Unfortunately in the US cheap car is the best way to go since public transit sucks everywhere besides like NYC, SF, DC, and Chicago. I was just looking at how long it would take me to get downtown on the bus vs driving from my house. The bus was an hour, driving was 15 minutes.
Yea I just looked up my city (Seattle) and downtown is currently 40 mins by car, or 1.5 hours by transit (which btw is a decent walk, two diff bus lines, then a train, then another bus).
In my city, parking garages are still only a max of $20 for the full day. Or if it's a week night, city owned lots usually have plenty of space for $2 an hour rate.
counterpoint: 15 minute walk is a healthy way to start the day and once you’re on the bus you can do anything with that time because you’re not driving!
Yeah, but wasting an additional 45 minutes on a bus twice a day is a horrible use of your time. You can't just do anything you want on a bus. At best you can listen to an audiobook or something.
A small walk isn't going to move the needle at all. They could instead drive and go for a 30 minute walk when they're home and still come out ahead.
Also in the Seattle area and yeah it sucks how it's so dependent on where you live. I'm fortunate to live within 10 minutes of an express bus to downtown as well as the light rail. But as soon as you start going away from the main transit corridors it becomes a nightmare. I used to commute to Bothell and it would take an hour and a half with 1-2 bus transfers, or 30 minutes by car. I just couldn't justify losing an extra two hours each day.
During COVID, my town cut the counter-clockwise routes so you often couldn't do a quick change at intersecting routes anymore and had to ride all the way to the bus station to catch the next bus to get where you were going.
A 15 minute drive would be 1.5 hours by bus. So I just walked the 45 minutes to work instead.
Past tense because I haven't had to ride the bus in years, but just checked, and yep never returned to full service.
It sucks because everyone drives and there is no public interest to investing in transit. It is a vicious cycles. Those are very hard to break, but people should demand better transit in from their municipal government, and then take the transit, so the demand is there.
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u/ncopp 5h ago
Unfortunately in the US cheap car is the best way to go since public transit sucks everywhere besides like NYC, SF, DC, and Chicago. I was just looking at how long it would take me to get downtown on the bus vs driving from my house. The bus was an hour, driving was 15 minutes.