this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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When I switched from using the bus to going by bike, i cut my commute time by more than half. If I were to take the car, it would halve again. Public transport is great, and necessary. But it will never be faster than a personal car for anything but large distances.
... where you live. Where I live (in central Europe) we have a subway every 2-3 minutes and you're at worst 2 blocks away from a stop. It all depends on the infrastructure. A subway cant be stuck in traffic...
Yep. Here in Berlin traveling to my old office (when I didn't work from home all the time) with the S or U-bahn took 30-35 minutes and by car/taxi about 40-45 minutes due to the traffic.
Berlin is one of the few german cities where public transport is done right. In cologne, where I lived, there are a lot of stops, but the inferstructure is just realy bad. They managed that trains get stuck in traffic too sometimes. And for some reason they trains only arrive in a 10-30min time window. So if you want to follow one line it's relatively fine, but if you have to change trains you have to be lucky. In the city center still faster than driving though.
Just say central european city.
I too live in central europe and the bus line i could take from my town to the town i work in takes 1 hr to get there and back, at the end of my day the bus only departes one hour after i'm finished with work so i have to wait for the bus the same amount of time i need for both ways with my car.
They should really say a European city with a subway. Not all cities in Europe have a subway.
It was pretty obvious from my comment that I live in a European city with a subway...
I didnt say my comment applied to all European cities either.
Also, trams/streetcars in Zurich have right of way and the red lights change for them. Which is completely logical considering how many more people you can fit in them than a few cards at a red light. The problems with public transit in North America are a function of our car infrastructure.
If I rode my bike to work, my shift would be over by the time I got there. I'm really starting to like the idea of biking to work.
Nearly every city on the planet with a subway system disputes your bullshit.
It sure is nice that everyone gets to live in New York, London, and Washington.
A better solution is to reduce how much people need to travel. Instead of building trillion-dollartransit systems so people can to to the office we should be taxing the everloving shit out of office spaces for jobs that can be worked remotely.
Why not both? I live in Stockholm and work from home. I have amazing trains that I could take to work, and I've never had a commute longer than 40 minutes. But a 0 minute commute is still shorter than 5minute commute.
Because not everyone can live in fucking Stockholm.
An apartment within 40 miles of my office in the city costs 5x as much per month as where I live. I can't get a fucking pizza delivered to my house, much less a bus. And unless I want to smell like a gym at work the 5+ months a year it's over 100° outside, I need to drive to the nearest bus station if I want to take transit. So I'm already having to drive and park somewhere. Then I have to pay to park at the bus station and pay again to ride the bus that drops me off 9 blocks from my office, where I'd have to walk the rest of the way.
All told it'd add 2-3 hours to my commute and be more expensive than driving.
But if 100% of the work I do is on the computer at the office. The real solution is to not have the fucking office at all.
There are obviously other systemic problems. Cities being designed around cars isn’t the only one.
But your rage shouldn’t be directed at the people who want to make public transit options suck less.
His solution isn't to make it suck less. His just says how great it is to live somewhere that was designed around walking because when the city was established that was pretty much the only option.
The Southern US is designed around cars because until fairly recently it was very sparsely populated, so everything had to be designed around cars and air conditioning in order to develop. It was the correct decision at the time, and changing it now is much more difficult than simply saying "be like this city that was established before the steam engine."
Oh I feel you. I’ve spent a decent amount of time in the southern US. Lots of wide open spaces and cities built on massive scales.
There won’t be any immediate fixes for these places. But there are steps that can be taken. And plenty of cities that are more densely populated, even in the north, Midwest, and west coast are just as terribly designed. Those are what infuriate me most. Los Angeles just makes me mad. It’s a giant concrete jungle full of absolutely necessary cars and it doesn’t need to be that way. 1 in 35 Americans live in LA County and yet it’s one of the worst cities in terms of public transit.
Yeah that's definitely a challenge, and I believe it is a failure of city planning.
My condo is worth $300k and is within 15min of central Stockholm. The housing crisis is definitely a problem around the world, but European cities that don't have the missing middle problem are in a much better place.
Back on topic, even if you could work from home, it would still take you over an hour to go grocery shopping or buy a pizza, which is a huge problem. Both of those things are within a 15 min walk for me.
I think the point here is that suburbs and cities have such dogshit public transit and bike infrastructure that people do everything by car. Nobody is telling those who live in rural areas to bike 30km to get groceries.
Guess where most people live and want to live?
I'm in Vancouver, while the system needs some improvement, the skytrain gets me right to the airport, with trains every few minutes. No parking nonsense. Driving, with traffic, is much longer. Bussing has some express routes so the trips aren't so many stops also. until the system wxpands develooment the consideration is looking for a place nearer a stop or station.
A bike is faster in my city if you are decently fast, but a bus or trolley is faster than cars during rush hours, because we have public transit lanes, so while everyone in their tin cans is stressed yelling at the dumbass who just cut them off im breezing past, listening to a podcast, meditating or catching a quick ten minute nap before work.