this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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This is one place where a difference is scale. In the US we always complain about the lack of trains and that is certainly a problem.
However several major cities have commuter rail lines that may be analogous. Google tells me the area served by my city’s commuter rail isn’t much smaller - the longest line runs about 60 miles and has dozens of stops in many smaller towns (nothing like you’re describing though). We even have lines running to nearby small cities. However the system is designed for commuting to the major city and is limited outside that use.
The comparison here in the us is that most cities still don’t have commuter rail system (but that is changing!) and we only have 2 practical intercity lines covering a tiny portion of our country
I might amend that from 'scale' to 'distribution'. Through the nineteenth century population centers built up around the rail lines. In the twentieth century that didn't matter so you have minor population centers just splattered all over the place.
This is the reality that our area has dealt with as they have tried to fund better transit, that they have to spend an exorbitant sum to serve a relatively small slice of the population because everyone is just spread everywhere.. Chicken and egg, designing a transit system around current population distribution is infeasible, encouraging a shift to a more amenable distribution requires that a transit system be deployed to motivate people.
We’ve all come to expect instant results and that’s really not going to happen here. Most of that scatter was built up with huge expansion of cars after wwii, it was built up over 80 years. Building last decades, that’s generally a good thing. But taking these two factors together, rebuilding our population centers should be expected to take a very long time. That doesn’t mean we give up: it means we make the investments and changes now. We plant the trees now, with the expectation that our grandchildren will sit in the shade.
One of the ways my city has been reinventing itself is with transit oriented development. Build the train first but develop a master plan around stops to develop people oriented population centers. That takes years to build out plus is one stop at a time. A big change last year was to require every community served by transit to establish special zoning near transit to encourage denser population growth. If this works, we’ll be completely different in a century or so
Sure, it's just an interesting challenge for funding development with public money.
You draw funds from people who can't benefit unless they further will spend even more money to relocate. Hard to get initiatives passed when your tax base is largely not going to benefit. The chicken and egg effect is harsher than just the time it will take.