People keep saying they don't want to ride on a train or bus because people are smelly, but with rare exceptions, I just haven't run into that problem.
My solution to noisy transit is to wear headphones.
I think the problem is more cultural conditioning, I've been riding transit for 25+ years, and I like taking transit to work. Others who haven't ridden transit don't understand why I'd ride a bus to work even though we get "free" parking.
On the way to work the bus is usually faster than driving (the bus takes the carpool lane), on the way home, traffic is bad enough that the bus is probably about the same speed as driving (maybe a bit longer since for one stop it needs to leave the freeway express lane so needs to cut through 4 lanes of traffic to get to the stop and then again to get back into the express lane), but I don't care since I'm usually reading.
That’s not an uncommon view, I’m sure, but I suspect if the externalities of driving an automobile with a single person in it were internalized, so each driver paid the full cost of driving, you and a lot of people would change your minds and instead invest in some (comparably vastly cheaper) noise-canceling headphones for the train/bus.
Minus air pollutuon, I’m not convinced. With air pollution cars are obviously way worse. For commuting your point stands: I prefer current trains to Bay Area traffic because they’re not crowded. But for everything else the car wins by a mile.
The land use required to merely own cars is not great but it’s not the primary cause of sprawl in the US. There are plenty of examples that show car-oriented development with transit to a city center can work at up to 2000 people per km^2 and a typical American suburb has less than a fourth of that population density.
The traffic deaths can be reduced dramatically by reducing miles travelled and speed, but if we’re playing that game they also rank lower than infectious disease which spreads just fine on transit. Traffic deaths also are only a bit higher than suicide in America and lower than it in Europe; suicide is a crude example of the excess death burden of unhappiness, which ought to be considered.
And furthermore I’m not even convinced you’ve been on a crowded train. BART is almost never truly crowded. Trains in Wuhan are crowded. Crowded often means literally shoving your way in if you want to go anywhere. And the person I responded to claimed he thinks about the tollbox operator on a crowded train.
So yeah, dying in traffic on an ugly highway? Cool story bro.
I prefer current trains to Bay Area traffic because they’re not crowded. But for everything else the car wins by a mile.
Which Bay Area trains are you taking that are not crowded? Both BART and Caltrain are full during commute hours -- Caltrain express trains are usually standing room only (in rail cars that aren't well designed for standing passengers) and BART is running crush-loads out of Embarcadero in the evening.
The Caltrain local trains are usually less full but those all stop trains take forever to go any significant distance. (SF to RWC is about twice as long on a local as on a baby-bullet)
I have spent years exclusively riding public transit and very rarely have I encountered an issue where another person became a nuisance. I would rather take public transit than drive any day of the week, both for safety reasons and because I can do other things while on the ride.
Sure, but cars take up 50x more space, create way more pollution, and are responsible for 40,000 deaths in the US a year. So you should not have that option.
Ideally, people live near transit (not so common in this country, but Transit Oriented Development near transit stations is becoming more popular), so they don't necessarily need to drive to the station.
But even when they do, it's easier to handle traffic spread among dozens of stations spread out over 100 miles of track than to have all of those commuters drive to the city center.
> But even when they do, it's easier to handle traffic spread among dozens of stations spread out over 100 miles of track than to have all of those commuters drive to the city center.
Commuters don't all drive to the city center, they drive to 1000s of working places and arguably that's easier to handle traffic-wise than the traffic around fewer train stations (in one city!).
No, then you end up in a situation like the SF Bay Peninsula where businesses are spread among small office parks that are hard to serve by transit, and it's impossible for families to live near where they work since the spouses may end up working in offices 30 miles apart, so at least one of them is in for a long commute and since there's no planning or zoning that kept their employer near transit, then they end up driving... or taking the employer sponsored shuttle bus if they are lucky enough to have that option.
If businesses were spread out near major transit lines, that'd be another matter, but as it is now, the density is too low to serve well, transfers are a hard sell to commuters, no one wants to commute 40 minutes by train only to have to wait 15 minutes to transfer to a bus that takes another 15 minutes to get them to work.
VTA transit tries to serve a huge area with light rail, but everything is so spread out and there are so many stops that it takes forever, you can take light rail the 12 miles from downtown San Jose to Mountain View, but it'll take over an hour with 28 (!) stops in between. You could bike faster.
I've never sat in stop-and-go traffic, looked around and thought "Gee, this is great utilization of this road!"
Oddly, I have looked around a crowded standing-room-only train and thought "Gee, these load factors must be good for farebox recovery"