I really don’t see how this keeps coming up as an excuse. East coast corridor is at least as dense and is not far off in purchase power per capita. Plus you could as well compate to China, another huge country with low density of purchase power, and look how they‘re charging ahead in infrastructure. It‘s the political system - not to say that the US should adopt China‘s of course, just that it‘s a better explanation of what goes wrong.
I think the commenter was referring to the fact purchasing power is not dense (ie, dense areas don't have as high a purchasing power)? A little confused by this too.
I like looking at purchase power in general, rather than GDP - the absolute numbers don't matter so much as long as your domestic market is large enough to produce most things people need.
Secondly, the density of savings and taxes per square kilometer is giving you an idea about how much potential for development a current settlement has. That's the capital that can be drawn from directly. Density of spendings (train tickets, consumer goods etc.) is the driver for outside capital to come in trying to get a dividend. Taken all together (savings + spendings) you get the density of PPP adjusted GDP per square kilometer as a figure that matters. As you can see in [1], US and China is actually quite similar in this metric, and it's probably also still similar if you just take its coastal regions. I also think that this metric is very similar for the population belt between London and Rome, and the East Coast corridor in the US.
Switzerland has a population density of 206 per km^2. NJ, RI, MA, CT, and MD have higher density. After all, nobody's expecting an express rail across Montana anytime soon: we're talking about the more populous part of the US.
It's hard to use "they are different" argument when your country is objectively worse than Switzerland and China.
Effective density in Switzerland is much higher, because that headline number aggregates a bunch of dense towns and cities (mostly located in valleys) with a whole lot of steep mountainsides with an approximate density of ~0.
It also helps that the topography forces development into mostly linear shapes (following the valleys), rather than radiating in all directions as normally happens in flatter terrain. Linear corridors are much easier to serve via public transit, because everything is "on the way".
Well, I'm sure having a linear string of cities helps, but effective density is higher everywhere: Switzerland is the norm instead of the outlier.
E.g., San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, at the center of Silicon Valley, have population density of 663 and 580 per km^2. And of course San Francisco has a whopping 7249 per km^2. They also have a string of connected cities, thanks to being constrained by the pacific and the SF bay from either side.
I don't think I have to repeat on HN what the infrastructure looks like in the Silicon Valley.
* Besides, your argument can be paraphrased as "Of course it's easier in Switzerland, because it's filled with mountains!" Think about it.
Yeah I feel like comparisons to Europe often fall flat for this reason. There are plenty of small, wealthy enclaves in the U.S. where the infrastructure is perfectly fine, but the U.S. is so big that telling someone in say, Bellevue, WA that the infrastructure in the Midwest is crumbling is the same as telling someone in Zurich that the infrastructure in Bulgaria or Turkey is crumbling.
Obviously that analogy is far from perfect, as Seattle has its own set of infrastructure problems, but extrapolating from most European countries doesn't seem particularly useful.
> There are plenty of small, wealthy enclaves in the U.S. where the infrastructure is perfectly fine
Is it though? I would assume NYC falls in that category and the subway is crumbling. The cars are old, and some of its subway stations have not only not been remodeled in years, they haven't been painted or cleaned recently either [1].
Manhattan is an incredibly rich and dense area, I'd say in theory the city is just as, or better setup for success in terms of public transport than Tokyio, Paris, or Mexico City. Yet, public transport in these cities seems to overall be of better quality than New York's.
Reading a bit into it, it seems clear that it's a matter of corruption, inefficiency and lack of will to fix things [2], not just "the way things have to be" due to external forces.
Public transit is in better shape even in poor republics of the USSR. I rode public transit in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and both were better than the NYC public transit. I am not even talking about CTA and SEPTA.
I completely agree that it’s not an inevitable state of affairs.
And I don’t think your point about Manhattan necessarily refutes my point. Just because a place is wealthy doesn’t mean it will have great infrastructure, but there are wealthy places in the US with good infrastrcture.
I also don’t dispute that it’s not a priority in most of the U.S. I just take issue with the idea that it’s easy to figure out what to do and we just need to look at a place like Zurich.
The U.S. is huge. It’s certainly more homogenous than Europe, but it’s big enough and variable enough that a lot of people deign to call the middle 2,000! miles fly-over country. Zurich and Istanbul are only like 1,400 miles apart, and are such drastically different places, but people expect the whole U.S. to have it’s infrastructure together when 1,500 miles gets you just halfway across the U.S.
>but there are wealthy places in the US with good infrastrcture
You're going to have to tell me what those are, because I've been all over the US and I have absolutely no idea what places these might be. All the wealthy places I've seen in the US either have crumbling infrastructure (northeast), terrible public transit, or no real public transit at all and expect everyone to get around in cars (e.g., suburban DC area).
>but people expect the whole U.S. to have it’s infrastructure together when 1,500 miles gets you just halfway across the U.S.
No, people expect the US's major metro areas to have their infrastructure together (i.e., subways), and they just don't.
And our insanely expensive higher education system. And the total absence of civil protections against surveillance-based capitalism. And the lack of oversight on speculator-driven excess in the mortgage industry and stock markets.