute in the US is about 32 km, a distance decently doable by regional train.
However, if we include daily errands, the median distance of any trip is about 6 or 7 km, a distance perfectly manageably by bicycle.
Back to the national scale, it takes a lot of suspension of critical thought to insist that the USA is too big for a nationwide railway network, while never blinking an eye at the fact that a nationwide highway network does exist, despite highways being more expensive to maintain, more energy-intensive to use, slower, harder to electrify & more dependent on specific energy resources, offering much worse capacity in both number of people and tonnes of freight, and uniquely getting worse in experience if/when upgraded to address induced demand.