[tptacek]

It's easier to maintain a dense public transportation system when the system's goals are (for instance) to move 80MM people around in an area the size of Colorado. Colorado, by comparison, has a population of 5MM.

But yes, I was making the latter point.

Does life expectancy tell us something about the differences between life in the United States and Finland? Yes... but what if all it's telling us is "the United States is simultaneously less dense and comparably urban to Europe"?

[tesseractive]

I wouldn't expect, say, Wyoming to have a well developed public transportation system, or even Colorado as a whole. But once you get past a fairly small number of major cities, our public transportation systems for metropolitan areas are still underdeveloped.

Colorado's front range, for example, would almost certainly benefit from having a well-developed commuter rail system, with heavy passenger rail connecting the corridor from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins (with a spur to Boulder) and light rail taking people from the terminals to points spread further out.

Doing something like this would take a long time and cost a lot of money, but our choice (so far) not to spend that money in most metro areas has a direct effect on the quality of life in this country.

[akgerber]

Fortunately, it isn't wholly hopeless in this country.

The Front Range is indeed making a large investment in commuter rail, though not yet all the way to Colorado Springs & Fort Collins: http://www.rtd-fastracks.com/systemmap.php

The Los Angeles area is likewise making significant investments in its rail system.

[Tuna-Fish]

You picked an interesting comparison -- Finland is one of the rare European countries that is actually less dense than the US. The population density of the whole of US is ~34/km², while Finland clocks in only 16/km². Even when you account for the fact that the northernmost third of Finland is essentially unpopulated, Finnish population density is still well under the American one. (And I quess you guys have the Rockies, Alaska and a few deserts too...)

[tptacek]

I picked Finland out of a hat, but the numbers I used were for Germany.

[Camillo]

Do most people in Colorado commute from a corner of the state to the other? I would expect most people to live in or near the city where they work, just as in Europe. Having hundreds of miles of desert or farmland around a city does not make it any more difficult to build a metro system, for instance.

[lsc]

There are very real economic reasons to build out rather than up, when you have suitable land nearby. Especially in areas like Colorado where land is cheap and regulation is light, building nice big cheap (in terms of construction costs) single family homes sounds pretty good, vs. building expensive (per square foot of usable space) high-rise condos. Construction costs are lower, and you end up with a bunch more living space, a garage, etc, etc. And from a buyer's perspective, you have a lot more control over a single family home.

And yeah; you can have public transit in the 'burbs? but it's not going to be popular. Because you have so much more living space than a city dweller, you are likely to get more utility out of the hauling capacity of a car. And having that extra living space also dramatically lowers the cost of owning the car; You don't have to pay for parking, and you can do basic work in the garage. (you can save a giant wad of cash doing basic stuff like swapping rotors yourself.)

Personally, I think the economic realities of the suburbs mean that only the poorest of the poor are going to not own personal vehicles; because of this, public transit is built for and associated with the poor in all but the most built-up parts of America. "Domestic help" is not fashionable here, either, so for the middle class, there isn't a lot of upside to letting poor people into their neighbourhoods. (I'm wondering if this is going to change with the rise of in-home elder-care. There certainly are plenty of Americans willing to do that sort of work for wages the middle-class could pay.)