Ask Slashdot: If Public Transport Was Free, Would You Leave Your Car At Home? 654
dkatana writes: The Estonian capital launched a program of free public transport to encourage people to leave their cars at home. But they never did. When Tallinn launched the program ridership numbers did increase, but not by the 20% the city had projected. Instead, they grew by a modest 3%, and by people already using public transport. What happened is that more pedestrians and bike users started to use public transit instead of walking and cycling. But car users continue to drive to work. Do you think the same would hold true in the U.S. if a similar program was started?
I would sell it (Score:5, Informative)
If public transport would be free in all of Germany, I would not use this car thing again.
Re:I would sell it (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it convenient? If I take the transit and it only extends my commute from say 10 minutes to 20 minutes, but I don't have to worry about paying for parking, finding parking, etc. sure I'd take it. But I probably already would be. If it took 1.5 hours and two transfers where I have to wait 20 minutes each at a terminal, vs 30 minutes driving, no, I would not take transit.
Chapel Hill/ Carrboro North Carolina (Score:5, Insightful)
I frequently ride public transit in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. It is the largest fare free system in the US. It is used by many people but growth in usage depends on many factors. Park and Ride lots make a big difference for people who live outside of town and must drive to get even close to their destination. Sidewalks make a difference because people who live close enough to walk to a bus stop have to have a safe place to walk. The Chapel Hill buses have bike carriers on the front so that bike riders can take the bus for part of their trip.
But one of the biggest factor is how easy it is to find parking. Cities use a huge amount of their space just to store cars during the day. The more expensive and hard to find parking becomes, the more people will use free public transit.
And all of this takes time. People have to adjust to the new reality of bus transportation being easier and cheaper than owning and driving a car. Over time, people will make decisions about where to live based in part on the presence of public transit. And if businesses also locate in areas served by transit, then it's easier for people to live and work on a transit line.
Re: (Score:3)
And all of this takes time. People have to adjust to the new reality of bus transportation being easier and cheaper than owning and driving a car.
They also need to work, in many areas, on comfort, cleanliness, and speed. We shouldn't be trading down to public transportation.
Install something like PRT so that the public option is just plain *faster* than cars and people will love them.
Heck, one idea I had was to put in more elevated walkways to avoid weather complaints and increase pedestrian capacity, then put slideways in the elevated walkways such that you double the distance a pedestrian can cover in a set amount of time. Which allows for fewer
Re:Chapel Hill/ Carrboro North Carolina (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, I don't think I'd much ever be interested in public transportation for many of the reasons you stated.
For me, it would be HIGHLY inconvenient. Having to wait on their schedule, and not being able to come and go on my time table is a deal killer.
Also, for things like grocery shopping, that wouldn't work. I usually look at the weekly sales and go hit 3+ grocery stores to get the best sale items. And I buy at once for a whole week, or even to put large things of meat in the deep freezer in case of a sale.
And for work? Forget about it. No routes are straight to my places I've worked at. I'd have to change multiple times, and nothing drops me off at the front door (or picks me up close to my home front door)...and in the heat of the summer or a torrential rain, well, I'd be soaked to the bone and not really professionally presentable.
Also...not the best thing in the world picking up a date via the bus, you not only look cheap, but she's not gonna real be thrilled sitting next to a smelly bum.
But to the bottom of it. I like to buy FUN cars. I've owned sports cars all my life. I have a blast every time I jump in the car and fire up the ignition. Why would I trade that for the PITA that would be public transportation? I have the means, and I'll always prefer my independence and enjoyment over saving a couple $$.
The sole exception being when I don't feel like the hassle of parking in the Quarter (and avoiding car break-ins), I do tend to park at the end of one of the street car lines, and ride into there to party, and catch a ride on it back to my car at the end of the night. But that is about the sole special example I could think of to ride public transpiration. And hell, that's only $1.25 each way...who doesn't have that?
Re:Chapel Hill/ Carrboro North Carolina (Score:5, Interesting)
For me, it would be HIGHLY inconvenient. Having to wait on their schedule, and not being able to come and go on my time table is a deal killer.
Have you ever read about Personal Rapid Transit(PRT)?
Faster, no waiting, you'll probably trade the short walk to your vehicle for a shorter walk in at work. IE it'll balance out. See a car that's unacceptably dirty hit the appropriate button and it goes off to the cleaners and you get the next one, which is probably already in the station. Since it's non-stop and individually routed, even if it's limited to 25mph, the fact that it doesn't stop makes it competitive with cars, and it blows them out of the water if it can go 45+.
The point that I was making is that public transit has to compete on more than just price, as you mentioned. That you will 'NEVER' take it as a primary means of movement is also mistaken, if they can make it 'good enough'.
Thing is, once it's good enough and you get even higher densities in the cities, things get better still. And you can avoid a lot of the cleanliness problems by adequately caring for the homeless population(IE rendering them not homeless).
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I frequently ride public transit in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. It is the largest fare free system in the US. It is used by many people but growth in usage depends on many factors. Park and Ride lots make a big difference for people who live outside of town and must drive to get even close to their destination. Sidewalks make a difference because people who live close enough to walk to a bus stop have to have a safe place to walk. The Chapel Hill buses have bike carriers on the front so that bike riders can take the bus for part of their trip.
Chapel Hill is also infamous for the number of people who commute into Chapel Hill (and even Orange County more general) from places like Durham, Mebane, even Raleigh. I don't know numbers, but I would assume--especially given the traffic on 15-501--that the vast and overwhelming majority are car drivers. One of my coworkers commutes to Durham every day from Carrboro. The trip takes around 20-25 minutes. She takes the bus sometimes, but my recollection is that it takes about 1.5 hours.
Light rail seems highl
Re: (Score:3)
It's easy to add more cars to the train.
It's not easy to add cars because you'd have to extend existing platforms to accommodate longer trains, which is usually expensive and time consuming.
This is not to discard the entire point about the value of light rail, but that particular argument is incorrect.
Re: (Score:3)
Public transit in the SF Bay Area consists of buses and Bart. Bart is always late and congested, and its administration seems intent on reducing cars and frequency so that you have to wait a long time and stand up and elbow each other no matter the time of day. The buses take an insanely lengthy amount of time to get anywhere more than 7 miles away.
Fix those things and I would get rid of half my cars.
Parking? Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
"But one of the biggest factor is how easy it is to find parking. Cities use a huge amount of their space just to store cars during the day. The more expensive and hard to find parking becomes, the more people will use free public transit."
Well no, that's not really a big factor. If you can't park at your destination of choice and public transit won't get you there, you won't go.
Re: (Score:3)
> Over time, people will make decisions about where to live based in part on the presence of public transit.
I live in Germany where transport (around here) is almost free ($70 per month flat fee). When we bought our house we did buy it in a town on the train track. This helps with public transport, but the property prices in our town is 30-40% higher than in off-the-track towns.
There are also other things. Our town has a much larger area of light industry than neighbouring towns, mostly because it is cl
Re: (Score:3)
Let me tell you how public transportation works where I live:
1) Wait 20 minutes+ in the rain for a bus, ride another 20 minutes to a hub, wait another 20+ minutes for a bus to actually take you where you're going, ride another however many minutes to get to your actual stop.
2) Have to sit the whole way next to a bunch of smelly drug addicts. Sorry to be harsh about it, but that's a large percentage of the people who ride the bus here.
3) When lunch roles around, wish you had a car to go eat somewhere new, th
Re: (Score:3)
Keep in mind that almost all pro-car/anti-bus/anti-train articles are written by relatively wealthy people who really don't understand what goes on in your life when you think $12.50 an hour is an amazing wage. In Cleveland you either have to pay $1k-$1,500 a year for gas, plus insurance, plus maintenance, and deal with several local police forces funded virtually entirely by traffic tickets; or spend an hour and a half on the bus whenever you want to get anywhere that isn't right downtown. A place like NYC
Re:I would sell it (Score:5, Interesting)
Or if public transpo even goes to places you need to go. I don't want to walk 40 minutes to the grocery store only to walk 40 min back to the stop (and then waiting 20 min at each stop while transfer).
That said, I already take public transportation >5x days a week, exactly because it is convenient for me.
Re:I would sell it (Score:5, Interesting)
Compare that to driving now, I have pretty easy interstate access where I live and my place of work is right off of that interstate. Traffic doesn't get too bad here most days but even when it does, it rarely takes longer than 45 minutes to get to work, and under normal circumstances, it takes me about 20 minutes. So my answer? No fucking way would I willingly take public transit unless I had no other alternative.
Re:I would sell it (Score:5, Insightful)
They'd have to pick me up at my doorstep, have a schedule flexible enough to wait for the dryer when necessary and stop for a breakfast tacos or bagels and coffee.
Re:I would sell it (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in San Francisco and live in East Bay. My house is a block away from a Transbay bus stop, and with its use of the carpool lanes I can get into the city faster via bus than is possible in a car. Once in the city, I can either stroll for a pleasant walk along the Embarcadero to my office or I can ride a Muni for under a buck, and the latter drops me off next door to Safeway with their Sriracha Sausage Breakfast Burritos ($2.71 including tax).
It's easier, faster, and cheaper to ride the bus than drive, and I get breakfast burritos. I'm living the dream.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
And forget biking. The one road that ran where I needed to was narrow and had no separate bike lane - I biked to work three times and nearly died every time. It's not about my biking ability, it's about the stupidity of the avera
In the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Public transport in the USA is almost uniformly low-ball, by which I mean to wave my hands at uncomfortable seating, sparse scheduling, sparse pickup and drop-off locations, smelly (nothing like an old diesel engine to get your sinuses in an uproar), and simply old-school -- the number of cities with proper elevated monorail systems that don't impact the streets or create shadowy hangouts for the unsavory is very small, and those (looking at you, Seattle) tend to not actually implement route coverage that is worth even considering for most excursions unless you're one of the lucky few who live, work and shop right along the line itself.
Offering something worth very little for free isn't going to get anyone very far, no pun intended (but I'm always happy when they fall out like that, lol.)
Considering my own use of private vehicles, I use them because:
o It's point to point; I start where I am and I end up where I'm going
o It's considerably more secure; windows up, doors locked, only trusted riders are on-board, and I control the vehicle
o I have my music (and my ham radio gear), in short, the environment is customized for me
o There's no waiting, no calling, and no communications problems
o Joyriding
o Car sex is fun and safe if done thoughtfully, while public transport sex is a direct route to the courtroom
Any of these would be sufficient, but all of them together are broadly decisive. A bright, scenic trip on a monorail appeals on its own merits; very little else does. That's because I have spent an enormous amount of time on public transport and liked it not at all.
My overall impression is that public transport as implemented here is that it is the very least we can get away with, regardless of the harm done.
I don't think we should be looking at it with an eye to making it incrementally better, either. It's a black hole that sucks very large amounts of money and returns nothing of new value. No one with an actual comprehension of the risks prefers public transport -- I think the most common case by far is that people use it because they have to use it.
What we need to be looking at is electric transport in varieties suitable for the individual and the various types of family units. Non-polluting in and of itself, utterly agnostic as to how the power it uses is generated, thus 100% friendly to conversion from polluting power generation to non-polluting. These vehicles can be extremely light and easy to park/store, ranging from tiny electric scooters for good weather use (we have one... awesome fun) through small enclosed commuter vehicles to full-on sedans and SUVs for people who need those. Circumstances and availability are rapidly improving in this regard. I see it as the best place to put our investment, if we are to be putting it anywhere in particular regarding transport itself. Beyond that, public funding should be going to infrastructure maintainance, because infrastructure decay is a very serious problem in this country.
I also think that in the urban context we tend to separate working- and living-specialized areas. This area is apartment buildings, that area has factories and so on, while shopping has clustered elsewhere. I suspect that's cost us more than it has benefited us. If the majority of people could reasonably live and shop close to their jobs, transport would be considerably less of an issue. But we don't seem to want to swallow that, and so we end up paying for our preference.
Re: (Score:3)
Hold it! Ham radios AND sex in the same car? I call bullshit!
Also, "..the number of cities with proper elevated monorail systems that don't impact the streets or create shadowy hangouts for the unsavory is very small. Where small equals zero. Seattle monorail is a private ride for Seattle Center.
See monorails.org
73 om de w7com
Re: (Score:3)
And that's where I think we hit the problem with public transportation. Public transportation suck in the US. It's not the public transportation sucks. Public transportation doesn't need to suck. It just does in the United States. We haven't invested in it. We haven't built up our country around it. We built our housing developments and industrial parks around road infrastructure, organized to make it easy for individuals driving cars rather than buses.
I think one of the things that we've learned in
Re:I would sell it (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends - does the public transport system suck less than driving a car?
Yes, driving 45 minutes through rush hour traffic sucks, but when the alternative is to drive 20 minutes, then spend an additional 40 minutes riding on public transport, waiting for a transfer, and finally walking exposed to the weather for 10 minutes at each end of the trip (40 minutes total exposure, just long enough to get totally rain-soaked at both the beginning and end of the day)... well, then, it doesn't really matter if you give that away for free, does it?
Re:I would sell it (Score:5, Funny)
My ideal is that everyone else takes public transport, and my 40 minute commute then becomes a 4 minute commute. I might need to remove the speed governor from my car, and get better tires, and add a rocket or two, but money well spent!
Re:I would sell it (Score:4, Insightful)
I ride my bike year round in a fairly harsh climate. It's all about dressing appropriately. Even the people that drive to work in my office have a 10 minute walk to get here from the ramp (where the company subsidizes parking).
Just my opinion of course but I think we'd all be better off if we spent more time exposed to the weather and not spending our lives in climates controlled bubbles.
Re: (Score:3)
This. I can drive 10-20 minutes, or spend 2-3 hours dealing with the buses, and a half mile walk between bus stops.
If there were buses in my neck of the woods that has a usable route, and didn't have 1+ hour gaps on the schedule, I'd definitely use it.
In fact, when I lived on a university bus line, and my work was near the university, this was an idea. Hop the bus (which came every 5-15 minutes), spend about 30 minutes for the ride, and be done with it. My car sat unused for months.
I just wish the US had
Re: (Score:3)
It's even worse for me - gotta walk 10 minutes to the stop at 7AM, catch the express downtown waiting at a completely exposed bench (sucks in hot of summer and cold of winter - or I can walk another 15 for a covered one), then either pay extra to catch the train that runs every 20 minutes (that would be a no brainer if free) or wait an hour for a bus going out of downtown that takes 25 minutes to get back on the freeway due to downtown congestion, then wait for and catch a city circular (usually less than 2
Re: (Score:3)
Depends - does the public transport system suck less than driving a car?
Considering that driving does not suck at all, that would be impossible.
Taking public transport is only free if your time is free. There is a bus that goes from near my house to near my work, the drive takes 15 minutes on a bad day, the bus takes 45 minutes on a good day.
That's a full hour more per day that I spend sitting on a bus rather than doing what I like.
However at the moment, I only take public transport to work when I feel the need to take a form of transport that is more expensive than driving my
Not as easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Once people have invested in buying car and already paying for gas, registration and depreciation, they feel like using it. The extra convenience exceeds the marginal cost. So if you make public transport free, the existing car users will continue to use cars, but the sale of new cars will decline. This will take time to show up in ridership statistics. Instead of measuring the ridership of public transport, the city should monitor registration of new cars (old cars registration should not be counted). That trend is a better indicator of long term success.
Another important factor is convenience. How good is the public transport? In my city in USA, public transport is pathetic. It stops at 7 pm on weekdays and no service on Sunday. Long distance (> 10 mile) stop after 9:00 am and do not restart till 4:00 pm. It means that I have to have a car and once I have a car, the marginal cost of operating car is same as the cost of public transport, so obviously I use car.
-- Does public perceive this free public transport continue to be free in future as well?
-- Is it good enough to completely get rid of the car?
If both of the above are 'yes', then it should show up in the new car registration statistics.
It's all about the routes, dummy (Score:5, Insightful)
The other thing is the availability of parking. If parking in the city is affordable and available, that reduces the appeal of public transportation.
Re: (Score:2)
I used to live an eighth-mile north of a major street that, eight miles east, was also an eighth-mile south of where I worked. One bus route right?
Technically yes, but it was complicated. Two different cities. I lived in a city that believed in mass-transit, such that the bus stopped near my apartment every fifteen minutes. Unfortunately I worked in a city that didn't want to commit enough money, so every other bus ended its route at the border between the cities. On top of that th
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly; this is why governments need to give up on buses and start building SkyTran systems instead. No one wants to take the bus when it's going to take almost as long as walking because the bus takes a winding, circuitous route and requites taking 5 transfers to get near where you're going, and then still requires walking a half mile because the bus doesn't actually go there. SkyTran fixes all that by taking you in an isolated shuttle-pod directly to your destination (within 1/4 mile or less), at 75-15
Re: (Score:3)
and it does so for a tiny fraction of the installation (per mile) cost of light rail
Citation needed.
Re: (Score:3)
10 years ago, the number of smartphones was exactly zero, outside of crappy junk like some WinCE phones. Now everyone and his brother has one. Luckily, it just took a couple of companies willing to invest and build the things, instead of a bunch of naysayers whining that there aren't any, so we can never have them.
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't demand Skytran specifically, but a PRT system would indeed be ideal. If I was ever in office I'd push hard to get a 'demonstration city'.
As you mention, while Skytran wouldn't have the capacity to deal with Manhattan, it could handle pretty much anything less. It'd kill the taxis there, which would be why it'd never go in there.
Still, at least for the densest 'downtowns', put a station on every other building or so, and have elevated skyways, perhaps with airport style sliding sidewalks to incr
Re: (Score:3)
Free isn't free. If it costs more time and effort than the equivalent (because the equivalent is more reliable, gets you within a block of your destination, and runs 24 hours a day) then "free" public transportation is still more expensive than the equivalent. Even a poor person who can't really afford to own and operate a car (witness the predatory reposess-a-car loan scams) will drive a beater to commute because the alternative is losing their job because they aren't able to get to work consisten
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My favorite is when the routes are changed, with poor communication about the changing (signs on stops are wrong, info from the "telephone for help" line is wrong... etc.) Waiting for an unexpected extra 2 hours after sunset in the cold goes a long way toward making people forget about the bus as an option.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the thing. A lot of the routes are useful to only a small amount of people at any given time. For people to give up their cars, we'd need armies of buses that run past stops every 5 minutes and covered about 95% of the city. That simply isn't cost effective.
Trains are only effective because they can be (but are not always) faster than driving. Buses almost by definition can't be faster than driving.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I just want to kind of chime in and agree. I do take public transportation into and out of the city near where I live, but when I do, it's because parking would be ridiculous and I hate driving in the city. But even then, I frequently end up driving anyway, and it's because getting from where I live to just about anywhere is generally timed in hours when taking public transportation and minutes when driving. A trip that might take 20 minutes by car can easily take two hours by public transportation.
It helps
You have to build it before they'll come. (Score:3)
When I lived in NYC, I would have paid 3x what I was paying to use public transit. I could get to anywhere in the city, or at least within ~2-3 blocks of anywhere, quickly, easily, and efficiently—a car would have slowed me down considerably.
On the other hand, living in southern California, I wouldn't have switched to public transit if I'd been offered at $300 a month bonus to do so. It would have meant hours every day walking around on foot in a very pedestrian-unfriendly city.
Two things are required
Is my time free too? (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't drive cars only because they are cheaper than public transit, but faster too.
People will respond from very high density cities and point out what I say isn't true for them. They don't need free rides for motivation, because in their situation, public transit is actually better. They should take the moment to get some insight; the world isn't waiting for their advice and doesn't want their lives.
Re:Is my time free too? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
So long as cost is not a factor, we should transit rail everything. Build a dedicated line, from everybodies house to their work...
You understand the underlying economics? It takes high population density/ridership to make rail economical. Where it is uneconomical it is also an environmental disaster (money being a decent, imperfect proxy for environmental damage).
Re: (Score:2)
Plus, I don't really want to live where I can hear trains running all hours of the day and night, so I choose not to...
Re: (Score:3)
When I visit greater Boston we mainly use the T to go into downtown, otherwise we drive. When my in-laws still had a vehicle we'd take mass transit from the airport out to the station closest to their house and use their car for most errands or trips, again excepting those that necessitated going do
Re: (Score:3)
I pay less than 90 euros/month to get most places in Paris and its suburbs (and that's about to go down to 77 euros/month with access to a much wider area). I can't even get a parking space that cheap. Add in the cost of insurance, gas, the car itself and it's a no-brainer. In the rare case that getting somewhere 10 minutes faster is important to me, or I'm going home after most transit has stopped and I won't spare the time for the night bus, I've saved plenty to spring for a taxi.
But it's not just that it
Re: (Score:2)
Here in the Minneapolis/St Paul metro, as long as you're going to either downtown and, honesty, downtown Minneapolis more-so that StP, it's faster to take the bus. However, pretty much anywhere else, it's way slower.
That said, my family of 4 only has one car and I take mass transit or carpool w/others. I see absolutely no reason why those working downtown should go there in any other way. It's faster, cheaper, allows you to sleep/read/etc, and it's better for the environment.
Re: (Score:2)
Need more info (Score:2)
Answer=maybe some
Re: (Score:2)
I'm already using Uber more than I should simply because I hate the quality experience of the ride via public transport.
Re:Need more info (Score:5, Informative)
The question is flawed. The fact is that most US public transportation is awful. This is quite literally by design. In the 1950's, a conscious decision was made by policy makers to begin neglecting public transportation and to start investing public money in road systems in a big way. This is what built the interstate system, for example. A few places, Portland Oregon, for example, took some of that interstate money and invested in public transportation. Portland's system is actually quite good, now, and if you lived there, you would probably use it quite a bit.
But if you live in one of the countless suburban freeway islands, using public transportation is absurd. The way the roads and infrastructure are laid out make it almost impossible to install an efficient public transportation system. In many suburban areas, the mere act of walking somewhere is almost impossible or illegal.
There is a truism in transportation design: the freeways make the sprawl. And the converse is also true: passenger rail transportation increase creates clusters of density. Evidence of this can be seen in the observation that since the massive reduction of passenger rail transportation in the US, there have been almost no new dense walkable diverse large scale downtown core cities established. The big ones, New York, Chicago, etc. were established during the age of passenger rail. Most new cities are freeway places, and usually don't achieve the density of the older cities. By choosing to build freeways, we chose to create suburban sprawl. The only way to get out of this trap is to slow the building of freeways, and to increase investment in passenger rail.
No, because it sucks. (Score:2)
I take public transportation occasionally to and from work in San Francisco. But in general, there's a huge amount of crazy homeless people at all hours of the day who take public transportation. The buses are often filthy, and they often don't run on time. it's difficult to get from one place to the other, especially if I need to go multiple places in a single day.
Given the choice, I bike or drive. There's nothing worse than driving along a long stretch of road in SF only to pass a bus stop filled with
Re: (Score:2)
I take public transportation occasionally to and from work in San Francisco. But in general, there's a huge amount of crazy homeless people at all hours of the day who take public transportation.
This seems to be a uniquely American problem. Why do homeless people ride buses all day, and why do people put up with it? (Have the homeless people paid the fare?)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
What I do believe is that many white, affluent people are fearful of being in close quarters with poor people and people of color.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Define "free." (Score:5, Insightful)
1) I can get anywhere I want with public transportation as it is right now. The problem is that it takes literally four to eight times more time (in my specific circumstances), and my time is far from free.
2) The notion that it's free is, frankly, dishonest and disingenuous. *Somebody* is paying for it, and that somebody is me, in one form or another. Just because the money is not coming directly from your wallet at that instant doesn't mean it's not happening.
3) It ignores subjective value. I often enjoy driving. I don't enjoy being crowded into a bus or tram / trolley. Trains aren't too bad from a comfort standpoint, but still not as fun as driving.
Re: (Score:2)
Where I used to live, there was a bus that went from about 2 blocks from my home to my office. It took twice as long as I could drive it and cost twice as much as I'd spend in gas (though, if I recall, it was a little cheaper than the car if I factored in the IRS standard cents-per-mile costs). If it had been free, I'd have been willing to deal with the extra time, but I couldn't see spending more time and more money.
From where I live now, I don't think there's even that convenient a path.
No (Score:2)
When they make it illegal to ride public transportation if you haven't bathed in 3 weeks, then we can talk.
Yes (Score:2)
If a bus passed by my place I would take it for free. I would even pay. But I am a rural kind of guy, so I drive.
Re: (Score:2)
If a bus passed by my place I would take it for free. I would even pay. But I am a rural kind of guy, so I drive.
I live in a city. I can walk to almost everywhere I need to go, except work. I live about 10 miles from work. It takes me about 15 minutes to get work. If traffic is bad, it takes me 30. If I took the bus, it would take me at least 2 hours. I would love to ride a bicycle to work, but I live on an island and the only bridge I can legally ride a bicycle on is about 5 miles north of both my home and office - adding an extra 10 miles onto a bicycle ride. It's also incredibly busy during commute and has n
That would mean a long walk (Score:5, Funny)
Cars are investments. (Score:3)
If you want people to switch from cars to public transportation then you need the following:
1) Speed comparable, if not faster than cars. If the car is 30 faster than the bus, no one takes the bus if they own a car. Time is worth more than anything else we have.
2) Convenient public transportation - it doesn't work if your city is all spread out and you have to walk more than 15 minutes to and from the bus stop. 10 minute walk to/from the bus stop is about the most you.
Otherwise, you need to start imposing costs on using the car - as in expensive parking.
NYC and London have some of the better public transportation systems of the world. They are faster than traffic, with many stops all over the city, and parking is expensive.
Re: (Score:2)
Once you buy the car, you prefer to use it.
If you want people to switch from cars to public transportation then you need the following:
1) Speed comparable, if not faster than cars. If the car is 30 faster than the bus, no one takes the bus if they own a car. Time is worth more than anything else we have.
2) Convenient public transportation - it doesn't work if your city is all spread out and you have to walk more than 15 minutes to and from the bus stop. 10 minute walk to/from the bus stop is about the most you.
Otherwise, you need to start imposing costs on using the car - as in expensive parking.
NYC and London have some of the better public transportation systems of the world. They are faster than traffic, with many stops all over the city, and parking is expensive.
Largely agree but I don't think speed has to be directly comparable. Obviously if it takes you 3 hours by bus and only 20 minutes by car, then you're not going to convince a lot of people to take the bus.
What you do have to consider though is that while driving, you can't do much else. On the bus, you can read, sleep, check your schedule, text or browse (safely). I've even done some coding when I had a 50 minute bus ride.
Re: (Score:2)
Rapidly depreciating 'investments'.
A car is an 'investment' in a very few cases. Even there I'd argue it was speculation 99% of the time.
The best I've ever done is $2500 turned into $45000. Which almost makes my lifetime car 'investments' break even, but that's only because I'm cheap and wrench.
A newer car is a sunk cost.
Re:Cars are investments. (Score:4, Informative)
The London tube is an amusing starfish... if you need to go to/from the center, it's great.
If you're out on an arm, and you need to get to a similar spot on the next arm, it's the bus for you, or even walking would be faster.
I tried to ride the bus, waited almost an hour before one showed up, but it wasn't one bus, it was all seven buses that run that line, apparently they had stopped off at the pub or something and then all hit the road at the same time.
Re: (Score:2)
> 1) Speed comparable, if not faster than cars.
I don't know if that's realistic or necessary. There's a lot to be said for being able to skip the hassle of driving, parking and etc. I'd even be fine with a 20% time penalty vs. driving. More than that, though, and the car really starts to look preferable.
> 2) Convenient public transportation
This. Plus, it needs to be convenient for all of my travel needs, not just going to and from a job downtown (For which it works fine for me.) It also needs to
Free of what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Free of drunk people, or homeless people who smell so bad it's unpleasant to be near them?
Free of limitations in when I can depart, or how much longer the ride takes than driving?
Free of the inability to easily stop to grab a coffee or use the bathroom?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Free of the inability to easily stop to grab a coffee or use the bathroom?
You can do this when you're stuck in traffic? I hope you have plastic seat covers.
Southeast Michigan (Score:5, Interesting)
In my neck of the woods, I have been told there are these things called "buses" that come around and pick people up... I often see people waiting under signs that indicate they are "places of bus stopping" - yet I rarely see these elusive contraptions actually on the road, or picking up passengers.
Public transportation is a great idea in theory, but poorly run in practice, even in metropolitan areas. As for Michigan, it might as well as be non-existent. Rural and suburban areas are always poorly serviced. The solution, of course, is for people to move to areas closer to work and other required destinations - but that only works well for people who do not put down roots somewhere with a mortgage.
Free or not, I simply don't have the option. My current employer used to be willing to let me telecommute, now they expect me to commute an hour or more every day, each way, to satisfy some CEO's bizarre notion of esprit de corps (though most of my team members are in other states). I'd gladly ride a bus if it was convenient, both in timing and within a reasonable distance to my destination, but it doesn't even exist.
Cost is not the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Cars are status symbols. If they didn't have that 'new shiny', they would have to find something else to waste their money on.
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on where I'm working (Score:2)
Where I live there is very good public transit from the suburbs to downtown. The buses have HOV lanes to bypass the traffic jams, and once I hit a train I am 25 minutes from downtown. If I drive I get there in 40 minutes and pay $15 for parking and about $8 for gas. If I take transit I get there in 55 minutes and I pay about $8 round trip. Very competitive when you consider price and trip time.
The problem is when you live in one suburb and work in another. The hub and spoke layout of the transit sy
Oh, hell yeah! (Score:2)
their weather is horrible (Score:2)
Estonia is so far North they have really horrible weather. Free buses are a huge improvement for those on bikes and those walking. For someone driving, it's still a downgrade...
No (Score:2)
It'd probably make me use public transportation somewhat more frequently for the sorts of trips I already use public transportation for sometimes. There are costs associated with a particular mode of transportation that aren't always monetary - for instance, time. The trip I most frequently use public transportation for, for instance, to get from my house to downtown LA, I have to factor in:
* Time to get there: for the train, first I have to walk to the train (~10 minutes), then I have to wait for the train
Needs to be more convenient (Score:3)
To get to work by 8AM, I would have to walk 3-4 blocks to the bus stop leaving by 6:40AM (not so nice when there's 6" of snow and -15F temps or when it's 90F+ at 7AM). I get on one bus to go about 2 miles away, then wait 15-20 minutes for another bus to get downtown.
Leaving work at 5PM, a 5 minute walk to the nearest bus depot at work MIGHT catch the 5:05PM bus, otherwise it's a 30 minute wait, then another transfer to another 15-20 minute ride and a 4 block walk uphill to home.
I could drive even with 7:30AM/5PM traffic in about 20-30 minutes either by Interstate or by a major through town federal highway. So I can give up an extra 1-1.5 hours a day of my time and walk several blocks in quite likely to be less than pleasant weather, or I can drive my car and pay about the same amount for a monthly parking pass as what a monthly bus pass would cost. Due to having children, I couldn't give up the vehicle, it would just mean different routes for the car and the bus.
Having visited cities like San Francisco, New York, Houston, and San Diego in the last year, cities that have well developed urban centers with public transit in mind seem to do much better with this than ones that were designed around cars and are trying to retrofit mass transit into them. The biggest difficulty in getting around NYC was figuring out whether to grab a cab, get on a subway, get a bus ticket, or get on one of the multiple trains. In several cases, there were at least 3 different options to get from A to B in roughly the same amount of time, though prices varied quite a bit. Subway was cheap, trains were pretty cheap, cabs were reasonable only because of the short distances.
Wrong conversation (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes (Score:2)
A few years ago, I used it regularly and had no choice. I live in a smallish college town. We have 2 bus systems, the college (free for anyone), bu only near the university, and only a few of connector points with the city system.
Leaving the Uni's system out, let us take a common task, getting from a near downtown residential area to Walmart on the north side of town. This involves the following steps: 1. Wait for bus clo
Yes, and I did (sort of) (Score:2)
Plural of anecdote is not data, etc etc., but....
When I moved to Atlanta I lived right in the heart of Buckhead and was two blocks from my office. I walked every day. It was awesome. A 10 minute walk was faster than a 30 minute (with traffic) commute, plus I didn't have to pay for parking. And I just enjoyed walking.
After two months I realized I never drove anymore, I just used the MARTA or Uber, so I sold my car.
The year I lived in Atlanta like that was awesome. No car payment, no car hassles, and I c
It would first have to go somewhere I want to go (Score:2)
There are a few times that I will take public transportation.
Living near the northwest limit of the Chicago area transit system, it is convenient if I'm headed to a convention at McCormick Place. But, I haven't gone there in over a decade... The conventions I go to moved out to the suburbs, where use of public transportation is comical at best.
Going to one this past May, I checked the PT route vs. car. Car took 1.5 hours. PT route involved 10 minutes to train station. 1.3 hours on train. 20 minutes on anoth
Re: (Score:2)
Public transport *IS* free for me! (Score:2)
As I'm a university student, my school ID counts as a free bus pass. Despite this, I still drive into work(at the University) because the public transport options are sufficiently bad that I don't feel like turning a 9 hour day into a 12.5 hour one for a 25 minute drive.
Price perception (Score:2)
If you make something "free", people won't value it.
alternative paths (Score:3)
It isn't an instant thing. Cheap public transportation means that people invest less in cars. It means that homes nearer to public transportation become more valuable. That leads to increases in ridership. Those increases lead to demand to expand the system making it more useful. Then from there the housing stock begins to shift towards more concentrated making cars less practical and public transport more practical. Secondary commercial services change -- think New York City.
A sudden shift in pubic transportation gets the ball rolling but there needs to be a long term sustained desire to shift people away from cars and towards public. It ain't about the $2 / mo. Though price does matter and it does help.
Uber (Score:2)
Currently looking forward to the emergence of driverless taxis. I'll ditch my car and use them as I need them. Save enough on insurance and maintenance that the taxi wins out as the cheapest option.
Needs to be frequent and ubiquitous (Score:5, Informative)
Unless public transit is frequent and ubiquitous, it can't replace a car regardless of price
When I moved to San Francisco, an unlimited Muni pass was so cheap ($35) that it may as well been free, but I still had a car because weekend service is infrequent, and didn't go everywhere I wanted to go. I thought about giving up my car, until I tried an out of town trip on BART one weekend, it would have been an hour (or less) round trip by car, but since it involved a train transfer plus a long wait for a bus (that never came so I ended up walking the 2 miles), the transit part of the trip ended up being being over 3 hours.
Even now an unlimited Muni pass is cheap ($70), much cheaper than owning and parking a car in the city so it's not the cost of transit that makes people hold on to their cars.
On the other hand, when I spent some time in Tokyo, a $170 monthly Metro pass was much better than having a car, few of my friends who lived there full time owned a car.
Some of us want freedom (Score:2)
and are willing to pay out share in gas to get where we want, how we want and when we want. Years ago I use to take transit and walk everywhere cause I like to walk but I also didn't have a car. It would take me 1.5 to get to work in the morning and after work. In a car even in heavy traffic it would have been 30 min each way. That's two hours of free time per day. Also instead of getting home at 10:30-11PM I would have gotten home at 9:30PM.
If I lived in Vancouver or some other shitty congested city I'd ta
Simulations never work right (Score:2)
I've simulated [citiesskylines.com] this exact scenario for hours, and I've gotten the same results from this study; moderate increase in usage but not enough to really address inner-city congestion.
They probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their study, too - this only cost me $20 during the Steam Summer Sale. Stupid government!
=Smidge=
Free public transit has its up sides. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
solely due to it being free
It's not free. Someone else is buying it for you. One way or another, they're passing that cost back to you and everyone else.
Wrong problem. (Score:3)
Driving is already more expensive than transit almost anywhere and for almost everyone. Full ownership costs for a car in a developed country tend to be in the range of 50+ c/km (80c+/mi) while bus fares tend to be flat rate of $2-6/trip, by the time you hit a 10km trip it's cheaper to take the bus/train.
People drive because of comfort and convenience, not cost (except those incredibly bad at math, which is a group probably large enough I shouldn't completely discount them)
For transit to win over car drivers they need to improve the convenience and comfort. improving cleanliness and comfort on transit vehicles helps, more express routes help, better schedules help.
Trouble is, those improvements are quite costly to implement. (arguably cleanliness is fairly simple, the rest less so)
People will take transit when it stops close to their origin and destination, has few stops on the way, is not crowded, is clean, and comfortable, and departs when they want to travel. It's a tall order.
Of course some cities have taken the opposite tack, they realize it's hard to make transit better, so they are attempting to make driving worse. This is done by intentionally avoiding needed road upgrades, removing driving lanes, blocking routes, adding transit only lanes or roads (make no mistake, they don't "add" them, they replace an existing road or lane). This does actually work. If driving to downtown takes longer than the train, and you can't find a place to park when you get there, you'll likely take the train instead.
The Onion got this issue right (Score:3)
Trick Question (Score:4, Interesting)
I live in the close-in burbs of a major metro area. There are buses, metro rail, some light rail
I live about 12 miles, as the crow flies, from a datacenter I use. It's normally about a 25 minute drive. There's a metro rail stop just two blocks from that destination, and one (with no parking, and little bus access) about two miles from where I live... but that rail ride costs about $12 (or $20, if you can park), and takes about 70 minutes one way. If somebody's taxes were raised to make that trip "free," it would still be grotesquely expensive in terms of time and flexibility.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you prepared for sticker shock? You don't want to know what your own lane would cost.
Re: (Score:2)
What I wonder is whether he realizes that if those of us who are driving because it's the fastest way between A and B get off the road because there's a decent competitive option he'd effectively have that lane for a lot less cost.
Re: (Score:2)
$1200 month won't begin to buy you your own lane.
Right now every car spend about $0.01/mile in gas taxes for the roads. You'd have to pay a whole lane worth of costs to get your own. Going to track days is much cheaper.
Also get a slower car, so you can drive the piss out of it. The problem with fast cars is you can't open them up, basically ever.
Re: (Score:3)
My slow non stock car is plenty fast. I never get a chance to open it up for long. I outran an idiot in a Maserati the other week (he clearly couldn't drive). Boy was he pissed. I think he might have hurt his car at the second launch.
My preference it for quick over fast for driving in traffic. There is nothing quite as fun as out-driving someone with money but no skills.
And all but the most extreme sports cars are suspended on mush. If I'm going to have to rework a car to suit me, I might as well build