And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient, if you can afford to use it. (That load-bearing "if" is important, though.)
Point-to-point transportation is faster and more convenient because:
1. we don't have bus lanes so buses are forced to sit in the same traffic as cars and 2. buses are often underfunded so have slow/infrequent service.
Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right. I can count on my fingers the number of times I used an Uber or drove a car in the 1 month that I stayed in Europe - this was going out every day, in multiple cities, rural and urban, and across different countries.
This is a good thing! If more people use public transit when it's possible, it opens up the roads for the handful of people who actually NEED to use a car.
If you have enough density to justify a bus lane, you have enough density to justify a subway.
That assumes a linear city, where everyone lives within a short walking distance of the same street.
In actual cities, bus lines from different neighborhoods converge on main streets. While individual lines may have 10–15 minute intervals, bus traffic on the main streets may be high enough to justify dedicated bus lanes.
Then, as the city grows, it can make sense to replace the bus lanes with light rail and direct bus lines with collector lines connecting to the rail line. Which should be cheap, as a dedicated lane is usually the most expensive part in building light rail.
But you generally want to avoid building subways until you have no other options left. Subway lines tend to be an order of magnitude more expensive than light rail lines. Travel times are also often higher, as the distances between stops are longer and there is more walking involved.
Not at all. Building a subway in most US cities right now is very expensive. Raising the tax revenue alone is probably a non-starter.
Moreover you're going to have to close the road down anyway to do any form of cut-and-cover or even deep bore construction, which means every business on the corridor and every person who lives on it is going to get angry for as long as the subway is being built.
There's no painless way to do infill public transport. The problem is that nobody in the US is willing to compromise.
This is true but seems like a problem worth solving. It's also true of more than subways; we have the same problem with bridges, housing and many other things. Better to get on with fixing it than use it as an excuse for doing something worse.
> Moreover you're going to have to close the road down anyway
That's a one-time cost, and you're not required to close a 500 mile stretch of road for years on end. Dig one block, install the tunnel, cover it, dig the next block.
IMO it comes back to the fact that Americans are just not willing to accept change of any kind right now. The economy feels too shaky, the electorate too divided (even within states and municipalities), and there's too little faith in government to architect the kind of change you'd need to build subways, underground metros, or even BRT. We need a larger feeling of unity even at a state level to make the changes necessary, which is why municipalities continue to do bare minimum maintenance of roadways and pretty much nothing else. The last big set of constriction in dense urban areas was funded by the Obama stimulus from the GFC which was passed 17 years ago.
Only if you're also intentionally making point-to-point worse.
Note that I'm not comparing to "get in your own car and drive", which has the disadvantage of having to park. I'm comparing the ideal taxi-shaped thing to the ideal bus-and-tram-and-train-shaped thing.
I'd suspect most car trips today are 1 or 2 passengers with the back seat and trunk empty; we'll eventually see new form factors of on-demand vehicle that trim off unneeded space. If you need to get from A to B alone, no cargo to speak of, you order a ride that covers that class and it's small. If you're taking a shuttle from the airport with your whole family and luggage, you order a ride with those specs.
(Also, tunnels are useful not just for the increase in traffic, but for moving car traffic away from non-car traffic, which makes both kinds of traffic safer, faster, and more efficient.)
They make even more sense if they are a bit larger and can accommodate multiple people at once. Something like a large van or small bus.
Even the rush hour traffic is trivially solved by mild carpooling (small vans for 4-6 people).
We're talking about cities, of course; in rural areas, nothing beats cars.
This is a false argument. Think about this: a bus every 10 minutes is effectively 500-900 meters long! It easily "takes" as much space as 100+ cars. In other words, nothing would change from the traffic perspective if instead of 1 bus every 5 minutes, you had 100 individual cars.
The "people in the shape of a bus" argument makes sense only when you're talking about the performance in a very narrow case of transporting people in a steady, uninterrupted stream of buses. Or if you need to size your traffic bottlenecks.
Moreover, a bus route necessarily is unoptimal for at least some people on a bus. They are effectively "thicker" than other people because they take up more "effective space". But wait, there's more! Buses also necessarily move slower due to stops, so the "effective length" of a bus becomes even longer because cars will clear the road faster.
But wait, there's even more! A single bus needs about 3 drivers to be effective. So with the average daily busload of around 15 people, you have almost 20% of the bus taken by the drivers on average. This makes bus trips pretty expensive. Not quite to the level of Uber/Lyft, but surprisingly close.
And these problems are fundamental. That's why urbanists like NJB don't like to talk about that.
Where I grew up in NW Scotland, it's a five hour round trip to go to the supermarket. You pretty much need a car for that.
Where I live right now it's a five minute walk to the supermarket, but I still need a car because the things I work on are a long way from where I live, often up steep muddy mountain tracks.
When I lived in the middle of Glasgow people used to come up and have a go at me about driving a massive V8 4x4 in the middle of a city. What am I supposed to do with it? Bike to the suburbs and then go and drive up a mountain?
"But why not get a job where you don't need to drive hundreds of miles in a massive 4x4?"
Because then the things on the tops of mountains don't get fixed when they break, and the radios don't work properly, and then people like you die in a fire.
Sometimes it's hard for people to grasp that just because their not-really-a-job tapping numbers into an Excel spreadsheet all day can be done from home or from an easily walkable city centre location, it doesn't mean that everyone's job looks like that.
I do wish I could usefully use a cargo bike. Those things are awesome.
We just want there to be viable public transportation options for situations where it makes sense. This even makes it easier for the people who do have to drive, like you, as there will be less congestion because a single bus can replace literally dozens of cars, combine that with a single tram and a single metro car and you're replacing literally hundreds of cars that would otherwise be on the roads instead.