The problem is that it isn’t a matter of cars vs busses. It’s a matter of urban design in general.
Public transit gets better as density goes up. A bus that drops you off at a giant-ass Walmart parking lot with nothing else but two drivethroughs in walking distance isn’t very useful. A bus that drops you off in a neighborhood with 4 dozen shops, a dozen restaurants, 4 bars and 3 coffee shops within a 5 minute walk is way more useful.
By contrast, density makes driving worse. Density means more people are driving the same way you want to go. More people in cars means more traffic on the road with you. Designing for cars pushes you to low density sprawl.
Just building public transit isn’t the solution. Just building public transit in a typical American suburban sprawl makes something about as compelling as a Ford F150 in Vatican City.
You have to fix urban design - stop building stroads and start building streetcar suburbs again.
There’s a Sci Fi trilogy about that. All aliens are omnicidal.
The main rule is “don’t ever get spotted by another civilization”. If another nearby civilization wants to conquer you, you could stop them by threatening to broadcast both our and their locations more broadly, a kind of mutually assured distruction.
There’s many regional differences in American English.
First, pronunciation is always changing, and changes tend to happen regionally.
For example, there’s the Mary-merry-marry merger. A bit over half of American speakers pronounce all three of those words identically, as mɛri. About 17% of Americans have a full three-way contrast. In NYC, for example, they’d say meɹi, mæɹi, and mɛɹi. And other people merged two of the three.
The pen-pin merger is a famous feature of southern American dialects.
Some words have regional pronunciations - crayon can have one or two syllables, for example.
And then there’s regional words, like pop vs soda, bucket vs pail, firefly vs lightning bug, you vs y’all vs yinz vs youse vs you lot vs you all vs you guys etc.
By asking about all of those sorts of things, you can figure out where someone’s from.
I don’t really think it’s better. They’re fine for coding.
They’re basically the corporate default because they’re easier for companies to buy and remotely administer, they’ve got good VPN software, good resale value, etc.
EVs have about half the lifecycle emissions as a gas car, given today’s electric grid. Which is better, but not all that much better.
However: 80% of the US lives in metropolitan and micropolitan areas. 20% of the US is rural. You can build better public transit in cities and small towns, and stop doubling down on building shitty-ass suburban stroads and sprawl. But Farmer Joe is never going to bike 20 miles to the nearest Dollar General. It’s just not practical, and neither is putting a bus stop in front of every farm.
A car-lite world where Farmer Joe drives an EV to a farmer’s market that 95% of people walked, biked or took a bus to seems way better than either the status quo or a car-free world.
The first seasons were 30 years ago, but the ending is only about 25 years ago.
BSG, though, finished in 1979. If someone says “thirty years ago” and your first thought is the 70s, you might be old. BSG ended 45 years ago. It’s 20 years older than the finale of DS9.
Edit: if someone asks you “who was president 30 years ago”, do you instantly think of Jimmy Carter? Because BSG came out basically in the middle of his presidency. If your first thought was Bush or Reagan, you associate the Sci Fi of 30 years ago with reruns of BSG.
It’s not just car-centric Euclidean zoning and suburban sprawl.
The US also builds really dangerous stroads that you don’t really see in most other countries.
5+ lanes of 55mph traffic next to a sidewalk and tons of driveways for businesses is inherently unsafe.
It’s also interesting to note that the biggest spike in fatalities was during the pandemic.
The best explanation I’ve heard is that bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic essentially disappeared with the switch to WFH during the pandemic. Streets artificially looked safer pre-pandemic due to drivers getting stuck in traffic at peak periods. The pandemic just revealed how inherently unsafe American stroads are.
The investments of just 125 billionaires emit 393 million tonnes of CO2e each year – the equivalent of France – at an individual annual average that is a million times higher than someone in the bottom 90 percent of humanity.
That is to say, if you multiply the emissions of the gasoline sold by ExxonMobil by whatever percentage of ExxonMobile that’s in Bill Gate’s portfolio, you get an absolutely ridiculous emissions number.
But that seems to assume that if it weren’t for those dastardly billionaires investing in oil companies, we’d all be living in 10-minute cities with incredible subways connected by high speed rail, powered entirely by renewables, and heated by geothermal heat pumps. And I honestly don’t beleive that.
FPTP always devolves into local two candidate elections.
There’s no guarantee, though, that those two parties are the same everywhere. Regional third parties can do quite well under FPTP. That particularly works for e.g. the Scottish National Party or the Bloc Quebecois.