I wholeheartedly agree with the purpose of this community and what it advocates for, but I wanted to add some rebuttals to your points.
You mention you have the privilege of not using your car. In car centric parts of the world, which is anything that isn’t a big city, this is a privilege. My family that lives in a town of 50,000 people in Germany still need to use their cars every day! There is only a bus system to get them around. Each working age adult uses their car every day! Including the one who lives in Köln and literally walks across the street to his office because car transportation is far more time efficient than transit.
See anecdote above. I live in Boston, which is supposedly extremely transit friendly and the T and commuter rail, while remarkably extensive, are abysmal. I rode it for two months until I finally gave up and got a car. I live in a house 0.5 miles from the commuter rail station and it’s the cheapest around at $750k, I should be able to have reliable transport to MIT/Kendall.
Your issues with driving, being honked at, being annoyed with lack of right of way, all seem to come from inexperience driving in the city. On roads with speed limits of 30 mph, there is no right of way, it’s just about whoever goes first. After some time, you learn what to expect from locals and adapt to their style. But I understand if driving in a big city makes people uncomfortable. There is a lot going on, and a lot to pay attention to.
Schedule. My god is our transit schedule awful. Commuter rail only once every hour. It’s either 5 minutes early or 20 minutes late regularly. So it’s completely unreliable. The Red line is now slow as fuck. Crawling at 10 mph in most areas now. It’s faster to ride your bike between stations, and get stopped by every traffic light than it is to ride the train. And now the red line only has service every 20-30 minutes!
I loved visiting London. We even got a rental to see things like Stonehenge or Brighton, but I never felt the need to use the car much within the city. While I thoroughly enjoyed driving through parts of London like tiny bridges that had inches of clearance on either side of the vehicle, or massive roundabouts near Victoria station, I never needed to do that for local journeys.
It takes 30 minutes for me to drive to work, but 50-90 minutes to go by public transit and I literally live in a massive transit corridor with service from my house directly to work. It’s absolutely absurd. Essentially, transit only broadly works in US if you live in NYC. It’s too sparse in SF to be used widely. Too sparse in DC. Chicago is 10 times worse with it’s urban sprawl. And unreliable as fuck in Boston. Boston doesn’t even have a reasonable train to the goddamned airport (yes I know about the blue line, but it’s still a 15 min bus from the blue line station, and you can only transfer to the blue line from the green line).
This is why people drive. Because for the vast majority off us, even those in Europe, there is no better alternative. If transit was so much cheaper, then why doesn’t every village of 10,000 people in Europe have a tram? There are simply too many places people want to go, and only extreme density can make transit cost effective.
Yes, but please join me in finding ironic the fact that nowadays not having to own a car has become a privilege. It is a “privilege” that has been artificially built into our societies. Taking the US for example, car companies in the 50’s bought and demolished streetcar lines to force more people to use their cars, created entire propaganda campaigns to remove the streets from public transport and pedestrians, and literally indoctrinate children with their agenda. This is a video I always recommend watching, as it goes through all these points from a US-perspective. This absolutely did not just happen in the US, this a map of the tram lines in my city in 1929, this is it nowadays.
About smaller settlements, again, while I DO think that a good public transport is possible even there (I think Switzerland is a good example of how that can be done, maybe the Netherlands? Someone in the comments will sure tell me better examples, thank you commenter), I feel like the prime scope of this community is on cities, aka where the big stuff goes on, where people live, work, shop and hang out (very good article about that).
3+5. I agree, infrequent or unreliable public transit is like no public transit at all (okay not really, but it sure is bad). There are two ways to make good transit: you either make it so frequent you literally don’t care about the schedules because you know the next ride is going to be at the station in 10 minutes or less at the most (hello, japan?) or you strictly schedule stops so that users can reliably know at what times the service will be there (I am obviously more of a fan of the first option, but the second probably applies better if you have a very small budget like a 5,000 people town). I suppose the reason you gave up on using transit despite living on a transit corridor that goes to your workplace is the lack of both, correct me if I am wrong.
I have to disappoint you on this, but I took my license driving here. I passed my driving test with no errors and I have never gotten into a crash; I always drive at the speed limit. What happens to be the reason one gets mostly honked at here, is actually following the rules: going at the speed limit rather than 50% more than that, or giving the right of way to a car in front of you which has it by law. There is no “local driving style” here, there is just anarchy resulting from decades of total lack of traffic rules enforcement, which goes hand in hand with having one of the bloodiest amount of deadly/injuring crashes in europe every year. Driving doesn’t make people just uncomfortable, it makes them stress. For an intelligent and curious species like humans, doing an extremely boring and repetitive task to which they are supposed to give their full attention the entire time, is stressful; road rage is very common, to the point it has become “normality” here, crashes are as well.
I wholeheartedly agree with the purpose of this community and what it advocates for, but I wanted to add some rebuttals to your points.
You mention you have the privilege of not using your car. In car centric parts of the world, which is anything that isn’t a big city, this is a privilege. My family that lives in a town of 50,000 people in Germany still need to use their cars every day! There is only a bus system to get them around. Each working age adult uses their car every day! Including the one who lives in Köln and literally walks across the street to his office because car transportation is far more time efficient than transit.
See anecdote above. I live in Boston, which is supposedly extremely transit friendly and the T and commuter rail, while remarkably extensive, are abysmal. I rode it for two months until I finally gave up and got a car. I live in a house 0.5 miles from the commuter rail station and it’s the cheapest around at $750k, I should be able to have reliable transport to MIT/Kendall.
Your issues with driving, being honked at, being annoyed with lack of right of way, all seem to come from inexperience driving in the city. On roads with speed limits of 30 mph, there is no right of way, it’s just about whoever goes first. After some time, you learn what to expect from locals and adapt to their style. But I understand if driving in a big city makes people uncomfortable. There is a lot going on, and a lot to pay attention to.
Schedule. My god is our transit schedule awful. Commuter rail only once every hour. It’s either 5 minutes early or 20 minutes late regularly. So it’s completely unreliable. The Red line is now slow as fuck. Crawling at 10 mph in most areas now. It’s faster to ride your bike between stations, and get stopped by every traffic light than it is to ride the train. And now the red line only has service every 20-30 minutes!
I loved visiting London. We even got a rental to see things like Stonehenge or Brighton, but I never felt the need to use the car much within the city. While I thoroughly enjoyed driving through parts of London like tiny bridges that had inches of clearance on either side of the vehicle, or massive roundabouts near Victoria station, I never needed to do that for local journeys.
It takes 30 minutes for me to drive to work, but 50-90 minutes to go by public transit and I literally live in a massive transit corridor with service from my house directly to work. It’s absolutely absurd. Essentially, transit only broadly works in US if you live in NYC. It’s too sparse in SF to be used widely. Too sparse in DC. Chicago is 10 times worse with it’s urban sprawl. And unreliable as fuck in Boston. Boston doesn’t even have a reasonable train to the goddamned airport (yes I know about the blue line, but it’s still a 15 min bus from the blue line station, and you can only transfer to the blue line from the green line).
This is why people drive. Because for the vast majority off us, even those in Europe, there is no better alternative. If transit was so much cheaper, then why doesn’t every village of 10,000 people in Europe have a tram? There are simply too many places people want to go, and only extreme density can make transit cost effective.
About smaller settlements, again, while I DO think that a good public transport is possible even there (I think Switzerland is a good example of how that can be done, maybe the Netherlands? Someone in the comments will sure tell me better examples, thank you commenter), I feel like the prime scope of this community is on cities, aka where the big stuff goes on, where people live, work, shop and hang out (very good article about that).
3+5. I agree, infrequent or unreliable public transit is like no public transit at all (okay not really, but it sure is bad). There are two ways to make good transit: you either make it so frequent you literally don’t care about the schedules because you know the next ride is going to be at the station in 10 minutes or less at the most (hello, japan?) or you strictly schedule stops so that users can reliably know at what times the service will be there (I am obviously more of a fan of the first option, but the second probably applies better if you have a very small budget like a 5,000 people town). I suppose the reason you gave up on using transit despite living on a transit corridor that goes to your workplace is the lack of both, correct me if I am wrong.