"Hilarious" is not the word I'd use. "Dispiriting", "Irresponsible", "Fucked up".

I don't understand why we aren't pouring massive amounts of money into public transport. Apparently many people in Western Europe seem to enjoy being stuck in traffic for hours every day. For some reason, company cars are still a thing in Belgium, very nearly everyone working in IT gets one. I can't wrap my head around how stupid this is.

Not only does there seem to be no sense of urgency, there doesn't seem to be much interest in doing anything at all..

> I can't wrap my head around how stupid this is.

Same as in the Netherlands: It's a cost/tax dodge. Looks like you get 500-800 euro/month in car but it actually only costs about 200 to the company and the company doesn't have to pay a significant amount of taxes over it. Scrap that advantage and it will quickly go away.

Public transport hasn't solved the problem of "the last mile". How do I get to/from the train station/bus stop? Frequently you still need a car to even get there and then you will need parking - which is often limited and costs a lot.

Then there's timeliness. Deutsche Bahn is known for frequently their trains are delayed. In summer, even on the Intercity connections (IC, ICE) trains will be filled to the brim and air conditioning unavailable.

I love trains. I want to use public transport. It's just so goddamn inefficient.

I live in a small town about 70km north of Frankfurt am Main. A lot of people will commute daily from here to Frankfurt. The drive is 45 minutes to 70 minutes depending on traffic. If I were to take a train I could: - Walk to the bus station (5 minutes) - Take a bus to the train station (25 minutes) - Take the train to Frankfurt (60 minutes) - Take the metro to the closest location for my office (10 minutes) - Walk into the office (5 minutes)

The time given is assuming no delays, and a schedule that matches up perfectly. Realistically you'll lose another 30 minutes just standing around on platforms.

Ultimately the whole trip, even with a daily ticket will already cost you double your fuel costs for the same ride while sacrificing air condition, quiet and comfort.

We need better solutions for a lot of things. I loved seeing how Oxford in the UK has massive parking lots outside the city center with free buses connecting you to the city. It means that people can take the highway to the city but not get stuck in city traffic.

Major part of the problem is working 70 kilometers away. Before cars you would basically just live pretty close to your place of work. I think that's how it should still be, but don't see any realistic way for societies to encourage that beyond building denser cities where every new residential area comes with rail transport from the get-go.

Bikes are great for solving transit’s last-mile problem provided it’s at all close to the last mile and not, say, the last 15. E-bikes especially so.

Beyond that, yes, transit schedules need to be frequent and reliable, with frequency especially being important if you have to make lots of transfers. It’s no big deal if you miss your train if another one will be there in a few minutes; if you have to wait 15-30 though, a slight delay can be a problem. For buses, giving them their own right-of-way is important.

Long-term though, as another commenter mentioned, we need to enable more people to live closer to work. I’m not sure what much of Germany is like (have only visited Berlin and Munich) but in the US we have a ton of sprawling suburbs because it’s not legal to build anything denser than single-family homes in most places here. Especially those places that already have good transit connections need to densify, and then the places nearest them need to do the same and build good transit connections.

Bikes are great for the last-10-mile problem, easily. I've got plenty of friends who cycle commute 15km+ each direction, each day, and are quite happy (and healthy) doing it.

That may be practical if it’s the entirety of your commute, but it’s less practical if you then have 70 minutes of riding the train immediately afterwards, right? I’m talking bikes as a response to transit’s last-mile problem.

Maybe e-bikes do change the calculus a bit there too though.

Many places have spots for bicycles on the trains, and mass guarded bike parking at train stations. Helps a bit with this last mile problem.

Ebikes really extend the range

1. Climate requires that we make some compromise

2. If we used cars less, there is a good chance public transport would have less of those issues you're talking about. It's a vicious circle. Urban planning has been favoring cars for a long time.

> How do I get to/from the train station/bus stop?

By foot, bike, trotinette. If it's too far, that isn't good public transit and/or you live too far.

> trotinette

I believe we call that a scooter in English. Had to look it up.

For me a scooter is a small bike ( moped in American i think?).

It used to commonly be that in the US before those Razor push scooters, and then electric scooters, became a thing.

> How do I get to/from the train station/bus stop?

Having good public transportation would mean having a bus stop within 100m of every house.

I used to live 700 meters away from the subway, there's also a bus stop 100m away from where I lived. The bus came less frequently than the subway, so I got a rickety old bike if I want to go the 700 meters faster. The whole way there's a bike path on the sidewalk, separated by a wide strip of grass/trees from the street.

In the US we can and do throw money it but we don't get anything from it. Costs just balloon and scare anyone else from trying it.

https://www.constructiondive.com/news/california-high-speed-...

> I don't understand why we aren't pouring massive amounts of money into public transport.

Because it would be seen as a socialist measure.

That might be a valid explanation in the US, but it's hardly the case in the rest of the world ...

> some oil producing countries could get in some sort of alliance, and artificially limit the amount of oil they extract, in return for subsidies

This is a difficult equation to balance when India and China burn cheap fuels while petrostates trade their reserves for bombs.

>it seems there is nothing that will truly limit fossil fuel consumption

Nothing will work while companies and consumers are free to ignore the externalities of their own actions.

Tax carbon.

You mean the US, because in a lot of european countries, we very much like using our public transports and bikes

The European 'we' who like using public transit and bike is unfortunately a small minority.

In France, if you add those two modes, you barely get over 10-12% of the number of moves people make.

The number of cars has again increased by 10% in the last decade. It has doubled since the 80s, when we thought that almost everyone who needed a car had one, and that they were already too many and had bad influence urban planning and many other aspects. The progression seems to never stop.

It's a flood of cars. If I take my municipality, there are more individual cars and vans than people who can drive them. It is not uncommon to see households with 3 or 5 cars. Cars are parked everywhere (rarely on owners' property, though); and that's before city people come over for the week-end or holidays (2/3 of houses are secondary residences)...

Everywhere but in large cities, local elected officials keep on pushing projects of motorways 'for economic development' like it was 1972 (a strategy which hasn't worked in 60 years, but eh...), spending tens and hundreds of millions of €, sometimes in direct competition of an existing or abandoned railroad. A case a few dozen miles away from my place: €200M for a 2 km bypass (no 0 is missing or extra). They have bottomless pockets for roads.

The west, as it is typically viewed, consists of far more than just the US and "a lot of European countries." There are plenty of places in Europe where public transport isn't as common as it should be, let alone other continents.

Some common definitions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world

Not sure where you mean by "western world" but public transport and cycling are very popular and normal options where I live.

The GP almost certainly means the US, that's certainly not true in most of Europe.

Even in the US, there are some cities with excellent public transit.

New York is the land of subways, and was known for its endless taxis at one point.

I know other US cities have light rail, elevated tracks, transit.

Even SV has things called buses, and rail transit too.

I think people just like to shout random ideas sometimes, without thinking.

I don't mean that the US doesn't have cities with good public transit, but that the cities with bad public transit are usually in the US.

I just checked my old bus route when I used to work in Kansas City.

Driving from Corporate Woods, Overland Park to Westbottoms Missouri is 19 minutes. The bus takes over an hour including a sixteen minute walk. In other words, nothing has changed in ten years. It takes about three times the time to take a bus as opposed to driving.

Many Americans make sweeping assumptions about the "western world" only based on what they see in the US ( lack of public transit, only SUVs, political partisanship, etc.).

Public transit is pretty great in most big French cities ( including mini metros in not huge cities like Rennes, Lille Toulouse).

> people still don't like using public transport

Because most public transport sucks, is unreliable, only works at certain hours, is dirty, unsafe, and covers only a small ridiculous amount of space limited to key cities. No wonder.

The pandemic will only make public transport less desirable as well.

Public transit sucks in areas where only poor people use it.

When everyone has to use it, all of a sudden, everyone becomes invested in improving it.

> unsafe

Driving is unsafe. ~40,000 people die while driving in the US every year, and many more are seriously injured.

Public transit is so much safer, it's not even in the same ballpark.

> Public transit is so much safer, it's not even in the same ballpark.

It's safer because it goes nowhere in the first place. I can't even believe you guys are even trying to compare public transport which is super limited in the areas they can possibly cover (by definition, because it's made to cover denser areas), and stuff like cars which can go virtually anywhere, anytime, in pretty much any weather condition. In video games that would like comparing a rail shooter to an open world one: they are too different products and the overlap in utility is very narrow.

1. Climate requires that we make some compromises.

2. If we used cars less, there is a good chance public transport would have less of those issues you're talking about. It's a vicious circle. Urban planning has been favoring cars for a long time.

  > only works at certain hours, is dirty, unsafe, and covers only a small ridiculous amount of space limited to key cities

come to japan, i think it will change your mind

Check out my profile before commenting...

Go protest to your local government for better public transport.

Wont change anything these are inherent issues of public transports.

FUD

> It's difficult to be optimistic, but it seems there is nothing that will truly limit fossil fuel consumption.

Eventually oil production will decline [1]. Right now, it seems as if this is the only thing that will limit consumption.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#Predictions

We need to make public transportation so alluring people want/need to use it.

For starters, I think public transportation should be free for the poor, and low middle class.

All air travel that uses fossil fuel would would be taxed if you are above middle class. Outlaw the private jets. (It just bothers me to see the Elon, or Saturday Night Fever types jetting off to Ibesa. (Too disenfranchised to check the spelling of the party port.)

Give companies federal income tax credits if they can keep their employees at home, and not commuting.

Encourage solar with incentives. Yes--we have been doing that, but in my state (CA) PG&E seems to balk at paying customers for the energy produced.

And more Nuclear power plants, but not on faults.

Bring companies back home if their product is in a county that dosen't care about Carbon. More than just a tariff.

(In the end I'm afraid Global Warming measures will be paid for by the poor, and middleclass. Their will be more taxes on gas. Their will be more effort to keep older cars off the roads. (poor can't afford electric vechicles right now. Those two year smog checks are really getting stringent, and don't make sense. I put 500 miles on my vechicle a year. Why am I paying every two years for a smog check. DMV has our mileage. Same gripe goes for mandatory insurance.)

All those are good things, but in the US, it will be seen as socialist measures.

It doesn’t matter. We are now in a feedback loop that will take us to +20c regardless . Geoengineering is our only hope.

Citation needed.