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Ask Slashdot: If Public Transport Was Free, Would You Leave Your Car At Home?
dkatana writes: The Estonian capital launched a program of free public transport to encourage people to leave their cars at home. But they never did. When Tallinn launched the program ridership numbers did increase, but not by the 20% the city had projected. Instead, they grew by a modest 3%, and by people already using public transport. What happened is that more pedestrians and bike users started to use public transit instead of walking and cycling. But car users continue to drive to work. Do you think the same would hold true in the U.S. if a similar program was started?
If public transport would be free in all of Germany, I would not use this car thing again.
If you make routes that are not useful - or have non-useful time tables - free, people still won't use them. A lot of driving that is done now is done in part because people are making commutes that are not easily - if at all - accommodated by existing public transportation infrastructure. If it takes two hours to get from A to B by public transport because you have to travel to C first - covering at least twice the total distance along the way and waiting for connecting buses or trains - people won't do it.
The other thing is the availability of parking. If parking in the city is affordable and available, that reduces the appeal of public transportation.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
We don't drive cars only because they are cheaper than public transit, but faster too.
People will respond from very high density cities and point out what I say isn't true for them. They don't need free rides for motivation, because in their situation, public transit is actually better. They should take the moment to get some insight; the world isn't waiting for their advice and doesn't want their lives.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Is the free transportation locally available? Does it get me where I want to go in a comparable amount of time? Will it be clean? Crowded? Run on time? Available if I need to change my departure time? .....
Answer=maybe some
The cost of public transportation is low in Denver. Probably $120 for a monthly pass. It's just inconvenient. If I drive my car I'm on my own schedule. A better program would be to educate on the cost of driving, and how much one would save by not having a car.
I leave my car at home to save on gas and parking.
More people would drive cars than before.
I'm an automotive performance enthusiast. I race, do car shows, mod, etc. I'd pay extra to have a lane on the highway w/o other motorist on it because most of you don't know how to properly pilot a vehicle.
I take public transportation occasionally to and from work in San Francisco. But in general, there's a huge amount of crazy homeless people at all hours of the day who take public transportation. The buses are often filthy, and they often don't run on time. it's difficult to get from one place to the other, especially if I need to go multiple places in a single day.
Given the choice, I bike or drive. There's nothing worse than driving along a long stretch of road in SF only to pass a bus stop filled with people who have clearly been there eagerl waiting for the next bus for a long time which you know won't be arriving for another long time since you just came down that same road without seeing a bus. Those poor people. I did that for years. Never again. Even if it's free.
1) I can get anywhere I want with public transportation as it is right now. The problem is that it takes literally four to eight times more time (in my specific circumstances), and my time is far from free.
2) The notion that it's free is, frankly, dishonest and disingenuous. *Somebody* is paying for it, and that somebody is me, in one form or another. Just because the money is not coming directly from your wallet at that instant doesn't mean it's not happening.
3) It ignores subjective value. I often enjoy driving. I don't enjoy being crowded into a bus or tram / trolley. Trains aren't too bad from a comfort standpoint, but still not as fun as driving.
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When they make it illegal to ride public transportation if you haven't bathed in 3 weeks, then we can talk.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Next, they'll start punishing drivers by converting traffic lanes into bike lanes, decreasing the available capacity of the area's roads.
If a bus passed by my place I would take it for free. I would even pay. But I am a rural kind of guy, so I drive.
The closest public transportation is about 35 miles from my house. So no.
If you want people to switch from cars to public transportation then you need the following:
1) Speed comparable, if not faster than cars. If the car is 30 faster than the bus, no one takes the bus if they own a car. Time is worth more than anything else we have.
2) Convenient public transportation - it doesn't work if your city is all spread out and you have to walk more than 15 minutes to and from the bus stop. 10 minute walk to/from the bus stop is about the most you.
Otherwise, you need to start imposing costs on using the car - as in expensive parking.
NYC and London have some of the better public transportation systems of the world. They are faster than traffic, with many stops all over the city, and parking is expensive.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The public transportation in the US — and almost everywhere else — is so heavily subsidized by taxes already, the cost of the actual fare is not a factor.
Personal car is simply more convenient. Oh, and the road maintenance is also heavily subsidized by taxes.
Humanity should stop all such subsidies — allowing private companies to build roads and/or run buses/trains/planes/bicycles as they believe promises the most profit. Currently the people deciding, what to do, and people profiting (or losing) from the decisions are distinct groups — the sooner one's own decision(s) cause him to make/lose money personally, the sooner the healing will begin.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Free of drunk people, or homeless people who smell so bad it's unpleasant to be near them?
Free of limitations in when I can depart, or how much longer the ride takes than driving?
Free of the inability to easily stop to grab a coffee or use the bathroom?
I'm 50 miles from my customer site, and live only about 2 miles from a train station where I could catch a ride that - after a bunch of connections and transfers, would get me to my customer's site.
In about three hours.
On a good day.
Driving takes 2 hours each way - on a HORRIBLE day and well under an hour each way on a good day.
depends on how clean and fast it is - i don't want to catch sniffalitaliss in a crowded street car!!
In my neck of the woods, I have been told there are these things called "buses" that come around and pick people up... I often see people waiting under signs that indicate they are "places of bus stopping" - yet I rarely see these elusive contraptions actually on the road, or picking up passengers.
Public transportation is a great idea in theory, but poorly run in practice, even in metropolitan areas. As for Michigan, it might as well as be non-existent. Rural and suburban areas are always poorly serviced. The solution, of course, is for people to move to areas closer to work and other required destinations - but that only works well for people who do not put down roots somewhere with a mortgage.
Free or not, I simply don't have the option. My current employer used to be willing to let me telecommute, now they expect me to commute an hour or more every day, each way, to satisfy some CEO's bizarre notion of esprit de corps (though most of my team members are in other states). I'd gladly ride a bus if it was convenient, both in timing and within a reasonable distance to my destination, but it doesn't even exist.
A car usually costs you several hundred dollars/euros per month. A ticket for public transportation is usually a fraction of that, maybe 100 dollar/euro. Why would you think that reducing that cost would make a significant difference?
Where I live there is very good public transit from the suburbs to downtown. The buses have HOV lanes to bypass the traffic jams, and once I hit a train I am 25 minutes from downtown. If I drive I get there in 40 minutes and pay $15 for parking and about $8 for gas. If I take transit I get there in 55 minutes and I pay about $8 round trip. Very competitive when you consider price and trip time.
The problem is when you live in one suburb and work in another. The hub and spoke layout of the transit system sucks for getting across town. The trip that I drive in 40 minutes, with free parking at the office, becomes a 2 hour nightmare with two bus trips and a train ride in between.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I wouldn't own a car. My college town had roughly the same population and I didn't need a bike.
You insensitive clod!
I frequently ride public transit in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. It is the largest fare free system in the US. It is used by many people but growth in usage depends on many factors. Park and Ride lots make a big difference for people who live outside of town and must drive to get even close to their destination. Sidewalks make a difference because people who live close enough to walk to a bus stop have to have a safe place to walk. The Chapel Hill buses have bike carriers on the front so that bike riders can take the bus for part of their trip.
But one of the biggest factor is how easy it is to find parking. Cities use a huge amount of their space just to store cars during the day. The more expensive and hard to find parking becomes, the more people will use free public transit.
And all of this takes time. People have to adjust to the new reality of bus transportation being easier and cheaper than owning and driving a car. Over time, people will make decisions about where to live based in part on the presence of public transit. And if businesses also locate in areas served by transit, then it's easier for people to live and work on a transit line.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
My commute to work takes about 15 minutes. On a good day, if I get the lights and avoid peak rush hour, I can make it home in about 10 minutes. Public transport, at least with current routes, would take me an hour and a half, plus up to a half-hour of waiting for the bus in the first place.
My son's drive to his college campus takes about a half-hour to 45 minutes. Public transportation would take over 2 hours plus about 20 minutes of walking at one end.
Both of these route are from one place near the edge of town to a different place near the edge of town. The problem is that almost all the transport routes are optimized (well, for lack of a better word) to get people to/from the center of town. If I worked downtown, I'd be more inclined to take public transportation (although for the most part the peripheral public transport still sucks, so I'd probably drive to a park'n'ride light rail station -- if they had more parking.)
So basically, fuck no, life's too short.
If there really was a public transit system to speak of where I lived I might use it. Living in the southern US though you get basically nothing.
If I don't have my vehicle, I'm at the mercy of the schedule. What happens if I need to pull an all nighter at work? If I need to go into work at an odd hour? What about transporting my work with me? How much stuff can I carry on a bus or train vs in my car?
My car gives me more control over how and when I travel places.
This is why central planning never works.
In the Chicago suburbs, a public transportation option would be at least twice as long in time for a commute.
And free does not make up for the lost time !
I thought about this, but after checking the routes for bus routes instead of a 15-20 minute drive, I'd take 3+ hours and multiple switches.
I've had a friend get fired from a job because he was forced to use public transportation and it was unreliable, causing him to be late too many times.
I take the express bus from San Jose to Palo Alto for my tech job. It's an hour each way. Sometimes a bit longer in the afternoon if there is more than five fender benders on the 280 between the 85 and the 17. Well worth the money at $140 per month for an express monthly pass.
Estonia is so far North they have really horrible weather. Free buses are a huge improvement for those on bikes and those walking. For someone driving, it's still a downgrade...
I ride the metro because I don't have a car. The cost doesn't really factor in for me. It's $80/month and goes where ever I need to (mostly).
That said, my main issues are the speed at which the busses move and who crowded they are. We'd benefit more with more dedicated bus lanes (and better enforcement for the ones we have) and more busses running. My current commute takes over an hour, if they could shave 15mins off my commute I'd gladly pay an extra $40/month and take transit more.
Other issues if transit was free would be homeless using the busses as shelter in the winter. Homelessness is a problem and we need to find a long term solution for that before giving away public transit for free. It doesn't matter if we can travel anywhere to work, if we all don't have safe places to sleep in.
It'd probably make me use public transportation somewhat more frequently for the sorts of trips I already use public transportation for sometimes. There are costs associated with a particular mode of transportation that aren't always monetary - for instance, time. The trip I most frequently use public transportation for, for instance, to get from my house to downtown LA, I have to factor in:
* Time to get there: for the train, first I have to walk to the train (~10 minutes), then I have to wait for the train (anywhere from 0-15 minutes), then I have to actually take the train there (~1hr). Then the same amount of time to get back. By car, I can just get in my car and drive there, but the amount of time it takes is widely dependent on traffic, which impacts the decision greatly. (Also when I get there, I have to find parking, which is a consideration as well, and how hard that is depends somewhat on where in LA I'm trying to end up.)
* Actual monetary cost: by train it's a few dollars each way for a ticket, per person. By car, it's pocket change in gas, but then you have to factor in parking, which is more per car but less per person depending how many people are going, so you have to factor that in, too.
* Might I be buying large, fragile or perishable things home? Obviously if so, a car is better.
So for that trip, there are a bunch of factors - sometimes it's better to go by car, sometimes by train. I've done both. Reducing the monetary cost of the train would just change the parameter values slightly in favor of the train, other than then the train would be even more totally jam packed with poor people who can't afford cars, as it goes through some rather less savory parts of LA in between (not saying that's bad that it goes through those parts, just that it would be bad taking a train that's jammed to capacity).
My 10 minute car commute to work, though, those same parameters are far more heavily skewed towards driving - the "walking" and "waiting for a train" times would heavily outweigh the "actually on the train" time (which would already be slower than driving, as there isn't particularly measurable traffic on that commute). Gas is tiny, parking is free, so it doesn't cost me much to drive, and would cost *loads* in time to take the train or bus. So no thanks.
To get to work by 8AM, I would have to walk 3-4 blocks to the bus stop leaving by 6:40AM (not so nice when there's 6" of snow and -15F temps or when it's 90F+ at 7AM). I get on one bus to go about 2 miles away, then wait 15-20 minutes for another bus to get downtown.
Leaving work at 5PM, a 5 minute walk to the nearest bus depot at work MIGHT catch the 5:05PM bus, otherwise it's a 30 minute wait, then another transfer to another 15-20 minute ride and a 4 block walk uphill to home.
I could drive even with 7:30AM/5PM traffic in about 20-30 minutes either by Interstate or by a major through town federal highway. So I can give up an extra 1-1.5 hours a day of my time and walk several blocks in quite likely to be less than pleasant weather, or I can drive my car and pay about the same amount for a monthly parking pass as what a monthly bus pass would cost. Due to having children, I couldn't give up the vehicle, it would just mean different routes for the car and the bus.
Having visited cities like San Francisco, New York, Houston, and San Diego in the last year, cities that have well developed urban centers with public transit in mind seem to do much better with this than ones that were designed around cars and are trying to retrofit mass transit into them. The biggest difficulty in getting around NYC was figuring out whether to grab a cab, get on a subway, get a bus ticket, or get on one of the multiple trains. In several cases, there were at least 3 different options to get from A to B in roughly the same amount of time, though prices varied quite a bit. Subway was cheap, trains were pretty cheap, cabs were reasonable only because of the short distances.
Any place I need to go that is within 8 miles I usually walk there unless I have to cross a freeway, or carry heavy items home. When I was working for a small publishing company I walked to and from work every day, 12 miles round trip, The amount of time it took me to get there was just under 1.5 hours one way. While I could take public transit home, going to work was often at odd hours and the bus here doesn't run at 2:50 in the morning. In some situations people would need to transfer to another bus trolly or subway to get to work, in my case I could have taken the bus most of the way home but why bother, the walk was enjoyable. Being on a stuffy bus sharing everyone's BO isn't such a glamorous thought, on the road walking; I can listen to my own music, talk on the phone and I only have to put up with My BO and a few pan handlers.
Public transportation does not reach my house. I would have to drive for ~ 45 minutes to reach public transportation.
Public transportation isn't even the real issue here, it's local zoning laws. When bedroom communities encourage suburban sprawl, you end up with hundreds of McMansions stacked on top of each other and the nearest bus stop is miles away. Meanwhile, roads are built to discourage bicycling (just adding a lane on the side doesn't negate the dozens of dangerous intersections you have to navigate to survive each way). Transportation routes really only service arterial streets, and those are only zoned commercial. My car is 15 feet from my back door. Public transportation isn't ever going to do that with cities built the way they are. Not even close enough to be competitive.
And I'm not just serviced by a poor local system; the American Public Transportation Association named UTA the Outstanding Public Transportation System of 2014.
A few years ago, I used it regularly and had no choice. I live in a smallish college town. We have 2 bus systems, the college (free for anyone), bu only near the university, and only a few of connector points with the city system.
Leaving the Uni's system out, let us take a common task, getting from a near downtown residential area to Walmart on the north side of town. This involves the following steps: 1. Wait for bus closest to home, it is on a 30 minute loop,takes 10 minutes to get downtown if you catch it, and downtown is a 20 minute walk, so depending on timing a walk is faster.
Time 10-30 minutes. 2. Exit at downtown xfer center, wait for bus that goes in that direction. It is on a 10 minute route, so typically not a long wait if any. Ride out to the mall (not the location for walmart), depending on stops 15-30 minutes.
3. Wait for transfer to route that completes journey, walking not a good option here as the last 2-3 miles are not very pedestrian friendly. 30 minute loop for this bus so up to 30 minute wait, time on bus 7 minutes. 7-40 minutes.
4. Shop, wait up to 30 for return bus. 15-45 minutes (long on return trip as this bus hits up a lot of apartments on way back from Walmart).
5. Catch the downtown connector 15-30 minutes
6. Wait for your bus home and ride it 10-40 minutes
Total time: 1:10 to 3:45, time if you drove from same location 15-25 minutes depending on traffic.
Our system is a pretty good one too, and this is one of the longest trips with the most xfers. Could you imagine trying to plan getting to work on time with a 2+ hour error margin? Or getting home to make dinner or get your kids to an event?
Not very feasible. Even if the longest time is rare, it is still quite a swing and an incredible portion of your day to waste riding a bus.
Silence is a state of mime.
Plural of anecdote is not data, etc etc., but....
When I moved to Atlanta I lived right in the heart of Buckhead and was two blocks from my office. I walked every day. It was awesome. A 10 minute walk was faster than a 30 minute (with traffic) commute, plus I didn't have to pay for parking. And I just enjoyed walking.
After two months I realized I never drove anymore, I just used the MARTA or Uber, so I sold my car.
The year I lived in Atlanta like that was awesome. No car payment, no car hassles, and I could drink at dinner every night without worries. Now I moved away from the city to a small town and had to buy a car again, and I'm actually sorta sad about it.
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
There are a few times that I will take public transportation.
Living near the northwest limit of the Chicago area transit system, it is convenient if I'm headed to a convention at McCormick Place. But, I haven't gone there in over a decade... The conventions I go to moved out to the suburbs, where use of public transportation is comical at best.
Going to one this past May, I checked the PT route vs. car. Car took 1.5 hours. PT route involved 10 minutes to train station. 1.3 hours on train. 20 minutes on another train. 10 minutes on bus. 19 minutes walk from nearest bus station to convention site. Cost for round trip? More than the cost to drive, including the $13 parking fee at the convention center.
"Free", as pointed out by others, is only to the rider... Someone has to pay for it. In Milwaukee, they're going to build a trolly system in the downtown that will be less cost-effective than simply renting a bunch of limos and drivers to do the work. And that's if the ridership reaches their claims... but the buses currently plying the route don't meet those numbers!
Does PT go where I shop? No. Does PT go where I work? No. Would I use it if it was free? Why?
Where I live, it takes me 15 to 20 minutes to drive to work. The closest bus stop is a 5 minute walk away, I'd have to leave 20 minutes earlier than I usually do in order to make it there in time for the bus, and the real killer is that the route the bus follows would take over an hour to get me to work. And then there's another 10 minute walk from the bus stop to the building I actually work at.
During the summer here it's already over 80 degrees F and sometimes close to 90 by the time I leave for work, so I'd also be nice and sweaty by the time I get into the office. Add another 5 minutes to shower and change clothes.
That is, of course, not counting the creepy panhandlers you have to deal with who often hang around the bus stops.
So no, I wouldn't use the public transportation here to get to work if it was free.
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As I'm a university student, my school ID counts as a free bus pass. Despite this, I still drive into work(at the University) because the public transport options are sufficiently bad that I don't feel like turning a 9 hour day into a 12.5 hour one for a 25 minute drive.
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The problem is that with the exception of major cities like New York, public transportation just isn't convenient enough to use in the US. With the exception of New York city, I'm not going to use public transportation if I have to drive to a train/bus station first.
If you make something "free", people won't value it.
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It isn't an instant thing. Cheap public transportation means that people invest less in cars. It means that homes nearer to public transportation become more valuable. That leads to increases in ridership. Those increases lead to demand to expand the system making it more useful. Then from there the housing stock begins to shift towards more concentrated making cars less practical and public transport more practical. Secondary commercial services change -- think New York City.
A sudden shift in pubic transportation gets the ball rolling but there needs to be a long term sustained desire to shift people away from cars and towards public. It ain't about the $2 / mo. Though price does matter and it does help.
Provide free Uber (or similar) service and I'd get rid of my car today. But public transit to really too inconvenient and has the disadvantage of being filled with the dregs of society--even moreso once it becomes free.
Currently looking forward to the emergence of driverless taxis. I'll ditch my car and use them as I need them. Save enough on insurance and maintenance that the taxi wins out as the cheapest option.
This is a false assumption. Because public transportation would never actually be free. In fact much of Amtrak is subsidized by tax dollars even though you still pay a ticket to ride it. The ideal that somehow a service that cost a lot of money to develop, maintain and operate can be free is ridiculous. If you live in a big city chances are good your car is old, or you only rent one when you need one. Or you have tried the car sharing system. But if you figure in how much of America does not connect to tracks anymore, let alone have public train transportation. Your really not being realistic at providing it even for a steep costs let alone for free.
Unless public transit is frequent and ubiquitous, it can't replace a car regardless of price
When I moved to San Francisco, an unlimited Muni pass was so cheap ($35) that it may as well been free, but I still had a car because weekend service is infrequent, and didn't go everywhere I wanted to go. I thought about giving up my car, until I tried an out of town trip on BART one weekend, it would have been an hour (or less) round trip by car, but since it involved a train transfer plus a long wait for a bus (that never came so I ended up walking the 2 miles), the transit part of the trip ended up being being over 3 hours.
Even now an unlimited Muni pass is cheap ($70), much cheaper than owning and parking a car in the city so it's not the cost of transit that makes people hold on to their cars.
On the other hand, when I spent some time in Tokyo, a $170 monthly Metro pass was much better than having a car, few of my friends who lived there full time owned a car.
This is the sort of drivel that flows from the mind of a moron who was born, schooled, works in, plans to retire in, and will die in a big city. Such people are mentally ill, having never encountered the REAL WORLD. Big cities are artificial and mind-altering.
Mass transit, like always-connected high-speed internet, and many other things taken for granted by people pickled in big cites are not practical in most rural areas. Who is going to provide mass transit for free to a farm kid in the middle of Kansas? Will there ever be a bus that the rancher in Wyoming can take to town?
When is a town of 4000 people in the middle of Nebraska going to get gigabit fiber service?
Far too many people in big cities live in an intellectual bubble where they cannot even IMAGINE what it's like on 95% of the Earth's surface - they're as acclimated to life on Earth as a space alien, and when they suggest stuff like this, they out themselves as childish and completely ignorant - fully-dependent on "service providers" in their glass concrete and steel containers.
The public transportation in my city is little more than a joke. People only use it because they have no choice, not because it's a desirable way to get around. "Free" would be no bargain.
and are willing to pay out share in gas to get where we want, how we want and when we want. Years ago I use to take transit and walk everywhere cause I like to walk but I also didn't have a car. It would take me 1.5 to get to work in the morning and after work. In a car even in heavy traffic it would have been 30 min each way. That's two hours of free time per day. Also instead of getting home at 10:30-11PM I would have gotten home at 9:30PM.
If I lived in Vancouver or some other shitty congested city I'd take a bike or moped.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
filthoids. When I'm in my turbo-charged chrome coffin I know you're mirin' and jelly. Booya!
I've simulated this exact scenario for hours, and I've gotten the same results from this study; moderate increase in usage but not enough to really address inner-city congestion.
They probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their study, too - this only cost me $20 during the Steam Summer Sale. Stupid government!
=Smidge=
I have an idea that is likely to be the true next generation of public transportation. The few people I have shared the idea with would stop driving their cars in and around the core and metro areas. Any other public transportation system that exists today has too many negatives for me to utilize. One day, I'll share my idea as I've got other things to do.
If I lived in NYC, I would not own a car. We did live in Washington DC (the Very District Itself) for nearly 6 years, but we still needed a car, because it was the only way to go shopping for groceries, etc. Still, while living there, I would regularly go to NYC on business by (a) walking 3 blocks to the Metro station, (b) taking the Metro to Union Station, (c), taking Amtrak to NYC, and (d) walking and/or using taxis in NYC. Coming home, I'd reverse the process.
The fundamental issue with public transit is that unless you have a very dense urban setting, you just can't get around all the places you need to in the time frame required. For vast portions of the US, that just doesn't work all that well.
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
If you work almost all day at a computer and have little more desired/needed interaction with people than you could comfortably do by phone or online then why the hell are you being required to commute in the first place? That is the most important question.
Next, the price of public transit is not the issue. Not being able to get around on my own schedule is an issue. And in my case I have a handicap which while not quite bad enough to put me in a wheelchair does preclude standing around waiting for transport or walking much at all at the endpoints.
Third, public transit is only per passenger/mile economical when nearly full. To satisfy more flexible schedule it has to run a great deal of the time at far less than its environment and $$ cost break even point.
So no, I wouldn't take it, generally speaking, even if it was free.
Now if we had self driving little pods that would optionally join/leave trains of such when optimal for the journey then I could see the point modulo the first and most important question of whether the trip makes any real sense in the first place.
It costs me about 5 dollars per day to commute via public, or about $200 per month. I spend only about $90 month on gas (I have a very small car). So on the surface, free public would seem to be a win win for me, almost an extra 1000 bucks a year in my pocket. Oddly enough, my employer covers public transportation in our very small city (pop abt 190k). I thought it was a fantastic idea when they first rolled the program out and still do. I started using it immediately, but as other commenters have suggested here, the quality and availability of the service factors more heavily than the cost to the commuter. The nature of my work requires that I cannot be a clock watcher. If someone has a question or needs assistance as I am walking out the door to catch a bus, I am obligated to assist them. So, within the first week of trying out the free public transit, I found my time at work started to increase by 30 minutes to an hour a day. Worse, if I missed the last 6:05PM bus, I was then stuck at work for another hour waiting for the next bus home. Buses here run every 15-20 minutes or so during rush hour, but once every 40-90 min thereafter, and many routes stop altogether after midnight. As others have stated, my commute time also increased significantly using public. What can take as little as 12-15 minutes door to door in my car increases to 35-40 minutes minimum per trip each day by bus. So my commute time per week via car is abt 2.5 hours, but by bus is nearly 7hrs, and that's if the buses are running on time. When I lived in Chicago, then NY, public was a no-brainer, but I was young and single and slummed it in tiny apartments, no dependents, no obligations other than to my job and myself. Often times the well-intentioned people pushing these initiatives are single, childless and can afford to live in more convenient but expensive urban areas. Many suburbs are populated not by wealthy white collar workers in SUVs living in McMansions but by lower middle class families in modest homes with aging parents they have to care for nearby.
I'll be busing it in the near future, solely due to it being free. I'll be moving about 35 miles from work. It's an estimated 45-60min drive. The bus is around 75-90min. At 25-30mpg, I'll be saving $8-10/day for the days I can take the bus. That would be about 85% of my net wage per hour. Considering I cannot pick up the extra saved hour at work, it's the only way to save some money on a tight budget. I also get the benefit of being able to read, instead of driving. I'd rather keep my current 1 mile commute, but we make due with the situation.
Public transport in the USA is almost uniformly low-ball, by which I mean to wave my hands at uncomfortable seating, sparse scheduling, sparse pickup and drop-off locations, smelly (nothing like an old diesel engine to get your sinuses in an uproar), and simply old-school -- the number of cities with proper elevated monorail systems that don't impact the streets or create shadowy hangouts for the unsavory is very small, and those (looking at you, Seattle) tend to not actually implement route coverage that is worth even considering for most excursions unless you're one of the lucky few who live, work and shop right along the line itself.
Offering something worth very little for free isn't going to get anyone very far, no pun intended (but I'm always happy when they fall out like that, lol.)
Considering my own use of private vehicles, I use them because:
o It's point to point; I start where I am and I end up where I'm going
o It's considerably more secure; windows up, doors locked, only trusted riders are on-board, and I control the vehicle
o I have my music (and my ham radio gear), in short, the environment is customized for me
o There's no waiting, no calling, and no communications problems
o Joyriding
o Car sex is fun and safe if done thoughtfully, while public transport sex is a direct route to the courtroom
Any of these would be sufficient, but all of them together are broadly decisive. A bright, scenic trip on a monorail appeals on its own merits; very little else does. That's because I have spent an enormous amount of time on public transport and liked it not at all.
My overall impression is that public transport as implemented here is that it is the very least we can get away with, regardless of the harm done.
I don't think we should be looking at it with an eye to making it incrementally better, either. It's a black hole that sucks very large amounts of money and returns nothing of new value. No one with an actual comprehension of the risks prefers public transport -- I think the most common case by far is that people use it because they have to use it.
What we need to be looking at is electric transport in varieties suitable for the individual and the various types of family units. Non-polluting in and of itself, utterly agnostic as to how the power it uses is generated, thus 100% friendly to conversion from polluting power generation to non-polluting. These vehicles can be extremely light and easy to park/store, ranging from tiny electric scooters for good weather use (we have one... awesome fun) through small enclosed commuter vehicles to full-on sedans and SUVs for people who need those. Circumstances and availability are rapidly improving in this regard. I see it as the best place to put our investment, if we are to be putting it anywhere in particular regarding transport itself. Beyond that, public funding should be going to infrastructure maintainance, because infrastructure decay is a very serious problem in this country.
I also think that in the urban context we tend to separate working- and living-specialized areas. This area is apartment buildings, that area has factories and so on, while shopping has clustered elsewhere. I suspect that's cost us more than it has benefited us. If the majority of people could reasonably live and shop close to their jobs, transport would be considerably less of an issue. But we don't seem to want to swallow that, and so we end up paying for our preference.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
As I understand, the idea of public transit is commonly thought of as Bus or some permutation of rail(subway,trolley, light rail, etc.). I could see a possible future where public transit could resemble a massive fleet of smaller (electric self-driven?) vehicles; It could be cheap, fast, and possibly transcend nations, offering transit to ... anywhere, possibly even via ground/water/air transport. If only energy was cheap enough... #ahemLTFR's
Driving is already more expensive than transit almost anywhere and for almost everyone. Full ownership costs for a car in a developed country tend to be in the range of 50+ c/km (80c+/mi) while bus fares tend to be flat rate of $2-6/trip, by the time you hit a 10km trip it's cheaper to take the bus/train.
People drive because of comfort and convenience, not cost (except those incredibly bad at math, which is a group probably large enough I shouldn't completely discount them)
For transit to win over car drivers they need to improve the convenience and comfort. improving cleanliness and comfort on transit vehicles helps, more express routes help, better schedules help.
Trouble is, those improvements are quite costly to implement. (arguably cleanliness is fairly simple, the rest less so)
People will take transit when it stops close to their origin and destination, has few stops on the way, is not crowded, is clean, and comfortable, and departs when they want to travel. It's a tall order.
Of course some cities have taken the opposite tack, they realize it's hard to make transit better, so they are attempting to make driving worse. This is done by intentionally avoiding needed road upgrades, removing driving lanes, blocking routes, adding transit only lanes or roads (make no mistake, they don't "add" them, they replace an existing road or lane). This does actually work. If driving to downtown takes longer than the train, and you can't find a place to park when you get there, you'll likely take the train instead.
Once people have invested in buying car and already paying for gas, registration and depreciation, they feel like using it. The extra convenience exceeds the marginal cost. So if you make public transport free, the existing car users will continue to use cars, but the sale of new cars will decline. This will take time to show up in ridership statistics. Instead of measuring the ridership of public transport, the city should monitor registration of new cars (old cars registration should not be counted). That trend is a better indicator of long term success.
Another important factor is convenience. How good is the public transport? In my city in USA, public transport is pathetic. It stops at 7 pm on weekdays and no service on Sunday. Long distance (> 10 mile) stop after 9:00 am and do not restart till 4:00 pm. It means that I have to have a car and once I have a car, the marginal cost of operating car is same as the cost of public transport, so obviously I use car.
-- Does public perceive this free public transport continue to be free in future as well?
-- Is it good enough to completely get rid of the car?
If both of the above are 'yes', then it should show up in the new car registration statistics.
It would be nice as a backup, but otherwise it's impractical, at least where I live. A less than 30 minute trip to work or back would take at least 3 or 4 times as long, counting wait time if I happen to miss a connection somewhere and any time I'd have to spend on foot getting to bus stops or light rail stations. Additionally, there are places I'd go where buses and light rail can't take me, or where it's just not practical (or safe) for me to do so.
In my opinion, I think that for most people, it's either a matter of a sense of personal freedom, or the perception of being poor, or both. Also, think about this: If you're on foot, you're vunerable. If you're on public transit, you're also vulnerable to whoever might decide to do something to you. If you're in your own vehicle, you have some protection. Even on a motorcycle, you can get away from a potentially bad situation. True story: Several years back, to save money on gas, I tried using local light rail to get me from work to a local community college, for which there was a light rail station right at the school. Worked out for a while, until one night, some idiot got into an argument with the light rail cop in the car over not paying his fare. Idiot had a butter knife in his back pocket, which he showed some of us. I likely could have taken then guy out without much problem, and granted a butter knife isn't likely to do much damage (unless you get jabbed in the eye with it or something), but all I could think was here I am trapped in this light rail car with this idiot, who for all I know is on drugs or something, and I may have to decide to take action myself or not. Screw that. I got another motorcycle shortly after that and started riding it instead.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The Onion, fifteen years ago, published what is still the most accurate article about public transportation ever written http://www.theonion.com/articl...
No
Public transit here in Raleigh and nearby Durham (which are two different cities entirely, in spite of what the news media may tell you) is really and truly awful. I think if they offered to pay me to take public transportation, I'd still continue to drive my car.
I hate driving, and I'll avoid it if I can. I prefer to bike, walk, or if it works, run.
I used to run to work once a week, and it would take me about 40 minutes. (Yes, I'd shower at work.) I'd bus home and it would take me 45-55 minutes to get home by bus. Yes, it took longer to bus home than it did to run in. T2 moment: "I can get out and run faster than this!".
Add to that the erratic bus schedule, the chance of missing the bus, or getting passed by the driver, or whatever. Taking the bus is awful.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Did the summary really just compare estonia to the US? Are you just being general or do you just not at all grasp the political structure and massive difference between US cities. Would never dirve in NYC. But in ohilly if you live clise to transit it works it you dont it pointless. Tallin is 61 sq km. Cities in the US tend to have metro areas in the 100 + square mile range. Philly is 161sq miles. Kind of not comparable to little estonian cities.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
I highly doubt your cost comparison. You probably forgot to take in to account one or more of the following costs of driving:
-depreciation
-insurance
-registration
-tire wear
-oil life
-licensing costs
-fuel (actually most people include only this one when calcuating cost of driving)
Driving is extremely expensive. I've never seen a case where driving is routinely comparable in cost to transit.
Admit it, Cost wasn't a factor, if transit had been free, you still would have driven. It's about comfort and convenience. I get it, just don't pretend that it's about cost.
Indeed. More frequent buses would make a bigger difference in most cases. I just checked how long it'd take me to get to work - about 4-6 times as long. That's significant. But a fair bit of that would be waiting at a transfer point. Double the number of buses* and you could cut the waiting time in half. Much more acceptable.
*Preferably electric, self driving, and/or small to reduce expense.
I don't read AC A human right
If by free public transportation you mean a private car pulls up to where I am, I get in, it drives me to where I need to go while I have wifi access, then I'll sell one of my cars.
If by free public transportation you mean the bus or train, I'm sorry but I don't have time for those.
I lived in Switzerland for many years. We did not have a car, but relied on public transport. But the public transport system there is fantastic, it was fast and efficient. I could purchase a pass to cover almost all the trains, buses, boats, cable cars, etc in the country. This pass was valid for a year and was not cheap, but cheaper than a car. It's the infrastructure that made this possible as well as the social situation. With one ticket/pass you are able to travel on all public transport providers, even if they are operated by different companies. It was possible to rent cars on an hourly basis (see https://www.mobility.ch/), and these cars are available at all main stations and within 5 minutes walk from our house we had around 10 different cars available for rent. All public transport is clean and safe and it runs to time.
Not only does the infrastructure support this, many people use it. In fact the country is proud of it's public transport system. I found that when I took a bus in Los Angeles, it tended to be poorer people taking buses, it was delayed and dirty. In Switzerland all people use the public transport. If you want a bit more space, you can opt for 1st class and pay twice the price, 1st class tends to be devoid of families and tends to be quiter.
I drive 45 minutes to work, one way. I drive through the country over the state border. No this would not change how I get to work.
I have lived in numerous major cities, and have not owned a car in about 10 years. I bike, I walk, and if available I take subways/trains. I try to avoid buses as much as possible.
Why? They are the worst form of transportation I can imagine. They are slower than driving (since they have to stop more often than a car on the same route), and only go on pre-determined routes. Subways and trains, while limited to a certain route, at least are quicker than driving. Taxis and other forms of automobile transportation are more expensive, but are faster than a bus. Making a bus free does not change its limitations.
I believe that all pubic transportation should be free (where "free" is defined as "no admission charge") to encourage public transportation. Asking why people do not take buses, though, is not a financial conversation, in my opinion.
Getting people to take public transportation is much more about making it convenient and fast. Does it pick up near where I am beginning my route? Does it drop me off near where I want to go? How much longer will it take than driving?
If you want people out of their cars, solve these questions satisfactorily. Make more and better bike lanes - and even dedicated bike paths. I would even encourage dedicated bus lanes with enforcement. I lived for a while in Boston, where "Bus lane" meant "double park lane".
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I ride the bus to work. It's a non-issue. It's the right thing to do. No parking required, let somebody else deal with the traffic. I have a car that I drive on weekends. One day a week I drive to work to remind myself why I take the bus the other four days. The bus takes a little longer than driving, but not enough that I worry about it much. I save up mid-week errands for the day I drive my car.
If I'm going to downtown Vancouver I take the bus. Parking is scarce and expensive. The traffic is impossible. UGH!
...laura
One part of the problem is that a car is a capital investment. Riding public transit costs $2.50 each way where I live. At any time, I can stop riding public transit, and purchase a car, without having an investment in the public transit system. If I stop driving my car, and start taking public transit, I now have an expensive piece of machinery that's difficult to sell (finding a buyer, taxes, title transfer, danger from meeting strangers in person, etc).
As someone who does not own a car, I doubt cost of public transportation is not a factor in its adoption. People don't ride public transportation for fairly specific reasons: wanting personal/dedicated space, wanting control of schedule, wanting to get from point A to point B faster, etc. The reasons why people *do* choose to ride public transportation are generally more dependent on financial limitations: parking is too expensive, don't own a car, tolls, etc.
To increase adoption of public transportation you need to make it faster and more convenient: no transfers, high frequency, easily understood route system, stops close to origins and destinations, etc. Where I live there is one commuter bus line and one "neighborhood" bus line that I use periodically. The limitations on increased use really come down to increasing frequency and making sure there are viable alternatives in off-peak times.
When I lived in NYC, I would have paid 3x what I was paying to use public transit. I could get to anywhere in the city, or at least within ~2-3 blocks of anywhere, quickly, easily, and efficiently—a car would have slowed me down considerably.
On the other hand, living in southern California, I wouldn't have switched to public transit if I'd been offered at $300 a month bonus to do so. It would have meant hours every day walking around on foot in a very pedestrian-unfriendly city.
Two things are required:
1) Very good coverage of the geographical areas of interest, with frequent runs, to minimize time loss walking and waiting
2) Pedestrian-friendly environs when walking and waiting
If you need to spell times and connections out on your route map—i.e. if you need more than just a diagram of where the stations are—then you probably won't see public transit use increase no matter what you do, because your public transit system just won't get the job done.
A good, workable public transit system that doesn't negatively impact lifestyles and livelihood can tell its users everything that needs to be told with a simple, pocketable list of stations (visual or textual) and a poster on the wall of each station listing what's connected there, without any reference to time.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Public transit runs on it's own slow schedule to locations that are neither where I am nor where I'm going. I live in a large city and it would still take me over an hour just to walk to a transit station and then I might have to wait 45min for the train I need. If I need more than one connection each might have up to 45min delay and at the end I still might have an hour walk to get to my destination. If you miss one, tack another 45min for it to come around again. Plus, I wouldn't be able to transport more than I can reasonably carry.
I had to use public transport for a time in Albuquerque which has a better public transit system than most. I'd never do it again voluntarily. At least not as a primary form of transportation. I do drive to the closest metro station sometimes when going to a large sporting event or concert downtown to avoid traffic and parking.
We don't drive cars only because they are cheaper than public transit, but faster too.
Actually one of the reasons I like to take the bus is that I can then use the time to do something useful because I am not driving. If I drive it would take ~25 minutes but I can do nothing but drive for those 25 minutes. By bus it is ~45 minutes but for ~40 of those minutes I can sit down and answer email, read journal papers, write course material etc. So while the bus may take longer I waste only ~5-10 minutes vs. 25 minutes when driving because I can do nothing but drive. For me the thing that will kill public transport is the self-driving car.
My public transit is cheap and I can quickly and easily walk to about three bus stops within a block or two of my house. The problem: my one-way commute is 15 minutes by car, it would be 65 by bus. That, in itself isn't the dealbreaker. I very often have to be at work before the first bus is even running and occasionally I come home after the last bus has run. If we could run an express from a stop near me to a stop near work that operates before and after the regular routes, I'd use public transit significantly more.
The issue is personal transit (private cars or taxis on public roads) versus mass transit (trains or buses), not public transit versus private. The only way mass transit can compete with the effectiveness of private cars is if the wait time is less than about five minutes, and the system in question can get you at least as close to all destinations as you could reasonably expect to park your car. In some cities, this is the case. In suburban and rural situations, mass transit sucks.
Public transit can replace my car when it's an Expressway from Asimov's Caves of Steel.
Public transit's primary failing is availability/timing. I need to travel from here to my dentist appointment at 9:45, not 9:00. I need to collect junior from the playground at 3:30, not 4:00-if-it's-not-running-late.
I can't even drive :D
It's never been a problem for me, except for about twice a year when I would like to return a favour or move something large.
I live in the Netherlands where there is excellent public transport.
Always read at -1, don't let others decide what you should and should not read.
I think the Onion Got it Right "Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others" http://www.theonion.com/articl...
my cube has a window...
When you have a large population affordable housing is pushed further from large centers where there's likely to be work. Not that that means we are about to see innovative new low cost designs, but rather apartments in the middle of butt fuck nowhere, if your lucky.
This results in increased commute times, a bus is non-viable at these distances and would have a commute time over an acceptable approximate limit of 1 hour. This doesn't mean a few minutes, this could mean 2-3+ hours.
I visited Sydney for awhile and the subway was very nice, geologically it is non-viable for some places, maybe those magnetic vacuum tube experiments...anyways.
Sometimes you need a car, most times, you need a car. Without it you'll have so many constant issues with time, location, travel, fares, and unexpected delays that it would create difficulties.
Here in the SF area we have Caltrain, but it runs infrequently and is very slow. Level crossings mean that it's also noisy. I would take it more if it were free (right now it's still cheaper to drive my 19.6 mpg 300 HP fun-car), but I wouldn't take it a lot more. If, however, it ran so often that I didn't need to think about the schedule, and were faster (by eliminating stops, possibly by color-coding trains), that would be a different story.
The buses are ludicrously slow and nobody knows when or where they're stopping or going. Few people take them at all. Nobody in my socio-economic group. They're just too stupid.
BART has a better schedule, but doesn't have a useful connection to Caltrain. It doesn't connect around the south side of the bay.
No system makes easy, direct connections to the major airports like you expect in major metropolitan areas. They all require at least one connection via a janky, slow, annoying shuttle bus. At worst they require several hops between various forms of transit. SFO is especially bad since they charge obnoxious fees for shared ride vans, even to off-site parking, and then make it nearly impossible to walk there from anywhere reasonable. They have no interest in improving access to their airport.
tl;dr: I'd take one form more, but not a lot more. I'd take public transit a lot at any cost that's less than driving so long as it's time-competitive with my alternatives. Right now nothing competes with my bicycle for less-than-fifteen-mile trips.
In North America, my experience is that a brand new car costs $225 CAD a month, bumper-to-bumper warrantied for the entire payment period (5 years). Maintenance thus consists of a lube job twice a year (new engines don't need it much more often unless your commute is insanely long), new gear oil twice, and replacing the brakes once. You will also need to replace the tires once. Antifreeze today is typically 5 year long-life, so no maintenance there. I would factor in $6 a month for oil changes, $2 a month for gear oil, $5 a month for brakes, and $6 a month for tires over those 5 years. Those costs can be lower if you do the work yourself. Comprehensive insurance for a proven driver that follows the rules of the road will be no more than $80 per month. Total cost of ownership minus fuel is $324 a month.
For the vehicle I'm discussing, it gets 6.4 l/100km. Assuming you drive the average 20,000 km per year, that means $128 a month in fuel costs, for a combined total of $452 a month spent to keep the car and run it. Or, put another way, $2.61 of your hourly wage will go towards *new* car ownership. Used car ownership is on average cheaper, however, the costs vary wildly and there is no way to guarantee reasonable costs and thus makes a poor comparison item.
In my area the government is spending $2 billion to upgrade a well used bus line to an LRT line, so I should assume our city will have a VERY modern transportation system compared to other areas. The city estimates this upgrade will reduce the time spent on a trip by 6 minutes. If I were able to start work at any time I please, and were willing to adjust my schedule to meet the hourly departure time of the bus taking me to the LRT, the minimum time I will spend taking public transit to work is 54 minutes each way. My commute to work by car is 13 minutes each way.
Bus passes are $79 monthly (no discount is given for children over 4). This means my family of 3 would spend $237 per month on public transit (I would not abandon my spouse or child for shopping trips, nor do I think they should be stuck in whatever area they can cycle within---which is not particularly far for a 5 year old!). My spouse is not employed and we have no plans to change that, so there is no extra expense (for me) in a second commuting vehicle.
I therefore pay a car premium of $215 a month (well, actually, I nearly break even because I bought a used car that is costing me less than $50/month to finance and it's been doing well in the repair department, but that's an aberration I suppose). Based on 251 working days a year, that's a $10.28 a day premium to save time on my commute.
I save 82 minutes a day commuting by car. Based on my decision to drive, I value my time saved is valued at $7.52 an hour. If I were working for a wage lower than this, I would be making a poor decision, though that is impossible as minimum wage here is much higher than this.
I'm even being nice and not including the extra travel expenses I'd incur by not owning a car (I very much enjoy driving to my vacation destinations, so I'd rent a car otherwise. But if I didn't enjoy it as much, I'd fly, which for a family of 3 is *always* more expensive than travelling by car, assuming a destination on the same continent).
Based on studies, and the fact I have chosen a far more fuel efficient vehicle than average, the environmental impact of my decision is, in fact, in my favour. So that helps convince me it's worth it as well! Soon enough I expect to buy an electric vehicle, which will reduce my emissions footprint to 0. My province is mostly powered by nuclear energy, so even the source is clean.
Simply put, in some places, public transit is a poor choice economically, or environmentally, or both!
Don't forget the cost of time. In most places public transport greatly increases your commute time.
On the other hand, you gain a lot of it back if you can work while riding the bus/train/whatever.
For me it's a huge "net loss" even if driving+parking had the same dollar cost as a bus/train ticket.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I took the bus from my house to college from time to time. It literally went from a block from my house straight to the college. It was still a pain in the ass.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
If it takes 2 hours to go with public transport and 30 minutes with a car you can't lure anyone with free rides.
US Is a car country - didn't they rip out tram rails in LA to make more people use freeways or because they were no longer needed?
Maybe an urban legend?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I need to go to a supermarket, 2 miles away
- public transport currently a free ride in this city: call some number to get picked up and then call a number again to get driven back, not very attractive
- walk with a backpack, not very attractiver
- bicycle - maybe...
Probably will take the car.
Maybe in a more densely populated area with a regular and frequent bus service this would be doable.
Bus goes every 45 minutes from the next corner and passes by a supermarket, it would work.
Even with free public transit, the government spends far more providing roads (for free) to private/individual cars.
If all roads were toll roads, would you still drive.
If the budget for private/individual transportation was equal to the budget for public transit, which would be preferred?
"free" isn't the whole story. Transit is already heavily subsidized; the monetary cost to riders is down in the noise. (At least, in my area, YMMV and all that.) The biggest issue I have with transit is that the rail is a significant distance from me on both ends (amounting to over 1/3 of the total distance) and feeder lines are... let's face it, dismal. I'm assuming that what is being searched for is a way to increase ridership. There are things wrong with mass transit, at least as implemented in my area, that are totally unrelated to cost; it'd be best to concentrate on some of them.
I go to the local citizens participation board meetings, and Transit is often there giving presentations and meet/greets. When I raise the issue of park and ride security, they wax lyrical about the security systems in place ... to protect Transit equipment. When asked about the park and riders themselves, they shrug and say that's local law enforcement's job.
And maybe that's true, but I think I've seen a cop car swing through the transit mall maybe twice in the last couple of years. It doesn't exactly make me want to recommend park and ride to daughter working swing shift.
It didn't take long to realize that waiting for the feeder busses is a lost cause. So that leaves park and ride, which only covers the distance at one end. (Unless you work it like a friend of mine, who bought an old beater car to park at the park and ride on the *other* end, so he has cars at both ends. It works for him.)
So yeah, like a lot of things, if mass transit was timely and convenient, I'd use it, sure why not? I have no love for being trapped in my for wheeled cage in traffic. But as currently set up, mass transit is not convenient, takes significant extra time out of the day, (due to the rail not really going where I need to go, and feeder lines being few and inconsistent). And, being in IT with the hours that sometimes entails, I have somewhat of a bad feeling about being in a near-deserted transit mall after dark.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Public transit is no good if you need to carry some large items, or need to distribute and/or collect things from several stops. There is no practical provision for storing your stuff while you walk off to take care of another part of your errand.
What drives this, and most other things consumer, is convenience. It's not the cost of a ride, it's that the ride doesn't go (either from, or to, or both) where the consumer wants to go. If you live a couple of km from the bus stop, and it lets you off a couple of km from work, you're probably always going to drive. Even if they pay you to ride the public transport. There's nothing convenient about having to walk a few km in the rain, and therefore having to leave earlier and arrive home later. So... consumers won't do it. As the Estonian's now know.
The message of the Estonian study is: It's not the cost, it's the convenience.
You make the decision to use public transit when you decide where to live in my experience. So it doesn't matter that fares are free when you never meant to take it in the first place.
I used to take an "express" bus that cost me $2.50/day and involved a total (both directions, from all stops) of 10 blocks of walking. I traded it for an $85/month parking spot.
The route was an express, but I caught it at the start of the route, which meant that the "express" part was only about half the trip distance, the rest of the route was stopping frequently to pick people up before it hit the freeway and quit making stops. This meant that the time from home to work, including waiting, was 45 minutes, longer if there was bad weather that delayed the bus. The return route was just as long. My total time commitment was something like 90 minutes per day.
My drive time to work average case was close to 20 minutes from garage to parking spot.
So by spending twice as much for parking, I gained nearly an hour per day of free time. Beyond worth it just for that.
But the bus had other annoyances -- climate control was often poor, meaning in the winter when I had to dress for the walk/wait, the bus was often way too hot. In the summer, good air conditioning was available only about 2/3rds of the time. Seating was too cramped for anything but a tablet (and in 1999, I didn't have a tablet) and often cumbersome with anything like a package or larger bag.
Driving, I could take care of other errands to/from work. If the weather was poor, I was at least stuck in a car with good heat/ac and I knew my commute would still be no longer than the bus and probably shorter since I could adapt my route and the bus couldn't. I was on my own schedule, which made leaving early/late easier as well as doing stuff directly after work versus 45 minutes to get home and then XX minutes to get someplace.
I think the express bus would have been more worth it if I was closer to the last stop before the freeway, but even then it would have largely been a tie only on trip time, the car would have still had all of its other advantages and the bus disadvantages (like climate) would have only been marginally better.
Parking price matters, obviously, and I had a good deal on parking (remember, this was '99) but I think given my specific details I would have paid probably $150/month for the time + flexibility pretty easily. Now that I have MORE demands on my time, I'd probably pay even more for parking to avoid the bus. I work as a consultant now, so the bus isn't even remotely an option.
If the ride is in a well maintained and decent looking (and smelling) train, that delivers me to within a 20 minute walk of where I need to go, sure. But smelly buses, filled with smelly sick people, that make me wait in the cold and wet to transfer from place to place? No. Not when I can ride in comfort in my car, listening to my audio book, or my music... with the temperature set at what I prefer and air that doesn't stink of body odor, piss, vomit, or yes, as my wife has witnessed, even feces. Plus those buses can't even do the speed limit on the freeway, yet they are allowed to block the HOV lane at 35-40 MPH, when no one is holding them back.
I loved it when I had a train to my work. Nice trains or no deal.
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And that is still true over "free". It's too hard to see the gas cost. It is very easy to see the time, promptness, and privacy costs. Sometimes you see aggravation and alternate activity bonuses, but not enough to have "free" transportation remove a significant amount of current cars off the road. You need higher car costs, or more significant bonuses for taking the PT.
> but not by the 20% the city had projected. Instead, they grew by a modest 3%
In my area (pacific northwest) whenever there's a new mass transit shiny object, the projected ridership increase is usually off by about 90%. (This new rail line will increase ridership by 22,000!!!! (Actual increase about 2,800)) This is in line with that. I'd ask, how is this in line with previous projections for transit projects for that area?
> What happened is that more pedestrians and bike users started to use public transit instead of walking and cycling. But car users continue to drive to work.
Likely reason is that most people walking or cycling are in an arrangement (location of home and work, condition of commute) where walking and cycling makes sense. And the people driving to work are doing so because for their circumstances it's the only practical solution.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The ROI on the investment isn't in money, directly, but in time, comfort and convenience.
That said, you ever try and carry a 6'x4' canvass, plus painting supplies on the bus, at rush hour?
Such an item can be painted and sold for money.
There's also time, my time isn't free and I place a specific value on it and spending several hours per day in traffic, ( by say living out in the boondocks), or taking public transportation in the city is a poor ROI. Just considering the commuting time to and from work, my car costs $25/day or roughly $16/hour since I spend 20 minutes commuting each way. I value my time much higher than that, the other side of $100/hour So they would need to pay me that rate for time over 40 minutes I spend commuting each day to make up the difference.
I have not owned an automobile for 10 years and 4 months.
When the weather is good I also ride my bicycle.
"But one of the biggest factor is how easy it is to find parking. Cities use a huge amount of their space just to store cars during the day. The more expensive and hard to find parking becomes, the more people will use free public transit."
Well no, that's not really a big factor. If you can't park at your destination of choice and public transit won't get you there, you won't go.
In my city, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, the transit system is terrible, as in you had might as well walk from many points as it will be more reliable.
Reliable is the operative word. For many people transit is not financially an option because they have to be at work on time at a certain time. Our transit system is woeful when it comes to that. Thus even if you have a minimum wage job it is a financially good idea to buy a hunk of crap car as it has a far better chance of getting you to work every day on time.
Also the vast majority of our bus system is designed to get city staff to their HQ from the suburbs where, demographically, city staff typically live. But if you work in one of the industrial parks then you are S. out of luck. And complete suffering upon those who live near one industrial park and work in another. They literally might be 2-3 hours using a transit system that would be a 30 minute drive.
So for me they could even pay me a small fee every time I used the transit system and it still wouldn't be of value.
It takes me 20 minutes to drive to work, 40 minutes to bike, and 55 minutes to take light rail. I have light rail stops just a 5 minute walk from both my house and from work, but there is a transfer between two different trains. So if it costs me an hour a day, I would rather spend an extra half hour with my kid morning and night than ride even a free light rail.
Biking gets me a workout that I desperately need, so I see that is time well spent for the days that I choose to ride.
Nothing in this world is free. If you don't have to pay for your ticket, someone else is footing the bill. Free public transit only means that it will be very hard to put together a system that is well funded. I'd might rather pay and be a user of a very good system.
Currently, the problem for me is not price. I'd love to take transit. But it would take me 1.5 hours to get to work and I can drive in 35 mins.
My best hope for now is that autonomous car networks evolve into a public transit/taxi system in the future.
The times I do take the bus, it's usually because I am walking and it happens to be there, but most of the time I either ride a bike, or pay to take a ride share service like lyft. It's not worth it to spend $2.25 and take 1 hour to go 5 kilometers, when I can pay $11 and get there in 20. I am lucky that SF is relatively small in size and its prohibitively expensive to use a car here. I'd hate to see how much a cab ride from the suburbs of Chicago to downtown would cost.
TANSTAAFL - and this goes to "free" public transit. Someone, somewhere pays, and guess who that is? (hint: it isn't the Government).
I've never seen a case where driving is routinely comparable in cost to transit.
You must be living in a cave, for about 99% of Americans, it is much cheaper to use a car for grocery shopping and commuting.
You can save a lot of money if you can live without owning a car at all.
For me insurance, registration and licensing are fixed costs. I'm paying them just by owning a car at all.
Depreciation cost has an age component and at distance travelled component.
Oil, tires and other service items are incremental costs which are significant, but less than fuel cost.
I use a mixture of car, bicycle and public transport. I think my biggest saving is that I'm happy to keep and older model car. I know if I drove everywhere, I would be strongly tempted to buy a newer and more luxurious car.
Outside of downtown? Not a frickin' chance.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
My SUV is like a moving living room (a little bigger than the average living room, actually). It's got a TV, DVD player, radio, climate control, cell phone, what more do you need? Every now and then I hear an unpleasant sound as I run over pedestrians and bicyclists, but I just turn the volume up a bit, and the screaming goes away.
It smells like old people, homeless people and drunks. Do not want.
To change someone's habits you need a carrot and stick. If they want cars off the road increase tolls, excluding people who are unable to PT eg. trucks, couriers, licenced taxis. This would offset the increase in public transport costs. Win the vote and make us all green.
It's about the economics of free time, and how much my free time is worth. Even when I lived in Boston, with decent public transit, it would have taken me a minimum of an additional 30 minutes total each working day to walk to the T, ride it, and walk at the other end. In the ideal world I would have done this, but in the "work until you drop" idiocy that is the work-ethic (i.e. moron ethic) in the USA I never felt I had 2.5 hours per week of free-time I was willing to give-up. I needed that time at home, with my family, as family time, period. If we finally achieve a society where we aren't continually overworked; where we feel we have even small amounts of "time to waste" then I think public transport will become more popular. Until then, I take the fastest possible method to get to work and return, period.
There are several things that require widespread adoption of public transport:
- Cheaper than driving yourself (that's easy) and have an easy payment mechanism (as in a subscription)
- An extensive network across the local city, a bus stop within ~1km of anyone
- Bus terminals that connect to the places you want to go - airports, other forms of public transport and shopping centers
- Trips should be no more than 50% slower than driving (adding 10m on a 20m driving trip is already stretching it)
- Most routes should avoid busy inner city traffic and not cause traffic (wheel/spoke systems in the US don't work)
- I shouldn't have to transfer onto more than 2 buses for a trip (bus routes should be engineered to be gridded into itself)
- Keep them safe and clean; regular checks that everyone pays for the trip and integrated law enforcement would keep most unwanted off the system
- Major arteries should run 24/7 at 30m intervals but even remote places should be serviced at least hourly between 5 am and 10 pm/22:00. Rush hours should have 10-15m intervals.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
In the 1980's Sheffield city (4th largest city in the uk) had bus fares at 5p 10p and double that after midnight. with the late buses leaving the city centre a little after 2 am , the clubs closed at 2am.
In the morning rush it might be the third bus that came past that you would catch. The first 2 being full already but that'd mean you had been at the bus stop for 10 minutes. 3 services going to different parts on the out skirts the routes converged and each service running every 10 minutes at peak times .
It worked well, because the buses were cheap people found them more economical than driving to work and parking all day. Because there were less cars on the road traffic flowed, the bus journey was quick, without holdups. Because regular folk used them, they were safe and clean. If you were a smoker, you had to ride on the top deck (yes smoking on public transport, seats were nicer downstairs). There was even kneeling buses which lowered the bus so wheel chair users and mothers with buggies could get on and off easily. The buses were subsidized but to everyones advantage, and 2 sets of doors get on and pay at the front get off via the side door, no waiting for people to get off before you could get on max 88 passengers. oh and the routes ran across the city centre to the opposite side, + circular buses that ran the outer ring road.
Then maggie forced the council to stop subsidising buses and opened up the routes to competition.
The rise in fares resulted in more car's commuting in. the deregulation resulted in over provision on popular routes and under provision for less popular routes. traffic jams with a large number of near empty buses with journeys taking longer to complete.
so done well everyone benefits and gets home quickly. done badly well bigger roads were needed but not budgeted for.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
I do have free access to public transportation (my employer covers the cost). I sometimes use this because parking at work is horrendous at the moment. But it takes something like twice as long to get to work, so I often feel it isn't worth it. To really make public transportation worth it, it has to be much more convenient. The subways in NYC are like that (at least in Manhattan). I really wish we had more investment in public transportation around the US, so that we had more public transportation systems that were convenient to use.
From 1990 to 1993, I live in San Francisco near Montgomery and Vallejo Streets (lower Telegraph Hill) and worked at Van Ness and Turk. I would ride the 83 Pacific from Montgomery and Pacific (two blocks south of my home) to Van Ness and then transfer to a 42, 47, or 49. When I boarded the 83, I was the only passenger almost every time, and there were never more than two or three. Two blocks uphill at Grant (Chinatown), old ladies with grocery bags would board by the dozens, all using senior citizen passes, which were (and are) very, very inexpensive, and of course being passes, the marginal cost to them of taking any bus ride versus not taking it was zero. The bus would be literally packed shoulder to shoulder. Two or three blocks farther uphill, all the old ladies would get off and I would be the only passenger again.
Now imagine a public transit system where no one paid anything, ever. It would be packed to overflowing with joyriders (i.e., people who would not travel at all, by any method, if they had to pay) 24x7, people would get on and ride 2-3 blocks and get off, and any efficiency savings from not having to collect fares and punish fare evaders would be dwarfed by the inefficiencies of people riding who really had no need nor even any strong desire, but hey, it's free, right?
Fast forward to the present day: I still take public transit to work, though I now live and worth much farther apart. My employer gives me commuter checks which subsidize the cost significantly, but everyone who doesn't have that arrangement at work still has to pay. I don't joyride because I don't get enough to cover my entire commute, much less extra unnecessary rides, but my employer still pays part of the cost of being able to attract workers who live far away from the office.
So no, public transit should not be free, but it should be subsidized so that riders have some skin in the game but employers bear part of the burden of getting workers from low-cost-of-living areas where most workers live to high-cost-of-living areas where most jobs live.
No, I don't believe you'd get any different uptake in the US than they did in Tallinn if you just made it free and did nothing else. However, if you banned private transportation in the region you probably would. Or, if like London you added a congestion charge for every trip into the region...
This article caused me to wade through my major metro area's online system to plan a trip between my new house, which is within blocks of a suburb park and ride facility, to my work, in the same town. By car this is a 10 minute trip, maybe, depending on the state of traffic lights.
At first the online system told me the trip was impossible at the time of day I specified. So I dug deep into the site and pieced together what appears to be the only possible set of routes that connects these locations without sending me to the downtown core for connections. After much digging I found that, for all practical purposes, the route is indeed impossible. It appears that, due to one key route only running in the very early morning and late rush hour, it would take me around 36 hours to commute each way.
If I took the bus all the way to the downtown core then back to work I still can't do it, because the morning bus to my work stops running before I arrive downtown.
Yeah. Not happening.
Cyrano de Maniac
For a while in the '00s, Austin TX tried doing free bus routes. It ended up being a place for the bums to hang out all day where there was air conditioning (summers usually get to 95F). They also had some free "Dillo" buses which looked like trolleys and ran around downtown, and they killed those, because of not enough riders. (I think those were open-windowed/doored like trolleys, so no air conditioning for the bums.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Public transport is already mostly free intra-city. Do a quick cost analysis, a metro/bus ride is much much less expensive than car amortization+gas+parking+time wasted. I think what's holding public transport back is route convenience (far away stops, change overs) and comfort (overcrowded, dirty, noisy, no room for bags...). Outside of city public transport is mostly not feasible (density is too low), and inter-city it is more expensive, but for single people still much less expensive than car.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
No. Since I am not a socialist, I don't believe in getting something for nothing.
There is no such thing as "free" anything.
There is opportunity cost to extra time taken.
There is cost to additional cloths needed to stand at a transit stop in the weather.
There is the inconvenience (and risk) cost for brush up against the less savoury components of society.
Factor in all the costs and maybe.
Transit still does not run at all hours, so if I get stuck at work until 2am I would be spending the night.
You could call that the getting stuck and needing a taxi cost.
If I lived near the stop AND work was near a stop, then I'd use it IF it were frequent.
Yes, that's a lot of "ifs".
If we get cheap driverless cars (e.g. Uber without the driver), THEN I could see not using my own car often.
It won't be free, so the entire thought experiment is pointless. To make the public transportation no charge at time of use, that means somebody else is going to be taxed to provide that. Since I'm always one of the people being taxed for this sort of thing, the real question would be, "If your taxes were raised substantially in order to get rid of fares for public transportation, would you use public transportation in order get some of your tax money back, even though you will lose the convenience, flexibility, speed, and independence that comes with driving?"
... and yet any attempt to use it in order run any sort of errand or outing means lengthy walks and waits outdoors, a dirty and smelly ride, almost without fail some rowdy and threatening teenagers, and a price tag that's roughly the same as typically expensed driving mile. So here in this area we spend literally billions on public transportation, but it's used by only a narrow group of people who happen to have residential and work proximity to the perfect route.
I live in the close-in burbs of a major metro area. There are buses, metro rail, some light rail
I live about 12 miles, as the crow flies, from a datacenter I use. It's normally about a 25 minute drive. There's a metro rail stop just two blocks from that destination, and one (with no parking, and little bus access) about two miles from where I live... but that rail ride costs about $12 (or $20, if you can park), and takes about 70 minutes one way. If somebody's taxes were raised to make that trip "free," it would still be grotesquely expensive in terms of time and flexibility.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
There are a lot of trips where the time doesn't matter to me and walking a bit at the destination is good, where I'd love to use public transit if it weren't more expensive than gas. I'd still use my car for shopping or for when I'm pressed for time, though.
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It would need to be fast, safe, and not infested with creepy weirdos. Free would probably only hurt all three of those things.
If it was freely available I'd use public transit more often, but still not terribly often. Portland is just too spread out and public transit takes too long to get places.
Free would be nice, but for me it's more a matter of feasibility. Free public transit's not useful if what would be a 15-minute drive by car takes 90 minutes by public transit and still involves a half-mile of walking at either end to get to the nearest transit stop. Ditto, as was the case at my last employer, if there is no public transit in the area where I work. If I could ride public transit, have it take a reasonable amount of time and have stops within a short walk of where I need to go, I'd cheerfully use it even if I had to pay more than the current prices.
Although even then there's still a few problems. For instance, what do I do when I'm bringing home groceries or large items from shopping? I still need some form of car for that stuff, it won't fit on conventional public transit. Frankly I'd love to see self-driving cars adopted on a scale that permits a switch from mass to true public transit: you call a small car to where you are, tell it where you want to go, sit back and wait for it to get there. If you've got stuff, you either call a larger car or have the store put it in an automated delivery vehicle. If you could do this at scale and provide separated lanes with only self-driving vehicles in them, I'd bet the problem of making a self-driving car work would be a lot easier than if they have to deal with unpredictable human-driven cars.
Public transportation has a huge number of disadvantages. Let me count the ways...
1. Limited entry points
2. Limited exit points
3. Unusable in an emergency
4. Provides zero privacy
5. Provides no temporary secure storage
6. Limited time availability
7. Requires recorded transactions on every trip, sometimes with money, sometimes with ride passes (as opposed to my car that I only have to fill up every two weeks)
8. No meaningful freight transport capacity
9. Completely unavailable in the vast majority of the US landmass, even those parts with roads
10. No off-roading capability, under any circumstance
Someone should try this in a hypothetical city and call it Seattle, at some time in the future which we shall term 1973. Then run the experiment for nearly 40 years until a time which we should call 2012 when it will be found to have no net effect on ridership.
Since this would be little known, at that point we shall create some information repository which we would call "Wikipedia" so people can look up answers to questions like this before bothering the entire /. readership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I use public transport when it's convenient.
I drive my car to the train station and catch the train to the CBD.
If I had to take connecting bus routes - on either end of the journey, I wouldn't bother with public transport at all and would drive the whole way.
It's a pain in the ass and dramatically increases the travel time. My time is worth more than that. It's either time I would spend at work making money or time I spend away from my family.
on where I was going, and how near the stations were.
If I was still commuting to downtown Atlanta, and MARTA was free, I would take it in a heartbeat. Driving downtown isn't that bad, but parking is a stone cold pain in the ass.
However, there would need to be a Marta train station within a couple of blocks of where I needed to go. That hasn't always been the case. If I had to transfer from rail to bus service, and it was still free, I wouldn't use it if I needed to transfer to bus.
I live moderately close to the city, but still it is over a mile to the nearest bus stop from my house, and around a mile from the bus stop to my place of work. So, walk 4 miles a day in horrible heat and regular rain storms during the summer, or drive which will likely take 1/3 the time or less. Hmm, such a hard choice. For inner city dwellers, public transport might make sense, but for the other 20% of people, it is a horrible choice.
Not at all for work. Earlier when I lived in a bigger city I was usually assigned to places where it would be inconvenient to use public transport (not always though and then I would use public transport). Now I moved to a small city and live a two minute walk from work.
And there are times I need the car. But if I go visit a bigger city and have no rush and it is free I would most likely see more of the city. I wouldn't so much replace driving a car with public transport - I would just do more traveling daily.
If it's free but not convenient, then no. If it's cheap (not free but cheap) and convenient, then yes. But, public transportation is rarely both.
I got more colds and other respiratory diseases when riding public transportation (in Philadelphia) than when driving my own vehicle, by a lot.
Also, the public conveyances were filthy - people used them as public urinals even, and were not reliable - invariably slower than the schedule indicated.
Free transit? That would multiply the problem, I think.
They are fools if they thought by offering free public transportation that Public Transpo would increase by 20%. The people that are worried about the cost of driving to work already take the public transportation. The rest of the people don't care about the cost of public transportation because they are already paying more money to drive. They care about the convenience.
Make it so public transportation is more convenient for everyone and you'll have an increase in usage.
Be seeing you...
My 45 minute door-to-door commute by car would take:
15 minutes to the nearest train station. $300/month parking (or $26/day taxi),
1 hour, 54 minutes by train,
7 minutes by taxi ($16/day) to job site..
So that'd increase my one-way commute from 36 miles / 45 minutes / $2.77 to 58 miles / 114 minutes / $21.
yeahhh no. add $12.75 if i have to pay for a one-way train ticket too.
What, are you seriously asking this question? Public transportation was freely available to the American people (electric powered mostly) before it was bought out, torn down, replaced by polluting diesel and gas busses, then dismantled when your government finally woke up and shut the motor companies down for crapping on public interests. If you reinstated a similar system as you originally had there is no question people would use it in droves. Aside from the percentage of American citizens who make up your iconic 'lazy and ignorant' stereotype the rest of the world knows only so well. Truly, it would usher in a cleaner environment, less dependence on fossil fuels, whether it be electric or ethanol/methanol based, however, that sounds like we're trifling with socialism and we know how America feels about socialism. Besides the fact that Yankees can't fathom a difference between socialist inclinations and the evil communists is beyond me, or most intelligent people for that fact. In all honesty, yeah sure,... I guess public transport might have a chance in a fossil fuel dependent, brink of bankruptcy nation that hates thinking for itself.
... and was a horrible failure. A few years back the Bay Area Air Quality Management District made public transit free on 'Spare the Air' days, as an attempt to get more people riding public transit. It worked in that respect, more people were riding. But a lot of them were general riff-raff who would not normally be able to afford to ride public transit. It made for horribly crowded buses, trains, and ferries, and they were full of generally undesirable people. This made for unpleasant rides, which completely defeated the purpose of the promotion. There has never been 'free transit' spare-the-air days since.
That being said, I'm still paying over 10 bucks a day for my commute, and its worth it to me. However crowded trains full of smelly people make me wonder some times.
If it takes too much time, people won't bother. My wife and I actually looked up how long the bus would take us to get to work. We live in a moderately populated area. Our commutes are about 20 and 35 minutes. The 20 minute drive would take her an hour, and my 35 minute drive would stretch to nearly 1-1/2 hours. There is no practical way (especially now that we have kids) to give up 1-2 hours of our day sitting on or waiting for a bus. I'm sure each situation is different, but cost is not always the driving factor for transportation. I'm not willing to save the 10-20 bucks a day my gas and car upkeep cost to waste that much time.
I lived for a while in Ukraine. In one town, we had an apartment in the city, in other city we were 5 miles out in the suburbs. The maximum distance from a bus stop for 95% of my start/end points about three blocks. Buses for different routes all over the city came by about three minutes. The longest I remember waiting for a bus for my particular route was about 15 minutes. I could go essentially anywhere I wanted to go very easily. In the exchange rate when I was there, a bus ride was $0.25. Everybody rode the bus; you would have a woman with kids, a guy in a suit, a man with grocery bags, and a farmer with a box of live chickens all on the same bus. Almost all of the walking I had to do had a sidewalk. I rode the bus system all the time - they had made it very convenient to do so.
In America, my home is seven miles away from a city of 175,000. I am a mile away from a city (extended metropolitan area of main city) of 20,000. Although the larger city has bus services, it has zero routes to the city of 20,000. The closest bus stop from my house is 1.7 miles away (30 minute walk). There are no sidewalks, which means I am either walking through people's yards (always dicey), or walking on hilly, curvy streets hoping not to get turned into road pizza by texting speeding drivers. Extra suck if it is rainy, humid (always), hot, cold.... The bus fare is $1.50. I know people who have been assaulted while riding the bus. The bus routes barely cover anything - the heart of the downtown area, a couple malls, and all the projects. I have ridden a bus in America (1) time.
At my job (3.7 miles / 1.25 hr walk) away from my house, I routinely cover areas 100miles away. I would just LOOOVE to drag 50 lbs of bulky gear (e.g. 3 or 4 totes) on and off of a bus. I have kids with medical equipment such as walkers/wheelchairs. Am I going to walk with them in the street for an hour to get to the bus? No thank you....
Public transport is pretty cheap, but it's extremely inconvenient where I live. Any given trip will easily take twice as long on public transport as it takes in a private car.
Maybe if we abolished the government-run gravy trains and just allowed private coaches to take on passengers it would be a different story.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There is no such thing as 'free' transport. Somewhere, someone has to pay for it. Inevitably, I'll want to go somewhere at some time when it isn't available. I'll keep my car, thanks.
I would use transit in this city a bit more if it was free, but not much. That's because the problem isn't cost. Rather, it is a combination of cost and service with service being the biggest factor. Service is so poor that it is faster to walk 30 minutes than it is to take a bus, and that is assuming that you don't have to be at your destination at a particular time. If you need to be at a particular place at a particular time, it is usually faster to walk to places up to 60 minutes away.
Then you have to consider the comfort factor. I don't mind waiting at bus stops, but virtually none of the stops in this city have seating and very few have shelters. That wouldn't be so bad if busses actually ran on schedule, but the typical bus runs anywhere from 5 minutes ahead of schedule to 10 minutes behind schedule. Once you're on the bus, there is a good chance that you'll discover that it is a cattle car (i.e. inward facing seats rather than front facing seats to maximize standing room). In the dead of winter, there is also a good chance that the bus driver cranked up the heat in spite of the passengers over heating in their winter attire. Of course, you can also expect motion sickness because there is a good chance that the driver doesn't know how to drive.
Don't get me wrong: I love public transit. I love it in cities where it is designed with the passengers in mind. It can be fast and comfortable. But until my current home city learns how to do so, I will simply take my bike. Even in the rain. Even throughout most of the winter.
Our country is too spread out. In urban places like NYC, Los Angeles, etc...it works, but out here in fly over country, it does not. Plus, my boss buys my car to do service work, but allows us to drive them home, since some of us live 15-30 miles from the office and when we have a service call, we can leave from home instead of driving to the office, pick up the vehicle, then drive all the way back.
Public transport in Tallinn is free for Tallinn residents only. It is done to encourage people to register as Tallinn residents instead of residents of some locality over the city border, and not "to encourage people to leave their cars at home".
And no, most places in the US are not that densely populated and can't have any public transport (at reasonable cost) that is remotely as convenient as your own car. There are exceptions like NYC, but these are exceptions.
i chose to live 40 minutes miles outside of town, where i can mow my half acre and drive an hour and a half to
work in my own private tin can. i'd never live in a city where you can't even park and there are all those
ethnic people. now you want me to ride a bus? the nearest bus stop is 10 miles away!
It's more about whether you want to sit next to somebody covered in his own puke, or maybe somebody who pisses himself and just sits in it. Or maybe you want to be crammed against Mr. Tuberculosis hacking his lungs out, right in your face.
Always fun to stand out in the freezing rain while the bus is an hour late.
And for women especially, there are issues of being physically attacked while waiting in the dark.
I could go on.
TANSTAAFL
And does it drop me off at my office? And how long does it take to get there vs. driving? I'm guessing that, outside of NYC and maybe DC and Chicago, the answers to those questions are not favorable.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
First of all, it's not possible for public transport to be free. SOMEBODY has to pay, and ultimately, the public will pay (the rich will make sure). Second, busses are way too shaky. I think somebody should do an analysis of the health effects of all of the shaking that a person experiences while on the bus for 2 hours, just to get across town. It is enough to induce serious motion sickness in me, and I can't imagine all of the other negative health effects. Ultimately, the public will pay for that as well.
...there would be fewer private cars on the roads since (I assume) most people would use the free public transport. Hence, I would DEFINITELY drive for the sheer pleasure of driving on unclogged roads :)
Unsubsidized transit costs are NEVER cheaper. Anywhere, anytime. And transit can never match the convenience without government interference with the driving system. Trying to hide the facts with subsidies is just another facet of fanatical unwillingness to accept the truth as long as there is somebody else's money to spend.
I live barely 5 miles away from my job in Washington, DC. Public transportation takes over an hour to get there, plus I still have to walk 0.9 miles one way to and from the bus stops. The train comes nowhere near my job. By car, the trip takes 8 minutes, and I have free parking.
German public transport is good, but even with that thee are many places it does not deserve, or when it deserve them it does so infrequently e.g. the bus behind my home is there only once per hour and stops deserving the station at early evening. next bus is ~ 1 kilometer away. So i am taking my bike everywhere instead (not a car mind you). If the bus was free, that would not change that.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Public transport means I get to sit next to those I do my damndest to avoid. People.
People on their phones. People with screaming heathens in their lap. People who haven't bathed for a day or ten. People who measure out cologne or perfume by the gallon, or smell like they smoked up an entire carton of cigarretes. People who are sick, but going to work anyway.
I'm not waiting for someone elses schedule. Not going to stand at a bus stop for half an hour in the heat, rain or cold only to learn the bus is full and I'll have to hope for the next one.
Not going to change trains, trolleys or buses four times just to get to my destination. Grocery shopping is right out as are most purchases that require a vehicle to deliver it.
My vehicle is one of the few places I can retreat to anymore to avoid most of the things mentioned above.
So give it up ? hahahaha Not a chance.
You insensitive clod. We'd have to build it 1st.
When I got to Boston, NYC, Vancouver, Chicago, or SF, I don't bother to rent a car - transit is easy. I live in Houston... good luck. Even if you live inside the loop - you're in a bus and on the road w/ the rest of us. Cheers, -T
Not only no, but hell no. I was once a young man who had to rely on public transportation back in the mid 1970's. It sucked. I got propositioned for drugs (people both wanting to buy or selling). I had to sit next to people who hadn't a clue what a shower was. I was shaken down for everything from spare change to cigarettes at bus stops. There were others with boom boxes who thought everybody on the bus really, really liked their music tastes, and made sure the rest of us heard it. It could be better. Something like a semi-private van service that did house pickups. Another problem with public transportation is the time hit. I work with a woman who's used the bus to get to our workplace for *years*. Every workday, she spends 4 hours of her life riding a total of 2 buses (she has 1 transfer) two and from work. and she only lives less than 12 *MILES* from work. I'd buy a Google car in a heartbeat if they were available. Not having to drive is a major plus, but not having smelly, threatening obnoxious passengers seated around me is another plus.
If public transportation could fill my needs as well as a car on a day-to-day basis, then of course I would. It would be reasonable to rent a car a couple times a year for longer family trips, where we might want to go further off the beaten path, or something.
The problem I see: Where I live is spread out. The nearest grocery store is several miles away, other major stores and restaurants are a similar distance (or more), and family and friends are located in a half-dozen similarly-spread cities nearby ("nearby" being 30 minutes to 2 hours by car). I like my current lifestyle. Whatever theoretical mode of transport I'd be using needs to accommodate itself to how I want to live; that's the great benefit to me of using a car. I'd accept up to a 15 minute wait time, but require that the transit time would be less than or equal to what I can currently do in a car. The only technology I know of that could provide that would be a fleet of auto-driving cars that act as a kind of automated Uber service.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
"Do you think the same would hold true in the U.S. if a similar program was started?"
I don't think so. Simply because at very many places public transportation is almost non-existent. Granted, I have first hand experience only from 3 states, and second hand reports from 3-4 more, but what I see is some big cities have a somewhat acceptable public transport system, but most of them don't have any, or if they do have some, they only cover some select routes, they run very rarely, and have very small capacity. Plus, even in places where coverage seems acceptable, like maybe SF, the system couldn't handle even an increase of 10-20% (and you have to really think about peak hours), let alone most of the population.
Let's face it, most US cities, regardless of size, simply weren't built with public transportation in mind - and keep in mind, that the larger the city, the longer and the more lines we need, and travel times can be really long. Also, building a good public transport system in a city or region that doesn't have it, or only has bus lines, would cost so much (think under and over ground metro lines, tram lines, trollies), everyone would run away when hearing the costs. Plus, lots of people wouldn't use it even if their lives depended on it.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
The reason people drive to work instead of using public transit, is not because public transit is more expensive. Period, no one in their right mind has ever made this argument. Even the most expensive public transit in the world is less tan a tiny fraction of the cost of owning and operating a car. They do not use public transit because it take far longer than a car. Look at Toronto, they could pretty much charge anything they wanted, it is faster to use public transit, so pretty much everyone does. There are even people who drive to work from out of town, who park out in the boondocks and transfer to public transit for the final leg of their journey (and probably spend thousands on parking). But then you have cities where it is ass slow, like slower than walking, and cities where the driver might be an hour early or an hour late, depending on if he took lunch.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
My overall impression is that public transport as implemented here is that it is the very least we can get away with, regardless of the harm done.
I don't think we should be looking at it with an eye to making it incrementally better, either. It's a black hole that sucks very large amounts of money and returns nothing of new value. No one with an actual comprehension of the risks prefers public transport -- I think the most common case by far is that people use it because they have to use it.
There are a lot of areas we can improve, but "a black hole that sucks very large amounts of money and returns nothing of value" really just shows you don't understand its value. It has a massive value. It lets people trade time for money, and not everybody has the money you do to drive everywhere. It also lets them do things like work places they couldn't work or couldn't afford parking. It makes everything in the cities cheaper because it makes labor cheaper in the cities. It makes the engine of commerce run more smoothly--a massive number of people use it every day and they are doing that because it returns value. It also returns value to others in the form of reduced congestion (I'm looking at you Seattle) and air pollution.
I live in one of the three largest cities in Mexico. Here, public transportation is already way cheaper than driving a car, but anyone who can afford a car drives instead, simply because of the convenience. Me and my friends relegate public transportation, basically, to those times when we know we'll be unfit (or unwilling) to drive back home -- clearly, having to pay for damages, hurting oneself or one's property or going to jail, would be the least convenient of fares.
Free as in Free Beer or free as in Obamacare?
Price is not the only argument. There are three things that mainly factor whether people use public vs. individual transport: Price, convenience and time. Price is a given. Convenience not only means whether you have to walk more (from station to station and from your locations to stations) but also whether you have to transport something. And of course time means whether it takes forever and a day for a train to arrive and whether they need an hour to go for a mile.
All this can be "won" a lot easier where there are a lot of people lumped together. It's easier to create a viable system of tightly packed stations if there is enough people to be served per square mile to make the whole thing economically sound, and with more people lumped together it also gets more likely that you're faster going by public subway than crawling through the traffic jam even if that subway stops twice every mile 'cause there's a station.
Hence I support a system that we use here in most towns: Large parking spaces at the "entrance" to our large cities (where the highways connect to town roads) with subway/city train hubs nearby to take you anywhere in town within less minutes than you could possibly get by car, especially during rush hours.
Prices are very ok as well (and heavily subsidized) but I'd wager that they're even the lesser argument for using such a service.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Most car owners can afford a train/bus ticket. Infact, for many, it may be cheaper.
The problem is time. If it requires me to change 2 buses to get my workplace, I wouldn't do it.
Also, there is the question of time. If car commute takes 25 minutes, but public transport takes 1 hour, people would take the car. I guess it would work if connections are frequent, and convenient.
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It's time and it's inconvenient. Riding a bus and rail system to work and back would turn my 60 minutes of commute time into almost 180 minutes. It disrupts your whole day waking up an extra hour and a half early and you get home late.
For a while when I had an even longer commute, I was getting up at 5:30am to get home at 8:00pm.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
That is all.
True, it's just that I noticed that they didn't show it in the video. I remember one financial assessment where they said 'no handicapped access', without checking, then proceeded to double the size of the pods, include an emergency walkway(wheelchair accessible!), and numerous other things until the PRT line was more expensive than light rail, then write the project off as unfeasible - without giving the company any opportunity to rebut.
I don't read AC A human right
You're repeating me ;)
Replacement for taxes - 'kill the taxis there'
Taxi company corruption - 'why it'd never go in there'
As far as paying for the subway goes, I doubt it, I'd have the PRT lines pay for themselves, property and sales taxes pay for the subways.
At least until we're out of the PRT expansion phase.
One trick is that I want 'the best' to win - because once a couple cities have it, you can run a line between the two, putting rest stations in every so often. Run it up to 100 mph+ and it'll easily be competitive with rail and planes below ~300 miles. The hindrance of plane check-in and taxiing balanced on the higher speeds. The slightly lower speeds up against 'most' high speed rails against 1 vehicle from pickup to drop off with no waiting for scheduling.
I don't read AC A human right
Public transportation need to be reliable and on time first, and affordable second. I don't care whether the ride is free if I wind up wasting 30-60 minutes due to delays once every ten rides.
Not only because of entitlement, not only because it doesn't go PRECISELY where they wanted to go at precisely the time they wanted (Which doesn't happen with the car either: traffic and parking mean you have to change your plan slightly in every case). But because they have the car and think "I ought to use it anyway". Even when they don't or shouldn't.
The only way to do it is to ban cars from large areas of town. Or take away cars altogether.
Firs you have to understand that Tallinn is tiny. City is really small (28.0 km2) and all the surrounding areas (total 8 districts) sits on 159.2 km2.
One of the largest districts is russian ghetto called Lasnamäe (30.0 km2). Tallinn population in about 435,245 and it's also the largest city in Estonia, with total population of 1.3 million (yes, 1.3).
BTW, if you take a bus or tram around rush hour in Tallinn, it's a lot faster than your car because bus can use dedicated lanes.
This dedicated lane is also available for cabs with a passenger.
How did Tallinn fuck up this great plan of free bus and tram?
Simple, they expanded the expensive "central" parking area and made previously free parking-lots fee based.
Those same parking lots where used by driver before to leave their car behind and take a bus or tram to the city.
So basically they had a good idea but managed to piss it away.
I'm retired and have few outside needs, groceries once a month, and appointments. Two cars, a Mazda MPV I'm working on with little success, and a Chevy truck I gave to my son so he could use going to and from work. Being nothing is close, I saw the bus system as my transportation.
A bike isn't a requirement (and I don't have) but sure makes it easier if one doesn't have too much to carry, a back pack holds what I need. The buses have racks to carry two bikes at a time and a monthly pass is just over $20 (U.S.) - cheap.
While it maintains regular routes, some buses that travel between the cities (and longest routes) do so on the quarter hour, so different times, some even needing to be caught away from the transfer points. There are three cities all within miles of each other, or even a sign marking the boundary where two cities meet. Each city large as this area is still growing at the rate it always has, be it an apartment complex, or a new store (three Walmart super stores are located here).
If one has a constant destination (from home to school and back) the buses work fine, but making different appointments takes planning and 2-3 hours of free time included for transfers and the extra time you give before an appointment (Almost always 30 minutes and up to an hour before is as close to a specific time one can get (here)). The routes and times always changing according to the need. Groceries I don't mess with the buses, calling for a ride for those. My Son did have my truck and felt unduly obligated.
It was too much for me time wise; taking a full day for a Doctor visit, prescriptions filled, and back or even an Eye appointment and back, very few times was more than one need met due to the distances between each. The truck now free I took it back and don't plan on using the buses on a regular basis anymore. For me this could change if more than one or two transportation options were available (overlapping schedules and different routes being covered) but that won't happen here.
There is a Dial-A-Ride option, if you can prove a disability or an inability to reach a bus stop. It's advanced notice and door to door service. I never felt right trying to exercise that option (a couple of miles walk is no big deal for me, a mile the longest I've had to make, as that buses route was temporarily down). A disability isn't defended by law but proof is required or a Doctor's expressed need; a 10-15 page request being sent with the fore mentioned item(s) for approval a prerequisite for Dial-A-Ride.
I can say as one who has tried, free dedicated transportation won't work removing drivers from the road (as the article itself proved), and if so only temporally, yet great for kids and school.
“If public transport *were* free”
Public transport takes me from a place where I'm not, to a place I don't want to be, at an inconvenient time, and with people I don't want to travel with. The exact opposite of my car. So cost is the least of my issues with public transport.
There can be a great inertia to something like this.
If you can push car owners to try public transport, there is a chance that many will stick with it.
I have a choice of driving or cycling to work. If for some reason I drive for a few days, I hate having to go back to cycling and will use any silly excuse to take the car. Once I've started cycling for a few days, I love the fresh air and freedom, and can't see any reason to take the car.
It's like swapping banks, it might be a good idea, save money and be more convenient but we don't unless something happens to push us into doing it and they we are generally happy we did.
I agree, I've never owned a car and don't really have need for one. I've lived in big cities most of my life and like you, use public transport daily. I especially like the cycling programs as that provides another (healthy) way to travel around without having to worry about theft. For those times where I want to drive, I'll rent a car. All of that saved money can be used for other things. :-)
...but convenience, speed and reliability definitely are.
When there's adequate public transport to let me get conveniently, quickly and reliably between points A and B, and to something akin to my own schedule, I tend to use it. When there isn't, I mostly don't. I live in the UK where, outside the largest cities, the latter case applies far more than the former. A car is pretty much vital.
Would I heck!
They don't call the bus "the peasant wagon" for nothing.
The problem with public transport is not the cost, but inconvenience.
If I'd count all the costs associated with my car, it would appear that it's far more expensive than public transport.
For example, I pay roughly 20 dollars a month for subway tickets. That would be 240 dollars per year. Period.
But I have to pay about 220 dollars per year in taxes and insurance for my car. Already almost there, right? And I didn't count gas, parking, service and repairs. If I add that, I will easily get four times that sum or more.
So cost is not a problem. But it's always crowded in public transport, you always have to wait (subway not that much but busses or rail are a pain), and to top it off there are places where you just can't get on a public transport at all.
So the final answer: no. Free public transport will not make me give up on my car.
And in case of Tallinn, frankly, the city is so small, you barely need any transport there at all besides your own feet.
Time is also a cost; if it takes me 20 minutes to drive somewhere by car but an hour to get there by mass transit, then the equation makes no sense. If, on the other hand, you live somewhere where driving is impractical and an hour drive can be replaced by 20 minutes on mass transit, then clearly I'd take mass transit almost regardless of the cost.
I moved from San Francisco area (Sonoma) to Copenhagen, Denmark, last year. In SF I never used public transport, there were only buses near where I lived and they were pretty sparse.
In Copenhagen I don't even own a car. I still live in the suburbs. There's a bus stop 3 minute walk from our house, or I can cycle 15 minutes to train station. While PT is a pain at times, it seems that there's nowhere here you cannot get to on it.
For kids and buying big stuff we've a cargo bike. For everything else, online shopping.
Unless you live inside a major city the 'cost' is not the biggest factor. Convenience is. Being able to go on your own schedule and from and to the location you desire, rather than just some approximation of those points determines us. For those outside the city (even nearby suburbs) the sprawl is far too great.
I live in Berlin; public transport everywhere and within minutes. The only reason I only use it rarely is my bike: Compared to London (where I lived two years) Berlin is very bike-friendly, lots of side roads and bicycle lanes along canals and through parks. And car drivers are used to it unlike London where you have aggressive drivers everywhere. And it's 35 minutes to work and 35 minutes back regardless how I get there; motorcycle via Autobahn, S-Bahn or bicycle. I pity all you guys sitting in a traffic jam in LA every week...
First the public transportation has to be practical to use, which it isn't outside of some large municipal areas of the US. Sure, there are other pockets here an there, but it's largely not usable otherwise.
Not that they don't make some effort. There is a commuter bus line from where I am to close to where I work, but it only runs twice in the morning and twice in the evening. If you miss it, too bad. I can't walk (or take other public transit) to the boarding points either, so what's the point.
It depends upon the convenience, the times, the routes, and the locations. I looked at using public transportation to get to my current job. Both from where I live now and where I used to live. From where I currently live it would take about 1.5 hours and I would still have to drive somewhere else to pick up the bus and would also have to walk a mile on roads without sidewalks. Where I used to live it would have also taken about 1.5 hours, only I was about 3 miles from work (where I am over 10 miles away now). I would have been able to walk it faster.
When people think personal vehicles, it seems motorcycles are left out. Is it because you MUST obtain a driver's license first, before obtaining a motorcycle endorsement? If motorcycling was categorized in a different path, by the state, not intrinsically tied to a driving license, but a RIDING LICENSE, which could be independent of a driving license, you'd see more riders, which could free up parking space, road traffic, etc.
I would consider using public transport if it were not for all the.. less than desirable elements. I especially wouldn't want loved ones traveling on free public transport. At least in my area it isn't safe. So how about this? Free public transport for those that need it and really expensive public transport with all the frills.
For any mass transportation system to be a success it must:
1. Get people where they want to go,
2. When they want to get there,
3. In reasonable amount of time, and
4. In reasonable comfort,
5. For less than it costs to drive.
If any of those are a fail, the system will only survive by throwing more coerced funding (taxes) at it.
If public transportation was free, there would not be any buses or trains going anywhere. So, no, I would not be using them.
Where I live it is already so underfunded that the routes near my house run so infrequently that I could not use them even if I was inclined to.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Public transport is the death knell and failure of a city. It is the warning sign that too many people are in the same vicinity and condoms should be given out for free until the situation is resolved. You see I used to be on a submarine and I learned something. Space isn't just a formula for placing objects, it is a quality of life point to living kind of thing.
I moved out of the city and the city moved out to me and as it slowly has moved I am told I have tonnes of convenience and lots of shops and stores, but all I find is a desire to move further away and lengthen my commute. Our cities are travesties of high cost high pressure high population density and very low if non existent quality of life. When you see the need for mass transit you might as well back up and move because the city has already failed. If we sprawl out our cities into areas where everyone can have at least ten acres of land and a nice big house we could put solar panels on that land and grow local crops and drive cars to commute to wherever we needed to go.
But this means businesses would need to spread out and people would need to accept that a 380 sq foot apartment for 2 grand a month is a warning sign, not the cost of living in the city. We would all be less stress, less unhealthy, eat better be nicer and eventually solve healthcare problems quality of life issues and yes we would all drive cars but there would be room and it would be pleasant, not a chore.
Hate me if you will I am right :)
Maybe :)
Time is money, and taking public transit takes more time then driving yourself somewhere. The cost of gas is worth it. You will get the people who can't afford a car taking public transit, and the very few people who believe in climate change. Might be different if climate change could be proven.
Not really free since you pay for it with taxes. Kinda like "free" health care in some countries. Yea, going to the doctor is free, but you are paying for it every time you buy something since every business is taxed to pay for it.
1) Make it free for a long period of time. You need people using it enough to ditch their other forms of transportation.
2) Make significant investments in improving the system. Most systems are at best inconvenient, at worst non-existent.
3) Make driving less attractive. Tax it. Tax the roads. Tax the gas. Tax the parking. Use revenue to pay for public system.
First of all, while I don't use public transportation, I decided to get a house where I could walk to work everyday. I do own and use a car, for longer trips and errands etc... The major difference is my brand new 2002 car has about 80,000 km on it, whereas most of my friends have several hundreds of thousands and are on their second car.
However one public transportation story I do have, is that when I was in college and worked as a grounds keeper at my university I had to be at work at 7am. Being in school I didn't have a car. The *only* bus I could take left at 5:30am. So for a summer I had to get up before 5am everyday to go to work, and I was early for work every day. Which you would think would be a good thing, but my co-workers thought that I was some brown nose suck-up for going to work so early and bred a lot of animosity. Never mind the fact that they all had cars, and I had no choice in the matter if I wanted to get their on time (the next bus would have made me late everyday). The following year I was not hired back, largely because I perceived that several of the staff who had been there longer resented me...
Some intangibles about not driving to work:
The Math:
I live close enough I actually walk home for lunch each day as well...
So 4 trips a day of roughly about 1km per trip.
4x1 = 4km per day.
I work 5 days a week, so 4x5 = 20km a week.
If I work 50 weeks a year (which is a bit much, as I get more vacation now, but for ease of calculation)
20km x50 = 1000km a year
I've worked there for 15 years...
15x1000 = 15,000km total.
So in all I have walked almost the equivalent of 15,000km in just going to work, never mind walking to close downtown amenities.
The gas you save. The less carbon footprint. Less wear and tear on car. However primarily the health benefits of a lot of short walks add up.
Though there are times I think I'm wearing a rut into the sidewalk with my trudgery.
Conversely: /12 for a daytime estimate: 625 days wasted sitting in your car over that period..
I have a friend that commutes an hour every day to work in another community.
Twice a day. 1h x 2 = 2 h a day in the car...
five days a week, is 5 x 2h 10h a week...
for the same 50 weeks, 500h a year...
If he's done the same 15 years, that's 7500 h in the car...
or
That's like losing 2 years of your life.
If it were convenient I certainly would. However, it would be hard to build a system that is convenient and cost effective to run that includes suburban areas in addition to cities. Given that in many cities a lot of the traffic is commuters coming going to and from work you'd have to build out an extensive system to make giving up a car attractive. Free alone is not enough since unless it doesn't add measurably to the commute time or require any noticeable change in routine people simply won't use it. Part of the reason is they don't see the cost of commuting each day beyond the time it takes, and free transportation would not change the most noticeable costs, so there is no incentive to change their routine. They may see the monetary costs when they buy gas or pay to park but the is often a monthly or weekly costs and thus less noticeable as far as the ability to drive a change in behavior. I doubt they would see enough savings to make many switch while at the same time they would suffer a loss (of time and convenience) in their minds so loss aversion would drive them to continue their current behavior.
Finally, it wouldn't be free. Someone has to pay for it; and unless enough money is allocated to keep it clean and safe ridership will drop, and thus support to continue offering it for free. It becomes a death spiral that ends spectacularly when it hits the ground.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I absolutely love driving. I'm a race fan, and when I'm not jealously watching my favorite cars and drivers circle my favorite tracks, I'm enjoying my own tours around the city streets, highways, and back roads around my home. I loathe the possibility of one day being forced to own and drive an automatic, let alone a self-driving car.
That all being said, this is an "Only Nixon can go to China" argument.
I have a 30-minute, 20-mile commute, 4-5 days a week. The same route, same pot holes, same inefficient drivers, same straight roads, same ill-timed stoplights.
If I could have that hour back, sitting on a train, getting things done, I'd take it. In a heartbeat.
But I live in the Indianapolis area, and on probably the most rural side of town. We are woefully behind on public transportation in general. And if it ever does come here, it's going to start with lines from Carmel and Fishers, then maybe Greenwood by the time I retire. And if it ever does reach me, that implies that the wonderfully rural area in which I live will likely no longer be rural.
So yes, I would leave my car at home. Even though I'm exactly the type of person who would drive anywhere. But it won't happen.
I want to get there the fastest method possible. make public transit faster than driving and parking for my destination at a reasonable price (or free) and I will take it.
...is worthless.
If there are busses running every 2 hours and I need to go to the grocery store, my ice cream will melt long before I get home.
If I need to take my dog to the vet, the bus won't let me take it on.
If I need to go take my gun to the shooting range, they won't let me on the bus with one.
First, get rid of the stupid rules on the public transportation, and then increase its availability. THEN you'll see the ridership and less car use.
Anything else is just playing games.
In the US, the people who use cars for daily commuting, etc. are doing so because there isn't really a public transportation option or they're too wealthy to care about it. Making the public transportation free isn't going to change either one of those situations. I live 18 miles from my office. There is a bus that runs that route, but not on any schedule that coincides with my work schedule.
I'm not taking over 2 hours to commute to work. And the same to commute home. After a 9 hour work day and 8 hours of sleep, that leave 3 hours for getting ready for work, eating dinner, and relaxing after I get home. Nope .. not going to happen. I don't live to work.
I took the bus to work when I was single and lived in the city many years ago. It was just as quick as a car (30 minutes each way), and I didn't have to pay for parking. There is no sense in taking a bus from where I live now, it's only a 35 minute commute. If the bus took an hour each way, I'd probably do it.
Instead, I'm looking at working from home full time in 4 months. In a completely different city, 2,000 miles from the office.
Much better alternative ....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
OK, I have the luxury of having a bus service that during peak time runs past a stop only 300 metres away from my flat, BUT... it goes all the way into the city to the center where I have to walk 300 yards to catch the next bus out going past where I work... that runs every ten minutes as well so I paek time there is a maximum ten minute wait in the middle... unfortunately, with all the windy route and stops, it takes some 40 minutes (on bad days) getting to the center and the outgoing one takes some 40 minutes (again on bad days) getting to the stop closest to work... (that's as long as 90 minutes!!!) and it costs me some £5.00 a day for the privilege..
Car takes me some 15 minutes on good days when all lights go green, there's naff all other traffic and there's no crashes, road-works etc., takes 45 minutes on bad days and I'm able to use the many back roads I know...
cycling ALWAYS takes 35 minutes whatever the traffic...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
It really depends on where you live.
I would say 'no' where I live now. Although there is a bus stop almost outside my house, it takes three times as long to get to work by bus than it does to drive - my drive being around about 20 minutes, and the bus journey (plus walk at the end) being an hour. I can actually beat the bus journey on my bicycle, and it's 12.5 miles (hilly miles, too). The bus not only goes "around the houses" taking a route much longer and slower than my direct route, it stops all the time, and it only goes within a mile of my workplace. It would be 1.2 hours every day longer on the daily route to work.
On the other hand if I lived in a big city such as Madrid I wouldn't even bother owning a car, regardless of whether public transport was free or not. The car becomes more of a liability than an asset once you live in a densely populated city.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Except you get to subsidize transit AND drive, you can't opt out of subsidizing it so there's not really a point to counting those costs when deciding if you should drive or take transit.
Actually though, subsidies where I live are about 50% for transit, so it's STILL cheaper for longer trips.
only if 99% are poor at math or live outside a city.
most people choose to only include fuel costs which are an actually small component of the cost.
I ride the rain to work. I live out in the suburbs. The station is just over a mile from my house...and it takes about an hour total from closing my house door to stepping inside the office. Public transit only works depending upon location. Light rail and Express buses are great for suburbs...but they need to be near enough to subdivisions to be worthwhile. Businesses also need to be located close to each other in business parks so that transit options could handle multiple employees. Having businesses out by themselves means there will never be mass transit options for them. As for me, it is "free" only because my employer pays the cost for a pass for all employees.
It's not free when you're still paying for it, even if you don't use it.
And no, I'm going to use my personal vehicle to get my tasks done as quickly as possible.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Public transportation is for mentally ill and the criminally poor. Screw that. I will gladly pay all the costs of car ownership to get exactly where I want to go quickly without having to deal with the unwashed freaks.
People would switch if public transportation allowed them to get to their destination faster. As long as you can get to your destination faster in a private vehicle, people will use them. Make the public transportation the fastest method people will use, That is why we fly long distances rather than drive.
I drive one day out of ten to work. But overwhelmingly, Americans are *stupid*.
Datum: I used to live in Chicago, in a far north neighborhood. I'd take the commuter rail into downtown. The last few miles, it runs along/in the middle of the expressway. At least four days out of five, if not 9 out of 10, we'd be cruising down at about 55mph, and the traffic on the freeway would be either stop and go, or almost standing still (except when it was standing still). Oh, and a lot near where I worked advertised an "early bird special", in by 07:00, "only" $22/day.
But they're driving their cars, usually with only one person in them, for "convenience".....
These days, taking a bus and the Metro adds perhaps 10 min to my commute.
mark
No way jose
#1 More frequent buses
#2 Allowed to take a bike
#3 Allowed to take things to put groceries and bigger items on to transport
I'm in NYC. Owning a car here is far more expensive than public transportation. Cheaper train or bus fare doesn't address the reasons why I don't take mass transit. It's not going anywhere I need to be. NYC's trains and buses service mainly Manhattan and Brooklyn, with some extension into Queens. A lot of places only see the occasional meandering and infrequent bus. I live in an area with very few direct public transit options; my driving commute is nearly an hour but Google Maps says that if I were to take two trains and two buses, I can reach work in just three hours. Six hour round trip, anyone? It's free! This is besides the issues of rubbing shoulders and sharing airspace with tandoori chicken and that guy who thinks everyone should enjoy his taste in music. I've never felt like that stuff would be OK except that three bucks is too much for the experience; the difference between cheap and free is irrelevant. Ultimately it comes down to trains and buses don't actually get me where I need to be. Heck, inside Manhattan the situation reverses and I'll be the first one down to the subway.
Not across the entire United States or not until people realized the cumulative cost of maintaining their own vehicles. United States became a personal vehicle nation after World War 2 when the economy was at its height and consumer satisfaction back then was probably also high as well.(citation needed) It became a cultural sense and public transport support waned. I live in the midwest and there used to be a light rail system in place but that was long ago. The topic of a new system is brought up now and then but is quickly buried. Now, having said that, there are metropolitan centers which would probably work quite well because there is an established public transport. I have used Chicago's Metro system and was very pleased with it. The hassle and cost of having a car versus using the public transport would be a no-brainer under circumstances such as these.
Public transit assumes that you work in a single location, with regular hours, and don't need to carry a lot of stuff. It also takes a LOT longer than driving. Here in Sacramento, CA, it would take me 90 minutes and would involve 3 bus changes to get from home to my regular office; driving takes 30 minutes normally, 45 minutes if traffic is bad. But I frequently visit customers in other parts of town, and taking public transit would take a LONG time.
Here in Sacramento, we have a fairly good "light rail" system that moves people from the suburbs to downtown, and back. Our "downtown" is substantially government workers, so our public "light rail" system primarily shuffles government workers to and from work. Light rail does not go to the shopping malls, or to the university (although there is one stop only 5 blocks away) or to the business office parks. It doesn't go to the airport (although they've been promising that "Real Soon Now" for the last 15 years) and shuts down completely at about 11PM, before the downtown bars and theaters close.
Like all such rail systems, it operates at a stiff loss, and is paid for by the transportation taxes that auto drivers pay. Even when I was working downtown, the only way rail made any financial sense was when the city jacked up parking rates, so that the daily parking was substantially more expensive than the rail ticket.
It's entirely pointless it being free or not, if, like in most of B.C. (and probably most of the reat of Canada) public transport is far and few between.. such as a 60 minute wait for a 45 minute walk .. for a healthy sober person anyways.. and of course, the big one.. public transport stops running a half hour before the bars close down, and maybe an hour before the clubs close. *If* it were free, and more usable, then in the city, yeah.. 100% probablilty I would use it, as I hate driving in town. I live in the country though, now.. Beyond "rural" as the nearest town of any size is a half hour away and the nearest real city is 45 minutes to an hour to town... Going to the city on the bus is almost 75 minutes, and the local town is 45 minutes, but a 15-25 minute drive on the highway. Considering the frequency of service, there's little likelyhood of ever using the bus to either town, or the city. If it were free, ANSD usable=y frequent, , I might more often. We would have already had a rapid transit system to town already. They started talking about it when the local train service stopped. Unfortunately, nobody wanted it because they liked the remotenmess of their location, and didn't want where I was living (and grew up, actually) to become a suburban community. It's coming our direction anyways, since the debate, 10 miles closer. Currently, it's a bedroom community for the affluent.. so much so that I couldn't even buy into my own community. People that were born and raised there can't afford to live there.. ;-( However, a free rapid transit system would possibly change that, as well as save lives.. Essential services should NEVER be run solely for profit, or even as a break-even exercise. That's why we have taxes, after all
Honestly, it's not really about the price. The problem is mainly one of schedule. Where I used to live, it was actually pretty decent. My wife took the bus regularly, and I was within walking distance to work (or driving when the weather sucked). Unfortunately we were also in a Strata with ever-increasing rules, fees, and a number of council members suffering from cranial-rectal inversion (I was on the council, and some members were often just plain hostile).
So I moved to a house. It's bigger, the neighbourhood is peaceful with less crime, and it's still not that far from downtown/work. It is up a hill that makes biking a lesser alternative to driving though. The bus service, however, is shyte. Once hourly, plus transfers to get uptown where the shopping is, and it ends at hours that aren't particularly helpful for anyone who doesn't work regular hours between 8am and 7pm.
Additionally for myself, I have on-call after-hours shifts where I need to be able to get to the office if there's an emergency, be it 3pm or 3am. Waiting on the hourly bus (plus transfer) isn't so helpful, and there's no late service.
It doesn't really matter how much the bus costs, if it doesn't work on the hours I do, it's not useful. Many people I know *would* prefer the bus over the costs of the car they can barely afford (the one that needs regular repairs, leaks oil, and isn't all that reliable in itself), but when they're working split/random shifts, need to pick up the kids within 15 minutes of finishing work, need to get bags full of groceries home, etc... well that doesn't work so well either.
Now, if we move on from busses and talk about (reliable) high-speed transport like LRT or subways, I'm game. When I lived in a bigger city, I *loved* the LRT. Even if it took me a bit longer to get to work, I could usually get on a bit earlier and rest/nap while enroute. I did still have a car for my forays out-of-city or for when I was picking up a trunkload of groceries/building-materials, but I didn't tend to drive it overly regularly (so still paying for insurance, but the lesser "not for work" amount as well as reduced emissions etc). I often wonder what the pay-off might be for a simple system in the smaller cities: something that runs straight from one end of town to another, and - even if it doesn't replace cars - at least swaps part of the drive for a group-parking lot and a quick rail trip.
Even better, here (Canada) they have often discussed - and dismissed - something like a high-speed-rail route between major western cities. Something like a bullet train from Calgary to Vancouver (10h by car). Yes, it would be expensive, and the usual objection are the amount of work, time and cost involved. Yes, they would have to burrow through or around mountains.
However, I was in Korea and Japan and the rail system was great (better in Korea). The trip is quick, fairly comfortable, as well as affordable and convenient. Again, I do recognise that the populations in Korea or Japan squeeze a lot more into a small area, but consider this: one of the bigger programs in Canada (and I believe N America in general) is that there's a lot of "space" but not so many people in the less-urban areas. Domestic populations are dropping, and immigration is basically keeping things afloat, but immigrants don't generally *WANT* to live in the smaller cities. Also, many professionals (doctors, lawyers, and yes even politicians) prefer the larger centres.
But what if all those people could get to the "big city" in 25% or less of the time it takes by car. What if it took about the same time to travel there that it currently does to do a grocery run? Suddenly, you can live in the smaller city in a decent-sized house/yard, with less smog, less crowding, and a nice view. You've got a 2000sqft house instead of a 500sqft shoebox to live in. If you want to go shopping, you can hit some of the local shops for your basic stuff, or take a train-trip and grab those electronics/clothes/food that aren't even available in your hometown, and still
Because when I go to town, I usually come home with not only my groceries, but also half a ton of feed. I suppose if I had my own rail siding, public transport might be more practical.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If public transport were free....
FREE is beside the point. Most riders are obviously willing to invest a few bucks for the sake of quiet and convenience. (Or willing to exert themselves on a bicycle for the same reason.) So forget FREE. The important question is "Does the transport conveniently and quietly get me where I'm going when I want to get there....? And do the same on the reverse...?"
I think this will continue to be a silly question until some services shows up with a clean, private, almost free self-drive car whenever I want one.
My commute from home to work is 3.6 miles one-way. Takes a few minutes by car...Almost an hour by bus. I can walk it faster. No, I wouldn't spend almost two hours of my day on a bus, vs. ten minutes in a car. I've got better things to do.
It would turn my commute from a 40 minute exercise to a 4 hour agony.
Each way.
Not what I had in mind. Thanks anyways.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
To a sprawling, massive country, like the USA is what would be known as fallacious.
But let's play. Take the figures for Estonia; the total miles of tracks, total population, total number of cars and the total cost for building it - scale it all to the physical size and population of the USA.
Then it becomes markedly clear why public transit in the USA is in general incomparable to comparatively physically tiny nations and entirely unworkable.
It would keep me from using my car in some cases...
Presently, at $4 r/t, it isn't worth going 1-2 miles, but might be worth going 40-50. It's more expensive than driving costs for my work commute by over 4:1 in spite of my gas guzzler. If I didn't own a car at all (and therefore eliminate all of the associated expenses), it would be cheaper, but the amount of time I'd lose to it would be worth more to me than the cost of operating my private car.
In spite of this, I do use the existing system for certain tasks, like going into downtown (sometimes) and getting to/from ferries (when I don't need to spend the extra to bring my car). The main thing I use it for is getting to/from the airport to reduce ferry and avoid airport parking costs. When I lived next to a trolley stop, I regularly used it to get to/from the airport and train station as it actually saved me time and money to take it over parking (and the requisite waiting for shuttles).
If you want to increase ridership, you need to make a compelling case for using it. I happily ride the tube and trains in the UK because they go places I want to go, they're convenient, run frequently, and they tend to be very centrally located. In the US, transit is an afterthought with poor planning, siting, and scheduling. This almost seems by design to make it unappealing to all-but those with no other choice.
This is a much more complicated issue. If the government was giving away candles, I might find it fun and interesting, but also inconvenient. Sure, I'd probably use them occasionally, but it would more than likely supplement my lighting. Electric lights would still be my main source of lighting.
I like using my car because it is convenient. I know I am spending money on it, but honestly, the biggest investment was the purchase of the vehicle. So sure I might jump on board the bus occasionally, but not all the time. I purchased a car for convenience and freedom to go places. I like to go to a place on a whim and not have to check bus routes.
Also, a car makes it much more convenient to shop. Imagine I pick up a case of soda and a couple gallons of milk. Yes, it is doable on a bus, but hardly fun at all. It might take me 5 bus trips to get the family groceries home.
And, as others have mentioned, its not like this is free. Someone is paying for it. More than likely, you are. But now you are forced to pay for the bus whether you use it or not. Sometimes, you just cannot use the bus. A single mom that needs to work and pick up their kids from daycare, and buy groceries, might not be able to spend valuable minutes waiting for buses. Is it fair to her to charge her for operating buses and then she has to pay for her car as well?
I've ridden buses and trains when convenient, but in all honesty there is a lot more to this than giving it away free. Buses work more fine for urban dwellers with no kids. Once you start adding other people to the mix, relying 100% on public transit loses its appeal rather quickly.
As a former public transit agency employee we had free unlimited use of the system. Problem is - the system sucked... my 35 minute commute turned into a 1 hour and 20 minute commute. The ride from the park and ride lot to the downtown transfer point wasn't too bad... but from the transfer point to the office sucked. Sometimes I lucked out and grabbed a non-revenue deadhead bus in (or to the transfer point on the way home) - but usually I went from a bus full of average quiet suburban commuters to a bus full of noisy savage niggers as we also hauled their high drop-out welfare asses to high school as well.
The thing for us is we were forced to ride the bus as least once a month and evaluate the ride - so most of us did it on our commutes from our save mostly white crime-free communities into work and back. Wasn't too bad. Well the powers that be wanted us to evaluate the entire system. So we were then forced to ride a route that was assigned to us - and most of those were in the nigger-infested ghetto neighborhoods. Oh what fun... the drunks, the smelly homeless, the mentally ill, the welfare queens with their 7-8 niglets from 4-5 different baby daddies, the white people haters.
Needless-to-say, even with the free fringe benefit of free public transportation for us employees - rarely anyone took advantage of it when the choice to ride or not ride was left up to them.
After I quit that shitty job, I never stepped foot on a public transit mode of transportation ever again.
My work provides monthly passes for free (-ish, I do have to work there), but I don't leave my car at home. I drive to the light rail parking lot.
Taking the bus from home would include a walk to the bus stop and a wait for the bus -- no matter what the weather -- and a long ride to the light rail station.
Air conditioning on the train can only do so much in a St. Louis summer, with 4 doors opening on each car every few minutes.
I've just now almost talked myself into dropping the monthly pass and getting free (-ish) parking in the parking garage instead.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Does free public transport create more jobs in the economy?
It takes me 13 minutes to get to work by car, 25 minutes to get there by bike, and 50 to get there by public transport, for the simple reason that I don't live near the railway station, I don't work near the railway station, and all buses go to the railway station only. In most cities in the Netherlands (except for the four biggest maybe) if you work in the same city as you live, in general public transportation the slowest option to work.
Furthermore, using the public transport I would have to make sure I'm in time for the bus every time, or I'd loose another 15 minutes. Next, using the public transport I'd most likely have to stand in an overcrowded bus and try not to get annoyed by that one guy/woman who always is there to irritate you by smelling like hell, playing loud music or making loud phone calls.
I go to work by train. When I go on holidays, I rent a car. When I need to do my weekly shopping, I use car sharing : Germany and Belgium
Last month I paid 20 EUR. This month will be around 25 and that will be the normal cost.
And this is without the public transport being free, just available.
With the car sharing, you do not have to give up on anything, yet still pay way less. It is said to be interesting if you run less than 10.000KM a year.
Calculation for me: :300 EUR
Insurance : 900EUR
Taxes
So that is already 100EUR per month for a car standing outside. Fuel needs to be payed in both and is even included in the 25EUR.
Next to that is the yearly maintanance That gets to around 50EUR per month and the devaluation of the car from 17.000 to 1.000 of 12 years. and that is another 160EUR.
So the car costs me say 250EUR per month. Not calculating fuel. So that is just standing there. I am sure that if I calculate more precise, I will be closer to 275 per month.
For that money I can easily pay the car sharing and on top of that public transport. Luckily the latter the company I work for does. Pretty standard in Belgium. At least 50% is paid, most (many?) companies pay the rest as well.
I do not need to drive a lot, so obviously YMMV, but certainly something to look into. I know several people who sold their second car and use Cambio as a second car.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
To get to the nearest public transportation I would still need a car (or bike in good weather) to get to the nearest public transportation to me (light rail). No buses run between my house and the light rail either.
But I WOULD ride the train to work every day if it were free, even if I had to drive my car to the station. It would save me a lot on gas and car maintenance. Not to mention shrinking my carbon footprint.
It shouldn't be free, and certainly not run by the government. That is my opinion at least.
Two separate issues.
The first is, is the public transportation like what I experienced when I visited Basel, Switzerland? I ran all around that city using their trams, and it was wonderful. My wife was working, and I would spend the days exploring. If it was like when I used it in Columbus, Ohio, to get to work. Well, just doing that was a time hit, it doubled the amount of travel time to get back and forth. And that was travel time. That does not include the time waiting for the bus, nor the time involved in walking from the bus stop to my final destination. Now, on the bus, I could read and listen to music and not worry about handling traffic. But I still lost time doing other things at home. And this was an express bus, not your regular local route, in which case, double that or more, again. Add on the fact that the buses there do not run everywhere I want to go (also, Columbus is a much larger city, area wise, than Basel, so yeah, it's to be expected), and that's an issue. Say, I wanted to go out to dinner with a friend that lived on the west side of Columbus (I lived on the north side), I would have to take a local bus downtown, make a transfer (if not more than one) to get to the west side. Or where ever we were going to eat at. Time wise, that just isn't feasible.
So yes, the first issue would be, what's going to be the quantity/quality of that public transportation? As it exists today? Not as it exists here in the US!
The second issue is, there are times when yes, you need a car. If you're doing any kind of major shopping, especially at say a warehouse club like Sam's, BJs or Costco, you're not going to be taking your stuff back with you in a couple of bags tucked under your arms. Again, while the public transportation in Basel was excellent, my wife and I had dinner with a colleague that lives in Basel. They don't own a car, so they rent a car by the hour when they have to have one. Which was usually around once a week or so from what I gathered.
Bryan
For me, it would not even need to be free, it would just need to be less horrible where i live (greater DC area). My commute by public transit is 1.5 hrs, or 20 min by car. Also, my car does not frequently smell of urine and vomit, the same can not be said for the metro.
No. If public transport were redesigned so it could carry individual pods, and run on demand, maybe.
If my region had free public transportation that could actually get me where i need to go I'd sell 2.228 of my vehicles in a hurry and only keep my work vehicle. Public transportation doesn't work when you have more tools and stock than you can carry at one time.
As noted by another poster, one drawback is operating on the transport schedule, not mine. Where I live, missing a connection can mean a 45 minute wait.
Additionally, even in a best-case scenario, commuting to work for me would be 2 and a half hours and 4 connections each way, with a walk of a few miles (often in rain, sleet, hail, snow) at the work end; and the same walk to get to a connection for transport home.
If I need a side trip (groceries, pharmacy, etc, etc), I can add another half hour or so on top of the shopping time. And carry 6 or more large, heavy bags on a packed bus, and a long walk from the bus stop.
Worst-case scenario is between 4 hours (one way) and no transpo at all in some areas due to weather, accidents, etc.
People who push public transpo in the US tend to live in cities with lots of public transportation options.
Most people in the US don't fall into this category.
And again, yes!
Speaking as an empowered, (dumb ass ignoramuses might call me spoiled), self sufficient American, who has the right and privilege of pursuing happiness, and the means to do so, I have to humbly decline, and violently protest ANY imposition, that taking my freedom of movement from me would inflict on my live, let alone the quality thereof. No, especially not if I have to waste hundreds of hours not doing what I am accustomed to doing, missing sleep, standing out in the rain for someone to take me close, but not all the way to the place I need to go at a moment's notice makes the decision for me. So, the simple answer to your question is: NO not I will not take the bus!