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>I mean, this is enormously dependent on how busy the route or routes is. A once an hour route is _very_ infrequent. Yes, it depends on the city. In Atlanta

by jasode 2y ago

>I mean, this is enormously dependent on how busy the route or routes is. A once an hour route is _very_ infrequent. Yes, it depends on the city. In Atlanta GA, the MARTA bus stops have 40-minute wait intervals outside of peak times. In Missoula Montana, the bus stop interval is 1 hour on Saturdays and Sundays. https://mountainline.com/your-trip/maps-schedules/ https://mountainline.com/your-trip/maps-schedules/ In the USA away from dense downtowns, using a public bus can be 4x the total commute time of a personal car when adding in all the extra wait times and the extra non-bus travel times to get to-and-from the bus stops. A 30-minute commute by car that takes 2 hours by public bus isn't appealing to most Americans. The layout & logistics of American lifestyles favors the car. At any Costco parking lot, you can see soccer moms loading up the SUV with a ton of groceries and toilet paper. Trying to haul all that on a public bus would not be convenient. (The other passengers would also be annoyed by that extra baggage taking up space.) And drivers also like listening to music in their private cars. In the USA, the more realistic consumer preference change would be replacing private personal cars with public robot driverless cars. Americans could then keep most of their lifestyle without drastic changes while the fleet of driverless cars reduces the space for parking and the pollution.

rsynnott 2y ago
> In Atlanta GA, the MARTA bus stops have 40-minute wait intervals outside of peak times. In Missoula Montana, the bus stop interval is 1 hour on Saturdays and Sundays. Yeah, okay, wow, that's really bad. Only place in the US I've ever used the bus was San Francisco (and its immediate surroundings), which is, I suppose, a bit of a special case, as American cities go (it was worse than the buses I'm used to in terms of frequency, but not _dramatically_ worse). > The layout & logistics of American lifestyles favors the car. This is true to some extent, but I would wonder how much of it is chicken-and-egg; people avoid the public transport because, as you've mentioned, it is _unusably bad_ (I wouldn't consider 1/hour acceptable except for late-night or rural services). As I understand it, in NYC, for instance, which has acceptable public transport, people _do_ use it. > At any Costco parking lot, you can see soccer moms loading up the SUV with a ton of groceries and toilet paper. Trying to haul all that on a public bus would not be convenient. Grocery delivery is a thing (actually, my impression is that it's less common as a first-party thing in the US; I'm not entirely sure why). And of course even in less car-dependent countries people often do use cars for _that_ sort of thing. > And drivers also like listening to music in their private cars. I mean, this would have made sense as a justification at one time (I think way back in the day this was actually used as a selling point by car companies), but come on, now, the walkman came out in 1979 (even before that, the transistor radio with earphone was a thing). I'm 40 and have been listening to music on public transport all my life.

by jasode 2y ago

rsynnott 2y ago

> In Atlanta GA, the MARTA bus stops have 40-minute wait intervals outside of peak times. In Missoula Montana, the bus stop interval is 1 hour on Saturdays and Sundays. Yeah, okay, wow, that's really bad. Only place in the US I've ever used the bus was San Francisco (and its immediate surroundings), which is, I suppose, a bit of a special case, as American cities go (it was worse than the buses I'm used to in terms of frequency, but not _dramatically_ worse). > The layout & logistics of American lifestyles favors the car. This is true to some extent, but I would wonder how much of it is chicken-and-egg; people avoid the public transport because, as you've mentioned, it is _unusably bad_ (I wouldn't consider 1/hour acceptable except for late-night or rural services). As I understand it, in NYC, for instance, which has acceptable public transport, people _do_ use it. > At any Costco parking lot, you can see soccer moms loading up the SUV with a ton of groceries and toilet paper. Trying to haul all that on a public bus would not be convenient. Grocery delivery is a thing (actually, my impression is that it's less common as a first-party thing in the US; I'm not entirely sure why). And of course even in less car-dependent countries people often do use cars for _that_ sort of thing. > And drivers also like listening to music in their private cars. I mean, this would have made sense as a justification at one time (I think way back in the day this was actually used as a selling point by car companies), but come on, now, the walkman came out in 1979 (even before that, the transistor radio with earphone was a thing). I'm 40 and have been listening to music on public transport all my life.