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Comment by thow-58d4e8b | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid it's not simply about political will. To have affordable and safe public transport, one would need to completely revamp the fabric of American society

Why is there no public transport? Because it's losing money due to low ridership. Why is the ridership low? Because people are afraid of dangerous neighborhoods, wackos, homeless and other people of lower castes. Why all of these factors? Because of massive inequalities, rugged individualism, broken healthcare, missing social nets,... Unless that is fixed, the public transport won't be a decent option. Driving everywhere allows people to form a bubble that shields them from daily witnessing the ills of the system

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> Why is the ridership low? Because people are afraid of dangerous neighborhoods, wackos, homeless and other people of lower castes.

Where do you get this? PT ridership goes down where it is unreliable, has insufficient hours, has too few runs and where stops are far away. These things are all from investing far below what the public needs.

What I have personally seen over and over is that PT fills up with all the people who can overcome the hurdles and make it work. Remove more hurdles, get more riders.

> Why is there no public transport? Because it's losing money due to low ridership. Why is the ridership low?

This certainly is not it, because public transportation is in general a public service whose main output is not turning a profit but positive externalities that boil down to quality of life. Consequently, there are plenty of cities around the world where their public transportation network is subsidized to the point where the service is completely free to use.

Let's put things in perspective: in the US, Texas wasted close to $3B dollars to expand a highway to a whopping 26 lanes[1]. Wouldn't it be far better if that cash was instead used to put together a commuter railway service that serves the same route, or even in Houston's appallingly tiny light rail network[2]?

[1] https://www.cntraveler.com/story/the-worlds-widest-highway-s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail

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