The man in the car has to be at work at 8AM. He has a 15-minute commute, so he can leave at 7:40 to give himself a bit of extra time to get there. At 12:30, he gets a call that his mother is in critical condition in the hospital. He leaves immediately, drives 30 minutes to the hospital the next town over, and is there to say his last goodbye before she passes away.
A man on the bus has to be at work at 8AM. The bus runs hourly with the scheduled pickup being x:20. Normally, it takes 30 minutes to reach his stop and another 10 minutes to walk, but sometimes the bus runs 10-15 minutes late, so he has to take the 6:20 bus to make sure he can get there on time. At 12:30, he gets a call that his mother is in critical condition in the hospital. The man pulls up Google Maps to find the quickest bus route to the hospital, runs to the bus stop in 5 minutes, and waits another 10 minutes for the bus to arrive. Unfortunately, this stop does not have a direct route to the hospital, so he must ride the bus for 10 minutes and make a connection to another bus at a different stop. On the way there, the first bus stops in front of a retirement community, and 10 elderly passengers spend a good 5 minutes fumbling through pocketbooks for bus fare because they don’t understand how to use the newfangled reloadable transit cards. One elderly man gets violent because he has no change and the bus driver won’t take a check, so he has to be removed from the bus. The man gets off at his first stop and sprints across the block to his next bus stop, but he realizes that he has unfortunately arrived late, and the second bus he had to catch just left. The bus runs hourly and this city is too small for there to be an abundance of taxis, so his options are either to wait an hour for the next bus or to call an Uber. The man opens his Uber app and, after 5 minutes, it matches him to a driver. The man waits around, watching the map as the Uber driver circles around the city for a bit, before eventually that driver drops and he is connected to a different driver. Another 5 minutes pass, the Uber driver arrives, and the man is now in a car on the way to the hospital. A 20-minute drive later, the man is now at the hospital, but his mother has just passed away before he had the chance to say goodbye.
Taxis are expensive and have the fuel issue per the post were replying to. They were pretty long winded but busses do take longer than driving yourself that much is true.
you use mass transit (buses, trains) normally, and you use personal transit (taxis, cars) in emergency situations like the comment was referring to. I think that’s what they are trying to say.
Also, buses, trams, and trains CAN be much faster than cars if they are built correctly. Going to a mall in the center of a >1mil population city is much easier and faster on a metro than a car.
Don’t think of buses in a vaccum, consider other modes like rail and bike paths as well.
You don’t walk to a freeway, get in a car and get off the car at the end of the freeway to walk right?
A man in a place with bad public transit gets the call that his mother has been in a car accident and is being rushed to the hospital at 8AM. Since it’s rush hour, he spends the next two hours stuck in gridlock traffic (bad traffic today, something about a big car accident…). He doesn’t make it in time for her last goodbyes.
In contrast:
A man in a city with a good public transport goes to work easily and there is minimal traffic. His mom doesn’t get hospitalized because there are fewer cars on the road and the streets are designed for pedestrian safety.
or
His mom gets to the hospital more quickly because there is less traffic. She survives.
or
He runs (or bikes) to the hospital within 20 minutes because he lives close to it in a dense neighborhood without endless sprawl caused by parking lots and cars.
or
He gets to the hospital quickly via an efficient transit route since there are many routes going to a hospital because… it’s a hospital!
or
He calls a taxi that arrives quickly and gets him to the hospital in 1 hour because there is less traffic.
Also, in all these scenarios everyone in the society is wealthier and healthier due to spending less money on their cars and breathing less pollution. They all get to work quicker because of less traffic congestion.
Nowhere in my post did I mention traffic. Traffic is not a concern in my area.
Emissions are a non-problem as EVs become more common.
The scenario involves a need to get out of your city and into another ASAP. How dense your city is irrelevant if the place you need to go is somewhere else.
The point of the scenario is about balance of time in life, and how to immediately get somewhere in an emergency. Regardless of whether the mother lives or dies in this scenario, is a loved one in the hospital ever not an emergency? Would anyone in the real world ever think “Well I’m sure the ambulance got there quick enough, no need to rush”?
Point 2: actually a very significant portion of pollution from cars are micropollutants from tires and not related to emissions
Point 3: trains.
Point 4: if we’re considering random scenarios: “oh no my car broke down” is… much more common than “my loved one is in the hospital”. Good public transport is only marginally slower, and is a more pleasant experience as a whole.
Most of these are from you never having had actually good public transport, it seems to me.
I lived in China, which supposedly has good public transport. I’ve spent a bit in Japan as well, which supposedly has god-tier public transport. Leagues above the rest of the world I’ve visited, but still less than ideal in a number of ways.
I’ve never felt more trapped than I did during the years I spent not owning a car. You’re stuck to transit schedules. You can’t stay out too late or all of the lines stop running and you end up having to walk home in the dark for miles or sleep on a park bench until dawn. There’s a severe lack of options to visit anywhere interesting outside of the city using public transit, so your entire world may as well be nothing but bleak urban sprawl. And it’s one thing to deal with trains and buses when you’re living on schedule, but when unexpected scenarios happen, you just get fucked.
Except you don’t “just get fucked” in those unexpected scenarios because taxis and ubers still exist. Most car owners pay over $1000/month in total cost of ownership, so you’d have plenty of budget for emergency taxis/ubers if you stop owning a car.
The thing is, you’re technically correct in your claim that transit time and convenience are the reasons “why people drive”. Those are the pros of driving, from the perspective of the individual making the decision to drive rather than use transit. However, in order to understand why we should de-prioritize cars in favor of other forms of transit, we must also consider the cons of driving for the individual (excessive cost, mental fatigue of focusing on driving, elevated risk of bodily harm, etc.) as well as the harms that driving causes to others (pedestrian fatalities, urban sprawl, marginalization of public transport, etc.)
After all, flying a helicopter would be even faster than driving a car, but nobody is going around implying that we should all fly helicopters everywhere just in case we need to rush to our mother’s side when she’s on her deathbed.
edit: I noticed in another comment you said that taxis don’t exist in your city and you avoid using uber out of principle due to their questionable ethics. I would hope that since you are concerned about ethics you would see that car-centric infrastructure has marginalized many people and neighbourhoods, far more than an occasional uber ride ever has. Buying a car and using it daily to avoid the ethical implications of an emergency uber ride once in a while is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
“15 minute drive” at rush hour. My man could walk.
This entire comment could be summarized by “butbutbut people who live in areas with shitty public transport have to drive”
We already know this. The point is to make it better, because good public transport is better for literally everyone. I live on the edge of town, and I’m 5 minutes from 7 bus stops for 5 different bus lines, and a train station. Most of those buses come every 10-15 minutes, and are up to 5 minutes late at rush hour. It is by far a better experience to take the bus than to drive for me.
I’m imagining more of a 15 minute drive down the interstate at 70mph. I am not going to walk or bike 15 miles to and from work, particularly in the rain/snow/heat.
I know you’re trying to say the opposite, but what I’m thinking of when reading your comment, is that more money should be invested in building better infrastructure to make buses and trains more reliable.
Like 90% of the traffic hindering the buses is made up of cars. With less cars, more people could ride buses, trains etc. and people could ride a lot more frequently. People shouldn’t have to fumble through their purses, because busrides should be mostly free.
I’m not even talking traffic. Buses are just inherently slower than cars.
A car gets me from point A to point B with little to no interruption. To go the same distance in a bus, I first have to walk 10 minutes to the closest bus stop, ride the bus down a less direct route with a dozen stops along the way, and then when I get to my stop, walk another 10 minutes to get where I need to go. And the entire time, you are at the mercy of a schedule that is often unreliable. I am not kidding when I say taking a bus would triple my commute time. When I am working 50+ hours a week, it’s just not feasible.
Everyone in here apparently lives in a fantasy city where public transport takes you exactly where you want to go, is never late, and runs every 5 minutes. And when the whole thread here is full of “Just take a taxi/Uber”, how is that a solution to the problem above?
And this is what so many people seem fail to realise here. You can’t have a flawless public transport system in an area with 1 person per square mile.
Is the suggestion here that nobody should be allowed to live in a remote location in order to remove cars from society? Or do people actually believe that a decent system exists for people with their nearest neighbours a mile away?
Feels like the issue has been simplified to the point of absurdity sometimes. I don’t love cars but I couldn’t live without mine, even if public transport was improved to perfection in my area.
Is this world that’s being proposed one where nobody can go camping? How do we get to places with no towns or cities? Charter a bus of our own or wait until 67 other people want to go with me? How do parents of 3+ young children manage? If you have triplets you’re making a very hard job (something simple like going shopping) 5x harder. Is this world one where food delivery is the only option for a big shop? Or are we expected to shop daily so we can carry everything home on a bus?
Omg. Let’s argue a once in a lifetime situation and use it as the reasoning for people driving daily let alone the whole environment point the ad is about.
It’s one-in-a-lifetime situations that people typically try to account for. And the average person is likely to have more than one emergency in life that they need to be somewhere ASAP for.
I take the bus to work almost every day. I have a choice of three bus routes that work for me, one of which runs every 15 minutes. The one I take runs every 30. The only time they have been behind schedule was during a blizzard, but I got an alert on my phone about it.
No one has ever slowed down everyone else while fumbling for change because the busses are fare-free.
Public transportation can work, but we have spent the last 80 years developing a culture of individual car ownership so that we haven’t prioritized making public transportation that works for the people.
So the model only works if you have a large number of free (at point of service) buses which go between everywhere anyone may want to start to anywhere they may want to go?
I lived in a larger city and for me it is normal to switch trains or busses a few times when i travel from a to b. But because they made a relatively smart system changing is in most cases fast.
Like trains meeting up at a station and people can simply walk to the other side to get the other train.
So it does not need all possible solutions, it needs a few that work well together.
The answer to these problems is just better public transport… buses coming more often. Problem solved. No need to resort to individualised transport because public doesn’t run often enough.
wouldn’t you just take a taxi/uber in such an emergency situation?
Also, buses don’t exist in a vacuum, and PT can easily be faster than cars. Think of metros in the city, dedicated bus lanes on congested roads, and bicycle paths to stations and stops
Have you used Uber? Last time, I was stuck waiting on the sidewalk for 30 minutes as my request got passed from driver to driver. It’s fine when they’re quick, but when your solution to “I need to go somewhere now” is to rely on borderline slave labor who don’t have to pick you up if they don’t like where you are, it’s not great.
I doubt it. Reduce both directions of car lanes by a couple of meters and suddenly you’ve got a bus lane. Alternatively if it’s narrower work it into a one way system and the lane that was the other direction becomes space for the bus lane.
For the first, if you can’t find a job where starting 10 minutes later is not something you can negotiate, then probably you working at a low end job, in that case you shouldn’t spend your hard earned money on car payments and gas anyway.
Cars are obviously more convenient, but also more expensive and less environment friendly. Noone force anyone to give up your convenience so no need to go defensive, just consider it as an option for all the good reasons.
I love how much hate this reply got. Yes, its over the top and unrealistic, but the point is that private cars are extremely convenient while public transportation isn’t. Yes, private cars are very bad for the environment. So is pretty much all modern human industry.
Stop having kids, if you’re so concerned about the environment. Your stupid butthole babies and their progeny will cause more environmental harm than any of your personal lifestyle choices.
The man in the car has to be at work at 8AM. He has a 15-minute commute, so he can leave at 7:40 to give himself a bit of extra time to get there. At 12:30, he gets a call that his mother is in critical condition in the hospital. He leaves immediately, drives 30 minutes to the hospital the next town over, and is there to say his last goodbye before she passes away.
A man on the bus has to be at work at 8AM. The bus runs hourly with the scheduled pickup being x:20. Normally, it takes 30 minutes to reach his stop and another 10 minutes to walk, but sometimes the bus runs 10-15 minutes late, so he has to take the 6:20 bus to make sure he can get there on time. At 12:30, he gets a call that his mother is in critical condition in the hospital. The man pulls up Google Maps to find the quickest bus route to the hospital, runs to the bus stop in 5 minutes, and waits another 10 minutes for the bus to arrive. Unfortunately, this stop does not have a direct route to the hospital, so he must ride the bus for 10 minutes and make a connection to another bus at a different stop. On the way there, the first bus stops in front of a retirement community, and 10 elderly passengers spend a good 5 minutes fumbling through pocketbooks for bus fare because they don’t understand how to use the newfangled reloadable transit cards. One elderly man gets violent because he has no change and the bus driver won’t take a check, so he has to be removed from the bus. The man gets off at his first stop and sprints across the block to his next bus stop, but he realizes that he has unfortunately arrived late, and the second bus he had to catch just left. The bus runs hourly and this city is too small for there to be an abundance of taxis, so his options are either to wait an hour for the next bus or to call an Uber. The man opens his Uber app and, after 5 minutes, it matches him to a driver. The man waits around, watching the map as the Uber driver circles around the city for a bit, before eventually that driver drops and he is connected to a different driver. Another 5 minutes pass, the Uber driver arrives, and the man is now in a car on the way to the hospital. A 20-minute drive later, the man is now at the hospital, but his mother has just passed away before he had the chance to say goodbye.
This is why people drive.
Sorry to burst your tortured made up anecdote, but taxis exist.
Taxis are expensive and have the fuel issue per the post were replying to. They were pretty long winded but busses do take longer than driving yourself that much is true.
you use mass transit (buses, trains) normally, and you use personal transit (taxis, cars) in emergency situations like the comment was referring to. I think that’s what they are trying to say.
Also, buses, trams, and trains CAN be much faster than cars if they are built correctly. Going to a mall in the center of a >1mil population city is much easier and faster on a metro than a car.
Don’t think of buses in a vaccum, consider other modes like rail and bike paths as well.
You don’t walk to a freeway, get in a car and get off the car at the end of the freeway to walk right?
Cars are expensive as hell and you gotta have a place to park it
They presently do, because they are under resourced.
some countries subsidize their taxis to keep them cheap, it’s a great alternative to public transit
Not in my city they don’t. I mean, I even mentioned that if you had read what I wrote, but you do you.
That’s not a point against public transport, that’s a point against your city lol.
This is the most convoluted bullshit ever.
Since we’re making up stories…
A man in a place with bad public transit gets the call that his mother has been in a car accident and is being rushed to the hospital at 8AM. Since it’s rush hour, he spends the next two hours stuck in gridlock traffic (bad traffic today, something about a big car accident…). He doesn’t make it in time for her last goodbyes.
In contrast:
A man in a city with a good public transport goes to work easily and there is minimal traffic. His mom doesn’t get hospitalized because there are fewer cars on the road and the streets are designed for pedestrian safety.
or
His mom gets to the hospital more quickly because there is less traffic. She survives.
or
He runs (or bikes) to the hospital within 20 minutes because he lives close to it in a dense neighborhood without endless sprawl caused by parking lots and cars.
or
He gets to the hospital quickly via an efficient transit route since there are many routes going to a hospital because… it’s a hospital!
or
He calls a taxi that arrives quickly and gets him to the hospital in 1 hour because there is less traffic.
Also, in all these scenarios everyone in the society is wealthier and healthier due to spending less money on their cars and breathing less pollution. They all get to work quicker because of less traffic congestion.
This is why people want better public transit.
Way to miss the point.
Nowhere in my post did I mention traffic. Traffic is not a concern in my area.
Emissions are a non-problem as EVs become more common.
The scenario involves a need to get out of your city and into another ASAP. How dense your city is irrelevant if the place you need to go is somewhere else.
The point of the scenario is about balance of time in life, and how to immediately get somewhere in an emergency. Regardless of whether the mother lives or dies in this scenario, is a loved one in the hospital ever not an emergency? Would anyone in the real world ever think “Well I’m sure the ambulance got there quick enough, no need to rush”?
Point 2: actually a very significant portion of pollution from cars are micropollutants from tires and not related to emissions Point 3: trains. Point 4: if we’re considering random scenarios: “oh no my car broke down” is… much more common than “my loved one is in the hospital”. Good public transport is only marginally slower, and is a more pleasant experience as a whole.
Most of these are from you never having had actually good public transport, it seems to me.
I lived in China, which supposedly has good public transport. I’ve spent a bit in Japan as well, which supposedly has god-tier public transport. Leagues above the rest of the world I’ve visited, but still less than ideal in a number of ways.
I’ve never felt more trapped than I did during the years I spent not owning a car. You’re stuck to transit schedules. You can’t stay out too late or all of the lines stop running and you end up having to walk home in the dark for miles or sleep on a park bench until dawn. There’s a severe lack of options to visit anywhere interesting outside of the city using public transit, so your entire world may as well be nothing but bleak urban sprawl. And it’s one thing to deal with trains and buses when you’re living on schedule, but when unexpected scenarios happen, you just get fucked.
Except you don’t “just get fucked” in those unexpected scenarios because taxis and ubers still exist. Most car owners pay over $1000/month in total cost of ownership, so you’d have plenty of budget for emergency taxis/ubers if you stop owning a car.
The thing is, you’re technically correct in your claim that transit time and convenience are the reasons “why people drive”. Those are the pros of driving, from the perspective of the individual making the decision to drive rather than use transit. However, in order to understand why we should de-prioritize cars in favor of other forms of transit, we must also consider the cons of driving for the individual (excessive cost, mental fatigue of focusing on driving, elevated risk of bodily harm, etc.) as well as the harms that driving causes to others (pedestrian fatalities, urban sprawl, marginalization of public transport, etc.)
After all, flying a helicopter would be even faster than driving a car, but nobody is going around implying that we should all fly helicopters everywhere just in case we need to rush to our mother’s side when she’s on her deathbed.
edit: I noticed in another comment you said that taxis don’t exist in your city and you avoid using uber out of principle due to their questionable ethics. I would hope that since you are concerned about ethics you would see that car-centric infrastructure has marginalized many people and neighbourhoods, far more than an occasional uber ride ever has. Buying a car and using it daily to avoid the ethical implications of an emergency uber ride once in a while is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
“15 minute drive” at rush hour. My man could walk.
This entire comment could be summarized by “butbutbut people who live in areas with shitty public transport have to drive”
We already know this. The point is to make it better, because good public transport is better for literally everyone. I live on the edge of town, and I’m 5 minutes from 7 bus stops for 5 different bus lines, and a train station. Most of those buses come every 10-15 minutes, and are up to 5 minutes late at rush hour. It is by far a better experience to take the bus than to drive for me.
I’m imagining more of a 15 minute drive down the interstate at 70mph. I am not going to walk or bike 15 miles to and from work, particularly in the rain/snow/heat.
Which would be about 5 minutes on a high-speed train.
Buses are great intracity.
Trains are great intercity.
I know you’re trying to say the opposite, but what I’m thinking of when reading your comment, is that more money should be invested in building better infrastructure to make buses and trains more reliable. Like 90% of the traffic hindering the buses is made up of cars. With less cars, more people could ride buses, trains etc. and people could ride a lot more frequently. People shouldn’t have to fumble through their purses, because busrides should be mostly free.
I’m not even talking traffic. Buses are just inherently slower than cars.
A car gets me from point A to point B with little to no interruption. To go the same distance in a bus, I first have to walk 10 minutes to the closest bus stop, ride the bus down a less direct route with a dozen stops along the way, and then when I get to my stop, walk another 10 minutes to get where I need to go. And the entire time, you are at the mercy of a schedule that is often unreliable. I am not kidding when I say taking a bus would triple my commute time. When I am working 50+ hours a week, it’s just not feasible.
Everyone in here apparently lives in a fantasy city where public transport takes you exactly where you want to go, is never late, and runs every 5 minutes. And when the whole thread here is full of “Just take a taxi/Uber”, how is that a solution to the problem above?
then your city just has bad transit planning, or is too rural.
And this is what so many people seem fail to realise here. You can’t have a flawless public transport system in an area with 1 person per square mile.
Is the suggestion here that nobody should be allowed to live in a remote location in order to remove cars from society? Or do people actually believe that a decent system exists for people with their nearest neighbours a mile away?
Feels like the issue has been simplified to the point of absurdity sometimes. I don’t love cars but I couldn’t live without mine, even if public transport was improved to perfection in my area.
Is this world that’s being proposed one where nobody can go camping? How do we get to places with no towns or cities? Charter a bus of our own or wait until 67 other people want to go with me? How do parents of 3+ young children manage? If you have triplets you’re making a very hard job (something simple like going shopping) 5x harder. Is this world one where food delivery is the only option for a big shop? Or are we expected to shop daily so we can carry everything home on a bus?
Omg. Let’s argue a once in a lifetime situation and use it as the reasoning for people driving daily let alone the whole environment point the ad is about.
It’s one-in-a-lifetime situations that people typically try to account for. And the average person is likely to have more than one emergency in life that they need to be somewhere ASAP for.
Nah, most don’t. Most don’t have a plan when their cars don’t start, emergency home repairs, or getting critically injured when nobody is home.
Car culture incentives you to want a car and to use a car. That’s okay.
I guess I am not “most” in each of those regards, then.
I take the bus to work almost every day. I have a choice of three bus routes that work for me, one of which runs every 15 minutes. The one I take runs every 30. The only time they have been behind schedule was during a blizzard, but I got an alert on my phone about it.
No one has ever slowed down everyone else while fumbling for change because the busses are fare-free.
Public transportation can work, but we have spent the last 80 years developing a culture of individual car ownership so that we haven’t prioritized making public transportation that works for the people.
So the model only works if you have a large number of free (at point of service) buses which go between everywhere anyone may want to start to anywhere they may want to go?
I lived in a larger city and for me it is normal to switch trains or busses a few times when i travel from a to b. But because they made a relatively smart system changing is in most cases fast.
Like trains meeting up at a station and people can simply walk to the other side to get the other train.
So it does not need all possible solutions, it needs a few that work well together.
The answer to these problems is just better public transport… buses coming more often. Problem solved. No need to resort to individualised transport because public doesn’t run often enough.
wouldn’t you just take a taxi/uber in such an emergency situation?
Also, buses don’t exist in a vacuum, and PT can easily be faster than cars. Think of metros in the city, dedicated bus lanes on congested roads, and bicycle paths to stations and stops
Yeah I mentioned Uber.
No, I meant to ask
Why would someone take a bus in such a critical scenario instead of a taxi or an uber?
Anyway, I think it’s impossible to argue PT with someone that seems to have grown up in a car centric society, so I’ll just give up.
Man have you heard of Uber? If one has an emergency there are solutions to your convoluted example, you know.
Have you used Uber? Last time, I was stuck waiting on the sidewalk for 30 minutes as my request got passed from driver to driver. It’s fine when they’re quick, but when your solution to “I need to go somewhere now” is to rely on borderline slave labor who don’t have to pick you up if they don’t like where you are, it’s not great.
The only perfect solution: cycling
My friend with triplets disagrees
Except cars have to deal with traffic whereas buses pretty much don’t.
What makes you think buses don’t have to deal with traffic while cars inherently do?
Bus lanes.
I guess my city is too old to have streets wide enough for dedicated bus lanes.
I doubt it. Reduce both directions of car lanes by a couple of meters and suddenly you’ve got a bus lane. Alternatively if it’s narrower work it into a one way system and the lane that was the other direction becomes space for the bus lane.
Special lanes and priorities! They’re a thing! Literally in the city next to mine (not necessary cus the town is small enough).
You can always call a a taxi if its urgent.
For the first, if you can’t find a job where starting 10 minutes later is not something you can negotiate, then probably you working at a low end job, in that case you shouldn’t spend your hard earned money on car payments and gas anyway.
Cars are obviously more convenient, but also more expensive and less environment friendly. Noone force anyone to give up your convenience so no need to go defensive, just consider it as an option for all the good reasons.
I love how much hate this reply got. Yes, its over the top and unrealistic, but the point is that private cars are extremely convenient while public transportation isn’t. Yes, private cars are very bad for the environment. So is pretty much all modern human industry.
Stop having kids, if you’re so concerned about the environment. Your stupid butthole babies and their progeny will cause more environmental harm than any of your personal lifestyle choices.