[perl4ever]

You have to at some point accept that the vast majority of people, while they don't live in nowheresville, Montana, also don't live in the very largest cities. A million or two people within say 10-15 miles is the sort of place a large portion of the country lives, and changing that on a national scale seems very far fetched to me. 85% of the country by population is outside the metro areas of NYC, LA, Chicago, and Dallas. Regarding them as a small group of people many miles away from civilization is not reasonable, but it's also not reasonable to assume the resources exist for infrastructure like the largest cities.

[inferiorhuman]

It's also not reasonable to assume the resources exist for infrastructure like the largest cities.

Cities have actively made decisions to design cities around the car at the expense of every other mode of traffic. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that the status quo can't change.

In fact if you look at the Bay Area, the problems with transit are largely due to other sorts of dysfunction, not due to lack of funding. Los Angeles, OTOH, has been building out public transit in a coordinated way (far more successfully than the Bay Area has). IOW where there's a will there's a way.

[vidarh]

> A million or two people within say 10-15 miles is the sort of place a large portion of the country lives

That's more dense than Oslo, which has several major rail arteries and a light-rail/subway system, most of which was initially built at a point where Norway was still a relatively poor country. It's vastly more than e.g. Bergen, which has 280k people, a tram

It boils down to whether or not you're willing to actually plan for it and spend money on it.