this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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When there's 1 farm per 5 km maybe. In 1920, you could get from Savanah to Boston just by taking trains and streetcars; every neighborhood was served by atleast a tram.
The USSR found it worthwhile to build rail lines to remote settlements, without stops, a few times a day a guy would just drive a 2 train locomotive and stop if he saw anybody.
In some rural parts of Japan, you have lines it's just 1 railroad, and every 20 miles is an unmanned station where it splits into 2 for the trains to pass, for like 10 stations. So you have 200 miles worth of suburbs being served by 40-50 workers running 20 3 car trains, that arrive every 30 minutes or so. The unmanned stations tend to have tons of bikes, they probably have buses too.
Average cost of owning a car per day is 20USD or so. A single railroad line that allows just 1000 people to not pay for a car does not cost 20,000 USD a day to operate. This is not including the cost of road building and maintenance. But even if it did, cheap transit is a public good; transit isn't supposed to be revenue neutral. Roads aren't revenue neutral.
Sure, you can get from Savannah--a major city--to Boston--also a major city just by taking trains. That's a great case for public transport.
But as someone else pointed out, can you get from one side of Savannah to the other efficiently, at off-peak times? I lived in Chicago for over a decade, and while the transit system isn't great, it's not bad. I lived in the Austin neighborhood (if you know Chicago, you know that's not a great area); if I went to see a concert at downtown without driving, I had to walk about a mile and a half to get home, because that was the closest train stop to my home, and busses in my area stopped running at 11p.
Where I live now, even if trains ran to my town (and they technically do, but it's only freight), I would have to travel 15 miles to get to the train. And that 15 miles from where I live to the train is also about 1500' of elevation loss. That's pretty great for riding a bike there, and really, really sucks for getting home. Especially if I have groceries of any kind.
I agree that we should have better public transit, and I agree that the cost is a net public good. But that doesn't solve all transportation needs. It may take a large bite out of them, but it doesn't fix all of them.
Continuing to run some transit late at night is one of the few things NYC and Chicago actually do better than most cities.
Even Tokyo runs some of its last trains before midnight. Some stations don't get their first trains until 6 am. Missing the last train because of an event that let out at 2AM or 11 and it took awhile to get to the station isn't that uncommon. It's not terrible to walk 5km in a more walkable city. But also that's where ebike and scooter shares, and even taxis fill the gap. You don't need to destroy the city with parking lots and wide roads to support that.
I think that most of the trains in Chicago run late at night, although far, far less frequently. I remember taking the green line with my bike late at night, drunk, and riding the mile or so north to my home through some moderately shitty neighborhoods (a bit west of Garfield Park, if that means anything to you). I lived in in a pretty rough area; there were definitely no taxis waiting for fares near the train stations (or anywhere!), and there weren't any e-bike or scooters in that area either. It was just rough getting around the Austin neighborhood in Chicago late at night without a car.
Savannah is a planned city designed in the 1700s. It's probably the most walkable large city in Georgia.