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From an efficiency point of view public transportation makes a lot of sense. From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed

From an efficiency point of view public transportation makes a lot of sense. From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I do look forward to travelling to the Netherlands one day and I will enthusiastically use public transit there just as a personal experiment to see if my experience differs enough from the subway transit in Montreal or Toronto that gave me nightmares and has me thinking every time I travel there: "Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this." The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers. I don't see myself ever not being a driver. I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude. It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby". Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above.

ericmay 1y ago
The thing that is so great about better transit for folks in cities in America is that it benefits you specifically in the lifestyle choices you want to live. Introducing better transit options gets folks out of their cars and onto the tram or sidewalk and that leaves you with your desire for solitude with more open highways. > It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby". Fair but you have to remember that this anti-car lobby is rather tiny in comparison to the pro-car lobby which is every state department of transportation, automaker, insurance company, oil executive, auto dealer, etc. they aren’t as loud and annoying because they don’t have to be, but take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.
- inetknght 1y ago
  > take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics. A bit of a segue, but this is true for just about anything with lots of money and/or power. Internet marketing, for example.
vid 1y ago
Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit. Plan your route so you get access to a seat, settle in with a book or music. The other people melt away. Whereas driving a car involves constant interaction with other drivers which in many places (including rural areas, not to single out pickup drivers but there is a pattern) can be quite fraught.
- etrautmann 1y ago
  Agreed - it was a bit of an adjustment moving to NYC and dealing with a packed subway but now I quite enjoy the density and people watching as a feature of the experience.
- mystifyingpoi 1y ago
  > Plan your route so you get access to a seat What do you mean specifically? Most of people working regular jobs don't really get to choose the time for their transit. They generally want to get to work as late as possible and get out of work as early as possible. Which means more people, because everyone wants this. Fun fact, when I was at high school, some students going home by bus would go backwards the bus path and get inside a few stops away from the school, just so they can guarantee a seat and not have to stand up for 60 minutes.
  - vid 1y ago
    Sometimes if you walk to a previous stop or come in from a different line you can find a seat more easily. If it makes sense you could even go a couple stops "backwards" if the train reverses at that point. Shifting your schedule might be another option. At one phase I took standing as a challenge and drastically improved my balance over a couple of years, though it's not fun when the car is really crowded.
    - mystifyingpoi 1y ago
      Sure, but at this point we are just hacking the system. Which is fine, I guess, no harm is done, but it feels wrong :)
qwertygnu 1y ago
I love my personal car bubble as much or more than most people (though maybe not as much as you), but at some point we have to get over ourselves. We're all so spoiled. Why the hell do we deserve to all have our own giant speed machines careening through cities where people (including us drivers!) are trying to live? It doesn't make any sense and it's a shame that we've let it go so far, especially in the US. It should be discouraged (financially, logistically, socially) to drive in dense urban places. Obviously, in order to achieve that, these urban places need to have alternative means of transportation.
- mystifyingpoi 1y ago
  Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density. I'm more dependent on my car(s) when I got the first newborn than I ever was.
  - komali2 1y ago
    > Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density. I hear this all the time yet right now am traveling in Amsterdam and see many parents trucking their kids around in bicycles without issue. Actually I remember seeing this in SF as well, and in Taiwan and Japan I see incredibly young children riding public transit on their own.
    - seper8 1y ago
      Most of these bike moms/dads still have a car at home.
      - tmtvl 1y ago
        As long as those cars are at home in the garage instead of on the road that's fine. The point is having fewer cars on the road, not fewer cars in general. Riding around on a bicycle and having a car for exceptional circumstances and a once a year road trip is healthier and safer than driving that car around every single day.
jcranmer 1y ago
> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby". The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments! These people are just the inverse of the equal(ly stupid) and opposite idiots who think all the problems in society are the result of cars or some other mis-allocation of resources toward transportation. They're incredibly small incredibly stupid groups who's extreme(ly stupid) opinions anchor the discourse, to the detriment of all the adults in the room. You see this pattern of crap on every issue too, not just cars/transportation.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    The case for public transit in the US would be strengthened if it weren't used largely as a vehicle for money laundering public funds into private funds. Another problem is that security tends to be poorly enforced, the last time I rode a public train there was a knife fight in our car over some ear-splitting gang music being played on the wrong turf (lol, literally the turf the train happened to be passing through at that moment as it passed momentarily from a latino to black neighborhood) which did not even alarm most the passengers. Normal people don't want to ride on a vehicle used for turf wars, robbery getaway express, and as a homeless sleeping center. Normal people are alarmed when ear-splitting rap music is being played provocatively, normal people get alarmed when lethal weapons are pulled out for immediate use in a crowded box. An occasion before that, a schizophrenic person tried to corner me in the back of a train car while going on an increasingly aggressive rant about how the government is out to get us. And this would bother me even less if I weren't disarmed, because of course it was illegal for me to carry a gun or knife to protect myself from the literal knife fights surrounding me on the train. I presume anyone poor enough to need public transit with half a brain in that town bought, borrowed, or stole a bicycle.
knorker 1y ago
> Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this. I don't believe this as a real rule. 10min vs 40min, maybe. 1h commute vs 4h commute? I don't believe that you would prefer spending 8h per day in a car. > The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers. The youtuber NotJustBikes keep saying that "the only thing that can improve traffic is viable alternatives to driving". I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history, and that drivers would actually need to pay for the externality costs they incur, instead of being leaches on society.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history Get the government out of the road planning/building business and let the chips fall as they may. There are two big problems with this though. First is demographics. Of all the people who currently say they want this "enough to be a problem" will immediately do an about face the first time they catch wind of a news story where some bigCo buys the land and puts a toll road through somewhere they don't want it or some inner-ring suburb of the kind they sympathize with the residents of losing out in gets absolutely screwed by some regional infrastructure conglomeration routes around them for not playing ball. Second is entrenched interests. Government road management is mostly a result of coincidence. Society was building paved roads for cars at the same time that the modern high touch administrative state was on the up and up so of course the state claimed that as one of the things it administered. Had the 20th century administrative state come 50yr later modern roads may very well have ben built out privately like railroads were. It would be a huge fight to get the government's dick out of it because of all the economic and political interests that are inter-twined with the status quo.
dml2135 1y ago
> Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude. I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.
Ajedi32 1y ago
Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, but also have higher marginal costs. They also take up a lot of space, which in a dense city where space is at a premium makes them even more expensive due to the cost of things like parking and big roads. The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose. And then you instantly run into the problem wherein people lie in all sorts of ways in order to justify distorting the market to their benefit or preference.
  - Ajedi32 1y ago
    True, infrastructure is tricky because you can't have a truly free market due to the impracticality of building, for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly. So instead you end up having to make some decisions about what to supply in a non-market based way, and that's fraught with all sorts of inefficiencies and politics. I think there's certainly room for our approach to be a lot more market-like than it currently is though. On the demand side at least it's pretty straightforward to charge people for what they use based on marginal costs incurred, and use those funds to build out more/better infrastructure.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      > for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly Worked fine for the railroad and they started off with not just competing networks but competing form factors (gauges). As long as users are fairly liquid and can direct themselves at whatever option they consider superior it will probably mostly all work out.
- evolve2k 1y ago
  Gen Z on the whole don’t agree with either of you. Younger people don’t want to have to drive or to take on the burden of vehicle maintenance or the considerable risk of being in an accident. Cramped trains and buses and symptoms of under investment they do not need to be this way. Switzerland deeply values trains and as the saying goes once the business class actively uses trains the whole dynamic changes. Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.
sandworm101 1y ago
>> Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above. Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment. Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport. I want a yard where my dog can hang out unsupervised without worry about stranger dogs coming around. I want to set off fireworks on holidays. Listen to a country-western station. That is the lifestyle that a great many people dream of living. I used to work with a guy from Belgium. He is now in Canada. The guy works in IT (secure stuff, government) but he loves animals. So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day. Doing that means he can have a hobby farm where he keeps a few horses. He bought an old tractor and is looking at growing/bailing his own hay next season. His lab just had puppies. His kids are growing up on a "farm" but go to a great school and have faster internet than I do in my "big city" apartment. Such a lifestyle just isn't possible without easy personal transportation.
- always_imposter 1y ago
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- haspok 1y ago
  Switzerland seems to have kind of the perfect blend of a solution (apart from the lack of space in general): it is _very_ car centric, almost everyone has a car, like in the US. On the other hand, to commute to work from their little sleeping villages they use the excellent train network which makes it possible to do the daily commute faster than by car. And many people use their ebikes, if for nothing else, just to get to the train station... Despite all this, property prices in Zürich (city), for example are sky-rocketing (much more than in the neighbouring villages), and for any available rental flat the viewing queue is usually longer than you can count. How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?... Some people might appreciate a 15 minute walk to their workplace, or a shop open after midnight on the next street, or just the buzzing life of a city in general.
MangoToupe 1y ago
I of course understand this attitude, but it fills me with hopeless dread that this country will never be able to do anything hard again. Our addiction to cars is one of the hardest to swallow and easiest to fix problems, and yet the will to do so is simply non-existent. To convince an American to give up on any collective, just point out they'll be mildly inconvenienced. No wonder we never even tried to fight our carbon emissions.
- cvwright 1y ago
  Safety is the much bigger challenge for public transit in the US right now. Since the pandemic, most cities have really eased off of any enforcement of rules or laws in public spaces. Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    That safety is illusionary. Cars are dangerous, more dangerous than subways. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-19/new-york-city-s-subway-is-actually-safer-than-your-car https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-19/new-yo...
    - mothballed 1y ago
      I suspect many view intentional harm as being far more traumatic than accidental harm. This is less the case if the person actually dies, although it may still be the case for their families.
      - mrguyorama 1y ago
        Someone crashing into you because they can't be assed to pay attention to the road, or get drunk and drive because they don't have public transport IS "intentional" harm. Traffic deaths are rarely "accidents".
        1y ago
komali2 1y ago
> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. Then, you've experienced poor public transit systems. A good one doesn't make you so packed in because there's enough trains for people to have comfortable amounts of space. Anyway, it's moot - if your city has lots of people, the only feasible way to move them around is public transit. Trying anything else will fail due to the nature of two things not being able to exist in one place at the same time. One somewhat packed subway car is several hundred square meters of unmoving packed highway.
- ux266478 1y ago
  I wouldn't qualify Tokyo's public transit system as poor. In fact, the only one that might rival it in Europe would be the one in Moscow.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    From a perspective of "packing people in"? Tokyo is absolutely poor. The MTA doesn't have to employ people to pack extra riders into full subway cars.
  - komali2 1y ago
    Tokyo has better public transit than the United States, certainly. However it's public transit options and general design aren't that great by modern standards. First, they have basically no bicycle infrastructure, and bikes are supposed to go on the sidewalk, so pedestrian cyclist collisions are common. Second, their many lines are semi privatized and split between many companies. That means inefficient design, upkeep, and construction. What should be a place where two lines interconnect is instead an in-station transfer at best - often instead it's a out-station transfer, where you have to return to street level to get to the station serving that company's line. There's also a annoyance around payment and payment systems for this reason. Third , they don't run enough trains. Rush hour is insane. Fourth, they still don't have gates at their platforms, despite their absurdly high suicide rate. I've just traveled through Brussels, London, and Amsterdam. In my opinion Brussels may have had better per capita transit since their tram system was so ridiculously fast and frequent, and cars had only a narrow area to go, with plenty of room for bicycles, however I didn't see much of the city. London trains were too expensive and too unreliable. I agree with you in this case, Tokyo is better. Amsterdam I've only been able to explore a bit but so far I'm very impressed. However for unfathomable reasons they let cars and scooter drive in these tiny roads next to the canals, and even more unfathomably, they give cars tons of the most valuable canal side real estate to park in!! So Tokyo does that better, but Amsterdam so far feels much more liveable. I haven't seen much else of Europe so can't speak to that!
delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
> just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude. Have you tried taking a walk in a forest, a desert, or on an ice sheet? Plenty of solitude to go around...
christina97 1y ago
I don’t enjoy the 15 minutes I spend packed in the NY subway when I have to take it during rush hour, but I do enjoy hopping on the subway off-peak when the cars are half empty and I get a seat and open my subway book. Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty. My two observations are that bumper-to-bumper traffic feels much more stressful to me (a lot more honking, people trying to cut into faster lanes, etc) than the subway (crammed and sometimes there’s a homeless person with bad BO), and that I spend much less time on the rush hour subway than in traffic jams in the past (even during rush hour, the subways are not that packed until you get into Manhattan).
- bombcar 1y ago
  Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time. At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car. But transportation is not Car vs the World™ no matter how many people (online) want it to be. It's a question of "how do you get people where they want/need to be". And that is a multi-faceted question with complex solutions - and the car will be part of it except in extreme/absurd situations that are so rare as to be ignored (like the "islands with no cars" (they have cars) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_islands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_islands). One of the best ways to discuss transportation is to NOT do "r/fuckcars" which makes everyone defensive and hate you, but instead talk about how the benefits are for everyone - grade separation of rail is nice, but it's also self enforcing (trains will crush cars). But grade separation for bikes and pedestrians is a win for everyone! Cars don't like bikes next to them, and bikes don't like being next to cars. Cars don't mind driving a few miles out of their way, but pedestrians just don't want to deviate from the crow-flight line unless rabidly enforced.
  - LastMuel 1y ago
    How come nobody ever points out that roads are “unprofitable”?
bluejekyll 1y ago
> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I get the same independent feeling from others you describe while riding my bike (not a bubble, but that’s a false sense of security in a car giving the 40kish car occupants who die every year in the US). In fact, I generally enjoy that bike experience more than I ever do driving because I never get stuck in car traffic, never get stuck behind a line of cars at a traffic signal. Never need to work about parking, other than finding a secure place to lock up (which some destinations lack). I used to love driving, but I started commuting by bike for work and realized over time that I enjoy biking so much more that I go weeks at this point without ever driving. FWIW I live in a smaller American city of about 120k people, but is part of a greater metro area.
adrian17 1y ago
> From a quality of life point of view The only thing that makes my occasional commute to office or distant family not a complete waste of time, is that I can read something or do a ton of language flashcards on the way. (plus a tiny small health benefit that like 20% of the commute is spent on foot.) In a car, even that would be taken away, with me being forced to focus on the road instead. > I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". Funnily, that's kinda how I feel about being in a car, having to constantly keep some level of awareness of others moving around. For the record, I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.
- eric_h 1y ago
  > I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it. Don't wait too long - I did that and had to take the test again! :)
SubjectToChange 1y ago
>I don't see myself ever not being a driver. Cars aren't getting cheaper, car maintenance has become absurdly expensive (compared to what it was), auto insurance is set to get far more expensive, and making your entire lifestyle dependent on the existence of cheap gasoline is not a great strategy. A lot of people will simply be priced out of driving. >It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby". Personal car commuting gets in the way of vital freight trucking. The highway system wasn't built to facilitate people going to work or traveling to see their grandma, it was build to move goods. >I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future,... The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. For instance, rural roads, rural hospitals, rural electrification, rural broadband, rural airports, etc. It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".
- ux266478 1y ago
  > The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. This is an uncritical viewpoint, you're simply describing a society. It doesn't matter where you live, you're soaking up the labor and capital of the wider net of people. That's what it is to have a civilization, and ours is so deeply interconnected that all relationships are inherently reciprocal. The trivially measurable flow of money doesn't say anything of substance as it's a second order abstraction, only that the mechanisms and pipelines by which money move are situated in cities. It's not urban labor and urban resources that builds, maintains and operates that infrastructure or the social fabric that it serves and is served by. > It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons". On the contrary, the negative health effects of cities are empirically measurable[1][2][3]. We should be striving at all times as human beings to move past having them at all, and should look to building towards healthier, lower density living and encourage it for anyone who is capable of doing so. We cannot fall into the trap of building, encouraging and valuing objectively worse living conditions in the name of efficiency, the entire point of this whole system is to lead better lives, not to make the numbers go up. [1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26630577/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26630577/ [2] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23015685/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23015685/ [3] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31610855/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31610855/
KaiserPro 1y ago
> I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people Hard agree, but so long as I have a seat, it means I can have a nap. One of the things that I can't do driving (safely!) is have a nap.
alistairSH 1y ago
I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude. Totally get that, some people don't like cities and crowds. But, they should also accept that more space (in this case, access to a car, roads, parking, etc) comes with costs and they should be willing to bear those costs personally.
pkulak 1y ago
I would have to admit that even I, I public transit nerd, would prefer an empty subway car. I also don’t like driving when I’m stopped dead in traffic, or biking when it’s next to a highway with no lane, or the bus when I miss my transfer, or walking when it’s pouring rain. I guess my point is that everything has a worst it can be. The idea, though, is that a city should offer all of them so that you can choose. And a subway at its worst, unlike driving at its worst, will still get you where you need to be on time.
- scott_w 1y ago
  I generally agree but I'll caveat that subway at its worst can be far worse with trains going missing. "Metro apologises" is a running joke around the north east of England for how bad its service became in the past 15 years.
  - pkulak 1y ago
    But 40,000+ Americans die in their cars (and run over by others' cars) every year. No subway caveat is ever going to beat that. And at least it's obvious that subways going missing is a _very_ solvable problem. We've completely given up on making driving safer. EDIT: Sorry, re-read the context, and I think you were countering my claim that a subway will always get you there on time? Yeah. You're right. Subways can absolutely be delayed, go missing, stop running, go on strike, etc. Sorry for going off the "rails" there. :D
    - scott_w 1y ago
      No worries, it happens to us all. I was mostly venting at the shocking underinvestment of my local public transport infrastructure and seeing it degrade over the last 20 years!
Scarblac 1y ago
Note that public transport in the Netherlands isn't particularly good, cycling is.
pjerem 1y ago
> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I understand what you mean. I don’t especially love it either. But I honestly 100% prefer that to being stuck in traffic, being attentive to everything everywhere just not to kill anyone. And I say that while owning a comfortable car. I truly enjoy and cherish not having to use my car to go to work because I did it in the past and I hated it. Being stuck in my car alone is far worse for me than being stuck in a train station because my train is late or cancelled. But it may be my personality. I came from the countryside, so I was using my parent’s car everyday. When I moved to the nearby city (in Europe) I truly felt not having to care about a car to be absolutely freeing. Now I’m back in the countryside but near a train station that I use everyday to commute and the idea that I may, somehow , if I change job, need to use my car everyday (which I like, btw) is really frightening to me. Exiting a train and walking two minutes to catch a tramway or a metro then a bus without real waiting times and without thinking about it then taking another route on the way back because a friend invited you for an afterwork really feels like society is just working.
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
The trouble is that your personal hangups are not compatible with a properly functioning city and the common good. There is no general, indiscriminate right to car ownership and use in the city; "discomfort" is not an especially compelling reason to permit it. So, in the city, someone with your "discomforts" must either accept the discomfort of public transit, or consider living elsewhere. (For the record, no one enjoys being packed in a train. They just deal with it, because there are superior competing goods and because it's preferable to the shitshow of living in a city mired in traffic and jammed with cars.

ericmay 1y ago

The thing that is so great about better transit for folks in cities in America is that it benefits you specifically in the lifestyle choices you want to live. Introducing better transit options gets folks out of their cars and onto the tram or sidewalk and that leaves you with your desire for solitude with more open highways. > It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby". Fair but you have to remember that this anti-car lobby is rather tiny in comparison to the pro-car lobby which is every state department of transportation, automaker, insurance company, oil executive, auto dealer, etc. they aren’t as loud and annoying because they don’t have to be, but take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.

inetknght 1y ago
> take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics. A bit of a segue, but this is true for just about anything with lots of money and/or power. Internet marketing, for example.

vid 1y ago

Once you get used to it, you get more solitude in public transit. Plan your route so you get access to a seat, settle in with a book or music. The other people melt away. Whereas driving a car involves constant interaction with other drivers which in many places (including rural areas, not to single out pickup drivers but there is a pattern) can be quite fraught.

etrautmann 1y ago
Agreed - it was a bit of an adjustment moving to NYC and dealing with a packed subway but now I quite enjoy the density and people watching as a feature of the experience.
mystifyingpoi 1y ago
> Plan your route so you get access to a seat What do you mean specifically? Most of people working regular jobs don't really get to choose the time for their transit. They generally want to get to work as late as possible and get out of work as early as possible. Which means more people, because everyone wants this. Fun fact, when I was at high school, some students going home by bus would go backwards the bus path and get inside a few stops away from the school, just so they can guarantee a seat and not have to stand up for 60 minutes.
- vid 1y ago
  Sometimes if you walk to a previous stop or come in from a different line you can find a seat more easily. If it makes sense you could even go a couple stops "backwards" if the train reverses at that point. Shifting your schedule might be another option. At one phase I took standing as a challenge and drastically improved my balance over a couple of years, though it's not fun when the car is really crowded.
  - mystifyingpoi 1y ago
    Sure, but at this point we are just hacking the system. Which is fine, I guess, no harm is done, but it feels wrong :)

qwertygnu 1y ago

I love my personal car bubble as much or more than most people (though maybe not as much as you), but at some point we have to get over ourselves. We're all so spoiled. Why the hell do we deserve to all have our own giant speed machines careening through cities where people (including us drivers!) are trying to live? It doesn't make any sense and it's a shame that we've let it go so far, especially in the US. It should be discouraged (financially, logistically, socially) to drive in dense urban places. Obviously, in order to achieve that, these urban places need to have alternative means of transportation.

mystifyingpoi 1y ago
Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density. I'm more dependent on my car(s) when I got the first newborn than I ever was.
- komali2 1y ago
  > Do you have kids? I don't think so (correct me if I'm wrong). Car is absolutely essential for driving around small kids no matter the urban density. I hear this all the time yet right now am traveling in Amsterdam and see many parents trucking their kids around in bicycles without issue. Actually I remember seeing this in SF as well, and in Taiwan and Japan I see incredibly young children riding public transit on their own.
  - seper8 1y ago
    Most of these bike moms/dads still have a car at home.
    - tmtvl 1y ago
      As long as those cars are at home in the garage instead of on the road that's fine. The point is having fewer cars on the road, not fewer cars in general. Riding around on a bicycle and having a car for exceptional circumstances and a once a year road trip is healthier and safer than driving that car around every single day.

jcranmer 1y ago

> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby". The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!

potato3732842 1y ago
>The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments! These people are just the inverse of the equal(ly stupid) and opposite idiots who think all the problems in society are the result of cars or some other mis-allocation of resources toward transportation. They're incredibly small incredibly stupid groups who's extreme(ly stupid) opinions anchor the discourse, to the detriment of all the adults in the room. You see this pattern of crap on every issue too, not just cars/transportation.
- mothballed 1y ago
  The case for public transit in the US would be strengthened if it weren't used largely as a vehicle for money laundering public funds into private funds. Another problem is that security tends to be poorly enforced, the last time I rode a public train there was a knife fight in our car over some ear-splitting gang music being played on the wrong turf (lol, literally the turf the train happened to be passing through at that moment as it passed momentarily from a latino to black neighborhood) which did not even alarm most the passengers. Normal people don't want to ride on a vehicle used for turf wars, robbery getaway express, and as a homeless sleeping center. Normal people are alarmed when ear-splitting rap music is being played provocatively, normal people get alarmed when lethal weapons are pulled out for immediate use in a crowded box. An occasion before that, a schizophrenic person tried to corner me in the back of a train car while going on an increasingly aggressive rant about how the government is out to get us. And this would bother me even less if I weren't disarmed, because of course it was illegal for me to carry a gun or knife to protect myself from the literal knife fights surrounding me on the train. I presume anyone poor enough to need public transit with half a brain in that town bought, borrowed, or stole a bicycle.

knorker 1y ago

> Even if it takes me 4x as long to get to my destination, driving is still better than this. I don't believe this as a real rule. 10min vs 40min, maybe. 1h commute vs 4h commute? I don't believe that you would prefer spending 8h per day in a car. > The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers. The youtuber NotJustBikes keep saying that "the only thing that can improve traffic is viable alternatives to driving". I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history, and that drivers would actually need to pay for the externality costs they incur, instead of being leaches on society.

potato3732842 1y ago
>I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history Get the government out of the road planning/building business and let the chips fall as they may. There are two big problems with this though. First is demographics. Of all the people who currently say they want this "enough to be a problem" will immediately do an about face the first time they catch wind of a news story where some bigCo buys the land and puts a toll road through somewhere they don't want it or some inner-ring suburb of the kind they sympathize with the residents of losing out in gets absolutely screwed by some regional infrastructure conglomeration routes around them for not playing ball. Second is entrenched interests. Government road management is mostly a result of coincidence. Society was building paved roads for cars at the same time that the modern high touch administrative state was on the up and up so of course the state claimed that as one of the things it administered. Had the 20th century administrative state come 50yr later modern roads may very well have ben built out privately like railroads were. It would be a huge fight to get the government's dick out of it because of all the economic and political interests that are inter-twined with the status quo.

dml2135 1y ago

> Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude. I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.

Ajedi32 1y ago

Exactly. Cars are a better experience in almost all cases, but also have higher marginal costs. They also take up a lot of space, which in a dense city where space is at a premium makes them even more expensive due to the cost of things like parking and big roads. The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.

potato3732842 1y ago
>The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose. And then you instantly run into the problem wherein people lie in all sorts of ways in order to justify distorting the market to their benefit or preference.
- Ajedi32 1y ago
  True, infrastructure is tricky because you can't have a truly free market due to the impracticality of building, for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly. So instead you end up having to make some decisions about what to supply in a non-market based way, and that's fraught with all sorts of inefficiencies and politics. I think there's certainly room for our approach to be a lot more market-like than it currently is though. On the demand side at least it's pretty straightforward to charge people for what they use based on marginal costs incurred, and use those funds to build out more/better infrastructure.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    > for example, multiple competing road networks. It's a natural monopoly Worked fine for the railroad and they started off with not just competing networks but competing form factors (gauges). As long as users are fairly liquid and can direct themselves at whatever option they consider superior it will probably mostly all work out.
evolve2k 1y ago
Gen Z on the whole don’t agree with either of you. Younger people don’t want to have to drive or to take on the burden of vehicle maintenance or the considerable risk of being in an accident. Cramped trains and buses and symptoms of under investment they do not need to be this way. Switzerland deeply values trains and as the saying goes once the business class actively uses trains the whole dynamic changes. Taking a zoom call in a car sucks. Taking one in a train with face to face seating, wifi, Power plus and a table between you is a much better experience.

sandworm101 1y ago

>> Then again, big city living isn't for me anyway (obviously). I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future, for the personal reasons outlined above. Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment. Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport. I want a yard where my dog can hang out unsupervised without worry about stranger dogs coming around. I want to set off fireworks on holidays. Listen to a country-western station. That is the lifestyle that a great many people dream of living. I used to work with a guy from Belgium. He is now in Canada. The guy works in IT (secure stuff, government) but he loves animals. So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day. Doing that means he can have a hobby farm where he keeps a few horses. He bought an old tractor and is looking at growing/bailing his own hay next season. His lab just had puppies. His kids are growing up on a "farm" but go to a great school and have faster internet than I do in my "big city" apartment. Such a lifestyle just isn't possible without easy personal transportation.

always_imposter 1y ago
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haspok 1y ago
Switzerland seems to have kind of the perfect blend of a solution (apart from the lack of space in general): it is _very_ car centric, almost everyone has a car, like in the US. On the other hand, to commute to work from their little sleeping villages they use the excellent train network which makes it possible to do the daily commute faster than by car. And many people use their ebikes, if for nothing else, just to get to the train station... Despite all this, property prices in Zürich (city), for example are sky-rocketing (much more than in the neighbouring villages), and for any available rental flat the viewing queue is usually longer than you can count. How is that possible, if nobody wants to live in a city?... Some people might appreciate a 15 minute walk to their workplace, or a shop open after midnight on the next street, or just the buzzing life of a city in general.

MangoToupe 1y ago

I of course understand this attitude, but it fills me with hopeless dread that this country will never be able to do anything hard again. Our addiction to cars is one of the hardest to swallow and easiest to fix problems, and yet the will to do so is simply non-existent. To convince an American to give up on any collective, just point out they'll be mildly inconvenienced. No wonder we never even tried to fight our carbon emissions.

cvwright 1y ago
Safety is the much bigger challenge for public transit in the US right now. Since the pandemic, most cities have really eased off of any enforcement of rules or laws in public spaces. Driving in rush hour traffic sucks, but it beats getting randomly stabbed in the neck by some psycho who didn’t even pay his fare.
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  That safety is illusionary. Cars are dangerous, more dangerous than subways. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-19/new-york-city-s-subway-is-actually-safer-than-your-car https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-19/new-yo...
  - mothballed 1y ago
    I suspect many view intentional harm as being far more traumatic than accidental harm. This is less the case if the person actually dies, although it may still be the case for their families.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      Someone crashing into you because they can't be assed to pay attention to the road, or get drunk and drive because they don't have public transport IS "intentional" harm. Traffic deaths are rarely "accidents".
      - 1y ago

komali2 1y ago

> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. Then, you've experienced poor public transit systems. A good one doesn't make you so packed in because there's enough trains for people to have comfortable amounts of space. Anyway, it's moot - if your city has lots of people, the only feasible way to move them around is public transit. Trying anything else will fail due to the nature of two things not being able to exist in one place at the same time. One somewhat packed subway car is several hundred square meters of unmoving packed highway.

ux266478 1y ago
I wouldn't qualify Tokyo's public transit system as poor. In fact, the only one that might rival it in Europe would be the one in Moscow.
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  From a perspective of "packing people in"? Tokyo is absolutely poor. The MTA doesn't have to employ people to pack extra riders into full subway cars.
- komali2 1y ago
  Tokyo has better public transit than the United States, certainly. However it's public transit options and general design aren't that great by modern standards. First, they have basically no bicycle infrastructure, and bikes are supposed to go on the sidewalk, so pedestrian cyclist collisions are common. Second, their many lines are semi privatized and split between many companies. That means inefficient design, upkeep, and construction. What should be a place where two lines interconnect is instead an in-station transfer at best - often instead it's a out-station transfer, where you have to return to street level to get to the station serving that company's line. There's also a annoyance around payment and payment systems for this reason. Third , they don't run enough trains. Rush hour is insane. Fourth, they still don't have gates at their platforms, despite their absurdly high suicide rate. I've just traveled through Brussels, London, and Amsterdam. In my opinion Brussels may have had better per capita transit since their tram system was so ridiculously fast and frequent, and cars had only a narrow area to go, with plenty of room for bicycles, however I didn't see much of the city. London trains were too expensive and too unreliable. I agree with you in this case, Tokyo is better. Amsterdam I've only been able to explore a bit but so far I'm very impressed. However for unfathomable reasons they let cars and scooter drive in these tiny roads next to the canals, and even more unfathomably, they give cars tons of the most valuable canal side real estate to park in!! So Tokyo does that better, but Amsterdam so far feels much more liveable. I haven't seen much else of Europe so can't speak to that!

delta_p_delta_x 1y ago

> just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude. Have you tried taking a walk in a forest, a desert, or on an ice sheet? Plenty of solitude to go around...

christina97 1y ago

I don’t enjoy the 15 minutes I spend packed in the NY subway when I have to take it during rush hour, but I do enjoy hopping on the subway off-peak when the cars are half empty and I get a seat and open my subway book. Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty. My two observations are that bumper-to-bumper traffic feels much more stressful to me (a lot more honking, people trying to cut into faster lanes, etc) than the subway (crammed and sometimes there’s a homeless person with bad BO), and that I spend much less time on the rush hour subway than in traffic jams in the past (even during rush hour, the subways are not that packed until you get into Manhattan).

bombcar 1y ago
Rush hour is more of a problem than people will admit; the biggest issue with public transit (in general) is that it is horribly "unprofitable" (for whatever you want that to be) except curing crush-time. At the extremes, a bus (or worse, a train) with one driver and one passenger is obviously worse than one person in a car. But transportation is not Car vs the World™ no matter how many people (online) want it to be. It's a question of "how do you get people where they want/need to be". And that is a multi-faceted question with complex solutions - and the car will be part of it except in extreme/absurd situations that are so rare as to be ignored (like the "islands with no cars" (they have cars) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_islands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_islands). One of the best ways to discuss transportation is to NOT do "r/fuckcars" which makes everyone defensive and hate you, but instead talk about how the benefits are for everyone - grade separation of rail is nice, but it's also self enforcing (trains will crush cars). But grade separation for bikes and pedestrians is a win for everyone! Cars don't like bikes next to them, and bikes don't like being next to cars. Cars don't mind driving a few miles out of their way, but pedestrians just don't want to deviate from the crow-flight line unless rabidly enforced.
- LastMuel 1y ago
  How come nobody ever points out that roads are “unprofitable”?

bluejekyll 1y ago

> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I get the same independent feeling from others you describe while riding my bike (not a bubble, but that’s a false sense of security in a car giving the 40kish car occupants who die every year in the US). In fact, I generally enjoy that bike experience more than I ever do driving because I never get stuck in car traffic, never get stuck behind a line of cars at a traffic signal. Never need to work about parking, other than finding a secure place to lock up (which some destinations lack). I used to love driving, but I started commuting by bike for work and realized over time that I enjoy biking so much more that I go weeks at this point without ever driving. FWIW I live in a smaller American city of about 120k people, but is part of a greater metro area.

adrian17 1y ago

> From a quality of life point of view The only thing that makes my occasional commute to office or distant family not a complete waste of time, is that I can read something or do a ton of language flashcards on the way. (plus a tiny small health benefit that like 20% of the commute is spent on foot.) In a car, even that would be taken away, with me being forced to focus on the road instead. > I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". Funnily, that's kinda how I feel about being in a car, having to constantly keep some level of awareness of others moving around. For the record, I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.

eric_h 1y ago
> I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it. Don't wait too long - I did that and had to take the test again! :)

SubjectToChange 1y ago

>I don't see myself ever not being a driver. Cars aren't getting cheaper, car maintenance has become absurdly expensive (compared to what it was), auto insurance is set to get far more expensive, and making your entire lifestyle dependent on the existence of cheap gasoline is not a great strategy. A lot of people will simply be priced out of driving. >It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby". Personal car commuting gets in the way of vital freight trucking. The highway system wasn't built to facilitate people going to work or traveling to see their grandma, it was build to move goods. >I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future,... The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. For instance, rural roads, rural hospitals, rural electrification, rural broadband, rural airports, etc. It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".

ux266478 1y ago
> The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. This is an uncritical viewpoint, you're simply describing a society. It doesn't matter where you live, you're soaking up the labor and capital of the wider net of people. That's what it is to have a civilization, and ours is so deeply interconnected that all relationships are inherently reciprocal. The trivially measurable flow of money doesn't say anything of substance as it's a second order abstraction, only that the mechanisms and pipelines by which money move are situated in cities. It's not urban labor and urban resources that builds, maintains and operates that infrastructure or the social fabric that it serves and is served by. > It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons". On the contrary, the negative health effects of cities are empirically measurable[1][2][3]. We should be striving at all times as human beings to move past having them at all, and should look to building towards healthier, lower density living and encourage it for anyone who is capable of doing so. We cannot fall into the trap of building, encouraging and valuing objectively worse living conditions in the name of efficiency, the entire point of this whole system is to lead better lives, not to make the numbers go up. [1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26630577/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26630577/ [2] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23015685/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23015685/ [3] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31610855/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31610855/

KaiserPro 1y ago

> I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people Hard agree, but so long as I have a seat, it means I can have a nap. One of the things that I can't do driving (safely!) is have a nap.

alistairSH 1y ago

I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation". And yeah, that's a me problem. Do what you like, just don't take away my means of being able to achieve a little bit of solitude. Totally get that, some people don't like cities and crowds. But, they should also accept that more space (in this case, access to a car, roads, parking, etc) comes with costs and they should be willing to bear those costs personally.

pkulak 1y ago

I would have to admit that even I, I public transit nerd, would prefer an empty subway car. I also don’t like driving when I’m stopped dead in traffic, or biking when it’s next to a highway with no lane, or the bus when I miss my transfer, or walking when it’s pouring rain. I guess my point is that everything has a worst it can be. The idea, though, is that a city should offer all of them so that you can choose. And a subway at its worst, unlike driving at its worst, will still get you where you need to be on time.

scott_w 1y ago
I generally agree but I'll caveat that subway at its worst can be far worse with trains going missing. "Metro apologises" is a running joke around the north east of England for how bad its service became in the past 15 years.
- pkulak 1y ago
  But 40,000+ Americans die in their cars (and run over by others' cars) every year. No subway caveat is ever going to beat that. And at least it's obvious that subways going missing is a _very_ solvable problem. We've completely given up on making driving safer. EDIT: Sorry, re-read the context, and I think you were countering my claim that a subway will always get you there on time? Yeah. You're right. Subways can absolutely be delayed, go missing, stop running, go on strike, etc. Sorry for going off the "rails" there. :D
  - scott_w 1y ago
    No worries, it happens to us all. I was mostly venting at the shocking underinvestment of my local public transport infrastructure and seeing it degrade over the last 20 years!

Scarblac 1y ago

Note that public transport in the Netherlands isn't particularly good, cycling is.

pjerem 1y ago

> From a quality of life point of view, I have never been comfortable being crammed into a sardine can with that many other people. I've done it. I've never enjoyed it. I understand what you mean. I don’t especially love it either. But I honestly 100% prefer that to being stuck in traffic, being attentive to everything everywhere just not to kill anyone. And I say that while owning a comfortable car. I truly enjoy and cherish not having to use my car to go to work because I did it in the past and I hated it. Being stuck in my car alone is far worse for me than being stuck in a train station because my train is late or cancelled. But it may be my personality. I came from the countryside, so I was using my parent’s car everyday. When I moved to the nearby city (in Europe) I truly felt not having to care about a car to be absolutely freeing. Now I’m back in the countryside but near a train station that I use everyday to commute and the idea that I may, somehow , if I change job, need to use my car everyday (which I like, btw) is really frightening to me. Exiting a train and walking two minutes to catch a tramway or a metro then a bus without real waiting times and without thinking about it then taking another route on the way back because a friend invited you for an afterwork really feels like society is just working.

lo_zamoyski 1y ago

The trouble is that your personal hangups are not compatible with a properly functioning city and the common good. There is no general, indiscriminate right to car ownership and use in the city; "discomfort" is not an especially compelling reason to permit it. So, in the city, someone with your "discomforts" must either accept the discomfort of public transit, or consider living elsewhere. (For the record, no one enjoys being packed in a train. They just deal with it, because there are superior competing goods and because it's preferable to the shitshow of living in a city mired in traffic and jammed with cars.