11 ms·

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 trans

• 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).
  • rayiner 4y ago
    > 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 That's the normal traffic pattern in many parts of the country. For example, in the DC metro area, 90% of the jobs are outside the city. It's routine to live in one suburb, commute to another suburb, and have a spouse commute to a third suburb.
    • woodruffw 4y ago
      This doesn’t refute the central point: those are needs-driven destinations, not random choices for a pleasure cruise.
• voisin 4y ago
  > The only real benefit of public transit is you can read during the commute. I think there is more to it than this. When driving, your nervous system is continually activated as your attention is (should be!) focused on everything going on around you for the entire time. 10x this when stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, making thousands of micro-decisions about when to break, how fast to speed up, how much room to leave ahead of you. The difference between 30-45 minutes of this and 1.5 hours of sitting peacefully on public transit is dramatic. But on all your other points I fully agree. The answer though is not to throw out public transit because of these pitfalls - it is to massively double down on improving public transit to mitigate these pitfalls.
  • Skunkleton 4y ago
    > 1.5 hours of sitting peacefully on public transit is dramatic Sitting peacefully isn’t really possible on a lot of public transit, especially during rush hours.
    • toxik 4y ago
      To me, that sounds like your public transportation can’t handle peak demand properly. I think that’s actually solvable by building more transportation and scheduling more trains, busses, etc. There will of course always be a trade off between peak capacity and spending, but this isn’t any less true for cars.
      • j7ake 4y ago
        Which cities handle peak demand such that everybody gets a seat on the metro or bus?
    • _whiteCaps_ 4y ago
      Commuting from certain suburbs into downtown Vancouver is great - a real train with many sections having tables and power outlets. Pretty much everyone gets a seat. But if you're in other areas, getting into Vancouver is like you described. There's options for more light rail around here but no political will to get it done.
• TimPC 4y ago
  I think this is only really true for subway routes. The stop and go nature of buses slows a commute down and you don’t have a traffic-free route to make up for it. Subways are so much faster between stops that you can make up for the delays due to stopping. In general, I feel once you make the conscious decision to build for cars and allocate vast amounts of space to parking everywhere then you’re going to generally do better with a car. Transit will only be more in line as you drive the % of drivers down and reduce the resource allocations for cars.
  • BeetleB 4y ago
    > Subways are so much faster between stops that you can make up for the delays due to stopping. That 2 hour trip to the airport? At least 1.5 hours of that is subway/train.
    • Skunkleton 4y ago
      I’m not sure where this idea that subways are fast comes from. The average speed of the NY subway system for example is ~20mph. High speed rail is a different story of course.
      • tuukkah 4y ago
        NY subway is not the best example as it's the oldest and slowest: https://ggwash.org/view/4524/average-schedule-speed-how-does-metro-compare https://ggwash.org/view/4524/average-schedule-speed-how-does...
        • Skunkleton 4y ago
          NY had one of the most extensive systems. Compared to other places, like my home in the Bay Area, even at 20mph the subway is effectively faster.
          • tuukkah 4y ago
            Indeed, the average speed of the subway isn't very meaningful for comparison as the bigger win is being able to skip the traffic jams where the car speed depends highly on the exact route and time of day.
• LesZedCB 4y ago
  plus you know the massive personal and societal cost savings of reduced fuel consumption
  • briandear 4y ago
    Perhaps we should instead be researching how to get more fuel cheaper. Much of the “cost” is self inflicted. Gasoline could be almost as cheap as bottled water if we wanted it to be.
    • muti 4y ago
      Cost also includes negative environmental effects
  • reddog 4y ago
    Its a commonly held belief that private cars are less energy efficient and are less environmentally friendly per passenger mile than mass transit. But that’s a myth. On average the American passenger car is more energy efficient than mass transit. In fact, there are only two mass transit systems in the US more efficient (in cost, energy and carbon) than driving a Prius. https://theicct.org/planes-trains-and-automobiles-counting-carbon/ https://theicct.org/planes-trains-and-automobiles-counting-c... https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-615.pdf https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-615.pd...
    • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Your first link doesn't support your point. It's talking about 300-500 mile trips (where you might be choosing plane vs train vs car vs bus) and it assumed 2.2 people in the car, and the bus still gets about 3x the efficiency. I'm not going to waste my time on some Cato nonsense.
    • wyre 4y ago
      I don’t see either of your sources showing public transit is more fuel intensive than a car. The first report assumes 2.2 people in a car which I don’t think is an actual average and a greyhound bus was 4x more efficient than the car.
• cercatrova 4y ago
  > The only real benefit of public transit is you can read during the commute. I use audiobooks so it works out for driving or taking public transit. The only difference is the noise level is higher in general with public transit.
• tpmoney 4y ago
  Many years ago when I was sharing a single car with someone who worked the complete opposite direction of me, I looked into the public transit thing. I lived in the west side of one city, worked in the east side of another. By car, it was 20-40 minutes depending on if you were in rush hour or not. While I would have hated it, 2x time commute by public transport would have been fine. But it wasn't even close. I would need to walk a little over 2 miles to get to the nearest bus stop by my apartment, then I would need to take that bus into the downtown area, transfer to another bus to the central bus depot. From there I could pick up an "express commuter bus to a massive office park about half way between the two cities, where I would need to pick up another "express" bus to get to the next city. From there I would have to pick up another bus, which would take me luckily directly to my work place. The problem was, none of these schedules were well coordinated. If I left around the time I would normally have to leave to make my shift on time, I would make it to my work place 6 hours later after accounting for all the waiting and transfer times. If I was willing to leave much earlier and arrive an hour before my shift (and if doing so met with the more frequent bus scheduling) I could get there in just 4 hours. If you aren't directly on, and going almost exactly point to point for public transport outside big cities like NY, it can be so much worse than even "twice as long". I hated the wear and tear going all the way one way and then completely back across the cities the other way doing the shared commute required. I hated the sometimes hour or two wait before or after a shift to make the commute work with the other person. But using public transport was effectively impossible.
  • goldtownjac 4y ago
    That’s definitely frustrating, but what did you expect? You lived in one city and worked in another. The “simple” solution to this is to live and work in the same city.
    • xyzzyz 4y ago
      For most people, much cheaper and simpler is to buy a beater car. That’s what the working poor do.
    • toast0 4y ago
      Are you supposed to move everytime you get a new job, even when it's nearby? And divorce and start dating again since your now ex-spouse will still be working in the old city?
• jjj123 4y ago
  If you include second order effects beyond your individual experience the benefits are plenty: - better for the environment - safer (especially for pedestrians) - more people can move using less space, resulting in less traffic/higher throughput - if public transportation was prioritized over cars, city layouts could be dramatically overhauled, with more streets used for pedestrian/bike traffic instead of cars These are the reasons I take public transportation instead of driving. I’d rather contribute in some small way to the society I want instead of settling for a local maximum of convenience. Edited for clarity
  • m463 4y ago
    theoretically. there are plenty of ways to lose efficiency. for instance, what if your whole society is n% less efficient?
  • kazinator 4y ago
    Most public transit vehicles don't have seat belts, and often force people to stand.
    • jjj123 4y ago
      What’s your point? That it makes riding the bus less safe? You’re safer on a bus without a seatbelt than you are in a small car because of the mass of the vehicle.
      • kazinator 4y ago
        ... than you are in a small car with a seat belt? The history of transportation is full of deadly bus accidents; cases when everyone or almost everyone on board was killed. A vehicle which has a larger mass decelerates more slowly. (Mass isn't the only factor, but how it's distributed and how the vehicle crumples.) The mass helps you only if you are secured to it, so that you decelerate at the same rate. Whether the vehicle stops in 0.2 seconds or 0.05 seconds, if you're loose, you're flying and hitting something. Something that has stopped by the time you hit it. Or something outside of the vehicle entirely. When you hit something, the deceleration of your body or body part is all that is relevant. A standing passenger can fall and get seriously injured just from hard braking.
• adrian_b 4y ago
  Which of public transit or driving is faster depends on the city, i.e. it depends on how congested the streets available for private cars are, in comparison with what is available for public transit. I live in a city with subway and going by subway to any place that is not too close (so that the time to walk to a subway station is not a too large fraction of the total time) is much faster than driving a car, with the possible exception of late in the night, when the streets might be empty. In most cities with subways where I have been, this was also true, because they also had congested street traffic. I have also been in several cities where the buses had their own street lanes, which were forbidden for private cars. In such cities, I have also seen frequently cases when going by bus was faster than driving.
• ajb 4y ago
  In a lot of places, if everyone using public transport were to use a car instead, they definitely wouldn't be faster than before; most likely much slower. In London, you often see from route planning apps that the time for using a car (including waiting for an uber) would be less - except during the rush hours, which is when most people need to.
  • xboxnolifes 4y ago
    It depends. In most places in the US, bas transit shares the same road space as cars. If almost all bus users switched to cars, not only would driving be slower, but riding the bus would also be made slower as well. So driving would still end up faster than taking the bus.
    • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Or phrasing that differently, the more people take public transport the faster everyone goes. Which is basically the whole point of it, greater efficiency in moving people around.
• D13Fd 4y ago
  I used to love taking the bus when I lived a block away from a major bus line. It took maybe 25-50% longer overall but I could actually use that time rather than driving and sitting in rush hour traffic. Honestly I’m not sure why anyone is surprised that public transit takes around twice as long. It’s self selected. The people who are going to use it live close and us it because that worthwhile. So on average it makes sense that it would be some multiple of the time it takes to drive.
• raffraffraff 4y ago
  It's a mixed bag. I don't drive, so whenever I have to go somewhere I don't really consider how long it would take to drive there. But whenever I do get there by car (eg: friend or family member) it's amazing how much extra time goes into stuff that i never have to think about. Like where to park, how much the parking costs, what if we meander half a mile shopping and grab lunch? Now we have to walk back to the car instead of having a bus straight home.
  • flemhans 4y ago
    You just take a car-sharing car back to your car. If there's no car-sharing car nearby, you can take an e-scooter to the car-sharing car, and then go to your car.
    • sagarm 4y ago
      Why not just take it step further and take it home?
  • listenallyall 4y ago
    I guess you have the transit map, and all the schedules, memorized? Because for most people, getting to an unfamiliar location at a specific time by public transit alone is quite a project. And then if you "meander half a mile", does the bus change its route to come get you?
    • pastage 4y ago
      Bring up your phone assitant and say "I want to take public transport to the meat packning district" and it will probbly work. My seven year old did it, and paid, on her own. GTFS is published by most public transport these days, so you have all the routes described months ahead of time. You can actually have all the schedules offline.
    • sagarm 4y ago
      The majority of people use navigation even when driving to a familiar location so they can be routed around other traffic and disruptions (which are by no means infrequent). Similarly, I'll check the route home on Google Maps to decide not only which route to take but which mode (walking, transit, shared vehicle, etc) to use.
• throwaway22032 4y ago
  Yep. I live close to a tube station. If I'm going somewhere on the network (~50% of journeys) it's great. Primarily because of traffic congestion, mind - in the early morning travel time is about the same by both methods. If I'm going anywhere else? Car hands down. The main problem is that the entire network of places is available by car by definition. Worst case is car and then the rest by foot (e.g. into a national park). By contrast public transport just doesn't serve the majority of places at all. Every train station has a road, not every road has a train station.
• drevil-v2 4y ago
  Same for me. It is approximately 5.8kms from my apartment to work. I have walked it before during a bus driver strike, took just over an hour at a leisurely pace - 11mins per km. Normal days - it takes me around 6 to 8 minutes to walk to the bus stop. There is a waiting period for the bus to arrive since you want to get to the bus stop before the scheduled stop - sometimes the bus is early. Then it takes nearly 30minutes to get to work - frequent stops along the way, 5 minutes waiting at the bus/rail interchange etc. Finally 7 minute walk to the office from the bus stop. Total of usually 50 minutes door to door via public transport and it costs $8 both ways. If I took my car, it would take me 15 minutes and $17 parking fee.
  • pja 4y ago
    Perfect cycling distance. In a sane country the bike would be the obvious mode of transport for most trips of this kind of distance.
    • drevil-v2 4y ago
      Weather is too erratic to lock in a bike ride. The area is quite hilly; narrow roads and steep gradients - not really commuter bike friendly.
      • pja 4y ago
        Could be very e-bike friendly!
• userabchn 4y ago
  I do not think discussions about transportation environmental cost usually sufficiently consider the productivity lost because of how long it takes to get places by public transport. We get a number of hours of productive work from each person every day, and so that productivity required all of the resources that the person consumed in a day. An extra hour of commuting every day, because I need to go from A to B, but because I take public transport I need to go A to C and then C to B and along the way need to make lots of stops, means that an extra fraction of the resources I consumed for that day will not be used for productivity. Also, the diagrams showing public transport being more space efficient often seem to assume that the public transport will be at capacity. On my 30 minute bus ride, to/from a major downtown, I am not infrequently the only passenger on the whole bus.
• tgv 4y ago
  It does take longer for most destinations, but not for my work commute. The traffic between work and home is quite bad, so public transport is equally fast, or faster.
• boh 4y ago
  There's also less people that have to own cars. If NYC didn't have subways it would be unlivable given the density. Also for what you've described to be true, you likely lived in a high income area since they provide easier access to where most offices are situated. If you're commuting in from the outer boroughs into Manhattan, driving is way slower given the traffic (and way more stressful, and then there's the parking situation).
  • doktorhladnjak 4y ago
    If NYC did not have subways, it wouldn’t be as dense. It would be a totally different city with respect to culture and who lives there. Something that is often overlooked in the transit vs private car debate is that modes of transportation affect urban design and ultimately different ways of living. Driving in a transit oriented city is totally different than riding transit in an auto oriented city.
• virtualritz 4y ago
  That. Most cars today contain one person – the driver. Until we have full autonomy, they have to keep their focus on the road. I read about four books/month. Whenever I used public transport to commute that number doubled. Not so when I commuted by car. And don't tell me I can listen to audio books. This doesn't compare in reading speed. And it is also is a dangerous distraction for most driving situations that are not an empty highway or a traffic jam.
• michael1999 4y ago
  Sounds like biking distance, but you can't really read on a bike.
• tvbusy 4y ago
  I live in Germany and have a different experience: it takes forever to find a parking space and the cost could be prohibitely expensive. In contrast, I can take the subway or bus and walk one or two block and don't ever have to worry about parking. Travel time with public transport and by car are mostly the same, with car having a higher risk of taking longer. Travel outside the city though, is certainly much easier with a car.
• inferiorhuman 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. That sounds like a great reason to build public transit infrastructure and housing near public transit infrastructure.
• TomSwirly 4y ago
  You might be surprised to discover that the world is different from your very limited experience of it. I lived in New York City for thirty years. The subway is always the fastest way to get everywhere, except in the middle of the night. Now I live in Amsterdam, and public transportation isn't quite as fast as taking my bike, but it's still everywhere, and faster than driving. > The only real benefit of public transit is you can read during the commute. Crazy carbrains, destroying our planet. So sick of you.
• fho 4y ago
  I commuted 80 km (as the car drives) every day for 5 years. This was in Germany and I used public transport most of the time. Driving by car was about 1h, public transport was 1:30h but I really prefered going by bike->train->tram over going by car. If have to go that long every day, just napping in the train is a huge benefit over a stressful car ride for me.
• cafard 4y ago
  Yes, and walking takes about twice as long as riding transit. I know that I am fortunate to live about 3 miles from work. But the moment I started riding transit instead of driving, I found my temper much improved and my wallet fatter by the difference between bus fare and downtown parking rates. We do own a car. Grocery shopping relying on public transportation would be difficult, though I did manage it when much younger.