[holmesworcester]

One way to look at this is that the Bay Area focuses on transportation technology that works and scales regardless of the rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible.

And the Bay Area, largely, eats its own dogfood.

There is no faster, more powerful public transportation system than a city that allows Uber to offer mototaxi service. Uber was allowed to turned that on in Rio at some point in the last couple years and it puts busses and subways to shame. The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero.

[flerchin]

The deaths per mile on the subway must be 3 orders of magnitude lower than the skilled motorcyclists.

[jandrese]

Especially if they're lane splitting in a crowded city street to speed through traffic jams. That's incredibly dangerous.

https://i.redd.it/rviipp7czy131.jpg

And the rail fatalities are only that high because of people using it for suicide.

[AlotOfReading]

The transit situation in the bay area is so bad that even the FAANG companies run their own private transit systems of commuter buses. I doubt there's many people paying for an Uber 2x a day from Fremont to Santa Clara with any regularity, but thousands of commuters do that trip daily by car and train.

[bkettle]

Why are the socio-political stars aligned in tens of countries across Europe and Asia but not in the US, if such alignment is so rare?

I might argue that the bay area focuses on transportation technology that is flashy and gets around existing regulations because it is new, with hardly any regard at all for how it scales.

[rsynnott]

One thing I wonder about is the extreme localism of US transport. As far as I can see from visiting, the Muni buses and subway/trams cover only SF proper, and kinda abruptly cut off before you get to places that are theoretically other cities, but in practice close enough that they’d be treated as suburbs of SF elsewhere (South San Francisco, say). That seems to have its own independent transport (except for BART and Caltrain) which seems pretty bizarre.

[beisner]

Unfortunately the problem is literally the way the government is structured from an electoral + mathematical perspective. Particularly heinous failure mode is polarization, which has been the norm for 50+ years (really started after Vietnam). Biased towards inaction and status quo structurally. The last sustainably unifying event was WWII, which doesn’t bode well.

[linguae]

In my opinion, there are two factors at play: (1) social division and (2) it’s easy in America for self-interested people and organizations to block progress by weaponizing due process.

I’ll expound on the first point. European countries and East Asian countries generally have a stronger sense of cultural cohesion, while America has many deep divisions such as:

1. Social liberalism versus social conservatism, which also correlates to a secular versus cultural Christian worldview.

2. Racial and ethnic divides with sometimes centuries of bad blood

3. Class divides between the poor, the working class, the middle class, and the wealthy.

These divisions make it harder for people to come together to work for the common good. There are some politicians who shamelessly act in the interest of their voter bases with little regard for those outside their bases, and there are also people who are suspicious of even well-intended proposals since there may be hidden motives behind them.

[datadrivenangel]

In Uganda and east africa they call the motorcycle taxis "bodaboda" and they're generally regarded as the only reliable way to get through insane traffic. They're also exceedingly dangerous.

[ExoticPearTree]

You should try taxi bikes in Vietnam, especially in Ho Chi Min City or Hanoi at rush hour. It feels like you get born a second time at the end of the trip.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero

I'd hazard a guess that an experienced cyclist would be able to beat most subway journeys too

Top Gear "London Race" episode: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1140803

[smcin]

"rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible."

is nonsense. EU countries have been building HSR for half a century already. Japan has HSR. China has HSR, nationwide. S Korea has HSR. At national/federal level. BRICS are next. The US is being left behind.

Your remark only holds true for US (and in particular California) politics and development laws, NIMBYism and the abuse of environmental process like CEQA [0], and how doing transit (in the US) involves coordinating multiple city govts and agencies - instead of it being a federal/state project. If Eisenhower's 1950s interstate highway system had had to be done like that and rely on permission from multiple local officials and govts and local revenue-raising, it'd be a patchwork mess too, if it had ever even gotten built at all. Eventually results in BART's 2003 Millbrae-SFO extension ($1.5b / only 8.7 miles of track). Address the root-cause, not the symptom.

After half a century of piecemeal transit in only some areas, this all causes the chicken-and-egg that US homeowners historically associate proximity to transit with negative property value.

As to the comparison to Uber, the non-viability of public transport in post-1950 US urban-planning cities/suburbs/exurbs is due to the low density, like why aren't there a grocery, cafes, services, banks, Amazon lockers, fractional car rental services etc. in/near any major transit node in the US? Amsterdam, Singapore, Barcelona prove you can have pleasant liveable world-class cities based on transit.

[0]: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101910935/balancing-need-for-...

[lazyasciiart]

Why is Uber so much better than Grab?

[paunchy]

Because Grab is a copy of Uber and it would not exist without Uber. It may be that Grab is an equal (or perhaps better) implementation right now. But the entire category of app-based ride-sharing was created by Uber.

[mike_d]

The Bay Area is crippled by people who live comfortably within biking distance of Whole Foods, Zeitgeist, and their Apple shuttle bus stop. These people can't fathom why anyone would want to drive a dirty car and blight the city with roads.

It costs almost a billion dollars to build a mile of BART, due to political corruption 65% of all MUNI service lines are to/from Chinatown, we keep the "iconic" cable car lines going even though they have the highest rate of accidents per mile and per vehicle in the country.

We just need to double or triple down on roads and let things like Waymo and Uber save us from ourselves.

Bikebrains rant about things like "induced demand" without actually understanding that building additional infrastructure simply serves pent up demand. They point to things like the Katy Freeway which was expanded to 26 lanes but "traffic got worse" - ignoring the fact that travel speeds increased by 60% for almost a decade until Houston's population ballooned to what it is today.

[platevoltage]

If I wanted to live in Houston, I'd live in Houston. I'm one of those "bike brained" morons that is happy that are getting rid of a lane on Grand Ave because pedestrians keep getting killed.