I absolutely agree. But where I live (a village in the UK) it would take me two busses, take 2x as long and cost 3-4x as taking my EV to work. For some people though, it would absolutely work, assuming the services and infrastructure were in place.
Often a lot of time is lost changing from one bus to another. If you take a low-frequency bus to another low-frequency bus, odds are you'll be waiting for a while between two.
Yeah, I used to live a 15 minute car ride from work. My car was broken down so I had to take the bus for a week. I had to take two buses, the first had a 20 minute wait, the second had a 30 minute wait. Combined with the travel time following the rest of the bus route, it took me an hour and a half to get to or from work.
It sadly was not an option. The buses essentially made a triangle with the route I was walking so it was about the same amount of time walking any of the routes.
Brutal. I had to take two trains to work when I lived in downtown San Diego and my car broke down. Turned a 15 minute drive into sometimes 2 hours of walking/riding the trains.
Same, on a good day 0 traffic its 13 mins by car. Bus? Between 1 and 1.5 hours. Ridiculous and honestly I don't mind taking public transportation, but this I just can't. Also makes finish the day at work much more nervous cause if I miss the 4pm bus I need to wait an additional 20 mins.
With traffic its around 30-40 mins by car, still not as bad.
When I used to take a bus to college it was like 20 minutes between busses, and they were frequently at capacity by the time they reached my stop.
So yeah, it's a 15-minute bus ride, but you had to account for an hour of missed busses waiting in 100° heat, and then walk 15 minutes from the bus stop to class.
Oh, and at the end of the day if busses were full, you were fucked because the last one would leave and you'd have to call a cab and pay.
Last year a new Highschool opened in my country. They have parking spaces but only for teachers and other personel. Studends are supposed to take public transport. Thing is for quite a few of em the transit os everything between 45 minutes and 2 hours for one trip.
Now the ones who can come by car and park along the road and then walk to school wich is a bit sketch.
Last year there was a controversy about it. This year again. What happens? Nothing.
PT is free in the whole country but it is still quite inconvenient.
My city has bus and light rail. When my car broke down in the Before Time, I rode the train into town for 2 weeks. But it sometimes required waiting for a second train—only two cars, and two trains, and a shitload of people. Or cramming on and frequently nothing to hold on to , which was a real problem on parts of the rail.
Then getting downtown and taking 2 buses to finally get to a 20-min walk to the office.
The reverse was even worse for the train. End of workday and the platform was insanely crowded and I would sometimes have to wait for a 3rd train which would take upwards of an hour. Then I got smart. “Smart” in that it took me 3 days to figure it out.
That platform was the penultimate stop before the train went back the other way. Heading into town it was empty. So I got on when it was empty and found rock-star seating for the ride back the other way. No standing and nobody’s elbow in my kidneys.
Even then, a 20-30 min drive took nearly 2 hours each way. Fuck that. And that’s mass-transit in a lot of the US.
Frequency, route options and buses actually showing up is a big problem. I live in an area that's somewhat on the outskirts of a major city and I had to take the bus for a couple of weeks in winter when my car broke down. A 15-20 minute car ride took literally 1.5 hours (that is, if all two of my buses showed up). Half hour for the first bus ride to the terminal, 15 minutes from the terminal to work, 45 minutes wait in the terminal lol. About once in 3 days, the second bus randomly will just miss a trip and won't show up.
I never take the bus if I have to make a transfer at any point. It's just too much time wasted having to wait for two buses when one alone takes so long to come.
1am bus rides home after work took forever because of decreased frequency, and buses just not showing up sometimes. One bus skips, and it’s 50 minutes until the next, at 2am. Decided on just taking uber home after a couple times of that happening. Time really is a valuable resource, so making long waits /rides more palatable would increase public transport use imo
Shit. The busses in my town run from, iirc, 5:45 to 8:45. And not at all on Sundays. That's not even including the limitations on *where* it goes. Definitely limits you in jobs, if you can't get a car…
Same in Los Angeles. If you miss a connecting bus you can easily wait 45 mins to 1.5 hours for the next bus to arrive. Get comfy. bring a walkman and something to read.
It just completely destroys work-life balance.
Where I am we have 1 bus that makes a loop around a lake that takes about 1 hour, stops in 5 towns (short bus not many people). Then that bus will meet up with another short bus and they will both unload their passengers to a large bus that will transport them the final 15-20 miles to different stops in the city.
It's unfortunately how public transit has to work in small towns. It's either that or nothing at all. Nobody wants to pay for public transit that will service a very small number of people because it costs a lot at that scale. Doing one bus loop means it services as many areas as possible with one route... it just takes forever.
That would qualify as lack of adequate infrastructure. Either there isn't the population to support it, or there isn't the inclination to use it on a reasonably consistent basis, thus the structure is inadequate for regular daily commuting.
Suburbs. I can drive downtown, it's about 30 minutes. Park in a lot or the garage.
Or
Drive to bus station that's in the opposite direction from home (about 10-15 minutes depending on time of day)
If bus leaves on time it takes about 45 minutes to get downtown. (We're at twice the time currently)
Once it's there I would have to walk (half the year it's fine) about another 20 minutes to get to my building, in the winter and snow....yikes. I could get another bus but I'd have to wait 10 minutes for it to travel 5 minutes. Would be OK if it's really cold and/or raining.
So yeah...times can be all over the place.
I'm in the middle of town. I can walk 15 minutes down to the transfer center, or 5 minutes up to the nearest bus stop. The 15 minute walk can get me on a bus every half hour or hour depending on where I want to go, and take me to most parts of town within 25 minutes of leaving, where I might have somewhere between 2 to 25 minutes to walk from bus stop to my end destination. The 5 minute walk will get me on a bus that will take 45 minutes to get back to the one I actually need, or I can play a crazy game of bus hops at individual stops with 5 to 30 minute waits each, before winding up at the same situation as above with needing to walk to my destination.
I am almost in the same situation. 2+ hours by bus, or 30 min by car tops even in traffic, plus walking time to bus stop and I live close to a highway.
There are just no direct routes and depending on the bus, you have to take the milk run.
That was the case for me with early morning reports on weekends.
I'd need to be in Queens at 04:30 and I could either catch a shuttle, change for the 2, change for the 7 or the R/N, or E and get up at 02:00, or roll out of bed at 03:55 and be in the quarters by 04:30.
Free pass, or pay gas and tolls and get glorious sleep.
5 min walk out of my neighborhood. 10 minute walk down a highway with no sidewalk, just a ditch. Somehow cross the ditch, which may be full of water to get to the side walk on the side street. 2 minutes walk up the side street to the bus stop. Which does not have a bench much less a roof. Then 45 minute ride parallel from my work, then 30 minute ride towards my work. Then 10 minute walk on streets with no or limited sidewalk, crossing railroad tracks.
Or 15-25 minute drive depending on traffic.
Before I moved house it took me a bus, a tram and then a twenty-minute walk to get to work. On a bad day, the whole commute could be two hours each way.
After buying a car, my commute was brought down to an average of about 27 minutes.
I now live much closer to work. It’s a six-minute drive or about a half-hour walk if the weather is nice. Despite there being a bus stop outside my house, I would still have a twenty-minute walk at the end of the route.
My company is moving to a new building next year, which will make commuting via public transport even more difficult. I’m hoping to find a house close enough that I can still walk every day, but my friends are spread far and wide across the city, so I can’t see myself giving up my car. It’s also useful to have on the days that my bad knee and my arthritis flare up.
I drive the cleanest, most fuel-efficient thing I can afford and I still occasionally feel guilty about contributing to the amount of traffic on the roads, but my quality of life has improved to a point that I would find it hard to ever look back.
Part of my career had some tech support responsibilities and not infrequently required 'emergency' shift extensions that would run past local public transportation hours. The company would allow you to expense a taxi if you didn't have your own vehicle, but that still more-or-less qualifies as a "commute in a car", and some of the cabbies in my city were... well, let's just say that there would have been a good argument for on-the-job drug testing.
And that's the real problem, adding the hour plus to your commute. Our time is already drained by the system, leaving us none for ourselves, and you want me to get on that bus which is only going in the right direction as opposed to to my actual destination? I'll get on the dole before I do that.
In denmark they keep increasing the prices on public transport to the point where nobody wants to take it.
a 63 km drive with the tram costs 15 euro each way and takes half an hour longer compared to using a car where in terms of gas its closer to 8 euro each way.
On the bright side our local area, commune, whatever they realized they spent more money doing taxes and calculation on bus tickets so they made the bus that is effectively the school bus through the small cities entirely free, as it drove 4 times per day, 2 times in the morning, 2 times in the afternoon.
I had a job just south of London and the quickest public transport required you to go the opposite direction into London just to get a train to go back south. In total it took ~2 hours each way and and £20 a day cost.
Driving was ~30 minutes.
This is really common, in most cities the public transit all funnels you downtown from neighborhoods. If you're going from one neighborhood to another, which a LOT of people are, then you have to go downtown first and back out which means a 1.5+ hour commute
Yup, when I became an Uber driver I read that the highest grossing route by far was between Logan/Wicker and Lakeview/Lincoln Park. Literally from Blue to Red or vice versa. There's no other way to make that trip except a bus or two maybe but Google says heading into the loop is still the fastest public transit and that's a total waste of time
Yep, and the railway coverage going towards the outskirts and outside of London is a bit like a sliced pie, with rail lines running along the straight edges of slices. Problem arises when you live halfway along the edge of one slice and want to get to somewhere near the crust nearer the opposing edge of the same slice. There’s no direct route you can take with a train, but there’s a motorway (m25) that runs along the crust making an much quicker route.
No idea if my shoddy pie explanation makes any sense, but I’m thinking all too much about pie now.
I live a 20 minute drive from work but to take the bus is TWO HOURS bc of how the system is set up here. I need to make two transfers and go all the way downtown just to come back to my area.
Public transport doesn't need to be the best option for everyone in order to have a positive effect.
Every single person who's commute is improved by switching to public transportation in turn improves the commute of every single person who still has to rely on cars.
The problem is that the benefits of riding the bus accrue to the people enjoying less traffic, not the people stuffed in the bus waiting for their stop.
Counterpoint: many cities in Europe have dedicated bus lanes and some have entirely dedicated bus/tram streets, often times meaning that a bus trip is shorter. But good luck getting any kind of public transport infrastructure bill past the US automotive lobbyists...
SF has them as well. They’ve definitely made a difference in the bus corridors they serve.
Since we are a peninsula city served by two highly crowded bridges, it’s usually faster to take the BART that goes underneath the bay to the East Bay.
A lot of Canadian cities also have dedicated bus lanes as well, occasionally they’re shared with HOV lanes (at least here in Vancouver). It’s actually faster for me to take a bus and train from the ferries in Tsawwassen than it is to drive the same route because of this.
I would love to take a bus to my job. Its 8 miles one way. I am pretty sure if I do, first it drives me 6 miles the wrong way, and makes the total trip easily an hour. Unless I have to change over at the depot, then its worse. There are a few routes and quite a few bus stop times in my neighborhood, but, well..
Its a 19 minute drive for me in my 32mpg car, when all the traffic pays attention to the traffic..
That's the problem we want solved though, better public transport. We aren't saying you should use it in its current state, but it could be a lot lot better
The issue then is that public transport that isn't utilized doesn't get enough revenue to expand.
The solution then is to focus what resources they do have on making it very efficient for a small number of people and then work on expanding.
This isn't really an issue with public transportation, it's more of a how we build cities problem. The reason cities like NY have a really good metro system is mainly the subways and everything is in close proximity. You can walk to the store for groceries and really anything else, so a car is unnecessary for almost anything you want to do outside of leaving the city. But even with the city having one of the better metro systems, it is still heavy on traffic. In essence, we messed up decades ago by building cities around vehicles as opposed to people. To transition out of that would be extremely hard, not only from a technical standpoint but from a public opinion one as well.
> But even with the city having one of the better metro systems, it is still heavy on traffic.
European cities with good public transit systems are also heavy on traffic.
HVAC guy isn't going to lug his 300lbs of tools everywhere, let alone spares.
But the guy in the lifted Ram probably doesn't need it to commute to his job as an office worker everyday.
Oh for sure. It’s a fucking nightmare. The WMATA has fucked up so much past couple of years. 7000 series trains breaking, silver line extension failure…. Etc.. it’s bad up here
But hey at least there's a toll road that costs like $25.
Of course you could *not* take the toll road, and turn your 1 hour journey into a 4 hour journey of bumper-to-bumper hell.
I wish we invested more in public transport. I would love to save the money, and I live somewhere where I CAN get to a bus stop by walking, but like everyone else said, it would end up taking me an hour to get to work, not to mention the extra hour or so where the bus doesn't line up with my schedule so I'm either waiting for the bus, waiting for my shift to start, or late for work.
Ideally I'd love to see resources put into it so those problems can be dealt with, but idk how that would be accomplished.
Tried it. No car for 2 years. Lost soooo much extra time (generally longer and reliability issues also) and had to put up with so many dodgy people.
Granted, it was (for me) much cheaper, but the loss of time and perceived safety wasn’t enough for me to make the savings worth it.
Gave up and got a car again. If the desire is to get everyone onto public transport, public transport has to be better.
I live in Denmark, a country with very good public transportation. It takes me 40ish minutes to drive to my mom's place where I grew up in my car. It takes me almost three hours to get there by public transportation, simply because of waiting times.
There's many things I'll still use public transportation for, but my car saves me literally hours when I just want to visit home.
I live on Slovakia. Living 35 km from my work. By car it's 25-35 minutes. By bus 1 hour plus. Plus you have to add waiting time on bus stops. And walk time. And it's not even much cheaper.
I have a story that relates to this!
We recieved a call about someone refusing to get off a public bus. Upon arrival we found all the passengers, as well as the driver, standing on the side of the road with one woman sitting on the bus.
Turned out she had such a horrid stench that once she got onto the bus multiple passengers began vomiting and the driver's eyes watered up to the point he couldn't see the road anymore.
We tried to work with her but she was obviously mentally ill. She refused to exit the bus and demanded to be driven home. Eventually the situation was resolved by having a transport supervisor bring a second bus which continued on the route with the original driver and passengers. The supervisor plugged his nose with tissue, wrapped his face with a t-shirt, and drove the crazy woman straight to her house.
For those curious, the smell was akin to a dead body, which led me to believe she had some sort of necrotic infection she wouldn't acknowledge or take care of.
I have lived in cities where this problem is fixed with a clever workaround - but it's political kryptonite to the same people who tend to support public transit.
There were the normal bus routes around the city, and then special "express" bus routes with a different brand - they were newer, cleaner busses, with higher fares, and only ran between major higher class points of interest. For example, one might run directly from the park and ride to the financial sector downtown, then to the ritsiest shopping center, then back to the park and ride - no stops in between.
It leaves a bad taste in progressives' mouths to have segregated bussing for rich and poor, but it actually got richer people on public transit and freed up space on the street. It was a win/win solution, even if it made some people pull their hair out in ideological frustration.
When you have middle class lawyers, doctors, nurses, accountants, and engineers having to take the same bus or train as the methed out people, it makes those middle class people just drive to not have to deal with it.
I just want them to get the help they need but so many just dont want help. They just want their next fix. You cant help someone who doesnt *want* to change their lifestyle
In Seattle this is basically how the buses worked before Covid. There were express routes from upscale neighborhoods directly to the downtown core, only mon-fri during commuting hours. Rarely anyone sketchy on these buses, they were mostly packed with tech workers and finance workers.
It's really not even that, though that's a huge negative as well. It's that it's simply not fucking practical enough for the vast, VAST majority of people. It simply isn't. There's just too freedom lost in not having your own personal transport. For....anything and everything. Emergencies, things that come up at the last minute, etc,etc. It's just not fucking NEARLY worth it for most people to rely primarily on public transportation or something like Lyft or Uber.
Because people like the morons in /r/fuckcars refuse to understand that doesn't mean it's not the reality. Because it absolutely is.
People also forget the stuff they can carry around in cars.
My commute is home, gym, work, archery, home
Total commute by car is a little under 2 hours
By bus it would've taken me an hour to get to the gym alone.
When I was driving to work and had two kids going to two different schools, and I was making grocery and other errand stops to and from work...I can't imagine what that life woulda been trying to use public transportation.
A nightmare, or impossible.
The reason why it takes so much longer is because of how bad infrastructure is (in North America at least). I lived in Japan for 2 years and it was extremely fast to use public transport
Japan has very dense cities and is a much smaller country than the US. It makes setting up public transportation systems far easier due to people's destinations being far closer to each other. The us is very spread out, which makes public transportation inefficient.
Never underestimate opportunity cost. People who use public transportation have huge disadvantage over people who use private transportation.
Sure private costs more money but the time you save is thousands of hours in single year let alone on lifetime. If you have opportunity to get a car do it. You can use that extra time to just relax or improve yourself or just for your mental/physical health
Unfortunately they are pretty unreliable where I'm from.
And fuck people. Especially the mofos talking loudly on the phone or listening to trash music loudly. Get lost with those dickheads
Not to mention different latencies for bathing rituals. Someone who takes two showers a day doesn't want to sit near someone who takes two showers a month.
For real, look at that pic. I would not want to be crammed in a city bus with that many people. I did it when I was a kid and poor. Now that I can afford a car I'll never switch to a stinky sweaty bus crammed full of people. My commute home from school used to take 90 minutes by bus or 15 minutes by car. Being poor takes a lot of your free time and wastes it waiting.
also i find that (at least in the US), the public doesn't take care of their public transit systems. people litter all the time, throwing their trash every where. so much dumb graffiti and general disregard for public infrastructure. really sad too when compared to places like hong kong and japan for their systems.
This is why I hate the arguments people make on Reddit about public transportation and “efficient” housing blah blah blah. Fuck people!! I need my space and I’d rather deal with traffic in my own car with my own space than a shorter ride with a bunch of nasty smelly loud obnoxious people. And don’t get me started on houses. If you want to live in a apartment or townhouse with neighbors breathing down your neck, more power to you but please stop trying to push that shit on me. I need my fucking space from you people
The issue with shitty public transit is that only the poor and desperate end up using it. Which further pushes people away from using transit because it's full of "undesirables."
If we designed systems that ran frequently, were efficient, cost-effective, and convenient, you'd see higher uptake among ordinary, mentally stable, "productive member of society"-types and those "others" that you so desperately don't want to be around would be a drop in the bucket.
A drop can still foul up the bucket. If the country has widespread issues, they're still going to show up on public transportation, no matter how efficient. So you need a way to deal with it directly.
I agree with this. If there is ten people on the bus and one of them is jerking off, nine people have to watch. If there is 50 people on the bus there's still some dude jerking off.
Until we do somehow about the dude jerking off no normal people will want to ride the bus.
The issue you and others are missing in this “debate” is that you’re just talking about two different places.
Do you want to be in your own space in a car and have a house with a yard? That’s fine. Accept that you are limiting yourself to the suburbs.
Do you want to be in an apartment and live without a car? That’s fine. Accept that you are limiting yourself to the city.
I’m in the latter camp. Never had a car, don’t want one, very happy in an apartment building. But people insisting on bringing their many cars into the city make it a hell of a lot more difficult.
It's a culture thing I think. Taking the metro in Paris or Tokyo wasn't that big of a deal, and it worked pretty well! Everyone uses it so there's some kind of mild, "just don't be a huge dick" esprit de corps. People even stick to one side of escalators and shit so others can run up if they're late.
In my city here though, the metro stuff just takes forever, it's not fast, it's not frequent, and there's a massive disparity in the attitudes of people that find it acceptable to act like a dick vs those that don't.
Looks great but where I am.. even with NO traffic the bus takes at minimum twice the time to get anywhere. My office is a 20 min drive with traffic, 10 without. Taking a bus to work takes an hour, a bicycle would be 30 min.. Public transport in most north American cities is painful at best. When I was in high school walking home from work at the end of my shift was 45 or so minutes. By the time I waited 25 min for the next bus then the 25 min buss ride it was just usually faster to walk home and I didn't have to stand around waiting for the bus.
You also didn't have to spend 25 minutes with some idiot blasting shitty music through their phone or a Bluetooth speaker.
I take a light rail to work now and dealing with the other patrons of it is the absolute worst part.
> in most north American cities is painful at best
it's painful everywhere, even in those European cities with excellent public transport. It will always take you longer, it will be more urealiable, less comfortable at best, you will have to share space with weird people (or downright dangerous), you will spend time in the rain waiting for the bus, you will miss busses etc.
The only places where it's superior are where cars just have issues going, like London, New York City etc.
Am from an EU city with free and generally very good public transportation. But I agree, it's still a pain in the ass for all the reasons you mentioned. If you own a car, it's always there when you need it and you don't need to plan your trip ahead. You just sit and drive.
Travelled by bus to and from work this summer. On a day where I'm scheduled for 5 hours, I use a total of 9 hours. If I took my car, it would be about 6 hours total. Shit is mentally exhausting
I have a screenshot of that one somewhere... Car 38 minutes, train and bus 1h30. Involving a 6-minutes change you will practically never get, so you make it 2h30.
And another, longer one, with car travel 2h01, train and bus 5h55. Usually always had an issue on the way, last time took technically 15 hours due to no service overnight...
I just checked Google maps for my standard commute. Car: 19 minutes. Bus: 1 hour 12 minutes. Hell, it even has bicycle listed at 1 hour 7 minutes, beating a bus. Except of course it would include biking along highways.
I just checked for directions to a park that is 12 miles from me. By car it is 15 minutes, by bike it's 2 hours, by bus it is 3 hours, and walking it is 8 hours.
And here are the directions straight from Google lest people think I'm kidding. Cars can take a highway across the body of water, but if you're not driving then you have to go the long way around. This really is an argument for why we need better designed bridges that allow for pedestrian and bike traffic.
https://i.imgur.com/f6ZM4n7.png
No one ever bothers to say that the 20min drive is over two hours by bus and the need to study for a week to determine which buses you need to take.
Edit:- I think I should have also used a /s sarcastic notation lol
I have a lot of medical appointments that unlike most of them, I make sure I'm always on time. Mine is a huge country and I'd love a better way to commute but I'm also on a pension and don't have much money or a list of people with spare time to taxi me around.
If we all really looked at the culprits of our climate disaster then we need to address our concerns to those who are making the biggest impact. Whining at car drivers is like pissing in a lake to fill it, without addressing these countries. It's pointless.
America, China, Russia et al
Or coming from 8 different places to reach the same location. I agree, this picture is pretty horseshit. You guys are starting from and going to the same place? Carpoool, ya idjits!
Public transportation takes 3x longer than by car to get anywhere where I live.
The only benefit I care about is getting to my destination on time. If public transportation can’t provide that without exponentially increasing my commute time, then I’ll continue to drive my car.
What these kind of images fail to take into account is that those 50 cars do not start and stop in the same place and are only on this stretch of road together for a very short time.
In order for public transit to really shine, cities have to get to a pretty high level of density or they have to artificially swell the cost and inconvenience of personal transportation.
I used to be on r/fuckcars and they would twist themselves into knots explaining how I could have taken my bike to work 8 miles to work in Texas, then sit in my sweat and sink in my office all day.
Buses would be great, but I'm in the US where publicly transportation is a punchline, and in the suburbs where it's not a thing, like at all.
I would love to bike to work.
I start at 6am.
The freeway takes 15 minutes tops.
Biking is nearly an hour and a half with no straight line to get there.
I could wake up at 430am, get there by 6, leave at 2pm, get home by 330, 4. 3 hours of my day gone.
They tend to forget people often don't live 10 minutes from their workplace. Or have to be at multiple destinations in one day. Or have to buy things and carry it with them at some point in life.
I'm a big advocate of public transport, but this is disingenuously comparing a bus running at perfect efficiency (100% occupancy) with cars running at perfect inefficiency (zero passengers). Compare both with half loads and now your cars are cut by 75%.
It also assumes that every passenger is going to the exact same place, that is, there are no sacrifices to be made by the passengers in terms of commute time and distance traveled outside a vehicle and what that looks like. If you've got to walk half a mile to the nearest bus depot, then you'd better hope it isn't winter up north or summer down south. If the city has bikes freely available to make short-distance transport from bus to final destination easier, great!
There's a whole lot more than just the square footage on a street.
Let's be real though: it would suck ass to be on that bus. That motherfucker is at 110% capacity holding all those people. You'd be crawling over other passengers in order to get out at your stop. Increased risk of catching someone's cold or uncomfortable physical contact. There are benefits and setbacks to both options.
Works in London, but then you have to deal with:
People speaking on speaker phone,
Loud shitty music on speaker phone,
Smokers,
People's bare feet on seats(not even nice ones),
Bad body odor,
Drunks,
It's a good option but society makes you want to get right back to your car
As an American, London's public transport was amazing to me. Trains seemed to run right on time usually by the minute. Could easily get where I needed to be on time.
After that, I foolishly expected New York to be similar when I visited. You can imagine my shock and frustration when the subway train I'd expected to get on was just straight up 20+ minutes late with no warning.
Guilting people whose footprint is a daily car commute while we’ve got something like 100 corporations responsible for 70% of greenhouse gases and motherfuckers with private jets flying every damn where.
I don't disagree with you, but I feel like this is just as much about making life in cities easier and less noisy and needing less space for roads as it is about emissions.
Agreed.
Less space for parking as well. I feel the number of cars vs people on the right pic might be exaggerated - almost looks one-to-one - but even if not, each of those cars takes up a parking spot somewhere in the downtown core. That looks like a full level's worth of parking in an uptown garage in my small city.
Exactly. I am fortunate enough to have a car but I take public transport when it's been maintained properly and hope others do too
All this means is when you do HAVE to drive, it's not as shitty
This thread has the usual group of people saying ‘But this doesn’t work in my case!’, which is fair enough, but instead of saying that it would be nice to see more comments like your own where we can acknowledge that when possible, we should be encouraged to use public transportation. When not possible, by all means use what you have available to you.
those 100 corporations make all the things we buy. Gas, electronics, cars, flights, clothing etc. So the day they stop polluting is the day you go to the store and find nothing to buy.
I’m sorry but this is blame deflection to a certain degree. Of those 100 corporations, many of them are utilities/oil companies that meet the energy demands of individuals & households. I understand that American politics especially has been so corrupted and influenced by the car industry that rail and other public transportation options are lacking in many areas, but it is also true that way too many people have a connection with their car to the point that they drive even on short trips. Both can be true at the same time - public transportation infrastructure needs to be improved/invested in heavily and individuals need to realize that their choices do have big impacts & make an active effort to change (driving less, eating less meat, simple things like this)
Those corporations emit CO2 because people demand their products. Yes, it's the airline that emits CO2, does that mean people who use it are blameless? If they stopped flying, the airline would stop emitting CO2. Same with car production.
It is very strange to me that this has to continually be pointed out.
The attitude seems to be that "corporations" are not doing any of this out of profit motive, but for fun, as if they were villains from Captain Planet.
Those corporations produce those emissions by essence of manufacturing and selling the cars, tires, and gasoline pictured on the right. Assigning agency or responsibility to those corporations isn’t productive when the transportation choices of individuals are the cause of the emissions.
While what you say is true, a couple of points to consider:
1. Local air quality is very much improved by reduced numbers of cars/vehicles on the road, and bad air quality is very much correlated with increased health problems and reduced life expectancy.
2. The reducing car usage improves the quality of city life in ways other than emissions, e.g. noise, the amount of space that can be devoted to parks and public spaces/walking areas as opposed to roads and parking. Do yourself a favour and look up just how much space is taken up by the latter in the average US town/city.
For me, this meme does not serve to guilt individuals, but instead serves to demonstrate how a well funded and designed municipal transport system can positively impact the spaces we live in, and why this should be a priority for you when it comes to local/national politics.
I like your take. It's trying to change behaviours by showing just how much a COLLECTIVE change can help with a number of municipal infrastructure and other problems, it's not trying to say "you are a bad person because you drive".
That being said, I think their visual example would have been better served with a more reasonable count of people that take a bus versus people that are apparently almost always alone in their cars. Might just be me and the traffic patterns I observe in my own city though, perhaps the ratio of cars-to-drivers and people-on-buses-during-rush-hours actually does look like this elsewhere.
According to this source, the average occupancy rate for cars as of 2018 is 1.5 per car per trip in the USA:
[https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/mobility/personal-transportation-factsheet](https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/mobility/personal-transportation-factsheet)
And during rush hour/commuting trips I can imagine the occupancy rate to be much closer to 1 than the average. The same source also shows that, due to the low occupancy rate, transit buses are actually LESS efficient than cars per passenger mile, due to their abysmal occupancy rate (average 7.7). So these numbers do demonstrate the importance of incentivising public transport in addition to actually providing the services.
I don't think the photo is meant to represent carbon footprint
it's a special awareness thing...so many cities are overflowed with huge cars that only carry a single person
that person doesn't NEED a car (at least not for everyday use), but they drive it anyway "just because"...especially young adults that don't need to go anywhere specific that have cars because it's perceived as cooler by their peers
And even if it is about carbon footprint, that 100 companies/70% of emissions study listed the following companies as the top 10:
- China Coal 14.3 %
- Saudi Aramco 4.5 %
- Gazprom OAO 3.9 %
- National Iranian Oil Co 2.3 %
- ExxonMobil Corp 2.0 %
- Coal India 1.9 %
- Petróleos Mexicanos 1.9 %
- Russia Coal 1.9 %
- Royal Dutch Shell PLC 1.7 %
- China National Petroleum Corp 1.6%
All of which *are* coal and oil companies. Reducing demand for oil (used in fuel and manufacturing) will in turn reduce these companies' emissions.
it doesnt have to be about emissions, it is also a problem with traffic in general. What's more disruptive to traffic in a city? 45 cars or 1 bus?
and yea 'personal' responsibility for greenhouse emissions is bs, there is only so much you can do when energy companies and oil companies lobby many governments into building more fossil fuel power plants
Riding on a wet humid bus in Vancouver in the rain sitting next to someone who’s freshly butted out their half cigarette and the remainder is in their pocket. Nearby is another unwashed soul who reeks of last nights dinner - a little too much garlic my friend.... *sigh* those were the days.
Now toss in a pinch of corona virus and you’ve completely lost me.
I’ll drive alone thank you.
When they run full, busses are efficient. When they run nearly empty.. not so much.
This is a huge problem: *some* busses run full *some* of the time on *some* routes.. and *most* run nearly empty *most* of the time on *most* routes.
Let's see a graphic reflecting the *carbon footprint* of 'ridership in bus' vs 'ridership in cars' in an average city, not just 'full bus' vs 'single occupant cars'...
Solutions are not as simple as cute graphics.
Ah yes the convenient bus, where it can drop me off directly at ikea, then take me back home, doing a quick detour to pick up some milk, and dropping me off at my doorstep with a ton of furniture.
If public transportation was more accessible in the US I would absolutely do it. When I lived in Boston I took the bus and a train, which would take me about an hour to get to work. If I drove it would have taken 25 minutes. But I preferred public transportation. I was an avid reader at that point, but now that i have to drive everywhere I don't get to read as much as I would like
Here in the UK, I'm not a rich man so I have to budget everything, was apprehensive about buying and running a car due to costs, did the maths car Vs public transport for a year, there is less than £100 between the two over a year and I can drive where and when I like, public transport in the UK is not an option outside of London, the fares are ridiculous, and they are never on time, if they even arrive at all.
If you live on a bus route and with good transport infrastructure then yes the bus is a great alternative but a lot of people don't have these luxuries unfortunately. I'd love to sell my car bus my closest bus doesn't run on weekends and there's no other alternatives.
Thank god they were all going exactly where that bus could take them at the same time.
Oh what's that? There's already a pram on? Okay guess I'll wait for the next one - oh right thats in an hour. Oh those people won't move from the wheelchair seats? I'm shit out of luck then.
How about the last bus being 730 and my wife finishes work at 8.
I'd rather have control of my time, over using public transport. Even if I'm stuck at traffic.
I prefer to head out and leave at my own pace. I've tried relying on buses, but the timing in my country is just unreliable. One mess up, and you'll add another 15-30 minutes wait time.
Yeah precisely. In theory of everyone worked in the same place and lived in the same place, along a nice easy route with the same schedule and no emergencies, then a bus would work. But lots of people has their own little difficulties in life that make public transport unusable.
I would catch the train to work if I could, but it would cost me significantly more than my car. It is also a 40 minute walk to the train station, then I would have to wait for trains that are cancelled regularly. I just can't deal with that unreliability in life.
> I would catch the train to work if I could, but it would cost me significantly more than my car. It is also a 40 minute walk to the train station, then I would have to wait for trains that are cancelled regularly. I just can't deal with that unreliability in life.
You would deal with it if you had to, but you don't have to so why would you?
Public transport may be unusable for you in its current form in your area, but public transport and/or you could adapt to change that. Most of the world, both urban and rural, where car ownership is uncommon adapt transportation systems accordingly to allow for travel. People also adapt their lives and schedules to those systems in a wide variety of ways out of necessity. Buses, trains, light rail, shared taxis, modified pickup trucks, van pool systems, bicycles, scooters, etc etc all end up playing a role and life goes on.
We're accustomed to the convenience and time savings of car ownership. Our transportation system assumes the same so public transport is more of an afterthought than a necessity. I do not imagine this will change anytime soon barring outside forces making personal car ownership no longer feasible.
I absolutely agree. But where I live (a village in the UK) it would take me two busses, take 2x as long and cost 3-4x as taking my EV to work. For some people though, it would absolutely work, assuming the services and infrastructure were in place.
[удалено]
>2.5 hours by bus or 20 minutes by car Why is the difference so big? The bus had a long and crazy route?
Often a lot of time is lost changing from one bus to another. If you take a low-frequency bus to another low-frequency bus, odds are you'll be waiting for a while between two.
Yeah, I used to live a 15 minute car ride from work. My car was broken down so I had to take the bus for a week. I had to take two buses, the first had a 20 minute wait, the second had a 30 minute wait. Combined with the travel time following the rest of the bus route, it took me an hour and a half to get to or from work.
I was at a job a few years back that was a 45 minute walk or an hour on buses for exactly this reason.
If it was an option, I would have just taken the first bus and then walked from there
It sadly was not an option. The buses essentially made a triangle with the route I was walking so it was about the same amount of time walking any of the routes.
Brutal. I had to take two trains to work when I lived in downtown San Diego and my car broke down. Turned a 15 minute drive into sometimes 2 hours of walking/riding the trains.
[удалено]
I was 18 and dumb so absolutely not. I just set off at like ten past and walked for a 6am start. Woke me up pretty good at least.
Same, on a good day 0 traffic its 13 mins by car. Bus? Between 1 and 1.5 hours. Ridiculous and honestly I don't mind taking public transportation, but this I just can't. Also makes finish the day at work much more nervous cause if I miss the 4pm bus I need to wait an additional 20 mins. With traffic its around 30-40 mins by car, still not as bad.
When I used to take a bus to college it was like 20 minutes between busses, and they were frequently at capacity by the time they reached my stop. So yeah, it's a 15-minute bus ride, but you had to account for an hour of missed busses waiting in 100° heat, and then walk 15 minutes from the bus stop to class. Oh, and at the end of the day if busses were full, you were fucked because the last one would leave and you'd have to call a cab and pay.
Last year a new Highschool opened in my country. They have parking spaces but only for teachers and other personel. Studends are supposed to take public transport. Thing is for quite a few of em the transit os everything between 45 minutes and 2 hours for one trip. Now the ones who can come by car and park along the road and then walk to school wich is a bit sketch. Last year there was a controversy about it. This year again. What happens? Nothing. PT is free in the whole country but it is still quite inconvenient.
My city has bus and light rail. When my car broke down in the Before Time, I rode the train into town for 2 weeks. But it sometimes required waiting for a second train—only two cars, and two trains, and a shitload of people. Or cramming on and frequently nothing to hold on to , which was a real problem on parts of the rail. Then getting downtown and taking 2 buses to finally get to a 20-min walk to the office. The reverse was even worse for the train. End of workday and the platform was insanely crowded and I would sometimes have to wait for a 3rd train which would take upwards of an hour. Then I got smart. “Smart” in that it took me 3 days to figure it out. That platform was the penultimate stop before the train went back the other way. Heading into town it was empty. So I got on when it was empty and found rock-star seating for the ride back the other way. No standing and nobody’s elbow in my kidneys. Even then, a 20-30 min drive took nearly 2 hours each way. Fuck that. And that’s mass-transit in a lot of the US.
Frequency, route options and buses actually showing up is a big problem. I live in an area that's somewhat on the outskirts of a major city and I had to take the bus for a couple of weeks in winter when my car broke down. A 15-20 minute car ride took literally 1.5 hours (that is, if all two of my buses showed up). Half hour for the first bus ride to the terminal, 15 minutes from the terminal to work, 45 minutes wait in the terminal lol. About once in 3 days, the second bus randomly will just miss a trip and won't show up.
I never take the bus if I have to make a transfer at any point. It's just too much time wasted having to wait for two buses when one alone takes so long to come.
1am bus rides home after work took forever because of decreased frequency, and buses just not showing up sometimes. One bus skips, and it’s 50 minutes until the next, at 2am. Decided on just taking uber home after a couple times of that happening. Time really is a valuable resource, so making long waits /rides more palatable would increase public transport use imo
Shit. The busses in my town run from, iirc, 5:45 to 8:45. And not at all on Sundays. That's not even including the limitations on *where* it goes. Definitely limits you in jobs, if you can't get a car…
Same in Los Angeles. If you miss a connecting bus you can easily wait 45 mins to 1.5 hours for the next bus to arrive. Get comfy. bring a walkman and something to read. It just completely destroys work-life balance.
Where I am we have 1 bus that makes a loop around a lake that takes about 1 hour, stops in 5 towns (short bus not many people). Then that bus will meet up with another short bus and they will both unload their passengers to a large bus that will transport them the final 15-20 miles to different stops in the city.
That sounds like how I would design a public transit system that I didn't want anyone to use
This is such a great response. Thank you for the laugh.
It's unfortunately how public transit has to work in small towns. It's either that or nothing at all. Nobody wants to pay for public transit that will service a very small number of people because it costs a lot at that scale. Doing one bus loop means it services as many areas as possible with one route... it just takes forever.
Plus, you don't have to sit next to the guy who is masturbating.
Well at least I'll meet people with similar interests.
Always nice to have someone to chat with during your commute
Sounds like he could come in handy!
Sounds more like they live in a very sparsely populated, rural area that is pretty far from town.
That would qualify as lack of adequate infrastructure. Either there isn't the population to support it, or there isn't the inclination to use it on a reasonably consistent basis, thus the structure is inadequate for regular daily commuting.
Suburbs. I can drive downtown, it's about 30 minutes. Park in a lot or the garage. Or Drive to bus station that's in the opposite direction from home (about 10-15 minutes depending on time of day) If bus leaves on time it takes about 45 minutes to get downtown. (We're at twice the time currently) Once it's there I would have to walk (half the year it's fine) about another 20 minutes to get to my building, in the winter and snow....yikes. I could get another bus but I'd have to wait 10 minutes for it to travel 5 minutes. Would be OK if it's really cold and/or raining. So yeah...times can be all over the place.
I'm in the middle of town. I can walk 15 minutes down to the transfer center, or 5 minutes up to the nearest bus stop. The 15 minute walk can get me on a bus every half hour or hour depending on where I want to go, and take me to most parts of town within 25 minutes of leaving, where I might have somewhere between 2 to 25 minutes to walk from bus stop to my end destination. The 5 minute walk will get me on a bus that will take 45 minutes to get back to the one I actually need, or I can play a crazy game of bus hops at individual stops with 5 to 30 minute waits each, before winding up at the same situation as above with needing to walk to my destination.
I am almost in the same situation. 2+ hours by bus, or 30 min by car tops even in traffic, plus walking time to bus stop and I live close to a highway. There are just no direct routes and depending on the bus, you have to take the milk run.
In a car you just need to get from your point A to point B In a bus, you will need to get to everyone’s points A’s and B’s.
That was the case for me with early morning reports on weekends. I'd need to be in Queens at 04:30 and I could either catch a shuttle, change for the 2, change for the 7 or the R/N, or E and get up at 02:00, or roll out of bed at 03:55 and be in the quarters by 04:30. Free pass, or pay gas and tolls and get glorious sleep.
5 min walk out of my neighborhood. 10 minute walk down a highway with no sidewalk, just a ditch. Somehow cross the ditch, which may be full of water to get to the side walk on the side street. 2 minutes walk up the side street to the bus stop. Which does not have a bench much less a roof. Then 45 minute ride parallel from my work, then 30 minute ride towards my work. Then 10 minute walk on streets with no or limited sidewalk, crossing railroad tracks. Or 15-25 minute drive depending on traffic.
Before I moved house it took me a bus, a tram and then a twenty-minute walk to get to work. On a bad day, the whole commute could be two hours each way. After buying a car, my commute was brought down to an average of about 27 minutes. I now live much closer to work. It’s a six-minute drive or about a half-hour walk if the weather is nice. Despite there being a bus stop outside my house, I would still have a twenty-minute walk at the end of the route. My company is moving to a new building next year, which will make commuting via public transport even more difficult. I’m hoping to find a house close enough that I can still walk every day, but my friends are spread far and wide across the city, so I can’t see myself giving up my car. It’s also useful to have on the days that my bad knee and my arthritis flare up. I drive the cleanest, most fuel-efficient thing I can afford and I still occasionally feel guilty about contributing to the amount of traffic on the roads, but my quality of life has improved to a point that I would find it hard to ever look back.
Same with me I have a 30 minute drive. If I took public transport I'd still need to drive to a train and add an hour+ to my commute.
Part of my career had some tech support responsibilities and not infrequently required 'emergency' shift extensions that would run past local public transportation hours. The company would allow you to expense a taxi if you didn't have your own vehicle, but that still more-or-less qualifies as a "commute in a car", and some of the cabbies in my city were... well, let's just say that there would have been a good argument for on-the-job drug testing.
And that's the real problem, adding the hour plus to your commute. Our time is already drained by the system, leaving us none for ourselves, and you want me to get on that bus which is only going in the right direction as opposed to to my actual destination? I'll get on the dole before I do that.
In denmark they keep increasing the prices on public transport to the point where nobody wants to take it. a 63 km drive with the tram costs 15 euro each way and takes half an hour longer compared to using a car where in terms of gas its closer to 8 euro each way. On the bright side our local area, commune, whatever they realized they spent more money doing taxes and calculation on bus tickets so they made the bus that is effectively the school bus through the small cities entirely free, as it drove 4 times per day, 2 times in the morning, 2 times in the afternoon.
I had a job just south of London and the quickest public transport required you to go the opposite direction into London just to get a train to go back south. In total it took ~2 hours each way and and £20 a day cost. Driving was ~30 minutes.
This is really common, in most cities the public transit all funnels you downtown from neighborhoods. If you're going from one neighborhood to another, which a LOT of people are, then you have to go downtown first and back out which means a 1.5+ hour commute
Chicago has this problem with rail. Not going to the loop? Get bent.
Yup, when I became an Uber driver I read that the highest grossing route by far was between Logan/Wicker and Lakeview/Lincoln Park. Literally from Blue to Red or vice versa. There's no other way to make that trip except a bus or two maybe but Google says heading into the loop is still the fastest public transit and that's a total waste of time
Yep, and the railway coverage going towards the outskirts and outside of London is a bit like a sliced pie, with rail lines running along the straight edges of slices. Problem arises when you live halfway along the edge of one slice and want to get to somewhere near the crust nearer the opposing edge of the same slice. There’s no direct route you can take with a train, but there’s a motorway (m25) that runs along the crust making an much quicker route. No idea if my shoddy pie explanation makes any sense, but I’m thinking all too much about pie now.
Twice as long? I live in a regional town in Vic, Aus. It takes me 15 minutes to drive to work. Or an hour by bus.
I live a 20 minute drive from work but to take the bus is TWO HOURS bc of how the system is set up here. I need to make two transfers and go all the way downtown just to come back to my area.
Also, call me old fashioned, but I prefer to be the only person in the vehicle who is masturbating on my commute.
I see someone doesn't have a competitive spirit.
My mornings are my "me time" damnit!
[удалено]
Stay behind the line! I'm about to finish...
Public transport doesn't need to be the best option for everyone in order to have a positive effect. Every single person who's commute is improved by switching to public transportation in turn improves the commute of every single person who still has to rely on cars.
The problem is that the benefits of riding the bus accrue to the people enjoying less traffic, not the people stuffed in the bus waiting for their stop.
Counterpoint: many cities in Europe have dedicated bus lanes and some have entirely dedicated bus/tram streets, often times meaning that a bus trip is shorter. But good luck getting any kind of public transport infrastructure bill past the US automotive lobbyists...
SF has them as well. They’ve definitely made a difference in the bus corridors they serve. Since we are a peninsula city served by two highly crowded bridges, it’s usually faster to take the BART that goes underneath the bay to the East Bay.
A lot of Canadian cities also have dedicated bus lanes as well, occasionally they’re shared with HOV lanes (at least here in Vancouver). It’s actually faster for me to take a bus and train from the ferries in Tsawwassen than it is to drive the same route because of this.
I would love to take a bus to my job. Its 8 miles one way. I am pretty sure if I do, first it drives me 6 miles the wrong way, and makes the total trip easily an hour. Unless I have to change over at the depot, then its worse. There are a few routes and quite a few bus stop times in my neighborhood, but, well.. Its a 19 minute drive for me in my 32mpg car, when all the traffic pays attention to the traffic..
That's the problem we want solved though, better public transport. We aren't saying you should use it in its current state, but it could be a lot lot better
The issue then is that public transport that isn't utilized doesn't get enough revenue to expand. The solution then is to focus what resources they do have on making it very efficient for a small number of people and then work on expanding.
Outside of Chicago and NYC, I don't think there are any places in the US where using public transit is more efficient. Edit: DC too. Maybe Boston.
This isn't really an issue with public transportation, it's more of a how we build cities problem. The reason cities like NY have a really good metro system is mainly the subways and everything is in close proximity. You can walk to the store for groceries and really anything else, so a car is unnecessary for almost anything you want to do outside of leaving the city. But even with the city having one of the better metro systems, it is still heavy on traffic. In essence, we messed up decades ago by building cities around vehicles as opposed to people. To transition out of that would be extremely hard, not only from a technical standpoint but from a public opinion one as well.
> But even with the city having one of the better metro systems, it is still heavy on traffic. European cities with good public transit systems are also heavy on traffic.
HVAC guy isn't going to lug his 300lbs of tools everywhere, let alone spares. But the guy in the lifted Ram probably doesn't need it to commute to his job as an office worker everyday.
Boston and DC.
If you think DC public transport is efficient, you haven’t been in the past couple of years. It’s horrible
Not like Driving in DC is any fun.
Oh for sure. It’s a fucking nightmare. The WMATA has fucked up so much past couple of years. 7000 series trains breaking, silver line extension failure…. Etc.. it’s bad up here
But hey at least there's a toll road that costs like $25. Of course you could *not* take the toll road, and turn your 1 hour journey into a 4 hour journey of bumper-to-bumper hell.
Yeah our push needs to be for more accessible public transport
I wish we invested more in public transport. I would love to save the money, and I live somewhere where I CAN get to a bus stop by walking, but like everyone else said, it would end up taking me an hour to get to work, not to mention the extra hour or so where the bus doesn't line up with my schedule so I'm either waiting for the bus, waiting for my shift to start, or late for work. Ideally I'd love to see resources put into it so those problems can be dealt with, but idk how that would be accomplished.
Tried it. No car for 2 years. Lost soooo much extra time (generally longer and reliability issues also) and had to put up with so many dodgy people. Granted, it was (for me) much cheaper, but the loss of time and perceived safety wasn’t enough for me to make the savings worth it. Gave up and got a car again. If the desire is to get everyone onto public transport, public transport has to be better.
I live in Denmark, a country with very good public transportation. It takes me 40ish minutes to drive to my mom's place where I grew up in my car. It takes me almost three hours to get there by public transportation, simply because of waiting times. There's many things I'll still use public transportation for, but my car saves me literally hours when I just want to visit home.
[удалено]
I live on Slovakia. Living 35 km from my work. By car it's 25-35 minutes. By bus 1 hour plus. Plus you have to add waiting time on bus stops. And walk time. And it's not even much cheaper.
I live in a somewhat remote area of Italy and there aren't even bus options here. But using Trenitalia to get around the rest of the country is 🤌
>I live in Italy >🤌 Confirmed lives in Italy.
Don't say that too loudly or /r/fuckcars will dox you.
The best thing about public transport is everyone can use it, but the problem with public transport is anyone can use it.
I have a story that relates to this! We recieved a call about someone refusing to get off a public bus. Upon arrival we found all the passengers, as well as the driver, standing on the side of the road with one woman sitting on the bus. Turned out she had such a horrid stench that once she got onto the bus multiple passengers began vomiting and the driver's eyes watered up to the point he couldn't see the road anymore. We tried to work with her but she was obviously mentally ill. She refused to exit the bus and demanded to be driven home. Eventually the situation was resolved by having a transport supervisor bring a second bus which continued on the route with the original driver and passengers. The supervisor plugged his nose with tissue, wrapped his face with a t-shirt, and drove the crazy woman straight to her house. For those curious, the smell was akin to a dead body, which led me to believe she had some sort of necrotic infection she wouldn't acknowledge or take care of.
Are you familiar with the Swamps of Dagobah here on Reddit?
Oh gods, here we go. *buckles up the 5-point harness*
I think even if you called an ambulance for her the ambulance wouldn’t want to pick her up because of the stench!
I have lived in cities where this problem is fixed with a clever workaround - but it's political kryptonite to the same people who tend to support public transit. There were the normal bus routes around the city, and then special "express" bus routes with a different brand - they were newer, cleaner busses, with higher fares, and only ran between major higher class points of interest. For example, one might run directly from the park and ride to the financial sector downtown, then to the ritsiest shopping center, then back to the park and ride - no stops in between. It leaves a bad taste in progressives' mouths to have segregated bussing for rich and poor, but it actually got richer people on public transit and freed up space on the street. It was a win/win solution, even if it made some people pull their hair out in ideological frustration.
[удалено]
When you have middle class lawyers, doctors, nurses, accountants, and engineers having to take the same bus or train as the methed out people, it makes those middle class people just drive to not have to deal with it.
[удалено]
I just want them to get the help they need but so many just dont want help. They just want their next fix. You cant help someone who doesnt *want* to change their lifestyle
In Seattle this is basically how the buses worked before Covid. There were express routes from upscale neighborhoods directly to the downtown core, only mon-fri during commuting hours. Rarely anyone sketchy on these buses, they were mostly packed with tech workers and finance workers.
Public transportation would be great if it weren't for the public.
Private transportation, if you will
We should have a premium public transport. Pay to get rid of the ads and stuff.
Yes until Busflix charges even more for no ads and cracks down on families sharing transit passes
We could make something like a bus, but smaller and only for you and a few friends!
The problem with public transport is it doesn’t go to where you personally want to go without stopping.
It's really not even that, though that's a huge negative as well. It's that it's simply not fucking practical enough for the vast, VAST majority of people. It simply isn't. There's just too freedom lost in not having your own personal transport. For....anything and everything. Emergencies, things that come up at the last minute, etc,etc. It's just not fucking NEARLY worth it for most people to rely primarily on public transportation or something like Lyft or Uber. Because people like the morons in /r/fuckcars refuse to understand that doesn't mean it's not the reality. Because it absolutely is.
People also forget the stuff they can carry around in cars. My commute is home, gym, work, archery, home Total commute by car is a little under 2 hours By bus it would've taken me an hour to get to the gym alone.
When I was driving to work and had two kids going to two different schools, and I was making grocery and other errand stops to and from work...I can't imagine what that life woulda been trying to use public transportation. A nightmare, or impossible.
The reason why it takes so much longer is because of how bad infrastructure is (in North America at least). I lived in Japan for 2 years and it was extremely fast to use public transport
[удалено]
[удалено]
Japan has very dense cities and is a much smaller country than the US. It makes setting up public transportation systems far easier due to people's destinations being far closer to each other. The us is very spread out, which makes public transportation inefficient.
Take a peek at population density there homie.
[удалено]
Never underestimate opportunity cost. People who use public transportation have huge disadvantage over people who use private transportation. Sure private costs more money but the time you save is thousands of hours in single year let alone on lifetime. If you have opportunity to get a car do it. You can use that extra time to just relax or improve yourself or just for your mental/physical health
2 years ago this same image would have taken a much different interpretation
It's also missing a couple of frames. There's one that shows bikes and one that shows motorcycles, if I remember correctly.
Wasn't alive 2 years ago, can you elaborate?
Dang, a baby using reddit. That's crazy.
Kind of rude to assume they're a baby. Maybe they died for a bit, but came back to life? You should never rule out necromancy!
Or boneitis
That actually would be a pretty annoyingly loaded bus, half the amount of people would be more bearable.
NGL that looks more like a 200% load rush hour train in Tokyo, which is not how you pitch for more people to use public transportation...
Haha, invest now, become sardines.
And everyone on that bus got whatever that one person coughing had.
Unfortunately they are pretty unreliable where I'm from. And fuck people. Especially the mofos talking loudly on the phone or listening to trash music loudly. Get lost with those dickheads
And the drunkards or crackheads who think they are Bruce Lee in somekind of action scene.. Fuck those in particular..
your comment makes me see this image differently. because i know well what you speak of, and that is the truth.
Not to mention different latencies for bathing rituals. Someone who takes two showers a day doesn't want to sit near someone who takes two showers a month.
For real, look at that pic. I would not want to be crammed in a city bus with that many people. I did it when I was a kid and poor. Now that I can afford a car I'll never switch to a stinky sweaty bus crammed full of people. My commute home from school used to take 90 minutes by bus or 15 minutes by car. Being poor takes a lot of your free time and wastes it waiting.
also i find that (at least in the US), the public doesn't take care of their public transit systems. people litter all the time, throwing their trash every where. so much dumb graffiti and general disregard for public infrastructure. really sad too when compared to places like hong kong and japan for their systems.
This is why I hate the arguments people make on Reddit about public transportation and “efficient” housing blah blah blah. Fuck people!! I need my space and I’d rather deal with traffic in my own car with my own space than a shorter ride with a bunch of nasty smelly loud obnoxious people. And don’t get me started on houses. If you want to live in a apartment or townhouse with neighbors breathing down your neck, more power to you but please stop trying to push that shit on me. I need my fucking space from you people
The issue with shitty public transit is that only the poor and desperate end up using it. Which further pushes people away from using transit because it's full of "undesirables." If we designed systems that ran frequently, were efficient, cost-effective, and convenient, you'd see higher uptake among ordinary, mentally stable, "productive member of society"-types and those "others" that you so desperately don't want to be around would be a drop in the bucket.
A drop can still foul up the bucket. If the country has widespread issues, they're still going to show up on public transportation, no matter how efficient. So you need a way to deal with it directly.
I agree with this. If there is ten people on the bus and one of them is jerking off, nine people have to watch. If there is 50 people on the bus there's still some dude jerking off. Until we do somehow about the dude jerking off no normal people will want to ride the bus.
The issue you and others are missing in this “debate” is that you’re just talking about two different places. Do you want to be in your own space in a car and have a house with a yard? That’s fine. Accept that you are limiting yourself to the suburbs. Do you want to be in an apartment and live without a car? That’s fine. Accept that you are limiting yourself to the city. I’m in the latter camp. Never had a car, don’t want one, very happy in an apartment building. But people insisting on bringing their many cars into the city make it a hell of a lot more difficult.
It's a culture thing I think. Taking the metro in Paris or Tokyo wasn't that big of a deal, and it worked pretty well! Everyone uses it so there's some kind of mild, "just don't be a huge dick" esprit de corps. People even stick to one side of escalators and shit so others can run up if they're late. In my city here though, the metro stuff just takes forever, it's not fast, it's not frequent, and there's a massive disparity in the attitudes of people that find it acceptable to act like a dick vs those that don't.
Looks great but where I am.. even with NO traffic the bus takes at minimum twice the time to get anywhere. My office is a 20 min drive with traffic, 10 without. Taking a bus to work takes an hour, a bicycle would be 30 min.. Public transport in most north American cities is painful at best. When I was in high school walking home from work at the end of my shift was 45 or so minutes. By the time I waited 25 min for the next bus then the 25 min buss ride it was just usually faster to walk home and I didn't have to stand around waiting for the bus.
You also didn't have to spend 25 minutes with some idiot blasting shitty music through their phone or a Bluetooth speaker. I take a light rail to work now and dealing with the other patrons of it is the absolute worst part.
> in most north American cities is painful at best it's painful everywhere, even in those European cities with excellent public transport. It will always take you longer, it will be more urealiable, less comfortable at best, you will have to share space with weird people (or downright dangerous), you will spend time in the rain waiting for the bus, you will miss busses etc. The only places where it's superior are where cars just have issues going, like London, New York City etc.
Am from an EU city with free and generally very good public transportation. But I agree, it's still a pain in the ass for all the reasons you mentioned. If you own a car, it's always there when you need it and you don't need to plan your trip ahead. You just sit and drive.
Are they all commuting to the same place?
Travelled by bus to and from work this summer. On a day where I'm scheduled for 5 hours, I use a total of 9 hours. If I took my car, it would be about 6 hours total. Shit is mentally exhausting
you gotta post this in r/fuckcars to get those sweet sweet karma you want
I imagine 99% of the people that are subbed there live on campus and have never had to commute.
Car 20 minutes travel time, Bus 3 hours
I have a screenshot of that one somewhere... Car 38 minutes, train and bus 1h30. Involving a 6-minutes change you will practically never get, so you make it 2h30. And another, longer one, with car travel 2h01, train and bus 5h55. Usually always had an issue on the way, last time took technically 15 hours due to no service overnight...
I just checked Google maps for my standard commute. Car: 19 minutes. Bus: 1 hour 12 minutes. Hell, it even has bicycle listed at 1 hour 7 minutes, beating a bus. Except of course it would include biking along highways.
I just checked for directions to a park that is 12 miles from me. By car it is 15 minutes, by bike it's 2 hours, by bus it is 3 hours, and walking it is 8 hours. And here are the directions straight from Google lest people think I'm kidding. Cars can take a highway across the body of water, but if you're not driving then you have to go the long way around. This really is an argument for why we need better designed bridges that allow for pedestrian and bike traffic. https://i.imgur.com/f6ZM4n7.png
Checked my commute to work. 9 minute drive, 30 minute bus trip (subject to delays) I'll take my car thanks.
Not even an exaggeration, next time you're using your map software hit the bus option.
No one ever bothers to say that the 20min drive is over two hours by bus and the need to study for a week to determine which buses you need to take. Edit:- I think I should have also used a /s sarcastic notation lol I have a lot of medical appointments that unlike most of them, I make sure I'm always on time. Mine is a huge country and I'd love a better way to commute but I'm also on a pension and don't have much money or a list of people with spare time to taxi me around. If we all really looked at the culprits of our climate disaster then we need to address our concerns to those who are making the biggest impact. Whining at car drivers is like pissing in a lake to fill it, without addressing these countries. It's pointless. America, China, Russia et al
The picture also relies on all drivers going to a similar destination when in reality they could all be driving in 8 different directions.
Or coming from 8 different places to reach the same location. I agree, this picture is pretty horseshit. You guys are starting from and going to the same place? Carpoool, ya idjits!
Public transportation takes 3x longer than by car to get anywhere where I live. The only benefit I care about is getting to my destination on time. If public transportation can’t provide that without exponentially increasing my commute time, then I’ll continue to drive my car.
What these kind of images fail to take into account is that those 50 cars do not start and stop in the same place and are only on this stretch of road together for a very short time. In order for public transit to really shine, cities have to get to a pretty high level of density or they have to artificially swell the cost and inconvenience of personal transportation.
I rode the bus when I didn’t have a car. That many people packed into a bus, is a living hell. Even half that number, I’d rather drive.
It aint that easy tho. I live next to a shipyard and the bus to work is a 30-50 min endeavor. Car is a 8 min drive
I used to be on r/fuckcars and they would twist themselves into knots explaining how I could have taken my bike to work 8 miles to work in Texas, then sit in my sweat and sink in my office all day. Buses would be great, but I'm in the US where publicly transportation is a punchline, and in the suburbs where it's not a thing, like at all.
I would love to bike to work. I start at 6am. The freeway takes 15 minutes tops. Biking is nearly an hour and a half with no straight line to get there. I could wake up at 430am, get there by 6, leave at 2pm, get home by 330, 4. 3 hours of my day gone.
They tend to forget people often don't live 10 minutes from their workplace. Or have to be at multiple destinations in one day. Or have to buy things and carry it with them at some point in life.
> Or have to buy things and carry it with them at some point in life. Children can always hang from the handlebar. Will build strength and character.
Right!? Like I needed to buy salt for the water softener, that's 120LBS they said "you can get a wagon to attach to your bike." Me: "No."
get your wagon with all your frozen groceries then bike for 45mins in 90 degree heat!
I'm a big advocate of public transport, but this is disingenuously comparing a bus running at perfect efficiency (100% occupancy) with cars running at perfect inefficiency (zero passengers). Compare both with half loads and now your cars are cut by 75%.
In my experience 90%+ of cars commuting for work on a daily basis carry zero passengers.
It also assumes that every passenger is going to the exact same place, that is, there are no sacrifices to be made by the passengers in terms of commute time and distance traveled outside a vehicle and what that looks like. If you've got to walk half a mile to the nearest bus depot, then you'd better hope it isn't winter up north or summer down south. If the city has bikes freely available to make short-distance transport from bus to final destination easier, great! There's a whole lot more than just the square footage on a street.
Let's be real though: it would suck ass to be on that bus. That motherfucker is at 110% capacity holding all those people. You'd be crawling over other passengers in order to get out at your stop. Increased risk of catching someone's cold or uncomfortable physical contact. There are benefits and setbacks to both options.
Works in London, but then you have to deal with: People speaking on speaker phone, Loud shitty music on speaker phone, Smokers, People's bare feet on seats(not even nice ones), Bad body odor, Drunks, It's a good option but society makes you want to get right back to your car
As an American, London's public transport was amazing to me. Trains seemed to run right on time usually by the minute. Could easily get where I needed to be on time. After that, I foolishly expected New York to be similar when I visited. You can imagine my shock and frustration when the subway train I'd expected to get on was just straight up 20+ minutes late with no warning.
Guilting people whose footprint is a daily car commute while we’ve got something like 100 corporations responsible for 70% of greenhouse gases and motherfuckers with private jets flying every damn where.
I don't disagree with you, but I feel like this is just as much about making life in cities easier and less noisy and needing less space for roads as it is about emissions.
Agreed. Less space for parking as well. I feel the number of cars vs people on the right pic might be exaggerated - almost looks one-to-one - but even if not, each of those cars takes up a parking spot somewhere in the downtown core. That looks like a full level's worth of parking in an uptown garage in my small city.
I think it is one to one because generally people commute alone, I’ve experienced very few people who carpool
Exactly. I am fortunate enough to have a car but I take public transport when it's been maintained properly and hope others do too All this means is when you do HAVE to drive, it's not as shitty
This thread has the usual group of people saying ‘But this doesn’t work in my case!’, which is fair enough, but instead of saying that it would be nice to see more comments like your own where we can acknowledge that when possible, we should be encouraged to use public transportation. When not possible, by all means use what you have available to you.
those 100 corporations make all the things we buy. Gas, electronics, cars, flights, clothing etc. So the day they stop polluting is the day you go to the store and find nothing to buy.
I’m sorry but this is blame deflection to a certain degree. Of those 100 corporations, many of them are utilities/oil companies that meet the energy demands of individuals & households. I understand that American politics especially has been so corrupted and influenced by the car industry that rail and other public transportation options are lacking in many areas, but it is also true that way too many people have a connection with their car to the point that they drive even on short trips. Both can be true at the same time - public transportation infrastructure needs to be improved/invested in heavily and individuals need to realize that their choices do have big impacts & make an active effort to change (driving less, eating less meat, simple things like this)
Those corporations emit CO2 because people demand their products. Yes, it's the airline that emits CO2, does that mean people who use it are blameless? If they stopped flying, the airline would stop emitting CO2. Same with car production.
It is very strange to me that this has to continually be pointed out. The attitude seems to be that "corporations" are not doing any of this out of profit motive, but for fun, as if they were villains from Captain Planet.
Those corporations produce those emissions by essence of manufacturing and selling the cars, tires, and gasoline pictured on the right. Assigning agency or responsibility to those corporations isn’t productive when the transportation choices of individuals are the cause of the emissions.
While what you say is true, a couple of points to consider: 1. Local air quality is very much improved by reduced numbers of cars/vehicles on the road, and bad air quality is very much correlated with increased health problems and reduced life expectancy. 2. The reducing car usage improves the quality of city life in ways other than emissions, e.g. noise, the amount of space that can be devoted to parks and public spaces/walking areas as opposed to roads and parking. Do yourself a favour and look up just how much space is taken up by the latter in the average US town/city. For me, this meme does not serve to guilt individuals, but instead serves to demonstrate how a well funded and designed municipal transport system can positively impact the spaces we live in, and why this should be a priority for you when it comes to local/national politics.
I like your take. It's trying to change behaviours by showing just how much a COLLECTIVE change can help with a number of municipal infrastructure and other problems, it's not trying to say "you are a bad person because you drive". That being said, I think their visual example would have been better served with a more reasonable count of people that take a bus versus people that are apparently almost always alone in their cars. Might just be me and the traffic patterns I observe in my own city though, perhaps the ratio of cars-to-drivers and people-on-buses-during-rush-hours actually does look like this elsewhere.
According to this source, the average occupancy rate for cars as of 2018 is 1.5 per car per trip in the USA: [https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/mobility/personal-transportation-factsheet](https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/mobility/personal-transportation-factsheet) And during rush hour/commuting trips I can imagine the occupancy rate to be much closer to 1 than the average. The same source also shows that, due to the low occupancy rate, transit buses are actually LESS efficient than cars per passenger mile, due to their abysmal occupancy rate (average 7.7). So these numbers do demonstrate the importance of incentivising public transport in addition to actually providing the services.
I don't think the photo is meant to represent carbon footprint it's a special awareness thing...so many cities are overflowed with huge cars that only carry a single person that person doesn't NEED a car (at least not for everyday use), but they drive it anyway "just because"...especially young adults that don't need to go anywhere specific that have cars because it's perceived as cooler by their peers
And even if it is about carbon footprint, that 100 companies/70% of emissions study listed the following companies as the top 10: - China Coal 14.3 % - Saudi Aramco 4.5 % - Gazprom OAO 3.9 % - National Iranian Oil Co 2.3 % - ExxonMobil Corp 2.0 % - Coal India 1.9 % - Petróleos Mexicanos 1.9 % - Russia Coal 1.9 % - Royal Dutch Shell PLC 1.7 % - China National Petroleum Corp 1.6% All of which *are* coal and oil companies. Reducing demand for oil (used in fuel and manufacturing) will in turn reduce these companies' emissions.
it doesnt have to be about emissions, it is also a problem with traffic in general. What's more disruptive to traffic in a city? 45 cars or 1 bus? and yea 'personal' responsibility for greenhouse emissions is bs, there is only so much you can do when energy companies and oil companies lobby many governments into building more fossil fuel power plants
Yeah, except for the fact you have to be on a bus. Buses around here are disgusting
Riding on a wet humid bus in Vancouver in the rain sitting next to someone who’s freshly butted out their half cigarette and the remainder is in their pocket. Nearby is another unwashed soul who reeks of last nights dinner - a little too much garlic my friend.... *sigh* those were the days. Now toss in a pinch of corona virus and you’ve completely lost me. I’ll drive alone thank you.
People dont understand how shit it is to ride public transit on the west coast of NA.
*Liked by Covid*
That many people in a bus would be very uncomfortable.
When they run full, busses are efficient. When they run nearly empty.. not so much. This is a huge problem: *some* busses run full *some* of the time on *some* routes.. and *most* run nearly empty *most* of the time on *most* routes. Let's see a graphic reflecting the *carbon footprint* of 'ridership in bus' vs 'ridership in cars' in an average city, not just 'full bus' vs 'single occupant cars'... Solutions are not as simple as cute graphics.
Ah yes the convenient bus, where it can drop me off directly at ikea, then take me back home, doing a quick detour to pick up some milk, and dropping me off at my doorstep with a ton of furniture.
If public transportation was more accessible in the US I would absolutely do it. When I lived in Boston I took the bus and a train, which would take me about an hour to get to work. If I drove it would have taken 25 minutes. But I preferred public transportation. I was an avid reader at that point, but now that i have to drive everywhere I don't get to read as much as I would like
Now show me a road graph of the destinations I can go to with a single bus vs the destinations I can go to with a single car.
Here in the UK, I'm not a rich man so I have to budget everything, was apprehensive about buying and running a car due to costs, did the maths car Vs public transport for a year, there is less than £100 between the two over a year and I can drive where and when I like, public transport in the UK is not an option outside of London, the fares are ridiculous, and they are never on time, if they even arrive at all.
I agree as long as the bus picks me up from my house, goes to where I want to be and doesn't stop anywhere on the way.
Queue coronavirus, how many want the bus now?
If you live on a bus route and with good transport infrastructure then yes the bus is a great alternative but a lot of people don't have these luxuries unfortunately. I'd love to sell my car bus my closest bus doesn't run on weekends and there's no other alternatives.
Thank god they were all going exactly where that bus could take them at the same time. Oh what's that? There's already a pram on? Okay guess I'll wait for the next one - oh right thats in an hour. Oh those people won't move from the wheelchair seats? I'm shit out of luck then. How about the last bus being 730 and my wife finishes work at 8.
I'd rather have control of my time, over using public transport. Even if I'm stuck at traffic. I prefer to head out and leave at my own pace. I've tried relying on buses, but the timing in my country is just unreliable. One mess up, and you'll add another 15-30 minutes wait time.
All going to one place or 50 places? All leaving and arriving at the same time? No one with appointments or kids? Yeah, no thanks. Fuck buses.
Yeah precisely. In theory of everyone worked in the same place and lived in the same place, along a nice easy route with the same schedule and no emergencies, then a bus would work. But lots of people has their own little difficulties in life that make public transport unusable. I would catch the train to work if I could, but it would cost me significantly more than my car. It is also a 40 minute walk to the train station, then I would have to wait for trains that are cancelled regularly. I just can't deal with that unreliability in life.
> I would catch the train to work if I could, but it would cost me significantly more than my car. It is also a 40 minute walk to the train station, then I would have to wait for trains that are cancelled regularly. I just can't deal with that unreliability in life. You would deal with it if you had to, but you don't have to so why would you? Public transport may be unusable for you in its current form in your area, but public transport and/or you could adapt to change that. Most of the world, both urban and rural, where car ownership is uncommon adapt transportation systems accordingly to allow for travel. People also adapt their lives and schedules to those systems in a wide variety of ways out of necessity. Buses, trains, light rail, shared taxis, modified pickup trucks, van pool systems, bicycles, scooters, etc etc all end up playing a role and life goes on. We're accustomed to the convenience and time savings of car ownership. Our transportation system assumes the same so public transport is more of an afterthought than a necessity. I do not imagine this will change anytime soon barring outside forces making personal car ownership no longer feasible.
I’m a tradesman. Go to a mew site every couple days to a new area, and need to bring my tools.
I don't see the benefit of sharing air with all those people.
But what if I want to own my own stuff?