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They don't do it well. They do it "well enough" for commuting, but you'll notice the streets are jammed with auto traffic. And Tokyo is famous for its terrible conditions on the commuter trains.
I'm only shooting down solutions that don't work and can be expected to make things worse.
Just because London/Tokyo/whatever have traffic doesn't mean their trains suck. Imagine how much worse it would be without trains.
That actually kind of proves my point, the cities quite literally would not work without trains, because trains can scale, unlike road capacity.
I would very much like to hear your solution to how to transport large volumes of people in a relatively small area.
As fun as our verbal sparring has been, all you've done is shoot down every possible option as "nuh uh not good enough" without ever acknowledging that once you crest ~3 million people in an area, everyone taking a personal automobile fundamentally starts falling apart due to the limits of space-time.
So I say again my friend, what's your solution?
That's assuming the conclusion.
My solution is to not put such large volumes of people in a small area. There's no good solution to transportation once you've jammed everyone together, they all suck.
Genuinely asking, how is that assuming the conclusion?
If Tokyo today has tons of traffic, and a quick Google says Tokyo has on average 9 million subway riders every day, then if there were not subways/trains then those 9 million people would need to get around some other way. And if the roads are already packed as you say, there definitely isn't room for them there.
I agree your solution (just have smaller cities) is actually a significantly more effective solution to traffic than anything else.
But isn't that kind of an is/ought problem (to be honest, not sure if I've used this correctly). You say: "we ought to have small cities, this will solve congestion" and that's, true, but we actually have big cities that need solutions now, and dispersing their populations isn't going to happen.
Also you'd probably need to re-align a lot of human society and economy to stop mega-cities from leveraging economies of scale and network effects to dominate smaller cities, because that keeps happening the world over basically since agriculture was invented.
Because the transit could be resulting in more trips (and more people) overall. If there weren't transit, there might be less density and fewer trips.
But you've been proposing transit for suburban NJ, which is not in fact a big city. In general politicians who propose these things are not trying to solve transportation problems anyway. They're in favor of big cities, transit unions, and environmentalism and against cars. So trains and the NYC subway just get slower and slower; more money gets poured into them and ends up as raises for the transit workers, motor vehicle lanes get taken away for bikes, and the resulting bike lanes get filled with crap -- in short a lot of money is spent and things get worse for everyone, except maybe the transit workers.
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