[ksdale]

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.

[aylmao]

> 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.

[1]: https://www.amny.com/transit/nyc-subway-stations-garbage-dum...

[2]: https://ny.curbed.com/2017/12/29/16829746/mta-nyc-subway-con...

[IWeldMelons]

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.

[ksdale]

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.

[magduf]

>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.