cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18626085
If you want an end game for what public transit can look like Europe is a great example. While I don’t think America can ever quite reach that level
Oh Lord.
Well we are having two different conversations then. Because I am from Europe and I travelled a lot. Public transport is horrific. Here I was thinking of a future that is better than the crap that is in Europe but you don’t even expect to reach that level.
I mean I will admit I don’t know a lot about European public transit and it is quite a broad region. I mostly have looked at Amsterdam as that’s the big example people use so when I say America won’t reach that level I’m more referring to how nice it is there. I have visited the UK once and I have step family there and the public transit/trains were nice there to actually have them as options compared to America which often times just doesn’t. When I visited I only visited Newcastle and London so again don’t have a ton of knowledge but in general seemed nice. But from my experience not owning a car in America travel within cities is already starting to get pretty good where I’ve lived and I just wish more cities would invest in it and create high speed rail lines between cities for longer trips.
I’m not going to look too far into it but half of all trips in Netherlands are made by car and 36% in London (which is probably significantly lower than the rest of the country). I don’t see either of those figures significantly changing. Netherlands is wayyyy denser than USA so you won’t even get close to 50% car trips with the Netherlands system.
That’s not to say you should copy what the Dutch do, you should. But it won’t solve the problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_the_Netherlands
