Hacker News Reader

> I think it's not feasible in America because of the culture. If you have a good chunk of people that are hell-bent against sharing space with others for one reason or another (some are legitimate reasons!), you're already discarding a significant chunk of passengers.

That's why America never layed any railroads in the 19th century, and everyone just rode by horse instead. Oh wait, that's not what happened at all.

View on HN

You are ignoring major cultural shifts - people also lived tightly packed into tenements then too. The tolerance for such space sharing without common purpose has declined.

Which means that culture could easily shift again. It's not like Europe wasn't just as car-obsessed immediately after WWII (and East Asia a few decades after that), they just realized that it was a bad idea and that cars were fundamentally incompatible with dense settlements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com