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this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2024
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Public Transport
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The thing that never ceases to astound me in the US is that the barrier for entry to public transport is so hilariously low, they have effectively nothing in most places so it's absolutely trivial to quintuple the amount of public transport users in a few years if they just tried, and yet most places do NOTHING
There is such an unmet demand for public transport that a bus startup should be eminently viable, but nope, no one even seems to be trying.
Meanwhile in europe we already generally have at worst decent public transport and yet companies like flixbus exist, which i don't even understand how they have ridership when they run routes parallel to railways that take like twice as long while obviously being less comfortable..
Would you mind explaining more? How's Flixbus?
so the way public transport generally works —in sweden at least— is that the bulk of it is managed by the regional government and uses a zone system (like the oyster cards in london i think). Then ontop of that there's SJ, the national train operator, which has its own generally separate ticket system that is more traditional where you book a specific departure between two stations.
Then outside of this you also have fully private public transport companies, of which the major ones are VR trains between stockholm-gothenburg, snälltåget which runs night trains from the north to south (sometimes down to hamburg/berlin), and flixbus which runs a bunch of routes throughout sweden.
so the strange thing about flixbus is that it runs a bunch of routes that take you between the same places as the trains can, in a less comfortable vehicle, and absolutely fucking hilariously slower.
For example gothenburg-stockholm is 3-4 hours by train and flixbus takes 6-7 hours.
There are some reasons i can see to opt for flixbus, most obvious being that it does serve places where getting to the trains is otherwise inconvenient and it can be like half the price, but it still astonishes me that a completely for-profit company finds that a sensible thing to operate here.