So I would have to walk like what? 15 minutes with my kid who is crying, then wait another 10 to 15 minutes for a train to show up, then wait on the train for 15 to 20 minutes, then walk from the station to the hospital for maybe 5 to 10 minutes.
So this is roughly 60 to 80 minutes, with my crying child, and all assuming a fairly efficient public transportation system. I think that's always the problem when we get pitchforks out to ban cars altogether. I'm all for "greener" cities, for bicycle lanes and all. All policies that try to make it less required to use your car are great, but a blanket ban is idiotic because sometimes, having a car can literally save your life.
If cars are banned everybody will seek the alternates: that means the walk to the train is much less than 15 minutes (unless you are a farmer - but farmers already have a 30 minute drive to the nearest hospital, and over an hour to a good one), and the train will come more often than every 15 minutes even at 3am. The train will also stop in the hospital, so that walk is less.
The big question with all these ideas is how to pay for it?
Economically it doesn't work in majority of the US. Some big cities might be able to pull it off - but even those often run at a loss and are subsidized by the city.
How does a small suburban area afford trains going all over?
How does a small suburban area afford roads going all over? Building rail is about the same cost as roads, and can be cheaper if we put as much effort into making tools for building it as we do roads today. Trains are more expensive than cars, but given they carry more people and last longer the cost per person is less than our current costs for cars per person. There are also mass production efficiencies that have the potential to bring the cost of a train down significantly if only we had demand for more.
Note that subsidies for transit also apply to local roads. Each area is different, but in many cases gas tax doesn't reach the city and the roads are all paid for from other taxes.
The problem is getting there. It is to predict how it would work out if we there today (see my assumptions above, I think they are reasonable but you might disagree and that will of course change what you come up with). However getting there is hard. Big cities are already making efforts to get there, but they are hampered because there is a complete lack of cost control and so trains cost way more than they should for no obvious reason. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/01/31/why-costs-matt... has some good information (read his other blog posts for even more data)
Of course in the end all trains don't make sense in the first place. Cars and trucks are flexible and so there will always be need for them. Farmers and construction workers need to get their supplies to places without infrastructure, while dirt and gravel roads are enough. Even baring that, the flexibility of a personal car means that the end of the personal car implies the complete end of modern civilization (your new job is manual labor: running a hoe)
There are many human-oriented cities around the world in which mass-transit reigns, and they manage to make life work. I've been in Hong Kong a lot, and I'm not sure I can pick two points in Hong Kong that are 80 minutes apart from each other. I mean, maybe getting to the New Territories from Sai Wan Ho or something, but they have their own closer hospitals, so...
It's hard to explain dry land to a fish, but life without cars is possible.
> There are many human-oriented cities around the world in which mass-transit reigns
All of which are densely populated cities.
This concept simply doesn't work in majority of America, where the average city is sparsely populated and quite spread out.
People living in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Portland, Austin, Los Angeles, etc... quickly forget what life is like in say... Fiddletown, California.
If Fiddletown, California were forced to pay for its own road construction and upkeep, instead of getting free money from the state or federal government, they'd have to massively raise their taxes, and the town would become a ghost town as people moved to the large cities that have lower per-capita infrastructure costs.
>then wait another 10 to 15 minutes for a train to show up
You seem to be assuming that every country has train systems as horrible as America's.
>and all assuming a fairly efficient public transportation system
No, you're not.
>having a car can literally save your life.
You don't need a car to save your life. This is why ambulances were invented: if you have a real life-threatening emergency, you call one of those. If you're having a true emergency, you have no business driving yourself anyway: you're a danger to everyone around you.
So this is roughly 60 to 80 minutes, with my crying child, and all assuming a fairly efficient public transportation system. I think that's always the problem when we get pitchforks out to ban cars altogether. I'm all for "greener" cities, for bicycle lanes and all. All policies that try to make it less required to use your car are great, but a blanket ban is idiotic because sometimes, having a car can literally save your life.