Sorta, kinda.
Suppose in some hypothetical future, we can take the (expensive) train to our destination in Somewhere, USA, and it drops us off.
So there we are, at a train station in Somewhere, USA.
What happens next? A bus? Light rail? Uber/Lyft/taxi? A friend who has time to show up? Renting a car? What's our next move? (Lots of destinations don't have much for local public transport.)
For contrast: When I drive myself to Somewhere, I've still got my car to use after I get there. I can go anywhere I want to go, at any time I choose to do so, and I can bring as much stuff and as many people as suits me without much additional cost.
I don't have to wait around for a train. I don't have to deal with checking luggage, or retrieving luggage. I can just pop into town -- with my car -- and set forth to do whatever I want. The bags can ride along with me until I get to wherever it is that I'm crashing for the night and until then, they don't present any particular burden at all.
I might have been better-rested if I took the hypothetical train, but getting dropped off at a train station isn't a very complete solution.
> What happens next? A bus? Light rail? Uber/Lyft/taxi? A friend who has time to show up? Renting a car? What's our next move? (Lots of destinations don't have much for local public transport.)
You're saying all this as if this exact scenario isn't solved in plenty of places across the world? You take the bus or tram or metro or cycle or just walk if it's close enough. If the city is actually built with public transport in mind, not just a single bus line that runs every 2 hours bolted on as an afterthought, those options can be easier and faster than finding a parking spot, unless you feel entitled to park your vehicle anywhere you please to the detriment of everyone who isn't you.
Where I live in the Netherlands it's faster to bike most places than driving, because we don't solely cater to drivers and don't devote half the city to letting people store their cars. Even up North in the villages you can still get around by bike, since cycling lanes are dead cheap to build and maintain and can go down in the middle of a swamp if you needed to.
> When I drive myself to Somewhere, I've still got my car to use after I get there.
Sure, and when I cycle to Somewhere, I've still got my bike. Same logic, except I can lock it to a post and forget about it rather than needing to find a dedicated slab of real estate specifically reserved for my vehicle's existence. And if I took the train, I can rent a bike when I get there, which is a thing that exists in basically every city that actually invested in making it work.
> I can go anywhere I want to go, at any time I choose
That only holds true because decades of car-centric design have made it so. In the Netherlands you couldn't just go anywhere you wanted by car, because there are plenty of streets and whole areas where cars flat out aren't allowed, because we actually prioritize the people who have to live with those infrastructural choices over random passersby who don't want to be "inconvenienced" by having to walk 5 minutes or share the road with someone who isn't also in a car.
If the US bothered to build out the infrastructure, you could go anywhere you wanted to go via public transport as well.
What happens in your scenario if you can't find parking anywhere near your destination and the only option is lugging your bags along roads that weren't built for pedestrians? I know I've been in similar situations in the past where I had to drive around for fucking ages trying to find a single spot, I definitely would've preferred walking than that whole circus.
> I might have been better-rested if I took the hypothetical train, but getting dropped off at a train station isn't a very complete solution.
Right, in a country that gutted its public transit and zoned everything to be car-dependent, a train station by itself isn't a complete solution. That's a policy failure, not an argument against trains.
> If the US bothered to build out the infrastructure, you could go anywhere you wanted to go via public transport as well.
Public transit != mass transit. There's no reason that self-driving vehicle fleets can't be municipally subsidized and provide a dramatically better private experience than any mass transit anywhere in the world, and we already have the infrastructure for it.
How many private vehicles do you need to provide mass transit away from a mass event such as a stadium, or a concert?
Ah yes. The entirely hypothetical situation that doesn't exist anywhere in the world
Those places are comfortable with subpar transit conditions. There's nothing actually individually desirable about taking the train compared to having a private car take you directly between points A and B, people just seem to shy away from admitting that in favor of pro-social signaling in support of public transit.
I guess you've never ridden on the Shinkansen or anywhere in Switzerland. I'd much rather take those trains than do the equivalent drives, especially if I'm the one behind the wheel.
Ah yeah, the subpar conditions of ... not being dependent on the car for 100% of your life. The subpar conditions of ... not having to spend hours driving on the highway. The subpar conditions of ... having a choice.
I wonder if there are psychological studies on why Americans en masse cannot even perceive the idea of there being other transportation options than cars and (to a lesser extent) planes. Even though in the rare cases when someone manages to provide a well-planned alternative Americans do use it, see Northeast Corridor (2200 trains a day, 15 million passengers a year, 14% of intercity traffic, replacing most air travel between some of the cities).
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Note: it's both funny and sad reading about the state of anything in the US that keeps pretending it's not a third-world country.
For example, Empire Corridor, passenger rail corridor in New York State running between Penn Station in New York and Niagara Falls: "In the 1890s, the Empire State Express between New York City and Buffalo was about 1 hour faster than Amtrak's service in 2013." (Wikipedia)
It can exist. Just add trains.
The lack of other public transportation is already real in much of the US.
(If we're not adding trains, then there's really nothing here to talk about in this context -- is there?)