this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Imagine having no good public transport
Unless the reason travel by car takes really long is because of traffic jams, it's actually rather hard to create public transit that actually wins out in time. Bus will be a lot slower, trains can only take you to so many places, and building a large metro system is prohibitively expensive.
I would like to use public transit, but when that would turn a 15 minute drive into a 55 minute trip, I'd rather not spend 27 hours a month extra going to work.
But you can do things while on the train like sleep or internet. It depends what that tradeoff is exactly, but I would still rather have a longer commute I can do things during.
Like get robbed, stabbed, harassed, inconvenienced, annoyed and assaulted?
Tradeoffs indeed.
Still much safer than roads with all the crashes.
How much more likely are you to die in a car accident in a bus or train versus a car? How many times have you taken public transit that you have such a problem with the issues you mentioned?
Where do you live?
Chicken and egg problem. Crime highly correlates with poverty. People perceive transit as being a poor people thing because it's cheap. Only poor people take transit. You get the gist.
Also, the incidence rate is probably lower than people's perception. I lived in San Francisco for about 3 years and only experienced one incident while taking transit everyday. Of course, transit doesn't have the problem mentioned above, so maybe it's not the best example.
I tried taking transit a couple of times in LA and in my hometown in a suburb in Florida. Transit is underutilized in these places (read as, people see it as a poor person thing). It was surprisingly... uninteresting. It was just getting from A-to-B. People mostly just sat on their phones or stared out the window or chatted. Was quite nice.
So maybe grab a friend or two for safety, since you're concerned about that, and give it a shot. I think you'll be surprised.
But if you're in LA or New York, the trains are super dirty. So uh, i recommend not one of those. No idea where you're located
(Edit: I'm assuming you're in the US because that kind of opinion is quite common there.)