The United States (and Canada too, for that matter), has collectively decided that public transit is for The Poors, and so it is funded accordingly.
It's funny that a video about subway stations could make someone homesick, but I watched that and found myself really missing life in Shanghai and how you can quickly zip around the city by subway and feel comfortable because of the quality of the system and infrastructure, much of which is just as nice or nicer than the stations shown in Chengdu. It has something like 300-400 stations now and is a massive contribution to quality of life for people across income levels. It's seriously great.
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It's funny that a video about subway stations could make someone homesick, but I watched that and found myself really missing life in Shanghai and how you can quickly zip around the city by subway and feel comfortable because of the quality of the system and infrastructure, much of which is just as nice or nicer than the stations shown in Chengdu. It has something like 300-400 stations now and is a massive contribution to quality of life for people across income levels. It's seriously great.
I haven't been to mainland China, but I have visited Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. Riding the metro systems in those countries makes me so jealous/angry that we could have built our cities in Canada to have a similar quality of public transportation but instead made the short-sighted decision to design our urban infrastructure around low-density car-dependent suburbs because we don't want to share spaces with poor people.
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I haven't been to mainland China, but I have visited Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. Riding the metro systems in those countries makes me so jealous/angry that we could have built our cities in Canada to have a similar quality of public transportation but instead made the short-sighted decision to design our urban infrastructure around low-density car-dependent suburbs because we don't want to share spaces with poor people.
Also been on all the systems in HK, Taiwan and Japan (also China too, but not the city shown in the above video). Just amazing systems that were always designed with the goal of making travel for the masses as convenient and cheap as possible. The systems in Tokyo and Hong Kong in particular - so great!
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I haven't been to mainland China, but I have visited Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. Riding the metro systems in those countries makes me so jealous/angry that we could have built our cities in Canada to have a similar quality of public transportation but instead made the short-sighted decision to design our urban infrastructure around low-density car-dependent suburbs because we don't want to share spaces with poor people.
It's too bad there isn't much appreciation of the benefits of density in Canada. Personally, I find suburban cities to feel lonely, isolating, and much less vibrant, but people like their suburbs here and density seems to face a lot of opposition. There are many contributors to quality of life that are hard to have without density though, including really excellent shared public systems like these.
It's also just hard to compete/compare with places that are far ahead in infrastructure development capacity, and the infrastructure development capacity is worlds apart between these places.
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I mean, to be fair you are talking about cities over 10 times the typical Canadian city size. Sure, Toronto has really dropped the ball. But you aren't going to have 10 subway lines in a city of a million, no matter how dense it is.
Personally, I'm way happier in a place with fewer people and less density than a city swamped with masses of humanity. Different strokes, sure. But there are plenty of benefits. Which is why a place like Calgary continually ranks so high on desirability and quality of living scales.
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I mean, to be fair you are talking about cities over 10 times the typical Canadian city size. Sure, Toronto has really dropped the ball. But you aren't going to have 10 subway lines in a city of a million, no matter how dense it is.
I'm not talking exclusively about Tokyo or Taipei. Kyoto has a population of 1.4M, approximately the same as Calgary. Their public transit system is lightyears beyond ours. It's not an issue of population size; it's one of deliberate choices and priorities US and Canadian society has made since the end of WWII. We've decided that the car is king and public transportation is for poor people, so we don't invest in it appropriately. If over 90% of Calgarians -- regardless of socioeconomic status -- used public transit as their primary form of getting around (as is the case in Hong Kong), you can be sure the system would be properly funded and more convenient.
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It's pretty hemmed in by mountains. Did hey have much choice other than to build up? From the centre to mountains is under 10km in almost any direction.
I'm not saying we haven't made poor decisions regarding transit, but it can be simplistic to compare ourselves to other cities. Pre-oil crash of 2014, I think Calgary had a really well used transit system that wasn't meant only for poor people.
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It's pretty hemmed in by mountains. Did hey have much choice other than to build up? From the centre to mountains is under 10km in almost any direction.
I'm not saying we haven't made poor decisions regarding transit, but it can be simplistic to compare ourselves to other cities. Pre-oil crash of 2014, I think Calgary had a really well used transit system that wasn't meant only for poor people.
The geography of a city is definitely a big factor. Hong Kong's a good example in that it's density has a lot to do with it both having steep mountains rising out of the ocean and about 40% of the land being nature preserve that further squeezes the city between the mountains and the sea. That said, it's also a good example of how a densely packed city of a million people wouldn't need ten subway lines, precisely because of the density. HK's main island population in 2008 was about the same as Calgary's population now, and it was serviced by a single subway line on the island. There are two lines now, but the new one was only recently added and not that busy. One really good line was enough for 1.3 million people living in a dense line.
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I'm not talking exclusively about Tokyo or Taipei. Kyoto has a population of 1.4M, approximately the same as Calgary. Their public transit system is lightyears beyond ours. It's not an issue of population size; it's one of deliberate choices and priorities US and Canadian society has made since the end of WWII. We've decided that the car is king and public transportation is for poor people, so we don't invest in it appropriately. If over 90% of Calgarians -- regardless of socioeconomic status -- used public transit as their primary form of getting around (as is the case in Hong Kong), you can be sure the system would be properly funded and more convenient.
You can’t really compare Kyoto and Calgary. How close is our closest city/town of substance? There… the extension of humanity beyond the formal City boundary continues so the GREATER Kyoto area has a massive population. Having been to Kyoto and exclusively used public transit for nearly a week it was so easy to get anywhere in a relatively quick way. Calgary?? Definitely not - hasn’t been set up properly for that at all. A good example… how to go from NW to NE.
You can’t really compare Kyoto and Calgary. How close is our closest city/town of substance? There… the extension of humanity beyond the formal City boundary continues so the GREATER Kyoto area has a massive population. Having been to Kyoto and exclusively used public transit for nearly a week it was so easy to get anywhere in a relatively quick way. Calgary?? Definitely not - hasn’t been set up properly for that at all. A good example… how to go from NW to NE.
The comparison between public transit in Kyoto and Calgary is absolutely absurd. Kyoto is only about 30 km from Osaka (2.7M), and about 45 km from Kobe (1.5M). The Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto area has a total population of about 19 million people. I would wager public transit would be a whole lot better here if Millarville was a city of 2.7 million inhabitants and Bragg Creek was another 1.5 million people.
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