https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav...
https://www.socialexplorer.com/home/post/the-us-urban-popula...
It’s a battle worth fighting but public transport infrastructure isn’t going to happen overnight and people will need cars that won’t bankrupt them until then.
Never happens on the timescale of the next decade, maybe two. How far along is California high speed rail? When did they start?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail (construction began in 2015 and it won’t be operational until at least 2031, 16 years later) If you break ground today, you won’t see new public infrastructure operational for at least a decade. Brightline light rail was built in Florida and is approaching insolvency, even with 3M riders per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline
We could provide subsidies to move the disadvantaged to major urban cores with public transportation systems, I’d support that. Have to find the funds to do it though. Cheaper than trying to build anything new in the US for sure.
https://dailyyonder.com/half-of-all-rural-counties-are-losin...
https://ecpmlangues.unistra.fr/civilization/geography/map-us...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/poverty-area-measures...
(Where will those bikes, busses, and trains you mention be built? China, as they are 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity)
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
Consider the US has $40T in debt and no will to raise taxes at this time, and therefore no will to spend on public infrastructure projects. Where will the capital come from?
How and when will we start? How many elections need to occur to appropriate funding? How much of the US electorate has to turn over for the right people to be elected to appropriate funding? Until shovels are in the ground, it’s vaporware and dreams.
The mayor of Carmel, IN thought traffic circles were better than intersections and wanted more mixed use development. They have that now, nearly every intersection in the city has been replaced over time as they were due for routine work.
In Detroit they are in the process of building out a 29 mile greenway around the city.
These city level projects are a lot more important than the national ones, when it comes to reducing car traffic in cities and having an impact on people’s most frequent trips.
Seeing this at a local level could inspire more rail connections between cities, which could also come from the private sector. We have already seen a couple examples of this.
For anything funded by the federal government, you’re right. They have a huge mess on their hands, and need to get serious about cleaning it up. They have no business kicking of any major public works projects until that happens (though that has never stopped them in the past). But at a local level, things can still move forward and we are seeing it happen to some extent, though it often still feels more like a hobby than a firm conviction.