Who’s Afraid of a Transit Desert?

We should be moving jobs west into New Jersey so less transit across the Hudson is needed.

The Hudson is a fjord, a flooded valley carved out by glaciers between the Palisades of New Jersey and the bedrock of Manhattan, and not an ordinary river. Transportation across it is expensive, both in terms of investment and energy costs, and should be minimized.

Only in the US! Somehow, Paris is able to build them for a tiny fraction of the cost. And since we’re talking about France here, it’s certainly not due to a dearth of workers rights.

Someone once owned the land on which all of Europe's railways are currently running quite nicely, thank you. It's not really a convincing argument against building railways in general. Public service or private enterprise, it's pretty much guaranteed that existing occupants of the land will get shat on by whatever interests stand to profit from doing so, but that doesn't mean that building the thing doesn't benefit the community as a whole.

One half of your point is that the US government is too incompetent/malicious to actually care for or remunerate its own residents, even as the richest country in the world. I can’t wave that problem away, and it contributes to my point about the dire state of American infrastructure.

But separately, as much as I respect the right for someone to their property, I think we as a society in the USA overindex on that personal right vs the public benefit and the health of the community as a whole, hobbling forward progress.

Just like the other commenter talked about Europe, I’m living in Japan currently - a far older country with far more people per sq foot who had to be relocated for the very thorough transit system here to be developed, with far less resources than the USA had when it was being built out.

The result is not that you end up with housing shortages, the effect is instead that transit dramatically increases the amount of viable land to live on within a reasonable commute to the city, creating cheap housing surpluses - provided that incentives are set up properly to encourage that housing production, as opposed to the USA’s hopelessly restrictive permitting/zoning + the incompetence of government to efficiently utilize land at transit stations + the unwillingness of the govt and electorate to allow private enterprise to do it instead (as it extremely profitably is done here in Japan).

That’s why I can get my current 1 bedroom apartment 15 minutes from the center of Tokyo for $600/mo here, a literal impossibility in even 2nd or 3rd tier American cities like the one I grew up in. And no, I’m not living in a shoebox or a soulless high rise, I live in a vibrant walkable neighborhood of low rises - since the combination of transit development, small (re: proper scale) streets and unrestrictive zoning means that a high quality of life is accessible to far more people.

Not to mention that if American cities were willing to deprioritize cars a bit you can probably get a pretty good system going almost entirely built on streets that are way wider than they need to be/evicting cars from those thoroughfares... glad to see baby steps in NYC and SF to do it a little, but at this rate it’ll be centuries before anything significant happens.

The existing rail system is very efficient for heavy freight.

High speed intercity rail needs a new railway system. There can't be any grade crossings with highways - a 200 mph train hitting a flatbed semi with a bulldozer on it is not something you want to have happen. The railway has to have curves of much larger radius that are banked correctly for high-speed operation. High-speed rail can have steeper grades, since the locomotives are powerful and the cars are light. High-speed rail is electrified with overhead catenaries, while freight is diesel with high clearance for double-stacked container cars.

I'm not even American, and just getting used to not calling myself young anymore (but intend to keep cycling for many more years).

As George Carlin said, The Earth is fine. The Earth ain't goin nowhere. We're all gonna die.

It's perhaps a little ambiguous, but I understood the comment as arguing the exact opposite. I interpreted "overdevelopment" to basically mean the kind of sprawl explainted here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason... ...where cities expand horizontally for short-term tax revenue gains/federal grants while accruing long-term infrastructure costs that their tax bases can't pay.