America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)

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“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation” – Gustavo Petro, Mayor of Bogotá

I think me and my fellow Germans collectively breathed a sigh of relief once you corrected your mistake and removed Bielefeld out of the German cities list. Thank you.

As a European that doesnt even have a driving license (cause public transport works here lmao) whenever Americans say public transit wont work with "small cities" what i actually hear is closer to "we cant have public transit because our zoning laws demand carparks, causing our buildings to be too far apart for any sort of meaningful distance between stops"

Living in the USA I noticed often times people in the suburbs don't want public transport because they believe it attracts "undesited individuals" and violence to their neighborhoods.

I'm from Tampa FL and I always like to point out to people that our old streetcar system from the 20s/30s was more built out and had more ridership than our current bus network of today, and we had 8x less people back then. Yet we can't convince anyone around here that a new light rail system or expanding our "historic" streetcar line that only goes 2.7 miles would be a good idea.

One reason that transit "doesn't work" in many U.S. cities is that the routes are designed to "avoid" the rich neighborhoods and areas of town that don't want transit. For many of the suburbanites transit is supposed to be for "poor people" so they try their best to keep transit systems from coming out as far as where they live. Although that has changed to some degree it is still part of the mindset of many people.

One of the things that pop out when travelling in Japan is that the train station and the immediate surroundings are a destination in itself: There are always vibrant commercial areas both inside and outside the stations full of places to shop, eat and drink - and then safely take the train home.

Mad respect from Germany for the Bielefeld joke. Got me almost crying of laughter especially as I live where this rumor of Bielefeld not existing started.

The need for more trains is not biased at all, steel on steel is where it's at 🤘

I'm so old that I learned about the Bielefeld conspiracy from the Usenet.

There is one other problem that needs to be discussed: even when "mixed use walkable neighborhoods" are built most of the commercial occupancy is taken up by cafes, bars, restaurants and galleries. These are great to visit but lack essential services. The commercial locations need to be more practical like bodegas, groceries, butchers, hardware stores, etc. There are several "mixed use walkable neighborhoods" in my general area but because all the commercial sites are impractical, many of the residential units go unrented or those who do live there still require a car.

Everyone in Jena (Germany, 100k inhabitants) uses the tram. It's awesome, and during rush hours you can hop on every 5 minutes. The city features 5 tram lines. Which are reduced to 2 at night. But the 2 at night still service the whole city. It just takes longer to get home. But I also think it's a mindset: In Europe the children are allowed to walk to school, and the schools are all accessable by foot and it is encouraged by teachers and government to let children walk (alone!) to school.

the fact that just the "smaller" german cities alone already pretty beat the numbers of tram lines in all of north america is quite fascinating

I’m a small developer in the Midwest and love this channel. I decided in college I wanted to devote my life to actually creating affordable housing rather than just debating it. I build these compact 900ft 3b/2ba unit 6-plexes (similar to early 1900 brownstones). And it is always a massive battle to get municipalities to approve them. Cities want suburban sprawl with single family housing. It’s depressing, some days I think we will never learn. Your channel is doing the lords work.

So, here's the same topic seen from another perspective. When I moved from the suburbs of Montreal, Canada to Hamburg Germany, I was amazed by how different it felt to take the regional train. In Montreal, when I looked out the window, it was miserable: all I could see were industrial lots or highways. Compared that to Hamburg, where I could see the city. I was amazed by the amount of interesting places I saw and I knew that if I wanted to go there, I likely would need to get off at the next step. The trains took me to interesting places in the city. In Montreal, getting to the train station required a car. Which meant the station was typically located in the middle of a huge parking lot.

You've reminded me of something that happened in southern England in the 20s and 30s. The Southern Railway bought up large plots of farmland (hundreds of acres) at carefully chosen spots along their railway lines running from London to the South Coast. They then built stations in the middle of these plots, and sold off the plots to developers who built houses, shops, schools, pubs and so on, with roads radiating out from the station - and they had most trains stopping at those new stations. That meant that, right from the start, the railway had thousands of potential passengers within ten minutes walk of the station, who could catch a train direct into the middle of London to go to work, and at weekends, hop on a train to go down to the coast for the day. The roads didn't get clogged with traffic, because people living that close to the station didn't need them. When the towns grew to a point where the outlying homes were a bit far to walk to the town centre, bus companies started routes radiating out from the railway stations, going out the edge of town. Result? EVERYBODY was a winner!

What's wild to me is that this isn't the norm. I grew up in Portland, I can quite literally get to any where in the entire portland metro area by one bus/max. If I do need to transfer, it's only once. Every bus and max runs every 15 minutes and late into the night, usually til 2-3am. Because of this I don't have a license nor a car, I have never needed one. Every time I visited Vancouver, Canada it was the same up there. My reality check was when I visited Seattle and realized "wow, this absolutely sucks and these lines make no sense. This one takes me 40 minutes out of my way and doesn't show up for 30 minutes, this one doesn't run for an hour randomly in the middle of the day for no reason, what gives?" Then I went to LA and realized Seattle's public transit is good in comparison. That's when I first started hearing people talking about public transit like it's just for poor people which is insane because no one talks about it like that here. I'd like to say Portland and Vancouver are ahead of the curve but they're not, the rest of NA is just behind most wealthy nations in this regard.

It's just wild to me that London Ontario is considered "too small" for public transport. I live in a city with 350,000 people, with a medieval city centre that can't accommodate any buses (which means getting to the city centre is a pain in the ass), and we still have 20 city bus lines, 14 regional bus lines, 3 tram lines, 4 dedicated rush hour bus lines, and 7 train stations.

When you mentioned about the towns being "too small" for the tram and subway systems, Nuremberg came to the mind. Nuremberg was too small to have the subway system when the idea was proposed in the 1960s. Yet, Nuremberg went ahead and built the three-line subway system. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise because the city centre is much more thriving and popular today without the countless trams and buses rumbling through the shopping district all day long. The daily ridership is about 400,000 on the average, which is almost the same number of residents within Nuremberg city limit. When Dallas and Denver were battling to get the tram network built, one argument was that nobody would ever ride them. Upon the launches in 1996 and 1994 respectively, both tram network has higher than anticipation demand and ridership. Denver paid Siemens extra fee to have the trams delivered sooner. This convinced the Denver area residents to vote for FasTrack, a further expansion of tram and commuter train network.