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Comment by turar | Hacker News Reader

It's a factor of poor public transit. Imagine walking out of your house, walking 3 minutes to the nearest bus stop, waiting at most 5 minutes for the next bus, and then not worrying about any congestion until you're at work.

If you miss the bus, the next one will be there in 10 minutes. If you don't want to wait for 10 minutes, another bus that will take a slightly different route and cause you to walk an extra 7 minutes from bus stop to your destination, will be there in 3 minutes.

Unfortunately most Americans have never experienced anything close to that level of public transit, and cannot imagine cities functioning like that.

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Toronto has a transit system that works like you describe (~10 minute waits), however, most still find it easily worth $600 a month to drive a car so you don't have to spend 20 minutes every day outside in -30 weather walking and waiting for transit.

Furthermore, even if you wanted to take transit occasionally, it's not worth it because the fare ($3 one-way) is almost always more than the marginal cost of driving (gas).

Then you have the signaling aspect (there's a perception that only poor people take the bus).

I don't think anything will change unless car ownership triples or more in cost.

Yeah, Toronto is much better than most North American cities, but it's not perfect by any means, at least if one is to believe r/toronto. :)

Regarding car ownership, yes, you can always tax car registrations and gasoline way higher and spend the extra money to add more frequent service, retrofit car lanes into bus-only lanes/streets, add bike lanes, and lower fares.

> walking 3 minutes to the nearest bus stop, waiting at most 5 minutes for the next bus,

Yup, welcome to Japan. How a good mass transit system changes how you live your life is hard to explain until you experience it.

This what it's like if you live and work near BART in San Francisco. You don't plan your commute. You just show up and wait on average five minutes.

Weekend service is much less frequent, though.

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