• stoy@lemmy.zip
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    11 months ago

    High speed trains should actually not be the primary focus of the US when it commes to public transport, city/suburban systems are more important.

    Don’t get me wrong, the US absolutely needs high speed rail, but without a well functioning local public transport system at both ends you end up with something that conceptually is more like an airport than a european train station.

    Without local public transport, travelers still need to go by car to and from the endpoints, just like a lot of airports, this means that stations will require a lot of expensive parking, that is essentially wasted space.

    Now, the US will probably allways be car dependant to a higher degree than Europe, this is due to how cities have been built, unchecked urban sprawl with little mixed use zones with few central spots makes it hard to build good metro and bus lines, where do you put the stations, where will people connect?

    I won’t pretend to have the answers, I absolutely don’t, but I know that regardless of how public transport is established in new and existing neighbourhoods there will be angry people, but lets just make sure that the happy people outnumber them