Tell me you are 100% ignorant of how unfathomably vast the United States is without telling me you are 100% ignorant of how unfathomably vast the United States is
Very interesting actually, thanks. It really is a shame. I spend a good amount of time in the South when I’m in the US and it always pains me to see crumbling little ‘depots’ as a vivid reminder of what once was, and could have been. I’ve always been of the opinion that rail could work in the US (albeit nothing to the scale these breadtubers envision), co existing with cars. Judging by the state of the freight tracks that go through Ga, I feel as if any sort of high speed rail would be very far from consideration without laying a whole new system.
I drove through Texas last year. You can drive 80mph for hours and see absolutely nothing. I have no idea what this user is talking about. Shit, even in places on both coasts there are states with hundreds of miles of forests/deserts/swamps, whatever. The only social problem Texas faces is becoming Mexico 2.0.
I'm aware of how enormous our country is. The size of a country doesn't mean shit regarding good urban planning. Russia is just over twice the size of the United States and has better urban planning (and rail networks) than our cities. Even Australia, which is a hell of a lot emptier, whose cities are arguably the closest to the U.S. in terms of design type, has better planned cities than the current American model. I've lived for extended periods of time on both sides of the Atlantic and can admit that the U.S., unfortunately, is behind in certain respects. Not everything, but our cities and transit infrastructure are an embarrassment. You want to know why everything west of the Edwards Plateau is relatively empty, save for isolated spots like El Paso, Odessa-Midland and Amarillo? It's because it's a burning, scrubby wasteland with hardly anything worth extracting except oil and natural gas. The soil is either literal rocks or impenetrable clay, which is shit for agriculture, and the water table is shrinking at an incredible rate due to people wasting a shit ton of water on lawn care and golf courses. You claim that I'm not aware of the size of the United States? Well I suspect you're not aware of Texas' geographic and climactic nuances which limit the reasonable areas for human settlement. The west and panhandle of Texas (which was hit extremely hard by the Dust Bowl and never recovered) are sparsely populated for a reason.
Lol calm down bugman, I have relatives in Texas and have spent a lot of time there. Muh climatic conditions, please. Look at a satellite image of Texas and note all the forest and farmland that dominates the eastern third of the state and the farm and pastureland that dominates the middle third. The arable, usable countryside is disappearing just rofl. There's room for Houston and Dallas Fort-Worth to sprawl out at least another hundred miles and it would barely be noticeable on a map of just the eastern half of the state.
I agree, the goal should be a balance between rail and automobiles, with robust inner-city tram systems (and streetcar suburbs) like the kind which were common across the U.S. until WWII. Of course the countryside will be more auto-reliant, that's largely unavoidable.
This doesn't answer my statement of why countries that rival the U.S. in size don't have this extreme sprawl problem in their urban areas. If the size of a country were the determining factor you would see similar levels of car-dependent sprawl in countries like Brazil, Russia, China, and Australia. The U.S. and Canada are rather unique in their extreme levels of urban sprawl compared to other large countries. I just want a better balance in the urban plan, a wider variety of transport options (I'm all for people owning private vehicles, mind - I don't hate cars at all and enjoy driving at times) and greater preservation of the countryside from over-development.
The opposite is far worse with only millionaires and geriatrics having houses while the working class is crammed into enormous housing developments of shoddily-built, “efficient” apartments and rural economies are destroyed to create recreational areas for rich urban dwellers. See the Pacific Northwest for an example of what happened when people who share your ideas gained power. The socioeconomic cost of forced density far exceeds anything sprawl has ever imposed; we don’t exactly have a shortage of natural land, but we do have a shortage of people who can pay a million dollars for a small house and it isn’t good to concentrate everyone in a few cities.
The U.S. ranks on the lower end compared to several developed (and even developing) nations in terms of home ownership.
You get that's because they count "owning an apartment" as "home ownership", right? Few of these people actually own a proper HOUSE.
Um wrong dude, have you seen the average British house?
Yes, but ownership of single-family detached houses wasn't what I was addressing. It was a response to his statement that home ownership in and of itself is a pipe dream to Europeans, which it clearly isn't. Yes, single family detached suburbanite houses make up a smaller proportion of building types in several European countries (though single-family detached housing is more common in the UK, the Balkans, the Baltics and Nordic countries) but the actual private ownership of one's home, regardless of building type is actually higher in much of Europe and Asia. They don't rent their flats. They own them. There are huge numbers of people in the U.S. who live in single-family detached houses but don't actually have the dignity of owning them and instead are sitting on a massive pile of debt.
All things considered, these actually look pretty comfy, but these channels are run by the type of people who would advocate for cramming others like sardines in industrial scale high rises with the right marketing, which the WEF has done with some success(?)
You fail to understand how unreliable buses are - It's not uncommon for buses to just not show up. So you either have to plan ahead and assume that the next bus won't arrive and plan around that., or cross your fingers and hope that it actually arrives for once.
I've never lived anywhere I had to use buses. I'd imagine subways are maybe a lot more reliable.
I was talking about cancelled or delayed busses, trains etc. Just 5 min late and you might miss the next train and your whole day is ruined
