people should be reminded that posts like these aren’t really critical of people for not taking the bus. they’re critical of systems and planning that don’t make you want to take the bus.
if the bus is always packed people will not want to ride it. that’s not on you.
if the bus is unreliable, that’s not on you.
if there’s no bus or public transit that goes where you want to go out somewhere of a reasonable walking distance, that’s not on you.
if where you’re going is not walkable in the first place, then taking the bus is pointless since once you arrive you’d need a car anyway.
demanding change however is on you.
it’s not like cars are awesome by the way. they’re inefficient, pricy, troublesome, there’s traffic, parking… it’s stressful and it’s deadly to boot. if people are not taking the bus, the city has work to do.
I’m critical of all the people driving over sized SUVs by themselves in NYC when I’m trying to get a loaded box truck though a gridlocked intersection. Even if the city instruction doesn’t have mass transit, you do not need Escalade over a commuter car.
yeah just because you’re not riding a bus doesn’t mean you should get around with a Gigantus Pollutinator 9000 or a private jet, obviously.
An SUV in NYC is especially egregious. They could have taken the train from Yonkers, and used the bus/subway. You guys are the one city in the US that actually has decent mass transit.
If you actually live in the city, and own an SUV you are an idiot spending way too much on parking.
Sometimes being in my little car driving in NYC is more relaxing or faster. Most of the time taking public transportation takes the same amount of time as driving, so I’ll pick driving so I don’t have to be cold or hot while waiting or to deal with other people. The argument for making more public transportation faster, more frequent is a good one and would make more people use it.
You guys are the one city in the US that actually has decent mass transit.
The DC metro is a lot nicer than the NYC subway.
Blame marketing (propaganda.) Our government has given control of our information networks to corporations and corporations use those channels to blast us with consumerist propaganda 24/7. People are taught that the type of car they drive defines who they are as a person so they do what they were taught and they buy a giant tank of a vehicle so that people will see them as dependable, manly, successful, outdoorsy, etc.
Valid complaint, but not really the focus of this post imo
I think (most) cars are awesome but want better public transit because there’s way too many people who are terrible drivers.
If driving required licensing like an airplane pilot I’d still get one. And probably enjoy driving more because I could expect people to know how to zipper merge.
I just want people to learn how the fucking stop signs work.
Semi solve by carrying passengers. Become the bus you wanna see.
piggy back rides for $1.99!
Pfft. But for real. I’m getting this feeling this is not normal in USA. Meanwhile where I live people routi ely pick each other up on the way ti save o fuel and/or time.
Carpooling is totally a thing, but in my experience doing it for years, unless the people in the group were punctual and lived close enough, it never works out.
Only for cost reasons, really, so it’s only super common in poorer areas or among laborers (who pretty much universally get paid shit)
I lost my drivers license for a false positive drug test for two weeks. I took the bus to work, which was completely fine and no big deal. But in the morning and in the evening my bus was packed to the brim with high school children, which was easily the worst part of my day.
people have designed the systems you are crying about and people use the systems you are crying about. People make the systems and engage them, you cant keep crying about systems or nothing will change
If this is America/Canada while it could be carrying more people the sad truth is that it’s probably carrying half a dozen people because it’s likely going from one unwalkable neighborhood to another. Especially up here in BC there’s a stark difference between downtown buses running between unis, skytrain and the dense core of Vancouver to the ones you’ll see in a suburban hell like Burnaby.
Or it takes prohibitively longer than a driving.
My wife considered taking the bus to work, but it would take 2 hours to get 20 minutes down the road.
Also add the fact that a bus pass is more expensive than our car insurance.
Yea, these are some of the hardest things we need to address to make non-driving more popular in North America - overseas the increased density lends itself a lot more naturally to public transit.
Australian manages pretty good urban public transport, with a much lower density than the US
(Our rural public transport effectively doesn’t exist though)
I don’t know much about Australia, what forms public transportation are implemented over there?
Hope you’re having a good day :)
Our biggest cities normally have bus and train. About half of them have some sort of light rail/tram equivalent too. The coverage isn’t completely comprehensive, so it’s possible to find suburbs that don’t have great coverage, but by and large, it’s pretty good. Footpaths and bicycle paths are common too. The cycling infrastructure is often gappy, so you on commutes etc, you can find yourself navigating spaces without dedicated cycling infrastructure, but generally, you can get a good portion of a cycle commute on dedicated bike spaces. The only roads without a pedestrian corridor of some sort are generally major highways
In our smaller and medium cities, the trains are normally inter city, not local, so they’re not so much use as public transport, but there are generally buses, though with less coverage. Good pedestrian infrastructure even in smaller cities though. It’s harder to survive in smaller cities without a car, but possible.
Once you get out of smaller cities and in to towns and villages though, it gets harder again.
Thanks for the reply! I hope someday the US gets there :)
Melbourne has the world’s largest tram (streetcar) system!
My town (sort of- it’s a bunch or merged towns) finally got its actual grocery store back! That sort of thing is such a big deal to micromobility and public transit.
It closed down like a decade ago and we’ve had this discount merchant that nobody goes to because it’s real junk ripe with dollar store shrinkfkation issues, and if you can afford to go elsewhere, you do, and a few overpriced small town grocers that charge 2-5x what a regular grocer does.
The closest real grocery was 25 minutes by car on the highway going 70 for most of the trip. The re-opened grocery is 21 minutes by human-powered bike, assuming fitness (no, but working on it).
So now that that’s an option again, I have an actual excuse to get a cheap e-bike for shopping for fresh produce (that’s what’s most pricy at the small town gougers). I already have a nice detachable basket for shopping, so it’s the perfect out-of-house regular activity. Maybe weekly instead of monthly grocery trips. I’ll eat better, and for less overall.
Especially since I just paid 3k to fix the transmission on my car (😭😭😭). Sadly I’m rural enough I need the car, but if I don’t have to use it, I win.
Where I recently moved to, everything is a 10-20 min drive away, but buses can be over an hour because how poorly they’re done. Apparently they used to be quite bad, but recent changes made them awful and no one understands how the new routes and timetables managed to be approved and implemented.
In most cases, someone opposed to public transportation finds a way into a position of authority and makes the routes worse with stupid justifications, then gets it killed because nobody uses it.
Conspiracy theory.
Conservatives running public services into the ground is an actual conspiracy, not a conspiracy theory.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html
It’s a thing that happens on very rare occasions in very corrupt Republican areas, not a thing that happens with any sort of regularity.
This is a massive part of the problem here in the UK too.
I just checked with Google Maps how long it would take my wife to get to work tomorrow morning. In the car it would take between 45 minutes and an hour, but public transport would take an hour and 52 minutes, with 29 minutes of that taken up by walking to bus and train stops. She would have to leave the house before 5:30 am, whereas the car would give her another hour in bed.
At the moment we’re under a yellow warning for rain too, so she would need to take waterproof clothes and probably a change of clothes too.
Until things like this are improved, it’s easy to see why lots of people still take the car :(
Wow, that’s a bummer :-/ For me it’s 15-20 min by car assuming a few minutes walk to where I’ve parked. 25 min by bike (20 min by road but I take a safer ‘scenic route’) and about 40 min by bus and about 10 minutes of that is walking to/from the bus stop. And the bus fare gets capped at 8 trips per week so every trip thereafter is free meaning if you commute to work every day, Friday and all weekend will be unlimited free trips.
And the bus fare gets capped at 8 trips per week so every trip thereafter is free meaning if you commute to work every day, Friday and all weekend will be unlimited free trips.
This sounds amazing. Meanwhile where I’m from they recently raised prices again.
Dedicated lanes make a huge difference there!
Actually, that’s almost part of the problem ironically.
Most of the bus routes go down dedicated bus transitways to a main hub, which means the first bus goes 30 minutes North instead of West.
Also, more frequent and convenient bus trips probably means less people on board per trip.
Ya outside of Vancouver metro area it’s not uncommon to see buses with like 4 people or less on it, sometimes no one.
I would use it more if I could do everything I needed in one bus ride there and back but you would need to take a bus to one area to do something, then a bus to a second area to do another thing, then a bus to a third area to do something else, then a bus back home.
Way too much hassle if you have multiple things to do.
Burnaby isn’t so bad as long as you’re on a transit corridor. Granted it sucks outside those corridors though.
Well, I need to stop by fedex, go the the grocery store, and pick up dry cleaning all before I get home. Then I need to make dinner. So, if the bus takes 1.5 hours and driving takes 15 minutes… the car wins.
We should really say fuck urban sprawl. I’d love to walk to work 🤷
I can do all of those things with a 5 minutes walk in my European city. And I don’t even live in the city centre.
Mixed zoning and walkable cities are the solution.
That sounds like a dream. What country do you live in?
Italy. Then of course not everybody is as lucky as me (e.g. people living in the countryside, or working far away from home), but the majority of people can enjoy having all their basic services at a walking distance. Especially if they live in the city centre.
Not living in the city is my solution. It’s great.
Part of the solution. Public transit needs to be much faster, more reliable, and more efficient too. But it needs proper investment.
ex Londoner here, I can plot that route in my head by walking around Clapham Common station where I used to live.
Lucky
In Munich and I’m the same, work to home is 20mins on PT, and everything I need is available at the home end of the journey. If I need to go to a bigger supermarket or something less regular I can take a different way home and stop in the middle. The problem isn’t PT, it’s urban sprawl and poor amenity planning.
Well those things are like in the same mall where the parking absolutely sucks, so bus was way easier.
For me it’s an 11 minute drive, 16 minute bike ride, or 58 minutes walk according to Google. Not sure about the bus since it doesn’t calculate time for multiple stops.
Perhaps, but bike and walking time don’t change based on traffic
Mall?
how is a grocery store in a mall?
That’s how it is in the Philippines.
Parking usually sucks, because it’s completely full.
I’ve even seen cars line up for a space to park at the mall.
The parking garages are usually big, but Manila is overcrowded by a significant amount.
Pretty normal in most European countries
My city started a program using taxes to pay for half the bus fares of citizens
So I looked things up.
Going to the nearest grocery store:
35 minutes walk 15 minutes bike ride 6 minutes car trip 90 minutes bus ride somehow
My city also seems to have a weird focus on lowering fares to increase ridership. Going from $2/ride to $1/ride isn’t going to convince anyone to turn their 30 minute drive into a 90 minute bus ride. Or deal with the uncertainty of whether the bus will be at the bus stop on time.
Right, cost isn’t the issue.
I wouldn’t mind getting a yearly subscription if I could use it anywhere, had more buses, and more routes.
Let me pay taxes goddamn it that’s exactly what they’re for.
Idk, I cost can be the issue. I live in a city with pretty decent public transit, and there’s a reliable transit line that will take me to a friend that I visit pretty regularly. It’s like 5-10 minutes to drive and maybe 20 to take public transit. More time, but if public transit was free I would definitely take it at least 80% of the time.
The problem is, if my boyfriend and I both go, it costs us ~$10 for the round trip. It’s hard to justify spending that when I already have a car, and the gas to get there is a negligible expense. I do okay money wise (hence why I have a car at all), but if you ride often enough that expense really adds up.
Yup. Takes forever. If busses didn’t exist in traffic, having their own dedicated lanes… well, then we would have a light rail.
Even if there’s only two or three things a month that transit is better for, you’re gonna get reductions in traffic. It doesn’t have to be a full car replacement to be worth bigtime investments.
And it’s the only thing that scale.
Seriously, tho!
Madison, WI just launched Bus Rapid Transit only on one route so far. But that route goes right past the stadium and arenas where the UW Badgers play their games, the city and university performing arts centers, the state Capitol, many popular music venues, and the State Street pedestrian mall. It has free park-and-ride lots at each end of the route. Lots of people say that they will ride in for events at these venues, so BRT hasn’t solved all our issues, but it’s lessening congestion and helping even drivers get around more quickly.
Current citty dweller here, having 200 people within 30m (in three dimensions) of my bed at night is unsustainable. Trust me theres a middleground somewhere
Well…. Having fewer people is a good solution.
Lets assume we disqualify the cars going left ro right, and if we also assume each car only has 1 person per car, that means the cars is 32.
A bus that size is usually built to fit around 50ish people using every seat, but none standing.
I ride my local bus everyday. It’s NEVER full like that. I might have 6 people on the bus. Sometimes I’m the only rider.
So, yeah, a bus CAN hold roughly as many prople as cars, (again assuming only 1 person per car, which probably isn’t the case 100%), the reality is that’s not functionally true.
Even if it’s only carrying 6 people it’s still doing a better job than the cars which on average probably have 1-2 people in each of them.
Yes, but it’s also the length of 4 cars, and uses diesel.
You can see on the road that it takes up one lane like the cars and is equivalent to about 2.5 cars lined up accounting for gaps. Also the point of this post is that if public transport was normalized then this bus wouldn’t have six people in it because half of these cars would be people on the bus instead.
On the road, 4 cars would take more space lined up one behind another.
I don’t know what the law is where you live but i know what it is where i live, so excuse my weird metrics for a sec while i explain how wrong what you said is.
In order to facilitate proper reaction time for yourself as the driver, you must have about two “seconds” (as in if you stared at the road beneath the car in front of you, your car would be there in about two seconds) between your car and the one in front of you.
Meaning the faster the vehicles are, the larger the gaps, and if we’re talking 4 vehicles, it’s 3 gaps.
For maneuverability’s sake, it’s worth mentioning the “wave propagation” that happens during brake time, but I won’t get into it.
The bus I ride every morning is always so full you struggle to get past the standing people to get to the door. The bus home is usually a little less busy, but I’m currently writing this comment while having to stand on that bus.
I absolutely avoided riding the bus in my native city. If a place wasn’t within a mile from a subway station then it might as well be in a different country because I’m not taking the bus there. The buses were always crowded and hot. Subway got crowded during rush hour, but at least there was good AC no matter where you stand.
We’ve only got busses. The climate control is usually pretty good though; decent AC in the summer and heated in winter. Just the occasional shitty driver that doesn’t set it correctly.
Tbh the worst part is inconsolable crying babys. That’s been pretty frequent this summer; but isn’t usually a problem throughout the rest of the year. Otherwise people just keep to themselves, it’s pretty peaceful.
Wow, that actually sounds awful.
The morning bus just sucks to get off, but I get on at one of the first stops so I pretty much always have a seat. I even nap most of the way there as it’s a ~40min ride.
The ride home I’ve often gotta stand for the first 3-4 stops until I can get a seat. Then I can just peacefully watch youtube or scroll lemmy, ignoring the world around me for a bit.
For a flat $70/mo for unlimited rides; it’s not a bad deal really. I’d rather this than driving and being frustrated dealing with the morons on the road; while paying significantly more between car payments, insurance, maintenance, and gas.
tbf, it’s only possibly not true because of intentional choices in city design and general social attitudes.
That being said, I live in a pretty shitty area for bus transport (I’m in the USA, no less) and the busses are still usually mostly full when I use them.
There are many other reasons why a bus might not be used at full capacity beyond just city design combined with the general attitude of “society”.
In individual cases, sure. But a well-designed city and public transport system should not be running skeleton capacities at daylight hours on the regular.
Badly designed transit is not a condemnation of all public transit. Specially when in most of the world public transit is vastly more occupied than in the US and Canada, by the simple fact of actually connecting places people want to go, where people can then walk around when they get there. Parking lots are not destinations.
I lived in a European capital until 28 and never got a driver’s license because public transport was faster than driving through horrible traffic.
Moved to the US and in less than a year had to buy a car because it was impossible to do anything without one. And that was in am area with considerably better public transport than usual for the US. It was just my wife driving, but after a few years I had to get a driver’s license too and buy a second car. I like walking, I prefer good public transit to driving, but it’s simply not an option in most of the US.
Oh, and another story. In my hometown I absolutely loved the subway as THE way to get around. It was cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and average wait was 2-3 minutes. I visited New York one summer and as per habit I went to take the subway to my destination. It was sweltering hot and I waited 20 minutes for a train. Up to that point I considered NYC to be the closest US city to what I’m used to, but that would have been a deal breaker.
is it not packed because all those people who could be inside are outside driving their own cars?
is it not packed because the bus line doesn’t have much demand?
either case is not an argument against public transit. the point is to make public transit more convenient and utilized.
insane that the bus gets its own lane \s
True! 10-12 more cars could have fit on that road if it wasn’t for that stupid bus.
But the poors have to get to their jobs serving me…
I got it! Let’s widen the road! Nobody uses the sidewalk anyway. /S
True but people have less of a problem when I masturbate in my car.
Honestly? I judge you every time man, but I can’t tear my eyes away
Majestic, isn’t it? I don’t send dick pics because they just can’t capture its grandeur.
Yeah. You meed a better setup for that. Just a basic 10x+oculus doesn’t cut it. Your microscope needs some immersion fluid for the 400x.
I’m starting to develop a vigor for public transit to match the one forced on us for car infrastructure in the 60s. Bigger, taller, more, I want 3 bus lanes and a tram line to any town in the country. We can do no wrong taking back all the space we gave to the car, as long as the garbage truck fits on the street, car users can share 1 lane both directions. Take their parking, take their license for rolling stops and using their phone, gift them e-bikes.
Make transit free, let the highways rot, expand the railways. Sorry for that pothole, all the money was used up by rail.
Just anything better than we have now. If we have to act fast and break things, so be it.
, car users can share 1 lane both directions.
Oh God, I don’t trust them with that.
I visited India 30 years ago and (in the southern part of the country at least) the major highways between cities had a single paved lane in the middle and then just dirt and gravel on the steeply-sloped sides. So on bus trips the drivers would stick to the middle until the last possible second and then veer off so that just the right wheels were on the pavement as they passed each other while tipping crazily to each side. I made the huge mistake on my first trip of sitting in the front seat; I later corrected my mistake by always taking the fucking train, which didn’t have this problem.
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lmao, I know that feeling. When I was younger, whole of body, and lived in a shittier area, there were multiple times that no amount of sprinting, shouting, and waving my arms after the bus which REFUSED to make its scheduled stop at the location I was very clearly standing at could penetrate the inscrutable thought processes of the fucking bus driver.
And I am sure drivers are furious about that bus lane.
Because bus lanes are usually poorly implemented. Usually they just take out a car lane, call it a bus lane, and wash their hands of it. Car congestion is now worse, and buses still have to wait at the same lights.
My city did a bus lane right: they took a 3 lane road (2 lanes each way plus dedicated left-turning only lanes), eliminated the turn lane and turned that into a dedicated bus lane with dedicated switching. The bus lane switches don’t correspond to regular traffic lights, so drivers don’t pull into the bus lane to use it (think weird slashes and circles) and the buses don’t have to wait at stoplights next to regular cars. Buses fly by the traffic, and cars didn’t lose a lane. They did extensive traffic surveys and found that only a small portion of traffic was turning left across oncoming traffic and those cars spent a long time waiting anyway. So now cars have to drive a few more blocks to turn but it’s almost the same travel time since they were waiting so long before anyway.
They also added bike lanes with raised concrete medians between them and the cars, which double as platforms for bus stops.
It was a huge win for everyone and works really well.
But how else will the oil companies increase profits for their shareholders?
by increasing prices while suppressing wages like everyone else?
Require better utilization of the cars or you have to take the bus. Pretty simple.
Yeah, and that’s why I prefer cycling or skateboarding wherever I need (depending on the distance). In Russia those MFs get pretty packed at times, sometimes to the point it gets hard to breath in there 😬
Depends if it’s full or not. I live in a city with decent public bus transport. Outside of rush hour those buses are just mostly empty and sometimes we have a grid lock of empty buses.
Yes this this is clearly a picture of an empty bus at 2AM when nobody is trying to get anywhere.
The bus has 33 people on it? Even buses in Korea don’t get that packed in most places.
33 is packed??
Try riding the bus when the children go to school. It will be so full, that combined with emptier busses you are sure to get the 33 on average.
Yea. The bus I take when I go to vocational school is one of those long double busses with bellows in the middle. If you get there at the wrong time, it’s packed to the point the doors won’t close. It has like 50 seats or so alone and at least the same amount of people standing, if not more. It’s crazy how many people you can squish in a single bus. Luckily the ride is only like 10min because it does get uncomfortably full at times.
Also, as a nice extra, the busses are fully electric, also.
one of those long double busses with bellows in the middle
I believe the technical term is: A bendy bus
Makes sense. English isn’t my first language and even in my first language (German), I couldn’t tell you how they’re called. Most people just call them double busses or accordion busses.
Ah. Danke. Ich wusste nur, dass die Ziehharmonika in der Mitte Faltenbalg heißt.
Russian here, the main routes are always packed here (esp during rush hour)
Doesn’t matter, if it was carrying 25% of the people that the cars are it’d be baller.
In my experience (lived in four countries, ~30 cities / towns), public transport just feels unsafe. It’s always a choice between crazies shouting, groups of teenagers playfighting and blasting their mobile phones on full volume or just the good old rapey stare from strangers. I’d rather not be exposed to all the worst elements of society at close quarters in a metal tube I can’t escape from.
Isn’t that a bit self-fulfilling, though? If more people rode the bus, then it wouldn’t be all creeps and teens.
For my part, having lived in Philly where the people on the busses are actually quite pleasant, it was still too inefficient to make it work. A ten minute drive would be over an hour on the bus, and god help you if the bus was running late (I’m kidding, the bus was always running late). That’s a problem that gets worse when there are more riders. As soon as it got too cold to ride a bike, busses would be completely full and unable to take more riders, which meant you’d have to wait for the next one.
Employers aren’t very understanding about being late. Even if you had a direct route from your house to your job, you’d still need to account for extra time for delays. Taking the bus means you pack on two extra hours onto your commute every day, which even at minimum wage is $3,770 worth of time every year. At a living wage, it’s over $10,000 per year. Even with upkeep and insurance, anybody getting paid enough to live practically needs a car. And that’s if you live and work in the city, which is the ideal situation for public transit. Move to the burbs, and that bus ain’t going where you are.
It seems like it would be a self fulfilling prophecy, you are right.
At the same time, having lived in London for 10 years… This is from today: https://red.artemislena.eu/r/london/comments/1fprfcy/i_cant_even_take_the_bus_in_peace_due_to_sexual/
The argument that more people taking public transport would somehow fix this makes no sense in a place like London. It’s a gigantic city with public transport permanently bursting at the seams.
A bus through a dodgy area at midnight won’t feel safe unless it’s policed somehow. I don’t know where the resources for that could possibly come from.
Hi, which countries did you live in? I’ve also lived in several countries throughout my life and only experienced what you’re describing in the US (at least in the city I live in, maybe it’s a bias)
Public transport in London was probably the worst. Case in point: https://red.artemislena.eu/r/london/comments/1fprfcy/i_cant_even_take_the_bus_in_peace_due_to_sexual/
The argument that more people taking public transport would somehow fix this makes no sense in a place like London. It’s a gigantic city with public transport permanently bursting at the seams.
A bus through a dodgy area at midnight won’t feel safe unless it’s policed somehow. I don’t know where the resources for that could possibly come from.
City seems to have some bias, if mostly the worst elements drive public transport.
