West Coast baby
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Public transit works perfectly fine in a low-density situation. Your urban planning needs to accommodate it, though, with walkability being a prime concern.
A car-centric city will never mesh well with public transit no matter how dense it is. The best you can hope for is good subway coverage but that's expensive and can't be done everywhere. Nobody wants to take the bus if they feel they have no safe route to the bus stop.
But if everything is opened up with proper sidewalks and bike lanes and maybe tram tracks, if street lights prioritize pedestrians over cars, if walking to the nearest convenient stop feels safe and effortless even if it's two miles away – then you get public transit that actually works.
It's not terribly difficult. But your urban planning can't be car-centric or you're getting nowhere.
I think when a lot of people say high density, they don't mean 100floor residential buildings are all the housing, but tend to think of something more akin to densely packed midrise buildings and green spaces. If you have the later, there simply is not space for cars and high density. Large universities come to mind, where there may be 50k people using 1-2sq mile while 5+ story buildings are rare. You would have to walk a mile or two to get to a car to drive 6 miles around to the other side of campus at 5mph to walk a mile or two to get to you class 1000ft away from your starting point if they were car centric.
You don't even need public transit at that level of density but it's an option.
What do you mean by "low density"?
Density is a spectrum. There's low density as in bikable Dutch suburbs, and low density as in US rural farms.
Public transit doesn't work for US rural farms, but does for bikable Dutch suburbs. Pedestrian-unfriendly infrastructure is bad for public transit for to the last mile problem, sure. But even with Pedestrian friendly design, making very low densities work with public transit is difficult.
That's because public transit relies on economies of agglomeration. With lower and lower density, fewer and fewer things are within a walkable or bikable distance to the public transit stop.
Many US suburbs have bad public transit partially from pedestrian unfriendly design, and partially from the walksheds of public transit having very little in them.
I agree with everything except your first point. It doesn't work at all in a low density setting, to the point that low density areas are always subsidized by high density areas. Low density needs to start paying their taxes and stop relying on the urban centers to build their infrastructure.