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Comment by Gud | Hacker News Reader

Writing this on a tram in Zürich. At this hour(peak hours) they depart ever 2-3 minutes or so. Walking distance is 50 meters.

It feels great.

Now let me hear your objections to why public transport could never work at your location

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The drivers in my country emigrated to Switzerland.

I jest, but it's true that my city of 650k souls is in a dire need of around 100 bus/tram drivers and that many emigrated to rich countries which provide an overall better standard of work/living.

Personally for minor errands I cycle because I can't rely on public transport and neither can anyone else, so there's traffic congestion everywhere. I'm not happy with this, but I don't really have other options.

Switzerland's extreme wealth makes them a bit of an outlier though, other european countries are probably a fairer comparisons for most places.

I would argue having functioning public transport is a must to generate extreme wealth.

I travel all across Europe for work and only few places has similarly functioning public transport as Zürich. Stockholm city center, that's about it.

I am not from Switzerland.

Public transport usually requires a medium-to-high density to be sustainable. However, it can get saturated - in Paris, the subway and the trams are full for long periods during the day, even at midnight! It makes the experience really unpleasant when you have no alternative.

Man, you really public transportation, you've been all over this thread sniping every positive comment about public transportation

I love quality public transportation. The problem is that most of the time people make cities less car-friendly, but don't improve public transport, as it's expensive and their electorate wants bike lanes, making the situation worse for everyone. In my city, they removed the parking space near the farmer's market, but didn't add any bus line or renovate the tram, which doesn't allow disabled people or just strollers to hop in. How are we supposed to come there?

> The problem is that most of the time people make cities less car-friendly, but don't improve public transport,

That's my complaint too. We've added plenty of things to make driving worse where I am, but there's no real alternative presented. I can walk a mile to a bus stop in the sun where the bus may or may not show up for an hour (they promise they will improve it eventually) and will then drop me off somewhere I still have to walk most of a mile from. They made the road to the bus stop a bit worse to walk on and I gave up.

I would love to not have to drive. But I'm not really given the option, I'm just given less parking so that there's a nice bike lane I can jump into when someone comes barrelling down the sidewalk.

I'm not really arguing that the world adopts the Paris metro system. First of all, there are turn stills everywhere which is nowhere to be found in Zürich. Why not create choke points and erect this annoying block everywhere in front of people who wish to reach their destination as quickly as possible. Great idea.

In Luxembourg, public transport is for free. Also great.

That's the reason nobody uses public transport in Paris: it's too crowded.

My location isn't urban and those in the nearest cities don't care about making it convenient for me to get there.

It's a trade off, but I've never been as comfortable when living in an urban area so it is what it is.

Yeah, it's not for every location.

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