This is not true in my experience, Seattle has a pretty solid bus system and we still felt like we were having to plan around them even though they generally would stop every 15 minutes. You could not count on them 100% either. Occasionally they just don't show up.
For trains that is great but you still have to get to/from the trains. Heck even bus stops require a 5-10 minute walk some times. So it's the walk to the bus stop, planning if the bus doesn't show up, the transit time which could include a lot of stops, and so forth. It really adds up to a lot of time lost.
Seattle has a pretty good bus system for the US but a pretty mediocre one globally.
When we talk about “frequent enough” 15 minutes is an eternity, honestly it is the bare minimum for what could be considered frequent.
Frequent is every 5-6 minutes. I’ve had commutes where the headway was 2 minutes. It doesn’t matter if the train/bus is late or doesn’t show up at that point.
There is this really strange mythology that persists around this. America is not built on small towns or cities any more than other countries, in fact it is generally much less so.
80% of the US population lives in urbanized areas. [0]
Your citation is counting towns, but that doesn’t reflect the way Americans actually live, and if you think about it, that makes sense, the US can’t have millions of million plus cities. City population size is going to follow some sort of geometric/power law distribution.
To answer your question, no one is advocating banning all cars outright.
If you looked at the article I referenced, only 40% of the population lives in cities larger than 50k (census.gov). I'd imagine it is a bit less than that if you look at cities over 500k which are still small in comparison (and would struggle with the public infrastructure being proposed here).
Urban could mean anything and is not defined in the wikipedia article explicitly ("definition needed"). The article even says it's changing constantly. So it's not very useful when they give %'s without even saying what it means.
Edit: Whether these boundaries are arbitrary or not is irrelevant as that is the tax base paying. Also the MSAs are defined as 10k or above. That's a really small tax base for such large infrastructure. Even my city of 250k would struggle a LOT providing any level of service like you are talking about. You need a 1M+ metro area to even consider it, and then providing full coverage is going to be difficult.
That’s because municipal boundaries are arbitrary, and a poor way to analyze human settlement patterns. Most of those small cities still lie within larger metro areas.
Don’t be disingenuous, that was never my point. As stated in my other comment, 223/331 million people lived in metro areas over 500k as of the last census, aka 67%. most people live in reasonably large cities.
>Whether these boundaries are arbitrary or not is irrelevant as that is the tax base paying.
I’d recommend you look a bit deeper into how public transit is funded, because this is patently false. The largest transit agency in the us, the NY MTA is a state agency. Public transit systems are generally funded by a combination of federal, state and local funding, often that local funding is a county or some other metropolitan transit funding district.
>You need a 1M+ metro area to even consider it, and then providing full coverage is going to be difficult.
Easy example of a city that has good public transit and is less than 1 million: Bern, metro population of 660k (just checked google maps and saw multiple bus routes with ten minute or less headways, along tram and trains networks).
Oh so you have to steal from the surrounding communities to support your urban utopia. Got it. What if they need funds too from the state?
I don't think you can compare the U.S. to Germany. Germany has like 6x to 7x the population density and is a much smaller country.
Edit: Generally state funded projects benefit everyone in the state, including the interstate system. A local transit project that only affects one city not so much.
This is not true in my experience, Seattle has a pretty solid bus system and we still felt like we were having to plan around them even though they generally would stop every 15 minutes. You could not count on them 100% either. Occasionally they just don't show up.
15 minutes isn't frequent enough if you live a block or so away from the bus stop, but it's pretty damn frequent if you live on the same road as the bus stop. If they can figure out how to make buses that aren't loud enough to wake the dead then I'll change my mind.
BTW I'm talking about diesel buses and electric trolley-buses. They're all loud.
They should ask Berlin for advice. I've got a tram like right outside my window, and the trams are only audible right before the rails get ground back into shape; busses pass me regularly and I don't notice unless I'm looking.
The sirens from the emergency vehicles on the other hand, those are probably part of the reason why I'm tired all the time.
Emergency sirens being so loud is an unfortunate consequence of how good sound isolation is in contemporary cars.
Unfortunately I don’t know of an easy solution to this. Perhaps vehicles should be required to rebroadcast emergency sirens internally? Or maybe it will solve itself when electric cars reduce road noise.
That's not a good public transit. Personally I wouldn't consider any city in the US to have good public transit. Traveling around in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai for instance, I never even look at the train schedule unless it's very late at night (to make sure I can catch the last train).
Buses typically aren't frequent enough except on the most popular routes to just turn up without planning. Subways / light rail systems usually are frequent enough.
For trains that is great but you still have to get to/from the trains. Heck even bus stops require a 5-10 minute walk some times. So it's the walk to the bus stop, planning if the bus doesn't show up, the transit time which could include a lot of stops, and so forth. It really adds up to a lot of time lost.