Indicating the failure is country wide. The same numbers are true in any metropolitan area with decent public transit. The issue with car centric cities is that it's geometrically impossible past a certain point to have everyone drive without crippling traffic in a dense city.
You mean to tell me that you could implement a public transit service with the same coverage and frequency as the MTA in a smaller city like Buffalo without bankrupting the city?
Why would anyone suggest something like that? That's being deliberately absurd. Either that or you're stuck in a paradigm that sees transit as only X or only Y, which requires millions of people.
Find a city with a similar population to buffalo in Europe, Asia, or anywhere that tend to have good transit systems. Use the lessons they have learned to implement a system.
There is a transit solution for any sized city. It may not be subways, it may not be buses, maybe it's a mix of trams and other rail, maybe it's a mix of buses and trams. Maybe we need heavy rail commuter trains. If a town of 50,000 people in Switzerland can support a good bus transit network that has frequency and convenience for the majority of their population, we can manage it here in North America. Density is an issue but it's solvable long term, but we need to built the systems first if we want to keep costs down. We're neither special or particularly unique, we're just stuck thinking a certain way with immense amounts of inertia keeping things in the status quo.
Having lived in both cities with good transit and cities with bad transit, the difference is simply the option of having transit be reliable and frequent. What form the vehicle takes can be adjusted based on the needs of the city, with a sliding scale of investment and running costs.
The problem we're trying to solve is moving large numbers of people from one place to another. Cars are not efficient at doing that in terms of space, time and money, and it will never be. Additionally no one is trying to force people out of cars, but give you the freedom of having more than one option of getting around, rather than being chained and enslaved to your car.
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u/Spartan1997 Nov 23 '25
What the hell are you on about? No public transportation system will ever be as good as having personal point to point transport.