Genuine Question. Even if I look at hungarian Transport, and they to this day use trains from the UdSSR, they come more consistantly then the DB.
They are really Bad sometimes, with like 20 seperate prices: Theres the bayernwald ticket that only works in the alps, then theres the official ticket to the destination. Theres a special offer, but only in the very special APP. You can use a d-ticket, but look! Some random ass slum in the middle of the worlds ass dosent accept that, but it does the MVV zone Tickets. But then you need the MVV zone 11-M, a ticket to the beginning to the Nürnberg zones, and a ticket for the Nürnberg zones.
And yet this shit is better than americas rails? How?
I live in the largest city in a Midwestern state. To access amtrak (the only passenger rail in the us)I need to drive 3 hours to the nearest station.
The city is shaped like a lopsided clock. I live in the burbs around 1 o’clock. I work for a fortune 50 company headquartered at 10 o’clock. To take the bus to my job I need to take the bus downtown and wait for an out bound. This would take 90 minutes when I could drive in 25.
America has not made public transit a serious option unless you are in Chicago, NYC or DC.
Ooh, lemme guess: live in Westerville, work for JPMC?
By your content I’m going to discuss regional, not local service. For context I’m in one of the top 10 most populous cities in the country. There is no regional rail service. That’s how bad it is. In order to catch a train, it’s a 2 hour drive to a much smaller city.
But let’s look at a train trip I wanted to take. All west coast, Portland, OR to San Diego, CA. There is at least rail service that would do it. I think it took 48 ish hours with a middle of the night layover in Los Angeles. The drive is about 16 hours. The flight is about 2.
When it exists, it’s slow and super inconvenient.
Its so bad its use is (wrongly) looked down upon as poor person transport unless its a large city. Everything is car culture and you are fucked without a car except in the largest metropolitan.
Shit does not run on time, its more expensive than it needs to be, and it goes very few places. It takes huge huge work to get it expanded because of NIMBYs and car companies fighting it.
Amtrak is doable but it takes as long or longer than driving a car.
There are no high speed trains and busses are a joke in cities. It can take hours to traverse a city because bus routes are terrible and constantly cut.
This is seriously all to do with car companies forcing out public transport in anyway possible as well as buying up a lot of city transportation portions and shutting them down as “not profitable”. Americans defend it because “public good” has been vilified here. Its so dumb.
Urban busses will be slower than driving in most situations since they have to stop every few blocks. That’s not really unique to the US. The exceptions are where there are BRT routes which can avoid commuter traffic, and this is becoming more common in the US but still lags behind the best European systems.
Just to make this more explicit, I lived near a mall growing up. The mall actively fought against getting a bus stop put in near by. Why? Because if there is a bus stop near the mall, then, gasp, THOSE PEOPLE might come to the mall. And by those people, I think we all know I’m talking about.
What is public transport? I think we need to establish that first. You mean like…the school bus? That’s the only kind I’ve ever seen.
Kids get public transport, education, and sometimes even food
Old folks get walkable communities
College kids (at great expense) also do
The revealed preference is that we could have an excellent quality of life except for voters hating 18-65 year old adults
Public transportation doesn’t work in the endless suburbs and stripmalls we’ve built. It’s too spread out, and we’ve been doing it for a few generations now. It’s difficult for my countrypeople to imagine living differently, to imagine that our current existence may not be their birthright.
People think nothing of living 20 plus miles from where they work or go to school, can’t imagine a world where such a thing is a ridiculous notion. We could have all these nice things. People want a better world, a more functional city.
But ask people to change, to live a smaller life, and be prepared for a deluge of excuses and justifications. We all wake up and collectively decide the world we’re gonna live in today.
My kids have theoretical public transportation to school, work, we live near the bus routes in several directions.
To work or the high school - that bus runs 1 times per hour. So they can only arrive very early or very late, and it’s about an hour walk to either of those.
The bus route to the university is actually pretty good, runs every half hour, and takes about 40 minutes to get there (vs. 10-15 minutes drive) then you have to trust your luck with the loop runner bus that goes from the transit center around the campus, that adds between 10 minutes and an hour, randomly because it has no schedule, just drives the loop all day and arrives whenever. There is an app that tracks it so you can know whether to risk crossing the huge road between the transfer ramp & the uni.
In a lot of areas it’s virtually non-existent. In my medium size’d city. A bus stop is about 2 miles away and comes every 50 minutes.
We americans have been conditioned to accept common means convenient.
Non-existent/Absolutely abysmal
Lmao what public transport? We don’t have that here.
Fair point.
We do have it in Germany and the local public transport is perfectly good, albeit a bit expensive in some cities, but its the interregional, long distance train network that has massive issues in Germany. Trains are constantly delayed or even cancelled, pricing is absurd, still no level boarding on the high speed trains, etc.
Outside of like NYC you have a car. It’s a bad system economically, ecologically, and socially, but many people are kind of stupid and reactionary. You show them how putting in a bike lane and adding a bus stop will lower car traffic, improve air quality, and increase economic activity and they just go “no because I feel so”. Or, “one time I had to move a refrigerator so we need to prioritize large privately owned vehicles”.
Fuck you, that’s how. It’s pretty much only cars. Not having a car isn’t really an option here, unless maybe you live in the heart of a big city.
* Big cities are limited to NYC, Chicago, and Washington DC.
I think Boston’s is pretty extensive as well, but that’s more of a mid-sized city and the infrastructure is certainly older
A big city not in the South. Houston and Dallas are #4 and #9. There’s public transit but it fucking sucks both places.
Its almost like you’re taking the piss
It’s not that alien is it? People rely on cars pretty heavily in most smaller towns in Germany.
Dont know, I live in a pretty walkable City where I can bike in 5 Minuten from one end to the other, with a tech store, School, Beach, Bank, etc. Everything you would need. I have a train coming hourly if I want to go to the Beach or munich, but its admittadly way worse (20-30 mins) to bike to the next bigger City.
Not German, but close enough - there’s usually at least one bus within walkable distance, even if it’s only like 4 times a day or something, that connects to a larger hub.
I lived in a place where I had to be by the bus stop at 7h30. If I missed that I’d have to wait for the next at 8h15, and if I missed that one, I’d better call to say I wasn’t able to go that day.
However, in smaller towns and in the countryside, with no cars, life is so different to the frenetic chaos of big cities that it’s hard to put into words.
I would imagine they all have busses? All rural areas in Scotland do at least.
And rural areas tend to be situated around villages with main streets - rather than random houses built outwards.
We aren’t just talking small towns though. Any city that isn’t New York, Chicago, or Boston might as well not have any rail service at all. Houston has 22.7 miles of passenger railway that is only located downtown. Columbus Ohio has a metro of 2.2 million people and doesn’t have a single inch of passenger rail. Cleveland has an OK system by American standards, which i use whenever i go to Cleveland, but the only option for me to take a train into Cleveland from where i live in NW Ohio would take an hour longer than just driving there outright.
Where I live, you can drive across town in 30 minutes. I once worked with a coworker who lived about a 15min drive from work (less than 8km), and it consistently took him 2 hours to get to work by bus.
When I worked two jobs, I’d take the bus from one to the other and it would always take like an hour and a half. One day I decided to walk it, cause it was only a couple miles (also cause the bus driver straight up passed right by me while I was sitting on the bus stop bench waiting for them), maybe a little more than a mile and a half. Took me 45 minutes, maybe.
Most cities have a bus service, but they only rarely connect to smaller towns (“smaller” being relative here, like 30,000 people).
To put it in perspective, I live in a suburban apartment outside of a medium-sized city in Ohio. There is a single busline that goes through my neighborhood (which thankfully has a stop right outside my complex). A bus comes by once an hour between 7 AM and 7 PM.
This can get you to work if you’re lucky enough to work a 9-5 next to a bus stop. My work has a bus stop, but I work a 4-12, so no luck.
My favorite bar is in the next town over, a college town about 15 minutes down the road. If I wanted to get there by public transit, I would need to wait for the hourly bus outside of my apartment, get off at a grocery store, wait about a half an hour for a connecting bus from the college town’s bus service, and that’s not even counting the drive time.
And if I don’t leave the bar by 6 PM, of course, I’m stranded without an Uber or something, because even on weekends (not that I have weekends off work) the busses only run till 7 PM.
And there’s other towns nearby that I literally cannot take public transport to. I had to work an event in a smaller city (but still probably within the top 20 in the state for population) about half an hour drive away. There is no bus service that connects me to them. The only options are driving or Uber.
Cars only
In many places it’s illegal to walk on the side of the road for motorist safety, and no they don’t see value adding sidewalks. Other places don’t like people that’s not from that area walking in front of their house and will call the police every single time.
Only large, northeastern, US cities have anything resembling real public transportation.
While in college, I needed to attend an event at another campus two hours away by car. I had no car. But I did try to look for a bus route:
- Four hours down to the nearest major city with a bus terminal
- Two hour stop in said city
- Five hours back up to the starting latitude at my destination
- Arrive Friday, attend the 6-hour function on Saturday, find somewhere to stay, and wait until Monday afternoon to make the same trip again in reverse.
I eventually found a friend who could drive me there and back, but we still had to get up at 05:00 on a Saturday to make it in time. Also, no Uber or Lyft, it was too rural to have drivers available at any given time. How glamorous it would have been if I could just hop on the train to the next town.
“American public transport”
Good joke! Best joke I heard since “American democracy”!
Removed by mod
Red head kid “y’all have public transit?” Meme.
