I guess one has to balance the time spent in traffic and being crammed with others in public transport. Here in the bay area, one can get stuck on 101 for 2 hours when it would take only 40 minutes via Caltrain. I'm sure quite a few people would rather save 1.5 hours every day being crammed in with others.
Re:The End of Car Culture
by seanmcdirmid on Monday July 01, 2013 @12:47AM
(#5968709)
Caltrain also has seats most of the time. The worst is that you might have to sit next to someone...cry me a river.
Re:The End of Car Culture
by potatolicious on Monday July 01, 2013 @01:01AM
(#5968751)
One of the more depressing things is that the conversation around transit is so frequently: "But... [horrified whisper] other people!"
Not to mention the amount of time spent circling city blocks in SF to find parking. I hate myself every time I need to drive to SF and find street parking. I remember spending 30 minutes circling blocks around pacific heights to find street parking, only for the purposes of eating at a restaurant near there.
Well, 40 minutes not counting getting to the train, waiting for the train, exiting the station, getting to your car & driving from the station home.
My 40 minutes includes that calculation already. If you plan accordingly, you don't need to wait for the train... just arrive on time. I bike to the station so that I don't need to pay for parking at the station.
On a side note, BART is probably going on strike this week, which means that an hour BART commute is soon going to turn into a 4 hour commute when the traffic on the highways double.
Ironically, though that's correctly pointed out as a vulnerability of "public transit," it's also a vulnerability of private automotive transit: if not for public transit, it would be far, far less convenient to drive from point A to point B, at least for some values of A and B
Re:The End of Car Culture
by BadassFractal on Monday July 01, 2013 @02:36AM
(#5969091)
Absolutely. However I was imagining public transportation being improved to the point where being crammed is no longer a problem due to many more options and routes being run much more often.
At that point it becomes a lot preferable to spend 1h on a train somewhere reading a book / catching up on news or email, rather than getting enraged in gridlock traffic without doing absolutely anything productive (yes, you could theoretically do radio/audiobooks).
Maybe not, but some of us find it vastly preferable to being crammed in with others on public transport. So don't tar everyone with your particularly preferences thanks.