Asklemmy

At least y'all have a system to be fucked up.

What rail? We have Amtrak but it's laughable even compared to the poorest European countries. It's cars or nothing baby.

I took Amtrak long distance once, as a "it can't be that bad, can it?"

It was a 12 hour trip that got delayed 3+ hours in 30c heat and the car I was in had its A/C broken for ~3/4 of the trip.

Probably could have driven for 8-10 hours instead for cheaper and cooler.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"American public transport"

Good joke! Best joke I heard since "American democracy"!

Red head kid "y'all have public transit?" Meme.

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.

My kids have theoretical public transportation to school, work, we live near the bus routes in several directions.

To work or the high school - that bus runs 1 times per hour. So they can only arrive very early or very late, and it's about an hour walk to either of those.

The bus route to the university is actually pretty good, runs every half hour, and takes about 40 minutes to get there (vs. 10-15 minutes drive) then you have to trust your luck with the loop runner bus that goes from the transit center around the campus, that adds between 10 minutes and an hour, randomly because it has no schedule, just drives the loop all day and arrives whenever. There is an app that tracks it so you can know whether to risk crossing the huge road between the transfer ramp & the uni.

the buses in my area are physically pretty nice but they are infrequent and my friends and I have learned it is rare to be able to ride the bus without getting sexually harassed by a stranger on the bus

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.

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.

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 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.

If americans come to germany and act like german public Transport is the best, how ~~frickin bad~~ non-existent is american public Transport?

FTFY. I was pretty blown away by it but I can get excited by a sidewalk.

When I saw "American rail" the first and only thought I had was of a porn parody of a movie: An American Rail: Fievel Bangs West.

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

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.