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Comment by pierat | Hacker News Reader

> It's mostly the poor and middle-class that use public transportation, so ending fares for it is helpful to their finances.

Its the poor class that uses public transit because it is substandard, and they dont have other choices.

Public transit is substandard because public transit has to fight on the regular roads, and not dedicated track/roads for transit. This means it is innately as slow or slower than driving. Because of this, it anyone who has a car WILL TAKE A CAR.

For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours. This is the predominant reason why people don't use public transit - 6 times longer.

Free is an essential start, though.

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So much of this. Public transit has to be a better alternative to driving a car. Time is the biggest factor to getting people to use it. I used to take the express bus into my office in the city. Since they had dedicated lanes it took me the same amount of time, all for $2.75. Driving is $10+ in tolls, $20 in parking, and fuel.

My coworkers thought I was crazy taking the bus thinking it was full of homeless. It was mostly lawyers, judges, jurists going to the federal court as well as medical staff at the nearby hospital. Based on the designer suits alone I can guarantee almost everyone had a European car or large body SUV sitting at home.

Free is a good start but if it still takes 2+ hours to get to a $15/hr job it's still a bad deal.

> For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours

Compared to SEPTA (Philly's bus system) this seems way off base. Yes, it takes longer to take the bus than to drive yourself because the bus has to stop for passengers. But your own car will still have to stop at red lights, wait for pedestrians, etc., nearly as much as a bus. I can see 30-45 minutes for a bus ride comparable to a 20 minute direct drive, but any more than that points to some other problem with your city's roads.

You're not accounting for time spent waiting for transfers.

Where I live the major employer is Cornell University and almost all of the buses stop there. A Cornell id will get you on any bus in Tompkins County and it is almost always a single-seat ride to Cornell and to the downtown area. Transfers in the downtown-Cornell-Mall triangle are also easy because you can always get a bus in 15 minutes or less.

Overall transit works great if most people are going to a few central points. It's much more difficult if the destinations are distributed. Frequent service could be a balm for that: if you had buses every ten minutes on all routes transfers would not be bad at all.

Yes, but Cornell lives in a small city.

Concrete example for my city. Going from the east end to the west end took over 2 hours. And most of it was on the rail system - so not competing with traffic. But it involved one transfer for the train, and another for the bus near the end of my destination.

Frequent stops - by both the train and the bus, as well as the stops, made it take a lot longer. In my case a car would have done it in about 40 minutes.

I rarely took non-express busses when I lived in Seattle, but once took the bus into the international district for work and then had to get to 23rd & Jackson (about 20 blocks, straight shot). First I had to wait for a route that went straight down Jackson - 10-15 minutes. Then the bus ride - 30 minutes. Then the same thing on the way back. Nearly an hour and a half, not including having to walk a few blocks to get to my destination. In retrospect, walking would have been faster, and had I driven that day, round trip would have been around 20 minutes, with traffic including the pickup I needed to make.

It may be a problem with the city, but it’s still a problem.

Try visiting the Midwest. Its like my anecdote, but for every city. And the larger the city, the worse the times with public transit vs car.

I would LOVE nice public transit where I would call a taxi OR walk to the public transit station, then get to a hub, and then head to the east/west coast. That *used* to be possible, with even commuter train stations available at cities with 1000 people. No more.

I WfH, so I'm already reducing my vehicular load on the atmo. I mow perhaps 4 times a year. Again, less poison in atmo. But when I want to pop over to the nearest big city (You know, microcenter/electronics/hobby/etc) I have only 1 choice. Car.

Maybe in eastern seabed cities that actually built their cities with public transit, it just works for you, cause those cities weren't completely demolished for interstates (well, just the redlined/black population of cities; they were demolished). But past your east coast mentality, the rest of us have no real choices. And it sucks.

And also, major shoutout to "Not Just Bikes" yt channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/notjustbikes

> For example, it takes me 20 minutes to go from 1 side of the city to the other. Using the bus routes, its 2 hours. This is the predominant reason why people don't use public transit - 6 times longer.

That's a problem that cities solve by using dedicated bus lanes. We should work on making public transportation faster and car transportation slower to change which mode of transportation that people are incentivized to use. Car owners are heavily subsidized by monopolizing the roads for an extremely inefficient per person mode of transportation. Cities subsidize them for any parking that is free. We all pay for the externalities of air pollution, climate change, and city space wasted on street parking and public/private parking lots/garages.

This is often true, but definitely not always, and significantly it doesn't account for the quality of the time spent. It would take me about 20 minutes to drive to work, and it takes me about 40 minutes by bus. I choose to spend 40 minutes reading a book on the bus instead of 20 minutes staring at someone else's bumper and getting road rage. The amount of times I hear people in the office whining about traffic & parking & other drivers always makes me feel weird because my commute in is so pleasant. While they're raging about other drivers, I was finishing up a library book.

Except when public transit doesn't have to run on regular roads. Metro, trains, trams. Those win compared to cars a lot of the time.

Dedicated bus lanes don't run on regular roads, either.

Public standard is substandard when it's badly run, and not because it's public transit. People who have a car may still decide that the costs of running it are greater than the costs of using public transit.

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