I think it’s a cultural thing. The study was made with North-American commuters, it’s not ever a thing in dense metro areas with good subways, like Paris or London.
Edit: The article does mentions that’s it’s different over here :)
Edit: The article does mentions that’s it’s different over here :)
Whenever we have a public transit thread on HN, I observe people having totally unrealistic image of Europe, probably based on hearsay or being a tourist in some of the top metros. Thus, let’s make a few facts about commutes in Europe very clear:
* European mostly commute by car, not by public transit, and the disparity is big, with something like 3-5 times as many people driving than riding public transit, depending on a country.
* Out of those who ride public transit, many if not most would prefer to drive, they just can’t afford it (regular Europeans are much poorer than regular Americans, most Americans have no idea how poor average European is, and vice versa)
* Most people don’t live in transit-heavy places like London or Paris. Most Europeans have little to no practical public transit around where they live.
* By far, biggest user of public transit are students and retirees.
* Finally, average European commute is much longer than average American commute, and in transit-heavy places like Paris or London, average commute is very long, something like 45-55 minutes one way.
Commuting in and out of Rennes takes about 40 minutes (by car), double that during rush hour.
> European mostly commute by car... In France ~4 times as many people commute by car
Yeah, because there's effall transit outside major cities? This is kind of a pointless statistic because overwhelmingly when we talk about this it's in the context of major cities. And the fact that smaller cities don't have transit isn't something desirable, it's a sad failure that those cities are trying to address.
> Even in Paris, something like a third of all commuters drive a personal car
Now we're talking - in major cities, the overwhelming majority of people do not commute by car. It would literally by physically impossible for everyone to commute by car.
> many if not most would prefer to drive, they just can’t afford it
> biggest user of public transit are students and retirees
this is pure bs
Most people I know commute by bike. Trains are used wherever practical, and proximity to train stations is a major consideration in choice of job and home. At least in my bubble, commuting by car is only used as a last resort--necessary for many, but they'd use an alternative if there was one.
If you live in place like central Amsterdam, then sure, you and most of your friends and colleagues likely cycle, especially if you are young and childless. However, living in central Amsterdam is very unrepresentative lifestyle for Dutch people, and even less so for Europeans at large.
My daughter's daycare is 1300m from my apartment, so I walk pushing her stroller, but the building is swamped with cars belonging to people coming from a distance of 5km+, and that's just the first leg of their journey.
With two preschoolers you either invest in a proper type of cargo bike, which costs as much as a used car, or drive all the way.
> Even in Paris, something like a third of all commuters drive a personal car.
See [1]: to get to their work place, 72% of Parisians and 75% of Franciliens (residents of Ile-de-France, excluding Paris) use public transit. It's at most 1/4 using a car (number not quoted in the study). The "a third" number is quoted for people going from Paris to suburbs during the week by car (which I think includes off-peak trips)
> Out of those who ride public transit, many if not most would prefer to drive, they just can’t afford it
Sorry but that's just an opinion. I'm not aware on a study of that, but I and a lot of people I know would rather not drive. Driving in Paris is a terrible, slow and costly experience.
[1] https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fichier/1293788/alap368...
And yes, driving in transit-heavy places like Paris or London is in fact often quite miserable. I probably overstated my case suggesting that maybe even most public transit users would prefer driving. However, in places outside of top metros like Paris or London, driving is relatively less painful, and public transit relatively more so (due to lower density of stops and lower frequency of schedule).
I grew up in an exurb of Warsaw, which is quite transit-heavy city, and a lot of people I knew commuted from the exurb to the suburb, which was halfway to the core of the whole metro. There was train line available, but driving was much preferable, because it was faster than commuter train, and was door-to-door, unlike the train. However, most people still took the train because driving every day was too expensive.
* Europe is a diverse place and such statistics vary a lot by country. You can't talk about the Netherlands and Romania in such a generalized way, you'll gloss over a lot of details.
I have serious doubts about that one. Take Dublin as an example. Traditionally, going back decades, about 35% of people working in Dublin City commuted in by car. This peaked in 2010 at 40% and has since been on a slow decline hitting 29% in 2019 (it _appears_ to have kept declining after that, but given that Ireland didn't really end covid restrictions until early 2022 the stats are a bit all over the place). It's not credible that this is due to people getting poorer; however it does coincide with improvements to the public transport system.
Meanwhile, in the rest of Ireland, which _is_ generally poorer than Dublin, and often quite a lot poorer, outside a couple of other urban centres, almost all commuting is by car; outside Dublin Ireland's commuter public transport story is not good (honestly it's not great in Dublin either, but it's better than elsewhere).
In Dublin, a lot of people would have a car, but not necessarily use it to commute to work. There does seem to be a cultural aspect to this; IME people who've recently moved to Dublin from a rural area are far more likely to commute by car even where it makes no sense (I know someone who lives in an apartment beside a tram stop, works in an office beside a tram stop on the same line, and _still drives to work_).