41 ms·

Riding transit takes almost twice as long as driving (2017)

135 points by trothamel 4y ago

librish 4y ago
Isn't this just showing that people prefer public transit if the travel time is on average twice as long (but not longer)? There's a selection bias in that people who choose to drive probably did so because it's significantly faster.
anonymousDan 4y ago
Would be interested to see a similar visualization for major European cities. As someone living in London I would be very surprised if public transport isn't quicker on average.
- adaml_623 4y ago
  I think it's undeniable that journeys in to, out of, or around central London are faster on public transport if you're going along one of the main routes. But there are lots of journeys outside of the centre, either sideways or diagonal, that are very awkward and slow on public transport. My problem is that I have very little data or intuitive feel for how the 8 million people in London actually move during the average day
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    My experience is that it’s common for people to meet in central London (and/or to have loca friends in the area you live) for this reason. Houses and workplaces are usually coordinated to minimise travel time (although there’s been a huge increase in homeworking since covid which is reducing the need for this).
- ageitgey 4y ago
  My experience in London is that it just depends on where you are going. - Local neighborhood? Walking or cycling is fastest - Next high street over? Bus or cycling is fastest - Most places in central London? Tube or train is fastest - That neighborhood a mile away that inexplicably has bad bus connections to you but you need to go because that's where the vet/store/whatever you need to visit is? Driving is often the best way, especially if you need to carry something. Cycling is pretty good, too. - That village 30 miles away? Driving or train (depending on your train line connections) - Full-size Ikea in Wembley? Driving (pretty hard to get there any other way) and you are probably going to want to bring something back - Mini-Ikea in Hammersmith? Take the Underground, driving wouldn't even really be possible Overall, I end up driving fairly rarely to never except for vacations or home repair type stuff. But having a multitude of transit options is really nice and most daily activities just require walking or quick local bus rides. I'm as pro-public-transit and cycling as they come, but there are definitely some types of trips where cars make sense. But I probably only drive 2-3 times a month vs. multiple times a day in the US. Zip cars are fairly omnipresent around London, so you don't need to own a car to drive those rare trips.
  - matsemann 4y ago
    Same experience here in Oslo. With the different rent-a-car-by-hour companies popping up, I'll just rent a car for a few hours every now and then. I could do that like 10 times a month and it would probably be cheaper still than owning a car, most people don't realize how much it actually costs. Sharing a car like this makes so much sense.
    - orwin 4y ago
      Yeah, i do that too, but sadly i'm in a fairly touristic city and in summer it become very hard to find available vehicle.
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
This will be really unpopular here haha. But the average person is always going to do what is best for them. You can let this inform almost any decision of your life when trying to decide what herd behavior and your users will do.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  That’s an extremely popular opinion, as evidenced by everybody doing it :-) Most of the responses here are methodological ones, not claims that we should all selflessly ride public transit.
- gernb 4y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is. https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc?t=462 https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc?t=462
- ska 4y ago
  I don’t see why you would expect this to be unpopular. You are oversimplifying though , the average person is usually going to do what they think is best for them, given the options they know about. The distinction is critical in topics like city/transportation planning.
  - JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
    I’d expect it to be unpopular because HN often seems to be solely populated by people riding a bike inside a subway car. :)
matsemann 4y ago
I think this problem is bigger in many US cities compared to Europe, because of the urban sprawl. There is almost no way to make it efficient to go from most people's houses to the city using public transport, since the area to cover is so great. To me, the solution is to re-think why everyone needs to go somewhere by car to get anything done. Why not have a grocery store closer? Some restaurants? Everyone having to travel from their house to the city centre to do basically anything is so wasteful. Most of this is because of zoning laws.
- mcntsh 4y ago
  The first example they give is NYC, showing cars being almost twice as fast as the train. NYC is denser than most European capitals.
  - jrimbault 4y ago
    Train stations in NYC are much less dense than (for example my own city) Paris subway network. New-York subway network is impressive for its sprawl, but not really for its efficiency.
  - bonyt 4y ago
    The New York metro area is much larger than NYC and includes suburbs and smaller cities in Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
    - mcntsh 4y ago
      Wouldn't those also be taken into account for the drivers side of the comparison?
      - kgermino 4y ago
        Yes, but someone from Long Island or Connecticut who works in Manhattan is unlikely to drive, while someone from those areas who works one town over will almost certainly drive. That will definitely skew these numbers if they don’t adjust for it
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yababa_y 4y ago
Checks out. There were a few commutes from my room in the Mission of San Francisco that were equal time lyft, bike, or take train. Of course this relies on timing the muni/bart appropriately. I never had my own car in a city, it is surely a diffetent way to experience a place. I figure if it was only OK in SF, it sucks everywhere else in the US.
bonyt 4y ago
> For New York metro residents who take public transportation, a door-to-door commute averages about 51 minutes. That’s much longer than the 29 minutes typically spent by those who drive alone. I mean, is this really an apples to apples comparison that is at all meaningful? The NY metro area includes NYC with its subway, but also suburbs in long island, New Jersey, and Connecticut with long commuter rail trips where you go to a different city, and short car commutes where you don’t.
- donohoe 4y ago
  This. I came here to say this. When you bundle NYC (which is one of the largest systems in itself between subway and bus) that represents a skewed average. As a NYC resident of 20 years I can assure you public transportation much much faster than a car in most cases. Don't even get me started about the time it takes to find parking in this city... I am guessing that that time consideration is not in this study.
  - parkingrift 4y ago
    >As a NYC resident of 20 years I can assure you public transportation much much faster than a car in most cases. Surely you jest. Even in Manhattan this is rarely true. Outside of Manhattan it is practically never true. In some circumstances in Manhattan the subway can indeed be faster, but it’s really only true for traveling north/south along an express line during peak traffic. For instance I can get from 96th to Chambers in about 25 minutes on a subway if I’m lucky with my timing. That’s faster than a car during peak traffic, but slower than a car during any other time of day. But if I need to get from 96th to basically anywhere else that isn’t on the 1/2/3 there is no way the subway will ever win, much less by any significant margin. Even the idea that subway is “much much faster” defies basic logic. If that were universally true few people would ever take a ride share or taxi. And this ignores the almost comical problems and lack of reliability with the subway system in NYC. I cannot count the number of times I’ve had to give up, exit the subway station, and hail a cab. I imagine for many people it’s happened one too many times and they’ve exclusively switched to rideshare/taxi. For me personally I’ve switched to electric bike. I gave up on the subway earlier this year after one too many negative encounters with vagrants and criminals. A good question to ask is how visitors feel about the NYC subway system. When friends or family come to visit, what do they think about it? I don’t know about you, but for me it’s a healthy combo of amazement at the scale of the system, and amazement at how atrocious and disgusting it’s become.
jeffbee 4y ago
Yeah of course it does. Everything about the built environment is designed to ensure this is true. Even places you think would be transit oriented in America are not. Here in Berkeley we have a transit-priority signal installed at a few key intersections along the busiest bus route but the public works department refuses to turn them on, because although they save minutes for the bus riders they cost a few seconds for the drivers. We also refused to put in bus lanes on Telegraph Avenue because it would have necessitated the removal of either a parking lane or a car travel lane (four exist today). So the bus just lumbers along in traffic and it’s impossible to be faster than cars that way because the bus has to make its stops.
Finnucane 4y ago
When I lived in Brooklyn, driving in nyc was a nightmare experience to be avoided at all costs. Parking could take as long as driving. Where I live now I could drive to work in less time than taking the subway. But it is about the same time as riding my bike.
AlbertCory 4y ago
I had the opportunity to compare the posted schedules for a light rail train and a bus, between the same two points. This is the Bay Area. The points were the Winchester light rail station (in Campbell) and the Lockheed campus, near Moffett. There's a bus that goes the same places with a vastly longer route, and of course many more stops. The times were the same: about an hour. If you were driving, you'd take freeways, and even in rush hour traffic it would be less than an hour. San Jose light rail is, by nearly all metrics, the worst in the country, so you can see why: it's terrible.
woodruffw 4y ago
First: I agree with the overall conclusion of the article. We absolutely should invest to make public transport faster, and thereby attract more riders. Second: At least for NYC, some of this data is slightly misleading. NYC has (at least) three public transport networks: the bus and subway within the city’s borders, and commuter rail between the city, Long Island, and the rest of NY/NJ/CT. It would probably be most interesting (and correct) to compare car commuters that could take each; my intuition is that the subway generally outperforms driving within the city, the bus slightly underperforms versus driving (since it gets stuck in traffic, and there’s no meaningful enforcement of bus lanes). I don’t have an intuition for the commuter rails.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > We absolutely should invest to make public transport faster, and thereby attract more riders. People don't use public transport because it is faster, but because it is consistent, it is cheaper than many other options and it reduces the stress of commuting. Being a passenger is much more relaxing than being the driver. Not having to find a parking spot is liberating for your mind. Not getting fines is good for your finances. Public transport doesn't attract more people because almost everywhere is at peak. NY subway, for example, moves 5.5 million people a day (the peak capacity is slightly above 6) but it is harder to make new lines or increase the number of rides, while with cars you just ride yours to the highway and stay stuck there in traffic for as long as needed. You can't stack trains like that or the delay of a single ride will cascade to the entire rail line possibly for many hours. People who prefer cars IMO are either outside of the public transport coverage, bad at planning or anxious.
  - mjevans 4y ago
    It still has to be fast enough. It also needs to evolve beyond just the hub and spoke model that expects everyone to commute to the big city from the suburbs.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      There is need for lot more circular routes. Connecting the spokes to each other.
muglug 4y ago
As others have said, this does not hold for the majority of commuters in New York City, where finding a parking space and navigating rush-hour traffic often makes commuting by car slower. In London they've chosen a different approach, making driving more painful: congestion charging and strictly-enforced 20-mile-an-hour speed limits on some of the main arteries in the centre of the city.
- boygobbo 4y ago
  The speed limit is a bit of a red herring. The average speed of traffic in central London is about 9 miles/hour & inner London about 12. The average speed in the suburbs (outer London) is about 20 mph, even though the speed limit is 30 mph. Average traffic speed in London: https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/sites/default/files/0832%20attachment.pdf https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/sites/default/files/0832... London speed limits: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-digital-speed-limit-map.pdf https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-digital-speed-limit-map.pd...
- mjhay 4y ago
  As the other reply pointed out, those speed limits are pretty aspirational. The average trip time in central London decreased 30% [0] quite a bit after introduction of the charge, but things have slowed down again for various other reasons apparently. I don't think the congestion charge is unreasonable considering the negative externalities the vehicles cause. Aside from work or delivery vehicles, it seems bizarre to drive into central London by choice. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge#Traffic_speeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge#Traff...
- orwin 4y ago
  By the way, the rational for putting speed limits is quite solid and i know one engineer who worked on that who told me the average speed in Paris around and during rush hour actually increase (by roughly 5 km/h) despite lowering the speed limit by 10 km/h. Outside those hours the speed limit setup did decrease the average speed (shocking!), but for commuters (who felt strongly against this new limitation) the overall change was actually a net positive (less hour stuck in traffic), and for car-owning residents (who where split on this) it was a net negative.
hammock 4y ago
Is the purpose of public transit to get you there Quicker, or to get you there Cheaper? Transit allows me to avoid owning a car, and the monthly parking charge at home, daily parking by work, etc costs that come with— that’s the principal benefit as a city dweller. I live in Chicago (city) and the 2-1 time ratio is what I use to decide whether I take a cab or not. I look up the time to my destination -a store, friends house, the beach, whatever- and if it’s twice as long or quicker to take the train/bus then I will. (That’s not totally true, I use shared bikes to get most places these days.) When I was poorer, I used 3-1. For my office, when I go, it’s about 2-1, and has been for any of the half-dozen different places I’ve lived here. I consider that a sign of Well-Done Transit, not the opposite. It’s not surprising to me that transit takes longer, because you have to walk to a transit stop and then walk from a transit stop. Why would you expect it to be faster? If you want it to be faster than driving, you have to eliminate all parking minimums.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  In London it’s not uncommon for transit to be 2:1 faster than driving. It’s only ever really faster going from suburb to suburb without going through the center. It all depends on what kind of infrastructure you have.
  - harvey9 4y ago
    I check Google maps for any journey where I have a choice of driving or riding in London. The variability is pretty wide. But agree with your point about suburb to suburb: in a choice of car vs bus (because there's no rail option for the journey) the car inevitably wins.
    - orwin 4y ago
      It is the same for Paris, mostly (they are a few exception with light rail, especially towards economic centers), but i think next year it should be better, with an automated subway line going around paris.
      - 4y ago
pluc 4y ago
Isn't that common sense? Public transit takes you everywhere and where you need to go. Driving just takes you where you need to go.
- tootie 4y ago
  Trains have no traffic. At least, when they're run properly
- _dain_ 4y ago
  No, there's no a priori reason why public transport should be slower. There are cities where it isn't the case, London for example. Cars get stuck in traffic (because they are traffic). Trains don't, and can reach higher speeds. Buses have (or should have) their own lanes, and priority at traffic lights, so that they don't get stuck behind cars. A single bus lane can have more passenger throughput than several car lanes; it's an absurdity that a bus should be delayed by single-occupancy vehicles hogging the space. If public transport is slower than driving, your city is doing it wrong.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    There is. You have to get to and from the station / stop twice every trip. This makes it slower unless you are in an area where the density is so high that the space constraints make cars prohibitive.
    - _dain_ 4y ago
      >You have to get to and from the station / stop twice every trip. And you have to get to and from your parking spot. >an area where the density is so high that the space constraints make cars prohibitive. Yes, these areas are called "cities". --- There are a lot of factors that go into determining the relative speeds of public transport vs private motor vehicles. Here are some of them (for buses): - street network topology: grid, spaghetti, cul-de-sacs? - are there highways slicing through the city, or is it mostly smaller roads? - speed limits on those roads - is there a congestion charge? - are there dedicated bus lanes? - is there priority for buses at intersections? - spacing of stops - boarding, payment, disembarking procedure - frequency of rides - directness of the route - viability of other non-car transport modes e.g. cycling Different answers to these questions give different journey times. Whether transit is faster than driving is the net result of all these questions. And most of them are political in nature. It's a choice, not some iron law. Plus, there's the obvious existence proof of fast public transit: airlines.
O_H_E 4y ago
This is the same here in Ontario, Canada in 2 of the biggest non-toronto cities.
fallingknife 4y ago
I think that this is the fundamental issue of why we don't have more public transit. It's just next to impossible to beat the convenience of cars. The only place I have been in the US where public transit is more convenient than driving is Manhattan. That kind of density is really the only place where you can do that.
jmyeet 4y ago
It's not clear to me that this is an apples-to-apples comparison. Specifically: is the same commute by public transport longer by car? For example, you might be comparing a ride from Garden City to Lower Manhattan by train to a ride from Garden City to JFK Airport by car. If so, then this is completely meaningless. There are also socioeconomic factors to consider. If you're poor then driving into Lower Manhattan just isn't an option for you. Car ownership is already expensive. Insurance in the NY metro area is particularly expensive. Parking anywhere in Manhattan is going to be really expensive. So you may end up using data like this as a reason to eliminate what is for many people their only option. At the other end of the spectrum are places like Houston, with a 26 lane freeway. It's also currently building the largest urban ring road in the world (IIRC) at >180 miles. Those are eyesores by themselves but it's absolutely criminal not to eliminate 2 lanes of a 26 lane freeway to run light rail along the length of the freeway. Stations are pretty easily combined with parking structures and integrated with bus routes. What you realize after awhile is being car-centric in America is not only a question of profound selfishness but it's also de facto segregation. Not from inorities per se, just "undesirables" ie poor people. It's why wealthier neighborhoods like Santa Monica tried to fight rail expansion into their area. The cost of car ownerships, much like most of the US outlawing building anything other than single family houses (typically on ridiculously large lots) is a deliberate economic barrier. US cities are really no different to Cape Town.
scythe 4y ago
>The new network isn’t just about saving time. It’s also opened up job opportunities for those who are now within walking distance of frequent service. “The goal,” Luhrsen says, “was to connect those places of density within the system -- to get people to jobs, to get them to schools, health-care facilities … seven days a week.” This ending paragraph is basically why I don't care about the title. At this point, convincing people to switch from cars to buses/trains en masse is a tiny glint of light on the horizon. Far more important in the near-term is simply providing adequate transportation to those who can't or don't wish to drive.
ouid 4y ago
Yeah, but i can't play super auto pets in my car.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
Plus you can't speed up if you are running late. I missed a train by 5 minutes in Chicago, than I was told the next one was sold out. If I had been in a car I could have made that time up. The other problem was late because I was waiting in a long line at the airport to buy metro pas, only to complete a transaction for weekly pass for some confused Italian couple. Then seeing some guy get arrested at the Greyhound station for seemingly asking the wrong question, and getting told I was bamboozled for asking if I could still catch the bus home. Seeing other people getting treated horribly there. Then ended that miserable experience sitting 5 hours on the Megabus wheel well on an over night bus to get home. No thanks. I'd rather a root canal. People advocating for no cars, often ignore how terrible public transportation can be.
sbf501 4y ago
FTA: "The revamped bus network, which required just a 4 percent budget increase, launched in August 2015. The results so far are encouraging: Weekday ridership has stabilized after declining for years, and is up about 10 percent on Saturdays and more than 30 percent on Sundays." In other news water is wet. The catch-22 with transit has been known for half a century. Declining riders = fewer $$$ = fewer routes = declining riders. The only way to stop this is with investment to increase schedules. Yet riders are blamed for not using it.
IronWolve 4y ago
When I was growing up, I'd take the city bus across town and it would take 2 hours, vs 25 minutes by car. It showed me I needed car for work, or I'd be spending 4 hours just on buses. 30 years later, When I was working downtown, park and ride was nice mix of getting there early, free parking, and I just a short walk. Now lets talk about those HOV lanes that now opened up for paying people, we literally made limo lanes that clogged up and made the buses slower. No new roads, and its just going to keep getting worse, so much worse. I've seen it get continually worse over 30 years.
vel0city 4y ago
I live in an exurb in the US. Transit tries to serve a lot of single family homes. That said, I've got two bus routes nearby which connect to the light rail to go deeper into the metro area and out to the airport. Despite there being a bus stop close to my door I still take my car most of the time. I could get by with living an only public transit lifestyle, and that's a part of why I chose to live here as opposed to elsewhere. But in the end this really limits my choices. Yeah, there is a daycare a few stops away, but that wasn't the one we wanted to send our child to. There is a grocery store, but it's not the ones we like to shop at. There are places I could work, but the place I want to work is a less than 10 minute drive but a 45 minute bus ride. To get to the places we do want to go, it's easily 2-5x as long of a travel. Just the other day a friend invited me to dinner. The restaurant was on the same bus line as one of the lines just outside my house. A great chance for transit, I wouldn't even have to change busses. It was a less than 20 minute car ride and a few dollars of tolls each way. Or a little over an hour on the bus each way. Sure, riding the bus would have been cheaper than the cost of my car, assuming my time is valued at $0 and everything is devoid of scheduling conflicts. But I value my time quite highly, and I often have pretty tight schedules.
beej71 4y ago
Time alone isn't a good measure. Minute-dollars is probably a better one. But value of time or money doesn't add linearly in people's minds, so even this could be improved. When I lived in the Bay area, rough numbers: Job 1, car: 3600 minute-dollars per day. Job 1, public transit: 800 minute-dollars Job 2, car: 2700 minute-dollars Job 2, public transit: 6000 minute-dollars
BeetleB 4y ago
This has been true for me wherever I've lived. If you just happen to live near a major bus line or subway station, and just happen to go somewhere where a transfer is not needed, then maybe public transit is faster. Otherwise, not a chance. From my previous apartment it would take about 2 hours to get to the airport using public transit, because I had to transfer twice - that's waiting three times. By car it would take 30 minutes without traffic, and the worst time with a car would be just under 2 hours. From my current residence it takes about 8 minutes just to walk to the bus stop. It takes 10 minutes to drive to work (fairly close). It takes 30 minutes by public transit (walk to stop, transfer somewhere). Whenever I talk to someone who doesn't own a car and really touts public transit, and I dig into the details, I always find that this person has a limited number of places he goes, with the rest being inconvenient to get to. The only real benefit of public transit is you can read during the commute.
- shawabawa3 4y ago
  You just haven't lived in a city with good public transport In e.g. London or Paris public transport is almost always the fastest way to get from A to B
  - sneak 4y ago
    This is also true in Berlin, but mostly because it is relatively slow to drive most long distances in the city.
    - flemhans 4y ago
      Public transit is 1.5-2x slower in Berlin too. Once I started using ShareNow I never looked back
  - elashri 4y ago
    You are describing people living in the majority if not all of US cities.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  > I always find that this person has a limited number of places he goes, with the rest being inconvenient to get to. This is just a description of traffic patterns in the US, in general. You presumably don’t cruise through random suburbs on the other side of your city on your way to work, or while running errands, or really for any reason other than needing to. Where I live, it’s both faster and cheaper for me to not own a car. It hasn’t hurt my traveling much, either, although you’ll have to take my word for that (until I figure out how to anonymize all the location data I collect for myself).
Mildlypolite 4y ago
In my city the bike is usually faster than the car simply because you don't have to search for a parking spot for 30 minutes.
- juve1996 4y ago
  Parking is an underrated part of the equation that many on here are not taking into account. It's scarce, and extremely expensive.
mattlondon 4y ago
The tube in London is significantly faster than driving in all but the most unusually low-traffic weekend days. What is terrible thigh are the buses. It is almost like it is a regulation now that they cannot go faster then 12mph. And even if they could go faster than that, they stop literally every 100-200 meters so you are constantly stopping and starting. It is infuriatingly slow and plodding as a result, despite the fact that they have dedicated bus lanes here. I simply do not know why there are not more "express" bus routes in London that only stop at major places (e.g. perhaps linking tube stations that are on different lines, or going "across" London (c.f. tube lines that tend to head to the center). I think it is the result of a bit of a socialist ideal about everyone sharing the same journey as some sort of proletariat-unite fantasy where we all share the same bus: children on their way to school, workers on their way to the office, grannies going to visit their grandchildren, etc etc - no matter your status or walk of life you're all together sharing the same journey, all equal, all together etc. That is all very well and good, but different people are under different time pressures, so lowering the bus to handle the lowest common denominator of someone who just wants to get it to go 0.5 to 1km down the road ruins it for those that need to cover distance. So those that can pay to go places faster than those that don't
a1371 4y ago
Significant clarification missing from the title: "IN AMERICA" And to some Americans' surprise, not everywhere is like that. When you build your cities around cars, no other mode of transportation can thrive. Over a century of sprawl and road widening can't have an overnight fix.
euos 4y ago
Transit can not be successful in low-density residential build. American life style is lifestyle of rich people - single family houses and cars.
armchairhacker 4y ago
It really depends on the place. This article focuses on New York which has a really bad subway system. In Boston they would reach a similar conclusion as well. But if they were focusing on Prague or Spain or Japan or Singapore or any system which isn't decades-old and falling apart, they would find riding transit is much faster than driving. Ik it's a dumb spin but if anything, this is reason to improve New York's subway system. Trains should be faster for any non-negligible distance, even counting walking and waiting for the train, as they can go a lot faster and don't have to deal with stoplights or traffic. And trains (even the ones in NY) are much better in terms of efficiency, productivity (can read or work on the train), and climate. The issue is, that trains are a huge long-term investment, and a lot of these broken railway systems need huge renovations. We need someone to put billions into this, of course it will save billions in the coming decades, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
- MiddleEndian 4y ago
  >In Boston they would reach a similar conclusion as well Really depends where you're going to and from, if you take into account parking+walking afterwards (not taken into account by google maps), traffic, etc. The subway can be a lot faster than driving. Buses and/or commuter rail, usually not so much. Lots of room (and some plans) for improvements there.
- juve1996 4y ago
  The few times I visited Boston I thought the subways were fantastic - got me almost everywhere in the city close enough to walk. Was it faster A to B than a car? Maybe not in drive times. But I didn't need to find parking, which can be very time consuming (or extremely expensive.)
  - acdha 4y ago
    Also the stress levels are wildly different: get on the T, open a book and relax versus dealing with confused tourists and crazed Uber drivers against a backdrop of shoddily-patched roads and indifferent signage.
- upbeat_general 4y ago
enragedcacti 4y ago
I was interested in the company publishing this and found that governing.com is operated by e.Republic, a media company founded, owned, and operated by scientologists [1]. It's founder is Dennis McKenna (not the brother of Terence) who was a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology during Operation Freakout [2], "a Church of Scientology covert plan intended to have the U.S. author and journalist Paulette Cooper imprisoned or committed to a psychiatric hospital." Given past events [3], I find the idea of a scientology media company trying to get the ear of state and local governments to be very concerning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Republic [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
- sofixa 4y ago
  > Given past events [3], I find the idea of a scientology media company trying to get the ear of state and local governments to be very concerning. Same goes for any religious group IMHO. Separation of church and state.
sigstoat 4y ago
i'd like to know the variance of the two looks like, and how much earlier transit riders have to leave wherever they are to account for it, than drivers. (this wouldn't show up because they measured door-to-door times.) admittedly i'm able to keep my car in good repair, but: over the decades i've only had a handful of days where my car didn't start in the morning, or i encountered _unexpected_ events on the road that made the trip take dramatically longer. (heavy traffic on a road i use every day would just show up in my average.) but when i've tried to use buses, while in school, or a brief period when my employer was at the other end of the bus that stopped in my neighborhood, i had buses not show up about once a week (or show up well ahead of the posted schedule). now that i think about it, i've been on about as many buses that had traffic accidents as i've had days where my car didn't start, despite using my car 100x more often than i've taken a bus.
throwaway290 4y ago
What a surprise, in cities designed for cars it's faster to use a car...
option 4y ago
it is also far less comfortable, you can take far less cargo (e.g. trip to the beach with kids), and you’ll be exposed to all the current pathogens
uoaei 4y ago
Many of the comments seem to have reached a conaensus about the purported issue: public transit is slow because where people are and where they want to be are not connected by public transit. It seems impossible to judge the speed of "riding transit" in an unqualified sense when where we build the places people want to be and how close that is to existing public transit is no part of the conversation.
TheRealPomax 4y ago
Is there a direct link somewhere, or is this just _that_ gated?
abeppu 4y ago
It's unclear whether their 1.9x times include time dealing with parking. In some urban neighborhoods, finding parking close to one's destination can be challenging, inefficient, and highly variable. If the closest parking you find is a ways away from your destination, then it adds time to _two_ trips.
erentz 4y ago
Even when we spend billions on transit we build it badly. US obsession with turning Light Rail into a Frankenstein that tries to fill all roles (eg commuter light rail). The resistance to electrification and reliance on slow loco hauled trains. Billions thrown at beautiful but not functionally helpful stations (cough Moynihan or Transbay). Not aligning new transit with development and not implementing station area land use changes. Etc. And of course top it off with how little we get for the money in terms of track miles. It’s tragic really.
throwaways85989 4y ago
Train boarding at least could be decoupled from slowing down and stopping. Just have a "Shuttle Wagon" depart pre arrival from the train with those who want to get out and another one speeding up with new passengers after the train as it passes through the station. Under ideal circumstances, a train would actually not even have to slow down for this. Con is that there is always a Shuttle in the station.
- rhodorhoades 4y ago
  But then you might as well go for the ‘Teslas in tunnels’ approach like the boring company.
rtanks 4y ago
josephcsible 4y ago
I support solutions to this of the form "let's make transit faster while keeping driving the same speed". I strongly oppose solutions to this of the form "let's keep transit basically the same speed but make driving slower".
flemhans 4y ago
This rule works in Copenhagen too. I'm often met with disbelief and even mild outrage when I make the claim.
- pastage 4y ago
  Copenhagen is a pretty car centric city though, public transport has traditionally not been that well prioritized. It is good city for bicycles, but the suburbs are sadly made for cars IMHO. There is also alot of infrastructure being built for cars in and around Copenhagen so it's not changing soon.
a-dub 4y ago
in my personal experience (with both transit and non-transit friendly locales): within NYC: bikes are the absolute fastest for short distances, the subway is comparable but generally fastest overall once things stretch out a bit, cars get hampered by "conditions" including traffic and parking; so they're ok if you hire a car late at night, but otherwise pretty slow and likely to get stuck in traffic. in the dense burbs (silicon valley, southern ca, hillsdale, long island): bikes are a mix but generally slower, cars are the fastest, transit takes 2-3x as much time, except during congestion where grade separated modalities often come in about on par with car travel time. in the rural burbs: cars win. transit takes 2-3x as much time. grade separation is rare, schedules are light and traffic is rarely an issue. i would want to see how these averages are being calculated. i'm guessing they're probably just doing a flat average over all zipcodes. this seems wrong to me, instead if you want to come up with a summary stat (which i think is probably a bad idea, as there are so many different types of cities with different behaviors for this sort of comparison) you'd probably want to weight by population. to say that the national average is 2-3x probably overweights all the rural transit systems where this is true.
- wefarrell 4y ago
  Outside of Manhattan cars are generally faster than the subway, significantly so outside of rush hour.
  - a-dub 4y ago
    sometimes? depends on how close to the train the stops are and if the bqe is involved/randomly backed up (which it appears to be right now). right this minute i'm seeing comparable drive times to the g train for north brooklyn to carroll gardens. i think what you say is definitely true as you move further out from the urban core (within the outer boroughs).
molszanski 4y ago
… and the water is wet. We have invested x50 times more in cars infrastructure compared to shared transport. Why are we surprised that cars produce better results?
sva_ 4y ago
I think a large reason of why people don't want to use public transit, which is often overlooked, is the social aspect: If you regularly use public transit, you're bound to have encounters with antisocial people who basically ruin it for everyone. The encounters I had on some regional transit made me think its probably better to just eat the extra bills for the car, rather than getting stabbed by some crackhead who turned the train (station) into their new home to escape the cold of winter.
O__________O 4y ago
At least for America, which was the country cited in the article, transit might take twice as long as driving, but driving costs many more times than using buses, plus there’s no up front cost, random major repairs, etc; related links below. Beyond that, American cities are largely designed for cars, which makes mass transit less viable. Not aware of any city in America designed for mass transit first, driving second; if it was, driving would likely take longer. ___ https://www.statista.com/statistics/990891/us-average-monthly-passes-in-transit-mode-transport/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/990891/us-average-monthl... https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-cost-owning-car https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...
theshrike79 4y ago
For me it'd take about 20 minutes to drive to the office + any time spent looking for a parking spot + possible rush hour Or I can walk about 7 minutes to the train station, hop on a train for 30 minutes and walk 5 minutes to the office. I always pick the latter, because I can just zone out for the 30 minutes in the train, maybe watch a TV show on my tablet, read a book or take a nap. Can't do any of those in traffic.
s1k3 4y ago
The difference? I can use those minutes doing something instead of paying attention to traffic and driving. I can read a book or get a head start on work or bum around on social media. If I bike to work it doubles as my exercise for the day. The utility of that time is what makes the difference for me.
steelframe 4y ago
tl;dr: For me bicycling is 35% faster than public transit and 85% slower than driving a car, and I bicycle primarily for lower stress and the benefits of daily exercise. My office is in the downtown district of a major city next to mine, 10 miles from my house in the suburbs. It costs $25 a day to park in the garage, although my employer subsidizes that if you sign up for a commuter benefit. Commute time by private motor vehicle is typically between 15-25 minutes during rush hour. Transit involves a half-mile (10-minute) walk to a bus station, an 11-minute ride to another bus station for a transfer, another 15-minute ride to another bus station, and a 1/3-mile (6-minute) walk to the office, for a total of 57 minutes and $2.75 in fares. On a good traffic day, public transit takes an additional 42 minutes each way for about an hour and a half more time commuting. There is a traffic-separated trail that starts about 1/10 of a mile from my house and ends about 1 mile from my office. Door-to-door, I'm usually doing the ride in about 37 minutes. So, my commute options are: * Drive single-occupancy vehicle. With employer subsidy, 20 minute trip and no out-of-pocket cost, otherwise $25. ~15 kWh (I drive an EV) plus wear and tear. Stress from driving and risk of collisions, but I have crumple zones and airbags to offer some safety. * Bus. 16 minutes of walking, transfer with 15 minutes of waiting (if the buses are on schedule), and 26 minutes bus riding. Again, free if I sign up for an employer benefit, otherwise $2.75 each way for a total of $5.50. Risk of collisions when crossing the street. Buses enjoy a pretty low collision rate where I live. * Bicycle. 37 minutes of riding, free to use bike cage. Risk of collisions getting to and from the trail and at points where the trail crosses roads. Could probably reduce this time to 32 minutes if I were to trade in my meat-powered bike for an e-bike. I've settled on the bicycle option because I find it's the most stress-free while at the same time I get exercise I wouldn't otherwise be getting. It's hard to quantify the value of the exercise against the additional 30 minutes of commute time (74 minutes of cycling vs. 40 minutes of driving my car), but I suspect in the long run the exercise is working in my overall favor in terms of well-being. Wear-and-tear on the bicycle costs me significantly less than wear-and-tear on my car. Since the trail is crushed gravel, I did have to make a capital investment in a bicycle with appropriate tires, a rack, and a bag that attaches to the rack pannier-style. I also shower at a locker room in my office building, but since I shower daily anyway, I don't count that as any lost time in my schedule. Side note: I'm often asked about bicycle commuting equipment since I've been bicycle commuting for about 15 years and have tried a lot of stuff, settling on what I've found works for me. Maybe I'll do a blog post sometime really getting into the details, but here's a "pretty okay" set of recommendations if you're riding on a crushed gravel trail: * Chromoly steel frame with rack mounts and 45c tires; maybe something like the Motobecane Cafe Noir from Bikes Direct ($800, when you can find it in stock); Motobecane Gran Premio Elite works well for road-only commutes * Planet Bike rack and full-size fenders * 2 Wheel Gear convertible pannier/backpack * Look Keo clipless pedals * Shimano RC1 shoes (SH-RC100) * Bontrager Commuter Comp Saddle * Cycliq Fly6 and Fly12 combination lights+cameras (super-pricey, but they're also convenient and have proven to be durable for me) * The Black Bib (the original $40 one) * Multi tool with a chain breaker and tire levers * Spare tube * Chain quick link * Something like the ez-clincher (note that specific one may not work great for 45c tires) tool for remounting your tire after changing a flat (pro tip: make sure the bead isn't set anywhere while you're popping the bead in if you want it to go easier)
razmooo 4y ago
Nevertheless, riding the metro or any other transport service has many pros. You can rest/nap, read books or even start your working day on the train. It is stress free as you don't need to be concentrated on the traffic. Driving in car is mostly just wasted time.
lordgallows 4y ago
There exists no American city with a robust public transportation network, they are all very flawed and dragged down by car first infrastructure. Countries with robust public transportation networks exist only in Europe and Asia. Even then, Switzerland and Japan are the only examples where the quality of public transport is taken seriously by the government and the people. Otherwise it’s there but really lacks the funding needed for it to do the job it should be doing. Contrast that with the car infra and entire countries will flip over backwards trying to maintain an unsustainable and unviable system, AKA burning money for no benefit to anyone, even in the short term.
trasz 4y ago
cosmotic 4y ago
Twenty-nine minutes to drive from Naperville to Chicago? Maybe at 4am. That's going to often take 2 hours.
sodimel 4y ago
I love how when visiting their plotly page[0] you can see their tests, like "Plot 955 copy copy copy copy" :) [0]: https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~governing/#/ https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~governing/#/

135 points by trothamel 4y ago

Isn't this just showing that people prefer public transit if the travel time is on average twice as long (but not longer)? There's a selection bias in that people who choose to drive probably did so because it's significantly faster.

anonymousDan 4y ago

Would be interested to see a similar visualization for major European cities. As someone living in London I would be very surprised if public transport isn't quicker on average.

adaml_623 4y ago
I think it's undeniable that journeys in to, out of, or around central London are faster on public transport if you're going along one of the main routes. But there are lots of journeys outside of the centre, either sideways or diagonal, that are very awkward and slow on public transport. My problem is that I have very little data or intuitive feel for how the 8 million people in London actually move during the average day
- nicoburns 4y ago
  My experience is that it’s common for people to meet in central London (and/or to have loca friends in the area you live) for this reason. Houses and workplaces are usually coordinated to minimise travel time (although there’s been a huge increase in homeworking since covid which is reducing the need for this).
ageitgey 4y ago
My experience in London is that it just depends on where you are going. - Local neighborhood? Walking or cycling is fastest - Next high street over? Bus or cycling is fastest - Most places in central London? Tube or train is fastest - That neighborhood a mile away that inexplicably has bad bus connections to you but you need to go because that's where the vet/store/whatever you need to visit is? Driving is often the best way, especially if you need to carry something. Cycling is pretty good, too. - That village 30 miles away? Driving or train (depending on your train line connections) - Full-size Ikea in Wembley? Driving (pretty hard to get there any other way) and you are probably going to want to bring something back - Mini-Ikea in Hammersmith? Take the Underground, driving wouldn't even really be possible Overall, I end up driving fairly rarely to never except for vacations or home repair type stuff. But having a multitude of transit options is really nice and most daily activities just require walking or quick local bus rides. I'm as pro-public-transit and cycling as they come, but there are definitely some types of trips where cars make sense. But I probably only drive 2-3 times a month vs. multiple times a day in the US. Zip cars are fairly omnipresent around London, so you don't need to own a car to drive those rare trips.
- matsemann 4y ago
  Same experience here in Oslo. With the different rent-a-car-by-hour companies popping up, I'll just rent a car for a few hours every now and then. I could do that like 10 times a month and it would probably be cheaper still than owning a car, most people don't realize how much it actually costs. Sharing a car like this makes so much sense.
  - orwin 4y ago
    Yeah, i do that too, but sadly i'm in a fairly touristic city and in summer it become very hard to find available vehicle.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

This will be really unpopular here haha. But the average person is always going to do what is best for them. You can let this inform almost any decision of your life when trying to decide what herd behavior and your users will do.

woodruffw 4y ago
That’s an extremely popular opinion, as evidenced by everybody doing it :-) Most of the responses here are methodological ones, not claims that we should all selflessly ride public transit.
gernb 4y ago
I'm not sure what your point is. https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc?t=462 https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc?t=462
ska 4y ago
I don’t see why you would expect this to be unpopular. You are oversimplifying though , the average person is usually going to do what they think is best for them, given the options they know about. The distinction is critical in topics like city/transportation planning.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
  I’d expect it to be unpopular because HN often seems to be solely populated by people riding a bike inside a subway car. :)

matsemann 4y ago

I think this problem is bigger in many US cities compared to Europe, because of the urban sprawl. There is almost no way to make it efficient to go from most people's houses to the city using public transport, since the area to cover is so great. To me, the solution is to re-think why everyone needs to go somewhere by car to get anything done. Why not have a grocery store closer? Some restaurants? Everyone having to travel from their house to the city centre to do basically anything is so wasteful. Most of this is because of zoning laws.

mcntsh 4y ago
The first example they give is NYC, showing cars being almost twice as fast as the train. NYC is denser than most European capitals.
- jrimbault 4y ago
  Train stations in NYC are much less dense than (for example my own city) Paris subway network. New-York subway network is impressive for its sprawl, but not really for its efficiency.
- bonyt 4y ago
  The New York metro area is much larger than NYC and includes suburbs and smaller cities in Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
  - mcntsh 4y ago
    Wouldn't those also be taken into account for the drivers side of the comparison?
    - kgermino 4y ago
      Yes, but someone from Long Island or Connecticut who works in Manhattan is unlikely to drive, while someone from those areas who works one town over will almost certainly drive. That will definitely skew these numbers if they don’t adjust for it

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yababa_y 4y ago

Checks out. There were a few commutes from my room in the Mission of San Francisco that were equal time lyft, bike, or take train. Of course this relies on timing the muni/bart appropriately. I never had my own car in a city, it is surely a diffetent way to experience a place. I figure if it was only OK in SF, it sucks everywhere else in the US.

bonyt 4y ago

> For New York metro residents who take public transportation, a door-to-door commute averages about 51 minutes. That’s much longer than the 29 minutes typically spent by those who drive alone. I mean, is this really an apples to apples comparison that is at all meaningful? The NY metro area includes NYC with its subway, but also suburbs in long island, New Jersey, and Connecticut with long commuter rail trips where you go to a different city, and short car commutes where you don’t.

donohoe 4y ago
This. I came here to say this. When you bundle NYC (which is one of the largest systems in itself between subway and bus) that represents a skewed average. As a NYC resident of 20 years I can assure you public transportation much much faster than a car in most cases. Don't even get me started about the time it takes to find parking in this city... I am guessing that that time consideration is not in this study.
- parkingrift 4y ago
  >As a NYC resident of 20 years I can assure you public transportation much much faster than a car in most cases. Surely you jest. Even in Manhattan this is rarely true. Outside of Manhattan it is practically never true. In some circumstances in Manhattan the subway can indeed be faster, but it’s really only true for traveling north/south along an express line during peak traffic. For instance I can get from 96th to Chambers in about 25 minutes on a subway if I’m lucky with my timing. That’s faster than a car during peak traffic, but slower than a car during any other time of day. But if I need to get from 96th to basically anywhere else that isn’t on the 1/2/3 there is no way the subway will ever win, much less by any significant margin. Even the idea that subway is “much much faster” defies basic logic. If that were universally true few people would ever take a ride share or taxi. And this ignores the almost comical problems and lack of reliability with the subway system in NYC. I cannot count the number of times I’ve had to give up, exit the subway station, and hail a cab. I imagine for many people it’s happened one too many times and they’ve exclusively switched to rideshare/taxi. For me personally I’ve switched to electric bike. I gave up on the subway earlier this year after one too many negative encounters with vagrants and criminals. A good question to ask is how visitors feel about the NYC subway system. When friends or family come to visit, what do they think about it? I don’t know about you, but for me it’s a healthy combo of amazement at the scale of the system, and amazement at how atrocious and disgusting it’s become.

jeffbee 4y ago

Yeah of course it does. Everything about the built environment is designed to ensure this is true. Even places you think would be transit oriented in America are not. Here in Berkeley we have a transit-priority signal installed at a few key intersections along the busiest bus route but the public works department refuses to turn them on, because although they save minutes for the bus riders they cost a few seconds for the drivers. We also refused to put in bus lanes on Telegraph Avenue because it would have necessitated the removal of either a parking lane or a car travel lane (four exist today). So the bus just lumbers along in traffic and it’s impossible to be faster than cars that way because the bus has to make its stops.

Finnucane 4y ago

When I lived in Brooklyn, driving in nyc was a nightmare experience to be avoided at all costs. Parking could take as long as driving. Where I live now I could drive to work in less time than taking the subway. But it is about the same time as riding my bike.

AlbertCory 4y ago

I had the opportunity to compare the posted schedules for a light rail train and a bus, between the same two points. This is the Bay Area. The points were the Winchester light rail station (in Campbell) and the Lockheed campus, near Moffett. There's a bus that goes the same places with a vastly longer route, and of course many more stops. The times were the same: about an hour. If you were driving, you'd take freeways, and even in rush hour traffic it would be less than an hour. San Jose light rail is, by nearly all metrics, the worst in the country, so you can see why: it's terrible.

woodruffw 4y ago

First: I agree with the overall conclusion of the article. We absolutely should invest to make public transport faster, and thereby attract more riders. Second: At least for NYC, some of this data is slightly misleading. NYC has (at least) three public transport networks: the bus and subway within the city’s borders, and commuter rail between the city, Long Island, and the rest of NY/NJ/CT. It would probably be most interesting (and correct) to compare car commuters that could take each; my intuition is that the subway generally outperforms driving within the city, the bus slightly underperforms versus driving (since it gets stuck in traffic, and there’s no meaningful enforcement of bus lanes). I don’t have an intuition for the commuter rails.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> We absolutely should invest to make public transport faster, and thereby attract more riders. People don't use public transport because it is faster, but because it is consistent, it is cheaper than many other options and it reduces the stress of commuting. Being a passenger is much more relaxing than being the driver. Not having to find a parking spot is liberating for your mind. Not getting fines is good for your finances. Public transport doesn't attract more people because almost everywhere is at peak. NY subway, for example, moves 5.5 million people a day (the peak capacity is slightly above 6) but it is harder to make new lines or increase the number of rides, while with cars you just ride yours to the highway and stay stuck there in traffic for as long as needed. You can't stack trains like that or the delay of a single ride will cascade to the entire rail line possibly for many hours. People who prefer cars IMO are either outside of the public transport coverage, bad at planning or anxious.
- mjevans 4y ago
  It still has to be fast enough. It also needs to evolve beyond just the hub and spoke model that expects everyone to commute to the big city from the suburbs.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    There is need for lot more circular routes. Connecting the spokes to each other.

muglug 4y ago

As others have said, this does not hold for the majority of commuters in New York City, where finding a parking space and navigating rush-hour traffic often makes commuting by car slower. In London they've chosen a different approach, making driving more painful: congestion charging and strictly-enforced 20-mile-an-hour speed limits on some of the main arteries in the centre of the city.

boygobbo 4y ago
The speed limit is a bit of a red herring. The average speed of traffic in central London is about 9 miles/hour & inner London about 12. The average speed in the suburbs (outer London) is about 20 mph, even though the speed limit is 30 mph. Average traffic speed in London: https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/sites/default/files/0832%20attachment.pdf https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/sites/default/files/0832... London speed limits: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-digital-speed-limit-map.pdf https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-digital-speed-limit-map.pd...
mjhay 4y ago
As the other reply pointed out, those speed limits are pretty aspirational. The average trip time in central London decreased 30% [0] quite a bit after introduction of the charge, but things have slowed down again for various other reasons apparently. I don't think the congestion charge is unreasonable considering the negative externalities the vehicles cause. Aside from work or delivery vehicles, it seems bizarre to drive into central London by choice. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge#Traffic_speeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge#Traff...
orwin 4y ago
By the way, the rational for putting speed limits is quite solid and i know one engineer who worked on that who told me the average speed in Paris around and during rush hour actually increase (by roughly 5 km/h) despite lowering the speed limit by 10 km/h. Outside those hours the speed limit setup did decrease the average speed (shocking!), but for commuters (who felt strongly against this new limitation) the overall change was actually a net positive (less hour stuck in traffic), and for car-owning residents (who where split on this) it was a net negative.

hammock 4y ago

Is the purpose of public transit to get you there Quicker, or to get you there Cheaper? Transit allows me to avoid owning a car, and the monthly parking charge at home, daily parking by work, etc costs that come with— that’s the principal benefit as a city dweller. I live in Chicago (city) and the 2-1 time ratio is what I use to decide whether I take a cab or not. I look up the time to my destination -a store, friends house, the beach, whatever- and if it’s twice as long or quicker to take the train/bus then I will. (That’s not totally true, I use shared bikes to get most places these days.) When I was poorer, I used 3-1. For my office, when I go, it’s about 2-1, and has been for any of the half-dozen different places I’ve lived here. I consider that a sign of Well-Done Transit, not the opposite. It’s not surprising to me that transit takes longer, because you have to walk to a transit stop and then walk from a transit stop. Why would you expect it to be faster? If you want it to be faster than driving, you have to eliminate all parking minimums.

nicoburns 4y ago
In London it’s not uncommon for transit to be 2:1 faster than driving. It’s only ever really faster going from suburb to suburb without going through the center. It all depends on what kind of infrastructure you have.
- harvey9 4y ago
  I check Google maps for any journey where I have a choice of driving or riding in London. The variability is pretty wide. But agree with your point about suburb to suburb: in a choice of car vs bus (because there's no rail option for the journey) the car inevitably wins.
  - orwin 4y ago
    It is the same for Paris, mostly (they are a few exception with light rail, especially towards economic centers), but i think next year it should be better, with an automated subway line going around paris.
    - 4y ago

pluc 4y ago

Isn't that common sense? Public transit takes you everywhere and where you need to go. Driving just takes you where you need to go.

tootie 4y ago
Trains have no traffic. At least, when they're run properly
_dain_ 4y ago
No, there's no a priori reason why public transport should be slower. There are cities where it isn't the case, London for example. Cars get stuck in traffic (because they are traffic). Trains don't, and can reach higher speeds. Buses have (or should have) their own lanes, and priority at traffic lights, so that they don't get stuck behind cars. A single bus lane can have more passenger throughput than several car lanes; it's an absurdity that a bus should be delayed by single-occupancy vehicles hogging the space. If public transport is slower than driving, your city is doing it wrong.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  There is. You have to get to and from the station / stop twice every trip. This makes it slower unless you are in an area where the density is so high that the space constraints make cars prohibitive.
  - _dain_ 4y ago
    >You have to get to and from the station / stop twice every trip. And you have to get to and from your parking spot. >an area where the density is so high that the space constraints make cars prohibitive. Yes, these areas are called "cities". --- There are a lot of factors that go into determining the relative speeds of public transport vs private motor vehicles. Here are some of them (for buses): - street network topology: grid, spaghetti, cul-de-sacs? - are there highways slicing through the city, or is it mostly smaller roads? - speed limits on those roads - is there a congestion charge? - are there dedicated bus lanes? - is there priority for buses at intersections? - spacing of stops - boarding, payment, disembarking procedure - frequency of rides - directness of the route - viability of other non-car transport modes e.g. cycling Different answers to these questions give different journey times. Whether transit is faster than driving is the net result of all these questions. And most of them are political in nature. It's a choice, not some iron law. Plus, there's the obvious existence proof of fast public transit: airlines.

O_H_E 4y ago

This is the same here in Ontario, Canada in 2 of the biggest non-toronto cities.

fallingknife 4y ago

I think that this is the fundamental issue of why we don't have more public transit. It's just next to impossible to beat the convenience of cars. The only place I have been in the US where public transit is more convenient than driving is Manhattan. That kind of density is really the only place where you can do that.

jmyeet 4y ago

It's not clear to me that this is an apples-to-apples comparison. Specifically: is the same commute by public transport longer by car? For example, you might be comparing a ride from Garden City to Lower Manhattan by train to a ride from Garden City to JFK Airport by car. If so, then this is completely meaningless. There are also socioeconomic factors to consider. If you're poor then driving into Lower Manhattan just isn't an option for you. Car ownership is already expensive. Insurance in the NY metro area is particularly expensive. Parking anywhere in Manhattan is going to be really expensive. So you may end up using data like this as a reason to eliminate what is for many people their only option. At the other end of the spectrum are places like Houston, with a 26 lane freeway. It's also currently building the largest urban ring road in the world (IIRC) at >180 miles. Those are eyesores by themselves but it's absolutely criminal not to eliminate 2 lanes of a 26 lane freeway to run light rail along the length of the freeway. Stations are pretty easily combined with parking structures and integrated with bus routes. What you realize after awhile is being car-centric in America is not only a question of profound selfishness but it's also de facto segregation. Not from inorities per se, just "undesirables" ie poor people. It's why wealthier neighborhoods like Santa Monica tried to fight rail expansion into their area. The cost of car ownerships, much like most of the US outlawing building anything other than single family houses (typically on ridiculously large lots) is a deliberate economic barrier. US cities are really no different to Cape Town.

scythe 4y ago

>The new network isn’t just about saving time. It’s also opened up job opportunities for those who are now within walking distance of frequent service. “The goal,” Luhrsen says, “was to connect those places of density within the system -- to get people to jobs, to get them to schools, health-care facilities … seven days a week.” This ending paragraph is basically why I don't care about the title. At this point, convincing people to switch from cars to buses/trains en masse is a tiny glint of light on the horizon. Far more important in the near-term is simply providing adequate transportation to those who can't or don't wish to drive.

ouid 4y ago

Yeah, but i can't play super auto pets in my car.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

Plus you can't speed up if you are running late. I missed a train by 5 minutes in Chicago, than I was told the next one was sold out. If I had been in a car I could have made that time up. The other problem was late because I was waiting in a long line at the airport to buy metro pas, only to complete a transaction for weekly pass for some confused Italian couple. Then seeing some guy get arrested at the Greyhound station for seemingly asking the wrong question, and getting told I was bamboozled for asking if I could still catch the bus home. Seeing other people getting treated horribly there. Then ended that miserable experience sitting 5 hours on the Megabus wheel well on an over night bus to get home. No thanks. I'd rather a root canal. People advocating for no cars, often ignore how terrible public transportation can be.

sbf501 4y ago

FTA: "The revamped bus network, which required just a 4 percent budget increase, launched in August 2015. The results so far are encouraging: Weekday ridership has stabilized after declining for years, and is up about 10 percent on Saturdays and more than 30 percent on Sundays." In other news water is wet. The catch-22 with transit has been known for half a century. Declining riders = fewer $$$ = fewer routes = declining riders. The only way to stop this is with investment to increase schedules. Yet riders are blamed for not using it.

IronWolve 4y ago

When I was growing up, I'd take the city bus across town and it would take 2 hours, vs 25 minutes by car. It showed me I needed car for work, or I'd be spending 4 hours just on buses. 30 years later, When I was working downtown, park and ride was nice mix of getting there early, free parking, and I just a short walk. Now lets talk about those HOV lanes that now opened up for paying people, we literally made limo lanes that clogged up and made the buses slower. No new roads, and its just going to keep getting worse, so much worse. I've seen it get continually worse over 30 years.

vel0city 4y ago

I live in an exurb in the US. Transit tries to serve a lot of single family homes. That said, I've got two bus routes nearby which connect to the light rail to go deeper into the metro area and out to the airport. Despite there being a bus stop close to my door I still take my car most of the time. I could get by with living an only public transit lifestyle, and that's a part of why I chose to live here as opposed to elsewhere. But in the end this really limits my choices. Yeah, there is a daycare a few stops away, but that wasn't the one we wanted to send our child to. There is a grocery store, but it's not the ones we like to shop at. There are places I could work, but the place I want to work is a less than 10 minute drive but a 45 minute bus ride. To get to the places we do want to go, it's easily 2-5x as long of a travel. Just the other day a friend invited me to dinner. The restaurant was on the same bus line as one of the lines just outside my house. A great chance for transit, I wouldn't even have to change busses. It was a less than 20 minute car ride and a few dollars of tolls each way. Or a little over an hour on the bus each way. Sure, riding the bus would have been cheaper than the cost of my car, assuming my time is valued at $0 and everything is devoid of scheduling conflicts. But I value my time quite highly, and I often have pretty tight schedules.

beej71 4y ago

Time alone isn't a good measure. Minute-dollars is probably a better one. But value of time or money doesn't add linearly in people's minds, so even this could be improved. When I lived in the Bay area, rough numbers: Job 1, car: 3600 minute-dollars per day. Job 1, public transit: 800 minute-dollars Job 2, car: 2700 minute-dollars Job 2, public transit: 6000 minute-dollars

BeetleB 4y ago

This has been true for me wherever I've lived. If you just happen to live near a major bus line or subway station, and just happen to go somewhere where a transfer is not needed, then maybe public transit is faster. Otherwise, not a chance. From my previous apartment it would take about 2 hours to get to the airport using public transit, because I had to transfer twice - that's waiting three times. By car it would take 30 minutes without traffic, and the worst time with a car would be just under 2 hours. From my current residence it takes about 8 minutes just to walk to the bus stop. It takes 10 minutes to drive to work (fairly close). It takes 30 minutes by public transit (walk to stop, transfer somewhere). Whenever I talk to someone who doesn't own a car and really touts public transit, and I dig into the details, I always find that this person has a limited number of places he goes, with the rest being inconvenient to get to. The only real benefit of public transit is you can read during the commute.

shawabawa3 4y ago
You just haven't lived in a city with good public transport In e.g. London or Paris public transport is almost always the fastest way to get from A to B
- sneak 4y ago
  This is also true in Berlin, but mostly because it is relatively slow to drive most long distances in the city.
  - flemhans 4y ago
    Public transit is 1.5-2x slower in Berlin too. Once I started using ShareNow I never looked back
- elashri 4y ago
  You are describing people living in the majority if not all of US cities.
woodruffw 4y ago
> I always find that this person has a limited number of places he goes, with the rest being inconvenient to get to. This is just a description of traffic patterns in the US, in general. You presumably don’t cruise through random suburbs on the other side of your city on your way to work, or while running errands, or really for any reason other than needing to. Where I live, it’s both faster and cheaper for me to not own a car. It hasn’t hurt my traveling much, either, although you’ll have to take my word for that (until I figure out how to anonymize all the location data I collect for myself).

Mildlypolite 4y ago

In my city the bike is usually faster than the car simply because you don't have to search for a parking spot for 30 minutes.

juve1996 4y ago
Parking is an underrated part of the equation that many on here are not taking into account. It's scarce, and extremely expensive.

mattlondon 4y ago

The tube in London is significantly faster than driving in all but the most unusually low-traffic weekend days. What is terrible thigh are the buses. It is almost like it is a regulation now that they cannot go faster then 12mph. And even if they could go faster than that, they stop literally every 100-200 meters so you are constantly stopping and starting. It is infuriatingly slow and plodding as a result, despite the fact that they have dedicated bus lanes here. I simply do not know why there are not more "express" bus routes in London that only stop at major places (e.g. perhaps linking tube stations that are on different lines, or going "across" London (c.f. tube lines that tend to head to the center). I think it is the result of a bit of a socialist ideal about everyone sharing the same journey as some sort of proletariat-unite fantasy where we all share the same bus: children on their way to school, workers on their way to the office, grannies going to visit their grandchildren, etc etc - no matter your status or walk of life you're all together sharing the same journey, all equal, all together etc. That is all very well and good, but different people are under different time pressures, so lowering the bus to handle the lowest common denominator of someone who just wants to get it to go 0.5 to 1km down the road ruins it for those that need to cover distance. So those that can pay to go places faster than those that don't

a1371 4y ago

Significant clarification missing from the title: "IN AMERICA" And to some Americans' surprise, not everywhere is like that. When you build your cities around cars, no other mode of transportation can thrive. Over a century of sprawl and road widening can't have an overnight fix.

euos 4y ago

Transit can not be successful in low-density residential build. American life style is lifestyle of rich people - single family houses and cars.

armchairhacker 4y ago

It really depends on the place. This article focuses on New York which has a really bad subway system. In Boston they would reach a similar conclusion as well. But if they were focusing on Prague or Spain or Japan or Singapore or any system which isn't decades-old and falling apart, they would find riding transit is much faster than driving. Ik it's a dumb spin but if anything, this is reason to improve New York's subway system. Trains should be faster for any non-negligible distance, even counting walking and waiting for the train, as they can go a lot faster and don't have to deal with stoplights or traffic. And trains (even the ones in NY) are much better in terms of efficiency, productivity (can read or work on the train), and climate. The issue is, that trains are a huge long-term investment, and a lot of these broken railway systems need huge renovations. We need someone to put billions into this, of course it will save billions in the coming decades, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

MiddleEndian 4y ago
>In Boston they would reach a similar conclusion as well Really depends where you're going to and from, if you take into account parking+walking afterwards (not taken into account by google maps), traffic, etc. The subway can be a lot faster than driving. Buses and/or commuter rail, usually not so much. Lots of room (and some plans) for improvements there.
juve1996 4y ago
The few times I visited Boston I thought the subways were fantastic - got me almost everywhere in the city close enough to walk. Was it faster A to B than a car? Maybe not in drive times. But I didn't need to find parking, which can be very time consuming (or extremely expensive.)
- acdha 4y ago
  Also the stress levels are wildly different: get on the T, open a book and relax versus dealing with confused tourists and crazed Uber drivers against a backdrop of shoddily-patched roads and indifferent signage.
upbeat_general 4y ago

enragedcacti 4y ago

I was interested in the company publishing this and found that governing.com is operated by e.Republic, a media company founded, owned, and operated by scientologists [1]. It's founder is Dennis McKenna (not the brother of Terence) who was a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology during Operation Freakout [2], "a Church of Scientology covert plan intended to have the U.S. author and journalist Paulette Cooper imprisoned or committed to a psychiatric hospital." Given past events [3], I find the idea of a scientology media company trying to get the ear of state and local governments to be very concerning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Republic [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

sofixa 4y ago
> Given past events [3], I find the idea of a scientology media company trying to get the ear of state and local governments to be very concerning. Same goes for any religious group IMHO. Separation of church and state.

sigstoat 4y ago

i'd like to know the variance of the two looks like, and how much earlier transit riders have to leave wherever they are to account for it, than drivers. (this wouldn't show up because they measured door-to-door times.) admittedly i'm able to keep my car in good repair, but: over the decades i've only had a handful of days where my car didn't start in the morning, or i encountered _unexpected_ events on the road that made the trip take dramatically longer. (heavy traffic on a road i use every day would just show up in my average.) but when i've tried to use buses, while in school, or a brief period when my employer was at the other end of the bus that stopped in my neighborhood, i had buses not show up about once a week (or show up well ahead of the posted schedule). now that i think about it, i've been on about as many buses that had traffic accidents as i've had days where my car didn't start, despite using my car 100x more often than i've taken a bus.

throwaway290 4y ago

What a surprise, in cities designed for cars it's faster to use a car...

option 4y ago

it is also far less comfortable, you can take far less cargo (e.g. trip to the beach with kids), and you’ll be exposed to all the current pathogens

uoaei 4y ago

Many of the comments seem to have reached a conaensus about the purported issue: public transit is slow because where people are and where they want to be are not connected by public transit. It seems impossible to judge the speed of "riding transit" in an unqualified sense when where we build the places people want to be and how close that is to existing public transit is no part of the conversation.

TheRealPomax 4y ago

Is there a direct link somewhere, or is this just _that_ gated?

abeppu 4y ago

It's unclear whether their 1.9x times include time dealing with parking. In some urban neighborhoods, finding parking close to one's destination can be challenging, inefficient, and highly variable. If the closest parking you find is a ways away from your destination, then it adds time to _two_ trips.

erentz 4y ago

Even when we spend billions on transit we build it badly. US obsession with turning Light Rail into a Frankenstein that tries to fill all roles (eg commuter light rail). The resistance to electrification and reliance on slow loco hauled trains. Billions thrown at beautiful but not functionally helpful stations (cough Moynihan or Transbay). Not aligning new transit with development and not implementing station area land use changes. Etc. And of course top it off with how little we get for the money in terms of track miles. It’s tragic really.

throwaways85989 4y ago

Train boarding at least could be decoupled from slowing down and stopping. Just have a "Shuttle Wagon" depart pre arrival from the train with those who want to get out and another one speeding up with new passengers after the train as it passes through the station. Under ideal circumstances, a train would actually not even have to slow down for this. Con is that there is always a Shuttle in the station.

rhodorhoades 4y ago
But then you might as well go for the ‘Teslas in tunnels’ approach like the boring company.

rtanks 4y ago

josephcsible 4y ago

I support solutions to this of the form "let's make transit faster while keeping driving the same speed". I strongly oppose solutions to this of the form "let's keep transit basically the same speed but make driving slower".

flemhans 4y ago

This rule works in Copenhagen too. I'm often met with disbelief and even mild outrage when I make the claim.

pastage 4y ago
Copenhagen is a pretty car centric city though, public transport has traditionally not been that well prioritized. It is good city for bicycles, but the suburbs are sadly made for cars IMHO. There is also alot of infrastructure being built for cars in and around Copenhagen so it's not changing soon.

a-dub 4y ago

in my personal experience (with both transit and non-transit friendly locales): within NYC: bikes are the absolute fastest for short distances, the subway is comparable but generally fastest overall once things stretch out a bit, cars get hampered by "conditions" including traffic and parking; so they're ok if you hire a car late at night, but otherwise pretty slow and likely to get stuck in traffic. in the dense burbs (silicon valley, southern ca, hillsdale, long island): bikes are a mix but generally slower, cars are the fastest, transit takes 2-3x as much time, except during congestion where grade separated modalities often come in about on par with car travel time. in the rural burbs: cars win. transit takes 2-3x as much time. grade separation is rare, schedules are light and traffic is rarely an issue. i would want to see how these averages are being calculated. i'm guessing they're probably just doing a flat average over all zipcodes. this seems wrong to me, instead if you want to come up with a summary stat (which i think is probably a bad idea, as there are so many different types of cities with different behaviors for this sort of comparison) you'd probably want to weight by population. to say that the national average is 2-3x probably overweights all the rural transit systems where this is true.

wefarrell 4y ago
Outside of Manhattan cars are generally faster than the subway, significantly so outside of rush hour.
- a-dub 4y ago
  sometimes? depends on how close to the train the stops are and if the bqe is involved/randomly backed up (which it appears to be right now). right this minute i'm seeing comparable drive times to the g train for north brooklyn to carroll gardens. i think what you say is definitely true as you move further out from the urban core (within the outer boroughs).

molszanski 4y ago

… and the water is wet. We have invested x50 times more in cars infrastructure compared to shared transport. Why are we surprised that cars produce better results?

sva_ 4y ago

I think a large reason of why people don't want to use public transit, which is often overlooked, is the social aspect: If you regularly use public transit, you're bound to have encounters with antisocial people who basically ruin it for everyone. The encounters I had on some regional transit made me think its probably better to just eat the extra bills for the car, rather than getting stabbed by some crackhead who turned the train (station) into their new home to escape the cold of winter.

O__________O 4y ago

At least for America, which was the country cited in the article, transit might take twice as long as driving, but driving costs many more times than using buses, plus there’s no up front cost, random major repairs, etc; related links below. Beyond that, American cities are largely designed for cars, which makes mass transit less viable. Not aware of any city in America designed for mass transit first, driving second; if it was, driving would likely take longer. ___ https://www.statista.com/statistics/990891/us-average-monthly-passes-in-transit-mode-transport/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/990891/us-average-monthl... https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-cost-owning-car https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...

theshrike79 4y ago

For me it'd take about 20 minutes to drive to the office + any time spent looking for a parking spot + possible rush hour Or I can walk about 7 minutes to the train station, hop on a train for 30 minutes and walk 5 minutes to the office. I always pick the latter, because I can just zone out for the 30 minutes in the train, maybe watch a TV show on my tablet, read a book or take a nap. Can't do any of those in traffic.

s1k3 4y ago

The difference? I can use those minutes doing something instead of paying attention to traffic and driving. I can read a book or get a head start on work or bum around on social media. If I bike to work it doubles as my exercise for the day. The utility of that time is what makes the difference for me.

steelframe 4y ago

tl;dr: For me bicycling is 35% faster than public transit and 85% slower than driving a car, and I bicycle primarily for lower stress and the benefits of daily exercise. My office is in the downtown district of a major city next to mine, 10 miles from my house in the suburbs. It costs $25 a day to park in the garage, although my employer subsidizes that if you sign up for a commuter benefit. Commute time by private motor vehicle is typically between 15-25 minutes during rush hour. Transit involves a half-mile (10-minute) walk to a bus station, an 11-minute ride to another bus station for a transfer, another 15-minute ride to another bus station, and a 1/3-mile (6-minute) walk to the office, for a total of 57 minutes and $2.75 in fares. On a good traffic day, public transit takes an additional 42 minutes each way for about an hour and a half more time commuting. There is a traffic-separated trail that starts about 1/10 of a mile from my house and ends about 1 mile from my office. Door-to-door, I'm usually doing the ride in about 37 minutes. So, my commute options are: * Drive single-occupancy vehicle. With employer subsidy, 20 minute trip and no out-of-pocket cost, otherwise $25. ~15 kWh (I drive an EV) plus wear and tear. Stress from driving and risk of collisions, but I have crumple zones and airbags to offer some safety. * Bus. 16 minutes of walking, transfer with 15 minutes of waiting (if the buses are on schedule), and 26 minutes bus riding. Again, free if I sign up for an employer benefit, otherwise $2.75 each way for a total of $5.50. Risk of collisions when crossing the street. Buses enjoy a pretty low collision rate where I live. * Bicycle. 37 minutes of riding, free to use bike cage. Risk of collisions getting to and from the trail and at points where the trail crosses roads. Could probably reduce this time to 32 minutes if I were to trade in my meat-powered bike for an e-bike. I've settled on the bicycle option because I find it's the most stress-free while at the same time I get exercise I wouldn't otherwise be getting. It's hard to quantify the value of the exercise against the additional 30 minutes of commute time (74 minutes of cycling vs. 40 minutes of driving my car), but I suspect in the long run the exercise is working in my overall favor in terms of well-being. Wear-and-tear on the bicycle costs me significantly less than wear-and-tear on my car. Since the trail is crushed gravel, I did have to make a capital investment in a bicycle with appropriate tires, a rack, and a bag that attaches to the rack pannier-style. I also shower at a locker room in my office building, but since I shower daily anyway, I don't count that as any lost time in my schedule. Side note: I'm often asked about bicycle commuting equipment since I've been bicycle commuting for about 15 years and have tried a lot of stuff, settling on what I've found works for me. Maybe I'll do a blog post sometime really getting into the details, but here's a "pretty okay" set of recommendations if you're riding on a crushed gravel trail: * Chromoly steel frame with rack mounts and 45c tires; maybe something like the Motobecane Cafe Noir from Bikes Direct ($800, when you can find it in stock); Motobecane Gran Premio Elite works well for road-only commutes * Planet Bike rack and full-size fenders * 2 Wheel Gear convertible pannier/backpack * Look Keo clipless pedals * Shimano RC1 shoes (SH-RC100) * Bontrager Commuter Comp Saddle * Cycliq Fly6 and Fly12 combination lights+cameras (super-pricey, but they're also convenient and have proven to be durable for me) * The Black Bib (the original $40 one) * Multi tool with a chain breaker and tire levers * Spare tube * Chain quick link * Something like the ez-clincher (note that specific one may not work great for 45c tires) tool for remounting your tire after changing a flat (pro tip: make sure the bead isn't set anywhere while you're popping the bead in if you want it to go easier)

razmooo 4y ago

Nevertheless, riding the metro or any other transport service has many pros. You can rest/nap, read books or even start your working day on the train. It is stress free as you don't need to be concentrated on the traffic. Driving in car is mostly just wasted time.

lordgallows 4y ago

There exists no American city with a robust public transportation network, they are all very flawed and dragged down by car first infrastructure. Countries with robust public transportation networks exist only in Europe and Asia. Even then, Switzerland and Japan are the only examples where the quality of public transport is taken seriously by the government and the people. Otherwise it’s there but really lacks the funding needed for it to do the job it should be doing. Contrast that with the car infra and entire countries will flip over backwards trying to maintain an unsustainable and unviable system, AKA burning money for no benefit to anyone, even in the short term.

trasz 4y ago

cosmotic 4y ago

Twenty-nine minutes to drive from Naperville to Chicago? Maybe at 4am. That's going to often take 2 hours.

sodimel 4y ago

I love how when visiting their plotly page[0] you can see their tests, like "Plot 955 copy copy copy copy" :) [0]: https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~governing/#/ https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~governing/#/