There is a dramatic difference between most European & Asian public transport systems and most non-NYC American public transport systems, though.
Once I stayed with my in-laws in Sanxia Taiwan, an exurb of Taipei. When we wanted to get to Taipei 101 (37km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to the historic district (26 km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to Tamsui (a bucolic oceanfront suburb, 42km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to Banqiao (the main shopping district, 16km away), we took public transit.
From the mid-peninsula, this is equivalent to going to San Francisco; going to downtown San Jose; going to Half Moon Bay; and going to Stanford Shopping Center. You can actually get to the first two through Caltrain, but you'll walk about a mile to get to the Caltrain station, rather than half a block to get to a bus that comes every 10 minutes. You can't effectively get to HMB, Stanford Shopping Center, or any of the other non-city-center through public transit in the Bay Area.
That's what foreigners tend to complain about with the walkability of American cities. It isn't the difficulty of getting from dense, built-up city centers to top tourist destinations. It's the difficulty of getting from common, ordinary residences to the next tier of destinations.
> a major North American city that is known for having good public transit
Compared to most large East and Southeast Asian cities (Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore), public transport in American cities is generally lousy, especially if a 15-minute drive (that's about 10 – 15km, maybe) turns into a multiple-hour affair. At that rate, one might as well walk.
The bus system in Taiwan is amazing. You see all ages represented from school kids to the elderly. They don't smell and have dedicated lanes in places. There are so many of them that you rarely have to wait more than 10 minutes at any stop. It's a great alternative to the subway for shorter rides.
It seems like cities like NY and San Francisco have the density to support similar systems.
That has more to do with the middling state of public transit in the US than it does with public transit itself.
In Taiwan, when you land at TPE, there is an express MRT line that connects directly to Taipei Main Station. You can also hop on the High Speed Rail and connect to southern destinations. Bypasses all of the traffic and congestion.
Fantastic way to travel and makes it so much more convenient.
US cities also tend to be more spread out, which also reduces the appeal of public transit. Contrast this to a Chinese city of the same size, which due to the fact that literally everyone lives in small apartments, is much more compact and easier to serve via public transport.
You've done a great job of summing up one of the reasons that public transit in the US is as bad as it is.
My goal is to safely get from Point A to Point B, and I don't want to spend a lot of time waiting around at Point A, or sitting and waiting on the way to Point B.
We have three goals here, in order of importance. Let's call them safety, convenience, and speed.
Taking a bus with a bunch of drunken hooligans doesn't help much with that first, and most important, goal. I want my transportation to be safe, and the high crime rates on public transportation in the US speak for themselves.
Interesting experiences are great. Getting mugged isn't, and while I'm not a prime target (muggers don't usually pick on two-hundred-pound guys that spend a lot of time in the gym), five loud, drunk people in a gang is not the sort of situation I want to be around regularly.
Especially if I'm carrying a $1500 laptop and a $600 smartphone.
Convenience, at least here in SF, is also pretty miserable. I have not once had a bus arrive on-time. The trains are usually on-schedule, but conveniently frequent only during peak hours, and they only cover a small portion of the greater Bay Area. Don't even get me started on CalTrain.
If I want to meet somebody and I need to take a bus, I need to add an extra half-hour window around my journey. If you assume a normal tech-person salary, that lost half-hour makes it cheaper to take a taxi for most journeys.
Speed is good for trains; busses, on the other hand, live at the whim of traffic.
Japan gets all of these right in its major cities. I have never once felt threatened on a train, and delays are few and far between.
The tradeoff they make is in manpower -- station employees are everywhere. We tend to not like hiring lots of people in the US, and so public transit stations might have one or two visible employees, and certainly not visible, uniformed personnel at every platform.
This is why cars are as popular as they are. In SF, if I want to go from Pacific Heights to the Inner Sunset, a journey by bus-and-train pushes about an hour. By car, it's about fifteen minutes.
In my car, I have a stereo, air conditioning, and a clean, comfortable seat. Public transit, on the other hand, is pretty filthy here in SF, and for some odd reason they jack the heat up enough so that I need to do a little striptease whenever I get on a train.
All minor inconveniences, sure, but it adds up quickly, and what do I get in return? I'm late, have lost money in the long run, and arrive more often than not in a worse mood than when I started.
I really want working public transit here in the US, but the way things are going, I don't see that happening for at least another decade.
Anecdotally, ~every American person who I know in Tokyo considered walking more than 5 minutes a chore when they first arrived, and then most eventually learned that gasp you can actually walk for longer than that and it is perfectly fine.
It's honestly quite amusing just how disconnected the average American's conception of city travel is from how things work in Tokyo and other walkable / public transport-focused cities. Europeans have it easier; I was already used to using public transport to get around even long-ish distances on a daily basis in Spain, and Tokyo is basically public transport paradise. Want to go from point A to point B? Here's 5 different routes - you get to pick bus, train, metro, or a combination. Some are faster, some are nicer, some you might just personally like better, and they all arrive on time. Every 5 minutes or so.
I still resort to taxis in Tokyo sometimes, but only when I'm in a rush (= already late to something), and even then that rarely saves more than 10 minutes, and if traffic is bad, can end up worse; it's only faster when there isn't already a fully direct train route wherever you're going. I consider it a tax on bad scheduling on my part; I'd much rather take public transport and not be in a rush.
SF has bus-only lanes everywhere. The bus is still very slow, even if you don't have to wait, because of all the extra stops. I'm looking at visiting parts of western Europe where supposedly public transit is good, but actually it's far slower than driving. The only way driving ever ends up being less convenient is if there's constrained parking. It's just very hard to beat a car that can go directly from point A to B.
What also beats mass transit is walking, if a city is laid out such that you don't usually need to walk very far.
I live in San Francisco, and the public transit is useable compared to most other parts of California. Recently I visited Copenhagen, Denmark, and I found the public transit to be much nicer than mediocre (even if I couldn't by train tickets with a sign-only-no-PIN American credit card!)
I find cities in Taiwan frustrating to navigate without personal transport, at least a bicycle.
Having lived in Kaohsiung for a bit, I observed that very few people use public transport unless they go to/from intercity rail or airport. Buses in particular are unreliable (mostly used by older people), and MRT alone is obviously not enough for the sparse city.
That's not a good public transit. Personally I wouldn't consider any city in the US to have good public transit. Traveling around in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai for instance, I never even look at the train schedule unless it's very late at night (to make sure I can catch the last train).
My point is that Americans won't see it the way you and I do.
>mass transit is much faster than driving, including walking, escalators, and elevators
It really depends; it's hard to compare. If you have a route in the US that's mostly highway and you avoid rush hour, you can get to your destination very quickly. If it's a bad route and/or rush hour, it can be hellish. Many people I work with have hour+ long commutes; it's not unusual at all. It usually takes me 45-60 minutes to get to various locations in Tokyo, and I'm not even that far outside the central district; it really depends whether I have to change trains though. Cars really can get you places quickly, but the problem is the whole thing breaks down if there's too much traffic. Not to mention the stress factor and expense.
>Yes, you have to walk a little, but we are not talking about a hike.
It's frequently a 5-15 minute walk from a station to your destination. Of course, land closer to stations is more valuable because of this, so apartments closer to stations are more expensive. But many people have to walk 10+ minutes to get home from the station, after climbing all the stairs to get out. For most Americans, that really is "a hike".
>In fact for most people, it’s not even enough walking to compensate for their sedentariness.
Yes, but we're talking about people here who fight over parking spaces that are 50 feet closer to the door of their Walmart.
>Also you are talking about subway stations but I doubt that there isn’t a denser bus network in Tokyo to get you to the subway stations fast and dry.
No, there really isn't. There are buses, but they generally only serve routes that are very poorly served by the trains. They're also not as convenient or fast as the trains. The network definitely isn't "denser" than the trains at all. They can be handy to save you a bit of walking when there's a typhoon though.
>It’s also SO MUCH LESS stress than traffic jams.
Agreed, but again we're talking about Americans here: people who would rather drive around in circles in the Walmart parking lot just so they can find a space 50 feet closer to the door.
So my point here is, it's not a panacea like many pro-transit Americans seem to believe. It's a very different lifestyle. I personally am happy with it and the tradeoffs, but car-brained Americans will not be.
And I can pretty much guarantee you that people in London and New York bitch about their public transportation systems all the time. Maybe people in Singapore don't but they're probably a pretty rare exception. And don't get even think about getting residents of Boston started on the performance of the MBTA and commuter rail last winter--and that's one of the better US public transit systems.
I like cities with good public transit systems but they're not nirvana. And for cities that are just so-so, like SF, the people I know there who don't own cars use Uber, Zipcar, and conventional rentals plenty.
I've traveled extensively in Europe. While transit was available in most cities, and usable, aside from the real metros, like London and Paris and Barcelona, and a few gems, like Budapest, transit was often not frequent enough and clearly took longer than a car. The reason I took transit was it was cheaper in absolute terms, and, as a student, my time wasn't worth much. Also, that was pre-uber. I daresay that if I visited those places today -- places like Oslo, Prague, Porto, Rome, Dublin, etc -- I would have taken uber. It would be faster, and my time is worth more.
The only Asian cities I've spent any noticeable time in are Bombay and Hong Kong. Bombay -- I guess it's called Mumbai now -- is a shit show, in every sense of the word. It's one of the largest cities in the world. Transit is awful and dangerous. The only reason my parents took it growing up was because when they were young they were too poor to afford anything else. When we go back now, as rich foreigners, we always take a private driver or taxis everywhere. It's just not worth it.
Hong Kong is a different story of course, due to the British influence and the fact that it was Britain when I last visited. Also, its constraints as a small island mean transit is a must have. And I would agree that it's transit system is better than most American cities.
That all being said, the American cities with densities approaching that of London, Hong Kong, etc all do have rather good transit options. As I stated elsewhere, the issue is the US has no large cities in the European and Asian sense. Our cities are sparsely populated. Yes, a lot of that is due to government policy, but it's also due to the fact that America is -- for the most part -- completely empty land.
It's tricky comparing public transport in your city to public transport in cities you visit as a tourist. Tourists don't travel during peak hours. They aren't as bothered (so they don't notice) a 10 minutes delay because they're not in a rush. They don't frequent residential areas so they may not experience the trickier journeys. A lot of cities are great from getting from suburbs to residential areas, but getting from one residential area to another is hard.
Arrived in Singapore recently and I'm quite impressed with the public transportation system here. My base is the slow Metro transit in Los Angeles and the over crowded system in Manila.
I’m not against public transit. I lived in Taiwan for a while which has very good public transport. But what’s good for a single person doesn’t necessarily work for a family living outside the city. The benefits of owning a car are pretty clear there.
It's pretty much the American concept of Suburbia that makes it hard to use public transport if you don't live in a city (or even if you live in a lot of cities, it seems).
Most European and Asian (specifically Japanese) cities have very good connectivity from the outskirts into the city centers.
Granted, it can be complicated and time consuming to connect from outskirt to outskirt. This is no reason, however, to throw away well working public systems of connectivity for some pipe dream, which still uses much too much resources for the density of a city.
Once I stayed with my in-laws in Sanxia Taiwan, an exurb of Taipei. When we wanted to get to Taipei 101 (37km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to the historic district (26 km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to Tamsui (a bucolic oceanfront suburb, 42km away), we took public transit. When we wanted to get to Banqiao (the main shopping district, 16km away), we took public transit.
From the mid-peninsula, this is equivalent to going to San Francisco; going to downtown San Jose; going to Half Moon Bay; and going to Stanford Shopping Center. You can actually get to the first two through Caltrain, but you'll walk about a mile to get to the Caltrain station, rather than half a block to get to a bus that comes every 10 minutes. You can't effectively get to HMB, Stanford Shopping Center, or any of the other non-city-center through public transit in the Bay Area.
That's what foreigners tend to complain about with the walkability of American cities. It isn't the difficulty of getting from dense, built-up city centers to top tourist destinations. It's the difficulty of getting from common, ordinary residences to the next tier of destinations.
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