When you say most places, I assume you leave out most of the world in this? The number of countries with broad complete train networks is small compared to the land mass of the earth inhabited by humans. Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
Most urban US cities have some attempt at an urban train network, and most significantly more useful than Seattle. The issue is typically more of funding and willpower - major infrastructure in an established city is expensive and disruptive to the point most don’t want to deal with it. Additionally the feeder transit infrastructure tends to be weak enough that the daily practicality is low because you have to live right on the line and your destination must also be. Otherwise you’re driving in. Finally the urban planning for surface roads has been well enough structured that the trade off for time saved in public transit doesn’t make sense. You spend time walking and doing transfers in excess of double a driving time.
Is that a flaw? If you electrify the cars to minimize pollution, automate their driving to reduce risk, ensure they collaborate to improve efficiency, I’m not sure I buy the argument any more.
> Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
By raw population numbers, most people worldwide does live in large cities with a lot of coverage by some type of public transport, not necessarily trains or subways. Buses exist.
Only about 1 in 8 people globally lives in a large (> 10 million people) city.
Most people who live in cities are in cities with < 250,000 people.
Exactly how many live in cities at all is determined by where you drawn the cutoff at which it's no longer a city.
And my answer to that is, if your area where people live isn't able to support a bus line, it's not a city. That means there's a lot of reality big towns out there.
And here we get into details. The problem with buses is their rubber tires. The awesome thing about buses is also their rubber tires. Need to move the bus line around? No need to run new tracks, just have the driver drive a different route. But all the negativities to buses aren't small details. Because you can just up and move the bus route, it means that the cafe owner right by the stop is at the mercy of the city planning department to exist, which leads to obvious power issues aka corruption. After everything else is greenified, rubber tires are the biggest source of pylori pollution from buses.
With respect to tire pollution, buses are far less bad than cars. Providing a bus is not nearly empty, while the per-vehicle pollution is worse than a car, it's per-passenger pollution is much less.
Yes but they're worse than trams and trains.
It is perfectly possible to live in these places without cars as the primary means of transportation.