• johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    We’ve also built cities (and especially suburbs) around cars which means that they’re not very centralized, especially in the Western half of the country. In most places this means busses are a more practical form of public transportation than things like subways or light rail.

    • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      as somebody who has worked in the field, the word is not as much “design” but “attempted to design” but the problem comes down to sprawl and effeciency, and we have many places in the US that have passed the maximum density that cars+ parking can effeciently accomodate even in small cities. This is one of the reasons that economists see big box stores (wal mart), strip malls, etc as net drains on local economies.

      One of the reasons the US is stagnating economically is the lack of medium density infrastructure that is simply not built because roads, oil, and cars are so heavily subsidized

      Take out those subsidies or match them with similar subsidies for trains and similar, and you’d see a shift where trains become cheap to small cities which would ease pressure on large ones.