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Outside of London, the majority of people in the UK drive to work.

Likewise, the majority of people commuting to (eg) Manhattan don't drive to work.

When someone in Houston says that they drive to work, the comparison isn't to someone working in Central London. It's to someone who lives who works in the outskirts of Birmingham.

I think the US is too car dependent. But from my experience, outside of London the UK is pretty terrible too.

Yes, that’s true. Unfortunately in the UK there’s a lot of cross-subsidy taking revenues away from commuter and intercity train services, which are in demand, and giving it to rural services which people don’t use. Hence the commuter services are not able to grow enough to compete with cars.

Revenue isnt taken away from commuter services, they are basically unsubsidized.

A few points:

1.) A lot of employers offer some percentage of parking reimbursement.

2.) A lot of employees live 1+ hour away. The bus doesn't work in these situations.

3.) Often times the bus is extremely dirty and dangerous. Risking injury or confrontation isn't worth saving a few dollars a day on driving.

Here in the UK, employers offer things like interest free loans for season tickets or buying a folding commuter bike etc.

1+ hour away is fairly common in London, even on public transport. Not only is London itself pretty large, but it has a big catchment area for people coming in for work from elsewhere.

Buses can be made safer and cleaner and more comfortable with investment. Would I prefer to drive in my own car in my own space? You bet I would. But the difference in price is not a few dollars, it in the order of £60 a day which is £1,200 a month. Not worth it. That £1.2K would be better spent paying down a mortgage

The people commuting 1 hour in the US usually don’t even have a public transit option or it would take 4 times as long. In my city, a trip that would take 1 hour by train/bus would probably be 20 minutes by car and parking is plentiful and cheap.

This is the same where I live but I think it’s a little misleading. Public transport doesn’t have to be faster or more comfortable to be better than taking a car. Cars are a pain in other ways (maintenance, insurance, up front cost, you can’t park right at your destination, you can’t read etc while commuting etc) and so individual journeys don’t have to be faster to be ‘better’ than taking the car.

I've visited London, and your rail systems (both the Underground and the national rail) are amazing. I feel very strongly that if more Americans could see how rail works in and around London with their own eyes, it would make people realize that it was the right approach for major cities.

I think that in the US, the problem is that most public transit is absolute garbage[1], and so people who have only lived here don't realize that it can actually be superior to a car for commuting if the people are willing to provide the funds to government and insist on using it to build a world-class public transit system. Therefore, public transit rarely improves, and so it's perceived as "the poor person's option" because it's extremely slow compared to driving, and generally absolutely filthy.

[1] To make things worse, the employees of the transit systems seem to generally be told that the systems they're supporting already are "world-class", and "the envy of the country", so they feel like there's no room for improvement.

Most of the US cities I've lived in have poorly laid out bus systems; Seattle is a notable exception with plenty of cross-town and downtown routes, and riders are never more than a couple blocks from the nearest stop.

Most cities are laid out in a hub and spoke system, pulling from suburbs into downtown, but most employers are in office parks in a ring outside the downtown area. A public transit commute may mean nearly an hour into downtown, than another hour to the suburbs, followed by a long walk. In other cities, public transit is only available at certain hours: my parents, for instance, can only catch a bus to work before 7 AM and then won't have a bus back home until after 5 or 6 PM.

> 2.) A lot of employees live 1+ hour away. The bus doesn't work in these situations.

I live in large dense city in the US (Los Angeles). I live a 15-20 minute car ride from work. The city is going to be doing some construction on my route and have asked the businesses to encourage their employees to take public transit, walk, bike, etc. during the construction. I looked into taking the bus, which for the first time in my life, is a reasonable walk from my home. It would increase my commute time (one way) from 20 minutes to 50 minutes! Sorry, but I don't have an extra hour I can take out of my day for that. It would be better to just work from home, but my employer won't let me do that for the duration of the construction which is supposed to last a year or two.

EDIT: For about a month, my office was at the Santa Monica end of the train. (Like literally right next to the train stop.) Sadly it no longer is. Even then, a coworker decided to take the train once from his place in Pasadena. His normally 45-60 minute commute increased to an hour and 50 minutes taking public transport. Sorry, but he'll just drive instead.

> I live in large dense city in the US (Los Angeles)

Los Angeles may be large, but it is NOT dense, even by US standards.

> Then add in congestion charging @ £11.50 a day [2] and you're looking at £35-£60 a day in fees before you add in your hassle factor of the traffic and paying for fuel

Congestion charge applies only to a small part of London and all those car parks have season tickets at something like -70% discount.

If traffic and fuel costs were such a hassle, nobody would drive to work except a few maniacs, generally cars are chosen for convenience / because public transport is slower and annoying in various ways.

It's that expensive because of the population density and government meddling. There's no need for that in the US...are you saying we should artificially charge the pants off of everyone driving to work just to force them to use public transport? Why? I like my car. I like driving my car. I don't want to ride a train, or a bus. If I can work to the office, I will. I'll drive everywhere else.

The "Why" is pollution is really high, and the traffic is awful. Everyone loses.

Government meddling on government-build roads?

Government run cities. Without "government meddling", you would not have public roads or street lights. You should visit London, Tokyo or Amsterdam. Hopefully it will change your views on how denser US cities may look like. I also like my car but the ability to walk places is really under appreciated in the US.

This is why we need higher gas taxes. Driving is much more pleasant than the alternatives to most Americans, until the true cost of their behavior is reflected at the pump we'll keep going in circles.

Right now my outrageous urban rent and taxes are subsidizing your driving privileges. Real estate for garages instead of housing/retail and road lanes for cars over pedestrians/cyclists. Those costs need to be passed on to the suburban drivers and not the car-less city dwellers.

Unfortunately the political will for gas taxes is null and we'll be left with draconian measures like car holidays and congestion tolls which won't alleviate the need to provide car infrastructure for peak demand, which is artificially high due to the distorted market.

It is because of government meddling that the US doesn't have high density living.

Yes, please please please let's get the government OUT of the housing market, and let's get rid of those building height limits that disallow anything above 6 stories, even though rent is in the thousands of dollars for a studio.

You should be allowed to drive your car and live in whatever low density place you want. Can you offer the same thing for me, by allowing the market to produce high density living as well?

Don't forget getting rid of parking minimums that add so much to the cost of construction that it adds hundreds of dollars to the monthly rent of an apartment in a typical urban area.

"Government meddling" is the primary reason parking is so cheap in the US. Typically the law requires a minimum amount of parking. People like myself who don't own cars tend to subsidize those who do.

I recall some sort of economic study that suggested rents would drop by hundreds of dollars per month if parking minimums could be eliminated. (No time to find it right now, sorry.) I'd take that, as right now my apartment gives me two parking spots that I can't do anything with. (A previous apartment manager complained when I used the spot for storage. Cars only, I guess. Renting to others would not be practical, either.)

> When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work it just Does. Not. Compute. In central London, driving to work is essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister.

I get this as well. I hear Americans talk about driving into town for work being hard, and they're literally talking about somewhere like San Francisco, and I think why on earth would you even think that was a reasonable thing to try to do? That's obviously a stupid idea.

Yes, because people are obviously too stupid to do what works best for them.

I'm quite familiar with going into Boston from the exurbs, in part because I commuted semi-regularly for about a year.

I do often take the commuter rail if I'm going in 9-5ish and can always get a seat because I'm near the end of the line but...

1.) It's not cheap, it's about $30/day between the train, parking, and the subway on the other end.

2.) It tends to take longer.

3.) The real kicker is that I have very little flexibility on the other end. There's basically one train mid-afternoon I can catch, a number at evening rush hour (which can be very crowded), and a few later.

4.) So basically if I have an evening event or just need to go in for the morning I drive, even if just to the subway parking though that fills up extremely early so I need to leave by 5:50-6am or so.

Technically the Prime Minister is forbidden from driving to work, or to any other place.

Part of it is - England is so small compared to US, which means everything is close by. Here in US, we have so much land which makes things scattered away. Hard to cover each route via public transport on such a large area

With respect, this argument is BS and gets brought out over and over and over and over again whenever this sort of thing comes up (e.g. Broadband, Healthcare, renewable energy) - "the US is just too large!" everyone cries "there is simply nothing that can be done!". It is an excuse for mediocrity and the US should be better than that.

In reality there are bubbles of population density in any country where large amounts of people congregate to live and work - we call these "cities". It is in these cities where public transport makes sense. If you need to go somewhere in the middle of nowhere, then drive (just the same as we do here in Europe - you dont need to cover every route with public transport)

we have so much land which makes things scattered away

The availability of space doesn't, in itself, make things scattered away.

The US is spread out because we choose policies that make it easier to spread into undeveloped land than to increase density. It's not some unalterable fact such that it has to be this way.