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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

> "In small, southern towns, the perception of public transportation is that it’s for the low-income,” said Gronna Jones, Wilson’s transportation manager. “There’s a stigma attached to riding the bus. Going to microtransit and nontraditional vehicles removed that stigma.”

I'm surprised how much of this problem seems to be mindset.

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As an immigrant to the US it strikes me as a very (definitionally?) American mindset. Lone wolf is always best, depending on someone else is a weakness.

Trouble is, it becomes self-fulfilling. Once people with that mindset are in charge they underfund transportation so it becomes the crappy unreliable nightmare people are afraid of.

Sadly, that's not just an American problem. I live in Germany, which is traditionally car-centric, and the ministry of transport - which is officially responsible for all forms of transport - has seen itself mostly as the ministry of cars and automakers for the last decades. The result is a massive underfunding of railway lines, which only the current (semi-green) government is trying to address.

It perhaps not much of a consolation, but it is just as well that railway infrastructure itself ages slowly. Public transport is considerably less expensive in Germany compared to my country (Britain, specifically England): a German Deutschlandticket costs €49 per month and provides unlimited rail travel on non-express lines, and unlimited local bus travel. A typical 5 hour rail journey - one off, one way - booked months in advance currently costs about €200 in Britain. It's a high-quality service, but not in any way affordable for the majority of workers to commute with.

The reason I bring this up is to say that Germany is still doing a great job at making rail public transport available, despite the crumbling infrastructure. As long as it can still get you from A to B reliably and safely, it is making a positive contribution to reducing the carbon footprint of travel. Hopefully, by the time that the infrastructure has degraded to the point where the service is dangerous or out of capacity, various components will have become slightly cheaper as well (rail crimping, for instance).

I also find it interesting, because I'd be surprised if many of those people who live in small, southern towns are not low-income. Trying to live beyond one's means is the best way to stay broke.

Could be that the manager's impression was wrong - or this is a case of "temporarily embarrassed middle-class": "yes, we're not rich but at least we're not so poor we have to take the bus..."

It's only surprising if you don't understand the layout of most cities in the western/southern US and how it compares with vastly denser areas in other countries.

The cities are specifically designed to be navigated by individual cars. The properties are spread out over a very large area. For many trips, walking from the bus route would take a very long time, and there are sometimes no sidewalks in a few important parts of a route.

Because of the long distances and car-centric design, even if the buses were free, they would still be impractical.

Even in cases where the commutes are more tolerable, due to the assumption in the designs that everyone will have a car, the great majority do. And so nearly everyone's commute will be somewhere between 100% and 1000% shorter than yours if you choose to use a bus. You will be waiting for the bus for a fair amount of time and then walking long distances.

Like where I live currently, if I go into Google Maps and ask it to navigate me to the closest grocery store which is about 3 miles away, when I click the transit icon it gives me a route involving buses but the first part of it is to drive five minutes to get somewhere that the bus goes. And then there are three bus transfers.

When I turn off the option of using a car and click on public transit, Google just gives up.

This area in general does have a fair number of bus routes. It's just that people live spread out everywhere. Even my apartment complex is actually single story buildings that are attached in a row. The closest main road does not have a sidewalk.

I don't have a car so I use Lyft to go everywhere. Luckily I rarely need to go out since I work remotely. I usually just use Instacart, although I skipped that yesterday since the pricing is such a huge markup.

Yeah, I have seen maps and videos of suburban areas where the pedestrian-accessible space stops once you get to the end of the street, but even then you have to navigate through a miles-long maze of streets and roads to get to the next public building.

I can understand why the US is so excited for self-driving cars...

That's why zoning and parking req should be eliminated. This will allow densification of the towns/cities. Combined with good transit inside the city+ bike lanes, it'll be a good start to motivate ppl move there, esp when they see they can arrive at work in 15 mins instead of an hour drive

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