9 ms·

I am not sure what you mean with this effectiveness. I live in Prague, the city with (what they say) one of the best public transport systems in the world, and

I am not sure what you mean with this effectiveness. I live in Prague, the city with (what they say) one of the best public transport systems in the world, and yet, going to my workplace is 45 minutes by public transport and 15 minutes by car. Even though I live close to a subway and tram station, and the workplace is right in the city center, car still wins - where is the effectiveness you're talking about? This is the case for my past 3 workplaces and 2 homes. Sorry but my time is more valuable than waiting an hour per day just because. Before you say that I can read or listen to music on the way in public transport, I listen to audiobooks in the car, and the trams are lately so packed that for me it's especially hard to not puke because of the terrible air (and sometimes smelly people, luckily not that much in winter) there, sadly I would puke right into someone's face. Even though there is a lot of traffic which slows my car down, I am still in comfort. I'd rather sit 45 minutes in a car listening to wonderful music than be pushed inside a can full of people for the same time, and given the traffic, I am not the only one thinking the same. First improve public transport, make it at least a tiny bit comfortable, then hate cars, not the other way around, that just won't work. (let the downvotes rain... What did I expect, a discussion? Lol)

lucideer 7y ago
There's multiple issues with your anecdote (one of course it being an anecdote, not a statistic); to focus on the main ones: - you're looking at individual efficiency rather than system: in particular the fact that public transport is made less efficient by people driving. You're describing a chicken-egg problem if you want improvements in public transport - you're focused on time as a metric, not accounting for economic cost (both individual and municipal: car infra is expensive), and other costs (health, env)
- TomMarius 7y ago
  If I live next to a subway and tram stations (trams have dedicated tracks not shared with car in most places here) and the car is still a better option, it's an issue with the public transport system and people driving do not make it much worse. The subway is not affected at all and yet the number of trains per hour has stayed constant for years.
  - glofish 7y ago
    What is your point exactly? That it is possible that there a few individuals for whom driving is more advantageous than public transport? Of course, it is possible. Is it likely that if everyone drove instead of taking public transport driving would become unbearable for everyone, you included? Of course again. So what are you arguing for exactly? That everyone should drive? Are you looking for absolution for liking to drive? Are you looking for an arrangment where it is ok if you drive but not others?
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      A few = hundreds of thousands cars daily? That's not "a few" to me (out of 1.5 million citizens city).
    - jeromegv 7y ago
      I don’t exactly understand the point either. Public transit is clearly more efficient when you look at it from a system perspective. A subway can carry 30000/person per hour and a car lane full of cars at 1.2 person/car isn’t anywhere close from those numbers. What is there to argue really? I’m sure you can get door to door faster in a car when you have an empty road and follow a path that doesn’t exist on public transit but you can’t argue that if everyone was driving that it would scale in any kind of way better. Car lanes are just not carrying the same amount of passengers on top of requiring a parking space on both end (which is highly expensive real estate in any larger city)
      - bluGill 7y ago
        Problem is most people are going from door to door, while your transit system makes you go to wherever it stops. Unless transit has some other large advantage it is going to be a worse choice for most individuals even given traffic. (separate tracks are a large advantage - but only if the tracks more or less go close to where you want to end up)
        lanstin 7y ago
keymone 7y ago
public transport and cars often share the same medium, it's almost always impossible to improve public transport without impairing life of car drivers and be accused of car hating. also public transport is not there to help you shave off minutes from commute time, it's there for those who don't have the option of going by car.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  I am already paying enough taxes to not be happy with paying for nothing with my own time on top of that. Every year the tax rate increases but the number of trams and subway trains is still the same.
  - Symbiote 7y ago
    The first result shows that's not true, and Prague has been building/extending lines and buying new vehicles. https://ceec.uitp.org/prague-investment https://ceec.uitp.org/prague-investment
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      They are extending into suburbs, not anywhere it's relevant to most Prague citizens (extended city to city centre). They even decreased the number of trams going from our stop (a pretty major one, because it's the nearest city stop for the airport) into the city centre, and the number of subways is constant. The D line is a meme at this point, it is supposed to be finished for 20 years now.
keldaris 7y ago
From my experience, your anecdote generalizes very well across most of the EU. You're being downvoted because HN has a particularly loud car hating bubble. Luckily, there are very few places these people have any meaningful chance of imposing their views on the rest of us.
- glofish 7y ago
  What does it mean to "impose" their views? Do you mean that car ownership is disincentivized by making people bear more of the cost of their car ownership?
  - keldaris 7y ago
    No, the two questions you ask have very little to do with each other. There's a perfectly reasonable debate to be had about the externalities of different modes of transportation, but that is not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to a relatively small (but very vocal) segment of almost uniformly young and able bodied city dwellers with a fairly narrow and very strongly held set of views about what city life should look like. These people seem to want to hijack urban planning and tax policy to legislate in the exclusive interest of their preferred lifestyle without regard (and often with outright contempt) for the views of their fellow citizens. That's what it means to "impose" their views. My prediction is that if and when any of this makes its way into mainstream discourse and actual policy, the backlash will be severe and rather ugly. This is particularly unfortunate, since there are plenty of real issues with urban planning and transportation, but instead of real debate we have polarized flamewars over trivialized strawmen (essentially "ban cars, maximize density" vs. "freedom and country living").
    - admax88q 7y ago
      Lol. Yeah it's those damn millenials that are ruining public debate again. There's is an equally loud segment of older car drivers who complain about the so called "war on cars" everytime somebody wants an alternative to driving.
aurbano 7y ago
I think that in order to have a good discussion it would help if you could explain why public transport is slower in your case. Is the route longer because there isn't a line that goes straight from your home to your workplace? Is it because there aren't a lot of trains, so they take too long to arrive? Otherwise it's hard to tell what the problem with public transport in your city. I live in London for instance, where cars are _almost always_ the slowest option for trips around zones 1-2 or even 3, because the center is always very busy. So when commuting here the fastest option is usually cycling, then 5-10 minutes slower is public transport and driving, which depending on the time of day will also be slower...
- bluGill 7y ago
  Public transit is only faster than cars when they have an "unfair" advantage. I'm guessing (I haven't been there) by London zone 1-2 you means trips where the subway (tube you call it?) gets transit out of the way. Other useful "unfair" advantage are trains - because they cannot stop - preempt traffic, and there are also transit only lanes where cars are not allowed. Anytime transit doesn't get some advantage over traffic it is slower because it has the same traffic plus the additional non-traffic stops it needs to make. For long distance trips transit is often faster. The unfair advantage is not cost effective to grant to all cars, but still need to be acknowledged.
  - SECProto 7y ago
    In a city where the availability of land is a major limiting factor, you could argue that cars are the ones getting an "unfair advantage" - 8 square meters of city surface permanently dedicated to moving oneself around is clearly an inequitable use of space.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      One of several reasons I put unfair in quotes.
pjc50 7y ago
That's quite unusual that the traffic is light enough. How much are you paying for parking?
- TomMarius 7y ago
  Nothing, I own my parking places (both home and office ones)
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Also an unusual situation! In central London parking places are an expensive capital asset: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/news/london-parking-space-goes-on-sale-for-350000/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/news/london-parking-space-g...
jan_g 7y ago
It is (almost) the same for every city, if you compare driving times from suburbs to city centre. The reason is that city train/metro/tram needs to stop on 15+ stations before reaching the inner city. Still, to me, train is superior - I can just sit and relax. Driving is much more tiring. 15 minutes or so difference is not worth it.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  In Prague, subway does not go to suburbs. Few trams do, but they do not reach the city centre. Not my case at all. The subway route I compare to car is 7 stops + 10 min walk.
  - sobani 7y ago
    What kind of awful subway is it, that takes 35 minutes to drive 7 stops? I just checked a Rotterdam subway line and it does 30 stops in an hour[0] which is a ~32KM distance as a bird flies[1]. [0] https://www.ret.nl/home/reizen/dienstregeling/metro-b.html https://www.ret.nl/home/reizen/dienstregeling/metro-b.html [1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Nesselande,+Rotterdam/Hoek+van+Holland+Haven,+Hoek+van+Holland/@51.9413423,4.2172473,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x47c5cd813f600759:0x5074da313c0c6b58!2m2!1d4.586625!2d51.9797308!1m5!1m1!1s0x47c5ad1ea57bcd9f:0x17bb2708c2461a3!2m2!1d4.1284167!2d51.9752644!3e3 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Nesselande,+Rotterdam/Hoek+v...
- mrep 7y ago
  For suburb to city center, you want multi-track train lines which only stop at a few stations and then switch over to a middle track which then goes the rest of the way downtown without stopping. The suburb I grew up in was about 20 miles outside of Chicago and the rush hour express train would get you downtown in about 25 minutes whereas doing the same route by car would take you 40-100 minutes during rush hour.
InitialLastName 7y ago
Is it possible that your easy car commute is made possible by nature of an effective public transit system removing cars from the road? And that without comprehensive transit you would have 45 minutes of traffic by car?
- TomMarius 7y ago
  Of course, there are many people for whose public transport is the best option, especially anyone living right in the city centre, and people living in the major population hubs (there are 5 or more significant ones). I am not any of these, and yet I am being asked to move to public transport - so I say, first make the public transport work for me as well as it works for them.

lucideer 7y ago

There's multiple issues with your anecdote (one of course it being an anecdote, not a statistic); to focus on the main ones: - you're looking at individual efficiency rather than system: in particular the fact that public transport is made less efficient by people driving. You're describing a chicken-egg problem if you want improvements in public transport - you're focused on time as a metric, not accounting for economic cost (both individual and municipal: car infra is expensive), and other costs (health, env)

TomMarius 7y ago
If I live next to a subway and tram stations (trams have dedicated tracks not shared with car in most places here) and the car is still a better option, it's an issue with the public transport system and people driving do not make it much worse. The subway is not affected at all and yet the number of trains per hour has stayed constant for years.
- glofish 7y ago
  What is your point exactly? That it is possible that there a few individuals for whom driving is more advantageous than public transport? Of course, it is possible. Is it likely that if everyone drove instead of taking public transport driving would become unbearable for everyone, you included? Of course again. So what are you arguing for exactly? That everyone should drive? Are you looking for absolution for liking to drive? Are you looking for an arrangment where it is ok if you drive but not others?
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    A few = hundreds of thousands cars daily? That's not "a few" to me (out of 1.5 million citizens city).
  - jeromegv 7y ago
    I don’t exactly understand the point either. Public transit is clearly more efficient when you look at it from a system perspective. A subway can carry 30000/person per hour and a car lane full of cars at 1.2 person/car isn’t anywhere close from those numbers. What is there to argue really? I’m sure you can get door to door faster in a car when you have an empty road and follow a path that doesn’t exist on public transit but you can’t argue that if everyone was driving that it would scale in any kind of way better. Car lanes are just not carrying the same amount of passengers on top of requiring a parking space on both end (which is highly expensive real estate in any larger city)
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Problem is most people are going from door to door, while your transit system makes you go to wherever it stops. Unless transit has some other large advantage it is going to be a worse choice for most individuals even given traffic. (separate tracks are a large advantage - but only if the tracks more or less go close to where you want to end up)
      - lanstin 7y ago

keymone 7y ago

public transport and cars often share the same medium, it's almost always impossible to improve public transport without impairing life of car drivers and be accused of car hating. also public transport is not there to help you shave off minutes from commute time, it's there for those who don't have the option of going by car.

TomMarius 7y ago
I am already paying enough taxes to not be happy with paying for nothing with my own time on top of that. Every year the tax rate increases but the number of trams and subway trains is still the same.
- Symbiote 7y ago
  The first result shows that's not true, and Prague has been building/extending lines and buying new vehicles. https://ceec.uitp.org/prague-investment https://ceec.uitp.org/prague-investment
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    They are extending into suburbs, not anywhere it's relevant to most Prague citizens (extended city to city centre). They even decreased the number of trams going from our stop (a pretty major one, because it's the nearest city stop for the airport) into the city centre, and the number of subways is constant. The D line is a meme at this point, it is supposed to be finished for 20 years now.

keldaris 7y ago

From my experience, your anecdote generalizes very well across most of the EU. You're being downvoted because HN has a particularly loud car hating bubble. Luckily, there are very few places these people have any meaningful chance of imposing their views on the rest of us.

glofish 7y ago
What does it mean to "impose" their views? Do you mean that car ownership is disincentivized by making people bear more of the cost of their car ownership?
- keldaris 7y ago
  No, the two questions you ask have very little to do with each other. There's a perfectly reasonable debate to be had about the externalities of different modes of transportation, but that is not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to a relatively small (but very vocal) segment of almost uniformly young and able bodied city dwellers with a fairly narrow and very strongly held set of views about what city life should look like. These people seem to want to hijack urban planning and tax policy to legislate in the exclusive interest of their preferred lifestyle without regard (and often with outright contempt) for the views of their fellow citizens. That's what it means to "impose" their views. My prediction is that if and when any of this makes its way into mainstream discourse and actual policy, the backlash will be severe and rather ugly. This is particularly unfortunate, since there are plenty of real issues with urban planning and transportation, but instead of real debate we have polarized flamewars over trivialized strawmen (essentially "ban cars, maximize density" vs. "freedom and country living").
  - admax88q 7y ago
    Lol. Yeah it's those damn millenials that are ruining public debate again. There's is an equally loud segment of older car drivers who complain about the so called "war on cars" everytime somebody wants an alternative to driving.

aurbano 7y ago

I think that in order to have a good discussion it would help if you could explain why public transport is slower in your case. Is the route longer because there isn't a line that goes straight from your home to your workplace? Is it because there aren't a lot of trains, so they take too long to arrive? Otherwise it's hard to tell what the problem with public transport in your city. I live in London for instance, where cars are _almost always_ the slowest option for trips around zones 1-2 or even 3, because the center is always very busy. So when commuting here the fastest option is usually cycling, then 5-10 minutes slower is public transport and driving, which depending on the time of day will also be slower...

bluGill 7y ago
Public transit is only faster than cars when they have an "unfair" advantage. I'm guessing (I haven't been there) by London zone 1-2 you means trips where the subway (tube you call it?) gets transit out of the way. Other useful "unfair" advantage are trains - because they cannot stop - preempt traffic, and there are also transit only lanes where cars are not allowed. Anytime transit doesn't get some advantage over traffic it is slower because it has the same traffic plus the additional non-traffic stops it needs to make. For long distance trips transit is often faster. The unfair advantage is not cost effective to grant to all cars, but still need to be acknowledged.
- SECProto 7y ago
  In a city where the availability of land is a major limiting factor, you could argue that cars are the ones getting an "unfair advantage" - 8 square meters of city surface permanently dedicated to moving oneself around is clearly an inequitable use of space.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    One of several reasons I put unfair in quotes.

pjc50 7y ago

That's quite unusual that the traffic is light enough. How much are you paying for parking?

TomMarius 7y ago
Nothing, I own my parking places (both home and office ones)
- pjc50 7y ago
  Also an unusual situation! In central London parking places are an expensive capital asset: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/news/london-parking-space-goes-on-sale-for-350000/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/news/london-parking-space-g...

jan_g 7y ago

It is (almost) the same for every city, if you compare driving times from suburbs to city centre. The reason is that city train/metro/tram needs to stop on 15+ stations before reaching the inner city. Still, to me, train is superior - I can just sit and relax. Driving is much more tiring. 15 minutes or so difference is not worth it.

TomMarius 7y ago
In Prague, subway does not go to suburbs. Few trams do, but they do not reach the city centre. Not my case at all. The subway route I compare to car is 7 stops + 10 min walk.
- sobani 7y ago
  What kind of awful subway is it, that takes 35 minutes to drive 7 stops? I just checked a Rotterdam subway line and it does 30 stops in an hour[0] which is a ~32KM distance as a bird flies[1]. [0] https://www.ret.nl/home/reizen/dienstregeling/metro-b.html https://www.ret.nl/home/reizen/dienstregeling/metro-b.html [1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Nesselande,+Rotterdam/Hoek+van+Holland+Haven,+Hoek+van+Holland/@51.9413423,4.2172473,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x47c5cd813f600759:0x5074da313c0c6b58!2m2!1d4.586625!2d51.9797308!1m5!1m1!1s0x47c5ad1ea57bcd9f:0x17bb2708c2461a3!2m2!1d4.1284167!2d51.9752644!3e3 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Nesselande,+Rotterdam/Hoek+v...
mrep 7y ago
For suburb to city center, you want multi-track train lines which only stop at a few stations and then switch over to a middle track which then goes the rest of the way downtown without stopping. The suburb I grew up in was about 20 miles outside of Chicago and the rush hour express train would get you downtown in about 25 minutes whereas doing the same route by car would take you 40-100 minutes during rush hour.

InitialLastName 7y ago

Is it possible that your easy car commute is made possible by nature of an effective public transit system removing cars from the road? And that without comprehensive transit you would have 45 minutes of traffic by car?

TomMarius 7y ago
Of course, there are many people for whose public transport is the best option, especially anyone living right in the city centre, and people living in the major population hubs (there are 5 or more significant ones). I am not any of these, and yet I am being asked to move to public transport - so I say, first make the public transport work for me as well as it works for them.