| You're proving my point that it's not practical to get around a lot of the US without cars because it's just so much bigger. Most travel is within your own country and blanketing the sparsely populated US with non-car alternatives is just not practical. For what it is worth, according to Eurostat, cars are pretty important over there, too. "Three quarters of trips by EU residents in 2016 were within their own country." https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... "Passenger car was by far the most important mode for passenger transport in all Member States." "Passenger cars accounted for 83.1 % of inland passenger transport in the EU-28 in 2015, with motor coaches, buses and trolley buses (9.2 %) and passenger trains (7.7 %) both accounting for less than a tenth of all traffic (measured by the number of inland passenger-kilometres (pkm) travelled by each mode)" https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... I guess they like freedom over there, too. |
No, my point is that if a group of countries can figure out how to improve transportation across themselves for similar distances, then why can't even individual states figure it out? They could, if they wanted to, but "freedom to drive" and other excuses.
You don't even need to "blanket" the country in tracks, for example. Connecting all major US cities would be a HUGE improvement over what exists today.
I'm not at all arguing that cars are unimportant, it's just that here in the US it is the only one of two choices for transportation (for almost all of the US) that we have given ourselves for moving between cities. The other option is air travel, which is expensive in terms of money and rights/privacy.