- better for the environment
- safer (especially for pedestrians)
- more people can move using less space, resulting in less traffic/higher throughput
- if public transportation was prioritized over cars, city layouts could be dramatically overhauled, with more streets used for pedestrian/bike traffic instead of cars
These are the reasons I take public transportation instead of driving. I’d rather contribute in some small way to the society I want instead of settling for a local maximum of convenience.
Edited for clarity
- Lost productivity or quality of life for rider.
If we suddenly double the amount of commute time someone experiences, how do you think that will impact their personal life? Their professional life?
Take it a step further and look at how the misery cascades: Imagine that person is a neurosurgeon and we doubled their morning commute so they now have to wake up an hour earlier. Will they be operating at their highest level?
I understand that the “anti-car” movement is probably well intentioned, but you know what they say about the road to hell…
1. If everyone drives the neighborhoods are spread out/less dense and filled with loud, dangerous, locally air polluting cars and their tires.
2. Cars are stressful to drive and lead to road rage.
3. Can't work while you drive a car, but can on trains and some subways. But at least can read, entertain yourself.
I agree with you and OP that this all comes at a higher commute time cost, but concluding it's open and shut on quality of life.
I personally think the anti-car movement should be focused on cities where we should reduce traffic within city cores and invest in shared electric bikes/various forms of non-car transit.
I have the luxury of being able to choose how I get around even if it means taking a little extra time, I get that not everyone has that luxury.
...you're forced to use mass transit!
I've never been able to get any work done in the car.
Like delivery works as their are a small number starting locations and no one cares about the max travel time.
Or transporting people between a small number of hub locations and not caring that much about how long it takes.
But public transit that transports every address to every other address is almost infinitely less efficient than just giving everyone a car.
You’re safer on a bus without a seatbelt than you are in a small car because of the mass of the vehicle.
The history of transportation is full of deadly bus accidents; cases when everyone or almost everyone on board was killed.
A vehicle which has a larger mass decelerates more slowly. (Mass isn't the only factor, but how it's distributed and how the vehicle crumples.)
The mass helps you only if you are secured to it, so that you decelerate at the same rate. Whether the vehicle stops in 0.2 seconds or 0.05 seconds, if you're loose, you're flying and hitting something. Something that has stopped by the time you hit it. Or something outside of the vehicle entirely. When you hit something, the deceleration of your body or body part is all that is relevant.
A standing passenger can fall and get seriously injured just from hard braking.
And by that I mean:
cases when everyone or almost everyone on board was killed.
A standing passenger can fall and get seriously injured just from hard braking.
The last fatal automobile collision I can think of was idk yesterday? Four dead. Six injured. But that was up in the north bay. The most recent fatal traffic collision I can think of in San Francisco was on the 19th (so about a couple weeks ago).
Here's a non-fatal wreck where the bus was hit hard enough to do a 180. No deaths and six injuries (some of the injured were pedestrians).
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/6-hurt-after-suv-colli...
One of the first links I turned up was this:
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
Deaths per 100 million miles traveled in 2020. Autos: 0.56, Buses: 0.02, Trains: 0.03, and Part 121 air travel: 0.002.
Traveling by bus is dramatically safer than traveling in a car.
Statistics about deaths mix the two together are hard to interpret: are there low deaths because the frequency of accidents is low, or because their severity is low? Or what mixture of the two?
In statistics about automobile accidents, I would expect there to be a high preventable component: deaths due to neglected use of seatbelts as well as operator negligence: distracted, drunk or reckless driving.
What is the deaths-per-100M miles figure for automobiles, if we count only the deaths of seatbelt wearers, where the driver wasn't drunk, distracted or otherwise reckless?
Regarding seat belts for instance, according to https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/occupant-protectio... 51% of the day-time fatalities in 2020 were confirmed cases of no restraint use.
(That doesn't mean those people would have lived if they had used a seat belt; that can only be estimated. However, the same page cites a high rate of seat belt use for the same period: 90.3%. So 51% of the day-time fatalities are coming from the 9.7% unrestrained passengers/driver population.)
that doesn't speak to the severity of the consequences of the collision.
Here's a vintage streetcar colliding with a semi. Three injuries. None life threatening. One treated at the scene (so presumably more minor).
https://www.ktvu.com/news/san-francisco-muni-f-street-car-an...
Here's a bus vs streetcar. No apparent injuries and the bus wasn't even taken out of service.
https://sfist.com/2012/10/10/muni_bus_hits_f-line_streetcar_...
Here was a terrible accident. Tram vs bus. Fifteen people injured. As the SFFD chief put it nobody was seriously injured.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Muni-bus-trolley-coll...
Surely a car vs a tram or bus would be worse, right?
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Muni-L-service-disrup...
No reported injuries from the Muni passengers.
Headline reads: Muni collision sends 1 to hospital. Body reads: No one on the Muni train was hurt, Rose said.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/muni-collision-sends-1-to-ho...
Muni bus hits car making an illegal turn. No serious injuries.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/muni-bus-slams-int...
there are plenty of ways to lose efficiency.
for instance, what if your whole society is n% less efficient?
This is arguably not true. It's not uncommon to find yourself on foot and alone in situation/places where it is not a good idea to be either.
I think there is more to it than this. When driving, your nervous system is continually activated as your attention is (should be!) focused on everything going on around you for the entire time. 10x this when stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, making thousands of micro-decisions about when to break, how fast to speed up, how much room to leave ahead of you. The difference between 30-45 minutes of this and 1.5 hours of sitting peacefully on public transit is dramatic.
But on all your other points I fully agree. The answer though is not to throw out public transit because of these pitfalls - it is to massively double down on improving public transit to mitigate these pitfalls.
Especially with all the sensors and smart safety features that modern cars come with, I don't feel that driving is any more stressful than having to balance myself on a constantly shaking bus while holding onto a crappy rubber handle, for example.
A reserved seat in an actual train, though, would be a different story.
Sitting peacefully isn’t really possible on a lot of public transit, especially during rush hours.
There will of course always be a trade off between peak capacity and spending, but this isn’t any less true for cars.
But if you're in other areas, getting into Vancouver is like you described. There's options for more light rail around here but no political will to get it done.
And how does falling asleep imply relaxation? If anything, falling asleep implies mental fatigue. So we can assume driving adds more mental strain. There are entire studies done on driver visual search patterns when driving [0]. What kind of visual search pattern do you use when walking? Are you constant scanning the horizon looking for potential hazards? In fact, walking is generally considered to be an automated activity [1].
[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16127339/ [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4879139/
And yes, walking is not stressful for most people, that's the point of my first reply in this thread. There are people that find being outside as stressful as you find driving if not more, it's a real condition called agoraphobia. It's silly to pretend everyone is affected by such a condition though and trying to rationalize this is not strengthening such an argument IMHO.
Interesting that these are the dangers you bring attention to. Forefront of my mind are the large heavy objects hurtling around.
When I ride public transport or have a driver — I feel relatively more lethargic than when I ride the motorcycle (and to a lesser extend driving a car.)
> it is to massively double down on improving public transit
Why? Private transport represents freedom, public transit represents control. Furthermore, getting public transit to a level of perfect will cost tens of billions of dollars and for what benefit? To have cities and towns shut down each time there is a transit strike, a superstorm, or the government decides we should stay home?
Cars, motorcycles, bicycles, scooters — those work. Let’s make that better. I definitely don’t like spending my time sitting next to strangers of an indeterminate mental status in a temperature that isn’t of my own choosing going to a destination that isn’t necessarily the precise place I want to go. I want to interact with strangers as little as possible.
Raise the fares to $20 (and enforce it) and perhaps I’d consider riding public transit. But after my experiences with the BART and piss-soaked, rat infested NYC subway stations, no thank you. If I want thrills hanging out with a bunch of psychotics waiting for an excuse to push you onto the tracks, I’d rather BASE jump the Met Life building instead.
For a young single person carrying nothing more than their Manhattan Portage satchel to some hipster haunt in Brooklyn, public transport can be great. For people with stuff to carry, small kids, wheelchairs, or mobility issues, or tight schedules, not so much. Add the safety aspects to it and public transport becomes less attractive — unless of course they start allowing those with firearms permits to carry on public transport. But even then, not sure why people would want to give up point to point freedom for public options.
I feel the opposite. If I need to get somewhere then private transport feels like control: I have to own and maintain a car, pay insurance, watch the road carefully, etc. Public transport, in contrast, feels like freedom. But I know this is not the common belief.
I guess it's something cagers just learn to live with.
The characterization of this as "slavery" is beyond ridiculous.
I'm also not sure what personal freedoms you think don't exist in Europe or Asia where such well-designed transit networks exist. You can still have a car, you just don't need to have one.
It doesn't have to be like this. It didn't used to be like this. It might take a few years, but eventually the new generation/ Progressive experimentation with 're-imagining' criminal justice will come to an end. At the moment, those unhinged folks (where I saw an almost aggression just days ago at 845 am) aren't behind bars, a few years ago serial criminals would be either in jail in and out, or in prison being punished for a crime. Today they're.. just about everywhere but.
That's just a fact of the situation. Now we can discuss the morality of putting people behind bars, etc. And have a reasonable conversation. Meanwhile the cities are unsafe, and NYC has an unemployment rate of 8 percent because office workers would rather be remote, and that hurts the economy.
I think you have this backwards. Public transport gives freedom to many many people who are unable to drive (can't afford a car, too young to drive, too old to drive, etc.). In the US if you can't afford to drive your freedom is vastly curtailed precisely because we do not have effective public transport in most cities.
Moreover what you call freedom is only freedom for those with enough money. Instead of heavily subsidising car/motor travel we should invest that money into making it possible for the next generations to continue living on this planet. That's not going to happen with more and more cars.
The idea that allowing private citizens to carry guns on public transit will make things safer is completely insane.
All these politicians that rant about second amendment rights still don't allow guns into their rallies, because people shooting guns in an area with even a relatively small number of people is NOT a recipe for safety.
which means your experience was not similar to a commuter's, at all
(Further, where did I say I was suggesting PT should be slower than it is now?)
If you're an anxious or unskilled driver, sure, it's probably stressful. But most people reach a point where they are as comfortable driving a car as walking down the street.
30 minutes of driving in my private, climate-controlled car, with a comfortable and highly-adjustable seat, listening to music or podcasts of my choice? And the ability to carry whatever I want? I'd choose that over 30 minutes of sitting on bus or train - which is likely to have uncomfortable seating, too hot or too cold, loud, obnoxious, smelly, or mentally disturbed other people - with no ability to transport anything more than you are willing to carry. Even at par, I would rather have my car - let alone if public transport takes 3x longer.
Last time I took BART into SF a guy sat down in the seat in front of me, opened up a plastic bag, and pulled out a needle and started injecting himself with something. I don't believe it was insulin. Uh...rather stick with my car, thanks.
This is just a description of traffic patterns in the US, in general. You presumably don’t cruise through random suburbs on the other side of your city on your way to work, or while running errands, or really for any reason other than needing to.
Where I live, it’s both faster and cheaper for me to not own a car. It hasn’t hurt my traveling much, either, although you’ll have to take my word for that (until I figure out how to anonymize all the location data I collect for myself).
That's the normal traffic pattern in many parts of the country. For example, in the DC metro area, 90% of the jobs are outside the city. It's routine to live in one suburb, commute to another suburb, and have a spouse commute to a third suburb.
GTFS is published by most public transport these days, so you have all the routes described months ahead of time. You can actually have all the schedules offline.
Similarly, I'll check the route home on Google Maps to decide not only which route to take but which mode (walking, transit, shared vehicle, etc) to use.
If there's no car-sharing car nearby, you can take an e-scooter to the car-sharing car, and then go to your car.
In general, I feel once you make the conscious decision to build for cars and allocate vast amounts of space to parking everywhere then you’re going to generally do better with a car. Transit will only be more in line as you drive the % of drivers down and reduce the resource allocations for cars.
That 2 hour trip to the airport? At least 1.5 hours of that is subway/train.
You must be talking about Japan or Europe.
The California "bullet train" was / is going to take 4 hours to go SF - LA. Less than driving, but about the same as flying, even when you factor in getting to & from the airports and waiting in the departure lounge.
And of course, the train stations are not "everywhere" either. You have to factor in getting to & from them, too. Especially in LA where you hardly ever want to go downtown.
Try driving into midtown at 8:30 AM vs the subway. You will not get there faster and then you'll have to find a parking space.
I would need to walk a little over 2 miles to get to the nearest bus stop by my apartment, then I would need to take that bus into the downtown area, transfer to another bus to the central bus depot. From there I could pick up an "express commuter bus to a massive office park about half way between the two cities, where I would need to pick up another "express" bus to get to the next city. From there I would have to pick up another bus, which would take me luckily directly to my work place.
The problem was, none of these schedules were well coordinated. If I left around the time I would normally have to leave to make my shift on time, I would make it to my work place 6 hours later after accounting for all the waiting and transfer times. If I was willing to leave much earlier and arrive an hour before my shift (and if doing so met with the more frequent bus scheduling) I could get there in just 4 hours.
If you aren't directly on, and going almost exactly point to point for public transport outside big cities like NY, it can be so much worse than even "twice as long". I hated the wear and tear going all the way one way and then completely back across the cities the other way doing the shared commute required. I hated the sometimes hour or two wait before or after a shift to make the commute work with the other person. But using public transport was effectively impossible.
Travel time with public transport and by car are mostly the same, with car having a higher risk of taking longer.
Travel outside the city though, is certainly much easier with a car.
In e.g. London or Paris public transport is almost always the fastest way to get from A to B
Once I started using ShareNow I never looked back
In London, you often see from route planning apps that the time for using a car (including waiting for an uber) would be less - except during the rush hours, which is when most people need to.
Also for what you've described to be true, you likely lived in a high income area since they provide easier access to where most offices are situated. If you're commuting in from the outer boroughs into Manhattan, driving is way slower given the traffic (and way more stressful, and then there's the parking situation).
Something that is often overlooked in the transit vs private car debate is that modes of transportation affect urban design and ultimately different ways of living.
Driving in a transit oriented city is totally different than riding transit in an auto oriented city.
https://theicct.org/planes-trains-and-automobiles-counting-c...
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-615.pd...
It's talking about 300-500 mile trips (where you might be choosing plane vs train vs car vs bus) and it assumed 2.2 people in the car, and the bus still gets about 3x the efficiency.
I'm not going to waste my time on some Cato nonsense.
That's a good scenario for buses because Grayhound can size buses appropriately and change the frequency. The number for buses within a city is trickier because you have some packed commute buses, and some with 3 passengers at 10 PM.
i live in seattle and joke about always being able to see at least one tesla. and still there are at least as many if not more SUVs than fuel efficient commuter cars.
I live in a city with subway and going by subway to any place that is not too close (so that the time to walk to a subway station is not a too large fraction of the total time) is much faster than driving a car, with the possible exception of late in the night, when the streets might be empty. In most cities with subways where I have been, this was also true, because they also had congested street traffic.
I have also been in several cities where the buses had their own street lanes, which were forbidden for private cars. In such cities, I have also seen frequently cases when going by bus was faster than driving.
I use audiobooks so it works out for driving or taking public transit. The only difference is the noise level is higher in general with public transit.
I live close to a tube station.
If I'm going somewhere on the network (~50% of journeys) it's great. Primarily because of traffic congestion, mind - in the early morning travel time is about the same by both methods.
If I'm going anywhere else? Car hands down.
The main problem is that the entire network of places is available by car by definition. Worst case is car and then the rest by foot (e.g. into a national park).
By contrast public transport just doesn't serve the majority of places at all. Every train station has a road, not every road has a train station.
Until we have full autonomy, they have to keep their focus on the road.
I read about four books/month. Whenever I used public transport to commute that number doubled.
Not so when I commuted by car.
And don't tell me I can listen to audio books. This doesn't compare in reading speed. And it is also is a dangerous distraction for most driving situations that are not an empty highway or a traffic jam.
Also, the diagrams showing public transport being more space efficient often seem to assume that the public transport will be at capacity. On my 30 minute bus ride, to/from a major downtown, I am not infrequently the only passenger on the whole bus.
I have walked it before during a bus driver strike, took just over an hour at a leisurely pace - 11mins per km.
Normal days - it takes me around 6 to 8 minutes to walk to the bus stop. There is a waiting period for the bus to arrive since you want to get to the bus stop before the scheduled stop - sometimes the bus is early.
Then it takes nearly 30minutes to get to work - frequent stops along the way, 5 minutes waiting at the bus/rail interchange etc.
Finally 7 minute walk to the office from the bus stop.
Total of usually 50 minutes door to door via public transport and it costs $8 both ways.
If I took my car, it would take me 15 minutes and $17 parking fee.
I lived in New York City for thirty years. The subway is always the fastest way to get everywhere, except in the middle of the night.
Now I live in Amsterdam, and public transportation isn't quite as fast as taking my bike, but it's still everywhere, and faster than driving.
> The only real benefit of public transit is you can read during the commute.
Crazy carbrains, destroying our planet. So sick of you.
Honestly I’m not sure why anyone is surprised that public transit takes around twice as long. It’s self selected. The people who are going to use it live close and us it because that worthwhile. So on average it makes sense that it would be some multiple of the time it takes to drive.
We do own a car. Grocery shopping relying on public transportation would be difficult, though I did manage it when much younger.
That sounds like a great reason to build public transit infrastructure and housing near public transit infrastructure.
From my previous apartment it would take about 2 hours to get to the airport using public transit, because I had to transfer twice - that's waiting three times. By car it would take 30 minutes without traffic, and the worst time with a car would be just under 2 hours.
From my current residence it takes about 8 minutes just to walk to the bus stop.
It takes 10 minutes to drive to work (fairly close). It takes 30 minutes by public transit (walk to stop, transfer somewhere).
Whenever I talk to someone who doesn't own a car and really touts public transit, and I dig into the details, I always find that this person has a limited number of places he goes, with the rest being inconvenient to get to.
The only real benefit of public transit is you can read during the commute.