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by msandford 3806 days ago
> I never heard anyone praising the public transportation system of the U.S. also everyone and their childs appear to have 2 cars.

The US has pretty good public transit in the places that have merited it prior to the widespread adoption of the automobile. If the city was large relative to its size today (geographically) in the early 1900s odds are good it's got acceptable to good transit.

The places which have mostly grown after the 1940s tend to have poorer transit as cars came to dominate.

Comparing what works in Switzerland with what works in the US doesn't make that much sense, though. There are plenty of stretches of railway in the western US that might be hundreds of miles between places big enough to warrant a substantial power station. Which means that you're going to have to pull hundreds of miles of high voltage lines (which aren't free) in order to have a stationary power plant power the all-electric locomotive. Or you can just drag around your own power plant, sans wires everywhere; a diesel.
1 comments
jandrese 3806 days ago
To go beyond that, cities that grew after the 1940s often have relatively poor transit access to the "new" sections. For example, the DC Metro system is only halfway through finally opening up service to the enormous northern North Virginia area and utterly failed to even provide halfassed streetcar service to Alexandria. New York City's subway system doesn't attempt to cross over into Jersey or even to the eastern half of Queens.
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warfangle 3806 days ago
> New York City's subway system doesn't attempt to cross over into Jersey or even to the eastern half of Queens.

There are other systems that do, though: PATH (for points immediately across the Hudson), NJTransit (commuter rail to a lot of NJ), LIRR (commuter rail to Long Island & Queens) and MetroNorth (commuter rail to points north in NY and CT).

Given how long it takes to ride the subway to the farther reaches of Queens (e.g., Jamaica), I can't imagine how long it would take to commute to Manhattan via subway from, say, Bayside Queens (which is served by LIRR).

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