Are you sure? I’ve never had that impression across years of transit, bus and rail, in Pittsburgh and Boston.
I think the biggest barrier is a chicken and egg problem: it’s hard to motivate transit expansion without dense housing and it’s hard to motivate denser housing except along existing transit corridors
The whole system would need to be rebuilt for me to even consider going back to that.
Most riders before covid were office commuters. Now with remote work what reason is there for it to be there? Oh right for the guy asking for hand outs to ride it all the way up and down the line all day while no one does anything about it.
Trust me it's not an issue of denser housing. I do not want denser housing. I don't even want to know my neighbors exist. Seriously.
I lived in a dense city for a long time. It sucked.
Admittedly, I'm one of those office workers, so I haven't used transit much since the pandemic began, but I'll be back to using it daily early next year or so (subject to change, as always...)
It's always going to depend on your line and your time of day for how pleasant transit is, but as a general rule the more families use a transit line, the nicer it is. When I lived in Brookline, MA and took the Green Line trolley, it was extremely pleasant, even during non-work hours (when you would see parents with small children and such on your ride). However, the line goes through an upper middle class semi-dense[0] suburban neighborhood, so of course it was nice.
The same logic applies to Tokyo. The entire city is dense and almost every person takes transit sometimes. Even if there are unpleasant people (I'm sure there are), the overwhelming number of ordinary families, office workers, and so on, taking transit makes the less savory riders nearly invisible, at least to tourists.
This is why I say it's a chicken and egg problem: you won't ever have nice transit unless you have a system where middle class people want to ride transit, and you won't have that system unless it's more convenient than driving the car, and you won't have THAT system unless housing is dense.
> I do not want denser housing.
That's perfectly fair, and I agree that many people feel this way. Personally, I want to live in a city and I like having a lot of neighbors. When I walked through Japanese suburbs (where houses fill up an entire tiny lot with almost no space between them), it felt very at-home to me. But that's personal preference.
> Do you realize how miserable subway stations in east coast cities can get when the AC is broken? If they even have AC?
Yes of course, one of the advantages of taking a car is that you have your own personal climate controlled box with your music and nobody else's noises or smells. I don't dispute this, but that's not really a USA-centric problem (aside from the occasional broken AC in summer or broken heating in winter). Having your own personal climate box will always be more pleasant.
[0] My definition: semi-dense because it felt urban near the main street/transit but in a few pockets of Brookline, you could be a 10 minute walk from transit but surrounded by expensive single family homes on large lots.
