We share the same goals (except for electric cars needing to take over - they do, but the real issue is that public mass transit needs to take over!), but the methods / the lengths Elon Musk is willing to go to in pursuit of those goals are disturbing to many people.

I don't think public mass transit will take over in the US in my lifetime, outside major cities. We're just too spread out, and a lot of us, especially people with kids, like it that way. Mass transit absolutely, positively does not work in the US if you have at least one child.

> Mass transit absolutely, positively does not work in the US if you have at least one child.

Kind of a confusing statement. Sure the current state doesn't work in the US, which is because it isn't designed to work and there is little to no investment or money spent on public transit. You can know that this is factually true by looking at your state department of highways budgets and examining how funds are allocated.

It does work in other countries, including countries that have parents with children. There is no logistical or cost-based reason it won't or couldn't work in the US. Nothing special about "spread out" - which is another choice we intentionally make or the size of the country. It's also mostly untrue since most of the population in the US lives in urban areas. Suburban areas can just continue to grow as is and become more dense while preserving SFHs.

_Transit_ is not what needs to change first. Infrastructure (stores, schools, daycares, hospitals, offices) needs to change before mass transit is even feasible. And that needs to be built out over an extended period of time, like 15-20 years, to have good coverage. This is particularly hard to grasp for someone who has never lived in Europe, which I have. So we “invest” in mass transit which (at least in my neck of the woods) almost nobody uses because it’s 10 minute drive to the grocery store and 15 minute drive to school, and both of those numbers triple or quadruple without a car. And now consider your kids extracurriculars, like swim team or something. And now consider having 2-3 kids. Cars are here to stay. To refrain from improving them would be like not doing anything about energy generation until we have fusion, which probably also won’t happen in my lifetime

> Infrastructure (stores, schools, daycares, hospitals, offices) needs to change before mass transit is even feasible. And that needs to be built out over an extended period of time, like 15-20 years, to have good coverage.

It's a chicken and egg problem in the end. A government has it easier to just dump funds for 10-20 years onto public transit subsidies (and provide the guarantee to the third parties you mention that any investment they make isn't going to be in vain) than if it convinces and pays off all these third parties to change before there is a viable public transit system.

In much of the US you can’t even build places people would need to walk to within walkable distance, due to zoning. A bus which takes 30 minutes to take you to the grocery store is barely any better than no public transportation at all. I haven’t used public transportation even once in the last 15 years. I sometimes check how long it’d take to get to the places I need to be however. Grocery store trip turns from 9 minutes into 36 each way. Going to work takes 25 minutes by car or an hour and a half by bus, each way. Dropping off my kid at his soccer practice? 8 vs about half an hour, each way. Idk where you people live that you think spending 3 hours daily on a bus is feasible or desirable, let alone logistically possible.

Cities in those countries, for the most part, were built around public transit. As a result, navigating by car is difficult and sometimes costly.

Retrofitting public transit into a city designed for cars at that same scale is unbelievably expensive before the costs of changing public opinion are factored in.

I say this as someone who dislikes what suburbs have become and would _love_ to see public transit proliferate throughout the US.

Where I live I’m Columbus I can still see the trolly tracks lining my streets. Buildings were torn down to pave over for parking lots. There is not this extensive retrofit that needs to occur for many American cities, it just needs to be funded.

In my home state of Ohio and in my home town we are spending a billion dollars to build a new ramp and make some other changes to a highway that was built well after the city was founded to make it “easier” for car traffic. We have the money. We are just choosing to spend it only on car infrastructure.

I do agree about public opinion though. But fortunately attitudes amongst millennials and Gen Z seem to be strongly in favor of better transit and more dense development patterns.

Where I live I'm Sam Houston ;)

The city named after me was also founded (1836) purposefully on undeveloped land and planned from the beginning to become an urban center and territory capital.

Within 3 decades of when Columbus got going, so I would have to say they both have a downtown layout that was originally designed for horses and horse-powered vehicles to begin with. And to accommodate a lot more horses in the future than there were in the area at the time.

Plus think of the gig workers. I can only imagine one of the blocks where people are waiting for an Uber today, is where early residents were once waiting for a Wells-Fargo coach. Once the Wells-Fargo startup was able to leverage being online 24/7, at your local telegraph office ;)

Streetcars came in the late 1800's and I would expect tracks were laid on what could be considered thoroughfares.

There was probably quite a bit of urban character by then and a good chance it was the rapid transit offered by the march of technology, rather than the mass transit aspect that was most appreciated by the riders. Houston already had horse-powered "buses" before this.

Next thing you know, a few decades later there's Model T's and you can really save tonnes of animal feed while helping the environment (at the time) at the same time. They all shared the roads even if it was not all horses and pedestrians as intended any more.

After years of mass-production, it would be like cars are reproducing faster than horses and taking over the place, car owners would have growing influence. Plus if for some reason older mass-transit hardware were deteriorating at a faster rate than the payer could justify reversing, there would be increasing incentive to eventually throw in the towel and let people drive themselves around.

It could happen ;)

Technology marches on but the mainstream beats the most heavily-trodden path.

Thankfully technology continues to march on, and the march of progress will continue to free us from being required to buy cars instead of starting new companies.

> Mass transit absolutely, positively does not work in the US if you have at least one child.

Here in Munich, one of the densest cities in Europe, I took the subway alone at age 7. There's nothing preventing US kids from doing the same with a bus, no matter if driven by a human or by some sort of autonomous system - except that US infrastructure at large is completely focused on cars and has zero respect for anyone not in the safety shell of a car, so it will be a challenge for a kid to even get to a bus stop safely.

But that can change, even in the matter of a few years. All it needs is the political will, a bit of funding, and in larger cities to get the homeless and drug addicts in safe housing or, for those incompatible with society for mental health reasons, into institutions.

Note that Munich itself is built for this. You can’t drop a bus line into an existing layout and expect that it’ll magically work. Which is what most mass transit projects in the US seem to be attempting to do. IOW it’s not even _transit itself_ that makes this feasible in Europe. It’s how they build the rest of their spaces.

It's unfortunate that this is the exact strategy that many politicians and government people default to.

"We got $200M in federal money for improving transportation. Let's spend $50M on it adding a station to this light rail we built 20 years ago to win federal money _that_ time and spend $150M on adding five miles of express lanes to the interstate."

Perfect example. I lived in Dallas for five years. Denton, a city about 45 miles north of downtown Dallas, operates this "commuter rail" line called the A-Train. This line has existed since 2006.

Denton is one of the biggest college towns in Texas. It has two of the biggest universities in Texas (TWU, UNT).

The A-Train doesn't stop at _either college_.

The A-Train also doesn't stop anywhere near where people actually live unless you live in downtown Denton (few people do). So, to use it, you have to drive (or take the DCTA bus, which, lol, don't) to a station to take this train which terminates...

...about 20 miles from downtown Dallas. You need to connect in Carrollton (a station you _definitely_ have to drive to) to take the Dallas Area Regional Transit train, which has a larger network (that still doesn't bring you anywhere you want to go, at least not directly)

The entire system was set up this way because the A-Train runs along one of the busiest segments of Interstate 35E. It runs up this segment because that's where the pre-existing rail was.

This segment is 8 miles.

That rail network goes ALL THE WAY UP TO KANSAS AND ALL THE WAY DOWN TO GALVESTON.

So, to summarize, two of the biggest cities in Texas have a commuter rail that connects them, on a relatively super small segment of rail that was already laid down, but takes passengers to stations where they will need a car to complete their trip.

Oh, and the A-Train only has, like, six stations, operates every 30 minutes between 0600 and 2200 on weekdays and every hour on Saturday, and is closed on Sunday because Texas.

The crazy part about this is that DESPITE ALL OF THIS, this is _still_ better than the *zero* rail service we have in Houston (the biggest and most populated city in Texas).

_This_ is why public transit is an incredibly hard problem to solve here. It will take billions and billions of dollars to _just_ develop DART, Houston's METRO and Austin's Capital into anything closely resembling a real public transit network. Most folks will just vote for a new stadium or more lanes to get stuck in.

(The kicker? I just learned that a section of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas network that the A-Train rides on in Houston was scrapped in 1998 to become...part of Katy Freeway, the 12+ lane monstrosity that absolutely completely fills up every rush hour like clockwork.)