> Coming from a rural area, I’m really appalled at how inefficient public transit is.
A highly utilized public transit system is often far more efficient than cars when measured in people-miles/hr during hours of peak transit demand, whereas rural transit is a totally different and non comparable transportation problem space.
The inefficient bus and rail systems are usually ones in areas where people mostly commute using cars, places like Silicon Valley.
In these places, the bus and rail lines are sparse relative to the population, so they take longer to get to any individual's destination.
> It’s clearly only functional enough to be used by people a) fortuitous enough to live right by public transit centers or b) people without a choice.
It's true that housing with easy transit center access is a privilege for working and professional class people today, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon since less than a generation ago, people of some means completely eschewed transit.
True, but even better is the fact that in addition to better people-miles per hour, a well designed system means people don't have to travel so far (by putting homes near jobs and amenities instead of surrounding everything with acres of asphalt - crazy idea!) so the <people-things they want to do> per hour ratio improves.
If a thousand people in point A want to get to point B 2 miles away, obviously a big train is faster than cars. The next step is to _make point B closer_. This is what is so often forgotten - when I lived in LA I knew Angelenos who'd visit London and say how great the tube was, but the same tube network in LA would be garbage. What makes the tube really work is the fact that those Angelenos almost never had to go more than a few miles to what they wanted, instead of saying things like "well it's 30 miles so if it's more than 30 minutes something has gone wrong".
People say things like "it took me 15 minutes to go a mile!!" but the real problem there is filling a mile of your city with garbage (parking and roads, mostly).
A highly utilized public transit system is often far more efficient than cars when measured in people-miles/hr during hours of peak transit demand, whereas rural transit is a totally different and non comparable transportation problem space.
The inefficient bus and rail systems are usually ones in areas where people mostly commute using cars, places like Silicon Valley.
In these places, the bus and rail lines are sparse relative to the population, so they take longer to get to any individual's destination.
> It’s clearly only functional enough to be used by people a) fortuitous enough to live right by public transit centers or b) people without a choice.
It's true that housing with easy transit center access is a privilege for working and professional class people today, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon since less than a generation ago, people of some means completely eschewed transit.