Actual American public transit is when you ask it for public transit directions and your phone shoots you with a small caliber bullet

If you look on Google Maps, there’s this super convenient line of trees that goes from the next large city north-ish of my town to the largest city in the state, south of me. It runs right through my town. If you go looking in that line of trees, you’ll find abandoned train tracks.

There was a day when someone (not me, I’m not that old) could get on a train in my town and go to virtually any medium to large city. Now, we can’t even get funding to connect the walking trail segments that parallel portions of those abandoned tracks between towns.

Just one more lane bro. And remove the bicycle lanes. That’ll fix everything.

The fact that the route has public transit and walkable options narrows it down to a handful of American cities.

Not one.

Not a single one of you is gonna acknowledge the artistry that is the username “beemovieerotica”?

That’s actually quite the improvement. I remember back when I had the lovely choice between an actual hourly train that would take you within a literal days walk of your destination with the entire route having the constant risk of you being run over, the local bus route which requried switching three busses even to leave town, with another 5 or 6 easily to reach close walking distance to where you’d be going the next town over, or the good old fashioned route of just driving there which took a good hour and a half if you were going anywhere important and had the added bonus of constant risk of being run off the road from our local drivers.

To be fair these days it’s a lot better, the bus route only takes three swaps at worst, and the bus drivers only ocasionally start driving like they are formula 1 racers on their way to take a pit stop in the middle of goddamn nowhere.

People in the “fuck cars” community would have an aneurysm. Work drive sucks.

It’s a mystery why people don’t take buses in the US.

A real head scratcher.

I love public transport, it is basically the only form of transport I use. I do occasionally drive a car, maybe once or twice a year. That said, I really prefer not to need transport in my day to day life.

I live in a city in Spain. It is an important city, but it is not very large. I walk to work in 20 minutes. From work I walk to the city centre 15 minutes. From the city centre I walk to the woods outside town in 15 minutes. It’s not even worth it to wait for the bus to arrive…

I was in the US with my sister. Didn’t know whether the bus to get us to town would pass as it was already sunsetting (yes, it did pass we later figured out) as the trip was a couple hours long. One guy stops with his big truck towing a boat and picks us up. Apparently he did not figure out we were hitching, he thought we were waiting for the bus and was afraid for us. Apparently the previous day he had taken the bus for the first time in his 65 years of life and that was one of the most traumatizing experiences in his life. He figured we should not go through the same pains he had to go through…

But yes, American public transport is terrible. While travelling I had decided not to rent a car. I ended up having to make friends with people travelling with cars so that I could go around with them.

It’s trash lol

The bus doesn’t even stop in my town anymore.

that’s why god created marshrutkas

I almost had jury duty a while back so I thought I might take public transit to that. Car trip is 25-30 minutes. Public is 2.5 hours and I would arrive 45 minutes before the courthouse opened.

Living in NYC, I had to go to downtown from uptown everyday.

Train: under 20 minutes.

Bus: over an hour.

The cool thing was I could use the same MetroCard for both. Sometimes I would take the bus because the scenery is nice to look at, or I wanted to read a book.