like i would rather deal with a crackhead singing miley cyrus on the 11pm bus downtown than deal with some fucking idiot cutting me off in traffic. at least the crackhead is actually likeable unlike literally everyone else on the road
Not to be all condescendingly European, but that argument weirds me out so bad. How individualistic can Americans get lmao. I've had uncomfortable experiences with people on public transport. And? Who gives a fuck? Life sometimes contains uncomfortable experiences. When I bitch about public transport it's trains being late or buses coming too rarely, not that I have to encounter my fellow humans.
Lol so a few years ago I went to LA and stayed at a friend's relatives' place. They were kind enough to show me around everywhere, but one day they were busy and I casually said that I'd just take the bus to look around instead. They were absolutely horrified, going, "What would we tell your parents if something happened to you???" Took me a bit to realise their problem was specifically with the bus, not just me wandering around town alone. In the end we compromised with me taking the tourist hop-on-hop-off bus :')
I have done hour long driving and hour long train ride commutes in DC and I have never felt as safe on the GW parkway in rush hour as I do on the Metro. Those Raytheon psychos would murder you like you're a Yemeni school child if they could shave a minute or two off their drive.
this has been very consistent with my driving experience, and I live in a completely different part of the US.
people like to talk about "crazy people on the bus" meanwhile every time I drive there's like 3 people minimum who seem to not care if someone else dies if they can get to wherever in 10 seconds less.
Nearly every time I take a walk in my rural neighborhood, some asshole flies through a stop sign and almost hits me, then has the audacity to look mad when I yell at them. Drivers are incredibly entitled.
My city is so poorly laid out for public transit that typical 20 minute car commutes take 1-2 hours by bus or rail. It's not anti-transit to acknowledge that the public transit experience in many US cities is terrible. However many Americans take this experience to mean that all public transit is necessarily horrible, an option which is only possible because so many Americans are ignorant of how good transit could be.
The crackhead is also probably not gonna kill an entire family just by mistake.
"HaVe YOu EvER bEen on ThE BUs" maybe taking the bus would be comfortable if your friends at the government actually FUNDED IT
Is the reason he did that well-known? I fucking hate him so much more after I read this:
A sustainable future will require a change in how we take long-distance trips, but Musk has scuttled attempts to build high-speed rail to keep us in cars. Ashlee Vance has shown how the main ambition of Musk’s Hyperloop proposal, an unproven form of transportation using vacuum tubes to go long distances at high speeds, was to get California’s proposed high-speed rail system canceled:
Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/01/elon-musk-climate-apocalypse-tesla-spacex
I actively seek out jobs at odd hours to avoid shitty commutes.
Some of my most memorable moments in city living was late night bus and train rides. It's quiet, you don't have to steer the vehicle, but you're not completely at ease because other people are around. It's fluorescently lit, but absolutely dark besides the moon. Nothing but mechanical sounds and shifting humans around you. It's nice. It's not joyus, but it has a place in my heart.
I used to ride the bus frequently and it was fine, the worst thing about it was very occasionally someone spilled food so you had to step around it on your way in/out
my city has fucking shit public transport despite the fact that its legit like a big city (like 500k people), but like its legit only really low class people who take it. legit only one of my coworkers takes the bus and I work at a place that pays like 10/hr
The fumes on the bus make me really nauseated.
It’s fine when there’s no traffic, but during rush hour the bus ride home is 45 min-1 hr and can be pretty intolerable.
Definitely train gang, but my bus issues could probably be solved with green technology.
I've used public transportation to get to work for years but I've never been as pissed off as when I had to commute by car. It's the only part of people showing up early that I understand because missing that rush hour commute adds a level of sanity that it shouldn't have to.
Commuted by bus daily for four years prior to covid, pretty much the only things that made it terrible were caused by car traffic
There're often cars parking in bus stops or driving in the bus lane, blocking the bus from making turns.
I love trams and trains, but buses panic me a little because I always feel like it isn't as easy to tell where you are :(
