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Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant i

Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant if any experience taking the bus. I took the urban bus to and from school for years: at least 1.5 hours each way. Often two, with at least one transfer. Outside of the city center, reliance on buses is a massive poverty tax in terms of reduced quality of life. Remove these bourgeoise policymakers and their unilateral fake goals. Work on real transportation improvements for the people, not to meet the myopic expectations of the ivory tower. That means making transportation maximally fast and low cost. That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation. No one who actually cares about society will be working to make it mirror the patterns of poverty. Disagreement with that premise should always be held in high suspicion.

mtalantikite 2y ago
As someone who has never had a license and admittedly doesn’t know much about car costs, aren’t they expensive? Like how much is a car payment plus insurance every month? And then gas and maintenance? It seems like requiring car ownership to survive is also not great. But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local public transit.
- FredPret 2y ago
  I also took transit for 1.5 hours each way when I moved to Toronto, Canada. My monthly transit cost + Ubers was around $400-1000 (I had to take two systems and frequently took Ubers when the bus was cancelled or delayed). My first car cost about $750 all-in, not counting equity in the car. My commute dropped from 3 hours to less than 1 hour, even in the notorious Toronto traffic. Suddenly I could go to Costco, and my grocery bill dropped by half, from around $800 to around $400. I got a good deal both buying and selling, and on the subsequent car, so my true cost was less than the monthly payment. Public transit makes sense in very dense areas. Everywhere else it’s an expensive boondoggle and the working class is better off driving old clunkers than the damn bus.
- dogbait 2y ago
  Expensive. Here in North Virginia (just outside of DC) it was $26k OTD for a 2021 Camry LE. We pay $223/mo in car insurance for my wife and I and $1k/yr in property tax for the car. Both held a license for 20+ years, both in our early 40s with no accidents in that time. Car maintenance cost varies - haven't had to deal with that yet. Depending on the study you look at it costs an owner $8 876 per year and society about 1/3 of the lifetime cost in supporting the vehicle (in the form of roads, pollution, infrastructure etc.) I never had a car in London (where public transport is used by all regardless of income and background). Here in the US we have a long way to go before we level up our public transportation system. That said, Washington DC's Metro is very good indeed. I hope they extend it further and further out. Sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/02/04/lifetime-cost-of-small-car-689000-society-subsidises-this-ownership-with-275000/?sh=4b5414226398 https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/02/04/lifetime... https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/study-car-ownership-costs-all-of-us-the-vehicle-owner-and-society https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/study-car-ownership-c...
- iteria 2y ago
  I took the bus for nearly a decade and I drive a car now. My life was greatly improved by having a car and while a car is more expensive technically, in indirect costs, it feels like a break even to me. At least as someone who buys cheap cars, tends to live within 30mins drive of my job and keeps them for a good long time. Even in a good public transit area in the US there is a significant time sink to using public transit for literally every aspect of your life. Getting to work is efficient and not significantly more time intensive than driving, but doing everything else like visiting a friend, going to a hair salon, get groceries can be a huge difference depending on what city you're in. I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive, but getting groceries was a harrowing 45mins journey. Places where getting to work took twice as long, but I could walk to the grocery store. In the US there's just no way to make public transit really work across all dimensions. Especially as we add in specificity. Like needing to bring home a large amount of items or visit humans instead of businesses. EU was much better about this just because of how mixed housing and businesses were.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    > I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive Woah, where? I find this hard to believe. Even trains are normally slower than driving.
    - Panzer04 2y ago
      Really? I feel like this sort of thing is hugely dependant on start and endpoints. Trains crush cars during peak, and are usually still better in dense areas, but add 10-20 minutes of last mile either end and driving quickly ends up faster (although in dense areas parking is not cheap)
- mrangle 2y ago
  Public transportation isn't exactly cheap when used every day. Then factor in your time and frustration. Nothing is as expensive as your time. Cars are amazing at their current cost, comparatively. And as I said, we should work on making them cheaper. Toward an ultimate goal of making everyone "richer". Which begins with reducing hidden poverty taxes like unavoidable multi-hour public transportation commutes. My ultimate dream for society, as a whole, is for everyone to "be rich". I don't necessarily mean having a disgusting surplus of money in the bank, but rather to eliminate the innumerable aspects of being "not rich" that boil down to an endless string of otherwise unnecessary daily sacrifices, sufferings and indignities. Then, at least, we'd begin to see the trauma of poverty be reduced and hopefully eliminated. In this case, that means turning a gimlet eye to the human cost of unavoidable mass transport that isn't rail. Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category. This opens up easier access to work, relationships, housing, and food including breaking down the barriers of food deserts. Thanks. The commute time was more an aspect of the innate slowness bus transportation combined with the unavoidable route through city side streets. In other words, it would be hard to improve upon. By car, the route is thirty minutes.
  - ColonelPhantom 2y ago
    > Nothing is as expensive as your time. Then public transport should be way cheaper than driving, as on transit you have some downtime where you can scroll through your phone, listen to some music, or perhaps even crack open your laptop if you're on a proper train. Driving requires constant attention, so you can't relax or do anything else in the meantime.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Scrolling through your phone is not exactly quality time. In general the time spent on any form of commuting is a net cost to be minimized.
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        Depends on what you're doing. I frequently use my rides to go through email.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Car ownership costs vary widely. If you buy a new $50,000 car every two years, that is obviously very expensive, and then will be expensive to insure, and many of those luxury vehicles aren't amazingly efficient. Whereas you can usually find a reliable and efficient used car for under $5000 and keep it for quite a bit more than 2 years, with a good driving record and the lower cost vehicle it can cost less than $1000/year to insure, and maintenance is dramatically less expensive if you do it yourself. And I mean the difference is $60 for a part on the internet vs. they charge you $250 for the same part and $500 for the labor to put it in. By contrast, a monthly NYC subway pass will run you a little over $1500/year, which will in most cases be less but not necessarily a whole lot less. Plus whatever you get stuck paying to Uber whenever you have to go somewhere the subway doesn't.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Cars can be expensive, yeah. I live in a very car-centric area (zero public transportation, with many things too far away for realistically walking there). To throw some numbers out: A "cheap" used car ($5k), financed over 3 years at 8% is $156.68 per month. At my middle age, decent full coverage insurance is around $100 per month (it would cost a lot more if I were still younger). We're at $256.68 monthly just to have a car that we may elect to drive. But that doesn't include parking for the car (a place to live with good parking tends to cost more than a place with awful parking). It also doesn't include the costs of actually driving the car, like regular maintenance, stuff that inevitably breaks or wears out, fuel, washing the car, and so on. Let's just make up a number and say that these things average ~$150 per month, for a total of ~$406.68 per month to drive a car. Now, suppose that a commute is 20 minutes each way using that car, or 1 hour if riding the bus. And that a bus pass costs $62 per month. And let's say that a person "brings home" $25 per hour worked, and that they work 40 hours in a regular week (173.93 hours in a regular month), and that the commute time counts as unpaid work. The car commute adds 14.49 hours per month, for 188.42 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $406.68. The bus commute adds 43.48 hours per month, for 217.41 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $62. The bus seems cheaper and slower at this point, which we all probably implicitly knew to be true. -- But if my math is right: By the time transportation is paid for, the person commuting by car has an effective hourly wage of $20.92 for their time+commute. And the person riding the bus has an effective hourly wage of $19.73/hour for their time+commute. So owning and driving the car may be a better option than taking the bus, depending on a person's specific situation and proclivities. And of course, it's more nuanced than that in ways that are harder to math out. With a car, commute time is just lost time. A person driving a car must drive that car the entire time; they don't get to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever, but they're only doing that for 40 minutes a day. With a bus pass, commute time might be productive time. A person riding a bus might decide to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever. So if a person chooses to do so, they can use some of that 43.48 hours riding back and forth to work doing something that has meaning to them. On the other hand: Owning a cheap(ish) car means being able to travel to places where a bus doesn't go, and do so on a whim, and (optionally) take a mountain of stuff along with them if that is useful for whatever reason. So yeah, cars are expensive. But buses are also expensive. (Life is expensive.)
Cheer2171 2y ago
Are you open to the possibility that your particular experience with buses is not what all buses are or must be like? This is also sounds like an underfunded and sparse bus system. You can do buses right or you can do them poorly, same with anything. If you have a dense enough network that most people don't have to transfer, or enough frequency it doesn't matter, it makes a huge difference. Public transportation (and particularly buses and coaches) are ubiquitous in some transportation systems in some very rich world cities. London comes to mind. The double decker buses are beloved. Bus rapid transit can actually be really nice. You know that rock stars and politicians practically live on buses while they do traveling events? Of course a BRT isn't going to be that private luxury, but even a middle quality charter bus that makes limited stops is pretty darn good. Having dedicated lanes removed the worst part of buses compared to trains. I used to daily take the AC Transit transbay buses from the East Bay to San Francisco, which are double-decker Greyhounds and have comfortable reclining seating with tables and wifi. The single entrance/exit is a benefit, because it only runs commuter hours and so in the morning it only picks up in the East Bay and drops off in SF. It allows enforcement of fares too. It's a higher fare, but that also attracts a commuter clientele. The main problem with it is that it is too popular and gets crowded, and you're SOL if all the buses are already full at your stop. But that if the flaw is that it is too popular, that's the best and easiest problem to have. Sometimes a regular AC Transit bus would show up and we would all groan and curse.
- DopplerSmell 2y ago
  The biggest problem with public transport is usually the public. Segregated services for commuters are great, but catching a bus to shop/recreation/restaurants is miserable and restrictive. As as aside, developing mass transit always has the problem of being at the whim of the next political goal (subsidised bus routes especially). Roads are physical easy to understand, so less subject to political vs.
  - ColonelPhantom 2y ago
    > Roads are physical easy to understand ??? Yes, roads require less 'active upkeep', an austerity government might stop funding transit but they will not close roads. However, this is more of a feature of the supposed 'independence' of car transport, not 'easy to understand'. In addition, defunding transit would be a lot harder and weirder if it is in a form that requires actual infrastructure (metro, train, tram) rather than some stops and a schedule (bus). That's one potential reason to trust bus transit projects less. Do keep in mind that roads aren't free after construction either; they typically require pretty significant upkeep (especially things like repaving, but also e.g. traffic signals).
ColonelPhantom 2y ago
Just because public transport is a poverty tax where you went to school does not mean buses and especially other transit are inherently for poor people. Buses do tend to be mediocre for longer distances, but the main issue is general quality of service. I grew up in a region with fairly mediocre transit, but because the living environment is not hostile most things can easily be done by bike unless you need to go to another city. Hell, I biked 8km to school, and while somewhat time consuming it was quite literally free exercise. When I went to uni, before moving to that city I relied on transit. Because of the low density in the region, trains are only half-hourly (which is by far the most sucky part) and it's on single-track rails so every train stops at all stations. However during rush hour it's still time-competitive with cars, and transfers are generally pretty good because those are the reason transit works in that region at all. Something like "you need a car to be able to get to (store)" that's mentioned in another comment would be literally unthinkable here. You can get practically anywhere with a bike and a transit card.
newsclues 2y ago
As someone that’s taken bus rides that are over a day long. I want good inter city rail. I want good urban railway or subway in metropolitan areas. And I want bike lanes for last mile travel. Once we do that and reduce the demand and congestion on the roads, we can plan new roads accordingly.
osigurdson 2y ago
>> No one who actually cares about society will be working to make it mirror the patterns of poverty Great comment! This is an incredible way to put it.
gcr 2y ago
My dad lived in a Colorado suburb and took the bus to work. He saw firsthand how the bus deteriorates when bad policy doesn’t fund public transportation. When he retired in his sixties, he was running on the order of 50 miles a week or so for his morning commute. Our governor adopted budget cuts that forced the public busses to run private ads, then called them an “eyesore.” People—especially poor people or families that don’t want to rely on cars — need reliable public transportation!
- TomK32 2y ago
  It's not just poor people who don't want to rely on cars but also those too young to have a license, or momentarily too sick or simply too old to drive safely and of course those with suspended licenses for whatever reason. Mobility should be a right for everyone, not just car owners.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Yep. People who can’t drive is big chunk of the population, which people who can drive just don’t see. Estimates are around 30%.
pkulak 2y ago
> That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation. That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re lucky. That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap! Trains, my friend. We need trains. Busses first, but eventually trains.
- rayiner 2y ago
  Cars fit in cities just fine. Just got back from Atlanta. Much nicer and cleaner and cheaper than New York City. The only problem is the pollution, which is fixed by EVs. The other stuff, like a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system. Trains are not the solution. Even the best train systems are much slower than point to point car transportation. When I go to Tokyo on business, I take Ubers, not the (excellent) train system, because cars are faster and more convenient. In Japan, 80% of households have a car. In Tokyo prefecture, there are about 40 cars per 100 households. In Osaka it’s 65 per 100.
  - hamandcheese 2y ago
    I am sure cars are faster when you can afford to pay a chauffeur and don't have to park yourself.
  - kanbara 2y ago
    this is insane. i have never ever taken a taxi in tokyo. the transit system is world class, cheap, and extremely convenient.
    - wozniacki 2y ago
      You mean even the part where people get stuffed into already packed trains? [1] I get it. Japanese trains are some of the best anywhere but lets not make them into some downside-free experience, not including the amount of walking thats involved trying to get into and out of the maze of levels at some of the stations, dodging salarymen and other straphangers.[2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSuU3GOKWAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSuU3GOKWAY [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCqBlwJy4M8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCqBlwJy4M8
doubloon 2y ago
well i rode a bike for several years and i would love separate interlocking paths for bikes to be everywhere. right now i cannot even go half a mile to get groceries because someone obsessed with "not modeling poverty" decided there should be no way to safely cross the 6 lane street between me and the grocery store.
yongjik 2y ago
That buses take 1.5 hours to an urban center while cars don't is not an immobile fact of life: it is the result of decades of policy decisions that used limited budget on more roads rather than buses and trains. If, for example, Denver, CO had an actual functioning transportation network, it would cover a decent chunk of its neighboring suburbs, and these parts will be considered more desirable because you don't have to waste time driving in and out of Denver. And then these parts will be developed faster, providing more housing to people who don't like the hassle of driving and parking, which will create even more public demand to extend existing infrastructure. That it doesn't happen just means Americans are stuck in the worldview of "I have never seen a functional public transit system in my life; I can't imagine why anyone would waste money on that!"
- soared 2y ago
  Hard agree - look at the development of large apartment complexes right next to lightrail stations in Denver. These were promoted by policy changes, but are effective in providing mass public transit of reasonable quality into the city center from the (extremely small) suburb-ish locations they exist at. If denver built out that light rail into a network dense housing could exist in the suburbs at an extremely reasonable cost (suburbs are cheaper than downtown, apartments are cheaper than housing). Like the article says, the neighboring counties/etc just don't want this, as the HOAs/homeowners in the suburbs want to entrench themselves and increase property values. Buses that can drive in the shoulder are better for people who already take the bus, but they aren't going to get many more people riding the bus. A light rail that actually went all the way to Boulder would help. Or a lightrail that actually went to Golden, and not only the government building 3 miles uphill from downtown Golden.
nox101 2y ago
You should consider experiencing living in places with good non-automobile transportation. a few off the top of my head. Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, London Poor people in these cities don’t feel disadvantaged for not having a car. I fact most people in these cities don’t have a car regardless of income level lived with a car in California for 20yrs, Lived without in some of those other cities for 15. without was way better. When I really needed a vehicle to carry something I could get a taxi. Trains are slow when poorly designed. good train systems have multiple levels of express trains.
- dmix 2y ago
  dont poor people in Paris live on the edges of the city far away from the good jobs downtown and are closer to the highways? I don't know much about European cities but maybe it's easier to build housing there than it is here because that's always the main issue in north america. The only reason people live in the suburbs where everyone is forced to drive is because a) housing it cheaper and b) its safer (most EU cities probably dont have anywhere near the crime levels of the US) c) its easier to raise kids because decent schools dont have waiting lists and basic stuff like grocery stores are cheaper I know it's a meme on Reddit but people living outside metropolitian areas aren't there simply because they are pro-car.
  - stouset 2y ago
    I know it’s hard to imagine if America is all you know, but there are other alternatives than endless suburbia.
    - dmix 2y ago
      yes but local government regulation prevents it, zoning and other overt policies manufactured suburbia, not supply and demand, while NIBMYism kills any possible development in urban areas or suburbs on the edges of cities https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265710941_Zoned_Out_Regulation_Markets_and_Choices_in_Transportation_and_Metropolitan_Land_Use_review https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265710941_Zoned_Out... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw
locallost 2y ago
I took public transport that was pretty bad, and now that I am older, I am still very supportive of public transportation. Unlike personal automotive transportation, it's been made to work somewhere. Cheaper and faster automotive transport does not mix well, people have been dreaming about it for a century and somehow it never worked anywhere. It's a shame you're throwing words like ivory tower around because it's exactly the acceptance of observed reality that is forcing people to think about new ways of doing things. Let's care about working people in ways other than making them spend a huge chunk of their income on inefficient transportation that always takes forever no matter how many lanes you build. Transportation they have to use because it's exactly the middle class that wants to prioritize its own comfort instead of the common good and there are no alternatives. Colorado has the right idea.
CalRobert 2y ago
Your proposed solution makes the world a dangerous, more hostile, more lonely choice for people who do not drive (and those who do, for that matter). Among other things, car-focused landscapes are terrible for raising independent children. You are removing the ability for them to travel on their own safely and replacing it with sprawling auto-focused landscapes.
globular-toast 2y ago
Buses are only bad because everyone else has cars. They get all downsides of car travel (plus more) with none of the upsides. It wouldn't be a "poverty tax" if the alternative was walking or cycling.
hifromwork 2y ago
>Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant if any experience taking the bus. It must be very cultural. I'm pretty well off (as most experienced IT people are), and I travel with Bus (or a Bike) to my job every weekday. Most of my friends and coworkers do the same (I don't even know anyone in my team who drives to work). I'm sorry about your experience with school bus - this sounds disastrous. But believe me that it's possible to improve. In my (big, European) city public transport and biking infrastructure is pretty good, cheap, and useful.

mtalantikite 2y ago

As someone who has never had a license and admittedly doesn’t know much about car costs, aren’t they expensive? Like how much is a car payment plus insurance every month? And then gas and maintenance? It seems like requiring car ownership to survive is also not great. But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local public transit.

FredPret 2y ago
I also took transit for 1.5 hours each way when I moved to Toronto, Canada. My monthly transit cost + Ubers was around $400-1000 (I had to take two systems and frequently took Ubers when the bus was cancelled or delayed). My first car cost about $750 all-in, not counting equity in the car. My commute dropped from 3 hours to less than 1 hour, even in the notorious Toronto traffic. Suddenly I could go to Costco, and my grocery bill dropped by half, from around $800 to around $400. I got a good deal both buying and selling, and on the subsequent car, so my true cost was less than the monthly payment. Public transit makes sense in very dense areas. Everywhere else it’s an expensive boondoggle and the working class is better off driving old clunkers than the damn bus.
dogbait 2y ago
Expensive. Here in North Virginia (just outside of DC) it was $26k OTD for a 2021 Camry LE. We pay $223/mo in car insurance for my wife and I and $1k/yr in property tax for the car. Both held a license for 20+ years, both in our early 40s with no accidents in that time. Car maintenance cost varies - haven't had to deal with that yet. Depending on the study you look at it costs an owner $8 876 per year and society about 1/3 of the lifetime cost in supporting the vehicle (in the form of roads, pollution, infrastructure etc.) I never had a car in London (where public transport is used by all regardless of income and background). Here in the US we have a long way to go before we level up our public transportation system. That said, Washington DC's Metro is very good indeed. I hope they extend it further and further out. Sources: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/02/04/lifetime-cost-of-small-car-689000-society-subsidises-this-ownership-with-275000/?sh=4b5414226398 https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/02/04/lifetime... https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/study-car-ownership-costs-all-of-us-the-vehicle-owner-and-society https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/study-car-ownership-c...
iteria 2y ago
I took the bus for nearly a decade and I drive a car now. My life was greatly improved by having a car and while a car is more expensive technically, in indirect costs, it feels like a break even to me. At least as someone who buys cheap cars, tends to live within 30mins drive of my job and keeps them for a good long time. Even in a good public transit area in the US there is a significant time sink to using public transit for literally every aspect of your life. Getting to work is efficient and not significantly more time intensive than driving, but doing everything else like visiting a friend, going to a hair salon, get groceries can be a huge difference depending on what city you're in. I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive, but getting groceries was a harrowing 45mins journey. Places where getting to work took twice as long, but I could walk to the grocery store. In the US there's just no way to make public transit really work across all dimensions. Especially as we add in specificity. Like needing to bring home a large amount of items or visit humans instead of businesses. EU was much better about this just because of how mixed housing and businesses were.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > I lived in a city where I was faster to take the bus to work than drive Woah, where? I find this hard to believe. Even trains are normally slower than driving.
  - Panzer04 2y ago
    Really? I feel like this sort of thing is hugely dependant on start and endpoints. Trains crush cars during peak, and are usually still better in dense areas, but add 10-20 minutes of last mile either end and driving quickly ends up faster (although in dense areas parking is not cheap)
mrangle 2y ago
Public transportation isn't exactly cheap when used every day. Then factor in your time and frustration. Nothing is as expensive as your time. Cars are amazing at their current cost, comparatively. And as I said, we should work on making them cheaper. Toward an ultimate goal of making everyone "richer". Which begins with reducing hidden poverty taxes like unavoidable multi-hour public transportation commutes. My ultimate dream for society, as a whole, is for everyone to "be rich". I don't necessarily mean having a disgusting surplus of money in the bank, but rather to eliminate the innumerable aspects of being "not rich" that boil down to an endless string of otherwise unnecessary daily sacrifices, sufferings and indignities. Then, at least, we'd begin to see the trauma of poverty be reduced and hopefully eliminated. In this case, that means turning a gimlet eye to the human cost of unavoidable mass transport that isn't rail. Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category. This opens up easier access to work, relationships, housing, and food including breaking down the barriers of food deserts. Thanks. The commute time was more an aspect of the innate slowness bus transportation combined with the unavoidable route through city side streets. In other words, it would be hard to improve upon. By car, the route is thirty minutes.
- ColonelPhantom 2y ago
  > Nothing is as expensive as your time. Then public transport should be way cheaper than driving, as on transit you have some downtime where you can scroll through your phone, listen to some music, or perhaps even crack open your laptop if you're on a proper train. Driving requires constant attention, so you can't relax or do anything else in the meantime.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Scrolling through your phone is not exactly quality time. In general the time spent on any form of commuting is a net cost to be minimized.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      Depends on what you're doing. I frequently use my rides to go through email.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
Car ownership costs vary widely. If you buy a new $50,000 car every two years, that is obviously very expensive, and then will be expensive to insure, and many of those luxury vehicles aren't amazingly efficient. Whereas you can usually find a reliable and efficient used car for under $5000 and keep it for quite a bit more than 2 years, with a good driving record and the lower cost vehicle it can cost less than $1000/year to insure, and maintenance is dramatically less expensive if you do it yourself. And I mean the difference is $60 for a part on the internet vs. they charge you $250 for the same part and $500 for the labor to put it in. By contrast, a monthly NYC subway pass will run you a little over $1500/year, which will in most cases be less but not necessarily a whole lot less. Plus whatever you get stuck paying to Uber whenever you have to go somewhere the subway doesn't.
ssl-3 2y ago
Cars can be expensive, yeah. I live in a very car-centric area (zero public transportation, with many things too far away for realistically walking there). To throw some numbers out: A "cheap" used car ($5k), financed over 3 years at 8% is $156.68 per month. At my middle age, decent full coverage insurance is around $100 per month (it would cost a lot more if I were still younger). We're at $256.68 monthly just to have a car that we may elect to drive. But that doesn't include parking for the car (a place to live with good parking tends to cost more than a place with awful parking). It also doesn't include the costs of actually driving the car, like regular maintenance, stuff that inevitably breaks or wears out, fuel, washing the car, and so on. Let's just make up a number and say that these things average ~$150 per month, for a total of ~$406.68 per month to drive a car. Now, suppose that a commute is 20 minutes each way using that car, or 1 hour if riding the bus. And that a bus pass costs $62 per month. And let's say that a person "brings home" $25 per hour worked, and that they work 40 hours in a regular week (173.93 hours in a regular month), and that the commute time counts as unpaid work. The car commute adds 14.49 hours per month, for 188.42 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $406.68. The bus commute adds 43.48 hours per month, for 217.41 hours total time in work+commute at a cost of $62. The bus seems cheaper and slower at this point, which we all probably implicitly knew to be true. -- But if my math is right: By the time transportation is paid for, the person commuting by car has an effective hourly wage of $20.92 for their time+commute. And the person riding the bus has an effective hourly wage of $19.73/hour for their time+commute. So owning and driving the car may be a better option than taking the bus, depending on a person's specific situation and proclivities. And of course, it's more nuanced than that in ways that are harder to math out. With a car, commute time is just lost time. A person driving a car must drive that car the entire time; they don't get to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever, but they're only doing that for 40 minutes a day. With a bus pass, commute time might be productive time. A person riding a bus might decide to read a book or hang out on HN or whatever. So if a person chooses to do so, they can use some of that 43.48 hours riding back and forth to work doing something that has meaning to them. On the other hand: Owning a cheap(ish) car means being able to travel to places where a bus doesn't go, and do so on a whim, and (optionally) take a mountain of stuff along with them if that is useful for whatever reason. So yeah, cars are expensive. But buses are also expensive. (Life is expensive.)

Cheer2171 2y ago

Are you open to the possibility that your particular experience with buses is not what all buses are or must be like? This is also sounds like an underfunded and sparse bus system. You can do buses right or you can do them poorly, same with anything. If you have a dense enough network that most people don't have to transfer, or enough frequency it doesn't matter, it makes a huge difference. Public transportation (and particularly buses and coaches) are ubiquitous in some transportation systems in some very rich world cities. London comes to mind. The double decker buses are beloved. Bus rapid transit can actually be really nice. You know that rock stars and politicians practically live on buses while they do traveling events? Of course a BRT isn't going to be that private luxury, but even a middle quality charter bus that makes limited stops is pretty darn good. Having dedicated lanes removed the worst part of buses compared to trains. I used to daily take the AC Transit transbay buses from the East Bay to San Francisco, which are double-decker Greyhounds and have comfortable reclining seating with tables and wifi. The single entrance/exit is a benefit, because it only runs commuter hours and so in the morning it only picks up in the East Bay and drops off in SF. It allows enforcement of fares too. It's a higher fare, but that also attracts a commuter clientele. The main problem with it is that it is too popular and gets crowded, and you're SOL if all the buses are already full at your stop. But that if the flaw is that it is too popular, that's the best and easiest problem to have. Sometimes a regular AC Transit bus would show up and we would all groan and curse.

DopplerSmell 2y ago
The biggest problem with public transport is usually the public. Segregated services for commuters are great, but catching a bus to shop/recreation/restaurants is miserable and restrictive. As as aside, developing mass transit always has the problem of being at the whim of the next political goal (subsidised bus routes especially). Roads are physical easy to understand, so less subject to political vs.
- ColonelPhantom 2y ago
  > Roads are physical easy to understand ??? Yes, roads require less 'active upkeep', an austerity government might stop funding transit but they will not close roads. However, this is more of a feature of the supposed 'independence' of car transport, not 'easy to understand'. In addition, defunding transit would be a lot harder and weirder if it is in a form that requires actual infrastructure (metro, train, tram) rather than some stops and a schedule (bus). That's one potential reason to trust bus transit projects less. Do keep in mind that roads aren't free after construction either; they typically require pretty significant upkeep (especially things like repaving, but also e.g. traffic signals).

ColonelPhantom 2y ago

Just because public transport is a poverty tax where you went to school does not mean buses and especially other transit are inherently for poor people. Buses do tend to be mediocre for longer distances, but the main issue is general quality of service. I grew up in a region with fairly mediocre transit, but because the living environment is not hostile most things can easily be done by bike unless you need to go to another city. Hell, I biked 8km to school, and while somewhat time consuming it was quite literally free exercise. When I went to uni, before moving to that city I relied on transit. Because of the low density in the region, trains are only half-hourly (which is by far the most sucky part) and it's on single-track rails so every train stops at all stations. However during rush hour it's still time-competitive with cars, and transfers are generally pretty good because those are the reason transit works in that region at all. Something like "you need a car to be able to get to (store)" that's mentioned in another comment would be literally unthinkable here. You can get practically anywhere with a bike and a transit card.

newsclues 2y ago

As someone that’s taken bus rides that are over a day long. I want good inter city rail. I want good urban railway or subway in metropolitan areas. And I want bike lanes for last mile travel. Once we do that and reduce the demand and congestion on the roads, we can plan new roads accordingly.

osigurdson 2y ago

>> No one who actually cares about society will be working to make it mirror the patterns of poverty Great comment! This is an incredible way to put it.

gcr 2y ago

My dad lived in a Colorado suburb and took the bus to work. He saw firsthand how the bus deteriorates when bad policy doesn’t fund public transportation. When he retired in his sixties, he was running on the order of 50 miles a week or so for his morning commute. Our governor adopted budget cuts that forced the public busses to run private ads, then called them an “eyesore.” People—especially poor people or families that don’t want to rely on cars — need reliable public transportation!

TomK32 2y ago
It's not just poor people who don't want to rely on cars but also those too young to have a license, or momentarily too sick or simply too old to drive safely and of course those with suspended licenses for whatever reason. Mobility should be a right for everyone, not just car owners.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Yep. People who can’t drive is big chunk of the population, which people who can drive just don’t see. Estimates are around 30%.

pkulak 2y ago

> That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation. That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re lucky. That’s not getting cheap. It’s like saying that single family homes in Manhattan should be cheap, then everything will be better. Cars and mansions don’t fit in cities. They can’t be cheap! Trains, my friend. We need trains. Busses first, but eventually trains.

rayiner 2y ago
Cars fit in cities just fine. Just got back from Atlanta. Much nicer and cleaner and cheaper than New York City. The only problem is the pollution, which is fixed by EVs. The other stuff, like a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system. Trains are not the solution. Even the best train systems are much slower than point to point car transportation. When I go to Tokyo on business, I take Ubers, not the (excellent) train system, because cars are faster and more convenient. In Japan, 80% of households have a car. In Tokyo prefecture, there are about 40 cars per 100 households. In Osaka it’s 65 per 100.
- hamandcheese 2y ago
  I am sure cars are faster when you can afford to pay a chauffeur and don't have to park yourself.
- kanbara 2y ago
  this is insane. i have never ever taken a taxi in tokyo. the transit system is world class, cheap, and extremely convenient.
  - wozniacki 2y ago
    You mean even the part where people get stuffed into already packed trains? [1] I get it. Japanese trains are some of the best anywhere but lets not make them into some downside-free experience, not including the amount of walking thats involved trying to get into and out of the maze of levels at some of the stations, dodging salarymen and other straphangers.[2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSuU3GOKWAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSuU3GOKWAY [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCqBlwJy4M8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCqBlwJy4M8

doubloon 2y ago

well i rode a bike for several years and i would love separate interlocking paths for bikes to be everywhere. right now i cannot even go half a mile to get groceries because someone obsessed with "not modeling poverty" decided there should be no way to safely cross the 6 lane street between me and the grocery store.

yongjik 2y ago

That buses take 1.5 hours to an urban center while cars don't is not an immobile fact of life: it is the result of decades of policy decisions that used limited budget on more roads rather than buses and trains. If, for example, Denver, CO had an actual functioning transportation network, it would cover a decent chunk of its neighboring suburbs, and these parts will be considered more desirable because you don't have to waste time driving in and out of Denver. And then these parts will be developed faster, providing more housing to people who don't like the hassle of driving and parking, which will create even more public demand to extend existing infrastructure. That it doesn't happen just means Americans are stuck in the worldview of "I have never seen a functional public transit system in my life; I can't imagine why anyone would waste money on that!"

soared 2y ago
Hard agree - look at the development of large apartment complexes right next to lightrail stations in Denver. These were promoted by policy changes, but are effective in providing mass public transit of reasonable quality into the city center from the (extremely small) suburb-ish locations they exist at. If denver built out that light rail into a network dense housing could exist in the suburbs at an extremely reasonable cost (suburbs are cheaper than downtown, apartments are cheaper than housing). Like the article says, the neighboring counties/etc just don't want this, as the HOAs/homeowners in the suburbs want to entrench themselves and increase property values. Buses that can drive in the shoulder are better for people who already take the bus, but they aren't going to get many more people riding the bus. A light rail that actually went all the way to Boulder would help. Or a lightrail that actually went to Golden, and not only the government building 3 miles uphill from downtown Golden.

nox101 2y ago

You should consider experiencing living in places with good non-automobile transportation. a few off the top of my head. Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, London Poor people in these cities don’t feel disadvantaged for not having a car. I fact most people in these cities don’t have a car regardless of income level lived with a car in California for 20yrs, Lived without in some of those other cities for 15. without was way better. When I really needed a vehicle to carry something I could get a taxi. Trains are slow when poorly designed. good train systems have multiple levels of express trains.

dmix 2y ago
dont poor people in Paris live on the edges of the city far away from the good jobs downtown and are closer to the highways? I don't know much about European cities but maybe it's easier to build housing there than it is here because that's always the main issue in north america. The only reason people live in the suburbs where everyone is forced to drive is because a) housing it cheaper and b) its safer (most EU cities probably dont have anywhere near the crime levels of the US) c) its easier to raise kids because decent schools dont have waiting lists and basic stuff like grocery stores are cheaper I know it's a meme on Reddit but people living outside metropolitian areas aren't there simply because they are pro-car.
- stouset 2y ago
  I know it’s hard to imagine if America is all you know, but there are other alternatives than endless suburbia.
  - dmix 2y ago
    yes but local government regulation prevents it, zoning and other overt policies manufactured suburbia, not supply and demand, while NIBMYism kills any possible development in urban areas or suburbs on the edges of cities https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265710941_Zoned_Out_Regulation_Markets_and_Choices_in_Transportation_and_Metropolitan_Land_Use_review https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265710941_Zoned_Out... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw

locallost 2y ago

I took public transport that was pretty bad, and now that I am older, I am still very supportive of public transportation. Unlike personal automotive transportation, it's been made to work somewhere. Cheaper and faster automotive transport does not mix well, people have been dreaming about it for a century and somehow it never worked anywhere. It's a shame you're throwing words like ivory tower around because it's exactly the acceptance of observed reality that is forcing people to think about new ways of doing things. Let's care about working people in ways other than making them spend a huge chunk of their income on inefficient transportation that always takes forever no matter how many lanes you build. Transportation they have to use because it's exactly the middle class that wants to prioritize its own comfort instead of the common good and there are no alternatives. Colorado has the right idea.

CalRobert 2y ago

Your proposed solution makes the world a dangerous, more hostile, more lonely choice for people who do not drive (and those who do, for that matter). Among other things, car-focused landscapes are terrible for raising independent children. You are removing the ability for them to travel on their own safely and replacing it with sprawling auto-focused landscapes.

globular-toast 2y ago

Buses are only bad because everyone else has cars. They get all downsides of car travel (plus more) with none of the upsides. It wouldn't be a "poverty tax" if the alternative was walking or cycling.

hifromwork 2y ago

>Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant if any experience taking the bus. It must be very cultural. I'm pretty well off (as most experienced IT people are), and I travel with Bus (or a Bike) to my job every weekday. Most of my friends and coworkers do the same (I don't even know anyone in my team who drives to work). I'm sorry about your experience with school bus - this sounds disastrous. But believe me that it's possible to improve. In my (big, European) city public transport and biking infrastructure is pretty good, cheap, and useful.