Genuine Question. Even if I look at hungarian Transport, and they to this day use trains from the UdSSR, they come more consistantly then the DB.
They are really Bad sometimes, with like 20 seperate prices: Theres the bayernwald ticket that only works in the alps, then theres the official ticket to the destination. Theres a special offer, but only in the very special APP. You can use a d-ticket, but look! Some random ass slum in the middle of the worlds ass dosent accept that, but it does the MVV zone Tickets. But then you need the MVV zone 11-M, a ticket to the beginning to the Nürnberg zones, and a ticket for the Nürnberg zones.
And yet this shit is better than americas rails? How?
Public transport in the US is when they bring that big police box van to arrest everyone.
What public transport?
This is the true answer, hence I don’t need to sarcastically form my own.
In a lot of areas it’s virtually non-existent. In my medium size’d city. A bus stop is about 2 miles away and comes every 50 minutes.
Only large, northeastern, US cities have anything resembling real public transportation.
Public transportation doesn’t work in the endless suburbs and stripmalls we’ve built. It’s too spread out, and we’ve been doing it for a few generations now. It’s difficult for my countrypeople to imagine living differently, to imagine that our current existence may not be their birthright.
People think nothing of living 20 plus miles from where they work or go to school, can’t imagine a world where such a thing is a ridiculous notion. We could have all these nice things. People want a better world, a more functional city.
But ask people to change, to live a smaller life, and be prepared for a deluge of excuses and justifications. We all wake up and collectively decide the world we’re gonna live in today.
Non-existent/Absolutely abysmal
We americans have been conditioned to accept common means convenient.
I live in a smallish town with decent public transport in the US. Free, highly reliable busses that go to nearly every part of town and a couple of the connected suburbs as well. The locals hate it, I guess they’re still mad it messed up traffic? Idk I just tell them if they hate the traffic so much use the free bus that is supposedly making their life so much harder.
This is abnormal in the US, having decent public transport. Its basically only available in MAJOR metro areas like NYC, LA, Seattle, Chicago. Most of the country barely has functional public transport, let alone reliable.
Please, tell me where you live!
But my opsec!
This is the way.
It may be bad in Germany but its worse in the USA. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has better transit options than the rest of the country. But its limited just to the city of San Francisco itself and maybe some parts outside the city. I just came back from a short trip to Germany, where my family lives. They live in Kassel, a mid-sized city in the north central part of the country. Even a mid-sized city has an extensive tram network and bus system. And a monthly transit card doesn’t cost as much. Getting to Kassel itself was easy by train, though the train was 1/2 hour late. I am very, very jealous of my family.
…i tried to live with public transit in marin county: just commuting to my job was three hours each way, with a very narrow window of opportunity for walking to a grocer at my transfer hub and no recourse on nights when i had to work late…
Where I live, there are literally zero public transit options. There are a few bus stops closer to the downtown area, but honestly I have never actually seen the buses that supposedly go there. Usually there are just homeless people hanging out at the bus stops. We do have a small Amtrak station, which is nice, I guess, but it’s way more expensive than driving and takes 4-10 times as long to get anywhere. Then when you get somewhere, you have to figure out how to rent a car. And this is the largest city in my state; most places don’t even have well-paved roads, much less public transit.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is surprisingly historically accurate if you ignore all the cartoons
Smh, we’re still doing toon erasure in 2025?
If the 'toons represent the working class, then ignoring them is very appropos of what the politicians do.
American Public what?
I kid. But it’s damned bad. I used to live just south of a major city (Baltimore, 500k people) beltway and worked just north of it.
We have a “subway” that has 3 stops, between one single suburb community and an area that was the city center decades ago.
We have one Lightrail. It goes North/South through the center of the city. I was extremely fortunate to live and work within walking distance.
There’s a commuter rail that just follows the freight rail tracks south and east, and tickets are expensive and the trains only run a couple of times a day.
I was 32km from work, via lightrail, it took at least an hour and up to 3 hours each way.
It was 60km to drive around the beltway, that took roughly 30 minutes
Bus coverage is pretty good in poorer neighborhoods, and nearly non-existent when the neighborhoods reach non-poverty level. You’d literally need to walk down an expressway to get to the nearest bus stop where I am now. No sidewalks anywhere.
I live in the largest city in a Midwestern state. To access amtrak (the only passenger rail in the us)I need to drive 3 hours to the nearest station.
The city is shaped like a lopsided clock. I live in the burbs around 1 o’clock. I work for a fortune 50 company headquartered at 10 o’clock. To take the bus to my job I need to take the bus downtown and wait for an out bound. This would take 90 minutes when I could drive in 25.
America has not made public transit a serious option unless you are in Chicago, NYC or DC.
Ooh, lemme guess: live in Westerville, work for JPMC?
Jpmc is at high noon.
To be fair, German public transport (and I admit that I’ve only taken it around Berlin) is about average for Europe. Better than Norway not as good as the Netherlands.
From my limited travel around the states I can say that availability of public transport varies a lot from town to town.
Local transport: San Fransisco has a lot of public transport and its pretty reliable. I spent over a week in Shreveport Louisiana and I only saw a bus once. maybe I wasn’t in the right place at the right time of day but it wasn’t everywhere like in a European city. I haven’t been to New York, but I have a new Yorker friend who says the subway stations are essentially a place for homeless people to masturbate when they get banned from the library. The entire state of Wyoming doesn’t seem to have any public transport.
Intercity transport: The greyhound busses are used almost exclusively by people who are not legally allowed to drive (full of meth heads and schizophrenic nuns) the drivers were obviously whichever mentally ill passenger was closest to the front when the previous driver overdosed. They’ll do things like throw their hands in the air and say don’t worry jesus is protecting us! That’s if there is a bus between cities. There isn’t a bus between salt lake city and park city next door for example. The trains have been reduced steadily to the point where the majority of us cities don’t even have a train station.
So yes Germany has excellent public transport, with the exception of having to validate your ticket before you get on the train (That’s an inefficient waste of time).
My only option is the local city bus. For me to go eight miles straight east to where my work is, I’d have to transfer twice, go a couple miles north of where my destination is, and leave home at least two hours before my shift. By car, it takes less than 15 minutes.
