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?
Lmao what public transport? We don’t have that here.
Fair point.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
Cars only
It’s not that alien is it? People rely on cars pretty heavily in most smaller towns in Germany.
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.
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.
Last time I visited the Netherlands I thought I was in walkability heaven
Edit: shit, sorry. Forgot you said Germany… But my comment still stands, although I bet Germany is at least as nice as well.
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.
Its almost like you’re taking the piss
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.
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.
USA.jpegright there. That image is for everyone who lives there except for like three cities. And the bike route is actually crossing several major roads.And the bike route is actually crossing several major roads.
It’s worse: The bike route is on a two lane highway with no shoulder. I’d be dead on Day 1 if I actually tried to walk/ride a bike.
My commute; this is a fun way to show how car centric America is lol
I used to just walk 1.5 hours to work sometimes because it was the same time the bus would take, to only drop me off 75minutes early for my shift, or ten minutes late. So I’d just walk.
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.
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.
Kids get public transport, education, and sometimes even food
Old folks get walkable communities
College kids (at great expense) also do
The revealed preference is that we could have an excellent quality of life except for voters hating 18-65 year old adults
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.
DB needs to stop to pretend to be a global player and buy fricking bus lines in England and other places that are just a waste of money. If you can’t operate without accumulating debt then maybe you shouldn’t fucking be doing that. They fucked up a working system for profit and made it worse for everyone.
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.
Just to make this more explicit, I lived near a mall growing up. The mall actively fought against getting a bus stop put in near by. Why? Because if there is a bus stop near the mall, then, gasp, THOSE PEOPLE might come to the mall. And by those people, I think we all know I’m talking about.
Urban busses will be slower than driving in most situations since they have to stop every few blocks. That’s not really unique to the US. The exceptions are where there are BRT routes which can avoid commuter traffic, and this is becoming more common in the US but still lags behind the best European systems.
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.
If americans come to germany and act like german public Transport is the best, how
frickin badnon-existent is american public Transport?FTFY. I was pretty blown away by it but I can get excited by a sidewalk.
Yeah I’m not sure if everyone realizes this. There’s all these states where there basically aren’t sidewalks outside of maybe small areas. Like entire miles and miles of residential areas with no sidewalks whatsoever.
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
Not too long ago, I saw a map showing where each train is in USA. Someone also posted a similar maps from Switzerland. Can you guess which one had more trains?
DB: “At least we’re not National Rail.”
National Rail: “At least we’re not Amtrak.”
Amtrak: “At least we’re not VIA Rail.”
In a lot of areas it’s virtually non-existent. In my medium size’d city. A bus stop is about 2 miles away and comes every 50 minutes.
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!
Only large, northeastern, US cities have anything resembling real public transportation.
