[rangledangle]

Cars are only useful because America foolishly built and rebuilt around cars, instead of humans. There were even places that functioned perfectly fine with transit and walking, destroyed and replaced with infrastructure for cars.

Undoing our mistake is always an option.

[sokoloff]

If it can be demonstrated to most voters to be a mistake, presenting the full plan to undo and replace it with something better would be a good next step.

[wizofaus]

When was the plan for what we have now ever presented to voters? Clearly it's not something that can be "undone" all in one go - but every day governments make decisions about what infrastructure to build/repair/extend, how much parking should be available and how much to charge for it, and how much to continue ensuring the current car-based economy is well supported/subsidized. If those decisions gradually moved towards "let's not assume cars are the be all and end all", we could still slowly unboil the frog as it were.

[sokoloff]

It never was. But as a voter, it's what outside my window right now and what I understand.

If you want to make wholesale changes quickly, you probably need the support of voters.

Nobody put 240V center-tapped, 60 Hz AC residential electricity to the voters either, but if you wanted to change it, you're probably going to need a strategy and a communications campaign to explain why and how.

[geraldwhen]

US public transit is ruled by homeless and criminals. Constant stabbing, sexual assault, robbery, and stalking.

I will not take my kids on any transit where they might be assaulted by a naked homeless man. America will never have safe public transit because it lacks the will to handle the mentally ill and addicts.

[wizofaus]

If the city you live in has been entirely designed around private motor vehicles and lacks any decent transit network (LA being the obvious example), no amount of investment into helping the mentally ill and drug addicts is going to make transit an attractive option for more than a tiny percentage of the population.

Thankfully in Australia's biggest cities our public transport systems are generally clean and safe to use - but a) they're not always super reliable, despite some improvements in recent years b) they're often poorly interconnected, meaning I could potentially do 80% of the journey sitting in comfort on a train, but spend 3 times longer than it would take to drive trying to deal with getting to/from train stations and c) there are still huge areas of said cities that are fairly poorly served by trains, and buses will always be a second rate way of getting around. Oh and d) you can't carry v. large items or animals on most public transport (*). All solvable problems, some easier than others, but there's a distinct lack of real political will to do so.

(*) e.g. it'd be a 15 min train ride to take my dog to the beach from where I live, but she's not a service animal so wouldn't even be allowed on, despite taking up less space than a human.

[wizofaus]

(Ooh, I actually just looked it up - you are actually allowed to take dogs on trains here, though they're supposed to be muzzled. Never seen anyone do so though, and I'm quite sure they wouldn't be allowed on buses).