“American public transport”

Good joke! Best joke I heard since “American democracy”!

Red head kid “y’all have public transit?” Meme.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My kids have theoretical public transportation to school, work, we live near the bus routes in several directions.

To work or the high school - that bus runs 1 times per hour. So they can only arrive very early or very late, and it’s about an hour walk to either of those.

The bus route to the university is actually pretty good, runs every half hour, and takes about 40 minutes to get there (vs. 10-15 minutes drive) then you have to trust your luck with the loop runner bus that goes from the transit center around the campus, that adds between 10 minutes and an hour, randomly because it has no schedule, just drives the loop all day and arrives whenever. There is an app that tracks it so you can know whether to risk crossing the huge road between the transfer ramp & the uni.

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

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.

the buses in my area are physically pretty nice but they are infrequent and my friends and I have learned it is rare to be able to ride the bus without getting sexually harassed by a stranger on the bus

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.

When I saw “American rail” the first and only thought I had was of a porn parody of a movie: An American Rail: Fievel Bangs West.