I looked at your comment history because we agree on a lot!
This is an interesting one. Public transit can pretty much only be built after there is demand. Because we limit growth so much, there are very few places where we have allowed growth that would support transit.
If you were to overturn land use regulation as a whole, you would get dense places, and then we could get more transit...
Keep your eye on the climate change ball. We have a perfectly acceptable drop in replacement for gas cars in the form of EVs. This is not the time for your urbanism fetish or massive social engineering.
It would be a disaster without that because it would mean that a ton of people, mostly lower-income people, would essentially no longer be able to have cars at all. They'd still need to get around, thus the public transit.
It has nothing to with urbanism or social engineering, it's just about the need for transportation.
> We have a perfectly acceptable drop in replacement for gas cars in the form of EVs.
No, we don't. Not yet. There are still serious problems around charging that remain showstopper issues for many, mostly lower-income, people.
70% of households even in the bottom income quantile have a car, and it’s 88% in the second to bottom income quantile. There’s no reason with modern battery technology these cars can’t be as cheap as gas cars. And building charging infrastructure is a thousand times easier than building public transit.
Meanwhile, public transit keeps people poor by limiting their ability to move around for better jobs and housing. It’s a huge unnecessary tax on poor people to try to yoke them to public transit in the name of climate change mitigation.
OK, then let's build a good charging infrastructure first. It just seems to me that getting public transit in a good place is a much easier and cheaper task than putting a good charging infrastructure in place. If I'm wrong about that, I don't mind.
My point is that if we take away people's gas cars before having an alternative that works for everyone, that's bad. And we don't have an alternative that works for everyone yet.
This is an interesting one. Public transit can pretty much only be built after there is demand. Because we limit growth so much, there are very few places where we have allowed growth that would support transit.
If you were to overturn land use regulation as a whole, you would get dense places, and then we could get more transit...