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?
In the US, public transit is almost universally unavailable. If it is available, it’s a massive luxury (or strictly necessary, like NYC).
…or completely inadequate.
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 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…
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
If you live anywhere outside of the inner city, public transport gets slow really quick.
I think most covered it all why they use a car.
I just want to add that it all depends on where you live. I don’t know what you mean by “most”. I would say most in cities with good bike lanes like Paris and Amsterdam would say most take the bike, or cities with great public transport like Tokyo would say most take public transport. If you live in a place like USA where it is dangerous to walk and the public transport is almost none existing then most would take the car. I think New York has ok public transport. But I don’t know, when I was there were sandy coming in so all of the subways were closed off.
Answer in Progress did a video on this yesterday
In the US, the state of public transit outside of a handful of (very expensive) cities is significantly slower and less reliable than taking a car. I would pin the reason for this on the shift of people outside of urban areas into suburban ones, and the lobbying power of the automotive industry to convince the government and citizens alike that cars were the right choice.
If public transit is the fastest option in the area, people do choose to take it! That’s the case for me too in the past couple of cities I’ve lived in. But most cities have a long way to go before they get there.
Aside from just talking about this from a convenience angle, a message that might help explain the issues with car dependency is how much more it costs! People that are more hesitant about public services might be easier to convince with a cost-based argument. This is a great video explaining the actual cost of car ownership.
Speaking from a US standpoint, the public transit sucks. The main issue where I’m at is lack of bus stops, and the bus is never on time. I’d have to walk down a highway (not interstate) to get to the bus stop, then it might not even arrive on time.
Cars are faster, most of the time. However, they still suck. Traffic in dense areas is heavy at almost all times of day where anyone is active. It’s really a failure on the US government why people dont take public transit as much.
I live 5 miles out from the city im WV. I would need to walk/bike up and down hills for 2 miles at a minimum just to get to a local transit stop.
We can’t sensibly talk about people’s preferences without talking about the environment in which those preferences arise.
Here are some things that are true for most car drivers:
- The road starts right at your house. You don’t have to go anywhere to get on it.
- Your car is right at your house whenever you want to use it. You never have to wait for it.
- Public transit requires that you pay up-front; the costs of using your car only bother you occasionally (e.g. fueling, maintenance, taxes that pay for roads).
- Businesses you want to visit are often required by law to provide parking for cars as part of commercial zoning.
- Cars are the dominant vehicle on the road; other vehicles such as bicycles, motorcycles, and scooters are in many ways treated as second-class citizens.
- Your employer didn’t choose to locate close to transit, but they did build a parking lot.
Well it depends on where you live… Someone in Los Angeles can’t rely on public transportation.
In my current case, because my local public transport service is not the most convenient.
I live in a medium sized city were we only have bus service. We have many lines covering “almost” all the city, but each of the lines only has a relatively small number of buses available. This causes long delays between arrivals and makes combinations very difficult when needing to use more than one line. Waiting times of 40 minutes in the bus stops are not uncommon. By car, it takes me 15 minutes to go anywhere.
Another issue is with pricing: in our case buying individual tickets VS a monthly pass only makes sense when you do more than 40 trips every month. It literally costs me more to use the bus than to pay for gas.
In the past I lived in much bigger cities with underground service and plenty of buses available, and I barely used the car, and didn’t even considered the pricing.
I live in San Francisco, so decent public transportation. But even then, it doesn’t run 24 hours. If you want late night fast food, unless you live in NYC, you either need a car or get to pay absurd prices for door dash to deliver cold food.
The biggest reason is my local public transportation. I live near a large city in northern West Virginia. The only bus that comes close to my address runs twice a day. Once at 7am and then again at 5pm. On top of that it would be a 20 minute walk, 10 minute bike ride, or 5 minute car ride to the bus stop. If I had to I could make it work but I can’t get groceries after work because I would miss the last bus by the time I got off work and finished my shopping. This means I would have to go out on Saturday at 7am and do my shopping and then catch the bus back at 5. Add on top of that having two kids and it’s just impossible. Unfortunately a lot of the US is like this. I wouldn’t mind if I had to pay more and my local government put more effort into public transit but that seems to be low on their list of priorities.
I will say that electric bikes and self driving cars in the future may change everything for the better.
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.
There is a substantial YouTube library of breakdowns on why we (usually North Americans) continually choose cars.
There are so many.
Convenience. Directness. I live in NYC in an outer borough. To get to the neighborhood next door it’s a 45 minute series of bus rides with the wait or… A 5 minute drive.
Now add in I have a family and try to make a toddler wait for the bus and xfer just to get somewhere.
