HangnMoss

There’s a reason for the lack of widespread public transportation in North America, and that’s scale. European countries are literally the size of US states. Texas (the second largest state) is almost twice the size of Germany, and nearly three times the size of the UK. In fact the only European country larger than Texas is Russia.

The more interesting number is population. While Germany is about half the size of Texas, they have almost three times the population. More people moving in the same direction, with less empty space between destinations makes mass transportation not only more practical, but a necessity.

Fewer people traveling to destinations more spread out is what lead to the automobile culture in the US. You could drive through multiple European countries in the time it would take to cross Texas.

Now for an interesting factoid. You could fit the entire world population (8bn) into Texas, and each person would still have ~86 square meters (925 sq ft) to themselves.

Canada? They can do better with mass transportation, simply because more than 85%of their population lives within 100 miles of the US border. Despite being the second largest country in the world, they have population densities similar to European countries.

Jerboa was doing fine for me until Jerboa got updated beyond the Lemmy instances I’ve been browsing (which aren’t updating because the new Lemmy release removes the captcha, which then prevents new sign ups). Now Jerboa says the biggest Lemmy instance is below the minimum version Jerboa supports, and refuses to open the instance. Helluva bump in the road…