LogFAQs > #967591652

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's easier to push mass transit solutions over individual car ownership in smaller European nations than it is in a nation with massive sprawling landscapes and spread out populations.

As much as this is an easy excuse to fall back on, many of the European cities with functional transit and active transport infrastructure have very comparable population densities to many North American cities. Similarly, as much as people like falling back on "it's easy to engineer cars out of cities that were built before cars were a thing," there are pictures of many Dutch cities from as recently as the 70's that are almost indistinguishable from modern American cities in how thoroughly car infrastructure dominates the landscape, but a serious, concerted effort to fix that has brought those same cities to the point of being globally recognized paragons of transportation infrastructure.

There are challenges, certainly, and the same solutions can't necessarily be copy+pasted with no adjustments to account for those idiosyncrasies, but the main challenges preventing American infratsructure from being fixed have nothing to do with the landscape or broader issues of population density. They've got everything to do with zoning laws that make it outright illegal to build anything other than single-family homes or high-rises, and a population that's bought into the oil industry's propaganda so thoroughly that they can't comprehend a world where not having their city designed to enable them to drive from door to door doesn't destroy their freedom and independence. Toss in oil/car lobbyists actively preventing investment in alternatives (both locally and on a more national scale, like rail) and the unfortunate reality that political terms are too short to yield tangible results from any major investment (meaning that investment will either be thrown out if a rival takes power or that rival will take credit when results do show up), and you've got a recipe for "maybe this 9th lane will improve traffic more than the 8th did."