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.
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.