Maybe nothing- some houses in NYC have garages. I’d be really surprised if someone who used a car once a month paid to rent garage space from someone else. My house doesn’t have a garage, and we pay about $300/month to rent one from a neighbor- but we currently have two cars that we use pretty much every day and it gets difficult to park after 6 pm. If we only used the cars on weekends , it wouldn’t be worth it to pay $300 to avoid looking for parking maybe once a week
I live pretty near the centre of Edinburgh. I do have a car but I never, ever contemplate driving into town. I can get a bus from practically my front door to the town centre. They’re clean, efficient and run at least every ten minutes.
I vacationed in Seattle in November of 2013 and took advantage of the mass transit system there. Everything was clean and most of the people using it looked to me like they had jobs. There was that one young man who reeked of pot and had a bunch of it in his backpack but the system in Seattle was quite nice I thought. I didn’t have a car and I could get just about anywhere in the city.
Contrast this with Little Rock, AR. I looked into taking the bus to work and I figured out it would add an additional 40 minutes to my commute. This doesn’t count the additional time walking from the house to the bus stop and from the bus stop to work. A trip that would take 20-25 minutes would take about an hour if I took the bus. Walking is fine but do I want to wear my work clothes when it’s 80+ degrees and 75% humidity in the morning?
“how does mass transit work comfortably and practically for you?”
It doesn’t. I don’t think people who have always lived near mass transit understand how it is in great swaths of this country. If I didn’t drive to work, my only option would be to take a cab at a cost of just about an entire day’s pay given we’re talking about two 30 mile trips. There are no buses between my town and the city I work in. No trains. No subways.
It depends a lot on the location.
Live and work in Barcelona, Madrid or Bilbao metro areas: there’s enough public transportation and frequently enough that many people would only take their car in the weekend (we even have a name for them: domingueros, Sunday drivers). People there are moving to not owning a car and either renting one when needed or using a sharing service. Since most of those areas are “mixed uses buildings” it is very common to be able to do your shopping on foot in your own area, or be able to take a bus. If you’ve bought so much you can always take a taxi back or have it delivered (appliances, furniture); many supermarkets offer the option to buy over the internet, people will buy mostly non-perishables that way and either pick the request up when they go get their perishables (pickup option, no charge) or have it delivered (no charge if purchase is above a certain amount).
I’m currently in a small town next door to Valladolid. There is a bus service to where I work; the same service can take me downtown in the afternoon by the simple method of not getting off in my usual stop. The regular buses between this town and Valladolid costs as much as city buses in Valladolid itself. Frequencies for these buses are actually better than for most of the in-town routes. I do have a car, so I can use that when it happens to be more convenient, but parking downtown is such a nightmare that I don’t think I’ll ever take my car there: the bus works a lot better.
There are two supermarkets, three pharmacies, a hardware store, a fishmonger’s, two butchers and a greengrocer within my block and the three neighboring blocks (the fourth one is a park). I can do any daily shopping on the way home from the bus. But if I lived in one of those places which came up during the late construction bubble which are all little houses and no stores, I’d need the car a lot more.
My community has been a leader in transforming itself from car-oriented suburb to a transit-oriented one. It is on the edge of the city, and a new subway was built through it decades ago. My community embraced it.
I ride the subway to work daily. I get there by walking (long but doable), riding a bike or taking a bus. Many of the bus routes are designed to get people to the subway stations. (Some of the outer suburban stations have parking lots so commuters can drive to them and avoid the traffic jams in the city).
My town encouraged development around the subway stops. For me, that means it is very easy to shop on my way home. When I get off the subway, there are many shopping options within walking distance.
Not true.
You can have some people who live in small, crappy apartments (either because they actually like them–urban living is quite popular now for many reasons–or they can’t afford better) to support a transit station, which you could also use from your palatial home. Plenty of subway stations work this way. And that has the added benefit of putting other things within easy reach for you–shopping, restaurants, etc. that cluster near transit stops.
And then there is the drive-to-the-subway model.
But if everyone gets back on the roads, the roads will be packed with traffic congestion again, making Uber and Lyft and driverless cars much less useful. So subways will become even faster than cars.
Stop imposing your values on everyone. Plenty of people prefer urban living and think it is worth the money. You should get out more and talk to some of them. They might tell you they think your suburb is dull, soulless, boring, inconvenient and not worth the savings, especially with a long, stressful commute. Also, they might do the math and find out your transportation costs - owning, fueling and maintaining a car, or two, or more - cut into your savings more than you realize. In some places, the cost of transportation can be greater than the savings in housing costs.
This is one of the biggest hurdles to mass transit. People who aren’t familiar with it are terrified of it. They think buses and trains are full of rapists and drunks. It goes back, I think, to the post-riot 1970s when cities were in deep decline and the buses and trains really were full of rapists and drunks.
P.S. in my area, some of the most expensive luxury housing being built now is high-density condos and apartments close to subway stations. They are in very high demand. Not only can people enjoy access to the subway, they enjoy access to all the other amenities that also locate near the subway, such as shopping and restaurants. Some don’t own cars.
It’s like America is waking up with a car hangover and rediscovering the benefits of living, working, shopping and socializing close together, e.g. civilization.
Now you mention it, I don’t recall anyone getting on any form of public transport in work clothes so mucky that no-one would want to sit next to them (any time in the last 50 years or so, in any of the 20 or 30 European cities I’ve visited). It may be that our workmen travel in their own vans - it may also be that they change into and out of work clothes at work, so that in public they dress like the rest of us.
One thing about public transport is that it has a socialising function from a very early age; it’s one of the most obvious ways in which parents teach their children the difference between public and private spaces and the different sort of behaviour required.
Ronnie Wood was considering low population density areas and ended up buying as close to Barcelona city center as you can live without being inside a fountain (Passeig de Gràcia x Aragon).
We get it… you’re a city dweller. Not everyone wants to live in the city, and that’s ok as well.
Still, the main thing causing problems in a lot of cities that grew in the 20th century is that many of them are decentralized compared to cities that grew in the 19th century or earlier. Back then, it was horses or walking, so everything was pretty much centralized in walking distance, and even in big cities, people didn’t commute like they do today.
But with the advent of cars, there’s nothing saying that everything has to be clustered in the original city center; to use an extreme example, Houston has the classic “Downtown”, the Galleria/Post Oak area, the Westchase area, the Energy Corridor area (roughly Eldridge/I-10) and the Woodlands, which are all relatively high density commercial areas with skyscrapers, etc… Then there are the industrial areas, which are more or less on the other side of town. All of these AND the areas where the workers live would have to be serviced effectively by public transit, and that’s a tall order in a metro area the size of Houston’s. Many other cities are similar as well- spread out, with clusters of important stuff, and you’d need a public transit net, rather than a sort of loop/hub/spoke system like most of them seem to have.
And in my experience, riding the DART light rail, the real problem people are the rank-smelling homeless and aggressively obnoxious youths, not working people of whatever kind. Get some of the first two categories, and part of your sensorium is guaranteed to be assaulted- either olfactorily, or aurally. Nothing smells quite like a homeless guy who hasn’t’ had a bath in a month and who has apparently pissed all over himself getting on the train in August.
I live in the suburbs of a city, just to be clear.
And nobody is saying “everything” needs to be in the city center.
All I’m saying is the balance has shifted too far to the car-dependent suburbs. We will always have suburbs, and that’s okay, as long as they don’t get out of control.
As others have mentioned, it doesn’t.
I looked it up - if I took the bus to work, it involves driving to the nearest Park and Ride location (a distance of about a mile and a half), riding the bus for a little over an hour and a half, and then walking about a mile to work. I am then at work with no car, and thus cannot run errands over my lunch hour, drive to the other work location, etc. So bus means a total of three hours of down time, two changes of bus, and a two mile walk, for a total of $6 a day.
Or I can drive. Commute averages twenty minutes, and I can leave and return whenever I like, go out to lunch, pick up stuff on the way home, etc. It probably costs more, but my car is paid for, gets 32+ mpg, and gas is $1.69 a gallon.
I would like to take the bus, but it wouldn’t be cost-effective to have enough buses to deal with commuters like me. I work from home when it snows, if that counts for anything.
Regards,
Shodan
I live in the New York City metro region, specifically in these 3 locations:
• in Nassau County just over the line from the edge of Queens, and in reasonable walking distance (or easy NICE bus ride in bad weather) of a major Long Island Rail hub, Mineola station.
• in Manhtattan, lower east side 2nd Ave in easy walking distance of the F train 2nd Ave stop, the 6 train Astor Ave stop, and the R train 8th Street stop.
• in the west Bronx, “Riverdale Heights” area near intersecton of Sedgwick and Van Cortlandt, in easy walking distance of the 1 train 238th St stop and reasonable walking distance (or bus ride) of the 4 train Mosholu Pkwy stop.
Getting around on Long Island via public trans isn’t great. The LIRR is aimed at getting folks into the city and back out of the city, and will only coincidentally also manage to take you to your intended destination somewhere else on Long Island. The bus service, never very good, has slid towards sucky due to budget cuts, but we still have it far better than neighboring Suffolk County does. Suffolk County is huge and the buses come sparsely and then you ride on them for a long time and if you have to transfer you can add another hour for each transfer. In Nassau County they come more often and things are closer together, so if it’s daylight hours on a weekday it’s… tolerable.
In the city (or if your destination IS the city even if you’re starting off in the outlying suburbs) the public trans is freaking FANTASTIC, it runs 24 x 7 and goes everywhere, the territory you’re moving around in is compact, and in Manhattan in particular everyone walks and the place is built for pedestrians. So you zip around in trains and on buses and walk the remaining bits and it works.
Reciprocally, driving anywhere around here is less than pleasant. I’ve lived in New Mexico and trust me if you’re living in Texas, especially west Texas, your automotive experience is not comparable to the sort that would be available in the NYC area. The definition of a traffic jam is “the cars are not moving”; the mere congestion that causes slowdowns to 15 or 25 miles per hour is just normal.
In the city parking is a problem. Looking for a parking space can take half an hour easily. Manhattan is rough on automobiles: short blocks with rapid acceleration and jerky movements and abrupt stops. Did I mention that the place is built for pedestrians? Manhattan pedestrians come from another planet, a planet where people have never been struck by a vehicle and where cars trucks and buses must have built-in automatic emergency brakes that kick in if someone so much as glances at the street — otherwise I have no explanation for the incredible confidence with which folks step off sidewalks anywhere and everywhere without a glance at automotive traffic. Driving here will give you ulcers. Auto insurance is severely expensive. Roads are swept daily and you have to move your car or get ticketed, and parking garages are expensive. All in all, it’s not a place conducive to getting around by car, whereas it has good public transportation, and the latter is accentuated by the fact that you can walk the entire length of Manhattan (and hence to any part of it) without much difficulty.
I live in Bellevue and work in Seattle. I typically drive 10 minutes to a park and ride for an approximately 25 minute bus ride into downtown Seattle. There is actually a bus that stops outside our house that will take me to the park and ride, but I tend not to use it due to school drop-off duties on the way.
The express bus is efficient and a straight shot in the HOV lanes to downtown. Driving would actually take longer and be significantly more expense taking parking and maintenance into account.
We still have cars for errands, although we’ve started walking a lot more.
I think the “poor versus professional” distinction is very apt regarding the success of transit. My express bus is typically fill of professionals, and riding the bus does not have the same stigma here as it does elsewhere. When I lived in Atlanta I lived in midtown and worked in the suburbs, and doing that by bus would have been at least 2 hours and 2 transfers one way.
I’m retired, so I don’t really have time constraints, but I checked my daughter’s home to work times. I should point out that she doesn’t like to drive, she went to college in Japan where she was totally dependent on mass transit, and is very comfortable with it.
Now she works at a large medical center, which supposedly has convenient bus service.
According to the transit trip planner, it would take a half-mile walk, three buses and 55 minutes overall to get from her home to her job. By car, it’s 8 miles and she can drive, park and be at her desk in less than 25 minutes.
Mass transit isn’t even on her radar.
Maybe. Uber and Lyft also might drive a ton of cars off the road via ride sharing.