> there's only one, maybe two or three cities in the US with good public transportation.
NYC's is, as you say, old and decrepit, but its coverage is pretty good. I don't think it's the best system in the US, however. I lived in Boston for some time; the T was better than NYC's system. I have visited Portland, and at least when I visited, its system was better than NYC's.
> Many European cities have decent systems
I have visited both London and Paris, and both of their systems were comparable to the T in Boston when I lived there in terms of coverage and usability.
I have not visited any cities in East Asia, but I can easily see their systems being better since those countries have made huge investments in that kind of infrastructure.
> You say that Americans have the ability to choose, but that's really not true
By your logic nobody has the ability to choose. Nobody has access to all of the possibilities. So using that as the standard for "ability to choose", which is what you are doing, is pointless.
I could just as well say you don't have the ability to choose anything but a city with public transportation, because that's all that even appears to be on your radar.
> The infrastructure that exists
Is, at least in America, determined by the choices of ordinary people in the past. And choices ordinary people make now will end up causing changes in the infrastructure that exists.
Sure, maybe nowhere in America meets your personal standard for "good public transportation", but why should I care? I have a reasonable spectrum of alternatives open to me and I choose the one that suits me best. I don't waste time agonizing over alternatives that might exist elsewhere but are not accessible to me. Most Americans are the same way. So, I suspect, are most people everywhere, even if what alternatives are reasonably available can vary widely in different parts of the world. Maybe that's a problem for you, but it's not a problem for me, and I suspect it's not a problem for most people everywhere, and I don't see why it should be.
The way you define Americans making a choice sounds a lot like a simple hill climbing algorithm. Once you're on the path of your nearest hill you're stuck there until conditions change, even if you can see a mountain in the distance you would have our whole society ignore it and stay on our little hill? That's why China is and will continue lapping us at transportation. Yes you should care, or at least be able to expect someone to care, or at LEAST not try to talk someone who does care out of it.
>I don't waste time agonizing over alternatives that might exist elsewhere but are not accessible to me.
But you're happy to waste time arguing against them?
Not at all. There is no such thing in a landscape that is changing on time scales that are visible to people, as our societies are. You can't stay stuck on a local maximum if the landscape changes it out from under you. You have to keep reconsidering things.
> you're happy to waste time arguing against them?
The (pretty limited) time I have spent posting in this discussion has not been wasted. I'm having fun.
You can get tightly boxed into one solution. In the US, car culture has caused a fundamental transformation of cities, which makes it extremely difficult to reintroduce public transit. Roads are very wide and there are massive parking lots everywhere, so it's difficult to reorient cities towards walking and public transit. You would have to eliminate those huge parking lots and reduce the number and size of roads in city centers, but because everyone already owns one or two cars, most people are dead-set against such changes.
There is another local optimum, which is extensive public transit and walkable city centers. I'd argue that that other local optimum is far preferable, but transitioning there is very difficult.
But because the vast majority of Americans have only ever been exposed to one solution, they have no idea if they would prefer the alternative. That's my point.
> the vast majority of Americans have only ever been exposed to one solution
I disagree. It may be that the vast majority of Americans have never been exposed to your particular preferred solution, but that's also true of the vast majority of people who live anywhere except a few East Asian cities, according to you. So I don't see why you are singling out Americans. You should be chastising basically everyone outside of East Asia for being backward. (And then, of course, you would just have even more people ignoring you.)
Most Europeans have a decent idea of what good public transit looks like, and the "few East Asian cities" include almost every large city in China and Japan.
As for why I'm singling out Americans: this thread began with a discussion about Americans.
The Boston T is not anywhere near as good as the NYC subway, but this is really beside the point: both systems are decrepit, and in no way stack up to modern public transit systems. Yet these are the best systems the US has to offer.
> Nobody has access to all of the possibilities.
Most people don't know what's out there, so they can't make an informed choice about what would be good public policy. That's my point.
> Is, at least in America, determined by the choices of ordinary people in the past.
I don't think most people understood the consequences of the decisions they were making. The transition to cars and the building of the interstate system had a huge number of ripple effects, and have completely transformed American cities, and as a consequence, public life. People didn't understand all these changes beforehand, and now they're locked in and taken for granted.
> I could just as well say you don't have the ability to choose anything but a city with public transportation, because that's all that even appears to be on your radar.
The reason I'm saying what I'm saying is that I've spent enough time on the three continents we're talking about to have seen the differences in public transit and how it affects city life.
> The Boston T is not anywhere near as good as the NYC subway
My experience of the T is some decades old; I understand it has indeed deteriorated quite a bit since then. But when I used it, I had reasonably contemporary experience of the NYC system as well, and the latter, at that time, was not as good. Any such comparison will of course change over time.
> how it affects city life.
Which, again, is all that appears to be on your radar. But not everyone's life is "city life".
They obviously don't have metro systems in Chinese villages. But Chinese cities do have great metro systems, while American cities are lucky to have any metro at all, or even a decent bus network or a few tram lines.
> My experience of the T is some decades old
Yes, it's extremely old. The Green Line looks like something out of the early 20th Century, and an important stretch of the Red Line had to be shut down a few years ago for emergency repairs, because they suddenly determined that it was too dangerous to continue operating. The whole system is on life support.
The NYC Subway is the only American system that could possibly compare to systems like the Paris Metro or the London Tube. But as I said, all these systems are terrible compared to the standard metro system you'll find in large cities in East Asia. Mainland Chinese cities have fairly standardized (which is how they keep costs down), very modern systems based on the Hong Kong metro. Taipei has a great metro system with a similar design. Japanese cities also have very extensive metro systems. I've heard great things about the Seoul metro system (though I haven't seen it first-hand).
But my point is that 90+% Americans have no idea about these systems. Without some basic exposure to the alternatives that are out there, it's pointless to say that Americans have made an informed choice. They make due with what they have, and largely don't know what the alternatives could be.
I've lived in various American cities with different levels of public transit. As I said, I far prefer the typical city layout in Europe and East Asia.
NYC's is, as you say, old and decrepit, but its coverage is pretty good. I don't think it's the best system in the US, however. I lived in Boston for some time; the T was better than NYC's system. I have visited Portland, and at least when I visited, its system was better than NYC's.
> Many European cities have decent systems
I have visited both London and Paris, and both of their systems were comparable to the T in Boston when I lived there in terms of coverage and usability.
I have not visited any cities in East Asia, but I can easily see their systems being better since those countries have made huge investments in that kind of infrastructure.
> You say that Americans have the ability to choose, but that's really not true
By your logic nobody has the ability to choose. Nobody has access to all of the possibilities. So using that as the standard for "ability to choose", which is what you are doing, is pointless.
I could just as well say you don't have the ability to choose anything but a city with public transportation, because that's all that even appears to be on your radar.
> The infrastructure that exists
Is, at least in America, determined by the choices of ordinary people in the past. And choices ordinary people make now will end up causing changes in the infrastructure that exists.
Sure, maybe nowhere in America meets your personal standard for "good public transportation", but why should I care? I have a reasonable spectrum of alternatives open to me and I choose the one that suits me best. I don't waste time agonizing over alternatives that might exist elsewhere but are not accessible to me. Most Americans are the same way. So, I suspect, are most people everywhere, even if what alternatives are reasonably available can vary widely in different parts of the world. Maybe that's a problem for you, but it's not a problem for me, and I suspect it's not a problem for most people everywhere, and I don't see why it should be.