Comment by kybernetyk
3 years ago
Having been the victim of public transport for the first 30 years of my life: nope. You just can’t polish a turd. (Maybe other countries can but here in Germany it’s a lost cause and you can’t make individual mobility expensive enough for me to ever take public transport again).
As a counter-anecdote, I’ve been using public transport exclusively for 35 years (since first grade) in Helsinki, London and New York, and never felt like I’m a “victim” of anything.
I only ever take a car for trips outside the city.
Indeed, and I think you’re quietly pointing at the nub of the problem: if you like in a major city or sufficiently close to one of its public transport ‘spokes’, and you want to travel to somewhere also covered in a similar manner (be that short- or long-distance) public transport is usually somewhere between great and acceptable. As soon as you fall outside that usability window, it often becomes close to unusable.
(One exception: local countryside bud services can sometimes be really valuable for local travel; but they often don’t link well with other public transport modalities, IME.)
In Minneapolis, our billion dollar tram has become a rolling homeless shelter.