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Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how people's positions can be so different. As a European who has lived in two (european) countries with good and affordable transport, I've always been a happy public transport user... until a couple of years ago, that is. Much of the transport is now filled with unpleasant people, dirt, delays, etc which paired with the insane prices of housing in the "walkable" parts of cities, has made me 100% invested in the myth of motorized freedom.

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Even in large cities like London there are huge areas where public transport is a joke. Yes it's fine in the very tourist center, but get out further from the center where normal people with families actually live and what is a 5-8 minute drive to a large grocery store becomes a mammoth 50-60 minute journey each way. I personally don't want to spend 15% of my waking day going to and from the shops and paying huge prices for public transport (and also struggle back carrying heavy bags) when I can pay pennies in electricity to drive there and back in a small fraction of the time. I can leave, do my shop, drive back (with heavy bags being carried by the car not my fingers!) and unpack and be sat down again and half way through a TV episode before I'd even have got there by public transport. And this is London where we have "good" public transport.

It sounds like your public transport isn't actually good.

No place in the world has good public transit then. Which is realistic I guess: fix your own area instead of looking down on others who are worse.

I've been to cities large and small in Japan that had better transit than what you describe in London.

That's probably why they have so much ridership.

I did not describe London...

mode share even in tokyo is only 51% - they have a lot of work they can do. That 51% is likely just going to work, cities rarely collect data for other trips but those matter and are places to work on.

there are waaay less cars than people in tokyo.

most people do everything via public transport and/or bicycle.

https://stats-japan.com/t/kiji/10786

i mean none of the supermarkets close to my home have parkings... (they have a bunch of bike racks though).

there is 1 combini with a small ~6 spots parking that sits mostly empty. my building has more units than parking spots, there are a lot of bikes though.

in tokyo, having a car is not the default, you need a good reason.

now if you get out of tokyo (like gunma), it's another story, in japan they talk about "car society" (kuruma shakai). you'll see lots of cars, and big parkings.

This is the point I am trying to make.

Even somewhere which is lauded as having "good" public transport such as London and its actually not good in real life situations. Yes its great and all to visit London or Amsterdam or Berlin or whatever on vacation when you don't have Real Life (TM) responsibilities to worry about and you're only ever shuffling around the most central tourist areas and attractions with no real time pressures etc.

But realistically unless you put train lines literally everywhere there are roads now, and have non-stop trains shuttling around all day every day that turn up every 3 minutes, public transport is going to be terrible for day to day living for most people simply because it doesn't go where you need it to go, when you need it.

I think the 15 minute city proponents are deluding themselves. Yes it is a nice dream that everything is a 15 minute walk away (...presumably on a warm sunny day when you have no time pressures), but really when it comes down to actual day to day living its kinda ridiculous - so you're going to have offices, nurseries, primary schools, secondary schools, universities, doctors, dentists, hospitals, grocery stores, vets, hardware stores, gyms, libraries, churches, synagogues, mosques, cinemas, restaurants, bars, art galleries etc etc - all the things we need for day to day living and life in general - repeated every mile or two so that people can walk to them within 15 mins?

That is absurd.

You just cant have that density of things like major hospitals or universities for example. Ah but then we add public transport links they say! But then you're back to where we are currently with a "good" public transport system actually being expensive and a pain in the ass to use because it can't be a direct link to every single possible place in the urban graph so it ends up meaning in reality you walk 5-10 minutes to reach a stop, wait 5-10 minutes for something to turn up, pay £3.50 to ride for 10-15 minutes, potentially change buses or train/metro/tram lines (including the 5-10 minute wait for that to arrive), get out, walk another 5-10 minutes etc, when if you had just driven it would have taken 5 minutes and you don't need to carry back 18kg of groceries on the return journey that also costs you £3.50 as well and also takes just as long except now everyone else on the bus/train/tram hates you because you're taking up the space of 4 passengers with your shopping bags and you're banging into them. And let's not even start with the weather.

tokyo contradicts your statement.

How? No roads and only rail everywhere? Point-to-point transport that cost pennies? No waits for things to arrive?

Tokyo with it's huge sprawl seems like the absolute antithesis of a 15 minute city.

for first, most people do not own cars and do everything via public transport/bicycle.

plus. it is often faster to use public transport than using a car, and cheaper...

supermarkets, grocery stores, hospitals, offices, appartments have generally no or little parking spots.

you will have to find dedicated parking spots which are pretty expensive, and will in fine have you walk around as if you were going to the station...

oh and yes, as i mentioned before lots of apartments don't have parking spots, so you will have to walk some to get to your car, and you will have to pay a hefty sum to rent the parking spot.

there are dentists/hairdressers/grocery stores/restaurants pretty much everywhere in tokyo. use google maps and try by yourself you will see.

people haul their stuff by hand or with their bikes.

people who don't have a very specific reason to own cars simply don't... there is no point. the building where i live has way less car parking spots than units (and it is illegal to own a car without a dedicated parking spot in japan).

people who have cars are generally one of: - do not actually live in tokyo - go in and out of tokyo often - need for work (cargo) - hobby / family need (haul a lot of stuff regularly or enjoy driving)

i'm specifically talking of tokyo, outside of tokyo you will find lots of parking spots and cars.

European countries only have good and affordable transport in the first and second tier cities. I usually spend a few weeks per year in Europe, often in smaller cities or rural areas, and the only public transport you'll find is some occasional bus service at inconvenient times. In those places everyone drives everywhere. Or they just sit around and home and don't go anywhere.

And then there are third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable and you again don't need a car.

My ideal city of the future is a small walkable town with everything within a 15-20 minute walk, possibly a part of a conglomerate of towns that run trains or buses between them.

I currently live in one such historical town in Southern Europe that's protected by Unesco. The streets are so narrow that not only there's no public transport, all non-resident and non-delivery traffic is prohibited and there's no Uber even. And yet you have everything you need for life and work within a 15-20 minute walk max. More for remote work, obviously.

An ideal city of the future doesn't need to be medieval but maybe we should go back to a city planning concept that is made for humans and not cars. And you know, narrow pedestrian streets are totally fine, they are cute!

> And then there are third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable and you again don't need a car.

Ah yeah sure I'll just find work in a place and then buy a house there. It's not like 3+ decades of mismanagement on migration and internal policies left even places 30+ minutes by car from work unafforable by mere mortals.

> third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable

Very many people, including me, want to live in a glorious walkable bijou old-town stone apartment, except they can't afford to because they stopped building them like that in about 1756 and the only jobs within walking distance of the old town are in hospitality and those do not pay the salaries to buy one of the treasured old town apartments from under an AirBnB host.

And if it's a really small, non-tourist town in the middle of nowhere, it may not even have the hospitality sector. So, yes, that bijou property may indeed only cost 50,000 euros, and yes, you can walk to the boulangerie or the confitería or whatever but you're probably going to need a car to get out of your tiny town and go to work or basically anywhere else.

Or you could work remotely or hybrid, or take a 30-60 minute wifi-enabled commuter train to the big city for your big city job, clocking in and handling your emails during your commute and doing the last bits of work on your way home.

There's lots of solutions.

It's interesting to me seeing the different ways that different people respond to our modern urban hellholes. I don't want to live in a city at all, I want to live in at most a village where people all have their own land, and the village 'center' is just the most convenient nexus of property lines, where people could set up the local market.

I always sort of assume people who are into de-urbanization are also de-dev, because I don't see how or why the large-scale industrial base would be needed or could be sustained with only smaller, distributed cities, but it's interesting to hear another perspective.

Peasant life has its charms, I suppose.

It's only peasant if you have a Lord. Ni Dieu, ni maitre.

You only have everything you need for work in such a city if your "work" is limited to small offices, restaurants, and retail shops. So you're excluding everything related to manufacturing, agriculture, resource extraction, logistics, military, etc. You know, all of that stuff that keeps modern industrial civilization operating and allows quaint medieval towns to continue existing at all. If you like where you live that's great, but it's hardly ideal and certainly not scalable.

> all of that stuff that keeps modern industrial civilization operating and allows quaint medieval towns to continue existing at all

That doesn't make sense to me. Medieval towns existed for centuries before industrial civilization and without it we might see a drastic increase in medieval style living...

In any case the poster is talking about their own ideal future scenario, maybe leaving out the details like the robots working in underground manufacturing facilities or fusion-powered hydroponic vertical farms etc.

> if your "work" is limited to small offices, restaurants, and retail shops.

...or just any kind of remote work. Still limited, not available to everyone obviously but can't be omitted.

Yeah, I agree. I've just happened to live in two capitals, so I've had access to top-tier public transport. But even in the capitals, a simple 10-minute drive can turn into a 50-minute journey on public transport (this is a literal common example of mine, not an exaggeration!). So even then, you have to consider how much your time is worth.

I lived in a lower-tier American city (Charleston, SC) for 15 years, and this was my experience with public transportation. I had commute options of a 7 mile drive @ 30 minutes due to congestion, a 7 mile bike ride @ 35 minutes no congestion thanks to bike lanes, or approximately 2 hours bus ride on an unreliable system with no good drop off points and no guarantees in a timely arrival or space for a bicycle to complete the 2 mile walk to my office. These numbers are also one way, not round trip.

In other words, I could not use the service in any honest sense.

Perhaps a nice future is a hybrid model of public transportation plus personal transport via bicycles and scooters, especially with battery powered options becoming so robust.

Even in the first tier cities there is usually significant personal car ownership, often with more than half of households owning one.

Is that because many people find even first tier city public transit inadequate for much of their normal in-city transport, or are there a lot of people living in the first tier cities who need to visit the smaller cities or rural areas often enough that it is worth keeping a car just for those occasions?

> only

Categorically this isn't true, I easily found good and affordable public transport in smaller towns. It's definitely less common, but to bluntly say that only first and second tier cities have gold and affordable public transport is inaccurate and dismissive.

My motorized freedom dreams got stuck in increasingly worse traffic. Nowadays I dream of a "bikeable" commute and grocery shopping and whatever works best between public transport and driving on the weekends.

My area is fairly "bikeable" but I seldom ride my bike for errands because I can't be sure that it will still be there when I get out of the store. The local authorities do almost nothing to prevent bike theft.

Sure, cars can also be stolen. But modern cars are now fairly theft resistant and police at least take it seriously as a crime.

I ebike and the combination of an old rusty bike plus a large lock seems to stop thieves, even though I leave it on the street 247. I take the battery in though. And have a funky diy paint job. Also even if it was stolen it cost less than any of a years tax on the car, one service on the car, one replacement shock on the car etc.

My way of shopping with my bike is either taking my obviously pricey bike, which I can just walk into the supermarket without anyone thinking it could be left outside, or just take my old 25kg bike that's kind of not worth stealing and lock it somewhat close to the entrance just in case.

I have the same experience, but I wonder if I just got older and more spoiled or if non-car traffic really got worse

It has gotten significantly worse to the point where I stopped taking it. Prices on public transport are now also so high I'm better off taking the car on most trips.

Also it it me or are "just have walkable/bikeable cities people" more obnoxious than vegan speed cyclists

And who do you think is most interested in such decay of public transportation?

I'd say the decline is happening (in my experience) in most public services, not just transport.

But anyway, I'm purposely staying away from discussing politics here since it's pointless, so I'll just share my experience as a public transport end-user, and the rest can fill in the gaps with their perspectives.

No one is "interested" in making public transit worse, the issue is that people in power are not users of it and so are not invested in it, and civic and national pride is generally dead in the West, being replaced with vapid nationalism, so there's no drive (no pun intended) to invest in public works projects.

The way I understand your comment, it implies that a) users of public transportation should be invested in it, whilst it’s more likely that they use it because they have no alternative, and that b) civic and national pride results in higher demand for public transportation. I don’t think those are universal truths.

You don't think that people who use services care more about the service than non-users? Whether they're forced into using it or not, the fact they do absolutely makes them more invested in it being good.

Civic and national pride makes citizens (which includes politicians and the wealthy) more likely to care about the actual state of their country. That's what national pride means, as opposed to nationalism, where they are proud without reason. Is public transit guaranteed to be one of those reasons they feel pride or shame? Not at all, but support for it is certainly more likely to come from that than a bunch of nationalists who don't actually feel any shame at failings of the country, of which public transit is currently.

When users of transit are few there is not enough people to care. often the only users are those least likely to be usefuly involved. so you can't get a useful advocate. Even when transit gets support it is from people wanting to feel good about helping the poor - but would never use it themselves and so they want something with no care for quality. They often make alliences with those whose intersts are not for good transit and don't care that the compromise is bad for transit.

The London Mayor some years ago, Ken Livingstone, was a huge proponent of public trasport and used it extensively.

The current Mayor, whilst still a proponent, likely does not use it. A quick glance at the social media that he recieves will tell you why - it would not be safe. He needs to travel with close protection officers.

The reason? He is Muslim, and Britain has become a very racist country indeed. Well, maybe always was, but the likes of Farage and Musk have so emboldened them that there is no longer a stigma.

Nobody is worrying about the native English. If they were, they wouldn't have immigrated there.

Make it like Japan, not public, private. Then, like Japan, provide positive feedback loops so it’s in each of the 100+ train companies in Japan’s best interest to provide good service. They do this by letting the private train companies have complementary interests like shopping centers, office rental, apartments, etc such that the more people ride their trains the more business they get to their other interests.

Conversely, “public” transportation always needs flawless perfect politicians to continue to fund it

I don't get it. If you've been enjoying public transportation for so long, then why is your reaction to it getting worse not: OK, we need to fix it so it's as good as it was.

Instead you are just saying: OK, I have the resources to fix the problem for myself, so I don't give a F.

I do give a F. I'm paying a fair amount in taxes every month despite not using it.

On top of that, what's your proposal? Whether I use it (and be miserable) or not doesn't move the needle either way, so I choose not to be miserable.

If there were actually a way to make it better, I'd maybe get involved. But since I see zero options, I just stay away from it. Virtue signaling doesn't work for me.

Ha, the "I pay taxes" type I see. Paying taxes doesn't necessarily mean you care. For example part of the taxes I pay will go into the Military Industrial Complex, but yet I wish they don't exist.

One way to reduce the chance of meeting "unpleasant" people (are they really unpleasant or has your perception just changed as you age?), is to just have more of public transportation! Besides pure statistics, it also makes people's lives better and will reduce poverty.

transportation is expensive and must be paid somehow. For most people good public transportation would realistically cost them $100 per month - that is less than they spend on a car per month but still a lot of money. (Car costs are mostly hidden - you spend less than that in gas, not noticing the payments, insurance which are paid differently, or maitenance which is large bills not often).

when looking at the above, most people live in a couple situation so think of it as selling one car and keeping the other - it still saves money and you get the best of both worlds. This only works though if transit is getting that money from everyone already though since you need that much before it is useful to those who would pay.

How do you fix the mentioned problem of "filled with unpleasant people" with money?

Usually when people get older and start complaining about new "unpleasant people" the issue isn't that new unpleasant people exist. Rather, its that the older person has not adapted and is stuck. They become "get off my lawn" types

As someone who is 32 and takes public transport, if a homeless person gets on my train car and smells bad enough to stink up half (or all!) of the car, they have earned the "unpleasant people" label fair and square. Yes I understand it may be their only option, and I sympathize with them but it still makes my trip unpleasant.

It’s easy to dismiss a problem by just saying that someone is just an “older person” who “didn’t adapt”.

It is, but it's also just something I see time and time and time again.

Every generation complains about how the world is going to shit and the yougins ain't got no respect and whatever particular segment of brown people at that time don't belong in their country.

I would have some sympathy if this wasn't, like, the millionth time this has happened.

Do you think the unpleasantness of people has gotten worse over time? If so, what caused that to happen?

Not my quote, just pointing out that not everything can be solved with money. But yes, I think it got worse over time.

Look one layer deeper and likely the issues are classist. Of course you didn't mention where you were, but, in the places I've lived, it goes down like this: the people who are wealthy enough to not need to use use public transit have more sway in terms of voting/persuading politicians, and push for policies that directly benefit them, even if it's to the detriment of the city overall.

Thus: more resources go towards those places with insane house prices, leaving everyone and everything else behind. The problem isn't public transit, it's the wealthy.

Right on point.

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