Riding transit takes almost twice as long as driving (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Riding transit takes almost twice as long as driving (2017)

governing.com

135 pointstrothamel282 comments

This has been true for me wherever I've lived. If you just happen to live near a major bus line or subway station, and just happen to go somewhere where a transfer is not needed, then maybe public transit is faster. Otherwise, not a chance.

From my previous apartment it would take about 2 hours to get to the airport using public transit, because I had to transfer twice - that's waiting three times. By car it would take 30 minutes without traffic, and the worst time with a car would be just under 2 hours.

From my current residence it takes about 8 minutes just to walk to the bus stop.

It takes 10 minutes to drive to work (fairly close). It takes 30 minutes by public transit (walk to stop, transfer somewhere).

Whenever I talk to someone who doesn't own a car and really touts public transit, and I dig into the details, I always find that this person has a limited number of places he goes, with the rest being inconvenient to get to.

The only real benefit of public transit is you can read during the commute.

> I always find that this person has a limited number of places he goes, with the rest being inconvenient to get to.

This is just a description of traffic patterns in the US, in general. You presumably don’t cruise through random suburbs on the other side of your city on your way to work, or while running errands, or really for any reason other than needing to.

Where I live, it’s both faster and cheaper for me to not own a car. It hasn’t hurt my traveling much, either, although you’ll have to take my word for that (until I figure out how to anonymize all the location data I collect for myself).

> This is just a description of traffic patterns in the US, in general. You presumably don’t cruise through random suburbs on the other side of your city on your way to work

That's the normal traffic pattern in many parts of the country. For example, in the DC metro area, 90% of the jobs are outside the city. It's routine to live in one suburb, commute to another suburb, and have a spouse commute to a third suburb.

This doesn’t refute the central point: those are needs-driven destinations, not random choices for a pleasure cruise.

> The only real benefit of public transit is you can read during the commute.

I think there is more to it than this. When driving, your nervous system is continually activated as your attention is (should be!) focused on everything going on around you for the entire time. 10x this when stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, making thousands of micro-decisions about when to break, how fast to speed up, how much room to leave ahead of you. The difference between 30-45 minutes of this and 1.5 hours of sitting peacefully on public transit is dramatic.

But on all your other points I fully agree. The answer though is not to throw out public transit because of these pitfalls - it is to massively double down on improving public transit to mitigate these pitfalls.

> 1.5 hours of sitting peacefully on public transit is dramatic

Sitting peacefully isn’t really possible on a lot of public transit, especially during rush hours.

To me, that sounds like your public transportation can’t handle peak demand properly. I think that’s actually solvable by building more transportation and scheduling more trains, busses, etc.

There will of course always be a trade off between peak capacity and spending, but this isn’t any less true for cars.

Which cities handle peak demand such that everybody gets a seat on the metro or bus?

Commuting from certain suburbs into downtown Vancouver is great - a real train with many sections having tables and power outlets. Pretty much everyone gets a seat.

But if you're in other areas, getting into Vancouver is like you described. There's options for more light rail around here but no political will to get it done.

Even that is assuming the public transit has enough capacity and safety. I remember the Seattle E-line before the pandemic for example. Packed in like sardines so you have to stand and maybe be able to hold on to something. Almost always someone at least yelling incoherently or starting a fight with an unlucky passenger. It was certainly not a relaxing reading nook. Not to mention having to often wait for 2 or more buses to fit inside at all. In many EU countries public transit is excellent even in the suburbs/exurbs. But it’s an order of magnitude difference in funding that I don’t see the US really ever doing.

Totally agreed. I would much rather sit in stop-and-go traffic for an hour than stand in a crowded bus or subway for the same hour.

Especially with all the sensors and smart safety features that modern cars come with, I don't feel that driving is any more stressful than having to balance myself on a constantly shaking bus while holding onto a crappy rubber handle, for example.

A reserved seat in an actual train, though, would be a different story.

I ride motorcycles and that intense focus for me is meditative. I feel more engaged and alert after a 30 minute motorcycle ride than I do riding an Uber. The motorcycle riding has a similar counterintuitive effect (for me) as Ritalin. (Ritalin is a stimulant used to treat ADHD.)

When I ride public transport or have a driver — I feel relatively more lethargic than when I ride the motorcycle (and to a lesser extend driving a car.)

> it is to massively double down on improving public transit

Why? Private transport represents freedom, public transit represents control. Furthermore, getting public transit to a level of perfect will cost tens of billions of dollars and for what benefit? To have cities and towns shut down each time there is a transit strike, a superstorm, or the government decides we should stay home?

Cars, motorcycles, bicycles, scooters — those work. Let’s make that better. I definitely don’t like spending my time sitting next to strangers of an indeterminate mental status in a temperature that isn’t of my own choosing going to a destination that isn’t necessarily the precise place I want to go. I want to interact with strangers as little as possible.

Raise the fares to $20 (and enforce it) and perhaps I’d consider riding public transit. But after my experiences with the BART and piss-soaked, rat infested NYC subway stations, no thank you. If I want thrills hanging out with a bunch of psychotics waiting for an excuse to push you onto the tracks, I’d rather BASE jump the Met Life building instead.

For a young single person carrying nothing more than their Manhattan Portage satchel to some hipster haunt in Brooklyn, public transport can be great. For people with stuff to carry, small kids, wheelchairs, or mobility issues, or tight schedules, not so much. Add the safety aspects to it and public transport becomes less attractive — unless of course they start allowing those with firearms permits to carry on public transport. But even then, not sure why people would want to give up point to point freedom for public options.

Imagine you're a person who occasionally needs to use a bathroom, or has anxiety about roads/traffic/driving, or claustrophobia from the idea of being stuck in traffic. I know people with all of these issues. Well-designed public transit like trains addresses them far better than personal vehicles.

I'm also not sure what personal freedoms you think don't exist in Europe or Asia where such well-designed transit networks exist. You can still have a car, you just don't need to have one.

A functional public transport system also means that people who are too young or old to drive, or have vision problems, or need to take medication which makes it unsafe to operate a vehicle, have the freedom to leave their homes and go where they need to go.

Although tbh I’ve never seen accessible public transit in the US.

> Private transport represents freedom, public transit represents control.

I feel the opposite. If I need to get somewhere then private transport feels like control: I have to own and maintain a car, pay insurance, watch the road carefully, etc. Public transport, in contrast, feels like freedom. But I know this is not the common belief.

This is the only reason I do not like riding a bicycle (or other private transport), you have to take care of it, park it and return to it. Just being able to walk and hop on public transport is a great feeling.

I guess it's something cagers just learn to live with.

So 1984 was right: "slavery is freedom". I'm too lazy to find thr exact quote, but I remember the reasoning in the book was similar: slavery is the freedom from the need of making decisions, assess risk amd bear consequences of your actions, so slaves must be freer than the free men.

With a great public transit system, it feels like you are beholden to nothing. You feel like going to a restaurant and you just start walking. In NYC you can even get to hiking trails by transit. It’s wonderful. Not to mention no DDs

I get what you're saying, however I disagree with the characterization. I don't want to be free of making all decisions, I just don't see much value in deciding mundane things like what turns to take or how fast to drive or where to park. I would rather spend my time deciding what work I will do, who I will love and befriend, what I will learn, and so on.

Whenever I meet with someone who drove to meet me, I'm struck by their need to return to their vehicle, think about parking, reflexive complaints about gas prices etc. In contrast I just choose a transportation mode is when I leave; often, I choose a slower walk, with a meandering path that actually engaged with my community for better or occasionally worse.

The characterization of this as "slavery" is beyond ridiculous.

It's the other way round: freedom is slavery. This was meant to say that a supposedly positive and worthwile feature as freedom would only be slavery in the end (for every "good" citizen), according to the totalitarian system of Oceania's society in "1984". The other two philosophies are "war is piece" and "ignorance is strength", with same intentions.

O'Brien, the main evil character in 1984, says at the end that the three dogmas can be reversed to reveal their additional meaning.

> Private transport represents freedom, public transit represents control.

I think you have this backwards. Public transport gives freedom to many many people who are unable to drive (can't afford a car, too young to drive, too old to drive, etc.). In the US if you can't afford to drive your freedom is vastly curtailed precisely because we do not have effective public transport in most cities.

>Raise the fares to $20 (and enforce it) and perhaps I’d consider riding public transit. But after my experiences with the BART and piss-soaked, rat infested NYC subway stations, no thank you. If I want thrills hanging out with a bunch of psychotics waiting for an excuse to push you onto the tracks, I’d rather BASE jump the Met Life building instead.

It doesn't have to be like this. It didn't used to be like this. It might take a few years, but eventually the new generation/ Progressive experimentation with 're-imagining' criminal justice will come to an end. At the moment, those unhinged folks (where I saw an almost aggression just days ago at 845 am) aren't behind bars, a few years ago serial criminals would be either in jail in and out, or in prison being punished for a crime. Today they're.. just about everywhere but.

That's just a fact of the situation. Now we can discuss the morality of putting people behind bars, etc. And have a reasonable conversation. Meanwhile the cities are unsafe, and NYC has an unemployment rate of 8 percent because office workers would rather be remote, and that hurts the economy.

The issue is that you are banking on everyone else to subsidise your motorways (construction and maintance is paid to 50% from income/state taxes), and let's not even talk about the externalities, or the cost of the land occupied by those roads.

Moreover what you call freedom is only freedom for those with enough money. Instead of heavily subsidising car/motor travel we should invest that money into making it possible for the next generations to continue living on this planet. That's not going to happen with more and more cars.

> Add the safety aspects to it and public transport becomes less attractive — unless of course they start allowing those with firearms permits to carry on public transport.

The idea that allowing private citizens to carry guns on public transit will make things safer is completely insane.

All these politicians that rant about second amendment rights still don't allow guns into their rallies, because people shooting guns in an area with even a relatively small number of people is NOT a recipe for safety.

I took a train for the first time in a while yesterday (normally I ride everywhere where feasible, though still end up driving more often than I'd like), and was struck by how peaceful and relaxing it was. I honestly didn't care how slow it might be - I had a book, and took pleasure in just watching the world scroll past. If all PT journeys could be like that one suspects they'd be a lot more popular. But service interruptions, poorly connected routes, infrequent services and random overcrowding are the main reality most PT users in many cities around the world have to deal with every day. I don't blame many for preferring to pay eye-watering petrol prices to sit in gridlock instead.

> I honestly didn't care how slow it might be

which means your experience was not similar to a commuter's, at all

No - but if we could aim to make commuting by PT a similarly relaxing and comfortable experience then slowness mightn't be seen as such a bad thing.

You're cutting into people's family time with this.

Perhaps but it's hard to see how a little more enforced meditative "alone" time would make anyone a worse parent.

(Further, where did I say I was suggesting PT should be slower than it is now?)

The point of a commuter train is to get to work. On time. Reliably. People freak the fuck out when they're going to be 5-10 minutes late due to any kind of service issue, because even if they know it wasn't their fault, their boss will assume it was (and most people who take public transit have bosses). You can outfit the trains with fine linens and couches instead of seats but being late to work in the morning will never be "relaxing" or "comfortable."

PT being regularly late is definitely a reason people avoid it, hence my suggesting we focus on service reliability and comfort. I'm not proposing we make PT slower than it already is - just that the focus needn't be on mean travel time. So the average PT consumer may need to leave their house a little earlier but would virtually always get where they're going on time (stress-free and in comfort), vs the current situation where you might fairly often be considerably late.

You must live in Japan because you would never relax on the public transport around here, except for the bus before it gets to town and after it leaves.

Even if you live in Japan you’re going to be spending an hour or so standing on the metro or bus.

Your nervous system is activated even more when walking: firing dozens of muscles for gait, even more for balance, reacting to sounds and movement around you, adjusting to different surfaces, wind, inclination, stairs, avoiding obstacles etc. Yet most people manage to take relaxing walks somehow.

Driving a car is a life or death situation where you’re engaged in a complex dance with many other people. The cognitive load isn’t even close.

So is walking down a street: not only can you become a victim of crime or mauled by an animal but a simple fall can kill you. People are different and as some are extremely stressed being outside, some are, too, stressed while driving. Most people manage both just fine though.

> not only can you become a victim of crime or mauled by an animal but a simple fall can kill you.

Interesting that these are the dangers you bring attention to. Forefront of my mind are the large heavy objects hurtling around.

I'd expect people to immediately start the "cars are too damn big!" routine if I brought up traffic and the guidelines advise against posting inflammatory content. The point I'm making is even a relaxing walk in a park is "a complex dance of life and death".

I don't think you're being genuine. Even if walking down the street was filled with personal peril (it's not, at least not the persistent peril of driving), you're still discounting the fact that making a mistake while driving can kill other people. How can I accidentally kill someone when walking down the street and spacing out? While driving on the highway, basically any multi-second lapse in judgement can cause fatalities, not just of yourself but of many others. Operating a multi-ton machine at high speed is definitely more cognitively demanding.

I genuinely believe that you consider driving more stressful than walking. I know for sure that many people don't. If you have time you can walk to the nearest busy intersection, stand and observe drivers. You will see that many are talking on the phone or with the passengers, check their phones, apply makeup and act in many other ways incongruent with the behavior of people in mortal danger. Moreso, people routinely fall asleep while driving and I am not aware of people falling asleep while walking. This implies that driving is more relaxing than walking.

How is checking your phone incongruous with being in a stressful situation? I was very stressed while my partner gave birth. I still checked my phone. And plenty of people walking check their phones. And those who walk and use their phone likely use their phone more competently than those who drive and use their phone. That implies walking has less mental overhead.

And how does falling asleep imply relaxation? If anything, falling asleep implies mental fatigue. So we can assume driving adds more mental strain. There are entire studies done on driver visual search patterns when driving [0]. What kind of visual search pattern do you use when walking? Are you constant scanning the horizon looking for potential hazards? In fact, walking is generally considered to be an automated activity [1].

[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16127339/ [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4879139/

I don't know, did I really say that it's incongruous with stress? I believe I had been talking about mortal danger. Do you see tight rope walkers checking their phones? Base jumpers, rock climbers, deck hands on a fishing trawler, firemen in a burning building, cops during a traffic stop, any other people during genuinely dangerous situation?

And yes, walking is not stressful for most people, that's the point of my first reply in this thread. There are people that find being outside as stressful as you find driving if not more, it's a real condition called agoraphobia. It's silly to pretend everyone is affected by such a condition though and trying to rationalize this is not strengthening such an argument IMHO.

Rock climbers definitely check their phones, just fyi. Apparently the police check their phones in active shooter situations as well (see Uvalde shooting). If the crux of your argument is that because people check their phones while driving, it is equally or less stressful then walking, then it's not a convincing argument.

You mean people climbing walls in gyms or actual rock climbers in the mountains where they may die? I specifically mentioned police during traffic stop, police definitely check they phones when they feel safe, as other professions I mentioned. Not when their life is on the line.

The micro-decisions you're referring to are trivial and no more of a cognitive load than deciding where to put your feet while walking.

If you're an anxious or unskilled driver, sure, it's probably stressful. But most people reach a point where they are as comfortable driving a car as walking down the street.

30 minutes of driving in my private, climate-controlled car, with a comfortable and highly-adjustable seat, listening to music or podcasts of my choice? And the ability to carry whatever I want? I'd choose that over 30 minutes of sitting on bus or train - which is likely to have uncomfortable seating, too hot or too cold, loud, obnoxious, smelly, or mentally disturbed other people - with no ability to transport anything more than you are willing to carry. Even at par, I would rather have my car - let alone if public transport takes 3x longer.

Last time I took BART into SF a guy sat down in the seat in front of me, opened up a plastic bag, and pulled out a needle and started injecting himself with something. I don't believe it was insulin. Uh...rather stick with my car, thanks.

I think this is only really true for subway routes. The stop and go nature of buses slows a commute down and you don’t have a traffic-free route to make up for it. Subways are so much faster between stops that you can make up for the delays due to stopping.

In general, I feel once you make the conscious decision to build for cars and allocate vast amounts of space to parking everywhere then you’re going to generally do better with a car. Transit will only be more in line as you drive the % of drivers down and reduce the resource allocations for cars.

> Subways are so much faster between stops that you can make up for the delays due to stopping.

That 2 hour trip to the airport? At least 1.5 hours of that is subway/train.

I’m not sure where this idea that subways are fast comes from. The average speed of the NY subway system for example is ~20mph. High speed rail is a different story of course.

NY subway is not the best example as it's the oldest and slowest: https://ggwash.org/view/4524/average-schedule-speed-how-does...

NY had one of the most extensive systems. Compared to other places, like my home in the Bay Area, even at 20mph the subway is effectively faster.

Indeed, the average speed of the subway isn't very meaningful for comparison as the bigger win is being able to skip the traffic jams where the car speed depends highly on the exact route and time of day.

> High speed rail is a different story of course.

You must be talking about Japan or Europe.

The California "bullet train" was / is going to take 4 hours to go SF - LA. Less than driving, but about the same as flying, even when you factor in getting to & from the airports and waiting in the departure lounge.

And of course, the train stations are not "everywhere" either. You have to factor in getting to & from them, too. Especially in LA where you hardly ever want to go downtown.

NY subway for virtually any destination is faster than driving, during busy hours.

Take a car to the airport. Take a subway to work.

Try driving into midtown at 8:30 AM vs the subway. You will not get there faster and then you'll have to find a parking space.

There are of course several stages of improvement possible between "bus sharing the road with cars" and "fully grade separated rail": dedicated bus lanes up to "bus rapid transit" lines, tram/light rail with more or less separation from other traffic, etc.

plus you know the massive personal and societal cost savings of reduced fuel consumption

Perhaps we should instead be researching how to get more fuel cheaper. Much of the “cost” is self inflicted. Gasoline could be almost as cheap as bottled water if we wanted it to be.

Cost also includes negative environmental effects

Its a commonly held belief that private cars are less energy efficient and are less environmentally friendly per passenger mile than mass transit. But that’s a myth. On average the American passenger car is more energy efficient than mass transit. In fact, there are only two mass transit systems in the US more efficient (in cost, energy and carbon) than driving a Prius.

https://theicct.org/planes-trains-and-automobiles-counting-c...

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-615.pd...

Your first link doesn't support your point.

It's talking about 300-500 mile trips (where you might be choosing plane vs train vs car vs bus) and it assumed 2.2 people in the car, and the bus still gets about 3x the efficiency.

I'm not going to waste my time on some Cato nonsense.

I don’t see either of your sources showing public transit is more fuel intensive than a car. The first report assumes 2.2 people in a car which I don’t think is an actual average and a greyhound bus was 4x more efficient than the car.

> a greyhound bus was 4x more efficient than the car

That's a good scenario for buses because Grayhound can size buses appropriately and change the frequency. The number for buses within a city is trickier because you have some packed commute buses, and some with 3 passengers at 10 PM.

haha what city do you live in where a prius is the average commuter car?

i live in seattle and joke about always being able to see at least one tesla. and still there are at least as many if not more SUVs than fuel efficient commuter cars.

Single data point, but I see a lot of cars around Cincinnati. I’m guaranteed to see another Prius and at least two Teslas every trip more than a few miles from my house.

> The only real benefit of public transit is you can read during the commute.

I use audiobooks so it works out for driving or taking public transit. The only difference is the noise level is higher in general with public transit.

Many years ago when I was sharing a single car with someone who worked the complete opposite direction of me, I looked into the public transit thing. I lived in the west side of one city, worked in the east side of another. By car, it was 20-40 minutes depending on if you were in rush hour or not. While I would have hated it, 2x time commute by public transport would have been fine. But it wasn't even close.

I would need to walk a little over 2 miles to get to the nearest bus stop by my apartment, then I would need to take that bus into the downtown area, transfer to another bus to the central bus depot. From there I could pick up an "express commuter bus to a massive office park about half way between the two cities, where I would need to pick up another "express" bus to get to the next city. From there I would have to pick up another bus, which would take me luckily directly to my work place.

The problem was, none of these schedules were well coordinated. If I left around the time I would normally have to leave to make my shift on time, I would make it to my work place 6 hours later after accounting for all the waiting and transfer times. If I was willing to leave much earlier and arrive an hour before my shift (and if doing so met with the more frequent bus scheduling) I could get there in just 4 hours.

If you aren't directly on, and going almost exactly point to point for public transport outside big cities like NY, it can be so much worse than even "twice as long". I hated the wear and tear going all the way one way and then completely back across the cities the other way doing the shared commute required. I hated the sometimes hour or two wait before or after a shift to make the commute work with the other person. But using public transport was effectively impossible.

That’s definitely frustrating, but what did you expect? You lived in one city and worked in another. The “simple” solution to this is to live and work in the same city.

For most people, much cheaper and simpler is to buy a beater car. That’s what the working poor do.

Are you supposed to move everytime you get a new job, even when it's nearby? And divorce and start dating again since your now ex-spouse will still be working in the old city?

If you include second order effects beyond your individual experience the benefits are plenty:

- better for the environment

- safer (especially for pedestrians)

- more people can move using less space, resulting in less traffic/higher throughput

- if public transportation was prioritized over cars, city layouts could be dramatically overhauled, with more streets used for pedestrian/bike traffic instead of cars

These are the reasons I take public transportation instead of driving. I’d rather contribute in some small way to the society I want instead of settling for a local maximum of convenience.

Edited for clarity

theoretically.

there are plenty of ways to lose efficiency.

for instance, what if your whole society is n% less efficient?

This is true in a minority of cases.

Like delivery works as their are a small number starting locations and no one cares about the max travel time.

Or transporting people between a small number of hub locations and not caring that much about how long it takes.

But public transit that transports every address to every other address is almost infinitely less efficient than just giving everyone a car.

You’re right that’s something cars solve for that public transport doesn’t. But that’s not what public transit advocates are asking for.

> - safer (especially for pedestrians)

This is arguably not true. It's not uncommon to find yourself on foot and alone in situation/places where it is not a good idea to be either.

I think this statement is more geared towards those commuters who are walking either way, not those that are deciding between driving and public transit. With fewer cars on the road, there is a lower likelihood of those walking being hit by one.

Most public transit vehicles don't have seat belts, and often force people to stand.

What’s your point? That it makes riding the bus less safe?

You’re safer on a bus without a seatbelt than you are in a small car because of the mass of the vehicle.

... than you are in a small car with a seat belt?

The history of transportation is full of deadly bus accidents; cases when everyone or almost everyone on board was killed.

A vehicle which has a larger mass decelerates more slowly. (Mass isn't the only factor, but how it's distributed and how the vehicle crumples.)

The mass helps you only if you are secured to it, so that you decelerate at the same rate. Whether the vehicle stops in 0.2 seconds or 0.05 seconds, if you're loose, you're flying and hitting something. Something that has stopped by the time you hit it. Or something outside of the vehicle entirely. When you hit something, the deceleration of your body or body part is all that is relevant.

A standing passenger can fall and get seriously injured just from hard braking.

Do you have literally anything to back that up?

And by that I mean:

  cases when everyone or almost everyone on board was killed.

And:

  A standing passenger can fall and get seriously injured just from hard braking.

I can point to Muni of the early 2000s. Their then-new trams experienced frequent emergency brake applications in the tunnel because reasons. It got so bad that the braking computer was changed to reduce the rate of deceleration during emergency braking. People were getting hurt, twisted ankles and whatnot. I can't remember anyone dying inside one of the trams. Ever.

The last fatal automobile collision I can think of was idk yesterday? Four dead. Six injured. But that was up in the north bay. The most recent fatal traffic collision I can think of in San Francisco was on the 19th (so about a couple weeks ago).

Here's a non-fatal wreck where the bus was hit hard enough to do a 180. No deaths and six injuries (some of the injured were pedestrians).

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/6-hurt-after-suv-colli...

One of the first links I turned up was this:

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

Deaths per 100 million miles traveled in 2020. Autos: 0.56, Buses: 0.02, Trains: 0.03, and Part 121 air travel: 0.002.

Traveling by bus is dramatically safer than traveling in a car.

The probability of being in a collision in a transit bus may be low, and the word "safe" covers this idea; but that doesn't speak to the severity of the consequences of the collision.

Statistics about deaths mix the two together are hard to interpret: are there low deaths because the frequency of accidents is low, or because their severity is low? Or what mixture of the two?

In statistics about automobile accidents, I would expect there to be a high preventable component: deaths due to neglected use of seatbelts as well as operator negligence: distracted, drunk or reckless driving.

What is the deaths-per-100M miles figure for automobiles, if we count only the deaths of seatbelt wearers, where the driver wasn't drunk, distracted or otherwise reckless?

Regarding seat belts for instance, according to https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/occupant-protectio... 51% of the day-time fatalities in 2020 were confirmed cases of no restraint use.

(That doesn't mean those people would have lived if they had used a seat belt; that can only be estimated. However, the same page cites a high rate of seat belt use for the same period: 90.3%. So 51% of the day-time fatalities are coming from the 9.7% unrestrained passengers/driver population.)

  that doesn't speak to the severity of the consequences of the collision.

So speak to it instead of posting disingenuous hypotheticals. For instance in San Francisco it's not that hard to find examples of Muni or Caltrain colliding with other vehicles.

Here's a vintage streetcar colliding with a semi. Three injuries. None life threatening. One treated at the scene (so presumably more minor).

https://www.ktvu.com/news/san-francisco-muni-f-street-car-an...

Here's a bus vs streetcar. No apparent injuries and the bus wasn't even taken out of service.

https://sfist.com/2012/10/10/muni_bus_hits_f-line_streetcar_...

Here was a terrible accident. Tram vs bus. Fifteen people injured. As the SFFD chief put it nobody was seriously injured.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Muni-bus-trolley-coll...

Surely a car vs a tram or bus would be worse, right?

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Muni-L-service-disrup...

No reported injuries from the Muni passengers.

Headline reads: Muni collision sends 1 to hospital. Body reads: No one on the Muni train was hurt, Rose said.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/muni-collision-sends-1-to-ho...

Muni bus hits car making an illegal turn. No serious injuries.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/muni-bus-slams-int...

If we’re listing externalities let’s at least be honest:

- Lost productivity or quality of life for rider.

If we suddenly double the amount of commute time someone experiences, how do you think that will impact their personal life? Their professional life?

Take it a step further and look at how the misery cascades: Imagine that person is a neurosurgeon and we doubled their morning commute so they now have to wake up an hour earlier. Will they be operating at their highest level?

I understand that the “anti-car” movement is probably well intentioned, but you know what they say about the road to hell…

Where in my comment did it say no one should drive to work, or that everyone should make choices the way I do? We live in a fucked up system, do what you have to do.

I have the luxury of being able to choose how I get around even if it means taking a little extra time, I get that not everyone has that luxury.

I understand the spirit of what you're saying, but productivity and quality of life is a many faceted debate. There are a ton of factors in here:

1. If everyone drives the neighborhoods are spread out/less dense and filled with loud, dangerous, locally air polluting cars and their tires.

2. Cars are stressful to drive and lead to road rage.

3. Can't work while you drive a car, but can on trains and some subways. But at least can read, entertain yourself.

I agree with you and OP that this all comes at a higher commute time cost, but concluding it's open and shut on quality of life.

I personally think the anti-car movement should be focused on cities where we should reduce traffic within city cores and invest in shared electric bikes/various forms of non-car transit.

> you know what they say about the road to hell…

...you're forced to use mass transit!

>lost productivity

I've never been able to get any work done in the car.

The typical public transit commute time in the US is 2x the time it would take via car.

ok, but I can do work on the. us

Which of public transit or driving is faster depends on the city, i.e. it depends on how congested the streets available for private cars are, in comparison with what is available for public transit.

I live in a city with subway and going by subway to any place that is not too close (so that the time to walk to a subway station is not a too large fraction of the total time) is much faster than driving a car, with the possible exception of late in the night, when the streets might be empty. In most cities with subways where I have been, this was also true, because they also had congested street traffic.

I have also been in several cities where the buses had their own street lanes, which were forbidden for private cars. In such cities, I have also seen frequently cases when going by bus was faster than driving.

In a lot of places, if everyone using public transport were to use a car instead, they definitely wouldn't be faster than before; most likely much slower.

In London, you often see from route planning apps that the time for using a car (including waiting for an uber) would be less - except during the rush hours, which is when most people need to.

It depends. In most places in the US, bas transit shares the same road space as cars. If almost all bus users switched to cars, not only would driving be slower, but riding the bus would also be made slower as well. So driving would still end up faster than taking the bus.

Or phrasing that differently, the more people take public transport the faster everyone goes. Which is basically the whole point of it, greater efficiency in moving people around.

I used to love taking the bus when I lived a block away from a major bus line. It took maybe 25-50% longer overall but I could actually use that time rather than driving and sitting in rush hour traffic.

Honestly I’m not sure why anyone is surprised that public transit takes around twice as long. It’s self selected. The people who are going to use it live close and us it because that worthwhile. So on average it makes sense that it would be some multiple of the time it takes to drive.

You just haven't lived in a city with good public transport

In e.g. London or Paris public transport is almost always the fastest way to get from A to B

This is also true in Berlin, but mostly because it is relatively slow to drive most long distances in the city.

Public transit is 1.5-2x slower in Berlin too.

Once I started using ShareNow I never looked back

You are describing people living in the majority if not all of US cities.

It's a mixed bag. I don't drive, so whenever I have to go somewhere I don't really consider how long it would take to drive there. But whenever I do get there by car (eg: friend or family member) it's amazing how much extra time goes into stuff that i never have to think about. Like where to park, how much the parking costs, what if we meander half a mile shopping and grab lunch? Now we have to walk back to the car instead of having a bus straight home.

You just take a car-sharing car back to your car.

If there's no car-sharing car nearby, you can take an e-scooter to the car-sharing car, and then go to your car.

Why not just take it step further and take it home?

I guess you have the transit map, and all the schedules, memorized? Because for most people, getting to an unfamiliar location at a specific time by public transit alone is quite a project. And then if you "meander half a mile", does the bus change its route to come get you?

Bring up your phone assitant and say "I want to take public transport to the meat packning district" and it will probbly work. My seven year old did it, and paid, on her own.

GTFS is published by most public transport these days, so you have all the routes described months ahead of time. You can actually have all the schedules offline.

The majority of people use navigation even when driving to a familiar location so they can be routed around other traffic and disruptions (which are by no means infrequent).

Similarly, I'll check the route home on Google Maps to decide not only which route to take but which mode (walking, transit, shared vehicle, etc) to use.

To be fair, same applies to parking. Finding a parking lot in an unfamiliar location in a dense city can be quite a challenge.

There's an app, but I also live in a pretty small city so I know all the routes to where I live. If I'm drifting to another part of town and will be "close enough" to a rail or bus line, certainly easier than retracing my steps back to some pinned location. And of course if I'm feeling very lazy there are taxis, which are extremely cheap compared to owning a car, and they will come get me if I want, but there are so many of them I'm better off grabbing one off the street.

Yep.

I live close to a tube station.

If I'm going somewhere on the network (~50% of journeys) it's great. Primarily because of traffic congestion, mind - in the early morning travel time is about the same by both methods.

If I'm going anywhere else? Car hands down.

The main problem is that the entire network of places is available by car by definition. Worst case is car and then the rest by foot (e.g. into a national park).

By contrast public transport just doesn't serve the majority of places at all. Every train station has a road, not every road has a train station.

Same for me. It is approximately 5.8kms from my apartment to work.

I have walked it before during a bus driver strike, took just over an hour at a leisurely pace - 11mins per km.

Normal days - it takes me around 6 to 8 minutes to walk to the bus stop. There is a waiting period for the bus to arrive since you want to get to the bus stop before the scheduled stop - sometimes the bus is early.

Then it takes nearly 30minutes to get to work - frequent stops along the way, 5 minutes waiting at the bus/rail interchange etc.

Finally 7 minute walk to the office from the bus stop.

Total of usually 50 minutes door to door via public transport and it costs $8 both ways.

If I took my car, it would take me 15 minutes and $17 parking fee.

Perfect cycling distance. In a sane country the bike would be the obvious mode of transport for most trips of this kind of distance.

Weather is too erratic to lock in a bike ride. The area is quite hilly; narrow roads and steep gradients - not really commuter bike friendly.

Could be very e-bike friendly!

I do not think discussions about transportation environmental cost usually sufficiently consider the productivity lost because of how long it takes to get places by public transport. We get a number of hours of productive work from each person every day, and so that productivity required all of the resources that the person consumed in a day. An extra hour of commuting every day, because I need to go from A to B, but because I take public transport I need to go A to C and then C to B and along the way need to make lots of stops, means that an extra fraction of the resources I consumed for that day will not be used for productivity.

Also, the diagrams showing public transport being more space efficient often seem to assume that the public transport will be at capacity. On my 30 minute bus ride, to/from a major downtown, I am not infrequently the only passenger on the whole bus.

It does take longer for most destinations, but not for my work commute. The traffic between work and home is quite bad, so public transport is equally fast, or faster.

There's also less people that have to own cars. If NYC didn't have subways it would be unlivable given the density.

Also for what you've described to be true, you likely lived in a high income area since they provide easier access to where most offices are situated. If you're commuting in from the outer boroughs into Manhattan, driving is way slower given the traffic (and way more stressful, and then there's the parking situation).

If NYC did not have subways, it wouldn’t be as dense. It would be a totally different city with respect to culture and who lives there.

Something that is often overlooked in the transit vs private car debate is that modes of transportation affect urban design and ultimately different ways of living.

Driving in a transit oriented city is totally different than riding transit in an auto oriented city.

That. Most cars today contain one person – the driver.

Until we have full autonomy, they have to keep their focus on the road.

I read about four books/month. Whenever I used public transport to commute that number doubled.

Not so when I commuted by car.

And don't tell me I can listen to audio books. This doesn't compare in reading speed. And it is also is a dangerous distraction for most driving situations that are not an empty highway or a traffic jam.

Sounds like biking distance, but you can't really read on a bike.

I live in Germany and have a different experience: it takes forever to find a parking space and the cost could be prohibitely expensive. In contrast, I can take the subway or bus and walk one or two block and don't ever have to worry about parking.

Travel time with public transport and by car are mostly the same, with car having a higher risk of taking longer.

Travel outside the city though, is certainly much easier with a car.

> This has been true for me wherever I've lived. If you just happen to live near a major bus line or subway station, and just happen to go somewhere where a transfer is not needed, then maybe public transit is faster. Otherwise, not a chance.

That sounds like a great reason to build public transit infrastructure and housing near public transit infrastructure.

You might be surprised to discover that the world is different from your very limited experience of it.

I lived in New York City for thirty years. The subway is always the fastest way to get everywhere, except in the middle of the night.

Now I live in Amsterdam, and public transportation isn't quite as fast as taking my bike, but it's still everywhere, and faster than driving.

> The only real benefit of public transit is you can read during the commute.

Crazy carbrains, destroying our planet. So sick of you.

I commuted 80 km (as the car drives) every day for 5 years. This was in Germany and I used public transport most of the time. Driving by car was about 1h, public transport was 1:30h but I really prefered going by bike->train->tram over going by car. If have to go that long every day, just napping in the train is a huge benefit over a stressful car ride for me.

Yes, and walking takes about twice as long as riding transit. I know that I am fortunate to live about 3 miles from work. But the moment I started riding transit instead of driving, I found my temper much improved and my wallet fatter by the difference between bus fare and downtown parking rates.

We do own a car. Grocery shopping relying on public transportation would be difficult, though I did manage it when much younger.

> For New York metro residents who take public transportation, a door-to-door commute averages about 51 minutes. That’s much longer than the 29 minutes typically spent by those who drive alone.

I mean, is this really an apples to apples comparison that is at all meaningful? The NY metro area includes NYC with its subway, but also suburbs in long island, New Jersey, and Connecticut with long commuter rail trips where you go to a different city, and short car commutes where you don’t.

This.

I came here to say this. When you bundle NYC (which is one of the largest systems in itself between subway and bus) that represents a skewed average.

As a NYC resident of 20 years I can assure you public transportation much much faster than a car in most cases.

Don't even get me started about the time it takes to find parking in this city... I am guessing that that time consideration is not in this study.

>As a NYC resident of 20 years I can assure you public transportation much much faster than a car in most cases.

Surely you jest. Even in Manhattan this is rarely true. Outside of Manhattan it is practically never true. In some circumstances in Manhattan the subway can indeed be faster, but it’s really only true for traveling north/south along an express line during peak traffic.

For instance I can get from 96th to Chambers in about 25 minutes on a subway if I’m lucky with my timing. That’s faster than a car during peak traffic, but slower than a car during any other time of day. But if I need to get from 96th to basically anywhere else that isn’t on the 1/2/3 there is no way the subway will ever win, much less by any significant margin.

Even the idea that subway is “much much faster” defies basic logic. If that were universally true few people would ever take a ride share or taxi.

And this ignores the almost comical problems and lack of reliability with the subway system in NYC. I cannot count the number of times I’ve had to give up, exit the subway station, and hail a cab. I imagine for many people it’s happened one too many times and they’ve exclusively switched to rideshare/taxi.

For me personally I’ve switched to electric bike. I gave up on the subway earlier this year after one too many negative encounters with vagrants and criminals. A good question to ask is how visitors feel about the NYC subway system. When friends or family come to visit, what do they think about it? I don’t know about you, but for me it’s a healthy combo of amazement at the scale of the system, and amazement at how atrocious and disgusting it’s become.

I travel from JC, and I can get to almost any point in Manhattan faster by PATH+subway/walking than by car+parking.

As an outsider of New York it’s pretty bleak to compare the shininess and opulence of all the new billionaire’s row towers to the decay and grime of the subway.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

It's because the state of New York controls funding for the NYC subway, instead of the city of NYC.

This doesn’t comport with my experience on the UWS: the subway was almost always faster for me, rush or not. The only exceptions were cross-town and way out on the 7, e.g. Flushing. My commute from Harlem (when I lived there) to the financial district was 25 minutes by train; a similar car commute would have been around 40 (and I would have needed to find parking).

People take ride shares and taxis because of separate pressures, including very reasonable ones like needing to haul something bulky to a specific address or trying to get to their airport (I will freely acknowledge that the subway connections to LGA and JFK are pitiful).

That's because you live in UWS (that's where I live too).

I used to live in Jamaica and trying to get anywhere that's not Manhattan is a chore. For example going to Flushing would take twice as long because you have to get close to Manhatten before you can switch from F line to 7.

Bus in this case works fine most of the time though. But you still need to walk to a bus station.

I grew up on the UWS (technically not, but it’s now called that because of neighborhood creep), but I currently live in Brooklyn.

That’s a fair point — there are a couple of pathological routes in the subway system, and traveling between Jamaica and Flushing is definitely one of them. But yeah — IME the bus tends to cover those gaps relatively well; the MTA’s priority (for better or worse) is high-traffic routes, meaning routes between the outer boroughs and Manhattan.

I mean, yes, I think it’s fairly well-known that the further out from Manhattan you are, the worse NYC public transit is. At the most extreme end, if you live in Statin Island you’re gonna have a bad time. Not coincidentally, many people there have cars.

IMO, the key idea here is that public transit is slower in places that have bad public transit. To find examples of really good public transit, you have to look outside the United States.

I picked this UWS example because it is the absolute most generous example you could possibly make. It's a relatively long distance to cover via bike or car and there are multiple express+local stops to hop on at.

And it's still slower for almost any trip you'd need to take where your subway exit isn't exactly where you needed to go. If you add walking 2-3 blocks north/south and 2-3 avenues east/west at entry and exit the uber/rideshare starts to dramatically leap ahead.

the subway is fine. visitors are always taken aback by the general grittiness of new york. traffic in the city is unpredictable and cars often spend a lot of time sitting at lights. parking is a nightmare. post pandemic reliability has reduced, but it's still pretty stellar. vagrants and criminals are an internet mirage, like when you start a new job and everyone is just parroting shit they read on glassdoor.

Last time my wife and I took a subway home from lower Manhattan we first dealt with a homeless man who entered the subway and tried to steal my wife's leftover food. Then we dealt with another homeless person who decided a subway car was the place to smoke a cigar.

People calling this stuff an "internet mirage" are just delusional to the reality that is slowly destroying the subway system. Why do you think ridership is down to 55% of pre-covid levels?

> For instance I can get from 96th to Chambers in about 25 minutes on a subway if I’m lucky with my timing. That’s faster than a car during peak traffic, but slower than a car during any other time of day.

Google Maps says both trips should take the same amount of time in the absolute dead of night.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/40.7154695,-74.0091386/40.79...

Admittedly, both ends of this trip are right by a subway station, but they're also both near the FDR Drive highway. And we're leaving out the time it takes to park your car, and it's the dead of night.

There is a lot of luck bundled up with the Google Maps estimates. You may immediately hop on an express train... or you may wait 7 minutes. We're also discussing the absolute best case scenario for a subway where I just happen to need zero east/west travel at entry or exit. Basically, this is a hypothetical trip from 96th to Chambers where the subway has every conceivable advantage possible, and it's still a wash in most circumstances.

>And we're leaving out the time it takes to park your car, and it's the dead of night.

It would be silly to drive your own personal car within Manhattan, so my analysis is strictly comparing rideshare/taxi to subway.

> You may immediately hop on an express train... or you may wait 7 minutes.

If we really are talking about midnight, perhaps. But trains on this line typically arrive every two minutes during rush hour, or every four minutes in the middle of the day.

> and it's still a wash in most circumstances.

But it's not "most circumstances". During rush hour, this trip could easily take 40 minutes by car, as Google Maps acknowledges.

You're of course correct that Google Maps isn't perfect. But I knew my own experience wasn't anything like the times you were quoting, so I was trying to find an authoritative source.

I actually think Google Maps is over-estimating the subway time. I know I can get from my apartment on 135th street to Times Square in 26 minutes door-to-door. Around 20 of those minutes are actually sitting on the subway, and I think the train gets to 96th street at around the halfway point.

I don't have this experience at all. I have a car in NYC and am a daily subway rider. Regularly comparing estimated time via Google Maps (which doesn't even include parking) the subway is almost always faster, certainly during hours when there is congestion (which is obviously when most people tend to travel).

> Don't even get me started about the time it takes to find parking in this city... I am guessing that that time consideration is not in this study.

For a while when I lived in Austin, cycling to work from where I lived would be comparable to driving in terms of time. That's despite the fact that I was only going roughly 15 mph when in motion. I'd often catch up to drivers at stop lights, and I could park directly in front of my building. No time spent finding parking and walking to the building. Some drivers are quite arrogant about the advantages of driving and are quick to dismiss the time spent parking, but time spent parking is a significant factor in many places.

I’ve had a similar experience in Minneapolis. Biking to work was the fastest way to go for me. An additional factor was very little walking once I got there. With the bus or driving I may need to walk several blocks to get to my office and if I bike I can lock up at the building. The actual time door to door wasn’t much different for all three modes but biking was the simplest and as a result fastest.

And being covered in sweat in a 100 degree day? Cars have air conditioning.

I regularly rode when it was over 100 degrees. It honestly was not a problem. I know a lot of drivers find this hard to believe, but it's true.

- Being in good shape reduced how much I sweat in the first place. If an average driver started cycling, they'd see a reduction in how much they sweat from getting in better shape alone.

- I would wear lightweight clothes for my commute and change when I got to work.

- On hotter days, I would wet down my shirt and a stocking I wore on my head. That water would evaporate, making sweating unnecessary. If the water evaporated prematurely, I found that a small spray bottle would work great to add back water and avoid sweating. (If it's too humid, this won't work, obviously, but I didn't find the humidity in Austin to be a problem.)

- Don't ride too fast.

- My ride wasn't longer than 15 minutes. Obviously, the longer the ride, the more sweat. I found that even on 100+ degree days, I would only slightly sweat given the other things I did.

- If I did sweat, I'd wipe the sweat off with a bandana or rag and then splash water on myself to freshen up. If you do splash water on yourself, dry yourself off before going to see coworkers as some assumed that I was sweating profusely when I wasn't.

- A bike commute naturally places going to work at a cooler part of the day, the morning. I don't care if I'm sweaty when I get back home.

- Also, getting a little sweaty isn't that bad. A lot of people seem to think that sweating automatically makes you smell terrible. But that hasn't been my experience. Yes, getting extremely sweaty can smell terrible and feel grimy too, but mild sweat is pretty normal and happens to people who are walking outside for a few minutes when it's hot.

Also: Don't wear a backpack as you will sweat on your back when it's hot. I imagine messenger bags would have similar problems. I recommend using something like a milk crate or panniers to hold anything you're taking with you.

Diet has a lot to do with how your sweat smells too, especially if you eat too much sugar. Btw sweat itself doesn't smell. It's the bacteria on your skin that makes it smell.

I've never lived in NYC, but I've both driven and taken subways there. Not real recently, though, so this could be out of date.

On "finding parking": it's all a question of $$$. If you're willing to pay through the nose for a commercial lot, it's reasonably quick. If you insist on cheap parking... well, you'll be hunting for a while.

Also, the average bicycle trip is shorter than the average airplane trip, therefore bikes are faster than airplanes.

Certainly faster to bike to many places than taking a plane there

Well no, but you could definitely spin that into the headline "Flying takes almost ten times as long as riding a bicycle"...

It takes me at least 29 minutes to park in NYC. Taking a taxi is usually faster but it depends on the route.

Also does this include trying to find a parking space?

See also, from the article: "Commuter rail passengers spend an average of 69 minutes traveling to work, far longer than those taking bus or light rail." Gee, could that be because they're traveling longer? (It's certainly not because commuter rail trains travel slower than a typical New York City bus!)

This is also a natural result of how much more pleasant taking rail is compared to driving. Sort of a induced demand and Jevon's paradox effect going on here.

Since you don't need to actively pay attention to the road you can multi-task, and that means that you can buy a house farther away. If there is no way to commute by rail, the house that you will select will need to be closer to your work, and will therefore likely be more expensive.

As someone who used nyc transit for years you could often walk faster given the number of delays and issues. Driving is definitely faster throughout the city unless things are gridlocked. Parking is the problem. I moved to seattle for work but also to escape the hell of logistics in nyc. To go anywhere outside immediate walking distance was a 40+ minute affair each way, making things like dropping down to buy a pair of pants a half day affair. On the way you’ll probably get to see someone assaulted on the subway, an insane person squeezing feces down their pant legs onto the floor (true story!), or any number of other mildly traumatic experiences folks from outside nyc never fully believe or understand.

But the transit system is also the beating heart of the city. I wish every city had their transit system.

I wish every city had a better transit system, because it's clear we can do much better than NYC transit.

I’m sorry that you had to see those things, but the idea that the average person will “probably” see them is a persistent myth. I’ve lived here my entire life, the entire time riding subways and buses for school and work, and I’ve never once seen an assault or someone defecate themselves.

I have seen lots of homeless people, most of whom were sleeping or minding their own business, and I have seen people urinate in subway stations (but not since I moved to Brooklyn). But both are a far cry from the mental image of general mishegaas that assaults and defecation projects.

Long time NJ to Midtown commuter - 1 hr 50 mins each way for almost 18 years. Now, with hybrid and office barely 20 mins away - my stress level has dropped off so much

Impressive. I could only do a 2 hour commute for a few months before moving. And this was mainly by rail which was quite empty in the evening

Or it could simply be that users of public transport tend to be poorer, and therefore live farther from work for lower rent.

Taking public transit/CTA in chicago has become unbearable.

Trains don't follow any schedules, they keep announcing on overhead speakers that next train is not coming because of covid related labor shortages.

My 15 min train ride has taken me anywhere between 15mins - 2 hrs in past 2 months. So i have to plan to be somewhere 1 hr in advance of my appointment so i don't miss it due to 'covid related labor shortages'.

I suspect most of the commenters here that come out in support of public transit everytime don't actually use public transit. They are wfhers in suburbs who like the idea of compact cities packed to the brim, where cars are banned, take public tansit or better yet bike through blistering cold with kids in tow.

> I suspect most of the commenters here that come out in support of public transit everytime don't actually use public transit.

Or, a bit more charitably, maybe they live where public transport actually mostly works. I.e. not in the US (by all accounts).

I think this problem is bigger in many US cities compared to Europe, because of the urban sprawl. There is almost no way to make it efficient to go from most people's houses to the city using public transport, since the area to cover is so great.

To me, the solution is to re-think why everyone needs to go somewhere by car to get anything done. Why not have a grocery store closer? Some restaurants? Everyone having to travel from their house to the city centre to do basically anything is so wasteful. Most of this is because of zoning laws.

The first example they give is NYC, showing cars being almost twice as fast as the train. NYC is denser than most European capitals.

Train stations in NYC are much less dense than (for example my own city) Paris subway network.

New-York subway network is impressive for its sprawl, but not really for its efficiency.

The New York metro area is much larger than NYC and includes suburbs and smaller cities in Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Wouldn't those also be taken into account for the drivers side of the comparison?

Yes, but someone from Long Island or Connecticut who works in Manhattan is unlikely to drive, while someone from those areas who works one town over will almost certainly drive. That will definitely skew these numbers if they don’t adjust for it

I live in Denmark, have pretty much ideal public transport for my work (one bus, very little walking on either end) and it still takes about twice as long.

Which would be fine, except when you bring this up lots of people start talking about how to make cars take more time, or making public transport free.

Neither of which solves the problem.

I probably would be more willing to take the bus if wasn't also less comfy than my car. Not only does my car have better seats than the bus, but I am guaranteed one.

But why does the bus take twice as long? Because it's stuck in traffic, take a different route, too many stops?

I do think the best way of course is to make public transport a viable option by itself. But it's hard to do without actually limiting the use of cars as well. It's a chicken-and-hen problem, as long as too many rely on cars, it's hard to have a very good public transport. For instance because of what I mentioned, people choosing places to live based on cars making it hard to cover with public transport.

Also, disincentivise car usage makes the city much better for those living there. I hate that people outside the city drive to work every day. Those cars are loud, takes so much space (which could've been cozy instead of asphalt), are a danger to kids, pedestrians, cyclists etc, pollutes the local air.

> Not only does my car have better seats than the bus, but I am guaranteed one

at the expenses of everybody else.

there is nothing more wasteful than turning up a very heavy, powerful and polluting machine to transport a single non disabled human for a few kms.

anyway, your seat would be guaranteed also on a bike, a moped, a horse, a donkey, a 20 tons truck, a bulldozer and an helicopter. Doesn't mean they are all equally good options. Doesn't mean city planning should consider the comfort of your bum a priority.

Well we are simply going to have to disagree on that on and then I will be quite happy to move elsewhere if the place I live isn’t willing to take my concerns as a sufficient priority.

> I will be quite happy to move elsewhere if the place I live isn’t willing to take my concerns as a sufficient priority.

that's your prerogative.

But until public transport is financed through taxes paid by the population (in Denmark that's particularly true, given the rate of taxation) the priority must be the public interest, not your personal one.

Like I said we are simply going to have disagree.

Yes but people seem to have this backwards. Denmark and Netherlands are actually one of the best countries in the world to drive a car, because so much of other traffic has been shifted away from roads. Even in large cities, people are surprised that you can drive somewhere within few minutes and there usually is parking - it's specifically because all the other infrastructure is so good that people are incentivised to cycle, take a bus or a train - so there's fewer people on the road.

So from that perspective - yeah, of course driving is going to be faster for you than public transport.

I also suspect a lot of people who argue to completely replace cars with public transit either haven't tried traveling with young children on public transit, or haven't had the luxury of using a car when traveling with young children. Because taking young children on public transit is pretty miserable.

What about a cargo bike? Looks a hundred times smoother those doing that here, compared to a car.

> lots of people start talking about how to make cars take more time

Why is this Harrison Bergeron-style "solution" to things so common these days? "A lot of people choose X over Y, but we want more people to choose Y over X instead. Make Y better? Unthinkable! Let's make X worse instead!"

Because it’s easier to make things worse than it is to make them better.

For a while I lived in an area in th US where I had a grocery store, a library, and several grocery stores within a mile. But my commute was 10 minutes by car, and almost an hour by bus. And the buses took a pretty direct route and there was a bus stop pretty close to my home. Part of it was just all the stops the bus made, and a big part of it was just waiting. The bus times weren't very reliable, so I had to show up pretty early, because if I missed the bus I would have to wait an hour for the next bus. And the bus just stopped and waited 20 minutes for a light rail to get there. And depending on the day, I might have to switch buses there.

And half a mile is still a long ways to carry groceries, especially in the heat or cold. But taking the bus required timing how long you shop so you are done in time to catch the bus that only comes once an hour.

And that doesn't even get into the hours the bus didn't run, or the inconvenience of having to carry all your groceries.

So while I think having such amenities closer to where people live, would be good, and would help. I don't think it is sufficient to solve the problems with public transit being slower.

Zoning laws and more importantly NIMBYs. I used to live in a city that's currently being taken to court after they cancelled the construction permits for mixed use buildings because a few very vocal citizens didn't want to live next to 4+ floor buildings and managed to get elected to the city council.

Your idea is actually how car-dependent cities are laid out. Look at a map of Phoenix for a textbook example: the city is laid out on a square mile grid with retail/offices on the grid corners. People may drive to go shopping, but that's a choice, they could walk there (if they want to brave the heat) since for most of the city the nearest shopping area is less than a mile (1.6 km) away.

Absolutely. It’s completely a consequence of the _choice_ to employ exclusionary zoning.

First: I agree with the overall conclusion of the article. We absolutely should invest to make public transport faster, and thereby attract more riders.

Second: At least for NYC, some of this data is slightly misleading. NYC has (at least) three public transport networks: the bus and subway within the city’s borders, and commuter rail between the city, Long Island, and the rest of NY/NJ/CT. It would probably be most interesting (and correct) to compare car commuters that could take each; my intuition is that the subway generally outperforms driving within the city, the bus slightly underperforms versus driving (since it gets stuck in traffic, and there’s no meaningful enforcement of bus lanes). I don’t have an intuition for the commuter rails.

> We absolutely should invest to make public transport faster, and thereby attract more riders.

People don't use public transport because it is faster, but because it is consistent, it is cheaper than many other options and it reduces the stress of commuting. Being a passenger is much more relaxing than being the driver. Not having to find a parking spot is liberating for your mind. Not getting fines is good for your finances.

Public transport doesn't attract more people because almost everywhere is at peak.

NY subway, for example, moves 5.5 million people a day (the peak capacity is slightly above 6) but it is harder to make new lines or increase the number of rides, while with cars you just ride yours to the highway and stay stuck there in traffic for as long as needed. You can't stack trains like that or the delay of a single ride will cascade to the entire rail line possibly for many hours.

People who prefer cars IMO are either outside of the public transport coverage, bad at planning or anxious.

It still has to be fast enough. It also needs to evolve beyond just the hub and spoke model that expects everyone to commute to the big city from the suburbs.

There is need for lot more circular routes. Connecting the spokes to each other.

> It still has to be fast enough

Fast enough is relative.

I'm European and don't know the USA situation very well, but IMO consistency beats speed every time.

The route between the city of Monza and Milan in Lombardy takes 10 minutes by train and 40 by car (not including parking)

People take the car because that train line is not reliable and trains are often canceled last minute.

In theory the train is much faster, in practice it's a Russian roulette.

We should invest in making public transit more consistent and frequent rather than faster. If something comes every 5 minutes… you don’t need to worry about schedule and the expected wait time from end of task until end of transit is lower.

Plus if you have transfers, it really drives down the time.

If the segment is really fast but only happens hourly, now you have to plan :( If it only happens hourly AND the timing is inconsistent or segments get cancelled, now you just have to possibly wait for hours.

This is complicated by the physical reality that different trains can't occupy the same physical space concurrently. One line coming more frequently displaces another.

There is a fair deal of complexity to this, that the common populace seems to assume isn't being implemented already. Transit is a very complicated prediction/optimization problem

Most transit (in the US at least) is buses. If you can have buses arriving every 5 minutes, it’s night and day from every 15 or especially every 30. I don’t think issue if overlapping lines applies to buses.

In SF, reaction to pandemic ridership decline was to decrease frequency of most transit. This also unfortunately makes transit less appealing :(

> Transit is a very complicated prediction / optimization problem.

It also depends what you’re optimizing for - is the goal to increase total users of system? Ensure there aren’t empty trains / buses? Have ridership “pay for” operations?

Because having your light rail continue into late night even if sparsely used means people can rely on it as an option. Frequent bus routes even on lesser used routes still can make the overall system more likely to be used.

I live in an exurb in the US. Transit tries to serve a lot of single family homes. That said, I've got two bus routes nearby which connect to the light rail to go deeper into the metro area and out to the airport. Despite there being a bus stop close to my door I still take my car most of the time.

I could get by with living an only public transit lifestyle, and that's a part of why I chose to live here as opposed to elsewhere. But in the end this really limits my choices. Yeah, there is a daycare a few stops away, but that wasn't the one we wanted to send our child to. There is a grocery store, but it's not the ones we like to shop at. There are places I could work, but the place I want to work is a less than 10 minute drive but a 45 minute bus ride. To get to the places we do want to go, it's easily 2-5x as long of a travel.

Just the other day a friend invited me to dinner. The restaurant was on the same bus line as one of the lines just outside my house. A great chance for transit, I wouldn't even have to change busses. It was a less than 20 minute car ride and a few dollars of tolls each way. Or a little over an hour on the bus each way. Sure, riding the bus would have been cheaper than the cost of my car, assuming my time is valued at $0 and everything is devoid of scheduling conflicts. But I value my time quite highly, and I often have pretty tight schedules.

I was interested in the company publishing this and found that governing.com is operated by e.Republic, a media company founded, owned, and operated by scientologists [1]. It's founder is Dennis McKenna (not the brother of Terence) who was a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology during Operation Freakout [2], "a Church of Scientology covert plan intended to have the U.S. author and journalist Paulette Cooper imprisoned or committed to a psychiatric hospital."

Given past events [3], I find the idea of a scientology media company trying to get the ear of state and local governments to be very concerning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Republic

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

> Given past events [3], I find the idea of a scientology media company trying to get the ear of state and local governments to be very concerning.

Same goes for any religious group IMHO. Separation of church and state.

Is the purpose of public transit to get you there Quicker, or to get you there Cheaper? Transit allows me to avoid owning a car, and the monthly parking charge at home, daily parking by work, etc costs that come with— that’s the principal benefit as a city dweller.

I live in Chicago (city) and the 2-1 time ratio is what I use to decide whether I take a cab or not. I look up the time to my destination -a store, friends house, the beach, whatever- and if it’s twice as long or quicker to take the train/bus then I will. (That’s not totally true, I use shared bikes to get most places these days.) When I was poorer, I used 3-1.

For my office, when I go, it’s about 2-1, and has been for any of the half-dozen different places I’ve lived here. I consider that a sign of Well-Done Transit, not the opposite.

It’s not surprising to me that transit takes longer, because you have to walk to a transit stop and then walk from a transit stop. Why would you expect it to be faster?

If you want it to be faster than driving, you have to eliminate all parking minimums.

In London it’s not uncommon for transit to be 2:1 faster than driving. It’s only ever really faster going from suburb to suburb without going through the center. It all depends on what kind of infrastructure you have.

I check Google maps for any journey where I have a choice of driving or riding in London. The variability is pretty wide. But agree with your point about suburb to suburb: in a choice of car vs bus (because there's no rail option for the journey) the car inevitably wins.

It is the same for Paris, mostly (they are a few exception with light rail, especially towards economic centers), but i think next year it should be better, with an automated subway line going around paris.

2025, but yes, the Grand Paris Express will drastically improve connectivity between the suburbs. There are already 10+ trams doing the same at a smaller scale, but an automated metro with high capacity and frequency will be a game changer.

In the other hand in Dublin Ireland I only once saw a trip that was more that 10min faster by bus than walking (according to Google Maps and I walk faster than Google Maps predicts).

The exception is the DART train which speeds things up if you happen to be going in the right direction but all of the other public transit is rubbish.

In dense urban area, granted there's just a bit of bike lanes.. bike will get you faster anywhere. I was shocked to see it took me less than by car.

I live in a Rust Belt city and bike everywhere. One of my common rides is five miles one way.

It's very common for me to be riding along the same cars from my house to destination, with a little back and forth leapfrogging. Turns out their average speed is similar to cycling.

With traffic lights, jams, bus stops, etc.. it does slow them down tremendously. Of course bikes can go through jams and lights willy nilly.

My job was 6 miles from home by car and 45min (some quite stressful), I actually took a longer path (7miles) by bike to enjoy a river path, took me 40min to arrive.

This really depends on the topography of the particular city. Even some small hills can kill any time advantage very quickly.

Initially, perhaps, but riding such hills regularly is a pretty good way to build up leg strength (and confidence descending) to the point small hills aren't really going to slow you down much. Traffic (+ stop lights) is far and away the biggest thing that slows me down on a bike - I can average 5 k/h faster once away from heavily congested areas with frequent stops required. In my city at least those less congested areas are the hillier ones!

I used to dread hills even as an avid bicyclist, but as soon as I had three big ones on my daily route my body just adapted. So yes topography does affect your choices less people will cycle there, but it does not affect time that much.

It's always important in these conversations to take into account the Downs–Thomson paradox[0]. If public transit gets stuck in traffic and takes longer than taking a car, people will take a car. And since taking a car is the least efficient way to use a lane, things will continue to get worse and worse as more people decide to use a car. You need to ensure that your public transit is not getting stuck in traffic.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox

That is why I proposed to eliminate parking minimums (I might add to tear down existing parking garages). Even a free-market equilibrium under the Downs Thomson would have less cars than what we have now

When I lived in Chicago, biking was the fastest way to get around by far.

Chicago has "good" public transport by US standards and it is still dog ass slow & often very crowded and unpleasant.

False dichotomy. In dense cities it exists to move people efficiently, because roads physically can’t accommodate everyone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity#/media/File%3...

It's not clear to me that this is an apples-to-apples comparison. Specifically: is the same commute by public transport longer by car? For example, you might be comparing a ride from Garden City to Lower Manhattan by train to a ride from Garden City to JFK Airport by car. If so, then this is completely meaningless.

There are also socioeconomic factors to consider. If you're poor then driving into Lower Manhattan just isn't an option for you. Car ownership is already expensive. Insurance in the NY metro area is particularly expensive. Parking anywhere in Manhattan is going to be really expensive.

So you may end up using data like this as a reason to eliminate what is for many people their only option.

At the other end of the spectrum are places like Houston, with a 26 lane freeway. It's also currently building the largest urban ring road in the world (IIRC) at >180 miles. Those are eyesores by themselves but it's absolutely criminal not to eliminate 2 lanes of a 26 lane freeway to run light rail along the length of the freeway. Stations are pretty easily combined with parking structures and integrated with bus routes.

What you realize after awhile is being car-centric in America is not only a question of profound selfishness but it's also de facto segregation. Not from inorities per se, just "undesirables" ie poor people. It's why wealthier neighborhoods like Santa Monica tried to fight rail expansion into their area.

The cost of car ownerships, much like most of the US outlawing building anything other than single family houses (typically on ridiculously large lots) is a deliberate economic barrier. US cities are really no different to Cape Town.

Significant clarification missing from the title: "IN AMERICA"

And to some Americans' surprise, not everywhere is like that. When you build your cities around cars, no other mode of transportation can thrive. Over a century of sprawl and road widening can't have an overnight fix.

It really depends on the place. This article focuses on New York which has a really bad subway system. In Boston they would reach a similar conclusion as well. But if they were focusing on Prague or Spain or Japan or Singapore or any system which isn't decades-old and falling apart, they would find riding transit is much faster than driving.

Ik it's a dumb spin but if anything, this is reason to improve New York's subway system. Trains should be faster for any non-negligible distance, even counting walking and waiting for the train, as they can go a lot faster and don't have to deal with stoplights or traffic. And trains (even the ones in NY) are much better in terms of efficiency, productivity (can read or work on the train), and climate. The issue is, that trains are a huge long-term investment, and a lot of these broken railway systems need huge renovations. We need someone to put billions into this, of course it will save billions in the coming decades, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

>In Boston they would reach a similar conclusion as well

Really depends where you're going to and from, if you take into account parking+walking afterwards (not taken into account by google maps), traffic, etc.

The subway can be a lot faster than driving. Buses and/or commuter rail, usually not so much. Lots of room (and some plans) for improvements there.

The few times I visited Boston I thought the subways were fantastic - got me almost everywhere in the city close enough to walk.

Was it faster A to B than a car? Maybe not in drive times. But I didn't need to find parking, which can be very time consuming (or extremely expensive.)

Also the stress levels are wildly different: get on the T, open a book and relax versus dealing with confused tourists and crazed Uber drivers against a backdrop of shoddily-patched roads and indifferent signage.

Isn’t NY one of the best subway systems in the US? I’m not saying it’s good but it’s certainly better than most other US cities meaning it’s close to the best transit vs driving comparison in the US.

Yes, by far. It is still one of the worst large systems in the world. Kiev's was more reliable than NYC's (and cleaner) before the war, make of that what you will.

When I was growing up, I'd take the city bus across town and it would take 2 hours, vs 25 minutes by car. It showed me I needed car for work, or I'd be spending 4 hours just on buses.

30 years later, When I was working downtown, park and ride was nice mix of getting there early, free parking, and I just a short walk.

Now lets talk about those HOV lanes that now opened up for paying people, we literally made limo lanes that clogged up and made the buses slower.

No new roads, and its just going to keep getting worse, so much worse. I've seen it get continually worse over 30 years.

in my personal experience (with both transit and non-transit friendly locales):

within NYC: bikes are the absolute fastest for short distances, the subway is comparable but generally fastest overall once things stretch out a bit, cars get hampered by "conditions" including traffic and parking; so they're ok if you hire a car late at night, but otherwise pretty slow and likely to get stuck in traffic.

in the dense burbs (silicon valley, southern ca, hillsdale, long island): bikes are a mix but generally slower, cars are the fastest, transit takes 2-3x as much time, except during congestion where grade separated modalities often come in about on par with car travel time.

in the rural burbs: cars win. transit takes 2-3x as much time. grade separation is rare, schedules are light and traffic is rarely an issue.

i would want to see how these averages are being calculated. i'm guessing they're probably just doing a flat average over all zipcodes. this seems wrong to me, instead if you want to come up with a summary stat (which i think is probably a bad idea, as there are so many different types of cities with different behaviors for this sort of comparison) you'd probably want to weight by population. to say that the national average is 2-3x probably overweights all the rural transit systems where this is true.

Outside of Manhattan cars are generally faster than the subway, significantly so outside of rush hour.

sometimes? depends on how close to the train the stops are and if the bqe is involved/randomly backed up (which it appears to be right now). right this minute i'm seeing comparable drive times to the g train for north brooklyn to carroll gardens.

i think what you say is definitely true as you move further out from the urban core (within the outer boroughs).

FTA: "The revamped bus network, which required just a 4 percent budget increase, launched in August 2015. The results so far are encouraging: Weekday ridership has stabilized after declining for years, and is up about 10 percent on Saturdays and more than 30 percent on Sundays."

In other news water is wet. The catch-22 with transit has been known for half a century. Declining riders = fewer $$$ = fewer routes = declining riders. The only way to stop this is with investment to increase schedules. Yet riders are blamed for not using it.

In my city the bike is usually faster than the car simply because you don't have to search for a parking spot for 30 minutes.

Parking is an underrated part of the equation that many on here are not taking into account. It's scarce, and extremely expensive.

At least for America, which was the country cited in the article, transit might take twice as long as driving, but driving costs many more times than using buses, plus there’s no up front cost, random major repairs, etc; related links below.

Beyond that, American cities are largely designed for cars, which makes mass transit less viable. Not aware of any city in America designed for mass transit first, driving second; if it was, driving would likely take longer.

___

https://www.statista.com/statistics/990891/us-average-monthl...

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...

Yeah of course it does. Everything about the built environment is designed to ensure this is true.

Even places you think would be transit oriented in America are not. Here in Berkeley we have a transit-priority signal installed at a few key intersections along the busiest bus route but the public works department refuses to turn them on, because although they save minutes for the bus riders they cost a few seconds for the drivers.

We also refused to put in bus lanes on Telegraph Avenue because it would have necessitated the removal of either a parking lane or a car travel lane (four exist today). So the bus just lumbers along in traffic and it’s impossible to be faster than cars that way because the bus has to make its stops.

Isn't this just showing that people prefer public transit if the travel time is on average twice as long (but not longer)? There's a selection bias in that people who choose to drive probably did so because it's significantly faster.

I had the opportunity to compare the posted schedules for a light rail train and a bus, between the same two points. This is the Bay Area.

The points were the Winchester light rail station (in Campbell) and the Lockheed campus, near Moffett. There's a bus that goes the same places with a vastly longer route, and of course many more stops. The times were the same: about an hour. If you were driving, you'd take freeways, and even in rush hour traffic it would be less than an hour.

San Jose light rail is, by nearly all metrics, the worst in the country, so you can see why: it's terrible.

Even when we spend billions on transit we build it badly. US obsession with turning Light Rail into a Frankenstein that tries to fill all roles (eg commuter light rail). The resistance to electrification and reliance on slow loco hauled trains. Billions thrown at beautiful but not functionally helpful stations (cough Moynihan or Transbay). Not aligning new transit with development and not implementing station area land use changes. Etc. And of course top it off with how little we get for the money in terms of track miles. It’s tragic really.

I think a large reason of why people don't want to use public transit, which is often overlooked, is the social aspect: If you regularly use public transit, you're bound to have encounters with antisocial people who basically ruin it for everyone.

The encounters I had on some regional transit made me think its probably better to just eat the extra bills for the car, rather than getting stabbed by some crackhead who turned the train (station) into their new home to escape the cold of winter.

Would be interested to see a similar visualization for major European cities. As someone living in London I would be very surprised if public transport isn't quicker on average.

I think it's undeniable that journeys in to, out of, or around central London are faster on public transport if you're going along one of the main routes. But there are lots of journeys outside of the centre, either sideways or diagonal, that are very awkward and slow on public transport.

My problem is that I have very little data or intuitive feel for how the 8 million people in London actually move during the average day

My experience is that it’s common for people to meet in central London (and/or to have loca friends in the area you live) for this reason. Houses and workplaces are usually coordinated to minimise travel time (although there’s been a huge increase in homeworking since covid which is reducing the need for this).

My experience in London is that it just depends on where you are going.

- Local neighborhood? Walking or cycling is fastest

- Next high street over? Bus or cycling is fastest

- Most places in central London? Tube or train is fastest

- That neighborhood a mile away that inexplicably has bad bus connections to you but you need to go because that's where the vet/store/whatever you need to visit is? Driving is often the best way, especially if you need to carry something. Cycling is pretty good, too.

- That village 30 miles away? Driving or train (depending on your train line connections)

- Full-size Ikea in Wembley? Driving (pretty hard to get there any other way) and you are probably going to want to bring something back

- Mini-Ikea in Hammersmith? Take the Underground, driving wouldn't even really be possible

Overall, I end up driving fairly rarely to never except for vacations or home repair type stuff. But having a multitude of transit options is really nice and most daily activities just require walking or quick local bus rides.

I'm as pro-public-transit and cycling as they come, but there are definitely some types of trips where cars make sense. But I probably only drive 2-3 times a month vs. multiple times a day in the US. Zip cars are fairly omnipresent around London, so you don't need to own a car to drive those rare trips.

Same experience here in Oslo. With the different rent-a-car-by-hour companies popping up, I'll just rent a car for a few hours every now and then. I could do that like 10 times a month and it would probably be cheaper still than owning a car, most people don't realize how much it actually costs. Sharing a car like this makes so much sense.

Yeah, i do that too, but sadly i'm in a fairly touristic city and in summer it become very hard to find available vehicle.

i'd like to know the variance of the two looks like, and how much earlier transit riders have to leave wherever they are to account for it, than drivers. (this wouldn't show up because they measured door-to-door times.)

admittedly i'm able to keep my car in good repair, but: over the decades i've only had a handful of days where my car didn't start in the morning, or i encountered _unexpected_ events on the road that made the trip take dramatically longer. (heavy traffic on a road i use every day would just show up in my average.)

but when i've tried to use buses, while in school, or a brief period when my employer was at the other end of the bus that stopped in my neighborhood, i had buses not show up about once a week (or show up well ahead of the posted schedule). now that i think about it, i've been on about as many buses that had traffic accidents as i've had days where my car didn't start, despite using my car 100x more often than i've taken a bus.

… and the water is wet.

We have invested x50 times more in cars infrastructure compared to shared transport.

Why are we surprised that cars produce better results?

There exists no American city with a robust public transportation network, they are all very flawed and dragged down by car first infrastructure. Countries with robust public transportation networks exist only in Europe and Asia. Even then, Switzerland and Japan are the only examples where the quality of public transport is taken seriously by the government and the people. Otherwise it’s there but really lacks the funding needed for it to do the job it should be doing.

Contrast that with the car infra and entire countries will flip over backwards trying to maintain an unsustainable and unviable system, AKA burning money for no benefit to anyone, even in the short term.

When I lived in Brooklyn, driving in nyc was a nightmare experience to be avoided at all costs. Parking could take as long as driving.

Where I live now I could drive to work in less time than taking the subway. But it is about the same time as riding my bike.

>The new network isn’t just about saving time. It’s also opened up job opportunities for those who are now within walking distance of frequent service. “The goal,” Luhrsen says, “was to connect those places of density within the system -- to get people to jobs, to get them to schools, health-care facilities … seven days a week.”

This ending paragraph is basically why I don't care about the title. At this point, convincing people to switch from cars to buses/trains en masse is a tiny glint of light on the horizon. Far more important in the near-term is simply providing adequate transportation to those who can't or don't wish to drive.

Many of the comments seem to have reached a conaensus about the purported issue: public transit is slow because where people are and where they want to be are not connected by public transit. It seems impossible to judge the speed of "riding transit" in an unqualified sense when where we build the places people want to be and how close that is to existing public transit is no part of the conversation.

Train boarding at least could be decoupled from slowing down and stopping. Just have a "Shuttle Wagon" depart pre arrival from the train with those who want to get out and another one speeding up with new passengers after the train as it passes through the station. Under ideal circumstances, a train would actually not even have to slow down for this. Con is that there is always a Shuttle in the station.

But then you might as well go for the ‘Teslas in tunnels’ approach like the boring company.

For me it'd take about 20 minutes to drive to the office + any time spent looking for a parking spot + possible rush hour

Or I can walk about 7 minutes to the train station, hop on a train for 30 minutes and walk 5 minutes to the office.

I always pick the latter, because I can just zone out for the 30 minutes in the train, maybe watch a TV show on my tablet, read a book or take a nap. Can't do any of those in traffic.

Time alone isn't a good measure. Minute-dollars is probably a better one. But value of time or money doesn't add linearly in people's minds, so even this could be improved.

When I lived in the Bay area, rough numbers:

Job 1, car: 3600 minute-dollars per day.

Job 1, public transit: 800 minute-dollars

Job 2, car: 2700 minute-dollars

Job 2, public transit: 6000 minute-dollars

Isn't that common sense? Public transit takes you everywhere and where you need to go. Driving just takes you where you need to go.

Trains have no traffic. At least, when they're run properly

No, there's no a priori reason why public transport should be slower. There are cities where it isn't the case, London for example.

Cars get stuck in traffic (because they are traffic). Trains don't, and can reach higher speeds. Buses have (or should have) their own lanes, and priority at traffic lights, so that they don't get stuck behind cars. A single bus lane can have more passenger throughput than several car lanes; it's an absurdity that a bus should be delayed by single-occupancy vehicles hogging the space.

If public transport is slower than driving, your city is doing it wrong.

There is. You have to get to and from the station / stop twice every trip. This makes it slower unless you are in an area where the density is so high that the space constraints make cars prohibitive.

>You have to get to and from the station / stop twice every trip.

And you have to get to and from your parking spot.

>an area where the density is so high that the space constraints make cars prohibitive.

Yes, these areas are called "cities".

---

There are a lot of factors that go into determining the relative speeds of public transport vs private motor vehicles. Here are some of them (for buses):

- street network topology: grid, spaghetti, cul-de-sacs?

- are there highways slicing through the city, or is it mostly smaller roads?

- speed limits on those roads

- is there a congestion charge?

- are there dedicated bus lanes?

- is there priority for buses at intersections?

- spacing of stops

- boarding, payment, disembarking procedure

- frequency of rides

- directness of the route

- viability of other non-car transport modes e.g. cycling

Different answers to these questions give different journey times. Whether transit is faster than driving is the net result of all these questions. And most of them are political in nature. It's a choice, not some iron law.

Plus, there's the obvious existence proof of fast public transit: airlines.

> No, there's no a priori reason why public transport should be slower.

Public transit usually isn't a direct run from where you get on to where you get off, and it usually stops several times along the way too.

Checks out. There were a few commutes from my room in the Mission of San Francisco that were equal time lyft, bike, or take train. Of course this relies on timing the muni/bart appropriately. I never had my own car in a city, it is surely a diffetent way to experience a place. I figure if it was only OK in SF, it sucks everywhere else in the US.

It's unclear whether their 1.9x times include time dealing with parking. In some urban neighborhoods, finding parking close to one's destination can be challenging, inefficient, and highly variable. If the closest parking you find is a ways away from your destination, then it adds time to _two_ trips.

The difference? I can use those minutes doing something instead of paying attention to traffic and driving. I can read a book or get a head start on work or bum around on social media. If I bike to work it doubles as my exercise for the day. The utility of that time is what makes the difference for me.

I love how when visiting their plotly page[0] you can see their tests, like "Plot 955 copy copy copy copy" :)

[0]: https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~governing/#/

The tube in London is significantly faster than driving in all but the most unusually low-traffic weekend days.

What is terrible thigh are the buses. It is almost like it is a regulation now that they cannot go faster then 12mph. And even if they could go faster than that, they stop literally every 100-200 meters so you are constantly stopping and starting. It is infuriatingly slow and plodding as a result, despite the fact that they have dedicated bus lanes here.

I simply do not know why there are not more "express" bus routes in London that only stop at major places (e.g. perhaps linking tube stations that are on different lines, or going "across" London (c.f. tube lines that tend to head to the center).

I think it is the result of a bit of a socialist ideal about everyone sharing the same journey as some sort of proletariat-unite fantasy where we all share the same bus: children on their way to school, workers on their way to the office, grannies going to visit their grandchildren, etc etc - no matter your status or walk of life you're all together sharing the same journey, all equal, all together etc. That is all very well and good, but different people are under different time pressures, so lowering the bus to handle the lowest common denominator of someone who just wants to get it to go 0.5 to 1km down the road ruins it for those that need to cover distance. So those that can pay to go places faster than those that don't

Nevertheless, riding the metro or any other transport service has many pros. You can rest/nap, read books or even start your working day on the train. It is stress free as you don't need to be concentrated on the traffic.

Driving in car is mostly just wasted time.

I support solutions to this of the form "let's make transit faster while keeping driving the same speed". I strongly oppose solutions to this of the form "let's keep transit basically the same speed but make driving slower".

Plus you can't speed up if you are running late. I missed a train by 5 minutes in Chicago, than I was told the next one was sold out. If I had been in a car I could have made that time up. The other problem was late because I was waiting in a long line at the airport to buy metro pas, only to complete a transaction for weekly pass for some confused Italian couple. Then seeing some guy get arrested at the Greyhound station for seemingly asking the wrong question, and getting told I was bamboozled for asking if I could still catch the bus home. Seeing other people getting treated horribly there. Then ended that miserable experience sitting 5 hours on the Megabus wheel well on an over night bus to get home. No thanks. I'd rather a root canal. People advocating for no cars, often ignore how terrible public transportation can be.

What a surprise, in cities designed for cars it's faster to use a car...

Yeah, but i can't play super auto pets in my car.

Transit can not be successful in low-density residential build. American life style is lifestyle of rich people - single family houses and cars.

Twenty-nine minutes to drive from Naperville to Chicago? Maybe at 4am. That's going to often take 2 hours.

This rule works in Copenhagen too. I'm often met with disbelief and even mild outrage when I make the claim.

Copenhagen is a pretty car centric city though, public transport has traditionally not been that well prioritized. It is good city for bicycles, but the suburbs are sadly made for cars IMHO. There is also alot of infrastructure being built for cars in and around Copenhagen so it's not changing soon.

As others have said, this does not hold for the majority of commuters in New York City, where finding a parking space and navigating rush-hour traffic often makes commuting by car slower.

In London they've chosen a different approach, making driving more painful: congestion charging and strictly-enforced 20-mile-an-hour speed limits on some of the main arteries in the centre of the city.

The speed limit is a bit of a red herring. The average speed of traffic in central London is about 9 miles/hour & inner London about 12. The average speed in the suburbs (outer London) is about 20 mph, even though the speed limit is 30 mph.

Average traffic speed in London: https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/sites/default/files/0832...

London speed limits: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-digital-speed-limit-map.pd...

As the other reply pointed out, those speed limits are pretty aspirational. The average trip time in central London decreased 30% [0] quite a bit after introduction of the charge, but things have slowed down again for various other reasons apparently.

I don't think the congestion charge is unreasonable considering the negative externalities the vehicles cause. Aside from work or delivery vehicles, it seems bizarre to drive into central London by choice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge#Traff...

By the way, the rational for putting speed limits is quite solid and i know one engineer who worked on that who told me the average speed in Paris around and during rush hour actually increase (by roughly 5 km/h) despite lowering the speed limit by 10 km/h. Outside those hours the speed limit setup did decrease the average speed (shocking!), but for commuters (who felt strongly against this new limitation) the overall change was actually a net positive (less hour stuck in traffic), and for car-owning residents (who where split on this) it was a net negative.

I think that this is the fundamental issue of why we don't have more public transit. It's just next to impossible to beat the convenience of cars. The only place I have been in the US where public transit is more convenient than driving is Manhattan. That kind of density is really the only place where you can do that.

This is the same here in Ontario, Canada in 2 of the biggest non-toronto cities.

Is there a direct link somewhere, or is this just _that_ gated?

This will be really unpopular here haha.

But the average person is always going to do what is best for them. You can let this inform almost any decision of your life when trying to decide what herd behavior and your users will do.

That’s an extremely popular opinion, as evidenced by everybody doing it :-)

Most of the responses here are methodological ones, not claims that we should all selflessly ride public transit.

I'm not sure what your point is.

https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc?t=462

I don’t see why you would expect this to be unpopular.

You are oversimplifying though , the average person is usually going to do what they think is best for them, given the options they know about.

The distinction is critical in topics like city/transportation planning.

I’d expect it to be unpopular because HN often seems to be solely populated by people riding a bike inside a subway car. :)

it is also far less comfortable, you can take far less cargo (e.g. trip to the beach with kids), and you’ll be exposed to all the current pathogens

tl;dr: For me bicycling is 35% faster than public transit and 85% slower than driving a car, and I bicycle primarily for lower stress and the benefits of daily exercise.

My office is in the downtown district of a major city next to mine, 10 miles from my house in the suburbs. It costs $25 a day to park in the garage, although my employer subsidizes that if you sign up for a commuter benefit. Commute time by private motor vehicle is typically between 15-25 minutes during rush hour.

Transit involves a half-mile (10-minute) walk to a bus station, an 11-minute ride to another bus station for a transfer, another 15-minute ride to another bus station, and a 1/3-mile (6-minute) walk to the office, for a total of 57 minutes and $2.75 in fares. On a good traffic day, public transit takes an additional 42 minutes each way for about an hour and a half more time commuting.

There is a traffic-separated trail that starts about 1/10 of a mile from my house and ends about 1 mile from my office. Door-to-door, I'm usually doing the ride in about 37 minutes.

So, my commute options are:

* Drive single-occupancy vehicle. With employer subsidy, 20 minute trip and no out-of-pocket cost, otherwise $25. ~15 kWh (I drive an EV) plus wear and tear. Stress from driving and risk of collisions, but I have crumple zones and airbags to offer some safety.

* Bus. 16 minutes of walking, transfer with 15 minutes of waiting (if the buses are on schedule), and 26 minutes bus riding. Again, free if I sign up for an employer benefit, otherwise $2.75 each way for a total of $5.50. Risk of collisions when crossing the street. Buses enjoy a pretty low collision rate where I live.

* Bicycle. 37 minutes of riding, free to use bike cage. Risk of collisions getting to and from the trail and at points where the trail crosses roads. Could probably reduce this time to 32 minutes if I were to trade in my meat-powered bike for an e-bike.

I've settled on the bicycle option because I find it's the most stress-free while at the same time I get exercise I wouldn't otherwise be getting. It's hard to quantify the value of the exercise against the additional 30 minutes of commute time (74 minutes of cycling vs. 40 minutes of driving my car), but I suspect in the long run the exercise is working in my overall favor in terms of well-being. Wear-and-tear on the bicycle costs me significantly less than wear-and-tear on my car.

Since the trail is crushed gravel, I did have to make a capital investment in a bicycle with appropriate tires, a rack, and a bag that attaches to the rack pannier-style. I also shower at a locker room in my office building, but since I shower daily anyway, I don't count that as any lost time in my schedule.

Side note:

I'm often asked about bicycle commuting equipment since I've been bicycle commuting for about 15 years and have tried a lot of stuff, settling on what I've found works for me. Maybe I'll do a blog post sometime really getting into the details, but here's a "pretty okay" set of recommendations if you're riding on a crushed gravel trail:

* Chromoly steel frame with rack mounts and 45c tires; maybe something like the Motobecane Cafe Noir from Bikes Direct ($800, when you can find it in stock); Motobecane Gran Premio Elite works well for road-only commutes

* Planet Bike rack and full-size fenders

* 2 Wheel Gear convertible pannier/backpack

* Look Keo clipless pedals

* Shimano RC1 shoes (SH-RC100)

* Bontrager Commuter Comp Saddle

* Cycliq Fly6 and Fly12 combination lights+cameras (super-pricey, but they're also convenient and have proven to be durable for me)

* The Black Bib (the original $40 one)

* Multi tool with a chain breaker and tire levers

* Spare tube

* Chain quick link

* Something like the ez-clincher (note that specific one may not work great for 45c tires) tool for remounting your tire after changing a flat (pro tip: make sure the bead isn't set anywhere while you're popping the bead in if you want it to go easier)

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