I have a commute that parallels the freeway for a portion. The train takes 18 mins or so to get through the stretch stops and all. The highway in rush hour takes about 30 mins if its really bad. However, the twist is I don’t work directly on this corridor, I need to transfer. The highway has an interchange with another, making the entire trip even in bad traffic about 40 minutes by the time I park and walk in.

With the train I need to transfer to another train. This could be a 10 minute wait at the platform before the train arrives, plus its an end of the line stop for this particular line so it will sit for another 5-10 mins while it changes operators. Then once it gets moving, another 15 mins since there are a few at grade crossings with this line and then a 10 min walk. I do it over driving because I can zone out half asleep in the mornings.

The transfering and frequencies are where transit enters a world of pain and these are expensive, complex issues to fix compared to an interchange ramp. Anytime I bring someone unfamiliar on the train, they basically swear off the system for good and moan why we didn’t just pay for the surging uber.

In many big asian cities, the nearest MRT stop is less than 5 minutes walking away, there are trains every 3 minutes, they ride fast, and the layout is such that you usually need 0 or 1 transfers to another colored line, can't really beat it imho, except with the public bikes in some cases

EU's metros are a bit dated compared to that, but still very useful.

In the NY one, I was sometimes thinking walking is about as fast if you add up the slow train speed with the waiting time. In SF, there is none?!

I’d love to see some maps of good examples, but I think transit with minimal transferring is a really tough network nut to crack. You can build hub and spoke or with a few hubs and spokes but this often requires going way out of your way into somewhere you can transfer between spokes. You can build a grid basically like what is done with busses, but again, the routing demands compromising your personal convenience because you are moving along a grid, versus more as the crow flies. At the end of the day no one is going to be perfectly happy with transit by definition. It serves the average commuter along the given corridor, never you in particular and your particular commute. A lot of car drivers today probably wont accept that, taking a backseat and saying they will deal with waiting if it means second order benefits that aren’t immediately obvious, since for the last 100 years they’ve held the notion that they are in charge.

taipei: https://www.travelking.com.tw/eng/tourguide/taipei/taipeimrt...

singapore: https://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltagov/en/getting_around/publ...

beijing: https://www.travelchinaguide.com/images/map/beijing/beijing-...

Some grid patterns and some circles. Of course not truly everything is close to a station, but the stations tend to be at important points, and points of interest / desirable living locations will appear around the existing stations.

I just don't understand this whole argument of "A lot of car drivers today probably wont accept that". Sitting in non-moving traffic in a car is truly horrible, I mean it's absolutely the worst, there's nothing fun about it, you're standing still, wasting time, taking 30 minutes for something that can be biked in 10 minutes. When you can instead just walk a few minutes, sit in a train, walk a few more minutes, sit in another train, walk to destination, all in 20 minutes, and you can do stuff on your phone in the meantime.

Even if you love the car so much, having a subway will maybe make driving a car acceptably fun again, since more people taking subway means less cars on the road so a chance you can actually drive instead of stand still all the time.

To me your opinion sounds really US-centered (where public transports typically suck).

It is fine to say that US has evolved for the individual car, and it's very hard to change. But I don't get why you say that it's the same everywhere else...