Genuine Question. Even if I look at hungarian Transport, and they to this day use trains from the UdSSR, they come more consistantly then the DB.
They are really Bad sometimes, with like 20 seperate prices: Theres the bayernwald ticket that only works in the alps, then theres the official ticket to the destination. Theres a special offer, but only in the very special APP. You can use a d-ticket, but look! Some random ass slum in the middle of the worlds ass dosent accept that, but it does the MVV zone Tickets. But then you need the MVV zone 11-M, a ticket to the beginning to the Nürnberg zones, and a ticket for the Nürnberg zones.
And yet this shit is better than americas rails? How?
I was stationed in Germany for three years in the 90s and most of the GIs I hung with had never used public transportation in the states beyond school buses. So
What public transport?
This is the true answer, hence I don’t need to sarcastically form my own.
Only large, northeastern, US cities have anything resembling real public transportation.
In a lot of areas it’s virtually non-existent. In my medium size’d city. A bus stop is about 2 miles away and comes every 50 minutes.
I live in a smallish town with decent public transport in the US. Free, highly reliable busses that go to nearly every part of town and a couple of the connected suburbs as well. The locals hate it, I guess they’re still mad it messed up traffic? Idk I just tell them if they hate the traffic so much use the free bus that is supposedly making their life so much harder.
This is abnormal in the US, having decent public transport. Its basically only available in MAJOR metro areas like NYC, LA, Seattle, Chicago. Most of the country barely has functional public transport, let alone reliable.
Please, tell me where you live!
But my opsec!
This is the way.
If it exists, it is better than American public transit. Here is my daily commute to work, as estimated by Google Maps:
Even Google goes “lmao use a fucking car, peasant.”It’s technically possible for me to take public transit, but it would be about the same as walking. Here is a quick sketch of the route I’d need to take, compared to my drive:
That route is because there are no east/west lines between me and my job. It starts by walking/riding my bike the wrong direction to get to the nearest bus stop. Then it takes me south-west through two cities, then north-west through two more cities. Then I’d have a ~20 minute walk to transfer rail lines, because my job is serviced by a different rail system than the one that my bus service touches. After that walk (and waiting for the next train) I take it north and then have to walk another 10-15 minutes to finally get to work.
Not counting wait times, it would take me nearly 2.5 hours to use public transit. When you consider the fact that some busses and trains only run once every 20-45 minutes, it actually stretches closer to 3-4 hours, if the schedules don’t line up. Or I could just fucking drive 10 minutes. Yeah, it’s no wonder Americans use cars for everything.
USA.jpegright there. That image is for everyone who lives there except for like three cities. And the bike route is actually crossing several major roads.And the bike route is actually crossing several major roads.
It’s worse: The bike route is on a two lane highway with no shoulder. I’d be dead on Day 1 if I actually tried to walk/ride a bike.
My commute; this is a fun way to show how car centric America is lol
I used to just walk 1.5 hours to work sometimes because it was the same time the bus would take, to only drop me off 75minutes early for my shift, or ten minutes late. So I’d just walk.
It may be bad in Germany but its worse in the USA. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has better transit options than the rest of the country. But its limited just to the city of San Francisco itself and maybe some parts outside the city. I just came back from a short trip to Germany, where my family lives. They live in Kassel, a mid-sized city in the north central part of the country. Even a mid-sized city has an extensive tram network and bus system. And a monthly transit card doesn’t cost as much. Getting to Kassel itself was easy by train, though the train was 1/2 hour late. I am very, very jealous of my family.
…i tried to live with public transit in marin county: just commuting to my job was three hours each way, with a very narrow window of opportunity for walking to a grocer at my transfer hub and no recourse on nights when i had to work late…
“American public transport”
Good joke! Best joke I heard since “American democracy”!
Public transportation in cities varies. But inter-city transportation? In most of the USA you simply cannot travel between towns or cities on public transportation. There are a few inter-city bus options (Greyhound, Flix, Megabus), but those don’t go everywhere.
The rail options outside of the NE corridor (Boston to Washington DC, basically) are very sparse. Here’s the map: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/Maps/Amtrak-System-Map-020923.pdf
That’s it. Most of those routes are at most once per day in each direction. So if you city even has a stop (which it probably doesn’t) the train may only come through in the middle of the night. Some routes are only 3x/week. And because of the massive distances involved and old equipment, it takes at least 70h+ to travel from coast to coast (more really, since connection times are long) and costs twice the price of a 6h flight ($250+ vs $80-120).
Trains are often on schedule, but can be many hours late. Once they are off schedule they are at the mercy of the freight train lines (who own the tracks) for passing. You can get stuck behind a slow moving cargo train for many hours.
Why is it like this? It’s complicated. But it starts with very low population density, large areas/distances, and a very different relationship between the individual and the state in the US vs most of Europe. Add the rise of suburbs in the automobile right when many US cities were growing. Another factor is public attitudes. People think that public transportation is for poor people. I know people who have never ridden a city bus, and I live in a city that probably has above average public transportation for the region.
Anyway, as a public transportation rider-by-choice I feel your pain. Having spent a few weeks in Germany recently (with a DT for travel), and having ridden extensively on US train and bus networks, yous is definitely much, much better. Resist the politics of privatization and decay.
Resist the politics of privatization and decay.
Too late. Railways have been converted to a public-private partnership in the 90s, and are trying to get broken up into a competitive market these days anyway, and local public transportation is also run by public-private companies. In the countryside, it’s usually managed by a private company in the first place, often organized in local organizations of several firms that offer the same fares - which usually has hard borders and can for example lead to villages next to each other having a 5 h connection time through railways, which don’t follow these area bounds.
I live in the largest city in a Midwestern state. To access amtrak (the only passenger rail in the us)I need to drive 3 hours to the nearest station.
The city is shaped like a lopsided clock. I live in the burbs around 1 o’clock. I work for a fortune 50 company headquartered at 10 o’clock. To take the bus to my job I need to take the bus downtown and wait for an out bound. This would take 90 minutes when I could drive in 25.
America has not made public transit a serious option unless you are in Chicago, NYC or DC.
Ooh, lemme guess: live in Westerville, work for JPMC?
Jpmc is at high noon.
American public transport
The what now?
I mean, it’s three words. You can put any two of them in a sentence. But not the third.
American Public? Public American?
Er, I think they mean:
American public (we exist)
Public transport (not much here)
American transport (cars)
American public transit doesn’t exist outside of a couple major cities.
So yeah. Probably the absolute worst Europe has to offer is a world altering step up.
Am American: this is correct
Yep. I’ve lived in 9 states so far. The only place I consistently used public transit was when I lived in NYC
Here’s a fun comparison: Tennessee vs Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania
They have very similar population density (70/km² vs 65/km²). Tennessee is roughly 4x the area and population.
There are only 2 inter-city train stops in Tennessee, in Memphis and a small town to it’s north, both on the 1x/day service between Chicago and New Orleans. The largest city (and its state capitol) Nashville has no rail service.
The entire state of Tennessee has only 10 inter-city bus stops. Ten! Serving 7M people. The 4th largest city in the state is Chattanooga (181k), and it has no inter-city bus and no rail.
Public transportation doesn’t work in the endless suburbs and stripmalls we’ve built. It’s too spread out, and we’ve been doing it for a few generations now. It’s difficult for my countrypeople to imagine living differently, to imagine that our current existence may not be their birthright.
People think nothing of living 20 plus miles from where they work or go to school, can’t imagine a world where such a thing is a ridiculous notion. We could have all these nice things. People want a better world, a more functional city.
But ask people to change, to live a smaller life, and be prepared for a deluge of excuses and justifications. We all wake up and collectively decide the world we’re gonna live in today.
Where I live, there are literally zero public transit options. There are a few bus stops closer to the downtown area, but honestly I have never actually seen the buses that supposedly go there. Usually there are just homeless people hanging out at the bus stops. We do have a small Amtrak station, which is nice, I guess, but it’s way more expensive than driving and takes 4-10 times as long to get anywhere. Then when you get somewhere, you have to figure out how to rent a car. And this is the largest city in my state; most places don’t even have well-paved roads, much less public transit.
