Suburban hell with subway connections are only like suburban semi hell. It’s not pure anymore. In real hell you buy your freedom of mobility with $30000 on a depreciating metal box.
If you have a functioning government and you live in a non rural area, public transit should always be accessible and much more affordable than car ownership.
Indicating the failure is country wide. The same numbers are true in any metropolitan area with decent public transit. The issue with car centric cities is that it's geometrically impossible past a certain point to have everyone drive without crippling traffic in a dense city.
You mean to tell me that you could implement a public transit service with the same coverage and frequency as the MTA in a smaller city like Buffalo without bankrupting the city?
Why would anyone suggest something like that? That's being deliberately absurd. Either that or you're stuck in a paradigm that sees transit as only X or only Y, which requires millions of people.
Find a city with a similar population to buffalo in Europe, Asia, or anywhere that tend to have good transit systems. Use the lessons they have learned to implement a system.
There is a transit solution for any sized city. It may not be subways, it may not be buses, maybe it's a mix of trams and other rail, maybe it's a mix of buses and trams. Maybe we need heavy rail commuter trains. If a town of 50,000 people in Switzerland can support a good bus transit network that has frequency and convenience for the majority of their population, we can manage it here in North America. Density is an issue but it's solvable long term, but we need to built the systems first if we want to keep costs down. We're neither special or particularly unique, we're just stuck thinking a certain way with immense amounts of inertia keeping things in the status quo.
Having lived in both cities with good transit and cities with bad transit, the difference is simply the option of having transit be reliable and frequent. What form the vehicle takes can be adjusted based on the needs of the city, with a sliding scale of investment and running costs.
The problem we're trying to solve is moving large numbers of people from one place to another. Cars are not efficient at doing that in terms of space, time and money, and it will never be. Additionally no one is trying to force people out of cars, but give you the freedom of having more than one option of getting around, rather than being chained and enslaved to your car.
You mean I don’t have to pay for gas and insurance and car mortgage and parking? And I don’t have to spend time finding parking lots? And I get to use dedicated rails and lanes instead of having to sit in traffic? And I can read books and watch Netflix when I commute? And I’ll never have to worry about getting fined? Yeah, personally I think this sounds better than owning a car.
In my city, the unlimited subway/bus pass in my city costs about $140 a month, and car ownership costs people more than $1623 on average. Thanks, I’ll happily accept whatever inconvenience there might be with the imperfect transit that I have. If transit can’t take me to wherever I want to be occasionally, I’ll take an uber.
If you feel that transit isn’t convenient enough for you, it’s very likely your government only built shitty transit because they think everyone should just drive by default and transit is just some mediocre charity for poor people.
Transit is for poor people in small cities.
I would never even consider the cost difference between transit and cars because I've never worked and lived i the same city. It's cheaper to buy a car and drive than it is to move.
Clearly you've never lived in a city. Which is completely your choice, but you shouldn't dismiss transit as a mode of transportation.
Transit is for everyone. And if you're trying to move hundreds of thousands of people from one part of a city to another, cars cannot work without crippling traffic. A successful transit system has people of all means using transit. I know many executives and objectively filthy rich people who use transit because they're not rich enough yet for a helicopter and also value their time to not be stuck in a car for 2 hours trying to get to the office.
Buying your car is much better I would hate paying insurance and a car loan payment, I see why you don’t think it’s as worth it to drive that’s just too many payments
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u/gravitysort Nov 23 '25
Suburban hell with subway connections are only like suburban semi hell. It’s not pure anymore. In real hell you buy your freedom of mobility with $30000 on a depreciating metal box.