I live in Minneapolis, we have the light rail in the downtown area that runs all the way down to the Mall of America and the airport. It also runs to St. Paul. We subsidize it heavily, but it is also an honor system for paying for it (no turnstiles). We also have a pretty decent bus system.
Problem is the further away you get from the city center the worse it gets. They've talked about putting in a light rail line to the southwest suburbs at a cost of billions of dollars, meanwhile the core roads don't get additional help and are perpetually bad because of the winter.
It's a balancing act, and at some point everyone needs to decide who's lifestyle is more important from a priority perspective IMO. If I decide to live in the suburbs, and commute an hour a day, is a dollar more important for that person? Or the person closer to the city core that wants more mass transit options?
Honestly I can go both directions. I currently have a 10 minute commute (by car). But I've also had the 60+ minute commutes for jobs. I also use the light rail to get to the airport pretty frequently. However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work.
I worked in Tokyo for a while. If you don't take cabs, you end up doing a fair amount of walking. There are a lot of trains and subways, so there is a limit to how much walking you have to do. Even if your origin and destination were both right next to a subway station, however, you could expect to do a lot of walking underground, since there is a lot of stuff underground in Tokyo around which subways have to be routed.
I think walking is great, and frequently I would figure ways to skip a subway line by walking a bit more, but I thought I'd mention this just to give a more accurate impression.
Berlin has a fantastic transit system. I was living almost in Potsdam, and I could get to Mitte in under an hour - and the trains and buses were almost always on the dot on schedule. Before I lived there for a few months, I had only really experienced the Boston T system, which is seemingly about as bad as a transit system can be and still be considered functional...
Bear in mind that Southwest Transit has bus routes to Minneapolis from a bunch of SW locations. The good thing about buses is that they can be responsive in ways a train can't: it's easier to add bus routes than train lines.
I take a bus in to downtown Minneapolis myself and it is far better than driving and dealing with traffic, parking, etc.
Problem is the further away you get from the city center the worse it gets. They've talked about putting in a light rail line to the southwest suburbs at a cost of billions of dollars, meanwhile the core roads don't get additional help and are perpetually bad because of the winter.
It's a balancing act, and at some point everyone needs to decide who's lifestyle is more important from a priority perspective IMO. If I decide to live in the suburbs, and commute an hour a day, is a dollar more important for that person? Or the person closer to the city core that wants more mass transit options?
Honestly I can go both directions. I currently have a 10 minute commute (by car). But I've also had the 60+ minute commutes for jobs. I also use the light rail to get to the airport pretty frequently. However I never used mass transit to get to work because I like to be able to leave when I want, and go anywhere I want as needed from work.