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.
I know you're trying to say the opposite, but what I'm thinking of when reading your comment, is that more money should be invested in building better infrastructure to make buses and trains more reliable. Like 90% of the traffic hindering the buses is made up of cars. With less cars, more people could ride buses, trains etc. and people could ride a lot more frequently. People shouldn't have to fumble through their purses, because busrides should be mostly free.
I'm not even talking traffic. Buses are just inherently slower than cars.
A car gets me from point A to point B with little to no interruption. To go the same distance in a bus, I first have to walk 10 minutes to the closest bus stop, ride the bus down a less direct route with a dozen stops along the way, and then when I get to my stop, walk another 10 minutes to get where I need to go. And the entire time, you are at the mercy of a schedule that is often unreliable. I am not kidding when I say taking a bus would triple my commute time. When I am working 50+ hours a week, it's just not feasible.
Everyone in here apparently lives in a fantasy city where public transport takes you exactly where you want to go, is never late, and runs every 5 minutes. And when the whole thread here is full of "Just take a taxi/Uber", how is that a solution to the problem above?
then your city just has bad transit planning, or is too rural.
And this is what so many people seem fail to realise here. You can't have a flawless public transport system in an area with 1 person per square mile.
Is the suggestion here that nobody should be allowed to live in a remote location in order to remove cars from society? Or do people actually believe that a decent system exists for people with their nearest neighbours a mile away?
Feels like the issue has been simplified to the point of absurdity sometimes. I don't love cars but I couldn't live without mine, even if public transport was improved to perfection in my area.
Is this world that's being proposed one where nobody can go camping? How do we get to places with no towns or cities? Charter a bus of our own or wait until 67 other people want to go with me? How do parents of 3+ young children manage? If you have triplets you're making a very hard job (something simple like going shopping) 5x harder. Is this world one where food delivery is the only option for a big shop? Or are we expected to shop daily so we can carry everything home on a bus?