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Train Rule
(midwest.social)
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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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With a few exceptions, US housing is so sprawled out that I don't know how we could do an effective train system. As things presently stand where I live, there's a decent train system, but most people have to travel several miles to get to the nearest station. For many, the park and ride concept works ok, so I suppose that reduces traffic a little bit.
I work in a corridor that lies between two lines with no public transportation anywhere near it.
I guess adding a shiton of buses from residential neighborhoods to train stations would help, but the time that would take would meet with enormous resistance from those who would rather sit in stop and go traffic in the comfort of their giant eighty thousand dollar pickup trucks (in which they are invariably up to their ears in debt)
Under current infrastructure, my twenty minute commute would take over three hours each way on public transportation, and I'd have to be in good enough shape to ride a bike a couple miles to the nearest bus stop, not taking rain snow ice or sweltering summer heat into consideration.
It can be better, but I don't know that it can be ideal as suggested in the OP without compelling several million people to move closer to the city center.
It takes me a good 15 minutes just to walk out of my large subdivision. And then we're outside of city limits and down a country road (there are corn fields), so it would probably take me another half an hour to 45 minutes just to get to a place where a train is feasible, let alone has a station there. And there's no sidewalks.
There's a city bus now. If we wanted to ride it, and we would, it's a 5 mile walk. And crossing a four-lane highway would be required.
I would love a robust U.S. train network, but it wouldn't help me get groceries from the supermarket to my house and I sure as hell wouldn't want to make that walk in the middle of February around here. Cars are just going to be needed in the U.S. for all the people who don't live in cities.
A bike could make that hour-long walk into a 15 minute ride.
This is a wonderful and naive statement. I would die within a week if I tried getting around on a bike. The only bikes I ever see on my commute are set out in memorial of people who died there on the roadside.i have lived in many places where bikes and public transportation were great, but reality is very different in many other places.
I am very much aware. I only intended to highlight that public transport doesn't have to visit every last corner of the suburbs, given proper infrastructure and traffic regulations.
Indeed, that's also partially a problem outside of the US in more rural parts of many countries. If governments made moving closer to the city center more compelling then I'm sure that lots of people would do so naturally with time. But that would require some actual thought, lots of planning, time and money. It's not easy to un-fuck decades of bad city planning, especially in the US with it's myriad of other, connected problems.