> Traffic fatalities would fall nearly to 0 if we made all speed limits 25mph.
You're saying it as if it's a bad thing. Nah, it would be great (with some exceptions that can be addressed). It would encourage ubiquitous and efficient public transport.
Consider moving to Switzerland then. Not only they're discussing an universal 30km/h (18mph) limit in urban areas, but some cities are also tweaking traffic lights to maximise stopped time on top of that.
I live in a 30kmph zone in Switzerland and it works fine. I'm not sure what the problem is.
It's a really common speed limit in Europe/UK and is suitable for residential city streets. On Geoguesser I have seen similar US streets that are 40mph which looks completely unsafe.
Switzerland has 1/2 the population of New Jersey. Are the accomplishments in public transportation because the Swiss have solved some fundamental issues that no one else possibility could, a truly amazing feat that the world should look to? Or do certain things work better under certain conditions, and it's pretty much the exact same thing everyone does that doesn't scale?
> Are the accomplishments in public transportation because the Swiss have solved some fundamental issues that no one else possibility could, a truly amazing feat that the world should look to?
Loads of other countries also have great public transportation, especially when the current state of the USA is what’s being compared against. Possibly including the USA itself before cars got going.
> Or do certain things work better under certain conditions, and it's pretty much the exact same thing everything that probably doesn't scale?
The thing which public transport needs to be good at scaling is passengers per hour per land area.
In this regard, approximately all public transport — bus, light rail, heavy rail, tram, ferry, underground — scales better than cars.
This is why the Swiss built them, as all those steep hillsides and valleys already have houses in them, and tunnels (regardless of if they’re road or rail) are expensive.
Seriously, why does this trope of saying “oh America can’t possibly, it’s such a big country” even exist, when the USA also has a road network despite being big and those roads are themselves generally much wider than Europe’s roads? It’s not like public transport is some special magic category that’s different from all the civil infrastructure the USA already makes, the only difference seems to be that “public” is a dirty word.
The real answer is that the US doesn't want public transit. I visited a rustbelt town several years ago, and a new mall had been sited specifically so that it would not be on the bus network: being accessible to the people who ride the bus was considered a liability for the businesses that would rent space in the mall.
More recently I visited a much nicer midwestern town which is planning an expansion of its bus network amd optimizing traffic lights for better bus flow. There is a new mall on the bus line. The difference is that 95% of bus riders in this second town are upper middle class college students.
To flip the argument: ok-to-good public transport is an Europe-wide thing. US is what, 2/3 of the population? Why don’t we ask if US needs to grow for public transport to scale?
Ah yes, because that’s the wrong dimension in the first place. Population density is the one that matters.
At the same time our government wants to increase the cost of public transportation [1] with the age old argument that it is too expensive compared to the cost of individual transportation.
While I don't have the numbers to analyze the costs it just doesn't make sense to me that a car with a single driver can be more cost effective than a bus, tram or train I guess the automobile lobby has convinced loads of my colleagues that individual transportation is price-comparable to public transport, even in Switzerland...
> doesn't make sense to me that a car with a single driver can be more cost effective than a bus, tram or train
This is a fascinating area to research. Of course there are trade-offs to model including a few such as: price of person's time waiting for next bus, time to go all around the mulberry bush instead of point to point, and hassles and personal safety in public places.
It would also make it take twice as long to drive from a ranch in Summer Lake, Oregon to the local grocery store in Lakeview to get groceries.
Some large swaths of the United States don't have public transit because of the expanse and also because of the use cases. People in the cities rely on people in these rural areas to grow food, so its not like you could wish everyone into the cities and solve the problem.
You're saying it as if it's a bad thing. Nah, it would be great (with some exceptions that can be addressed). It would encourage ubiquitous and efficient public transport.