Doesn’t mean it’s not a nightmare, and that doing it with a car wouldn’t be easier. Try doing this with two toddlers one day, lol, I promise you it’s not as easy as watching someone else do it.
Depending on how rowdy kids are, it’s not even easy in the car. You’re strapped in, focused on roads, and any “incidents” they incur may require you to pull over.
The other thing about public transit heavy cities is, in order for people to use them, they have to be much more walkable - in other words, not wasting their wide open space with eight-land roads, or ocean-sized parking lots. That also means, if all you’re going out for is groceries, it would be a waste of time to get in a car, or a train; just walk to a grocery store and back. Plus, if the trip genuinely does work out conveniently, you would not need to buy huge quantities in bulk each trip - just take multiple short trips through the week.
I happen to have a somewhat lucky city living situation, and this is pretty much how it works out for me. Sometimes when someone visits me, they offer to drive me to the grocery store, and it’s basically just as much hassle as walking, thanks to the pedestrian underpass I normally take home.
I can fully understand your position. People in big and densely packed cities profit a lot from proper public transport and vice versa. Plus the city itself is layed out to function with public commute in mind, I’ve experienced it personally in New York.
I’m from a rural area. Our public transport system can’t fully replace cars. The main transit traffic is concentrated around rush hour in the morning and evening. To provide most people with public commute would require an immense increase in busses and train lines, only for 80% to be idle during low traffic hours.
There’s often a visual comparison between how many people a full car and bus can carry. Obviously the bus wins. But you rarely see the comparision between the space needed for a single empty car or bus to be parked. Cars can park on the side of the road or have a parking lot on location (even underground). Busses need ports and infrastructure. Trains are an even bigger problem to store. Their ports can easily take up a good chunk of the entire city. That’s why there’s always a financial incentive to have too little busses or trains than too many. People can tolerate waiting, but can’t tolerate higher prices to sustain a surplus on transport.
Also, public transport is often confined to local bubbles. Go outside your bubble and things start to get messy. When I was in High School, we had about ¼ of our class commute every day from one city over. They were either way to early or always late, because one cities train and bus plan wasn’t tuned to the others, resulting in people either having to get up about 2 hours before school starts at 7 am to catch a train or run the risk of missing their bus connection to the school. It’s even worse if you are crossing train districts and have to buy multiple tickets. When I was in college, some people came from another major city about 40km away. Their district covered half the state therefore their price was ~300€ per month and additionaly they had to pay 90€ per month for our smaller district. And both of those were the reduced prices for students. I could leave my car running idle for 20 days straight for that price.
EWs are important because cars are never going to be replaced by even the best public transport systems. But at least with could reduce the amount of cancer we get from sitting in traffic and breathing commute air. If I could choose, I’d rather have a power plant spit out steam and gas through state of the art filters somewhere in the outskirts, than to be surrounded by combusted gasoline resedue all day.
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}
I see people doing all the things you list on the trains and busses in London all the time.
Doesn’t mean it’s not a nightmare, and that doing it with a car wouldn’t be easier. Try doing this with two toddlers one day, lol, I promise you it’s not as easy as watching someone else do it.
Depending on how rowdy kids are, it’s not even easy in the car. You’re strapped in, focused on roads, and any “incidents” they incur may require you to pull over.
The other thing about public transit heavy cities is, in order for people to use them, they have to be much more walkable - in other words, not wasting their wide open space with eight-land roads, or ocean-sized parking lots. That also means, if all you’re going out for is groceries, it would be a waste of time to get in a car, or a train; just walk to a grocery store and back. Plus, if the trip genuinely does work out conveniently, you would not need to buy huge quantities in bulk each trip - just take multiple short trips through the week.
I happen to have a somewhat lucky city living situation, and this is pretty much how it works out for me. Sometimes when someone visits me, they offer to drive me to the grocery store, and it’s basically just as much hassle as walking, thanks to the pedestrian underpass I normally take home.
I can fully understand your position. People in big and densely packed cities profit a lot from proper public transport and vice versa. Plus the city itself is layed out to function with public commute in mind, I’ve experienced it personally in New York. I’m from a rural area. Our public transport system can’t fully replace cars. The main transit traffic is concentrated around rush hour in the morning and evening. To provide most people with public commute would require an immense increase in busses and train lines, only for 80% to be idle during low traffic hours.
There’s often a visual comparison between how many people a full car and bus can carry. Obviously the bus wins. But you rarely see the comparision between the space needed for a single empty car or bus to be parked. Cars can park on the side of the road or have a parking lot on location (even underground). Busses need ports and infrastructure. Trains are an even bigger problem to store. Their ports can easily take up a good chunk of the entire city. That’s why there’s always a financial incentive to have too little busses or trains than too many. People can tolerate waiting, but can’t tolerate higher prices to sustain a surplus on transport.
Also, public transport is often confined to local bubbles. Go outside your bubble and things start to get messy. When I was in High School, we had about ¼ of our class commute every day from one city over. They were either way to early or always late, because one cities train and bus plan wasn’t tuned to the others, resulting in people either having to get up about 2 hours before school starts at 7 am to catch a train or run the risk of missing their bus connection to the school. It’s even worse if you are crossing train districts and have to buy multiple tickets. When I was in college, some people came from another major city about 40km away. Their district covered half the state therefore their price was ~300€ per month and additionaly they had to pay 90€ per month for our smaller district. And both of those were the reduced prices for students. I could leave my car running idle for 20 days straight for that price.
EWs are important because cars are never going to be replaced by even the best public transport systems. But at least with could reduce the amount of cancer we get from sitting in traffic and breathing commute air. If I could choose, I’d rather have a power plant spit out steam and gas through state of the art filters somewhere in the outskirts, than to be surrounded by combusted gasoline resedue all day.