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?
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
The infrastructure is set up for cars, and then everyone has to drive their own car because we can’t share a space respectfully. The only time I’d consider riding the bus is if I didn’t have a car and if I had to for work. In the states the view towards public transportation is that if you depend on it you’re not doing too well, which is sad. I commute 70 miles 1 way to work and would love to have a bullet train or something as an option. But as it is now, no, it’s not even an option. I had a previous coworker that took 2 buses to work every day, and he was always telling me about the “interesting” people he’d run into on the bus, like a guy with a puppet at 7:00 in the morning, or the drivers that didn’t know the schedule so they couldn’t tell him when another bus would be coming. No thanks.
“American public transport”
Good joke! Best joke I heard since “American democracy”!
if there is some kind of service to the general benefit of the public, you can presume America either does not have it, or will lose it within 5 years
Red head kid “y’all have public transit?” Meme.
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.
United States has rails?
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
I live around the Twin Cities metro of Minnesota (two cities split by a river), which installed its first passenger light rail about 20 years ago. I recently moved from the north suburbs to the south side of town. I was very excited to be able to drive 10 minutes east on the freeway to my buddy’s house within walking distance of a station to take the 10 minute light rail ride downtown for a basketball game. Previously I would have driven 20-40 minutes (depending on traffic congestion) to pay $20 to use a parking ramp because the light rail doesn’t extend north.
Over the last 20 years they have extended the rail between the airport/Mall of America on the south side to the downtown of one city, and connected that downtown to the downtown of the other city across the river. If you live anywhere north of the city proper, or more than a few miles away from the one line running south, there is little reason to use the rail system over driving the whole way. If you do though, it’s pretty great.
That’s just been my experience, my understanding is some larger cities (Chicago and NYC are what come to mind) have more robust rail systems, but many cities (mine at least) have limited access for most people living in them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
American transport outside of subway systems is literally unusable in most cases. The bus in my city of 1M+ people takes 1.5 hours to go about 20 minutes of distance by car. In some cases I can beat the bus to a destination on my bicycle.
If americans come to germany and act like german public Transport is the best, how
frickin badnon-existent is american public Transport?FTFY. I was pretty blown away by it but I can get excited by a sidewalk.
Yeah I’m not sure if everyone realizes this. There’s all these states where there basically aren’t sidewalks outside of maybe small areas. Like entire miles and miles of residential areas with no sidewalks whatsoever.
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.
I had a bus skip my part of the route in US.
They literally took a whole different route that skips over the stop sign I am waiting at so they can get to the last stop faster and clock out.
I was using dart which gives live maps view of where the bus is.
Also sometimes busses malfunction and can’t work but still go through all the stops, just don’t let people in. Dart doesn’t tell you they malfunctioned. You have to see for yourself when bus rolls by.
As far as drivers are concerned, someone’s phone wasn’t working so they restarted it to show the ticket. Our driver called the police for “delaying the bus.” Entire bus had to walk to next stop.
Yippeee
