The California highspeed rail project is 33(!) years old.

Even better. I didn't remember. It's a suppressed memory!

Busses. I rode on a public bus once while visiting Columbus Ohio.

I knew a bus ride was in my future and I'd not done that before, so I asked questions of the various people I know who live there.

Not one of them had ever had a ride on the bus in the city they call home, or knew how the bus worked, and all of them made a point of telling me that they were sure that it would be filthy and awful somehow.

The COTA website didn't set clear expectations for a new rider and wasn't very helpful.

I eventually posted on the local subreddit asking for direction, and got exactly 1 useful response out of many non-useful responses.

I don't know if it's just a Columbus thing or what, but it seems clear from this experience that folks there hate the bus. Is there a place in the US where they're appreciated?

(Anyway, other than having to walk mile or so to get from the airport to the nearest bus stop because WTF, things went perfectly fine. I had a great chat with some random dude who was waiting a different bus. My bus showed up exactly when Google Maps predicted, I had exact change ready, and the transfer ticket for the next bus on my route was easy to deal with. They were clean, comfortable-enough, and I was the only rider.)

Your experience isn't uncommon. Lots of cities in the US have pretty limited transit, and a lot of the people in those cities don't use it. It's usually seen as a last resort kind of thing for those who can't get private transportation, as opposed to just yet another option.

Boulder Colorado has a public airport bus route that is pretty widely used - it takes one hour and is well liked by the general public.

It seems that Columbus has one today, but they didn't back when I needed it in 2021 or so.

(Need is relative, I suppose. I don't mind walking and I pack light; I was able to spend a couple of weeks out of town with a backpack that counts as just a personal item; getting to the bus stop wasn't a big deal for me.)

> The most recent being when we built all these urban highways.

What? Clarify please, because if you are going back to the 1950's/60's/70's you are talking about a very different country. Today all all of that you are talking about would solidly fit in the "fantasy" category.

You must not be from Los Angeles. Come drive our highways for a few months. I've had better experiences in third world countries.

> to run bus routes

That only works in certain locations and do absolutely nothing for the largest sources of traffic. Nothing.

Just like carpool lanes, which area massive joke on us: nobody carpools to use those lanes, so the traffic reduction they deliver, expressed as a percentage and rounded to the nearest integer is, zero.

The US, in general, was not built for the kind of mass transport Europeans are used to. And that will never happen here. In the US, self-driving cars will be our solution to the problem. Give it about ten years and we are really going to start to see adoption and the benefits of it. In a sense, virtual mass transit using existing infrastructure. That might work, slowly, but it could work.

In ten years I hope that the only human-drivable cars I will own will be my race cars, which get towed to the track. Everything else should be electric and self-driving to a large extent.

Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports. Driving in Los Angeles absolutely sucks.

>> Oh, yes, and I want to ride a Joby multicopter hailed using Uber to go to the major airports from local verti-ports.

> And you think I live in fantasy land.

Yes, you do.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/newsroom/uber-air/

> So in just a few decades we managed to radically change the way people moved and lived. Which was an extremely radical change from how everyone lived and moved just a few decades before that. And yet somehow that's just impossible to ever happen again.

You must be a software guy. Moving atoms is very different from typing words into this textbox. Also, in the US, the 1950's to 1970's was a very, very different time. That was probably the peak of our industrialization phase. You had millions of men who came back from WW2 ready to work all kinds of jobs, an industrial based that had exploded due to WW2, massive entrepreneurial drive at every level and the ability to get shit done without the nonsense that kill even the most basic projects today.

Yes, a few decades can change things radically. In the decades since the period you use as the reference for this fantasy the US, Europe and other nations have deindustrialized to an alarming degree and China has become the world's factory. We make nothing here. To be able to to things you have to make things. On top of that, our political system has welcomed bat-shit-crazy ideologies, like the current push for down-right socialism/communism who's only recorded history is the destruction of nations.

So, yeah, yours is a fantasy. This is not the United States of the 1950's, 1960's or 1970's, not by a large margin.

To understand things at this level you need contact with reality. I've you've never tried to get a non-trivial project done in the real world, moving atoms, not bit, I can see how waving a magical wand and thinking we can do what was done five to seven decades ago might be possible. It is not. I've been in manufacturing my entire life. I assure you this is not the 1950's.

> This ultimately doesn't really deal with some of the big immediate and local issues though in crowded urban environments

Sure, but that's a different problem, isn't it? What we can change --over time-- is the relationship between where people work and where they live. If you take the greater Los Angeles area, the massive concentration of job centers in centralized "hubs" as I call them is tragically destructive. You have people driving into these hubs from every possible angle and you end-up with shit like the 405 freeway being a parking lot all day, every day.

This isn't about public transportation. It's about politicians being politicians (which I use to mean: incompetent) wasting decades of valuable intelligent planning. In the town I live in they absolutely refuse to grant permits for the kinds of job magnets that would have people from this town work here. As a result, if you are unfortunate enough to not have found work in this area, you are eating a one to two hour commute every day.

So, if you want to solve the housing and congestion problem, you need a long term intelligent planning policy that will incentivize businesses to build in areas that will reverse some of the flows.

To use a company I am very familiar with, SpaceX, just look at where they are in Los Angeles. It's probably one of the worst locations one could choose. And like that, probably hundreds of large employers in that area and a few miles north, south, east and west. A good policy would have looked at the concentration and created intelligent plans to incentivize companies to find locations that would balance flows and spawn new housing developments surrounding these centers of employment.

Instead of doing that, what you end-up with over time are companies leaving for other states where they have more favorable financial climates as well as the ability to, in some cases, build what they need and where they need it.

Moving atoms isn't easy. Some things we can do. Others we cannot. Public mass transportation is not likely to be some thing that will take over the US. Exceptions here and there, sure. I've completed non-trivial construction projects that don't even begin to approximate the zoning and political complexity of the kinds of things you are talking about, and every single one of them has been an expensive nightmare purely because our system has devolved into something that prevents progress rather than encouraging it.

Note that I am not at all opposed to the image you paint. I have travelled and worked in European and Latin American cities where public transport is wonderful and love it. I am just being realistic about who we are and we can actually accomplish in the US. We can't build a single new nuclear (or whatever) power plant while China is building a hundred. That should tell you something.

This is a lot of words to ultimately agree with my core point. If we have the political will to do so, we can. It pretty much all boils down to that. If we don't have it, we can't do it.

I agree, in most parts of the US we do not currently have the political will. I agree, building things and changing minds often takes time.

But instead we've elected people who put people into power who thinks bike lanes are woke and need to be destroyed. So I guess it'll take a bit longer before we start making real progress on these issues.

You flying on that Joby tomorrow? I hear They've been saying their air taxi service is coming next year for so many years now and are only supposedly just now starting FAA testing. I wouldn't hold my breath for actual useful and anywhere near affordable service anytime soon.

> I agree, in most parts of the US we do not currently have the political will.

This isn't about political will. Politicians are whores, it doesn't matter what side, they respond to money and votes. This is worse than that, this is about people not being intelligent enough to vote with a view towards future benefits --decades away. Politicians buy votes by promising crap that the masses eat-up and never get. This nonsense is as old as time. This is precisely the kind of thing that destroyed nearly every nation in Latin America. And now idiot voters are pushing the US in the same direction with these bat-shit-crazy socialist/communist politicians gaining ground in various places. Americans will eventually learn, however, and sadly, this might require a few decades.

In that context, the whole mass transit conversation is so utterly insignificant it isn't even worth the bits we have wasted in this chat.

> bike lanes are woke

No, they are not woke, they are stupid...in certain cities. Some of the things I have seen are truly horrific. One of my own kids, who decided commuting to work on a bike was a good idea, nearly got killed twice. A year later he bought a car.

Once again, there's reality and fantasy. They are not the same.

>You flying on that Joby tomorrow?

If I could, absolutely. I've talked to people who would never get in a Waymo. I have, many times, also through Uber. Great experience. Progress.

> I hear They've been saying their air taxi service is coming next year for so many years now and are only supposedly just now starting FAA testing.

If you've never been involved in product development, manufacturing, testing and certification within a regulatory environment you don't have a real sense of just how hard and detailed these processes can be. Could it go faster? Sure. The point is, we probably don't really want them to in a case where safety is the top consideration. It will take as long as it will take.

> I wouldn't hold my breath for actual useful and anywhere near affordable service anytime soon.

Sure, but it will happen and affordability is relative. For example, it costs me $120 each way for an Uber to the airport that could take one to two hours to get there. If I drive my own car, I still get to eat two hours on the road and spend about $300 parking it at the airport. So, if I can buy a 30 minute Joby ride for $300 to $500 round trip, with Uber car pickup and drop-off included, sign me up!

Also, people use helicopters today and they are not at all cheap to fly. So this isn't like comparably-priced options are not out there. In fact, a Joby solution integrated into Uber is far more likely to democratize short-range air transport than anything else.