Asklemmy

I was stationed in Germany for three years in the 90s and most of the GIs I hung with had never used public transportation in the states beyond school buses. So

Lmao what public transport? We don't have that here.

Public transportation in cities varies. But inter-city transportation? In most of the USA you simply cannot travel between towns or cities on public transportation. There are a few inter-city bus options (Greyhound, Flix, Megabus), but those don't go everywhere.

The rail options outside of the NE corridor (Boston to Washington DC, basically) are very sparse. Here's the map: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/Maps/Amtrak-System-Map-020923.pdf

That's it. Most of those routes are at most once per day in each direction. So if you city even has a stop (which it probably doesn't) the train may only come through in the middle of the night. Some routes are only 3x/week. And because of the massive distances involved and old equipment, it takes at least 70h+ to travel from coast to coast (more really, since connection times are long) and costs twice the price of a 6h flight ($250+ vs $80-120).

Trains are often on schedule, but can be many hours late. Once they are off schedule they are at the mercy of the freight train lines (who own the tracks) for passing. You can get stuck behind a slow moving cargo train for many hours.

Why is it like this? It's complicated. But it starts with very low population density, large areas/distances, and a very different relationship between the individual and the state in the US vs most of Europe. Add the rise of suburbs in the automobile right when many US cities were growing. Another factor is public attitudes. People think that public transportation is for poor people. I know people who have never ridden a city bus, and I live in a city that probably has above average public transportation for the region.

Anyway, as a public transportation rider-by-choice I feel your pain. Having spent a few weeks in Germany recently (with a DT for travel), and having ridden extensively on US train and bus networks, yous is definitely much, much better. Resist the politics of privatization and decay.

If it exists, it is better than American public transit. Here is my daily commute to work, as estimated by Google Maps:

Even Google goes “lmao use a fucking car, peasant.”

It’s technically possible for me to take public transit, but it would be about the same as walking. Here is a quick sketch of the route I’d need to take, compared to my drive:

That route is because there are no east/west lines between me and my job. It starts by walking/riding my bike the wrong direction to get to the nearest bus stop. Then it takes me south-west through two cities, then north-west through two more cities. Then I’d have a ~20 minute walk to transfer rail lines, because my job is serviced by a different rail system than the one that my bus service touches. After that walk (and waiting for the next train) I take it north and then have to walk another 10-15 minutes to finally get to work.

Not counting wait times, it would take me nearly 2.5 hours to use public transit. When you consider the fact that some busses and trains only run once every 20-45 minutes, it actually stretches closer to 3-4 hours, if the schedules don’t line up. Or I could just fucking drive 10 minutes. Yeah, it’s no wonder Americans use cars for everything.

"American public transport"

Good joke! Best joke I heard since "American democracy"!

Here's a fun comparison: Tennessee vs Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania

They have very similar population density (70/km² vs 65/km²). Tennessee is roughly 4x the area and population.

There are only 2 inter-city train stops in Tennessee, in Memphis and a small town to it's north, both on the 1x/day service between Chicago and New Orleans. The largest city (and its state capitol) Nashville has no rail service.

The entire state of Tennessee has only 10 inter-city bus stops. Ten! Serving 7M people. The 4th largest city in the state is Chattanooga (181k), and it has no inter-city bus and no rail.

American public transit doesn't exist outside of a couple major cities.

So yeah. Probably the absolute worst Europe has to offer is a world altering step up.

American public transport

The what now?

I mean, it's three words. You can put any two of them in a sentence. But not the third.

I'm 30 years old and have taken a bus once in my entire life. Not because it sucks but because it's simply nonexistent. I'd have to drive 30 minutes just to get to the place that had the public transport and at that point I might as well just drive all the way there. And I don't even think the US has any trains that go between cities anymore except for commercial trains. I literally live next to a train track and it's all cargo trains. I've never seen a passenger car on a train in my entire life. Could just be where I live, but I've driven from coast to coast and the only trains are cargo trains.

Not too long ago, I saw a map showing where each train is in USA. Someone also posted a similar maps from Switzerland. Can you guess which one had more trains?

What is public transport? I think we need to establish that first. You mean like...the school bus? That's the only kind I've ever seen.

If americans come to germany and act like german public Transport is the best, how ~~frickin bad~~ non-existent is american public Transport?

FTFY. I was pretty blown away by it but I can get excited by a sidewalk.

I live in an area know for having some of the better public transport in the states. My drive to work is about 25 minutes. I can bus to work, but it takes almost three hours and three separate busses, and then I cannot bus home after work.

America is owned and operated by rich people. They couldn't make money running passenger trains so once we were ordered to invest in car-only infrastructure the trains were mostly disbanded and shut down. There's a ghost of a system left with just a few corridors that could be considered bare minimum service in a developed nation.

How many kilometers of high speed rail does the US have? Zero. We have some that gets close, but not really.

My mid-sized city has two trains per day, one each direction, and they both leave between 1am and 2am. In Germany you would have 30+ trains per day in a city this size, likely a notable S-Bahn network, and also some trams and/or U-Bahns in the city to compliment busses. I've got busses in town, but they operated about every 30-45 minutes each, with evening service being every 60 minutes. Here's the fun part: our busses are the most used public transit system for a mid-sized city in the US right now and it's still pathetic when compared to even basic services in Europe.

DB needs to keep getting investment. Germany must get to a dedicated passenger rail network to separate out the freight trains. DB should also be re-nationalized and operated as a national service, not a for profit system that will inevitably fail as a commercial venture, leading to yet more terrible service. Here's hoping the latest German Parliament follows through on investment money that they pushed through at the start of the year! Also, keep the Deutschland Karte! That's such a great resource for everyone.

I live in the largest city in a Midwestern state. To access amtrak (the only passenger rail in the us)I need to drive 3 hours to the nearest station.

The city is shaped like a lopsided clock. I live in the burbs around 1 o'clock. I work for a fortune 50 company headquartered at 10 o'clock. To take the bus to my job I need to take the bus downtown and wait for an out bound. This would take 90 minutes when I could drive in 25.

America has not made public transit a serious option unless you are in Chicago, NYC or DC.

Only large, northeastern, US cities have anything resembling real public transportation.

Its so bad its use is (wrongly) looked down upon as poor person transport unless its a large city. Everything is car culture and you are fucked without a car except in the largest metropolitan.

Shit does not run on time, its more expensive than it needs to be, and it goes very few places. It takes huge huge work to get it expanded because of NIMBYs and car companies fighting it.

Amtrak is doable but it takes as long or longer than driving a car.

There are no high speed trains and busses are a joke in cities. It can take hours to traverse a city because bus routes are terrible and constantly cut.

This is seriously all to do with car companies forcing out public transport in anyway possible as well as buying up a lot of city transportation portions and shutting them down as "not profitable". Americans defend it because "public good" has been vilified here. Its so dumb.

And yet this shit is better than americas rails? How?

Where I live there are 3 mass transit options. The airports, inter-city busses, and Amtrack. We generally get around by car.

Amtrack costs as much as taking a plane but takes as long (or longer) than the busses and is really only a viable option in the North East US. The US does have an extensive rail network that covers a most of the US, but it's mostly used for heavy freight. Most towns and cities don't have a passenger rail terminal anymore. We only have this option only because we are between Atlanta and New Orleans. Most places in the US don't have this option. Here's a map of the US rail network. If you go to layers you can hide everything except Amtrak routes to see what I mean. Link doesn't work in Firefox as a heads up.

The inter-city busses are usually only once a day (sometimes only once a week) and take forever to get anywhere and often have long layovers on the way. But they do go almost everywhere in the country. Company is called Greyhound if you want to look them up.

And finally, we have the local regional airport. Imagine what Berlin might have been like during the middle of the Cold War. It's probably not too far off the situation at our airports. Show ID at the entrance, Strip, Walk through the scanner while your stuff is riffled through, dress, Show ID again at the gate, and pray you don't get picked for a more thorough search or harassed by TSA which might cause you to miss your flight. Granted, I haven't flown in over a decade, but my last plane trip made me decide to never fly again if I could at all help it.

What public transport?

i mean, can you get where you want to go, and back, by transit? if so it's kilometers better than most american transit.

eta: wait, you're talking rail specifically? then if you have any passenger rail, that's already way better than most american cities.

I live in a smallish town with decent public transport in the US. Free, highly reliable busses that go to nearly every part of town and a couple of the connected suburbs as well. The locals hate it, I guess they're still mad it messed up traffic? Idk I just tell them if they hate the traffic so much use the free bus that is supposedly making their life so much harder.

This is abnormal in the US, having decent public transport. Its basically only available in MAJOR metro areas like NYC, LA, Seattle, Chicago. Most of the country barely has functional public transport, let alone reliable.

In a lot of areas it's virtually non-existent. In my medium size'd city. A bus stop is about 2 miles away and comes every 50 minutes.

I had a bus skip my part of the route in US.

They literally took a whole different route that skips over the stop sign I am waiting at so they can get to the last stop faster and clock out.

I was using dart which gives live maps view of where the bus is.

Also sometimes busses malfunction and can't work but still go through all the stops, just don't let people in. Dart doesn't tell you they malfunctioned. You have to see for yourself when bus rolls by.

As far as drivers are concerned, someone's phone wasn't working so they restarted it to show the ticket. Our driver called the police for "delaying the bus." Entire bus had to walk to next stop.

Yippeee

Red head kid "y'all have public transit?" Meme.

I am lucky enough to live along the rail line that connects the east coast to Chicago. It is the main connection between population centers. There are only 2 train lines that pass through, each line only has one train in both directions. (total 4 a day, 2 east, 2 west) No service during the day, only early morning and late night.

Rail service is a joke here.

Our buses are more of a suggestion even if they go to where you want.

What rail? We have Amtrak but it's laughable even compared to the poorest European countries. It's cars or nothing baby.

American rail doesn't exist outside of like two cities. To take public transit to work, I'd have to walk about 12km to the train station. From there, I could catch a train that runs every hour to downtown. I think that train takes about 45m, but I have no idea how often it runs. From downtown, I could transfer to light rail for 20m, transfer again to a bus for 15m, and then I could walk the last 6 blocks or so. Not counting the 12km walk, it would take at least 1:20 plus time spent waiting on transfers.

Or I could drive there in 45m of horrible traffic.

Threadbare. In cities like NYC, it approximates European transport, though is somewhat more dysfunctional. Elsewhere, you have things like “commuter rail” (like a regio/S-bahn, only with next to no off-peak service, running solely as a shuttle between CBDs and dormitory suburbs). There’s Amtrak, but it’s slow and infrequent and runs on tracks owned by freight railroads, and often is delayed by hours from waiting for freight trains to pass. Bus services have a stigma, associating them with poor (and typically non-white) people, to the point where people who have a choice avoid them, and vote to minimise the amount of their tax money that goes to pay for them. And in some Republican states, the government has scrapped even buses, replacing them with Uber vouchers mailed to households.

So yes, DB is creaking and needs investment to bring it up to scratch, but its service levels (even when wracked by delays) are utopian compared to most of the US.

Once Kansas City had apparently a fantastic streetcar. Then the car companies bought it up and tore out the rails. Now we're getting a streetcar being built again but it's just doing downtown on one street. I'm not near the streetcar.

So I drive to work. It's 12 miles, about 30 minutes (or 20 miles, 30 minutes if I take interstate around the city... honestly this city is weird, EVERYTHING is 30 minutes away.) If I wanted to take the bus, the shortest time frame would be 1 hr 35 minutes... not including that I'd have to get halfway there to get to the first bus stop.

Cities... if I wanted to take the train, I can go to Chicago for relatively cheap using Amtrak... but gotta plan that 3 months in advance, and the 8 hour ride we HOPE doesn't get extended because Amtrak doesn't own the rails it's on. Flipside, driving is 8 hours. Other cities, St. Louis, Wichita, basically I have two train lines, one in state, and one cross country. If I want to go to Denver... it's not happening.

So to answer your question, I want you to try to imagine how bad you think our public transportation is. Then lower your expectations.

My city only has the bus, which is super unreliable and the times might as well not exist half the time, or what happened to me recently was they changed stops for a route and Google maps never updated. It's typical to wait for an hour for a bus, sometimes they zoom right past you, or you need to transfer between lines. They're also planning on cutting 35% of bus lines next year, raising the fare, and stopping service at 11 pm, all due to lack of funding. You can read more here:

https://www.rideprt.org/2025-funding-crisis/funding-crisis/

There is a train, but it only goes to the suburbs outside of the city. The bus is your only option when you're in city limits.

I would take some more confusing steps over there not being an option at all.

It may be bad in Germany but its worse in the USA. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has better transit options than the rest of the country. But its limited just to the city of San Francisco itself and maybe some parts outside the city. I just came back from a short trip to Germany, where my family lives. They live in Kassel, a mid-sized city in the north central part of the country. Even a mid-sized city has an extensive tram network and bus system. And a monthly transit card doesn't cost as much. Getting to Kassel itself was easy by train, though the train was 1/2 hour late. I am very, very jealous of my family.

DB: "At least we're not National Rail."

National Rail: "At least we're not Amtrak."

I happen to be a prime example of how bad US Rail is this week. I'm taking my son from near Fredericksburg (the real one), up to Ballston for a summer camp. We have a couple options:

1. Drive

• Distance: ~70 miles one way, ~140 round trip
• Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes one way, with traffic. ~3.5 hours round trip.
• Cost:
  • 4 gallons (US) of gas @ $3.50/gal: $14
  • Wear and tear: estimate at 0.5 gas cost: $7
  • Parking: $11
  • Total: $32/day

2. Virginia Railway Express (VRE) and Washington Area Metro (WMATA)

• Distance: N/A
• Time:
  • Drive to Fredericksburg station: 20 minutes
  • VRE (Fredericksburg to L'Enfant station) - 1 hour 20 minutes
  • WMATA (L'Enfant to Ballston) - 20 minutes
  • Total: 2 hours one way, 4 hours round trip
• Cost:
  • Drive: we'll just ignore this, it's close enough to zero.
  • VRE: $23.56/person * 2 people: $47.12
  • WMATA: $3.45/person * 2 people: $6.90
  • Total: $54.02/day

So, for the low, low cost of about 1.68 times the cost of driving, we can take slightly longer to get to our destination and have zero control over our schedule, which makes the actual time devoted to travel considerably longer. We tried the public transit route last year, and it meant leaving earlier in the morning (about 30 minutes) to catch a train to get us there on time, and getting us home around 45 minutes later. And this is right around the US Capitol, which has some of the better transit options. Needless to say, we're driving this year.

I really want to be able to take transit, but it's basically dead in the US. Earlier this year, I needed to go to Boston for work. Catching a train from Washington, DC to Boston meant an 7 hour train ride (using the "high speed" Acela line) at ~$500 round trip. Flying was 1.5 hours and cost ~$300 round trip. Wanna guess which option I used?

Basically, all of the incentives are stacked against transit options in the US. Except within certain metro areas, driving or flying is always cheaper and faster. Yes, inside those metro areas, public transit can be great. I used to work in Washington, DC and used the VRE I mentioned earlier to get there and then WMATA or the Capital BikeShare to get to my office. That was great, since I didn't have to drive into DC every day, which sucks big donkey balls. But it probably wasn't cost effective and wasn't really time efficient either.

While in college, I needed to attend an event at another campus two hours away by car. I had no car. But I did try to look for a bus route:

• Four hours down to the nearest major city with a bus terminal
• Two hour stop in said city
• Five hours back up to the starting latitude at my destination
• Arrive Friday, attend the 6-hour function on Saturday, find somewhere to stay, and wait until Monday afternoon to make the same trip again in reverse.

I eventually found a friend who could drive me there and back, but we still had to get up at 05:00 on a Saturday to make it in time. Also, no Uber or Lyft, it was too rural to have drivers available at any given time. How glamorous it would have been if I could just hop on the train to the next town.

By your content I’m going to discuss regional, not local service. For context I’m in one of the top 10 most populous cities in the country. There is no regional rail service. That’s how bad it is. In order to catch a train, it’s a 2 hour drive to a much smaller city.

But let’s look at a train trip I wanted to take. All west coast, Portland, OR to San Diego, CA. There is at least rail service that would do it. I think it took 48 ish hours with a middle of the night layover in Los Angeles. The drive is about 16 hours. The flight is about 2.

When it exists, it’s slow and super inconvenient.

I thought it cute when I believed you were comparing bus service, but laughed out loud at "america's rails"

DB is the definite proof that German efficiency is a lie, but tourists using urban transports in big cities will usually have a good experience. Even the public transports in Berlin have got their shit together in the last few years, even if S-Bahn/DB are still a level below BVG.

My only option is the local city bus. For me to go eight miles straight east to where my work is, I'd have to transfer twice, go a couple miles north of where my destination is, and leave home at least two hours before my shift. By car, it takes less than 15 minutes.

if there is some kind of service to the general benefit of the public, you can presume America either does not have it, or will lose it within 5 years

Where I live, there are literally zero public transit options. There are a few bus stops closer to the downtown area, but honestly I have never actually seen the buses that supposedly go there. Usually there are just homeless people hanging out at the bus stops. We do have a small Amtrak station, which is nice, I guess, but it's way more expensive than driving and takes 4-10 times as long to get anywhere. Then when you get somewhere, you have to figure out how to rent a car. And this is the largest city in my state; most places don't even have well-paved roads, much less public transit.