Driving 8 hours round trip today to pick up one person, and I’ll never understand why Americans think this is more convenient than my colleague taking a train.
#FuckCars #WarOnCars #TheWarOnCars #Urbanism #CarBrain #PublicTransportation #lightrail @fuck_cars #PublicTransit
In America the train costs as much as a plane ticket. Driving is cheaper. We also have very little in the way if trains. Most of our long distance travel is by bus. Tiny, dirty, cramped busses where if someone takes a shit in the toilet everyone smells it for hours. I would rather drive.
@Caradoc879
True, but it’s a bit more than that. They seem to think that cars are always the ultimate in convenience. I know a couple that opted to drive in central London instead of taking the tube. 🙄
That’s because there’s a weirdly narrow subset of our population that have both experience with public transportation being available, and it being nice.
If your only experience with public transit was a slow, infrequent and unreliable bus that reeked of piss and came by once every two hours with no way to know if it’s running late or cancelled, you’d also come to the conclusion that a car was more convenient.
It’s one of those self fulfilling prophecy things. People expect public transportation to be awful, so they don’t use it, so usage numbers drop making sure funding gets cut further.
@DontMindMe
@fuck_cars @Caradoc879 People - including you - are creatures of habit. I’ve seen people drive to a neighbor’s house even though they had to park in the street and thus the total walk was more than if they had just walked - when the only option for almost everything is to drive you don’t think of alternatives when/if they would be viable.
Damn, is it that bad in the states? I just did a quick lookup for Toronto to Montreal by train, and it’s about the same price as driving (maybe less, depending on the cost of gas that day).
But the convenience, and not wasting two people’s lives, makes it totally worth taking a train.
Bruh it’s that bad here. Eastern Canadians are lucky, in Western Canada within cities it’s barely acceptable in some cases and as bad as the average US city in many others. You will not find an inter city train in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan or Manitoba that actually connects you to where you want to go. Via Rail is an absolute JOKE and I’m literally hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest station.
Man, that sucks :(
It’s worse than that. The SK government used to run a bus service all over the province. They shut it down, expecting a private company to take over. To the surprise of absolutely nobody now we have no transportation at all between cities and towns that isn’t the occasional plane or cars.
I’m glad to be living on the west coast where we have Amtrak. Amtrak round trip from sac to SF and back is only like $20. Busses pretty much run everywhere in the city too so you don’t absolutely need a car/uber to get around.
@Showroom7561
@fuck_cars @DontMindMe @Caradoc879 Pretty much or worse. If you have a family it gets even worse - I’m trying to take my family - 3 kids and driving is the only reasonable option - gas is cheap, 3 nights in hotels on the way, and a few restaurants along the way. We save at least $3000 vs flying - I gave up on Amtrak when I realized it was going to take even longer than driving and was at least $1000 more (I’m not sure if I gave up at one-way price or the round trip price) At that price I can afford to spend a few days in a car. We will just make sure to see something on the way - though having done the trip before I’m not sure what is left.
No doubt!! You have to consider several factors, and sometimes, taking a car is the best option. But as you say, it works out better when you have an entire family.
The OP only described one colleague who could have used the train on their own, rather than a single car for two passengers (one of which wasn’t part of the travel). I guess in the OPs case, you’d have to also consider whether they were being paid work hours for that drive.
So in this case, I think a train (assuming it was accessible and economical) would have been the better option for the OPs colleague. LOL
The train from Chicago to Boston this weekend is 22 hours and $140. It’s not even cheaper than flying.
https://www.rome2rio.com/tickets/Chicago/Boston?oDateTime=2023-12-09&adults=1&mode=train
https://www.kayak.com/flight-routes/Chicago-Midway-MDW/Boston-Logan-Intl-BOS
Mostly. If your locality is served by Amtrak - and only a few dozen cities are out of the 3 million square miles of ConUS - then it can be somewhat convenient and cost effective if you plan your travel more than 2-3 months in advance. It’s about 2/3 the speed of car travel, but more comfortable, generally. If you buy tickets less than 3 weeks ahead the prices are about 4x what they are for booking at 3-6 months out. Also, unless you live in one of the 2-3 hub areas, trains run only once or twice a day. For comparison, Last time I checked it’s like £70 to go from London to Aberdeen and takes 7 hours and trains leave every hour or two. From Roanoke to New York - 80 miles closer than the UK route I know of - it’s $200, 9 hours, and only two trains run per day - the first departs at 6:20am, the second at 4:15p (and gets in around 2am). It’s only a 7.5 hour drive and $40-50 in gas to go from Roanoke to NYC, and it’s pretty easy to park outside the city and take a commuter train in.
Oh, and there’s no workable hub and spoke system due to the few trains and long travel times. My daughter is just 300 miles away at school and the city has a train stop. It’s a 5 hour drive one way. It takes two days and 3 train changes to get from her city to the closest station to me, about a 45 minute drive away. It’s ridiculous.
While this is often true, I think there’s a habit of comparing apples-to-apples, when they are not the same. Getting to/from the airport is often expensive while train stations are commonly in convenient downtown locations.
Again, I feel like a lot of people over simplify and just go, “My gas is X, the train ticket is Y. X<Y, so driving is cheaper.” It completely ignores maintenance costs and depreciation, which are a lot more than people give them credit for.
I don’t think it is an oversimplification honestly. It might work out as a favorable arrangement if we’re only talking about only moving around within a larger city with robust infrastructure, but the scenario of the post with a 4 hour drive speaks to the fact that this isn’t the case.
For driving a fair distance your expenses will be gas, tolls, and parking generally. A long-range train ticket will likely cost more than all those combined and then on top of that you’ll still likely have to pay for extended parking and/or other transportation on one side of the trip if you don’t have someone you can rely on.
I don’t by any means live in the middle of nowhere and the nearest train station to me is still over a two and a half hour drive. I don’t enjoy it, but the infrastructure just isn’t there to make this a feasible option for many people.
You’re doing exactly what I spoke about, oversimplifying!
Every km you drive brings you a km closer to needing to change your oil, tires, brake pads, etc. You might only think of these expenses when you visit the mechanic, but they can be amortized out when you drive.
Every km you drive decreases the resale value of your car. You might only see this when you sell the vehicle, but that’s part of the price calculation.
EDIT My original comment got cut-off. I’ve completed my thought there.
@n2burns
@fuck_cars @DontMindMe @Caradoc879 @InquisitiveApathy
Those are tiny factors. The vast majority of the costs of a car are fixed no matter how much or little you use it. You have to pay for it up front, license it, and insure it. Those are items you mention are not free, but they are very small costs compared to the fixed costs.
Sorry, that’s just not true. Some costs are fixed, or have a minimum, but many depend on distance driven. Obviously whether the “majority” of costs are fixed depends on how much you drive/localized costs/etc, but very few people have the “vast majority” of their costs fixed.
If you want sources, feel free to look it up yourself, but here are a few showing the breakdown of ownership
P.S. You actually reminded me, insurance changes with how much you expect to drive! As well, driving more increases the odds that you’ll get into an accident, which can increase your premiums.
@n2burns
@fuck_cars @DontMindMe @Caradoc879 @InquisitiveApathy
I have never seen insurance that checks how much you drive. Maybe they do a neighborhood scale, but not on a personal one. I understand some places have that, but it isn’t universal.
I keep track of my records, and have for years, which is why I say most costs are fixed: they are.
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@yA3xAKQMbq
@fuck_cars @DontMindMe @Caradoc879 @n2burns @InquisitiveApathy
I have had cars that I drove twice the national average, and cars hardly driven at all. In all cases the fixed costs exceed the variable costs. I don’t know where the others are getting there data from, but it doesn’t match mine. Of course different driving habits, but per lifetime of the car (not km!) the fixed costs are more in my experience.
The argument was not whether fixed cost exceed the variable cost or vice versa.
The argument was that a lot of people severely underestimate the actual cost of any given trip because they only account for (a subset of) the variable costs (i.e. gas).
And it’s true. Rarely anyone does full costing when it comes to cars because „the fixed cost are there no matter how much you drive“.
@yA3xAKQMbq
@fuck_cars @DontMindMe @Caradoc879 @n2burns @InquisitiveApathy
the argument in this thread has been about if fixed vs variable costs where more. I fully agree cars are expensive no matter how you do the math, and most people underestimate it (in part by only considering gas). However I stand by my claim that once you have the car you may as well use it as the additional variable costs from all optional trips is tiny (I’m assuming that you have the car for some purpose that cannot be done by something else - towing the proverbial boat for example).
Yep. I live in a suburb outside a major city. To get to the “train station” without a car, I’d need to walk over a mile to the closest bus stop, take that bus up the road to a transfer, take that bus to the light rail station, then take that light rail to the train station. 1 1/2 hours vs 45 minutes driving. And if I’m already driving 45 minutes anyway, I’d rather just stay in my car and go straight to my destination.
Another ignored factor is safety. depending on the city (like mine), public transportation is full of mentally ill and people on drugs. I’ve seen more fights and freaky shit on public transportation than I have the rest of my life combined. I had to physically intervene a dude harassing my client with autism once and shove him out the door. That was the last time I took public transportation because it’s not worth my safety. Thanks drug decriminalization.
Of course, it’s because of the ramping down on the war on drugs, not because of the opioid epidemic, the housing crisis, and rampant poverty!
Time is a resource that once spent can’t be gotten back. I agree that time spent inefficiently is another huge factor, but I don’t think that’s going to be seen as a strong argument in this community so I intentionally omitted it.
I would be careful about making generalizations linking mental illness and public transport. I know you’re commenting based on your own experiences(which are valid), but it’s not going to be the case everywhere and will vary depending on the city support systems, which to your credit you did touch on. Any sufficiently large gathering place, regardless of purpose, is going to have its fair share of weirdos in the end.
“Convenient Downtown Locations” assumes that there is ample public transit to and from those locations. For example, we took a train into Chicago from a small town in Iowa. There was absolutely no public transit going to that station. It was literally a 2 hour drive to the station, and that was the closest train station to us. Additionally, once we got there, we found out that our train was running 6 hours late. This wasn’t communicated to passengers until it was about 30 minutes from the scheduled departure time. This was for a train ride that took 4 hours, and was the same cost as a plane ride that would have been about 45 minutes, and the airport was about a 25 minute drive from our home.
We could have driven the whole thing in 4 hours and it would have been about 1/4 the cost.