this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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Anything except public transportation
Never been a fan of the "we shouldn't make the smaller, easier improvements because we need to do the bigger, harder things instead" argument...
Yes, we need more and better public transit, but that is going to take a whole lot of time, money, and effort to work towards. Yes, it's worthwhile, and we shouldn't STOP working towards it because of this, but I don't think that's a reason to balk at a smaller, easier incremental change that encourages safer driving while also simply being more efficient.
More efficient is more cars per hour. When cars move faster, you can get more cars per hour through those intersections when the lights are green.
For public transportation in the US you need medium density living. So you're talking about getting everyone on board and uprooting everyone as you upgrade cities or build new cities for that.
"Anything except making incremental improvements that are practical instead of doing nothing because the preferred goal is impossible, at least practically impossible" - not as catchy, I admit :P
I'd argue the even bigger deal is mixed zoning. You can even be in a fairly spread out, small town, if you can just walk to the local grocery store, hardware store, etc, that's even better than needing to transit.
I rarely leave my neighborhood even in a very transit heavy city because I've got 3 grocery stores, a green grocer, two bakeries, a hardware store, etc, all within ~5 minutes walk. Both my kids' schools, a pre-K-K and an elementary, are within a block or two.
A lot of this can be accomplished by simply rezoning and letting the infill slowly change.
Big box grocery is a big part of the problem. We've got a relative abundance of grocery stores here - in US terms, but that means a 2-5 mile interval between then, and who is going to walk several miles carrying groceries? It doesn't help when competing groceries open directly across the street from each other, but even fixing that and making distribution of the current stores more even, there would still be a lot of the population 2+ miles to the nearest store, in our relatively high density suburban "core". Get that down to a maximum of 1km from every home to the nearest grocery and you're starting to have a walkable / bikeable solution for food.
As for bikes, we also have near-zero practical support for biking to get your groceries - starting to get something calling itself bike lanes, but they're not terribly safe looking, and then you get to the store and you're extremely lucky if there's even a rack provided to lock the bike to - the racks that do exist seem to be in direct conflict with pedestrian use of the sidewalks.
That is very true and it's wild how fast it changed. I remember still having small grocery stores in the 90's, but they've all closed down now. A few still exist as discount stores, but they aren't true full service grocery stores, mostly frozen stuff and junk food. It definitely exacerbated the "food desert" problem a lot of the US has... a lot of folks with limited mobility only have access to these shitty faux-grocery stores, it's kind of no wonder so many people eat like shit.
I'm not in the US anymore but that big box transformation was well and truly completed by the time I left.
I had a friend who had an apartment in Hamburg, roughly 600m from an S-Bahn station. within 50m of that station was the neighborhood grocery. You walk up to take the train to wherever, and on your way home you stop off in the Biergarten first, have a few, then stop in the grocery before walking home - downhill no less for the arms full of packages side of the trip. Not a bad layout, but about half the residents still had cars parked all over the streets which they used more or less daily. So, in some ways, the US arrangement just doesn't bother with the under-utilized trains, but it also eliminates them as an option which really sucks when you want to go to the airport, or take an inter-city train somewhere...
I agree - I should have said medium mixed zoning as that's what I was intending to convery :)
Also, for wheelchair users like me, higher density would probably lead to cheaper delivery services of all kinds - Walmart has that market cornered at the moment, and I hate that it's Walmart that figured it out. :|
Do you want traffic lights to only turn every 5-10 minutes? Lights were always going to be changing more than transit was arriving, if altering how it changes slows speeding drivers why wouldn’t you want that?