I’m 25 and I don’t have a drivers license. I mean, I’ve never really felt the need to go and get one. Public transport is usually the fastest option where I live, and it takes a lot less responsibility to use it.
But most people would still prefer driving, rather than using the public T. Why?
Because public transport is not available (and reliable) enough for me.
For me it’s available but not reliable. There’s always something that forces it to shutdown. There are frequent delays and the monthly fees are really getting up there.
I think this is the main reason people don’t use it in America.
Public transportation doesn’t exist for most Americans.
If it does exist, it’s really bad. Buses are the most prevalent in America and they just suck in most cities.
Bus routes are pretty sparse, so you end up having to walk a pretty decent distance to catch the bus and then again when you get off the bus and go to your destination. It sucks because it adds and extra 30 minutes to the trip, but the exercise is nice so for me the walk is something I can deal with.
What I can deal with is the fact that buses are hardly ever on schedule. A late bus sucks because you’re waiting forever for it to get there. An early bus can be even worse; if you get to your stop 2 minutes early but the bus was 4 minutes early you’ve missed it and now you’re waiting another ~20 minutes for the next one. If that bus happened to take you to an infrequent connecting route you’re going to miss that connection too. Now instead of being 20 minutes late you’re an hour late because you missed your connection.
I’d love to take public transportation instead of my car, but I don’t want to waste hours of my life waiting around because the bus is never where it’s supposed to be when it’s supposed to be there.
I’d guess because for a lot of us in the USA, public transportation is insufficient to meet our needs. I’d love to take a train from home to work, but there’s no train line that’s anywhere near my house. They’re building one that’ll go near my work, but it’s not done yet. Busses are available, I suppose…but the time it’d take to get from home to work or back would be a lot longer than driving takes, even in heavy traffic, given that I’d have to transfer several times.
For longer trips, again, the infrastructure just isn’t there. To visit my sister, for instance, requires taking a bus if I want to take the public transportation option. My (step)son takes the bus to go see his dad (who lives in the same city as my sister) since he doesn’t like driving, and it takes a good 2 extra hours compared to driving. We should have train service, but no…Scott Fucking Walker killed the project back in 2010 when he got elected governor of Wisconsin.
As the simplest catch all to your question:
People prefer cars when they do not have access to adequate public transit.
If the transit is unsafe, untimely, or unsanitary, then it is not adequate. I live in an area of the US with a robust transit system comparatively and even it isn’t adequate. You don’t need a car to get pretty much anywhere but the travel times are at a minimum 2x due to how sparsely things are scheduled off peak times. They’re a bit closer during peak times though.
I honestly miss the free time I had while taking the buses and trains to read news or play games, but since work requires quite a hefty list of materials, and can randomly shift during a day, I need the mobility of a personal vehicle these days.
Freedom: I can pick up my car and go where I want to go, when I want to go without worrying about time.
I think it boils down to:
- some places have good public transit, others don’t
- some trips just don’t work well without a car, making people get cars
- once you have a car anyways, it’s often slightly more convenient
In some places, public transport is just bad, while car infrastructure is good. In some cities, on the other hand, public transport is great while going anywhere by car is slower than walking.
A car lets you comfortably get basically anywhere, anytime, in any weather, with any (reasonable) amount of luggage, usually on a more direct path than public transit. Nobody will bother you during that time.
Public transit:
- may not work if you have luggage
- may not go exactly where you want to go, requiring a lot of walking at the end
- may require significant waiting, including waiting for connections
- may take a lot longer, especially if you need to take some inconvenient connection because there is no direct one
- may simply not be available
- may be really uncomfortable or even unsafe (full, aggressive/rude/stinky people, dirty)
- may be unreliable
I don’t have a car, and usually that works fine, except when it doesn’t and I realize I’m missing out on something because to be there at 9:00 am I’d have to get up at 5:00 am, walk to the station, take the first train at 6:00 am, hope I don’t miss any connections and sit on two trains and one bus vs. a 1 hour drive by car. Or I need to get to some place simply doesn’t have any public transit in reasonable walking distance. Or I would like to transport two crates of beer.
These trips that just don’t work on public transit make people get a car. Now they own a car and have paid the biggest part of the expense up front. And once you have the car, it’s very often faster and more convenient to just get the car and drive somewhere rather than deal with public transit, which probably will take longer, won’t go at the exact time you want to go, etc. - and most importantly, it requires a lot more planning and figuring stuff out than with a car.
Driving a car you own also appears deceptively cheap because maintenance etc. is often seen as a fixed cost (even though driving more increases the cost), so people only consider the cost of the fuel. Even with European prices, driving 100 km at 6 liters/100 km is like 10-12 EUR. A public transit ticket is going to be just as expensive, if not more. Especially if it’s two people going together. So even if for some connection public transit may make sense, it can quickly price itself out of the game once someone owns a car.
Having car sharing easily available can solve the problem, but that’s still a lot more annoying than a car you own, since it requires planning, you can get unlucky and not have a car available, and dealing with booking/pickup/return is a hassle. And it quickly gets more expensive than buying a really cheap car.
Is the best resume of why my city public transportation ranges from decent to bad depending on where you have to go and what part of the city. Also is safer ro go in a car to almost anywhere.
This would be like if a farmer went to New York City and said I don’t understand why everybody doesn’t just milk their own cow instead of buying it from the grocery store.
Just a mod trying to help a community stay active while talking about their culture shock :) I’m aware the US is quite different to where I’m from, just asking why.
A car is superior in almost every way where I live.
-Cars are faster. They don’t have to stop to pick up and drop off other passengers.
-Cars operate on your schedule. They leave when you leave.
-Cars take you directly to your final destination. No transfers.
-Cars can take you anywhere. Want to take a road trip, you can.
-Cars take cargo. On transit, you can only take what you can carry or can fit in a cart (if a cart is accepted and will fit).
-Cars allow you to set up for your comfort. You control climate control, you control the radio. You can even adjust the seat for comfort.
- Even if I sold my house and moved to a part of town where the bus runs, the bus would still take much longer than driving, resulting in even more wasted time out of my day
- My job is in this city so I don’t want to move and find a new, probably less secure, job
- Cities where one can reasonably go carless aren’t viable for me to live in because (a) too expensive, and (b) I’ve gotten too old to fall asleep among the banging and thumping and barking and stomping melody of apartment life
- I don’t like having strangers coughing and sneezing on me.
The majority of housing in the USA requires a car. The nearest public transport option for me is 40 miles away.
If I did live in a city I would prefer to live near where I worked and shopped. Then I could get by without a car day-to-day, but would still want the freedom of a car for road trips.
- Because I live in the United States where public transportation sucks. Although where I live, Portland, it is amongst one of the better cities.
- I have a kid that I need to drop off at daycare, school, various activities and having my own car is far more convenient for that than public transportation.
- And related to point 2., I don’t have time to rely on and follow a bus schedule.
If I want to go somewhere in a car, I get in my car and go there.
If I want to go somewhere using public transport, I have to walk to the nearest stop, wait for the transport to arrive, wait in the transport to take an inefficient route to the closest stop to the destination, then walk from the stop to the destination.
Basically, a 10 minute drive becomes an hour long ordeal.
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Do you ride a bike?
I do! I’m an avid cyclist and ride whenever I can.
i can road rage in a car 👍
From 2nd gear straight into the 6th xD
I may have fucked up my transmission but I showed them!
- Not beholden to public transport schedules and it’s faster to use a car in suburban/rural areas
- Able to move a large amount of goods at once - especially important if you own a home
- Can turn around if I forgot something
- More quiet than buses. I’d hate if a bus drove by my house every 30m
- Can listen to music without headphones
I live in a city with excellent public transport and use it a lot, but a car is total freedom. You can go exactly where you want, and stop anywhere on the way. Even with great public transport you can’t beat it.
In the US, public transit is almost universally unavailable. If it is available, it’s a massive luxury (or strictly necessary, like NYC).
Here in Jacksonville, FL, there’s essentially 0 public transport. No bus stop near the neighborhood or to the grocery store (which is 20 minutes away).
…or completely inadequate.
Or forced to be inadequate, in the case of Baltimore.
We were supposed to get a new east-west light rail line. It was shovel-ready and federally funded. However, our wonderful governor Larry Hogan, in his push to punish those Baltimore ni- I mean, apply his fiscal conservative bona fides, canceled it, calling it a “boondoggle”. Instead of this “boondoggle”, Hogan threw his support behind the Purple Line, a similar light rail proposal to connect the whiter, wealthier suburbs in Montgomery and PG Counties. It was funded by public-private partnerships and ended up the subject of land disputes, went billions over budget, and is only just finally getting off the ground.
He also pushed for highway expansion projects that just so happened to benefit his real estate investments, but we don’t begrudge him for that for reasons of…
Took my comment right out of my head. As someone who lives east of the city the redline would have been nice to have but racism took it away. I was just talking to my gf about it last weekend when we went into the city for a ballgame and how nice it would be to ride the train instead of driving.
I remember having a bus come every hour. If you miss that bus, then oops you’re an hour late for work.
If you run 5 minutes late in your car, then you are 5 minutes late for work.
Also if you have to take 3 or so busses to connect somewhere, depending on how the scheduling worked out, you could get unlucky and have an hour wait between bus 1 & 2 and an hour wait between bus 2 & 3.
Taxis cost a decent amount of money here.
Uber/Lyft/etc are hit and miss. App says if you need to be somewhere at 9am, to request the ride at like 8:30 or whatever. And when you do, you don’t get anyone showing up or someone will grab your ride, not come to you for 10 minutes, and then put your request for a ride back out there for someone else to grab.
Or in the case of NYC, strictly necessary and completely inadequate!
Agreed, the only cities that I’ve been to that had decent public transport were Chicago (The L) and New York City.
Salt Lake City is coming up in public transit. There’s a decent light rail and a pretty well spaced bus network. Frequency is a major issue though.
I’ve heard public transit is pretty good in DC, too. My fiancée and I are planning a trip to DC at the end of August. I plan on parking my car at the hotel and just use public transit, so we’ll test that theory.
EDIT: Also, I’ve never been to Salt Lake City. Seems like a really cool place though!
It has its blind spots (NW is underserved because the NIMBYs didn’t want the Metro to bring
black peoplelower property values) and it has infrastructure issues, but it’s on the whole pretty good
Seattle is decent til like 10pm and then it goes to shit.
