Quote from: Nearings Fault on Aug 21, 2023, 04:44 AMI find it impossible to disagree with any of that...
Just to keep things interesting here, I am going to be Politically Incorrect and disagree with one assumption made in the video, which is that if cities had been designed with MOAR public transportation we would have had a better outcome. IMHO, anybody who believes this never lived in a city dependent on public transportation and themselves were carless as they gre up in post WWII Amerika.
NYC had what is arguably the best and most extensive public transportation system of any metropolis in the world, and if you grew up dependent on this system without a car, your life positively sucked. They were crowded, sweaty and smelly during the rush hours getting to or from work, and they ran infrequently or not at all on off hours or overnight. If I was out listening to folk music, discussing the evils of capitalism and drinking at a bar in Greenwich Village until 2AM, it would take until 6AM before I finally made it home waiting for 3 subway lines and a bus to get out to Flushing. Each individual line ran hourly, but according to Murphy's Law at each transfer you always JUST missed the train and had to wait a full hour for the next one.
Even in the best served areas of NYC like Manhattan, your walk from your apt or job to the nearest subway stop was 5 or 6 blocks, about 1/4 mile, which meant if it was rainy & windy by the time you got to your destination you were pretty well soaked, even if you did remember your umbrella. This is like ALWAYS having to park your car at the furthest out parking spots in the Walmart parking lots. Trudging through ankle deep snow and slush in the winter wasn't a whole lot better either. Out in the Boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, the walk to a subway stop was often 1/2 to 1 mile. To get a "Type 3" Free transport car while in HS which allowed you to use BOTH subway and bus lines to get to school, you had to live a minimum of 1.5 miles from the nearest subway stop. I lived 1.3 miles away as the crow flies and at first was issued only a Type 1 pass for the subway to get to Stuyvesant. In my first successful legal appeal, I used a photocopy of the street map for my neighborhood and showed the actual walking distance on the streets was 1.6 miles, and I got my Type 3 pass. :)
Even at top walking speed of 5 mph, 1,6 miles takes more than 20 minutes, but that was sometimes better than the bus which was supposed to run every 30 minutes and not to a very exact schedule. If a driver called in sick, it could be an hour between buses. I often elected to walk just because it was more consistent. This was only a tiny piece of the daily commute, which was followed by 3 subway lines, the #7, the #3 and the LL. The last one ran so poorly I often elected mot to take that also and walk from Union Square, about 1/3rd mile. All together, I was doing good if I made the whole commute in an hour and a half each way.
God forbid you ever need to use public transportation to go shopping for anything bigger than a toaster. Ever try to carry a TV or a set of Bose speakers home on the subway? I did, and I don't recommend it. Even groceries you need to limit to 1 bag. You can do more with a rolling shopping cart, but negotiating the stairs is a challenge.
While subways are probably overall more energy efficient than carz, there is plenty of waste there too. At rush hour when the train is stuffed with homo sap meat packages like a can of sardines, on off hours I often sat by myself in a 40 foot long 20 ton rail car burning fossil fuels to get from point A to point B. They have to run all the time whether there are people on them or not in order for them to be dependable as a means of transportation.
The cost of building true subways which are SUBTERRANEAN and out of sight allowing other activities to go on above is extraordinary. Back at the turn of the century in 1900 when NYC subways were first being built, immigrant labor which dug the underground tunnels came cheap. By the 1960s this was no longer true and "subways" out in brooklyn and queens were put on elevated tracks, just as big an eyesore and neighborhood destructive as elevated highways.
So, in retrospect, I really don't believe that more and better public transportation could have allowed for the growth of the American economy as the expansion of the road system and application of the automobile did. The FSoA is just too big, and while retrofitting cities like Detroit or NYC was a complete disaster, cities out in the midwest which grew in the age of the automobile with ring roads and spoke & hub systems aren't so bad. Indianapolis and Kansas City aren't too bad.
What the carz did do was allow development to spread out over the whole country. By the time the automobile arrived, cities had already developed to so much density of population that movement around in them had become severely limited. People who lived in one neighborhood in NY or London often spent their whole lives there and never left. That's why people from Brooklyn have one accent, people from Queens another. Cockney english is different from King's Cross, etc.
Spreading everything out with the automobile allowed for the unprecedented growth of the Amerikan economy, which of course is not really a good thing since it just ends up burning up more energy and depletinting more resources, but strictly from the economic end Growth = Good. It's the Mantra of Capitalism.
I don't think cities ever would have been more livable with the public transportation systems available at the time than they are with carz. However, if there were EV Self-Driving Flying Cars you could order up on your Iphone App to show up at 2AM to pick you up drunk after the meeting of the Socialist Workers Party listening to Bob Dylan in the Village and flying you home to Flushingin 20 minutes for $1 cab fare, all our problems would be solved! ;D
RE