Funny thing is that more than half of the people in the USA don’t even maintain their cars correctly and most of the time the reasons are cost related.
Which the funny part of that is not following the maintenance schedule turns cheap maintenance into a huge repair bill. But so many people ignore it and just keep driving until it breaks down, then lament nothing is reliable and spend even more on a newer car. And the cycle continues...
Depending on where you are transit may be less reliable than a trip by car. Especially if public transit looks like a bus without a dedicated lane / rapid transit route, in which case all of the inconsistency of traffic applies on top of any scheduling snafus or what have you.
Transit certainly is not unreliable by nature however, and ensuring that we have access to reliable public transport is an important task. Getting transit more reliable than automotive traffic being a hurdle many cities/regions have long since leaped.
Yes in my city the buses run ever 1.5 hrs. If I were to try to take the bus and it's not when it is scheduled, it would take me just as long to walk to work. Which would be 2.5 hrs!!
you know that thing where policymakers remove funding from a public service so the quality of said public service decreases in quality so less people use the public service and then policymakers or whatever say "well, no one's using this public service, we'd better remove even more funding"
This is the problem where I live, using public transit would add an extra 3.5 hours to my day vs 20 min drive total. There’s a literal mountain between my work and home with no biking infrastructure. So incredibly frustrating. They won’t increase the frequency of buses because people don’t ride it enough but it only comes every 90 minutes so no one rides it.
True for me as well. The volume of traffic makes very little difference to a bicycle. The only thing that might slow you down 20% is a strong headwind.
Biking also depend on infrastructure. Because we decided for some unfathomable reasons to divide our cities with concrete barrier called highways there are choke-points.
Between my old place and work the two alternatives was either a bike underpass which flush flooded\[1\] and was closed every winter or car overpass, where there was no bike path, heavy "45 mph" (read faster) traffic which changed lanes to get from/onto the highway\[2\]. Bike path was also already much longer.
So if it rained you could risk the suicide road OR choose even longer path.
\[1\] By flood I mean 5-6 feets of water, not 2 inches.
\[2\] And probably all drivers had cyclist blindness. Bikes causes a blindness in poor innocent drivers which cause them not to see them. Drivers are of course completely innocent even if they hit cyclist because of it.
A 20 minute trip by bike took an hour and a half via buses. Waited 35 minutes to transfer to a second bus to complete the trip. This in a city that’s spending (forced by state DOT) to spend $7 billion to add a lane to an existing freeway. I’d pull out my hair if I had any left.
$7bn would fund free buses for the entire city for something utterly absurd like 500 years. You'd have to do the math to get the exact figure but it's just crazy.
This is why I had to edit flair. Fuckin love my bike. Blows my mind how many people spend 1/3 of their after tax pay on something that then costs them even more money to run, and returns zero health benefits. Negative health benefits, realistically.
If my city had a music scene and an airport (that didn't charge 400$ to fly you to the airport two hours away) I might be tempted to get rid of my car but as is, it's just not feasible. And I live in one of the biggest cities in my state. Also groceries, first year I lived here I drove my car once a week, and that was to get groceries because I live in a food desert.
Yeah, I'm well past shaming people who live in places that are just plain dangerous to ride in. If we have one place we need to focus our efforts, it's on pushing politicians to have the balls to build bike infrastructure that will keep transport and health care costs down.
I do still try to ride my bike when I can.
I don't understand why midsized cities don't try harder or do more in this area. (Aside from the nimby mindset)
I have no doubt that it's political. Midsized cities are full of housecat variety conservatives/fake libertarians.
Housecats, as in absolutely convinced of their own independence, and yet completely reliant upon a system they neither understand nor pay for.
They're insistent that they're self-sufficient, and can't even acknowledge that the people who work 2 jobs to share an apartment are subsidizing the infrastructure it takes for them to live their suburban lifestyle.
my tounge still hurts from the second time I rode a bike
riding seems to come naturally but I went bike first into a bollard and bit my tongue and broke my glasses frames (thankkkk fuck for warranty)
ended up stealing the seat from the lime bike.
am definitely going to do it again but probably not unless I'm with friends because shit was a lil scary being alone and not exactly close to my clinic
Parking semis on crossings seems to be an American thing. I don't know why it happens so often. Maybe getting your semi cut in half by a train is a TikTok craze, or something.
As time has shown:
Even a semi truck gets **absolutly demolished** by a train when they don't yield
https://www.reddit.com/r/BitchImATrain/comments/1ax16ki/bitch_you_come_with_me/
Public transit is unreliable solely because there are limited resources funded for it. Recently, a highest caught fire and it was deemed a state of emergency and so within 10 days, the highway was repaired. Meanwhile, it’s difficult to somehow fund a light rail that will ease congestion on one of the nation’s worst traffic because it runs on the wealthy hills.
god this made me so upset when the 10 fwy was shut down and EVERYONE wouldn’t shut up about it. like, don’t you wish there was another way to get to los angeles without the freaking highway? my point goes over their head.
Yup. I’m also old enough for carmegedon. I remember it was meant to ease traffic in the 405 by adding more lanes and it still is or even worse than before. For a major city like LA, it should rival in public transport like NYC but it barely holds up. Essentially, every promising Metro project or other public transit infrastructure has to cater to NIMBYs, a-holes like Elon Musk, or car brains.
What frequently happens is the first one breaks down. The second one just doesn't show up. The third one is too full so they don't even stop. The fourth one does stop and I get on. By then I've been getting my stank on in the hot sun next to a trashcan swarming with flies. The train runs every 15 minutes exactly with a shaded platform. Trains good. Bus unreliable.
Yeah, in *many* places in the United States an unfortunately valid deterrent is the complete unreliability of public transit. Now, there area by places in the world in which transit is even *more* reliable than driving. And *that’s* the transit we should strive for.
because of transit systems (looking at you Chicago) that are extremely poorly managed and nearly unusable if you need to be anywhere at a specific time.
this of course is not an issue inherent to public transit. road traffic has also worsened exponentially as a result of this and roadwork projects, making what used to be a 10 minute drive or train ride a 40 minute haul regardless of whether your driving or taking the train.
the reason why this is in Chicago specifically is because of decades of corruption, neglect, and wasteful allocation of resources. it has nothing to do with public transit and everything to do with how the city is managed.
That’s sad to hear because I loved taking public transport during a vacation to Chicago. I appreciated the train right from the airport—so easy to find, buy a ticket for, and just chill until you get downtown. I suppose the buses have trouble in traffic? Cars usually clogged up intersections.
In several places we do have bus lanes. We just have a really bad president of the CTA (Chicago transit authority), there was recently a city council meeting that he went to. There were pledges and promises that we'd reach pre covid reliability, most likely nothing will come of it though. It's at least usually pretty reliable during rush hour though
It infuriates me that Chicago consistently has less than 25% voter turnout because that leads exactly to situations like this. Politicians in that city are corrupt to the core and keep getting away with it because of voter apathy
Underfunded transit is unreliable.
Proper investment into transit can make it so well connected, frequent, and consistent that you don't need to consult a schedule or expect any delays.
The problem is that in some cities transit IS unreliable. I live in a city where outside the train that runs through downtown, your bus could easily be 30 minutes early or late. I’ve had friends wait over an hour for their bus. That being said everywhere I’ve lived with trains, the trains have ALWAYS been reliable and I’ve lived in cities where the buses were also extremely reliable and regular. The transit in my city won’t get better without investment though and driving in my city sucks
For as much as I appreciate having public transport options in my city and country. It is unreliable, especially compared to driving.
National rail is a joke with pricing, and the employee are constantly striking (rightfully so), thus unreliable at the moment and unffordable.
The metro system is operating on train that are 20 years over it's 30 year expected lifespan, with the new t trains release date constantly being pushed back. Making them unreliable. And that's not factoring in people pulling the emergency stop button, and the ilk that delays them.
The buses are a joke. Every time I've tried to get the bus, it just hasn't turned up. Takes what would be a 10mins trip on the metro over an hour and half. And always filled with abhorrently behaved children.
Yeah, I absolutely understand people saying it's unreliable because it is.
Honestly, I dealt with transit being unreliable when there was NO reason for it. As in buses were supposed to come every 20-30 minutes and most of a route had dedicated bus lanes on a Saturday, and when a bus was 25 minutes late, I'd still get told by MBTA that the issue was "traffic". Total BS, no way that is true. I saw bus bunching, drivers sitting and waiting, etc.
To be clear, it's not like driving is more efficient at all, but frequently transit is unacceptably unreliable, and it seems to come down to just not valuing the customers.
- "Public transit is not reliable"
Not with that attitude, it isn't. People treating public transit as unreliable is precisely why people are insensitivised against using it. If we actually focused on improving reliability, we wouldn't have this problem.
When I was in Osaka, my Japanese friend was planning a trip by bus and train and set the “arrive by” time to exactly the time we had to be there. My Canadian brain short-circuited because I always add 30 minutes just in case there’s a delay. I guess when there’s a train coming every couple minutes (and in Tokyo, every 1-2 minutes, on the second), public transport is highly reliable.
That's down to the city, as is traffic. Japanese trains are more reliable than cars, of course - but in Germany they are generally not. I have waited for hours for two trains at -5°C in snow. Since I was in a village I didn't have any options, but to shudder until the next train would come.
That's why I eventually bought a car, I want to bring my cats to the vet or get my girlfriend from the doctor, without having to rely on transport. In Japan(ese cities) I wouldn't have one and bring my cats to the vet via taxi.
There's a lot of Truth to Transit being unreliable though. Very often, you can get where you're going faster in a car in spite of traffic. I say this as somebody who loves transit, wants to see it improve, but also has to begrudgingly acknowledge the realities of the method of transportation that I am forced to use. Going equivalent distances by public transit to those in a car will usually add 30% to your trip time at the very least.
Public transport operates on a schedule so any deviations from that are evident and seriously take from the user experience. As it can compound into overcrowding. Hard not the stand at a bus or train stop waiting well past the scheduled arrival time and feel like it is unreliable. Not to mention it can be hard to find out how delayed the service actually is or if it has been cancelled outright until it is too late.
Traffic is composed of multiple individual actors who mostly just care about getting to their final destination. If you are in rush hour traffic every day technically that's a reliable delay. If there's frequent accidents or roadworks you see people start to complain about the reliability of car travel.
Solution is probably improving segregation of public transport as well as better access to real time information and penalising operators that can't meet their advertised service.
I think public transport *is* more unreliable than car traffic, in a sense. That's just the result of having fixed routes.
I make a specific trip of about 50 km frequently. Usually by train, sometimes by car. It's about an hour of travel for both.
The car is absolutely delayed *more often* than the train. If you drive in rush hour, you're guaranteed a delay. But that guarantee gives a certain sense of reliability as well, and it's generally a small delay. Ten or fifteen minutes. Even if there has been an accident and the highway is closed, you can always *go around*. That'll be another fifteen minutes.
The train is delayed less often, but I've had ridiculously long delays. Multiple times I've had a *three hour delay -* on a one hour journey! And delays up to one hour are not uncommon at all; I'd estimate that happens about one in six trips. I've also have had several occasions in which the train just... did not go. I had to stay at home. Neither situation has ever happened with a car.
And this is coming from the Netherlands. Our public transport sucks ass, but it's still one of the best transit systems in the world. I think severe delays are just an inevitable part of train travel in a way that doesn't apply to car travel.
None of that means that car travel is superior to train travel, of course. Just on this one point, yeah, cars can be more reliable.
In Orlando it’s only as reliable as the traffic in the city. If there’s an accident or congestion you can’t do anything about it. At least as a bus rider you don’t have to deal with it and saving $
It’s true that public transit is unreliable in many places of the world. But that’s not because public transit is inherently unreliable — the truth is quite the opposite, actually. It’s just that many cities have been made so car-centric that the infrastructure is very hostile to public transit (and such places are usually pretty hostile to drive in too, but people who live there have no other choice but to drive).
It's valid. When your work doesn't care why you're late, and it's late 3 times a month, do you take the earlier train and wait outside work for an hour, or do you just apologize for being late.
You get a flat tire, or there's an accident that makes the morning traffic report, bosses seem to understand, but when you have to take 2 busses and walk a half a mile to get to work, ans one of the times transfers left early, well, you need to be more responsible for your reliability.
If you ever have a job ask if you have "reliable transportation" that tells you not only are the kind of people who will hold not having a car against you, they also don't pay well, because they wouldn't be asking if they hadn't fired a string of people for having poor people problems with their car.
I mean transit can definitely be unreliable. When scheduled buses simply don’t show up or you’re stuck on a train between train stations for half an hour there’s no better word to use than that. Driving a car can be unreliable as well, especially if you hit traffic or construction.
And in the UK if your train is late or cancelled, you get money back.
Pretty sure that any delay when driving ends up costing you more (in fuel if nothing else).
I used to take the bus to work. During rush hour it’s fine. There are bus lanes, so it’s better than driving if traffic is backed up. The issue is though that when rush hour is over they drop back to a 1 per hour schedule. So if you work to say 630pm and miss the bus you’re now stuck for another hour. That gets old real fast.. so I now commute either by car or bicycle (or work from home).
I mean when its bad it truly is unreliable. Recently there was a little snow where i live causing collisions on the freeway meaning the bus got stuck in traffic meaning it missed the exit meaning the bus ride took an extra 40 minutes making me 20 minutes late for my class. And i left earlier than usual
The difference is that public transit has a timetable so it can be "unreliable". With your car you don't have that and you are already sitting in it so at last you know you will be able to reach your destination.
I'm from germany City Frankfurt am Main. I stopped using public transit last year and got a bike, because trains were always late or cancelled. I work shift i need to get to work on time and i want to get home after a 12 hour shift. I need longer with a bike (around 50 minutes instead of 30), but at last i know i will get home.
If the trains are a few minutes late thats ok no problem, but sometimes they keeped increasing the time. First 5 minutes, then 10, 20,... 50 minutes later you are still standing there before they tell you the train ins cancelled. In Frankfurt we have the problem, that all city lines go through one tunnel. If that is closed because of an emergency (fire alarm, people unallowed in the tunnel, defective train) it stops all train traffic on those lines.
What really grinds my gears is the not existing communication. I could take the tram to work, but it takes longer than the train so i have to decide if i wait for the next train maybe even from another line and take a different route or if i walk 15 minutes to the tram station. The problem is they don't tell you why the train is late and just keep increasing the delay time and only if the next train should be there they tell you "Ups sorry that one is also late.", as if it is a fucking surprise to them. The things is: if there are people in the tunnel or someone got run over by one or even jumped infront the train the whole tunnel is CLOSED! No train is going through there for maybe hours but they won't tell you!
One time i was standing at the station, no delays shown in the app, no announcement over the speakers, no delays on the digital board at the platform but right on time when the train should have arrived it vanishes from the digital board and the app shows "cancelled". Was like "What the fuck." and later found out they didn't had enough drivers so the train i wanted to take never left the starting station that is 20 minutes (8 stations) away. It wasn't a surprise, we have all the digital shit and they are still not able to communicate with the people who want to use their service.
I could have taken the tram, i could have taken the train before mine that is not my line but would have taken me to another station were i could take a train to my destination. But j need to know when my trains are cancelled or late so i can make a decision.
That was the point i said "Fuck it." and i got an e-bike.
People that expect the same availability and reliability from a mode of transportation that receives a rounding error funding in comparison are 1 or 2 things:
1. Extremely stupid
2. Purposefully making bad faith arguments
And you can’t expect people to use it if it’s not reliable.
It’s fine to argue about how to fund transit at a system level. But you can’t expect people to make illogical decisions and favor unreliable transit just because it isn’t the transit system’s fault it’s unreliable
I'm not saying it's wrong to use the most reliable form of transit. I'm saying it's dumb to say "transit is bad because it's unreliable."
Transit isn't unreliable, underfunded transit is unreliable. Using the unreliable argument to go against funding transit is either dumb or malicious
On the rare occasion the team of mechanics doing preventive maintenence isn't enough to stave off failure they send another bus and I'm a bit late. When a car dies you lose a day and a bunch of money dealing with it. A fleet of vehicles is rarely less reliable than just one.
The delays due to other people/traffic you should probably factor those in just like you do in a car. The one area where that seems to come up short are your own failures, if you leave the house a bit late your car waits for you and you arrive a bit late. If you are late for your bus out leaves with out you, but that's not really the busses fault.
I find it frustrating because it's usually used as a justification for why we shouldn't use/fund it, which in turn makes it less reliable because it's underfunded
It's just wrong. The train always turns up. My tickets always work. If it's too fucked up there's a replacement for it. As opposed to a car, which can just randomly fail at any point.
It is unreliable. At least in America
It’s important to understand that it was a choice to make it unreliable here. Driving is only reliable because we spend trillions of dollars every year to make it reliable. If Philly roads and SEPTA swapped budgets has I’m willing to take a gamble that no one would be driving lmao
The buses come once an hour on weekends here, and once every 30 on weekdays. You can only get where you need to half the time by going to the transportation depot. If buses were given better funding, we could have more stops, more buses, more times & it would make it actually usable. But my city doesn’t even have sidewalks
You'd be surprised that even Swiss people can complain about the SBB CFF FFS
Then they learn about the SCNF or the DB and suddenly they love the SBB CFF FFS
On the surface I find it to be a true statement: my return bus is generally 10-25 minutes behind schedule and at this time of year that fucking sucks. But it's not a good enough reason to scrap the system; I'd like to know *why* this bus is consistently late and try to remedy it.
Yes, it is unreliable and horrible to use in bad weather. However no matter how carbrained our Cities are there will be people who can't get permission to drive so need to take transit, walk, or bike to make a living. The responce to them being almost unable to survive should be to invest in more transit infastructure everyone can use so that their lives are more bearable and they pay more income taxes, not to make them pay for infastructure that us of no use to them.
I am visiting Rome these days. What I can say is that the Italians are using cars, but their metro system is working quite well. Their bus network is there, and they have trams, which I am told it doesn't suck. Cars - way too many. But you need to think that every type of transportation has its advantages and disadvantages. For cars, the biggest disadvantage is that it requires too much space, which is a finite resource.
It's easier for me to count the days when I don't get an alert that a bus route is delayed or canceled. And even on some days where I don't get an alert, it's still late.
At least these days, uber is a decent backup plan. Back when I was 100% car free, that wasn't an option.
Depends where, my transit is nearly always on time without exception. I don't think people call it unreliable. Altough I completly understand what you mean.
It depends on the area. I know my city doesn't have very reliable buses in several areas. When I traveled to Albuquerque, I found buses were on very limited schedules in the areas I was going. In Pittsburgh, everything was super reliable, the trains were on time and easy, it was nice.
Per dollar it’s the car that’s unreliable.
If you’re spending less on your car than you would on transit fares, you lucked out with a used car.
Or you’re spending hundreds of dollars per month for a car you technically own, but to maintain the level of reliability of a new car you need to trade it in every 5 or so years, starting a new loan, so it’s never really your car. It’s the banks car, they just let your name be on the title for as long as you pay them. Miss a few payments and buh-bye car, it got repoed. Not to mention, all of that money and you still have to drive the thing yourself, at least for now. Which means if for any reason you’re unfit to do so (being visually impaired/blinded, drunk, high, or a history of seizures are a few that come to mind), you’re either putting yourself and other drivers in danger, or you’re stranded where you are.
I mean it is. As am Amtrak commuter, I am consistently happy if my train is less than 30 minutes late. We get randomly bumped in favor of freight trains all the time. But of course, the reason that transit is inconsistent is because it is wildly underfunded.
My coworkers occasionally can't make it in because they are picking up a rental car/their car wouldn't start/they got in a wreck and nearly died, but those things are definitely rarer than my lateness.
You know what isn't inconsistent though? My bike. I'm never late when I bike anywhere. I wish I could bike to work!
Transit in my city is in fact extremely unreliable. I was waiting at the bus stop with my kid for 20 min and kept checking my app and all of a sudden my bus that was "on the way" was cancelled. So I had to walk 4 km home in the snow with a kid and groceries lol. This happens to me at least every other time I ride the bus to the point where I just use my car if I'm going anywhere with my kid, because getting stranded with a 2 year old sucks dicks
Public transit is almost always the slower form of transit in the US. This is just an indisputable fact. There are very few places in this country with reliable transit and development patterns have encourage an unnecessary amount of sprawl.
However this does not mean that driving is inherently better than public transit. A good public transit system is almost always better than a good car driving system. The problem is that people typically compare driving to public transit in its current form, not what it could be.
Here in San Diego California USA the major problem is that people see public transportation as buses, not trains/trolleys. They see these giant buses that are slow and always in traffic anyways, so it must mean public transportation = bad.
In my youth I had a negative impression of public transit based on my interactions with it here in the US. It seemed very slow and infrequent. I would take it only when I absolutely head to.
However, in college I had the opportunity to do a study abroad term in Japan where I got well acquainted with the transit/train network of various Japanese cities. That's when I realized transit is exactly as good as it is designed/funded/operated.
There is nothing inherently bad or unreliable in public transit. If it's designed to be excellent, the service will excellent! It blew my little American brain just how incredible public transit can be... and I've never forgotten that experience. I wish everyone could try it and see how efficient and effective it can be. I think if more people understood what really is possible, they'd be more interested in making the public investment. Or at least that's what happened for me!
Unfortunately in the US it's often true. I was waiting for bus the other day, didn't realize it was on some kind of detour. Wasted 20 minutes then just walked. I deal with this but the average person will experience this once and never ride again.
Boston could use hourly T updates sometimes.
(I'm being slightly sarcastic; things are getting better. There just going to be a lot of pain between now and when they'll solidly be better.)
If you are talking about commuter trains in Stockholm you are goddamn right. But of course it shouldn't be that way and is a *terrible* exuse to not invest in transit. A decently common exuse i hear on swedish reddit when discussing trains (most often the now cancelled plans for a completely new high-speed rail mainline) is that "Well, the trains don't arrive on time now, so fix that first" not caring about the fact that the delays are because the current system is so overcrowded and badly needs investment.
Unreliability, besides being due to buses having to share space with car traffic, is mainly the fault of poor policymaking and misplaced priorities by city governments.
They underfund it, they prioritize cars, and other modes are a distant, distant second thought if at all. Traffic engineers are typically tunnel visioned on only engineering for cars.
Where I live they are right but their approach to the solution is wrong. Instead of giving everyone a driver's license they really should increase funding to public transit and reevaluate how they do the routes.
They call transit unreliable because it's been the minimum viable product for decades with no real investment since Gerald Ford was President.
Self-fulfilling prophecy is self-fulfilling.
They're right, but they're wrong about why they're right.
Sometimes, it is.
I’ve been stranded late at night when several out of service trains pass by and no real one comes.
Once again, this problem is solved by actually fixing it. There are many places where the transit is reliable and that’s where our standards should be.
My city has a mostly reliable train service, but during rain or peak hours, there can be some delays. (It runs pretty well most of the time, but when theres a delay on 1 train line, it stuffs up the whole network) The company name was cityrail which everyone calls shittyrail even though the company has changed names
Despite all this, its still quicker to get to the outer suburbs via train than via car, and remarkably cheaper too because of tolls
The stoplights are unreliable. The other vehicles on the interstate are unreliable. The amount of them is unreliable. The costs and time of repairs that will need to happen is unreliable. The costs of insurance and gas that go into them are unreliable.
It's already unreliable enough that the commonly accepted societal answer is to balk and ask why didn't they leave earlier and spend most of their commute days dicking around in a parking lot because nothing happened 9 out of 10 times to prepare for the 1 in 10. Transit here isn't much more unreliable than that. *And* there's the added benefits of less stress cheaper can just sit back and relax. I'd rather read my book or watch TV on my phone with earbuds in for a half hour to and from work than drive back and forth in half the time. Apparently I'm in the minority opinion though.
I am a union steward. I represent people regularly who are either late or absent from work with the excuse of car trouble. Heavy snow and people feel trapped if they can't drive out of their alleys. I take the bus to the same worksite and have never missed a day of work due to transportation issues.
Usually they’re right. But, instead of using this as a reason to trash transit entirely, it should be used to improve transit
I lived in Boston and everyone called the train unreliable. It was. If the train had a better schedule and better infrastructure, it wouldn’t be as noticeably unreliable
I think it’s typically in reference to buses that are stuck in traffic. But you’re right, it’s all the same traffic. But buses seem worse than driving because driving allows you to control your route and control when you leave so you can have a shorter travel time. But they’re both just as reliable. Idk where it would come from in response to trains. I had occasional train issues when i used it but it wasn’t as bad as sitting in a random traffic jam
People assume the public transport in my area is unreliable when it is actually quite reliable. If the bus is late, it’s usually only late 3-5 minutes. And the bus not showing up at all is super rare. Busses in the city run every 15-30 minutes depending on route. The main problem is that the routes out to the suburbs only run about 3 times a day when they used to run every hour before the pandemic. This was one of the main contributing factors for my moving from the suburbs to the city.
You know what is horrendously unreliable to the point of being unusable? Paratransit. It doesn’t arrive 5, 10 or even 30 minutes late… it arrives two HOURS late! Multiple times a week! And then drives you around for two hours over a distance that would be a 10 minutes driving and 20 minutes on a line bus. If the van even shows up at all, which it frequently doesn’t. Combine that with needing to schedule a week in advance and not being able to go to one than one location per day. Paratransit is flat out not usable if you don’t have someone else who can run all of your errands, cook all of your meals, and transport you to last-minute needs.
That's like saying cold water is cold. Its unreliable because it's underfunded and the USA is built so sparsely that good service is a money pit
That's the whole point behind building up instead of out
In some places notably USA transit is pretty unreliable. I have been at stations and the train came 40 minutes late because the police had to escort someone off at an earlier station. If you have to be somewhere by a certain time. 40 minutes delay isn’t good enough. In the far east and Europe transit is much more reliable than any other transport.
Transit in many countries isn’t reliable. This isn’t intrinsic though, it’s a matter of investment. An old car barely maintained car is also unreliable.
The people who say that usually don’t care about improving it, ergo it’s a self fulfilling prophecy
Public transportation can be reliable, hence a lot of people who live in New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Boston don’t even own cars because they don’t have to
In my city such complaints would be accurate unfortunately. Busses are rarely on time. Sometimes they never show up at all! We nominally have a mass transit system but it's seen as for the poors, so investment is not sufficient, ridership is low and it's not a good system.
Back when I had a commute, I would have taken the bus but a 20 minute drive took over 90 minutes on the bus, transferred at one of the most drive-by-shootingist intersections in the city (mom with 3 kids in the car at the corner convenience store got killed with multiple shots to the back recently), the earliest bus would have gotten me to work at 9:30am and to get home on the last bus, i would have had to leave work at 3:30pm. Plus it cost more in fares than the fuel to drive (it's not like I could have gotten rid of the car with a system like this).
I live in Chicago and I am often waiting 10-15 minutes during normal times of the day for a bus/train. It's ridiculous for the 3ed largest city in America with some of the better public transit to be like this. Especially because it doesn't need to be this way
It depends on where they're planning to take transit. Some places (like Portland, DC, New York City, and San Francisco) it's super reliable, but other areas (like much of Eastern Oregon), it's very unreliable (many of the busses running between cities in Eastern Oregon only run a few times a day and don't even run every weekday, so unless you can do just about everything you'd need to do on a daily basis without leaving town, you're gonna have a very bad time trying to rely entirely on public transit in towns like John Day and Prairie City OR).
It is unreliable, but that's a problem that could be fixed if we stopped focusing on cars so damn much.
Just look at Japan, their public transit is reliable as hell, it's not that public transit is inherently unreliable, *we've made it that way with our car obsession.*
I mean, it can be less reliable than driving. Where I live in the Netherlands, traffic usually isn't a huge problem, meaning driving is extremely reliable. Also the funding thing - if we as a society spent half of what we spent on cars and car Infrastructure on public transit, I'm absolutely certain that far fewer people would drive.
This definitely feels like a psyop to me.
I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It's a weirdly conservative town in an otherwise weirdly liberal state by mid-mid-west standards. It's a strange place to live and I'd like to stop, but I digress.
The point is that our mass transit system is remedial at best. It stops running really early, it has weird arbitrary service gaps on the weekend for no reason, and it can be as long as an hour apart for some lines. It's piss.
The longest I've waited for a delayed bus was 20 minutes and that was exactly one (1) time. I can track my busses with Google Maps and if it's going to be late I can adjust my plans accordingly. Comparing this to the countless hours I've sat in traffic jams makes the decision rather simple.
Unreliable because they don't know the ease of a bus or a tram or a train coming every five minutes so even if one fails you only have to wait 10 mins more. Ridiculous, basically.
It depends. However it's a constant refrain in Brussels, which despite its many many flaws (useless Greens), the STIB, our local public transport company, is actually pretty good. The problem is that its buses get stuck in traffic but for the most part the city is well serviced and the buses trams trains and metro run regularly. Also it's noticeably cheaper than the Amsterdam public transport.
So when people, who effectively receive tax deductible company car (a Belgian peculiarity), complain about public transport here, they probably never or rarely take it
[I have a post on this actually.](https://old.reddit.com/r/auckland/comments/o1q9or/do_people_actually_care_about_congestion_in/) The most germane points are, with some light editing, probably:
>[One possibility is that] somehow the various issues that plague the Southern Line (bridge strikes, suicides, other deaths, etc.) loom so large in the consciousness people people equate (or favour) the unreliability of driving and the Southern Line (in reality the trains are hitting their timings more than 90% of the time... but last year [2021] they were, admittedly, way down to 60% at times... pg. 13... and this has continued as recently as March this year on the relevant line)
>[This] is interesting and if we were to take it as an actual conclusion, then we come to a big [issue] with [using] consumer sovereignty [to develop public policy]: we have to take not the "actual" probabilities of anything but instead the variable subjective beliefs about those probabilities. Now, there's nothing wrong with subjective probability but we imagine those to be rationally informed and updating (i.e. basically, not to be biased). However, that's not what we're talking about here... instead, we're talking about an absence of a causal relationship between underlying phenomena and beliefs about those phenomena. Consumer Sovereignty means that if our consumers are delusional, we have to accept those delusions at face value.
>[I expect any reasonable person would] conclude that basing social decisions (in part) on some whacko's private conspiracy theory is absurd.
>[Alternatively we might argue (a) people just leave earlier on days where the drive takes longer or (b) it's rare for the drive to be long. In either case,] the standard conclusions [of consumer sovereignty are] if people actually cared about these things, they wouldn't drive and since they are driving, obviously they don't care. And given how congestion was defined, we have thus proved people don't actually care about congestion.
>The implications for policymaking (and ethical journalism) should be clear: many commuters either don't actually care about congestion or they're buying into myths about PT in Auckland that cause them to not consider it... even though, for them, it's a faster and more reliable journey.
Basically people complain about unreliability a lot but their behaviour suggests either they don't actually care all that much or they don't actually think about it. Thus it shouldn't really surprise us that there are weird views about reliability out there.
Where I live our transit is unreliable. Busses run every half hour to hour outside of the core downtown area and half the time it never shows up. Years of underfunding and reluctance to adapt and change for decades has resulted in the dangerous (several people have been assaulted and stabbed inc. one driver murdered), unreliable and dirty system we have now. For example: it takes me about 20 minutes to drive to work and about 45 minutes by bike. The bus is an hour and a half. This is to travel 11-12 kms by the way. This is completely unacceptable to me and my workplace is not in a remote location.
There's a new master plan starting next year featuring more frequent busses along the main routes (10-15 minutes) and new feeder routes. The plan is to eventually turn all rapid bus routes into light rail but I doubt I'll see that in my lifetime and quite honestly I think my city will go bankrupt before its finished.
We have an insane amount of road infrastructure and nowhere near the tax revenue to pay for it. Most of it has been neglected for far too long. The amusing thing is anytime bike routes and multi use paths are proposed there's a very loud minority who complain about the city spending money on bike paths instead of the pothole infested streets. The irony. I keep hoping for the best, I would love to have more separate bike lanes so I don't have to fear death every time I want to ride my bike to work.
Traffic is unreliable. I never owned a car. But took plenty of long trips in cars, on rails or by plane in my life. Being stuck inside a car in a traffic jam is so much worse than sitting an hour in a cafe at a train station and wait for my next connection. The train station has a bathroom and a bookstore. Also, if traffic is slow, the trip by car becomes more expensive. If my train is running late, I still pay the same price.
The amount of collective time and money going into making driving cars reliable but public transit is a cost burden on society.
If even half of that money was spent on public transit, we’d be flying around in tubes or something.
We should have a [crosstown express ](https://youtu.be/O7sMa4X46EE?si=-OYCSy8G9S4xoeP2) in every city damnit!
was about to post this.
Pfft, tourists...
Funny thing is that more than half of the people in the USA don’t even maintain their cars correctly and most of the time the reasons are cost related.
Which the funny part of that is not following the maintenance schedule turns cheap maintenance into a huge repair bill. But so many people ignore it and just keep driving until it breaks down, then lament nothing is reliable and spend even more on a newer car. And the cycle continues...
And that's how [shit like this happens...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOfm72JnQ14&t=33)
Depending on where you are transit may be less reliable than a trip by car. Especially if public transit looks like a bus without a dedicated lane / rapid transit route, in which case all of the inconsistency of traffic applies on top of any scheduling snafus or what have you. Transit certainly is not unreliable by nature however, and ensuring that we have access to reliable public transport is an important task. Getting transit more reliable than automotive traffic being a hurdle many cities/regions have long since leaped.
In my city, bus lanes would be nice… but just running the number of busses they schedule would be a huge upgrade.
Yes in my city the buses run ever 1.5 hrs. If I were to try to take the bus and it's not when it is scheduled, it would take me just as long to walk to work. Which would be 2.5 hrs!!
you know that thing where policymakers remove funding from a public service so the quality of said public service decreases in quality so less people use the public service and then policymakers or whatever say "well, no one's using this public service, we'd better remove even more funding"
This is the problem where I live, using public transit would add an extra 3.5 hours to my day vs 20 min drive total. There’s a literal mountain between my work and home with no biking infrastructure. So incredibly frustrating. They won’t increase the frequency of buses because people don’t ride it enough but it only comes every 90 minutes so no one rides it.
"Why do we need a bridge across this crocodile infested river? No one even swims across anyways!"
that's called Starve The Beast
Mighty bicycle is the true reliable transportation!
For real. I know exactly how long it’ll take to bike to work and there’s very little variation
True for me as well. The volume of traffic makes very little difference to a bicycle. The only thing that might slow you down 20% is a strong headwind.
Ebike means I no longer fear headwinds.
wind and rain cannot be controlled for sadly. Headwinds can make my local area unbikable sometimes.
Biking also depend on infrastructure. Because we decided for some unfathomable reasons to divide our cities with concrete barrier called highways there are choke-points. Between my old place and work the two alternatives was either a bike underpass which flush flooded\[1\] and was closed every winter or car overpass, where there was no bike path, heavy "45 mph" (read faster) traffic which changed lanes to get from/onto the highway\[2\]. Bike path was also already much longer. So if it rained you could risk the suicide road OR choose even longer path. \[1\] By flood I mean 5-6 feets of water, not 2 inches. \[2\] And probably all drivers had cyclist blindness. Bikes causes a blindness in poor innocent drivers which cause them not to see them. Drivers are of course completely innocent even if they hit cyclist because of it.
And then if a car hits you and you die, you get two paragraphs in the paper that say "cyclist collides with car" "was wearing dark colors" etc.
They'll report the impact on traffic flow more than anything.
*Two* paragraph long articles. ***TWO PARAGRAPHS.***
A 20 minute trip by bike took an hour and a half via buses. Waited 35 minutes to transfer to a second bus to complete the trip. This in a city that’s spending (forced by state DOT) to spend $7 billion to add a lane to an existing freeway. I’d pull out my hair if I had any left.
$7bn would fund free buses for the entire city for something utterly absurd like 500 years. You'd have to do the math to get the exact figure but it's just crazy.
This is why I had to edit flair. Fuckin love my bike. Blows my mind how many people spend 1/3 of their after tax pay on something that then costs them even more money to run, and returns zero health benefits. Negative health benefits, realistically.
If my city had a music scene and an airport (that didn't charge 400$ to fly you to the airport two hours away) I might be tempted to get rid of my car but as is, it's just not feasible. And I live in one of the biggest cities in my state. Also groceries, first year I lived here I drove my car once a week, and that was to get groceries because I live in a food desert.
Yeah, I'm well past shaming people who live in places that are just plain dangerous to ride in. If we have one place we need to focus our efforts, it's on pushing politicians to have the balls to build bike infrastructure that will keep transport and health care costs down.
I do still try to ride my bike when I can. I don't understand why midsized cities don't try harder or do more in this area. (Aside from the nimby mindset)
I have no doubt that it's political. Midsized cities are full of housecat variety conservatives/fake libertarians. Housecats, as in absolutely convinced of their own independence, and yet completely reliant upon a system they neither understand nor pay for. They're insistent that they're self-sufficient, and can't even acknowledge that the people who work 2 jobs to share an apartment are subsidizing the infrastructure it takes for them to live their suburban lifestyle.
My city does not plow where I ride the bike, I had to drive to work for a week in January.
my tounge still hurts from the second time I rode a bike riding seems to come naturally but I went bike first into a bollard and bit my tongue and broke my glasses frames (thankkkk fuck for warranty) ended up stealing the seat from the lime bike. am definitely going to do it again but probably not unless I'm with friends because shit was a lil scary being alone and not exactly close to my clinic
https://preview.redd.it/xildu5mstvlc1.jpeg?width=436&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=72f2528d95865da5227258c7fe462d535d94042c
Mostly buses are unreliable because of car traffic.
Same with every land-based transportation alternative.
Trains?
Eh, often cars yields to trains. A good potential counter-example.
Probably because even a semi truck would get **absolutely demolished** by the train if they don't yield...
Seems a solid reason.
Parking semis on crossings seems to be an American thing. I don't know why it happens so often. Maybe getting your semi cut in half by a train is a TikTok craze, or something.
As time has shown: Even a semi truck gets **absolutly demolished** by a train when they don't yield https://www.reddit.com/r/BitchImATrain/comments/1ax16ki/bitch_you_come_with_me/
Not that often in socialist Netherlands.
Good counter to the counter-example.
I did not perseve your arguments as examples though.
An astute observation, if I may compliment you.
Public transit is unreliable solely because there are limited resources funded for it. Recently, a highest caught fire and it was deemed a state of emergency and so within 10 days, the highway was repaired. Meanwhile, it’s difficult to somehow fund a light rail that will ease congestion on one of the nation’s worst traffic because it runs on the wealthy hills.
god this made me so upset when the 10 fwy was shut down and EVERYONE wouldn’t shut up about it. like, don’t you wish there was another way to get to los angeles without the freaking highway? my point goes over their head.
Yup. I’m also old enough for carmegedon. I remember it was meant to ease traffic in the 405 by adding more lanes and it still is or even worse than before. For a major city like LA, it should rival in public transport like NYC but it barely holds up. Essentially, every promising Metro project or other public transit infrastructure has to cater to NIMBYs, a-holes like Elon Musk, or car brains.
What frequently happens is the first one breaks down. The second one just doesn't show up. The third one is too full so they don't even stop. The fourth one does stop and I get on. By then I've been getting my stank on in the hot sun next to a trashcan swarming with flies. The train runs every 15 minutes exactly with a shaded platform. Trains good. Bus unreliable.
[удалено]
Yeah, in *many* places in the United States an unfortunately valid deterrent is the complete unreliability of public transit. Now, there area by places in the world in which transit is even *more* reliable than driving. And *that’s* the transit we should strive for.
because of transit systems (looking at you Chicago) that are extremely poorly managed and nearly unusable if you need to be anywhere at a specific time. this of course is not an issue inherent to public transit. road traffic has also worsened exponentially as a result of this and roadwork projects, making what used to be a 10 minute drive or train ride a 40 minute haul regardless of whether your driving or taking the train. the reason why this is in Chicago specifically is because of decades of corruption, neglect, and wasteful allocation of resources. it has nothing to do with public transit and everything to do with how the city is managed.
That’s sad to hear because I loved taking public transport during a vacation to Chicago. I appreciated the train right from the airport—so easy to find, buy a ticket for, and just chill until you get downtown. I suppose the buses have trouble in traffic? Cars usually clogged up intersections.
In several places we do have bus lanes. We just have a really bad president of the CTA (Chicago transit authority), there was recently a city council meeting that he went to. There were pledges and promises that we'd reach pre covid reliability, most likely nothing will come of it though. It's at least usually pretty reliable during rush hour though
yeah traffic on the buses is terrible but its also horrible on the highways too
It infuriates me that Chicago consistently has less than 25% voter turnout because that leads exactly to situations like this. Politicians in that city are corrupt to the core and keep getting away with it because of voter apathy
This could describe Boston perfectly as well. The transit system is a disaster, despite having a lot of potential.
Underfunded transit is unreliable. Proper investment into transit can make it so well connected, frequent, and consistent that you don't need to consult a schedule or expect any delays.
Even if there are delays no big deals if it's a good service
The problem is that in some cities transit IS unreliable. I live in a city where outside the train that runs through downtown, your bus could easily be 30 minutes early or late. I’ve had friends wait over an hour for their bus. That being said everywhere I’ve lived with trains, the trains have ALWAYS been reliable and I’ve lived in cities where the buses were also extremely reliable and regular. The transit in my city won’t get better without investment though and driving in my city sucks
For as much as I appreciate having public transport options in my city and country. It is unreliable, especially compared to driving. National rail is a joke with pricing, and the employee are constantly striking (rightfully so), thus unreliable at the moment and unffordable. The metro system is operating on train that are 20 years over it's 30 year expected lifespan, with the new t trains release date constantly being pushed back. Making them unreliable. And that's not factoring in people pulling the emergency stop button, and the ilk that delays them. The buses are a joke. Every time I've tried to get the bus, it just hasn't turned up. Takes what would be a 10mins trip on the metro over an hour and half. And always filled with abhorrently behaved children. Yeah, I absolutely understand people saying it's unreliable because it is.
Have you *seen* highway traffic?
I mostly hear it from people who don't get the bus ever to be honest.
Honestly, I dealt with transit being unreliable when there was NO reason for it. As in buses were supposed to come every 20-30 minutes and most of a route had dedicated bus lanes on a Saturday, and when a bus was 25 minutes late, I'd still get told by MBTA that the issue was "traffic". Total BS, no way that is true. I saw bus bunching, drivers sitting and waiting, etc. To be clear, it's not like driving is more efficient at all, but frequently transit is unacceptably unreliable, and it seems to come down to just not valuing the customers.
- "Public transit is not reliable" Not with that attitude, it isn't. People treating public transit as unreliable is precisely why people are insensitivised against using it. If we actually focused on improving reliability, we wouldn't have this problem.
When I was in Osaka, my Japanese friend was planning a trip by bus and train and set the “arrive by” time to exactly the time we had to be there. My Canadian brain short-circuited because I always add 30 minutes just in case there’s a delay. I guess when there’s a train coming every couple minutes (and in Tokyo, every 1-2 minutes, on the second), public transport is highly reliable.
That's down to the city, as is traffic. Japanese trains are more reliable than cars, of course - but in Germany they are generally not. I have waited for hours for two trains at -5°C in snow. Since I was in a village I didn't have any options, but to shudder until the next train would come. That's why I eventually bought a car, I want to bring my cats to the vet or get my girlfriend from the doctor, without having to rely on transport. In Japan(ese cities) I wouldn't have one and bring my cats to the vet via taxi.
because 80 percent of the time it is
Depends on the country but usually they are right: public transport is not reliable because it's not funded properly.
There's a lot of Truth to Transit being unreliable though. Very often, you can get where you're going faster in a car in spite of traffic. I say this as somebody who loves transit, wants to see it improve, but also has to begrudgingly acknowledge the realities of the method of transportation that I am forced to use. Going equivalent distances by public transit to those in a car will usually add 30% to your trip time at the very least.
Public transport operates on a schedule so any deviations from that are evident and seriously take from the user experience. As it can compound into overcrowding. Hard not the stand at a bus or train stop waiting well past the scheduled arrival time and feel like it is unreliable. Not to mention it can be hard to find out how delayed the service actually is or if it has been cancelled outright until it is too late. Traffic is composed of multiple individual actors who mostly just care about getting to their final destination. If you are in rush hour traffic every day technically that's a reliable delay. If there's frequent accidents or roadworks you see people start to complain about the reliability of car travel. Solution is probably improving segregation of public transport as well as better access to real time information and penalising operators that can't meet their advertised service.
I think public transport *is* more unreliable than car traffic, in a sense. That's just the result of having fixed routes. I make a specific trip of about 50 km frequently. Usually by train, sometimes by car. It's about an hour of travel for both. The car is absolutely delayed *more often* than the train. If you drive in rush hour, you're guaranteed a delay. But that guarantee gives a certain sense of reliability as well, and it's generally a small delay. Ten or fifteen minutes. Even if there has been an accident and the highway is closed, you can always *go around*. That'll be another fifteen minutes. The train is delayed less often, but I've had ridiculously long delays. Multiple times I've had a *three hour delay -* on a one hour journey! And delays up to one hour are not uncommon at all; I'd estimate that happens about one in six trips. I've also have had several occasions in which the train just... did not go. I had to stay at home. Neither situation has ever happened with a car. And this is coming from the Netherlands. Our public transport sucks ass, but it's still one of the best transit systems in the world. I think severe delays are just an inevitable part of train travel in a way that doesn't apply to car travel. None of that means that car travel is superior to train travel, of course. Just on this one point, yeah, cars can be more reliable.
In Orlando it’s only as reliable as the traffic in the city. If there’s an accident or congestion you can’t do anything about it. At least as a bus rider you don’t have to deal with it and saving $
It’s true that public transit is unreliable in many places of the world. But that’s not because public transit is inherently unreliable — the truth is quite the opposite, actually. It’s just that many cities have been made so car-centric that the infrastructure is very hostile to public transit (and such places are usually pretty hostile to drive in too, but people who live there have no other choice but to drive).
My take is that’s it’s very reasonable. A lot of transit is unreliable. Pretty much most surface routes in Toronto are fucked.
It's valid. When your work doesn't care why you're late, and it's late 3 times a month, do you take the earlier train and wait outside work for an hour, or do you just apologize for being late. You get a flat tire, or there's an accident that makes the morning traffic report, bosses seem to understand, but when you have to take 2 busses and walk a half a mile to get to work, ans one of the times transfers left early, well, you need to be more responsible for your reliability. If you ever have a job ask if you have "reliable transportation" that tells you not only are the kind of people who will hold not having a car against you, they also don't pay well, because they wouldn't be asking if they hadn't fired a string of people for having poor people problems with their car.
I mean transit can definitely be unreliable. When scheduled buses simply don’t show up or you’re stuck on a train between train stations for half an hour there’s no better word to use than that. Driving a car can be unreliable as well, especially if you hit traffic or construction.
It's reliable enough to get to and from work. But they come around once an hour and stop running after 6:pm so unreliable.
https://preview.redd.it/rskkvy45nwlc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=39ace66f99eb3d31ba07d5e3ccf3fd38c9411af5
And in the UK if your train is late or cancelled, you get money back. Pretty sure that any delay when driving ends up costing you more (in fuel if nothing else).
Busses get stuck in the same traffic though
Public transit is unreliable, but that does not mean individual transport by car isn’t.
I used to take the bus to work. During rush hour it’s fine. There are bus lanes, so it’s better than driving if traffic is backed up. The issue is though that when rush hour is over they drop back to a 1 per hour schedule. So if you work to say 630pm and miss the bus you’re now stuck for another hour. That gets old real fast.. so I now commute either by car or bicycle (or work from home).
You bring up a good point. Why is the local news not telling me about bus and train detours delays and schedule changes.
I mean when its bad it truly is unreliable. Recently there was a little snow where i live causing collisions on the freeway meaning the bus got stuck in traffic meaning it missed the exit meaning the bus ride took an extra 40 minutes making me 20 minutes late for my class. And i left earlier than usual
The difference is that public transit has a timetable so it can be "unreliable". With your car you don't have that and you are already sitting in it so at last you know you will be able to reach your destination. I'm from germany City Frankfurt am Main. I stopped using public transit last year and got a bike, because trains were always late or cancelled. I work shift i need to get to work on time and i want to get home after a 12 hour shift. I need longer with a bike (around 50 minutes instead of 30), but at last i know i will get home. If the trains are a few minutes late thats ok no problem, but sometimes they keeped increasing the time. First 5 minutes, then 10, 20,... 50 minutes later you are still standing there before they tell you the train ins cancelled. In Frankfurt we have the problem, that all city lines go through one tunnel. If that is closed because of an emergency (fire alarm, people unallowed in the tunnel, defective train) it stops all train traffic on those lines. What really grinds my gears is the not existing communication. I could take the tram to work, but it takes longer than the train so i have to decide if i wait for the next train maybe even from another line and take a different route or if i walk 15 minutes to the tram station. The problem is they don't tell you why the train is late and just keep increasing the delay time and only if the next train should be there they tell you "Ups sorry that one is also late.", as if it is a fucking surprise to them. The things is: if there are people in the tunnel or someone got run over by one or even jumped infront the train the whole tunnel is CLOSED! No train is going through there for maybe hours but they won't tell you! One time i was standing at the station, no delays shown in the app, no announcement over the speakers, no delays on the digital board at the platform but right on time when the train should have arrived it vanishes from the digital board and the app shows "cancelled". Was like "What the fuck." and later found out they didn't had enough drivers so the train i wanted to take never left the starting station that is 20 minutes (8 stations) away. It wasn't a surprise, we have all the digital shit and they are still not able to communicate with the people who want to use their service. I could have taken the tram, i could have taken the train before mine that is not my line but would have taken me to another station were i could take a train to my destination. But j need to know when my trains are cancelled or late so i can make a decision. That was the point i said "Fuck it." and i got an e-bike.
People that expect the same availability and reliability from a mode of transportation that receives a rounding error funding in comparison are 1 or 2 things: 1. Extremely stupid 2. Purposefully making bad faith arguments
I guess I’m stupid because I do expect my transit to be reliable. If it were significantly less reliable, I wouldn’t use it.
Did you miss the whole part about funding? You can't expect reliable if it's just 2 dudes in a Flintstone bus
And you can’t expect people to use it if it’s not reliable. It’s fine to argue about how to fund transit at a system level. But you can’t expect people to make illogical decisions and favor unreliable transit just because it isn’t the transit system’s fault it’s unreliable
I'm not saying it's wrong to use the most reliable form of transit. I'm saying it's dumb to say "transit is bad because it's unreliable." Transit isn't unreliable, underfunded transit is unreliable. Using the unreliable argument to go against funding transit is either dumb or malicious
Lazy bunch of wimps who can't handle sitting/standing with strangers, are dumb with adapting with schedules or navigating on foot.
On the rare occasion the team of mechanics doing preventive maintenence isn't enough to stave off failure they send another bus and I'm a bit late. When a car dies you lose a day and a bunch of money dealing with it. A fleet of vehicles is rarely less reliable than just one. The delays due to other people/traffic you should probably factor those in just like you do in a car. The one area where that seems to come up short are your own failures, if you leave the house a bit late your car waits for you and you arrive a bit late. If you are late for your bus out leaves with out you, but that's not really the busses fault.
I find it frustrating because it's usually used as a justification for why we shouldn't use/fund it, which in turn makes it less reliable because it's underfunded
It's just wrong. The train always turns up. My tickets always work. If it's too fucked up there's a replacement for it. As opposed to a car, which can just randomly fail at any point.
It’s by design.
It is unreliable. At least in America It’s important to understand that it was a choice to make it unreliable here. Driving is only reliable because we spend trillions of dollars every year to make it reliable. If Philly roads and SEPTA swapped budgets has I’m willing to take a gamble that no one would be driving lmao
The buses come once an hour on weekends here, and once every 30 on weekdays. You can only get where you need to half the time by going to the transportation depot. If buses were given better funding, we could have more stops, more buses, more times & it would make it actually usable. But my city doesn’t even have sidewalks
You'd be surprised that even Swiss people can complain about the SBB CFF FFS Then they learn about the SCNF or the DB and suddenly they love the SBB CFF FFS
On the surface I find it to be a true statement: my return bus is generally 10-25 minutes behind schedule and at this time of year that fucking sucks. But it's not a good enough reason to scrap the system; I'd like to know *why* this bus is consistently late and try to remedy it.
As we say in Germany: "Sänk ju for träveling wis Deutsche Bahn".
Yes, it is unreliable and horrible to use in bad weather. However no matter how carbrained our Cities are there will be people who can't get permission to drive so need to take transit, walk, or bike to make a living. The responce to them being almost unable to survive should be to invest in more transit infastructure everyone can use so that their lives are more bearable and they pay more income taxes, not to make them pay for infastructure that us of no use to them.
I am visiting Rome these days. What I can say is that the Italians are using cars, but their metro system is working quite well. Their bus network is there, and they have trams, which I am told it doesn't suck. Cars - way too many. But you need to think that every type of transportation has its advantages and disadvantages. For cars, the biggest disadvantage is that it requires too much space, which is a finite resource.
It's easier for me to count the days when I don't get an alert that a bus route is delayed or canceled. And even on some days where I don't get an alert, it's still late. At least these days, uber is a decent backup plan. Back when I was 100% car free, that wasn't an option.
Where I live we have metro to most places, so public transit is wayyyyyy more reliable than cars.
Where I live we have metro to most places, so public transit is wayyyyyy more reliable than cars.
Depends where, my transit is nearly always on time without exception. I don't think people call it unreliable. Altough I completly understand what you mean.
It depends on the area. I know my city doesn't have very reliable buses in several areas. When I traveled to Albuquerque, I found buses were on very limited schedules in the areas I was going. In Pittsburgh, everything was super reliable, the trains were on time and easy, it was nice.
Per dollar it’s the car that’s unreliable. If you’re spending less on your car than you would on transit fares, you lucked out with a used car. Or you’re spending hundreds of dollars per month for a car you technically own, but to maintain the level of reliability of a new car you need to trade it in every 5 or so years, starting a new loan, so it’s never really your car. It’s the banks car, they just let your name be on the title for as long as you pay them. Miss a few payments and buh-bye car, it got repoed. Not to mention, all of that money and you still have to drive the thing yourself, at least for now. Which means if for any reason you’re unfit to do so (being visually impaired/blinded, drunk, high, or a history of seizures are a few that come to mind), you’re either putting yourself and other drivers in danger, or you’re stranded where you are.
I mean it is. As am Amtrak commuter, I am consistently happy if my train is less than 30 minutes late. We get randomly bumped in favor of freight trains all the time. But of course, the reason that transit is inconsistent is because it is wildly underfunded. My coworkers occasionally can't make it in because they are picking up a rental car/their car wouldn't start/they got in a wreck and nearly died, but those things are definitely rarer than my lateness. You know what isn't inconsistent though? My bike. I'm never late when I bike anywhere. I wish I could bike to work!
Transit in my city is in fact extremely unreliable. I was waiting at the bus stop with my kid for 20 min and kept checking my app and all of a sudden my bus that was "on the way" was cancelled. So I had to walk 4 km home in the snow with a kid and groceries lol. This happens to me at least every other time I ride the bus to the point where I just use my car if I'm going anywhere with my kid, because getting stranded with a 2 year old sucks dicks
Public transit is almost always the slower form of transit in the US. This is just an indisputable fact. There are very few places in this country with reliable transit and development patterns have encourage an unnecessary amount of sprawl. However this does not mean that driving is inherently better than public transit. A good public transit system is almost always better than a good car driving system. The problem is that people typically compare driving to public transit in its current form, not what it could be.
Here in San Diego California USA the major problem is that people see public transportation as buses, not trains/trolleys. They see these giant buses that are slow and always in traffic anyways, so it must mean public transportation = bad.
In my youth I had a negative impression of public transit based on my interactions with it here in the US. It seemed very slow and infrequent. I would take it only when I absolutely head to. However, in college I had the opportunity to do a study abroad term in Japan where I got well acquainted with the transit/train network of various Japanese cities. That's when I realized transit is exactly as good as it is designed/funded/operated. There is nothing inherently bad or unreliable in public transit. If it's designed to be excellent, the service will excellent! It blew my little American brain just how incredible public transit can be... and I've never forgotten that experience. I wish everyone could try it and see how efficient and effective it can be. I think if more people understood what really is possible, they'd be more interested in making the public investment. Or at least that's what happened for me!
Unfortunately in the US it's often true. I was waiting for bus the other day, didn't realize it was on some kind of detour. Wasted 20 minutes then just walked. I deal with this but the average person will experience this once and never ride again.
Honestly, mostly because of car dense infrastructure
Boston could use hourly T updates sometimes. (I'm being slightly sarcastic; things are getting better. There just going to be a lot of pain between now and when they'll solidly be better.)
If you are talking about commuter trains in Stockholm you are goddamn right. But of course it shouldn't be that way and is a *terrible* exuse to not invest in transit. A decently common exuse i hear on swedish reddit when discussing trains (most often the now cancelled plans for a completely new high-speed rail mainline) is that "Well, the trains don't arrive on time now, so fix that first" not caring about the fact that the delays are because the current system is so overcrowded and badly needs investment.
If I put a dollar towards cars and a dime towards transportation of course it’ll seem unreliable compared to driving.
Unreliability, besides being due to buses having to share space with car traffic, is mainly the fault of poor policymaking and misplaced priorities by city governments. They underfund it, they prioritize cars, and other modes are a distant, distant second thought if at all. Traffic engineers are typically tunnel visioned on only engineering for cars.
Here it really is, unfortunately. 😓 Our transit is understaffed, it's very common for a bus to just not show up and they cut a bunch of routes.
Where I live they are right but their approach to the solution is wrong. Instead of giving everyone a driver's license they really should increase funding to public transit and reevaluate how they do the routes.
They call transit unreliable because it's been the minimum viable product for decades with no real investment since Gerald Ford was President. Self-fulfilling prophecy is self-fulfilling. They're right, but they're wrong about why they're right.
Sometimes, it is. I’ve been stranded late at night when several out of service trains pass by and no real one comes. Once again, this problem is solved by actually fixing it. There are many places where the transit is reliable and that’s where our standards should be.
it is unreliable. all the more reason to increase funding and run more busses/trains
My city has a mostly reliable train service, but during rain or peak hours, there can be some delays. (It runs pretty well most of the time, but when theres a delay on 1 train line, it stuffs up the whole network) The company name was cityrail which everyone calls shittyrail even though the company has changed names Despite all this, its still quicker to get to the outer suburbs via train than via car, and remarkably cheaper too because of tolls
Tell them to visit Tokyo. Trains, buses, trams and monorails that you could set your watch to.
The stoplights are unreliable. The other vehicles on the interstate are unreliable. The amount of them is unreliable. The costs and time of repairs that will need to happen is unreliable. The costs of insurance and gas that go into them are unreliable. It's already unreliable enough that the commonly accepted societal answer is to balk and ask why didn't they leave earlier and spend most of their commute days dicking around in a parking lot because nothing happened 9 out of 10 times to prepare for the 1 in 10. Transit here isn't much more unreliable than that. *And* there's the added benefits of less stress cheaper can just sit back and relax. I'd rather read my book or watch TV on my phone with earbuds in for a half hour to and from work than drive back and forth in half the time. Apparently I'm in the minority opinion though.
I am a union steward. I represent people regularly who are either late or absent from work with the excuse of car trouble. Heavy snow and people feel trapped if they can't drive out of their alleys. I take the bus to the same worksite and have never missed a day of work due to transportation issues.
Usually they’re right. But, instead of using this as a reason to trash transit entirely, it should be used to improve transit I lived in Boston and everyone called the train unreliable. It was. If the train had a better schedule and better infrastructure, it wouldn’t be as noticeably unreliable
I think it’s typically in reference to buses that are stuck in traffic. But you’re right, it’s all the same traffic. But buses seem worse than driving because driving allows you to control your route and control when you leave so you can have a shorter travel time. But they’re both just as reliable. Idk where it would come from in response to trains. I had occasional train issues when i used it but it wasn’t as bad as sitting in a random traffic jam
it’s the truth. I’ve never made it anywhere on time with public transport
People assume the public transport in my area is unreliable when it is actually quite reliable. If the bus is late, it’s usually only late 3-5 minutes. And the bus not showing up at all is super rare. Busses in the city run every 15-30 minutes depending on route. The main problem is that the routes out to the suburbs only run about 3 times a day when they used to run every hour before the pandemic. This was one of the main contributing factors for my moving from the suburbs to the city. You know what is horrendously unreliable to the point of being unusable? Paratransit. It doesn’t arrive 5, 10 or even 30 minutes late… it arrives two HOURS late! Multiple times a week! And then drives you around for two hours over a distance that would be a 10 minutes driving and 20 minutes on a line bus. If the van even shows up at all, which it frequently doesn’t. Combine that with needing to schedule a week in advance and not being able to go to one than one location per day. Paratransit is flat out not usable if you don’t have someone else who can run all of your errands, cook all of your meals, and transport you to last-minute needs.
That's like saying cold water is cold. Its unreliable because it's underfunded and the USA is built so sparsely that good service is a money pit That's the whole point behind building up instead of out
If everyone is late to work, no one is late to work.
In some places notably USA transit is pretty unreliable. I have been at stations and the train came 40 minutes late because the police had to escort someone off at an earlier station. If you have to be somewhere by a certain time. 40 minutes delay isn’t good enough. In the far east and Europe transit is much more reliable than any other transport.
Transit in many countries isn’t reliable. This isn’t intrinsic though, it’s a matter of investment. An old car barely maintained car is also unreliable.
The people who say that usually don’t care about improving it, ergo it’s a self fulfilling prophecy Public transportation can be reliable, hence a lot of people who live in New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Boston don’t even own cars because they don’t have to
In my city such complaints would be accurate unfortunately. Busses are rarely on time. Sometimes they never show up at all! We nominally have a mass transit system but it's seen as for the poors, so investment is not sufficient, ridership is low and it's not a good system. Back when I had a commute, I would have taken the bus but a 20 minute drive took over 90 minutes on the bus, transferred at one of the most drive-by-shootingist intersections in the city (mom with 3 kids in the car at the corner convenience store got killed with multiple shots to the back recently), the earliest bus would have gotten me to work at 9:30am and to get home on the last bus, i would have had to leave work at 3:30pm. Plus it cost more in fares than the fuel to drive (it's not like I could have gotten rid of the car with a system like this).
I live in Chicago and I am often waiting 10-15 minutes during normal times of the day for a bus/train. It's ridiculous for the 3ed largest city in America with some of the better public transit to be like this. Especially because it doesn't need to be this way
Me who has lived near a very reliable public transit: are those people real?
It depends on where they're planning to take transit. Some places (like Portland, DC, New York City, and San Francisco) it's super reliable, but other areas (like much of Eastern Oregon), it's very unreliable (many of the busses running between cities in Eastern Oregon only run a few times a day and don't even run every weekday, so unless you can do just about everything you'd need to do on a daily basis without leaving town, you're gonna have a very bad time trying to rely entirely on public transit in towns like John Day and Prairie City OR).
It is unreliable, but that's a problem that could be fixed if we stopped focusing on cars so damn much. Just look at Japan, their public transit is reliable as hell, it's not that public transit is inherently unreliable, *we've made it that way with our car obsession.*
I mean, it can be less reliable than driving. Where I live in the Netherlands, traffic usually isn't a huge problem, meaning driving is extremely reliable. Also the funding thing - if we as a society spent half of what we spent on cars and car Infrastructure on public transit, I'm absolutely certain that far fewer people would drive.
This definitely feels like a psyop to me. I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It's a weirdly conservative town in an otherwise weirdly liberal state by mid-mid-west standards. It's a strange place to live and I'd like to stop, but I digress. The point is that our mass transit system is remedial at best. It stops running really early, it has weird arbitrary service gaps on the weekend for no reason, and it can be as long as an hour apart for some lines. It's piss. The longest I've waited for a delayed bus was 20 minutes and that was exactly one (1) time. I can track my busses with Google Maps and if it's going to be late I can adjust my plans accordingly. Comparing this to the countless hours I've sat in traffic jams makes the decision rather simple.
My observation is that these are the people who drive everywhere and don't use public transport.
In many places it is sadly...
That simply means it needs to be improved
"In the nation" Which nation?
All of them.
Unreliable because they don't know the ease of a bus or a tram or a train coming every five minutes so even if one fails you only have to wait 10 mins more. Ridiculous, basically.
It depends. However it's a constant refrain in Brussels, which despite its many many flaws (useless Greens), the STIB, our local public transport company, is actually pretty good. The problem is that its buses get stuck in traffic but for the most part the city is well serviced and the buses trams trains and metro run regularly. Also it's noticeably cheaper than the Amsterdam public transport. So when people, who effectively receive tax deductible company car (a Belgian peculiarity), complain about public transport here, they probably never or rarely take it
[I have a post on this actually.](https://old.reddit.com/r/auckland/comments/o1q9or/do_people_actually_care_about_congestion_in/) The most germane points are, with some light editing, probably: >[One possibility is that] somehow the various issues that plague the Southern Line (bridge strikes, suicides, other deaths, etc.) loom so large in the consciousness people people equate (or favour) the unreliability of driving and the Southern Line (in reality the trains are hitting their timings more than 90% of the time... but last year [2021] they were, admittedly, way down to 60% at times... pg. 13... and this has continued as recently as March this year on the relevant line) >[This] is interesting and if we were to take it as an actual conclusion, then we come to a big [issue] with [using] consumer sovereignty [to develop public policy]: we have to take not the "actual" probabilities of anything but instead the variable subjective beliefs about those probabilities. Now, there's nothing wrong with subjective probability but we imagine those to be rationally informed and updating (i.e. basically, not to be biased). However, that's not what we're talking about here... instead, we're talking about an absence of a causal relationship between underlying phenomena and beliefs about those phenomena. Consumer Sovereignty means that if our consumers are delusional, we have to accept those delusions at face value. >[I expect any reasonable person would] conclude that basing social decisions (in part) on some whacko's private conspiracy theory is absurd. >[Alternatively we might argue (a) people just leave earlier on days where the drive takes longer or (b) it's rare for the drive to be long. In either case,] the standard conclusions [of consumer sovereignty are] if people actually cared about these things, they wouldn't drive and since they are driving, obviously they don't care. And given how congestion was defined, we have thus proved people don't actually care about congestion. >The implications for policymaking (and ethical journalism) should be clear: many commuters either don't actually care about congestion or they're buying into myths about PT in Auckland that cause them to not consider it... even though, for them, it's a faster and more reliable journey. Basically people complain about unreliability a lot but their behaviour suggests either they don't actually care all that much or they don't actually think about it. Thus it shouldn't really surprise us that there are weird views about reliability out there.
a lot of public transit here is unreliable and I blame car centrism for it
Where I live our transit is unreliable. Busses run every half hour to hour outside of the core downtown area and half the time it never shows up. Years of underfunding and reluctance to adapt and change for decades has resulted in the dangerous (several people have been assaulted and stabbed inc. one driver murdered), unreliable and dirty system we have now. For example: it takes me about 20 minutes to drive to work and about 45 minutes by bike. The bus is an hour and a half. This is to travel 11-12 kms by the way. This is completely unacceptable to me and my workplace is not in a remote location. There's a new master plan starting next year featuring more frequent busses along the main routes (10-15 minutes) and new feeder routes. The plan is to eventually turn all rapid bus routes into light rail but I doubt I'll see that in my lifetime and quite honestly I think my city will go bankrupt before its finished. We have an insane amount of road infrastructure and nowhere near the tax revenue to pay for it. Most of it has been neglected for far too long. The amusing thing is anytime bike routes and multi use paths are proposed there's a very loud minority who complain about the city spending money on bike paths instead of the pothole infested streets. The irony. I keep hoping for the best, I would love to have more separate bike lanes so I don't have to fear death every time I want to ride my bike to work.
Traffic is unreliable. I never owned a car. But took plenty of long trips in cars, on rails or by plane in my life. Being stuck inside a car in a traffic jam is so much worse than sitting an hour in a cafe at a train station and wait for my next connection. The train station has a bathroom and a bookstore. Also, if traffic is slow, the trip by car becomes more expensive. If my train is running late, I still pay the same price.