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.
To be fair, German public transport (and I admit that I’ve only taken it around Berlin) is about average for Europe. Better than Norway not as good as the Netherlands.
From my limited travel around the states I can say that availability of public transport varies a lot from town to town.
Local transport: San Fransisco has a lot of public transport and its pretty reliable. I spent over a week in Shreveport Louisiana and I only saw a bus once. maybe I wasn’t in the right place at the right time of day but it wasn’t everywhere like in a European city. I haven’t been to New York, but I have a new Yorker friend who says the subway stations are essentially a place for homeless people to masturbate when they get banned from the library. The entire state of Wyoming doesn’t seem to have any public transport.
Intercity transport: The greyhound busses are used almost exclusively by people who are not legally allowed to drive (full of meth heads and schizophrenic nuns) the drivers were obviously whichever mentally ill passenger was closest to the front when the previous driver overdosed. They’ll do things like throw their hands in the air and say don’t worry jesus is protecting us! That’s if there is a bus between cities. There isn’t a bus between salt lake city and park city next door for example. The trains have been reduced steadily to the point where the majority of us cities don’t even have a train station.
So yes Germany has excellent public transport, with the exception of having to validate your ticket before you get on the train (That’s an inefficient waste of time).
My only option is the local city bus. For me to go eight miles straight east to where my work is, I’d have to transfer twice, go a couple miles north of where my destination is, and leave home at least two hours before my shift. By car, it takes less than 15 minutes.
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American public transport either doesn’t exist or is considered to only be for poor people and migrant workers [sic].
The only place this isn’t true is in a big city.
American public transport
The what now?
I mean, it’s three words. You can put any two of them in a sentence. But not the third.
American Public? Public American?
Er, I think they mean:
American public (we exist)
Public transport (not much here)
American transport (cars)
I happen to be a prime example of how bad US Rail is this week. I’m taking my son from near Fredericksburg (the real one), up to Ballston for a summer camp. We have a couple options:
- Drive
- Distance: ~70 miles one way, ~140 round trip
- Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes one way, with traffic. ~3.5 hours round trip.
- Cost:
- 4 gallons (US) of gas @ $3.50/gal: $14
- Wear and tear: estimate at 0.5 gas cost: $7
- Parking: $11
- Total: $32/day
- Distance: N/A
- Time:
- Drive to Fredericksburg station: 20 minutes
- VRE (Fredericksburg to L’Enfant station) - 1 hour 20 minutes
- WMATA (L’Enfant to Ballston) - 20 minutes
- Total: 2 hours one way, 4 hours round trip
- Cost:
- Drive: we’ll just ignore this, it’s close enough to zero.
- VRE: $23.56/person * 2 people: $47.12
- WMATA: $3.45/person * 2 people: $6.90
- Total: $54.02/day
So, for the low, low cost of about 1.68 times the cost of driving, we can take slightly longer to get to our destination and have zero control over our schedule, which makes the actual time devoted to travel considerably longer. We tried the public transit route last year, and it meant leaving earlier in the morning (about 30 minutes) to catch a train to get us there on time, and getting us home around 45 minutes later. And this is right around the US Capitol, which has some of the better transit options. Needless to say, we’re driving this year.
I really want to be able to take transit, but it’s basically dead in the US. Earlier this year, I needed to go to Boston for work. Catching a train from Washington, DC to Boston meant an 7 hour train ride (using the “high speed” Acela line) at ~$500 round trip. Flying was 1.5 hours and cost ~$300 round trip. Wanna guess which option I used?
Basically, all of the incentives are stacked against transit options in the US. Except within certain metro areas, driving or flying is always cheaper and faster. Yes, inside those metro areas, public transit can be great. I used to work in Washington, DC and used the VRE I mentioned earlier to get there and then WMATA or the Capital BikeShare to get to my office. That was great, since I didn’t have to drive into DC every day, which sucks big donkey balls. But it probably wasn’t cost effective and wasn’t really time efficient either.
“American public transport”
Good joke! Best joke I heard since “American democracy”!
American public transit doesn’t exist outside of a couple major cities.
So yeah. Probably the absolute worst Europe has to offer is a world altering step up.
Am American: this is correct
Yep. I’ve lived in 9 states so far. The only place I consistently used public transit was when I lived in NYC
If it exists, it is better than American public transit. Here is my daily commute to work, as estimated by Google Maps:
Even Google goes “lmao use a fucking car, peasant.”It’s technically possible for me to take public transit, but it would be about the same as walking. Here is a quick sketch of the route I’d need to take, compared to my drive:
That route is because there are no east/west lines between me and my job. It starts by walking/riding my bike the wrong direction to get to the nearest bus stop. Then it takes me south-west through two cities, then north-west through two more cities. Then I’d have a ~20 minute walk to transfer rail lines, because my job is serviced by a different rail system than the one that my bus service touches. After that walk (and waiting for the next train) I take it north and then have to walk another 10-15 minutes to finally get to work.
Not counting wait times, it would take me nearly 2.5 hours to use public transit. When you consider the fact that some busses and trains only run once every 20-45 minutes, it actually stretches closer to 3-4 hours, if the schedules don’t line up. Or I could just fucking drive 10 minutes. Yeah, it’s no wonder Americans use cars for everything.
My commute; this is a fun way to show how car centric America is lol
USA.jpegright there. That image is for everyone who lives there except for like three cities. And the bike route is actually crossing several major roads.And the bike route is actually crossing several major roads.
It’s worse: The bike route is on a two lane highway with no shoulder. I’d be dead on Day 1 if I actually tried to walk/ride a bike.
I used to just walk 1.5 hours to work sometimes because it was the same time the bus would take, to only drop me off 75minutes early for my shift, or ten minutes late. So I’d just walk.
I live in a bigger US city that does have a metro. It’s not bad for doing longer trips in certain directions, when it’s working. But it breaks down at least a few times a year, and if you have to make a transfer to another train to make it to your destination, it’s often literally faster to walk.
Lmao what public transport? We don’t have that here.
Really? Like… How do you move around then? Only cars? But if you dont want / have a car? If youre still doing your drivers license?
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.
A big city not in the South. Houston and Dallas are #4 and #9. There’s public transit but it fucking sucks both places.
* Big cities are limited to NYC, Chicago, and Washington DC.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Hell, I’ve heard of Americans coming to Vancouver Canada and being pleasantly surprised about our public transit. We don’t even technically have a proper heavy metro, and the SkyTrain is classified as automated “light” metro, AKA the kind they have in tiny German towns that are too small for heavy metro or S-bahn, AKA basically the same as an airport peoplemover but built out for a metro area of 3 million people.
