Genuine Question. Even if I look at hungarian Transport, and they to this day use trains from the UdSSR, they come more consistantly then the DB.
They are really Bad sometimes, with like 20 seperate prices: Theres the bayernwald ticket that only works in the alps, then theres the official ticket to the destination. Theres a special offer, but only in the very special APP. You can use a d-ticket, but look! Some random ass slum in the middle of the worlds ass dosent accept that, but it does the MVV zone Tickets. But then you need the MVV zone 11-M, a ticket to the beginning to the Nürnberg zones, and a ticket for the Nürnberg zones.
And yet this shit is better than americas rails? How?
United States has rails?
American transport outside of subway systems is literally unusable in most cases. The bus in my city of 1M+ people takes 1.5 hours to go about 20 minutes of distance by car. In some cases I can beat the bus to a destination on my bicycle.
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.
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.
I live in an area that also has decent bus coverage with stops all over, although I’ve never actually taken the bus. I can’t take the bus to work because there aren’t stops where I need to go. I also attend school 19 miles away, and depending on traffic it’s anywhere from a 30-45 minute drive. Last year my car broke down and I looked into taking the bus to school for the few weeks I would be carless. It would have been a 5 1/2 hour trip each way, I would have had to take 3 or 4 buses, transfer between 2 different companies, and I would have had to walk several miles in between stops to get from the first bus company’s stop to the second’s. Realistically, I couldn’t have even left on time to make it to class or gotten back home while the buses were still running, even if I wanted to waste my life riding buses. I worked an extra 100 hours of OT that month to pay for my rental car.
What rail? We have Amtrak but it’s laughable even compared to the poorest European countries. It’s cars or nothing baby.
Amtrak doesn’t own the rail line in most areas, so the trains are regularly halted to allow commercial cargo to pass. I think the Zepher is last to its destination most of the time.
I live around the Twin Cities metro of Minnesota (two cities split by a river), which installed its first passenger light rail about 20 years ago. I recently moved from the north suburbs to the south side of town. I was very excited to be able to drive 10 minutes east on the freeway to my buddy’s house within walking distance of a station to take the 10 minute light rail ride downtown for a basketball game. Previously I would have driven 20-40 minutes (depending on traffic congestion) to pay $20 to use a parking ramp because the light rail doesn’t extend north.
Over the last 20 years they have extended the rail between the airport/Mall of America on the south side to the downtown of one city, and connected that downtown to the downtown of the other city across the river. If you live anywhere north of the city proper, or more than a few miles away from the one line running south, there is little reason to use the rail system over driving the whole way. If you do though, it’s pretty great.
That’s just been my experience, my understanding is some larger cities (Chicago and NYC are what come to mind) have more robust rail systems, but many cities (mine at least) have limited access for most people living in them.
Lmao what public transport? We don’t have that here.
Fair point.
In many places it’s illegal to walk on the side of the road for motorist safety, and no they don’t see value adding sidewalks. Other places don’t like people that’s not from that area walking in front of their house and will call the police every single time.
Outside of like NYC you have a car. It’s a bad system economically, ecologically, and socially, but many people are kind of stupid and reactionary. You show them how putting in a bike lane and adding a bus stop will lower car traffic, improve air quality, and increase economic activity and they just go “no because I feel so”. Or, “one time I had to move a refrigerator so we need to prioritize large privately owned vehicles”.
Fuck you, that’s how. It’s pretty much only cars. Not having a car isn’t really an option here, unless maybe you live in the heart of a big city.
* Big cities are limited to NYC, Chicago, and Washington DC.
I think Boston’s is pretty extensive as well, but that’s more of a mid-sized city and the infrastructure is certainly older
A big city not in the South. Houston and Dallas are #4 and #9. There’s public transit but it fucking sucks both places.
Most cities have a bus service, but they only rarely connect to smaller towns (“smaller” being relative here, like 30,000 people).
To put it in perspective, I live in a suburban apartment outside of a medium-sized city in Ohio. There is a single busline that goes through my neighborhood (which thankfully has a stop right outside my complex). A bus comes by once an hour between 7 AM and 7 PM.
This can get you to work if you’re lucky enough to work a 9-5 next to a bus stop. My work has a bus stop, but I work a 4-12, so no luck.
My favorite bar is in the next town over, a college town about 15 minutes down the road. If I wanted to get there by public transit, I would need to wait for the hourly bus outside of my apartment, get off at a grocery store, wait about a half an hour for a connecting bus from the college town’s bus service, and that’s not even counting the drive time.
And if I don’t leave the bar by 6 PM, of course, I’m stranded without an Uber or something, because even on weekends (not that I have weekends off work) the busses only run till 7 PM.
And there’s other towns nearby that I literally cannot take public transport to. I had to work an event in a smaller city (but still probably within the top 20 in the state for population) about half an hour drive away. There is no bus service that connects me to them. The only options are driving or Uber.
Where I live, you can drive across town in 30 minutes. I once worked with a coworker who lived about a 15min drive from work (less than 8km), and it consistently took him 2 hours to get to work by bus.
When I worked two jobs, I’d take the bus from one to the other and it would always take like an hour and a half. One day I decided to walk it, cause it was only a couple miles (also cause the bus driver straight up passed right by me while I was sitting on the bus stop bench waiting for them), maybe a little more than a mile and a half. Took me 45 minutes, maybe.
Its almost like you’re taking the piss
Cars only
We do have it in Germany and the local public transport is perfectly good, albeit a bit expensive in some cities, but its the interregional, long distance train network that has massive issues in Germany. Trains are constantly delayed or even cancelled, pricing is absurd, still no level boarding on the high speed trains, etc.
It’s not that alien is it? People rely on cars pretty heavily in most smaller towns in Germany.
I would imagine they all have busses? All rural areas in Scotland do at least.
And rural areas tend to be situated around villages with main streets - rather than random houses built outwards.
Not German, but close enough - there’s usually at least one bus within walkable distance, even if it’s only like 4 times a day or something, that connects to a larger hub.
I lived in a place where I had to be by the bus stop at 7h30. If I missed that I’d have to wait for the next at 8h15, and if I missed that one, I’d better call to say I wasn’t able to go that day.
However, in smaller towns and in the countryside, with no cars, life is so different to the frenetic chaos of big cities that it’s hard to put into words.
Dont know, I live in a pretty walkable City where I can bike in 5 Minuten from one end to the other, with a tech store, School, Beach, Bank, etc. Everything you would need. I have a train coming hourly if I want to go to the Beach or munich, but its admittadly way worse (20-30 mins) to bike to the next bigger City.
We aren’t just talking small towns though. Any city that isn’t New York, Chicago, or Boston might as well not have any rail service at all. Houston has 22.7 miles of passenger railway that is only located downtown. Columbus Ohio has a metro of 2.2 million people and doesn’t have a single inch of passenger rail. Cleveland has an OK system by American standards, which i use whenever i go to Cleveland, but the only option for me to take a train into Cleveland from where i live in NW Ohio would take an hour longer than just driving there outright.
“American public transport”
Good joke! Best joke I heard since “American democracy”!
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.
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.
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
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.
Yep. I’ve lived in 9 states so far. The only place I consistently used public transit was when I lived in NYC
Am American: this is correct
Red head kid “y’all have public transit?” Meme.
DB: “At least we’re not National Rail.”
National Rail: “At least we’re not Amtrak.”
Amtrak: “At least we’re not VIA Rail.”
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.
My city has two trains per day: one each way. They leave at 1am and 2am. The US train system is hilariously bad.
I know that DB in Germany is horrible compared to the rest of Europe, but at least it has trains that run during daylight hours!
