The $25k car is going extinct?

Do you have example of places with density similar to US where public transport works well? Australia has some in urban centres, but otherwise car centric. Same in NZ. Elecric bus to my place costs 8x more than driving EV (before it was taxed)

Whilst I can spiel off complaints, public transport in Australia gets my kid to and from school everyday, and myself to and from work in two different cities, everyday, without being late. (When the union isn't striking).

It does seem to work.

Australia kind of gives you the choice. The inner city areas have great PT, great public spaces and some awesome outdoor walkable retail/food streets. But then you've also got the outer suburbs which is a hellscape similar to the US.

It's also not that expensive to rent inner city or buy an apartment. The outer suburbs mostly exist because people have a mentality of invest in land at any cost, even if it means living in a wasteland and commuting 3 hours a day.

ChatGPT says it's either only 5.6% or 27% (which is pretty good) for Sydney.

How do you get to train station?

Not to whom you're directing your question, but I drive the short distance to the car park at the interchange/station, then catch the bus the long distance to the city.

It's a great setup, and/but the very specific infrastructure[0] that I use only services maybe a quarter of the city's mid-suburbia. There's other public transport that services plenty of the rest though.

Doxxing myself here, but anyway: [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Bahn_Busway

It’s not public transport but I live in a single family home in a town of 60,000 people and 70% of trips are made by bikes.

https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w

900 or so people per square km.

To give a random comparison (because I know it well) Sacramento has a density of 2000 per square km and far, far worse transportation.

We have these around Auckland. Parking fills up 100% before 7AM.

California has only a slightly lower population density than France. France has 27,000km of operating passenger rail tracks, California 2,600km (similar to Ireland, a country of 5 million people not noted for its public transport, with a lower population density than California).

This is a weird form of American exceptionalism where people insist that the US can't have the nice things that all other rich countries have, because Density. And this might even be true if you're talking about, say, Wyoming. But it absolutely isn't an excuse for places like California or Florida.

Which tells you that ChatGPT is essentially useless.

Like, why post this? The difference between the two figures is so vast as to be pointless, and it likely just made them up anyway. This is something that you can actually look up.

The density issue isn't country wide, but about metro areas. See Spain: If you look at the entire country and divide by population, it looks like the one of the least dense countries in Europe. But what if instead we look at where people live? Get the population density of the square kilometer where each person lives, and divide by number of people, so completely empty space doesn't count for anything. Then you see Spaniards live in areas denser than Liechtenstein. And guess what? Spain has top notch public transport, including high speed rail, because every endpoint is dense. I am right now sitting in a town, population around 100k, with higher population density than New York's Upper East side. We don't even have that much public transport, because only the elderly and the disabled need it, given that I can be on any given edge of town by walking 2 kms. In your typical US suburb, that gets you nowhere.

So it's not country density, but population center density. Single family homes with yards and individual garages make public transport pretty bad, as the catchment rates of each stop just don't have enough people. Just put the people closer together, and have more farmland/forest around the town.

Auckland is an incredibly busy city, on the same kind of world scale as Sydney, as far as my understanding goes.

The interchange has a four level car park that fills up to about three quarters full by 8am-ish. A secondary car park was just finished maybe a couple of years ago, with an additional ~50% capacity.

Addendum - not really a great comparison because houten has a lot of farmland which will affect the value (Sacramento has similar issues though)

Anyway the density doesn’t feel high here and maybe that’s the more relevant bit

All buses flow in and out of the train station. Buses move in and out of all the suburbs.