I will push back there. Automobiles rarely pay the cost for their transportation infrastructure. Some of the roads are good, some are bad, some are congested some are clear. The populations adjust their life around the infrastructure not the other way around. Since the streets are already free, for public transit to compete in any way, it also ought to be free... we should expect people to adjust to ideal public transit living locations for the exact same reason.
Most Americans would probably not feel safe biking for their commute. Our bike infrastructure is patchy and insufficient to provide sufficient separation and protection from massive speeding tons of steel.
I lived for over thirty years in the United States, but mostly stopped biking there. Now I bike everywhere.
I agree with everything you say but you're missing a key point - the active hostility that a significant number of drivers have for bikes.
I biked in Canada for ten years, and drivers there (at the time) were mostly indifferent to bikes.
(And yet I say this, and then I remember that one of Canada's rising bike stars at the time was permanently paralyzed by a driver who had repeated tried to force him off the road before (in his small community) and who had been reported to the police many times for it, and yet suffered no penalty other than a temporary license suspension. This was in the early 80s, and I haven't thought about it in 30 years, but I still feel a rush of rage.)
Now I live in the Netherlands, and cars are actively solicitous of bikes. Let me tell you that the center of Amsterdam has a lot of cobblestone streets with no separation between bikes and cars, not even a line on the street, but (nearly all) the cars treat cyclists as if they are delicate and breakable, which is actually the case.
I mean, that could trivially be changed by waving a magic "this section of the road is for bikes" wand. We feel unsafe on bikes because there are too many streets designed for cars and too few for bikes. Switch out 10% of streets effectively for bikes only and you'll suddenly see people biking.
It's literally happening in SF, Minneapolis, Portland, and NYC. Caring about the Overton window is a concern for people who don't actually want to change anything ever.
The amount of lane-miles dedicated to bikes in NYC is <1%. At the rate bike lanes are currently built in NYC it would take centuries to reach anywhere in the 10% neighborhood.
Cyclists keep getting promised the world around the country. I’ll believe it when I see it.
I didn't find the distinction in the Wikipedia article, but in the US "public transit" is commonly used to refer to local transit options and "trains" usually refer to intercity travel.
Right, while in the uk with much higher density of towns and train stations, people also use them for local travel to get into town or one town over. The extreme case is something like a million people use trains to commute into London every day, with another million or so on each of bus and Tube (subway).
>* Users of the highway passenger transportation system paid significantly greater amounts of money to the federal government than their allocated costs in 1994-2000. <https://web.archive.org/web/20170628114204/http://www.rita.d...> This was a result of the increase in the deficit reduction motor fuel tax rates between October 1993 and September 1997, and the increase in Highway Trust Fund fuel tax rates starting in October 1997.
>* School and transit buses received positive net federal subsidies over the 1990-2002 period, but autos, motorcycles, pickups and vans, and intercity buses paid more than their allocated cost to the federal government.
>* On average, highway users paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles to the federal government over their highway allocated cost during 1990-2002.)
US highways literally the least of anyone's concern. They are totally sensible even if we had walkable/bikeable cities.
The real costs are tied up in surface roads and what lies underneath them. Repaving, sewer, cable, electricity, drainage... all that stuff has to be replaced regularly, and when it does, it's a massive subsidy from the people who don't drive cars on those roads, to the people who live or drive heavy trucks on them.
Building efficient transit systems and moving away from the most inefficient system, that also happens to kill 100 people every day will make people's lives better.
Which is why public transportation needs heavy investment now.
It is much better for 80% of the people living today and 100% of the people living 50 years from now who will be dealing with the devastation caused by our CO2 emissions.
The claim I'm responding to is that, rather than making heavy investments to adapt transit infrastructure to people's lives, people should just adapt their lives around the transit infrastructure we have.
...because we let them for some reason, because public transit is for "other people" in america. We don't allow camping on the road, because it's what we expect people to use. Other countries don't allow public transit to be treated like shit because most people use it.
The vast vast majority of street damage comes from heavy trucks. Cars and light trucks likely do pay for their road usage (a car causes something like 1/10000th the wear as a tractor trailer).
If there is no per-mile fare, then there is no incentive not to use the road. Using gasoline as a proxy does not charge the people using complex and expensive overpasses more than people using surface streets.
There is no incentive to minimize construction and maintenance costs at all. No pay-as-you-go model like busses and trains have.
