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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

i just spent three hours on the bus today and i would much rather have spent an hour in a car instead, though my risk of dying would surely be higher

there are a lot of places within 100 km of my house that i'd enjoy visiting but where public transport doesn't go. if i had a car, i could go there easily. if that means shortening my life expectancy by 20 minutes, that seems like a worthwhile tradeoff. the risk i'd be imposing on innocent people around me by driving a car is ethically trickier

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I'd you shorten your life expectancy by 20 min but get 2 hours back today it seems like a fair trade.

And that's why public transit in the us is such a mess, if you want people to use it, you have to make it fast and frequent before people need it, so when you do use it, you thin, huh, that's not too bad.

well, i wasn't actually dead on the public transit, although on the bus whose air conditioner was broken it felt like it part of the time

This I definitely agree with. A bus is the worst mode. Most of the downsides of a car with very few if any of rail especially in places with significant traffic. If you replaced that bus experience with light rail, almost certainly you’d be at your destination several times faster

well no, because light rail would necessarily involve walking farther from my house, and it has to wait for car traffic too, albeit less often than buses do. the bus i took actually had a reserved bus lane for a lot of the route, avoiding the traffic thing, but it still only averaged 14 km/hour

Bus, specifically, has the worst UX of both worlds. You still get the unreliability of being on road (so still getting/contributing traffic jams) and the suffocation of train (due to being crowded public transportation). I mostly avoid it in favor of trains or cars, or even motorbikes since it's ubiquitous in my country, unless that's literally the only option I can get.

Totally agree. The only exception to this is buses with dedicated lanes. Not say they are as good as trains, but at least don’t have the traffic issues.

I've instructed my kids to avoid public transit, and drive as much as possible, for totally different reasons....

https://nypost.com/2022/10/11/nyc-subway-murders-jump-to-hig...

There were 255 traffic deaths in NYC 2022[0], so according to the statistic on the site you link to, driving is 36x more dangerous.

[0] https://www.silive.com/news/2023/01/nyc-traffic-deaths-drop-....

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