[queenkjuul]

I think it's the US fragmentation between city/county/state/federal, exacerbated by our asinine suburban municipality system. A town of 8000 has equal say to a city of 2M. Unless the feds insist (which they only do for highways and military installations) then it's incumbent on the state to wrangle its counties, which they were practically designed not to do.

Honestly LA's biggest problem, for example, isn't that the buses and Metro are insufficient (they might be) but that they're operated by 18 different agencies across 24 municipalities spanning 4 counties (made up numbers, but representative). Every tiny section gets to object, provide input, demand concessions, or outright refuse to cooperate. You see this to a limited extent with London boroughs, so i understand, but nobody seems to have mastered it like California.

Here in Chicago this has never been quite so bad, but it's still similar. The state just passed new rules to consolidate the Chicago area Transit systems. Thankfully we're drastically more functional than LA from the get go, and unlike LA, Chicago controls the vast majority of desirable land in the area, so the city has a lot more political power to ensure things keep working.

Regardless: the suburban/regional networks are massively worse than those within the city, funding is a nearly-annual state-v-city showdown, the state owns the highways within the city so they can override certain city decisions regarding bike lanes/bus lanes/trams....

The US is a mess lmao