I’m lucky to have any transit access in my suburban town.
I live in a suburb of a big city, not by choice, and I also live within walking distance of a bus stop… if you don’t mind walking for three hours just to get to the bus stop.
Yeah, I mapped my public transit commute out one time. For starters, it’s complicated because Google/Apple/Waze/etc have the public transit option greyed out. Like it’s not even an option. If I try, Google suggests getting a Lyft. Which is really just saying “lol get a car, scrub.” I wish I were making this shit up:
Here’s a quick visual of my daily drive, versus the public transit route I would have to take:
So my commute starts with me biking 20 minutes away from work, to get to the nearest bus stop. Then I take a 20 minutes bus ride to the nearest rail hub. Then I take a commuter rail south-south-west for an hour, to get to the connecting line. Then I make a connection. The rail times rarely line up, so I’d probably have to wait at the station for ~15 minutes for the connection. Then I take the second rail line 45 minutes northwest.
But here’s where I run into my next problem… My house is serviced by one public transit system, and my job is serviced my another entirely separate transit system. Due to local politicians in the different cities not getting along, the two systems don’t connect. So now I need to bike 20 minutes north, to get from the northernmost station in one transit system, to the southernmost station in the other. Then I take another train 20 minutes north. Finally, I have about a 10 minute bike ride to get from the train station to my job.
All together, that’s ~50 minutes biking, ~20 minutes on a bus, and a little over 120 minutes split across three different trains. Plus the waiting time in between each connection, because the trains I need only run every 15-20 minutes. Bare minimum, I’m looking at around 3.5 hours for public transit… Or I can just take the highway 10 minutes west.
“But wait, you have walking and biking options! You could do those instead! The biking option in your screenshot is only 54 minutes!”
While this may be true on paper, I’d like to refer you to the “I had to go 2 hours out of my way to avoid certain death” panel in the posted comic. That 54 minute bike route is on a 70 MPH two lane highway, with no shoulder or sidewalk. I’d be dead before I was even halfway there.
“So take an alternate route?”
That giant loop I listed earlier is the alternate route. That 10 minute highway route cuts through a nature preserve. There are no other roads or paths parallel to it. You either take the highway, or you go all the way around.
I can’t even legally reach my grocery store without a car. I have to cross that same highway to get to the store, and there is no sidewalk that crosses it. So I’d need to break the law to walk to the grocery store.
This kind of design sounds completely insane. You could walk half way to Cockfosters along the Piccadilly line in that time. Any other city I can think of here you could walk the entire diameter of the city within 3 hours.
I don’t even need public transport because I live in a town, usually quicker to walk and always quicker to cycle compared to waiting for a bus. Not sure if its better to swim than take the ferry, maybe I need an amphibious bike?
That’s American city design for you. The cities are designed expecting that everybody has a car, so they’re sprawling, especially in the suburbs. Public transit is simply tacked on later and is very limited in range, and is almost always buses, very few trains. You’d have to be seriously lucky to live near a bus stop in the suburbs.
By the way, I can walk to the nearest grocery store in less than 15 minutes, so I feel good about that, at least. It’s very rare for the suburbs to be in walking distance of a grocery store.
I live in a suburb of a big city, not by choice, and I also live within walking distance of a bus stop… if you don’t mind walking for three hours just to get to the bus stop.
Yeah, I mapped my public transit commute out one time. For starters, it’s complicated because Google/Apple/Waze/etc have the public transit option greyed out. Like it’s not even an option. If I try, Google suggests getting a Lyft. Which is really just saying “lol get a car, scrub.” I wish I were making this shit up:
Here’s a quick visual of my daily drive, versus the public transit route I would have to take:
So my commute starts with me biking 20 minutes away from work, to get to the nearest bus stop. Then I take a 20 minutes bus ride to the nearest rail hub. Then I take a commuter rail south-south-west for an hour, to get to the connecting line. Then I make a connection. The rail times rarely line up, so I’d probably have to wait at the station for ~15 minutes for the connection. Then I take the second rail line 45 minutes northwest.
But here’s where I run into my next problem… My house is serviced by one public transit system, and my job is serviced my another entirely separate transit system. Due to local politicians in the different cities not getting along, the two systems don’t connect. So now I need to bike 20 minutes north, to get from the northernmost station in one transit system, to the southernmost station in the other. Then I take another train 20 minutes north. Finally, I have about a 10 minute bike ride to get from the train station to my job.
All together, that’s ~50 minutes biking, ~20 minutes on a bus, and a little over 120 minutes split across three different trains. Plus the waiting time in between each connection, because the trains I need only run every 15-20 minutes. Bare minimum, I’m looking at around 3.5 hours for public transit… Or I can just take the highway 10 minutes west.
“But wait, you have walking and biking options! You could do those instead! The biking option in your screenshot is only 54 minutes!”
While this may be true on paper, I’d like to refer you to the “I had to go 2 hours out of my way to avoid certain death” panel in the posted comic. That 54 minute bike route is on a 70 MPH two lane highway, with no shoulder or sidewalk. I’d be dead before I was even halfway there.
“So take an alternate route?”
That giant loop I listed earlier is the alternate route. That 10 minute highway route cuts through a nature preserve. There are no other roads or paths parallel to it. You either take the highway, or you go all the way around.
I can’t even legally reach my grocery store without a car. I have to cross that same highway to get to the store, and there is no sidewalk that crosses it. So I’d need to break the law to walk to the grocery store.
This kind of design sounds completely insane. You could walk half way to Cockfosters along the Piccadilly line in that time. Any other city I can think of here you could walk the entire diameter of the city within 3 hours.
I don’t even need public transport because I live in a town, usually quicker to walk and always quicker to cycle compared to waiting for a bus. Not sure if its better to swim than take the ferry, maybe I need an amphibious bike?
That’s American city design for you. The cities are designed expecting that everybody has a car, so they’re sprawling, especially in the suburbs. Public transit is simply tacked on later and is very limited in range, and is almost always buses, very few trains. You’d have to be seriously lucky to live near a bus stop in the suburbs.
By the way, I can walk to the nearest grocery store in less than 15 minutes, so I feel good about that, at least. It’s very rare for the suburbs to be in walking distance of a grocery store.