this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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The man in the car has to be at work at 8AM. He has a 15-minute commute, so he can leave at 7:40 to give himself a bit of extra time to get there. At 12:30, he gets a call that his mother is in critical condition in the hospital. He leaves immediately, drives 30 minutes to the hospital the next town over, and is there to say his last goodbye before she passes away.
A man on the bus has to be at work at 8AM. The bus runs hourly with the scheduled pickup being x:20. Normally, it takes 30 minutes to reach his stop and another 10 minutes to walk, but sometimes the bus runs 10-15 minutes late, so he has to take the 6:20 bus to make sure he can get there on time. At 12:30, he gets a call that his mother is in critical condition in the hospital. The man pulls up Google Maps to find the quickest bus route to the hospital, runs to the bus stop in 5 minutes, and waits another 10 minutes for the bus to arrive. Unfortunately, this stop does not have a direct route to the hospital, so he must ride the bus for 10 minutes and make a connection to another bus at a different stop. On the way there, the first bus stops in front of a retirement community, and 10 elderly passengers spend a good 5 minutes fumbling through pocketbooks for bus fare because they don't understand how to use the newfangled reloadable transit cards. One elderly man gets violent because he has no change and the bus driver won't take a check, so he has to be removed from the bus. The man gets off at his first stop and sprints across the block to his next bus stop, but he realizes that he has unfortunately arrived late, and the second bus he had to catch just left. The bus runs hourly and this city is too small for there to be an abundance of taxis, so his options are either to wait an hour for the next bus or to call an Uber. The man opens his Uber app and, after 5 minutes, it matches him to a driver. The man waits around, watching the map as the Uber driver circles around the city for a bit, before eventually that driver drops and he is connected to a different driver. Another 5 minutes pass, the Uber driver arrives, and the man is now in a car on the way to the hospital. A 20-minute drive later, the man is now at the hospital, but his mother has just passed away before he had the chance to say goodbye.
This is why people drive.
Sorry to burst your tortured made up anecdote, but taxis exist.
Taxis are expensive and have the fuel issue per the post were replying to. They were pretty long winded but busses do take longer than driving yourself that much is true.
you use mass transit (buses, trains) normally, and you use personal transit (taxis, cars) in emergency situations like the comment was referring to. I think that's what they are trying to say.
Also, buses, trams, and trains CAN be much faster than cars if they are built correctly. Going to a mall in the center of a >1mil population city is much easier and faster on a metro than a car.
Don't think of buses in a vaccum, consider other modes like rail and bike paths as well.
You don't walk to a freeway, get in a car and get off the car at the end of the freeway to walk right?
Cars are expensive as hell and you gotta have a place to park it
They presently do, because they are under resourced.