https://www.google.com/maps/place/3500+Deer+Creek+Rd,+Palo+A...
I don't know about Austin, but with Fremont's public transit, it would take at least 40 minutes to get from the Fremont BART station to the Tesla factory on public transit. That doesn't count the time needed on BART from someplace with a lower COL (Fremont itself is a $$ place to live). For that, add at least another 1/2 hour (for nearest lower COL in Castro Valley or San Leandro). So, it wouldn't be unheard of to have an hour+ commute to Tesla Fremont on public transit.
Large and wealthy Bay Area employers like Tesla therefore run private shuttles for employees for this reason (a practice started in the current era by Genentech way back in the early 00s I think, and later Google popularized it among tech co's)
Maybe Austin has world class public transit, though I kind of doubt it.
I actually would give Tesla a bit of a pass on this since it is a factory purchased from GM/Toyota and it inherently needs lots of space, so you can't expect a train station at the factory gate.
Tech campuses like the Googleplex, the Apple spaceship donut, Oracle HQ on the edge of a marsh are where the failings of the public transit system are most apparent.
The traffic to the office is always awful, so a pleasant ride to the office, skipping traffic via dedicated bus lanes on the route, without needing to drive, sounds great to me in principle. I WANT to like this. I WANT to use this. But, there are several problems with it in practice.
For me, the bus is still significantly slower than driving because of all of the stops, even though it skips car traffic. For my wife, who needs to walk 10 blocks from the bus stop to her office, it's even slower.
My wife and I both get motion sick, especially if I don't get a forward facing seat.
Other people riding the bus smoke drugs, don't clean themselves & smell awful, scream loudly & incoherently, etc.
On the 10 block walk from the stop to her office, my wife saw homeless folks fighting, some screaming, and other smoking fentanyl. As a small woman, she did not feel safe, and informed me she wouldn't be taking the bus again. With our car, she can drive directly to the secured parking garage in her office, no safety risk.
We're going to stick to the safety, security, and speed of the car, thanks. It's not the lack of infrastructure, public transit is just a much worse experience.
None of this will get better, our transit agency doesn't even have the guts to reduce fare evasion via real enforcement because of the wacky political climate here.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/sound-transit-fare-...
Find a way to make public transit clean & safe and we'd probably ignore the other negatives listed above. Unfortunately, the political climate in the US in areas with adequate public transit makes that impossible.
On a different note, I rode Sound Transit buses to Redmond every day pre-pandemic and it was a pretty good experience. The seats were really nice and some even reclined! I think it is a bit slower than driving but I would rather sit on a bus for an extra 10 minutes reading a book than be driving in soul crushing traffic.
Fare evasion is a symptom; the real issue is it being politically unviable to have a police force actively riding buses and light rail.
Nobody is disagreeing that systems built around transit/biking/etc are better than car-oriented ones. They're saying that an individual in the latter system may still need to drive. In case you've forgotten, your original comment was in response to a specific individual, suggesting that he didn't need to drive.
Everyone chooses where to put homes and workplaces with transportation in mind.
In the UK people who commute by rail commute an average of 235 miles per year. [0]
I’ve had commutes of 150 miles per day. (Or 30,000+ miles per year) although that’s on the high end of what Americans might do.
The typical commute for people in my last office job was 30-50 miles per day. About 10,000 miles per year. About 1-2% of the people in our office lived in the same town as the office. This is in a top-50 metropolitan area of the US.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/466097/average-distance-...
Yeah, the American desire to have a large grassy lawn surrounding their house means density is far too low to make public transit viable.
> Even though average miles travelled for commuting purposes has declined to 799 miles travelled per person in 2020, a decrease of 37% compared to 2019 (1,276 miles travelled per person) and an overall decrease of 43% compared to 2002 (1,400 miles travelled per person)
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-travel-sur...
So, still close to an order of magnitude less than my anecdotal data. The bottom line is that the US definitely has a lot of sprawl.
Is that even a serious argument?
Public transportation networks are designed to serve urban areas, with specific solutions catered to specific combinations of travel distance and throughput.
Hand-waiving by pointing out isolated individuals live in isolated areas means nothing. Mass transportation is designed to serve the masses, not hermits who chose to live far from urban centers.
Meanwhile, all those person's filling in those two-digit-lane highways live somewhere, and if they can pack a highway they certainly can be served by a suburban railway service.
Subway systems work well when people commute from the edges of a city to an urban center. Throw US suburbs into the mix, and you get some strange complications, like:
* suburbs that from adjacent cities that sprawl together -- the residents there may commute to different cities
* suburban office parks -- this makes it difficult to effectively meet people's needs with an affordable hub-and-spoke model, because large numbers of people commute not to the urban center, but between adjacent suburbs
Sprawling suburbs can be, and often are, served by public transportation. The critical factor affecting the US approach to public transportation, which is purely ideological, is the neoliberal belief that public transportation services are only worth considering if they are provided by private corporations and only if they are profitable right from the start.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world these services are either public or public-private partnerships, and subsidized with clear externalities in mind. For example, if I recall correctly the Tokyo subway network is operated by a few private companies which profit not by the direct exploration of their railway lines but from real estate investments coordinated by the expansion of their railway lines.
Consequently, we have european capitals which coordinate urban planning (i.e., where suburban sprawls can and cannot be built) with coverage of their public transportation services, including investing in extensions of subway lines to deserted places where medium- and high-density housing projects have been approved.
> Subway systems work well when people from the edges of a city to an urban center.
Subway is not a good example in discussions over public transportation in urban sprawls. The main purpose of subway networks is to enhance mobility within a urban area. Consequently, typically you see subway networks with subway stops at 500-800 meters and travel speeds of around 50km/h, which just happens to be slightly better than traveling by car. Park-and-ride stops are only another aspect of the main goal of eliminating car traffic within the city.
The standard strategy to serve urban sprawls with public transportation is to cover them with bus routes which feed into a high-throughput mass transport systems such as commuter rail or bus rapid transit, also serving as park-and-ride stations.
> suburban office parks -- this makes it difficult to effectively meet people's needs with an affordable hub-and-spoke model, because large numbers of people commute not to the urban center, but between adjacent suburbs
This is not true. I happen to have worked for a company located in a suburban office park which wasn't served very well by public transportation, but the office park itself organized bus services from one of the city's multimodal hub to the office park.
Also, this is so common and mundane that I know for a fact that even some Ikea stores in europe located in industrial districts offer free bus services connecting public transport hubs to them.
I worked a job for several years where I could have taken either bus or light rail to work. I still chose to drive because I already had a car, my car had more privacy, I didn’t have to go outside in the weather, and I had more autonomy.
For public transit to compete, it has to be someone’s best option. Being usable is not good enough to cause people to switch.
Yes, you could build it all anyway, and that’s probably the only long-term solution. But it’s not politically popular. If not for budgetary reasons, then because people don’t want construction interfering with their drive.
In the end, I feel like we’re better off just concentrating on public transit in the neighborhoods that want to use it.
Very ineffective though, very limited hours, akward stops where you have to walking stretches with the sun beating down on you and the annoying unsettling noise of cars rushing past you on a main road, worst case the particular place they’re at doesn’t have sidewalk for a good stretch and they have to hug the grass line to stay out of the road and out of peoples yards.
I’ve lived in several small cities/large towns with primarily suburban areas, as well as highly sprawled MSAs and this describes any suburban bus system I’ve seen.
Needing to travel 30 miles for a grocery store applies to only a tiny, tiny minority of Americans here.
edit: some data to back up my point: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/june/us-shoppers-a...
> When the ERS researchers looked at rural food store access, they found that the median distance to the nearest and the third-nearest food store was 3.1 miles and 6.1 miles, respectively.
6 miles is pretty far to go by bike each way, no doubt, though 3 miles isn't too bad, especially if you use an ebike, and those are steadily becoming more affordable. That would be in the range of 10-15 minutes each way.
That said, the bigger problem right now is having decent bike infrastructure to actually get there, rather than the distance.
Live closer? How do people in Germany get a gallon of milk? Or Japan?
How is it that every country in the world is able to do this except us?
Ultimately physics will win here and we're going to run out of cheap gasoline and fossil fuels and you're going to wish you could walk a couple blocks to a neighborhood grocery store. Milk is going to be $7/gallon and gas is going to be $7/gallon and you're going to effectively pay $15 or more to drive to the store 30 miles away and buy that gallon of milk. The whole reason you're were previously able to live 30 miles away from a place to buy milk is because we've had cheap, subsidized fossil fuels. This is going away. There's no amount of oil we can drill for that will change this reality over the long term. No political party can "fix" this. Republicans can't open enough pipelines. It doesn't matter anyway. If you choose to live 30 miles away from the nearest house or grocery store, you also will incur the associated costs of doing that. Townships and other entities aren't going to be able to afford to repair roads. They don't have the money unless they raise taxes by a lot. Better get ready for that too.
Public transit isn't feasible in many places, nor are bikes. Why is that? It's because we've decided to make sure that this is the case and we've spread out towns and cities, and used zoning to make sure that there are no stores within walking distance of the suburbs just so we can keep wasting money building new roads and buying new cars. It's a hidden tax going straight to shareholders of construction companies, automobile manufacturers, and government officials who green light all highway and road projects with your tax money even when we could just change a few things and reap huge savings. It's mind-blowing every time I see these comments. "How am I supposed to do this? See it doesn't work? Well yea because you've decided to make it not work and then tried it and you're like "oh the thing I made not work doesn't work! See??".
Nobody is interested in "taking your car" and nobody is interested in forcing you to live in a place that looks like Hong Kong. What many people are interested in though is building in sensible ways that include cheaper and more effective transit options, like walking, biking, light rail, and possibly busses. 90% of your day-to-day needs should be within a distance that you don't need a car for. Everything else is incorrect and just won't work in the long-term for most people.