12 ms·

As an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty. A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the s

• jzebedee 8mo ago
  This is highly location dependent with how unequal the US transit infrastructure is. It'd help to add your city for anecdotes to mean much.
  • epolanski 8mo ago
    I lived in Columbus Ohio as an exchange student and I really disliked the car-centric nature of...everything. I wish it had better public transport in general but I honestly wish that about pretty much any place.
    • jcims 8mo ago
      Typing this from a suburb of Columbus now. COTA provides decent service to get around in the downtown and directly adjacent neighborhoods, but it drops off sharply as soon as you get outside of that area. Part of the problem is the typical US sprawl of the place. The area inside the beltway is ~200 square miles - https://urbandecisiongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/fc_popDensity_2000.png https://urbandecisiongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/fc... I live just outside the beltway. Driving to the OSU stadium just north of downtown would take me about 25 minutes. According to Google maps, the nearest COTA stop is a 20 minute walk away, then it's an hour and ten minutes to get to the stadium. Agreed it would be lovely to be able to hop on a bus or train and get somewhere within a reasonable amount of time.
• janalsncm 8mo ago
  Maybe it goes without saying, but the reason you don’t mind the bus in Europe is not because you are European but because the European buses are nicer. The things you say about noise and pollution are also true in the US, and American drivers are acutely aware of them. But the alternative is not a European bus, so people drive.
  • enraged_camel 8mo ago
    >> Maybe it goes without saying, but the reason you don’t mind the bus in Europe is not because you are European but because the European buses are nicer. Actually I think it is both. Car culture in Europe is nowhere as dominant as it is in the US. Many Europeans grow up with public transportation as the default mode of getting around. So they are more likely to be accustomed to things that become grievances for Americans. I was born and raised in Turkey, and now live in the US. In Turkey when you take a bus or train during rush hour you’re often packed like sardines. No concept of personal space. Same with many cities in Europe. That type of thing wouldn’t fly anywhere in the US, except maybe NYC. Even then though New Yorkers tend to dislike it.
    • kjkjadksj 8mo ago
      There is also the monetary angle. How many european households can afford a car for both parents and a car each for two kids, registered, insured, paid for to park wherever they go? Even if you are poor in the US cars are remarkably accessible. You can finance a used car with no credit and a couple dozen dollars a month.
      • miki123211 8mo ago
        And the parking angle. Europe builds apartment complexes which are ~3 to ~10 stories tall, the US builds sprawling suburbs, zoned so that there's no grocery store in sight. If you're packed 3 to an apartment in a 10-story complex, it's unlikely there's enough parking for all of you.
        • 8mo ago
• adrianN 8mo ago
  I live in Berlin and strongly prefer the bike over the bus because buses are slow and unreliable. I wish we had a lot more bus lanes and aggressively towed cars blocking them. More subways would be even better though.
  • angmarsbane 8mo ago
    When I was in Mexico City I was blown away and inspired that their bus lanes were actually physically separate from car traffic, sometimes they were even elevated a foot or so alongside car traffic. It made the buses so much faster! I wish bus and bike lanes in the USA were equally separated from car traffic. Different color paint and intermittent bollards don't cut it. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right and physically separate bus lanes is doing it right.
    • SoftTalker 8mo ago
      Nice idea but it quickly runs up against budget realities.
      • adrianN 8mo ago
        Bus lanes are usually not a budget problem. The problem is car centric laws and regulations that make it hard to impossible to take space away from cars.
      • panick21_ 8mo ago
        Nonsense. The infrastructure in much of the US is already there. All you need is willingness to enforce it. All you need maybe is a bit of paint. Police could actually make some money.
        • SoftTalker 8mo ago
          You need more than paint to build physically separated, elevated bus lanes.
• rickydroll 8mo ago
  I know I'm a corner case on this, but there are two cases where our car life significantly improves your quality of life. 1: you live with ADHD: "Oh my God, I need to leave five minutes ago" scheduling method. To anyone who says, "You just need to be more disciplined about time," I refer you to the part about ADHD. 2: If your quality of life depends on activities that are more wilderness/far away from cities, such as hiking, astronomy, camping, bird watching, and don't include (actively exclude?) urban experiences that require amenities. 3: Friends and family live 30 minutes to 6 hours away. I have no problem with improving bus service for people and getting them out of cars because that means there'll be more room for me to go to where I want to go when I want to go.
  • miki123211 8mo ago
    1. Makes sense. 2. This is why non-car-centric countries don't ban cars. If you're that kind of person (and not everybody is), you buy a car. You may not use it beyond these wilderness activities though. 3. Trains.
    • rickydroll 8mo ago
      Good points. A few years ago, I visited a friend in Estonia, and even though he was in Tartu proper, they still drove almost everywhere. Essentials were only available by car. Trains are an interesting subject. For them to be useful, you would need to have rails covering the same destinations and paths as the highway system. One should also be aware of network effects when adding another layer of transportation services, including how they affect the distribution of services and residences. From experience, we know that roadways encourage spread because they allow you to cover a greater area with little time cost. Rail will likely encourage denser development and a higher cost of living due to a greater influence of rent-seeking entities. One of the tensions one would need to explore is the tension between the need/desire of a chunk of the population to keep their distance, keep their living space separate from others, and be acoustically and physically isolated from them, while still needing services a 30-minute drive away.
      • 8mo ago
• bogedy 8mo ago
  always seemed obvious to me that the reason for the disparity is that european buses are a way to get around dense cities and US buses are a welfare program for residents of sparser cities who can't afford cars. the bus lines don't actually go anywhere people care about, they're their just to provide the bare minimum ability to go somewhere. the top comment is right and this article is a good exmaple of what transit people do. they get so excited about transit and how awesome it is that they forget about some of the more fundamental issues.
  • fn-mote 8mo ago
    This argument doesn’t mesh with what I experience in my daily life. Busses go places I care about: two blocks from my work, and to the airport. My US city is dense. Not like Europe, but unless the argument is that major metropolitan areas in the US are not dense enough (LA?), I don’t buy it. Bus transit has problems, but I don’t think it’s as simple as the parent is asserting.
    • xxs 8mo ago
      Virtually US cities are not dense compared to Europe. The large cities in Asia are on its own level, though. US is at the bottom when it comes to population density. For instance LA has half the density of Romania's capital Bucharest.
  • hirsin 8mo ago
    Which of the cities used as examples in the articles are "sparse"? LA? Pittsburgh is one of the smaller ones listed and while the bus network there is very hub and spoke, it's also still semi usable. But to call NYC, LA, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, etc sparse doesn't seem very accurate. Yes, LA is vast, but I wouldn't call it sparse.
    • andy81 8mo ago
      LA is sparse by European standards, or rural by Asian standards. http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf CTRL+F for "BUILT-UP URBAN AREAS BY URBAN POPULATION DENSITY: 2025" America is the exception for population density in general.
• Moldoteck 8mo ago
  I'm not a fan of busses and use em only by necessity. Otherwise I prefer trams and bicycles much more. Trams are more chill due to less hard turns and more space, bicycles are a beast for fast arrival if infra is ok. In Zurich trams are very nice, but bike infra comsi comsa up to bad depending on area.
  • miki123211 8mo ago
    Trams have the same problem trains have. If something happens on a tram line (and these are a lot more integrated with roads than train lines, so things do happen), a big segment of the network comes to a standstill. They're not like buses or cars that can drive around a major accident in an emergency, even if that meanns they'll skip a stop or two.
    • Moldoteck 8mo ago
      In most situations you want trams to have own lanes and semaphore priority which reduces collision chances to a minimum. Worst case you can have some spare busses to provide temporary replacement services for such situations or you can divert some buses from other lines to provide services in problematic sector till situation isn't resolved.
    • derriz 8mo ago
      My experience of public transport modes in various cities is at odds with this. Trams and trains generally offer far more reliable schedules, frequencies and journey times than busses because they either have completely dedicated alignments or have priority where there is any interface with normal traffic. Most buses inevitably bunch (see https://setosa.io/bus/ https://setosa.io/bus/ for a nice simulation) and/or get stuck in traffic as a matter of routine. The inconvenience may be less per delay but busses are delayed far more frequently than trams and trains on most of the public transport systems I've used. So for regular users, the cumulative inconvenience is much worse on busses than on trains/trams. Which is why people flock to trains and trams when available as an alternative to busses. Specifically with regard to the parent, the frequency at which unplanned outages happens with tram services in Zurich is extremely low in my experience - certainly planned changes to schedules or routes (for maintenance, upgrades, etc.) are far more frequent. And when "something happens" (i.e. a traffic accident), the path for trams is cleared as quickly as possible - often in 30 minutes or less - so you'd really have to be unlucky to be inconvenienced by such an occurrence.
• throw0101a 8mo ago
  > A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the same space would (as you rarely get more than 1 person per car in peak hours). Some animated GIFs illustrating how much space automobiles take up compared to alternatives: * https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ft67d/showing_the_benefits_of_public_transportation/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ft67... * https://torontolife.com/city/transit-versus-cars-gif/ https://torontolife.com/city/transit-versus-cars-gif/
• deliciousturkey 8mo ago
  As an European I really _do_ mind buses. I try to avoid riding them as much as possible. They are dirty, smelly, and really cramped with little legroom. I would really hate living somewhere where I was forced to use them, and would rather move elsewhere.
• retired 8mo ago
  I sometimes take a peak into European busses but I don't see 25-30 people sitting in there on average. That is a lot of people. Busses, at least the one where I live in Europe, are very loud, noisy and smelly. I'd rather have 20 cars pass my home than one bus. I don't hear or feel those cars but once that bus passes my coffee cup visibly shakes. I also don't mind cycling behind most cars but cycling behind a bus is a terrible experience. You feel the heat blasting out of the rear-right side and the diesel smoke is terrible.
  • stuaxo 8mo ago
    Europe is made up of a lot of different countries, even in the UK there's a big difference in bus provision depending on where you are.
  • pasc1878 8mo ago
    Busess are improving many of them are now fully electric. 20% of London's busses are zero emission - agree that London is dense enough for this to work - long didtance busses still have to be diesel, although Tfl have some 15 mile routes that are electric
• jwr 8mo ago
  The reason why US bus ridership is so low is because buses are terrible. They are dirty, loud, inconvenient to get onto, often badly designed inside (too many seats, too little space), with unsavory individuals making you feel unsafe. In summer they aren't air conditioned, they seem to be refrigerated, you literally need a coat to stay warm. The fact that they are also slow is just icing on the cake. In addition to that, the US has a stigma: "only poor people ride buses". Get on a bus in Europe to see the difference.
• yfw 8mo ago
  Probably because you have a better social net and buses aren't being used by the marginalized parts of society.