>>1010905>>1010956I think you people are hitting on an important issue, which is dealing with very high densities. New York is an extreme example, and like that anon says, the subway is always full. But here's something to keep in mind, surface space in NY is grossly wasted. When you have a dense city it's simply retarded to have streets with 4, 5 or even more lanes just for cars, while sidewalks are completely stuffed with people. It's amazing how the car lobbies have brainwashed us into accepting that such a brutal inefficiency it's a reasonable way of handling transportation.
I think the key in talking dense cities nowadays is surface transportation.
Large cities like Paris, London or New York are examples of large, dense cities with good Metro/Subway/Tube coverage, yet this coverage is still insufficient seeing the enormous density. Building additional rapid transit lines is usually complicated, expensive or even impossible. It also requires deep tunneling which makes metro use less practical.
However, building surface rapid transit (ie modern trams) costs a fraction of a subway, yet offers between 30 and 50% of a subway's capacity. For every two or three tram lines you've added the capacity of a subway line, all the while having more varied itineraries and coverage.
Essentially this is just doing the same thing that buses are doing in these cities but taken to another level. In turn, this allows to reduce road space, and add pedestrian space. It makes no sense that if a subway is saturated, the additional transport offer is just buses, jumping over the intermediate step of trams. There's no reasonable explanation for large cities investing in new rapid transit lines but not light rail systems. When they start doing BRTs it gets completely ridiculous (not the case of the examples I mentioned). The only explanation for this is the pressure of automobile/bus lobbies trying to force the use of inefficient transportation.
