Comment by pavel_lishin
13 hours ago
There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is.
And in this example, how many stops would you have to cut to turn an hour-long bus ride into a 20 minute one, to compete with the car? You're effectively cutting it down to two stops - where you board, and where you disembark. That's just not a plausible way to organize a bus route, aiming it at one person with a car.
> There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is.
I find this very unlikely to be true for people who have spent any amount of time driving in a city.
I think the majority of city residents tend not to own cars, but I could be wrong about that.
They don't own cars because owning a car in the city sucks in a lot of ways, more so than in rural areas.
So yeah, if your point is that if you take away all the bad parts of using a car, and leave public transit as is, then using a car comes out ahead. Splendid.
That feels like you've made a tautology here. In places where public transit is more convenient than driving (and parking), many people choose not to own and drive a car.
Owning a car is not mutually exclusive with commuting via transit.
> I think the majority of city residents tend not to own cars
This depends a HUGE amount on the city. NYC/London/Paris probably true. LA? It is not uncommon for a household to have more cars than drivers
Counterpoint: many people are driving cars they cannot afford and car loan delinquencies are at record highs. People would take public transit if it were an option.
If public transit was super convenient I think way more people would take it. There are things and places I don’t frequent purely because of parking and public transit isn’t convenient.
But I don’t want to drive three miles to park in a sketchy lot to hop on a train that will drop me off a mile from the venue.
> There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is.
Yeah, no, this simply isn't true.
People don't take transit in America because largely that transit is sparse, infrequent, unreliable, and slow. When a twenty minute drive becomes a hour and a half of buses and walking, virtually nobody rational will willingly choose that.
You’re assuming parking is free. Donald Shoup’s shade is shaking its head at you