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Yeah. America isn’t the world.
Plenty of countries have functioning public transport.
America is not the exception, you can survive without cars.
They say, as I know people in the midwest who commute 1.5 hours each way to the city for their job and then turn around and drive home. I have a friend who lives in a town of no shit, 400 people.
There's no bus that goes there. It's 30 miles from the nearest "city" of 15,000, and he works another 20 miles past that.
You can survive without cars
Sure, they'll just not eat, not work, and not do anything. Dude I'm all for urbanization and adding mass transit, but you're going to be hard pressed to add rail routes or even bus routes to not just that one town of 400, but all the other thousands of tiny towns. Hell even the town of 15,000 doesn't have a rail route. Hell even the state capital is missing a rail route. Let alone commuter options.
I'm not saying America is an exception, I'm saying you're naive for thinking your one opinion will work for everyone, and that the problem is more nuanced then you understand.
That's why I brought up Cali HSR. It's been over a decade of planning and building that, and that's connecting two of the largest cities in the country, and you're just casually saying "Just build it everywhere". Like yes we want that too, but the realities of building that would be centuries of work.
Only the wealthy, tiny almost pointless to consider ones. Poor Countries and large Countries have no such infrastructure.
China has tons of it.
So does Russia.
Japan isn’t “small” (it’s the length of California) and has tons of it.
The EU is pretty big and all interconnects.
Size isn’t the issue. It certainly hasn’t prevented us from paving half our country.
China is unmovable by vehicle at all such that their failure of a mass transit system is trying busses on stilts.
Japan is tiny. I mean very tiny minuscule area of land.
Most of EU has no such thing. You are assuming it EU is Germany, France, and Belgium. PS, all the actual Countries (which EU isn't one) in the EU are tiny.
Size is a factor in cost and that is the real reason most Countries have no such thing as viable mass transit for the majority of their citizens. Paving sold cars and cars made corporations lots of money. Mass transit does the opposite and is thus objected to by same corpos.China has a working HSR system connecting all their major cities. The fact that their population scale is so massive means they also try weird shit to get what they can.
Japan is very narrow but it’s also very long. The actual amount of miles a train much cover from one end to the other is very large.
Yes the EU is not one country (though it is a polity). That should make it harder, not easier to cover it with rail, and yet there’s rail lines connecting all the major cities crossing national borders. Does the “size” counter reset once you cross a line on the map?
It’s not the size, it’s the political organization. You even hint at this when describing how we paved America: the political and economic configuration was aligned to make it happen despite the massive cost. The USA was crisscrossed by passenger rail and street cars, and still is for cargo. We just took a different path later, but it doesn’t actually have to be that way.
Absolutely doesn't, and we should push them to bring back rail, but that will take a very very long time to build. Even major cities are missing rail links, they would need huge infrastructure to add it there, and then smaller links for the teeny tiny towns. We should do both - invest in good public transit, and also embrace stopgap measures.
We can both say "EVs are the solution for now" and also do things like "No new lanes will be added unless rail is considered first"
Public transit is cheaper and more accessable. It would be quite easy to make it profitable. Private transportation is more expensive both on the production side and infrastructure side. The auto industry did a lot of scummy shit in order to make it profitable. In the US, they bought up and shut down just about every public transport corp in order to force the public to buy cars and force the state to build infrastructure.