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Comment by direwolf20 | Hacker News Reader

Taxis daily! In a country without trains, is that normal?

Driving to work is the most common way of commuting everywhere in the US except NYC. So in that sense, no, taking a taxi to work daily is not normal, just as walking, biking, and taking public transit aren’t normal.

When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.

San Francisco's connection to Caltrain is deplorable, but as far as US cities go, the heart of it has pretty good public transportation.

> but as far as US cities go

That the load bearing part right there. SF's transportation is pretty piss poor

> but as far as US cities go, the heart of it has pretty good public transportation

Damning with extremely faint praise there...

not everywhere in the US except NYC. People take trains in Chicago, for example.

They do, at a much higher rate than the US as a whole, but cars are still dominant. Transit mode share in the city of Chicago is around 21%, down from 28% pre-pandemic, while driving is at 44%. For Chicagoland as a whole, driving is 63%, transit only 9%. The usual source for this data is the American Community Survey; I pulled these numbers from https://api.census.gov, but the same source is also cited in e.g. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...) and Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-22/how-ameri...)

According to [1] the median Bay Area big tech worker earns $272k/year - or $130/hour.

According to [2] Uber drivers make $15 to $25 an hour, before expenses like fuel.

So while it's not normal it's certainly plausible that some people take taxis on a daily basis.

More broadly, as levels of wealth inequality rise in a given society, more people end up working in the personal service sector doing things like cleaning, food delivery, taxi driving etc.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... [2] https://www.triplog.net/blog/how-much-do-uber-drivers-make

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