Could be worse.
Multiple times I’ve seen NIMBYs vote down light rails and other public transit options. They’ll talk about taxes and traffic, but it always boils down to them not wanting “undesirables” having access to their amenities.
Jesus Christ I’m in the US and it isn’t like that here. Where is that? That’s ridiculous.
YABA DABA DOOOOOOOO
Looks like London buses at rush hour
In Europe I’d take that bet. In America, I’d rather be stuck waiting 3+ hours for public transport than walk along unprotected highways where I could just be knocked down for existing
Or being bothered by police for walking in a car only zone.
Really depends on the details. The delay in public transport is probably waiting for a connection - if it’s somewhere pleasant where I can catch lunch/breakfast, then probably take public transport. If I’m on vacation and the walk is through a historic part of town or a scenic hike then probably walk.
You’d walk for three and a half hours?!
To get to work? No way. While on vacation? Sure.
Time to ponder your existence
bike: 51 min
Car: 25 min
- time spent looking for parking, and time spent walking from the car to the actual destination
Not an issue if you avoid downtown.
It depends where you live. I’m in Europe, and in my case driving to a park (im suburbs, not downtown) with my son was 10min, and cycling was twice as long but with a bike we could go directly to the playground, which was 15 min walk from the park entrance (including taking out the stroller etc) . So, while google maps showed me 10 vs 20 min, i learned it’s faster to actually just cycle there.
Also include horrific externalized costs from cars.
Yep, my comment of 25 minutes completely omits the costs, just talking about time.
The externalized costs of owning a car (and most USians don’t even care for their vehicles as well as they should) are immense.
That’s the broken part in a lot of the areas of the US, there is so much parking that you will always find a spot easily and everyone no matter which mode of transit needs to spend time to cross the giant parking lot because that’s what is between the road and the store for example.
I’m lucky I don’t live there and only whitnessed the hostility of the infrastructure towards everyone not in a car when I was visiting on holiday.
Yeah, but to counter that, slightly, usually there a lot of paid parking. The free parking is usually not as abundant.
Yep for the added cost of just one more minute I would totally opt for the more exercise healthier option. But three and a half hours is a heckuva a long time for either option.
Plus I can usually walk faster than the maps projection - I think I’d take it as a personal challenge
something something freedom i think. its your choice… umm… have it your way–no wait thats burger king…
whatever- takes bus and arrives in 20 mins
Yeah, but also Google Maps sucks massive donkey balls for finding public transit routes.
There’s probably a much faster connection available if you use your public transit’s own website.does public transit usually have a website that is not just a list of names of places and times?
Citymapper is a great app that handles public transportation navigation very well for most major cities.
(Not FOSS. Free with some ads or 10usd/year ad free. Shoot me)
This is again a US only issue I’m afraid. It works great in Europe and Japan.
Maybe it changed, but last time I tried it it didn’t work well in Germany.
Granted, our public transport system is pretty complicated.I use it daily an overall it’s better than the DB or my local network’s app.
Sometimes it’s wrong so I use both. Where it shines is telling me how to get to the right stop and steig. For some reason neither German app will tell me what steig I need and it is a pain.
It didn’t work well in Germany when I arrived in Europe six years ago, but for the last three or so years it’s been quite good.
It really does suck in Germany. At least in Berlin, Citymapper is the bees knees!
I stopped using them when they removed their promise not to sell user data from their privacy policy. I also didn’t feel great about using a closed source service anyway.
Now I use a combination of Öffi and Organic Maps.
I missed that! That sucks. Didn’t know about Öffi!
Öffi used to be the best app for all of Germany, but it stopped working some months ago, and I read that that was due to an API change from Deutsche Bahn.
So now I use my local transit company’s app and the DB navigator.Öffi still works well for me 🤔
Works again for me too, thanks.
Öffi works again with the DB as provider, they switched to the new API.
Also did you know that there is a fork which adds some new, pretty handy features: https://github.com/santawho/oeffi-ng
Google Maps works fairly well for most US public transit. Mostly because there isn’t much of it; so it’s not hard for them to maintain it. 😉
Ha! Got you Europeans! It was all part of the plan, we INTENTIONALLY chose worse public transit, so we can have accurate Google map routes!
Where I am (seattle), google maps and the king county metro site give the same routes and information. Almost feels like they’re talking to the same API considering it gives the same time down to the minute.
I use this app called Transit. Same data, but if any data is missing, it’s crowdsourced by people on the bus using the app.
that’s because king county literally uses google and google maps to provide transit maps and routing information.
It’s absolutely fine in the Netherlands.
Nowhere as optimal as 9292 though. And for walking and bicycling, OpenStreetMaps or Komoot or Tourtje are better as well than that Americrap. The latter two are annoying in that you need to make an account, though.
On top of that, all those I mentioned are much less data hungry than G**gle Maps.
It used to be better but Google being Google they keep killing their good services
That’s of course more likely the said public transit site sucking at providing an API that works. But yeah, for a user that can be a good lpt.
I get the point, but I’d still rather a 3.5 hour train ride with transfers than a 3.5 hour walk.
Funny thing is I’m the opposite, so long as it’s OKish weather. I prefer the reliability and flexibilty (and exercise).
Yeah walking for a portion may be a good option. If there’s no long wait for transit for this trip, there’s a chance you miss a transfer, and have to walk anyways.
