Anyone who's had the chance to live in a European city with good
> public transit knows that the availability of a good, reliable,
> well-planned, integrated public transit system is not just more energy
> efficient (and also more economical) -- its availability, and all the
> individual and commercial and social responses and asaptations that
> society makes to its availability, also combine to make everyday life
> simply immensely more pleasant in innumerable ways.
> Trouble is, there's a chicken-and-egg problem: you have to have the
> whole integrated system and the associated personal, social, and
> commercial adjustments to get the benefits; but until you have the
> system, the associated responses don't happen; and until you have the
> responses and adaptations, the transit system can't be built and be
> economically viable.
Unfortunately for such transit systems, most cities in the U.S.A. have grown in the automobile era so that there is no real focus for public transportation -- no central point. This makes it almost necessary to have a car, since there is no practical way to serve all the criss-crossing travel patterns which in some cities may have the majority of travel.
There are some places where this is not true in limited areas. There is no way I would try to drive in New York City, with its excellent public transit system. San Francisco's seems to work well, too. It is said that Boston's does too, but I have no personal experience.
There is no place in the world where public passenger transportation does not require a subsidy; in most cases, outright operation by a governmental entity.
Also, rail transit systems are tremendously expensive to build in established cities.
Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@aol.com snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com