The infrastructure is set up for cars, and then everyone has to drive their own car because we can't share a space respectfully. The only time I'd consider riding the bus is if I didn't have a car and if I had to for work. In the states the view towards public transportation is that if you depend on it you're not doing too well, which is sad. I commute 70 miles 1 way to work and would love to have a bullet train or something as an option. But as it is now, no, it's not even an option. I had a previous coworker that took 2 buses to work every day, and he was always telling me about the "interesting" people he'd run into on the bus, like a guy with a puppet at 7:00 in the morning, or the drivers that didn't know the schedule so they couldn't tell him when another bus would be coming. No thanks.
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What’s American rail?
Our side of town has zero rail, and it would take about two hours on a bus to get home from downtown, 7 miles away. Oh, and the Amtrak train 7 miles away shows up once a day at 2am. And I could probably hitchhike to where I’m going faster than that shit train would get me there.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is surprisingly historically accurate if you ignore all the cartoons
To be fair, German public transport (and I admit that I've only taken it around Berlin) is about average for Europe. Better than Norway not as good as the Netherlands.
From my limited travel around the states I can say that availability of public transport varies a lot from town to town.
Local transport: San Fransisco has a lot of public transport and its pretty reliable. I spent over a week in Shreveport Louisiana and I only saw a bus once. maybe I wasn't in the right place at the right time of day but it wasn't everywhere like in a European city. I haven't been to New York, but I have a new Yorker friend who says the subway stations are essentially a place for homeless people to masturbate when they get banned from the library. The entire state of Wyoming doesn't seem to have any public transport.
Intercity transport: The greyhound busses are used almost exclusively by people who are not legally allowed to drive (full of meth heads and schizophrenic nuns) the drivers were obviously whichever mentally ill passenger was closest to the front when the previous driver overdosed. They'll do things like throw their hands in the air and say don't worry jesus is protecting us! That's if there is a bus between cities. There isn't a bus between salt lake city and park city next door for example. The trains have been reduced steadily to the point where the majority of us cities don't even have a train station.
So yes Germany has excellent public transport, with the exception of having to validate your ticket before you get on the train (That's an inefficient waste of time).
I live in a bigger US city that does have a metro. It’s not bad for doing longer trips in certain directions, when it’s working. But it breaks down at least a few times a year, and if you have to make a transfer to another train to make it to your destination, it’s often literally faster to walk.
Public transportation doesn't work in the endless suburbs and stripmalls we've built. It's too spread out, and we've been doing it for a few generations now. It's difficult for my countrypeople to imagine living differently, to imagine that our current existence may not be their birthright.
People think nothing of living 20 plus miles from where they work or go to school, can't imagine a world where such a thing is a ridiculous notion. We could have all these nice things. People want a better world, a more functional city.
But ask people to change, to live a smaller life, and be prepared for a deluge of excuses and justifications. We all wake up and collectively decide the world we're gonna live in today.
San Francisco has a pretty good bus/trolley system. There might be other cities with decent busses but I’m unaware of them.
Some major cities like New York, Boston, Philly, Chicago have acceptable subways, and commuter rails. You can probably get a daily train from one city to the next. Example: you can take a train from Boston to NY once a day - it’s fairly ok, and probably preferable than driving for most people.
Most cities have busses that suck, and literally zero trains and subways.
Most Europeans don’t realize how big the US is, and how much of it is quite rural. It doesn’t make sense to build a rail to service the few dozen families in east bumfuck nowhere.
Getting a license to drive is, generally speaking, pretty easy from most states. Usually just a written test and a road test where you just have to drive around the block without breaking any rules.
Some city dwellers survive without cars, but they are kind of stuck in the city. When they want to get out, they’ll rent a car for the day.
Just took a look at some population density maps, and I must say that the kind of density you have between Boston and Washington DC is approximately what most of Central Europe looks like. Other parts of USA are pretty sparsely populated.
Apart from the large cities, you could say that anywhere east of Dallas looks a lot like northern Scandinavia in terms of population density. Even Poland has a higher density than the gaps between major cities such as Phoenix and Denver. To me, it seems like nearly everyone lives in one of the big cities, and there's hardly anything in between them.
The worst part, from a transportation perspective, is that our low density rural areas in the US are often isolated homesteads. Fully scattered single family farms and ranches, miles from the next family. We don't have as much village centric rural areas as in Europe. So it makes delivering services (transportation, education, health care) to our rural population much harder.
Boston to NY is more like hourly - Amtrak has a lot of trains going on the line from Boston to/from DC (DC also has a very good transit system for the US at least from what I've heard).
The problem with those trains is that they're expensive and slower - the Amtrak northeast regional costs $75-300 (depending on the date and time, as Amtrak is a company and charges more around holidays and during peak travel hours 🙃) each way from NY to Boston and takes ~4-4.5 hours. Driving can take 3.5-4 if you plan around rush hours in both cities.
When I was in Australia, a bunch of people asked me about the public transport here and all of them were baffled when I told them how shit it was...
I have no idea where this perception that everything must be perfect in Germany or Europe came from but it is sooo outdated.
Speaking of tickets; in NSW you just tap your Opal card when entering/leaving train stations. It makes so much more sense and is so much easier.
Because compared to America everyone else’s “shit” is 10x better than our “none at all”.
Don't even need an Opal card- just tap your phone or your bank card.
The network is also massive. You can tap on in Kiama and tap off in Scone. That's about 400km, roughly equivalent to Berlin to Frankfurt, on regular metro trains. Might take a while, but you can do it.
American public transport either doesn't exist or is considered to only be for poor people and migrant workers [sic].
The only place this isn't true is in a big city.
American Public what?
I kid. But it's damned bad. I used to live just south of a major city (Baltimore, 500k people) beltway and worked just north of it.
We have a "subway" that has 3 stops, between one single suburb community and an area that was the city center decades ago.
We have one Lightrail. It goes North/South through the center of the city. I was extremely fortunate to live and work within walking distance.
There's a commuter rail that just follows the freight rail tracks south and east, and tickets are expensive and the trains only run a couple of times a day.
I was 32km from work, via lightrail, it took at least an hour and up to 3 hours each way.
It was 60km to drive around the beltway, that took roughly 30 minutes
Bus coverage is pretty good in poorer neighborhoods, and nearly non-existent when the neighborhoods reach non-poverty level. You'd literally need to walk down an expressway to get to the nearest bus stop where I am now. No sidewalks anywhere.
Hell, I've heard of Americans coming to Vancouver Canada and being pleasantly surprised about our public transit. We don't even technically have a proper heavy metro, and the SkyTrain is classified as automated "light" metro, AKA the kind they have in tiny German towns that are too small for heavy metro or S-bahn, AKA basically the same as an airport peoplemover but built out for a metro area of 3 million people.
I'm British and I came to Berlin a couple of weeks ago.
That shit was 10x better than London and 100x better than the rest of the country
Am I in the minority, thinking that the London Underground is actually pretty amazing? Wherever I was across the huge area the city takes up, I rarely needed to check a timetable- There would be a station within walking distance, I could be relatively confident that a train would turn up within fifteen minutes and get me to basically anywhere in London in fairly short order.
In a few cities it's good. NYC, Chicago, where white people live in DC, and maaaybe SFO come to mind. (LA your subway is only for movies, F off). Literally everywhere else it's a travesty of busses designed to institutionalize and reinforce classism and poverty. So it's bad, and no one wants to use a bus system (lack of tracks? Lack of charm!) of it served wealthier neighborhoods.
I did some research and my city is almost 1:1 with Bielefeld Germany.
Bielefeld has 4 tram lines, 140 busses on a network that covers most of the city and established bike lanes. Wichita has 40 busses, 13 set bus routes, and 3 bike lanes in the whole city. I'm "lucky" enough to live two blocks from the nearest bus stop, but that bus route doesn't land anywhere near places I want to go. Great if you're in rehab thigh I guess.
Non-existent/Absolutely abysmal
In the US transit mostly doesn't exist beyond buses that barely ever run.
there is none in most of the country, most cities just have buses where you might have to spend up to 30 minutes walking to the nearest stop to wait up to an hour
We americans have been conditioned to accept common means convenient.