The USA is pretty big and has a lot of sparsely populated area compared to Europe. People living outside major metro areas don't care about public transit, because public transit only works and makes sense in dense urban areas.
So people in Upstate New York don't care about mass transit in NYC, and so the representatives they elect to NY state government don't care about it.
Public transit honestly is not even on my radar of issues I care about, because where I live it makes no sense at all.
Pretty tired of "$REGION is too big and sparsely settled for transit" argument. British Columbia is over 2x the size of California, with about 1/10th the population but the city of Vancouver, the only large urban area in the province, has consistently high transit usage and investment. In fact, projections for transit usage have understated the growth in transit usage.
The lack of population density is a benefit in many regards. Texas is likely going to soon deploy high-speed rail at a cost not much higher than Western European standards or equivalent (adjusting for economic variance). There are two good reasons for that: Texas is far more friendly toward development, and there is a lot of sparsley settled, inexpensive land.
The challenge of public transport is to get the timing exactly right. Ideally, you'd build transit where nobody currently lives but will move to immediately after construction ends. Build it too late and it's really hard to make the necessary infrastructure modifications. Build it too early and the line won't generate enough usage, political opposition will grow and other modes of transportation will replace it.
I'm not very familiar with British Columbia, but does the whole province have public transportation on par with Vancouver? If not, that seems to support the comment about regional sparseness...
The city I live in (Los Angeles) covers an area 10x bigger than Vancouver. Even when you compare the metro areas, Vancouver is ~4 times denser
I brought up Vancouver's situation to compare it to New York because they both have large rural areas and comparable rates of urban and rural populations, about 50% of the population of NY and BC live in their largest cities. In addition, both NYC and Vancouver are highly urbanized, dense and developed cities.
If it were truly the case that rural voters down play the importance of intercity public transit, then Vancouver should have the same dismal public transport priorities that plague NYC. In contrast, Vancouver has a long history of progressive public transit initiatives despite being attached to a very large and sparsely populated province which suggests that NYCs problem isn't the upstate voters.
> So people in Upstate New York don't care about mass transit in NYC, and so the representatives they elect to NY state government don't care about it.
That would make sense if there were no political subdivisions below the state level with the power to tax and spend, but there are. NYC has both its own revenue sources, including income, sales, and special excise taxes, and its own (quite vast) governmental apparatus with which to spend that revenue in the service of its residents. They ought to have more than the tools required to get projects done -- it's a government on scale with many smaller countries!
NYC also has structures in place like the Port Authority, set up specifically to solve intra-jurisdictional problems (and IIRC with its own funding from tolls).
None of this seems to have helped stop costs from spiraling out of control.
So people in Upstate New York don't care about mass transit in NYC, and so the representatives they elect to NY state government don't care about it.
Public transit honestly is not even on my radar of issues I care about, because where I live it makes no sense at all.
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