Public transportation options where you live

In My Humble Opinion
1

Kind of a poll, I guess…

I am curious what kind of public transportation options, if any, are available near where you live. Specifically:

  1. Do you take public transportation regularly, like to work every day?

  2. If you normally drive to work, could you get to your job using only public transportation if you had to? How long would it take? What would it cost? How many transfers would you have to make?

  3. What about other places? Could you get to stores and entertainment options without driving a car?

In my case, I normally drive the 25 miles to work near Boston. I occaisionally take the commuter rail. The station is 1.5 miles from my house. Then I need to transfer at the next to last stop to the subway, which I take for two stops, then walk a few blocks. The subway costs $1, the commuter rail is almost $5 one way. The whole trip takes a little over an hour.
The only hard part in this is getting to the train station near my house. There is parking but it fills up early. I can easily walk the 1.5 miles, but there is no sidewalk most of the way, and it is along a pretty busy, yet narrow road. At night or in the winter when snowbanks narrow the road even more, you are cheating death. There has been some talk of building a bike trail parallel to the road but it hasn’t happened. There is no other public transportation (bus, for instance) anywhere near us.

As far as getting to other places, we are lucky in having a nice assortment of stores a couple of blocks away, including restaurants, pharmacy, convenience stores, and various specialty stores like book and video rental. No supermarket, though. There are also a fair number of employment options within walking distance, mostly computer related…not my field, but it makes our house that much more desirable should we decide to sell.

So how about you? It might be helpful to include info about your location, if it isn’t in your profile.

2

  1. Yes, I take MARTA (the train here in Atlanta) in to school every day, though I usually drive to the station.

  2. I could take the bus to the station and go from there, but I usually don’t because the bus takes 30+ minutes, whereas my car takes 10.

  3. Certainly. In fact, about the only way I go into downtown is the train. I can’t imagine driving in that madness. Out here in the 'burbs, though, I drive.

3

One of my main reasons for moving to Chicago was the great public transit. I was happy to get rid of my car and now I take transit everywhere I want to go. There are some times, like cold rainy mornings or when the cd player’s batteries die, that I think it’d be nice to have a car again, but overall I’m really glad I don’t have to have it.

St Louis, where I moved from, has pretty sad public transit, at least from all the places I lived. I understand the city is expanding Metrolink but to some protest. My last apartment I thought I was close to the buses but they shut down a bunch of lines right before I moved there.

4

I live in rural Iowa. I drive everywhere. Between stormchaser and I, we have enough cars/trucks/vans to drive almost a different one every day of the week.

5

I walk to work (easy cause it’s only two blocks). I’ve never driven a car in my life, but I live close to Route 4, where the buses go to and from the Paramus malls and to NYC. What else do I need?

6
  1. Do you take public transportation regularly, like to work every day?

I catch the 22B Metrobus outside of my apartment in Arlington. I take the bus to the Pentagon where I grab the Blue Line train into DC. The whole trip takes about 30 minutes. If I drove, it could take me from 45 minutes to 2 hours depending on traffic.
3. What about other places? Could you get to stores and entertainment options without driving a car?

You can get just about anywhere you need to go in DC with Metro. There was just an article in the Washington Post about how people are moving to Arlington and giving up their cars.

7

  1. I live in DC and take Metro to work everyday (Orange/Blue from Eastern Market to Smithsonian). I also have several Metrobus lines available to me, but I rarely take advantage of them.

  2. I can get to a large number of restaurants and retail stores on foot easily. While the Safeway would be quite a hike, Eastern Market has all sorts of specialty meats and cheeses, fresh produce, and baked goods. There is also a weekend crafts fair/flea market year round.

8

1/2. I take public transport daily to work, and have for several years now. In all that time, I can recall one day where I got in 3 hours late due to some kind of mass transit difficulty (accident/derailing/something like that), and maybe one other time where my husband drove me to another train line’s station when there was a similar problem. It takes me about an hour and a half to get to work (downtown Chicago, something like 15 miles away), and about an hour and 15 minutes to get home. This is comparable to drive times around that time of day, or better. I walk a few blocks, take a commuter train, then transfer to a shuttle bus. The bus is a little over a dollar each way, my monthly train pass is around $80 or so.

  1. Regarding other places, if I wanted to go to downtown Chicago for these - yes, extremely easily, using the commuter train. For options more close by, there are stores for the basics (clothing, groceries, drugstore, hardware) within easy walking distance, plus a number of restaurants, coffee shops, a video store, bookstore, and so on. A suburban bus line stop within walking distance could take me to a nearby mall.
9

The only public transportation in these parts is TARC (Transit Authority of River City - city buses). My job is across the river and several miles from the last TARC stop. I suppose it would be possible, but rather inefficient and the trip would be long. There is talk of light rail or monorail, and I think plans have even been developed for it, though there’s no money to build. And it’s not a route I would ever use. If I ever lived and worked in areas that would allow me to ride the bus to work, I think I would consider it due to the possible cost savings in parking fees, gas and the like. But right now it’s not feasible.

10

I’m 30 and don’t even have a drivers license. Never needed one.

Ah the joy of living in NYC, best public transit in the world.

11

Yes. I walk to a bus and take that into New York City every weekday. I’ve never actually taken a car to work in my thirteen or so working years so far (and I only learned to drive two years ago).

I live in northern New Jersey, so this is all considered quite weird. (Though not among the NYC people I work with, most of whom have never owned or driven a car.)

**

I actually chose my house (lived there nine years now) in part because of convenience to a bus line, since I knew I’d have to get to work that way.

**

If I wanted to get into NYC, yes. If I wanted to go anywhere else (except for one mall), no. Any other trips are by car, exclusively. (Well, that’s not quite true – I have managed to do jury service three times travelling only by bus.) But shopping, movies, and all manner of weekend errands are by car.

The mass transit around here is set up to get commuters in and out of NYC, and that’s it. (And the area I’m in is pretty sparse, anyway – there are decent trains to a large swath of New Jersey that doesn’t include my county.) If you live in an inner city and want to get around by bus, you can – though it will be slow and probably annoying. If you live in the suburbs, the only way to get most places by mass transit is via New York City.

12

1. Do you take public transportation regularly, like to work every day?

I have to. My wife takes the car, so the bus is the only option.

2. If you normally drive to work, could you get to your job using only public transportation if you had to? How long would it take? What would it cost? How many transfers would you have to make?

I don’t normally drive, but to drive from the house to the front door at work takes 15-20 minutes. On the bus it takes a bit over an hour. The fare is $1 and I have to make one transfer. The bus route gets me near my workplace - I either have to climb a fence or go a stop further away and walk back for 5 minutes.
3. What about other places? Could you get to stores and entertainment options without driving a car?

There are places in Tallahasse that you cannot go on the bus route. The airport, for instance. Many restaurants are on the outskirts of the city, not even near a bus route. Most of the entertainment and shopping is at malls or shopping centers, and you can get there, but the problem is this: you have to go downtown to the terminal to transfer to another route. They designed it so that no routes intersect in different areas of the city. It’s no wonder the service is underused, because with traffic, it’s pretty much guaranteed that your bus will be late arriving at the terminal, and it’s 50-55 minutes until the next bus. People who don’t have to put up with that crap, don’t.

I come from Toronto, where there is a world-class transit system. I never had to learn to drive, I could get anywhere, anytime. Here, they close down for a half hour so the drivers can have lunch, and the last regular bus is at 7 PM. Night service is laughable. It exists, but large areas of the city are cut off by amended routes for the three hours the bus operates at night.

Two things I can say in Taltran’s favor are that it only costs $1, and all the buses have bike racks on the front, for those who also need a bike to go places where buses don’t go.

They have a long way to go before the bus service here could even be called convenient.

13

Minneapolis / St Paul MetroTransit:

1. Do you take public transportation regularly, like to work every day?

I take the bus to work most days (probably 9/10). On the days that I don’t bus, I carpool.

2. If you normally drive to work, could you get to your job using only public transportation if you had to? How long would it take? What would it cost? How many transfers would you have to make?

I normally take an express bus that ends up being about 20 minutes door to door (from leaving my apartment until sitting down at my desk). If I miss the express bus, I have to transfer and it ends up taking about 40 minutes. I usually just take the one bus and walk the second leg of it (a bit over a mile, I think - I’d rather walk than wait, though). The bus is super cheap for me as I can get a student pass - unlimited service for $50 / semester ($150 / year).

Driving takes a bit longer than the express bus / a bit less than non-express. It costs $1.75 to park (carpool) or $3.25 if I drive myself. With the student pass, bussing is MUCH cheaper. If I had to pay day by day, driving would end up cheaper / easier.

3. What about other places? Could you get to stores and entertainment options without driving a car?

I can get to the airport easily by bus, and the Mall of America if I should ever decide that it sounded like a good idea. I’m walking distance to small shops, including 2 ‘up-scale’ grocery stores. I s’pose I could take the bus to normal grocery stores / Target / etc - but it would be rather annoying.

If you pick your apartment / house carefully and are lucky with your place of employment, public transit can work here.

14

There is a public bus system downtown but I live too far away to catch it. So no, I’ve never taken public transportation. Well, MARTA in ATL but that’s only when I (duh) visit ATL.

15

1. Do you take public transportation regularly, like to work every day?

I live in Alexandria, VA but I drive to work in Tysons corner. It takes me half the time to drive than it would public transit and I can sleep later.

2. If you normally drive to work, could you get to your job using only public transportation if you had to? How long would it take? What would it cost? How many transfers would you have to make?

If I had to, I could and I have but I don’t like to. It takes me about an hour, hour and a half with metro/bus and about half an hour driving. The cost is usually about $5 each way. In the morning I’d either bus it or walk to the Braddock Rd station, take the Blue line to Rosslyn and catch the 5B bus. In the evening it’s bus to the metro (Orange line) to Rosslyn, then change for the Blue line, then a bus from the Metro station. It’s a pain in the a$$.

3. What about other places? Could you get to stores and entertainment options without driving a car?

I can and do. I can easily walk to Target and grocery shopping. If we want to go into DC we just hop on the metro. Heck, we can even walk to the airport (on bike trails) if we wanted to. If we felt like it, walking into Old Town would be easy but we get lazy and drive. My boyfriend walks to work every day because he got lucky and got a job down the street. I end up driving a lot though because I do a lot of errands on my way home from work. We walk/public transit on the weekends though.

16

First, I think it is great that there are so many who take advantage of public transportation.

I am in a small town for college and we have a public transportation system and it is ok. It covers the entire county which is cool because about a half hour from here there is a major shopping area. So I can take a bus there. My fare is paid through my tuition so all I do is show my student ID and am able to ride anywhere in the county.

I have about a ten minute walk to the place where I can pick up the bus. It doesn’t come onto any residential roads.

I can walk to the video store, Giant Eagle, Mcdonalds, Bakery day old store and some other places.

I don’t drive and don’t own a car and am dreading the day I have to get one.

17

I don’t have a car, have never had one, and don’t want one, either. I live in Nashville, and when I moved here I really lucked out finding an apartment. It’s on the same bus route as where I work (so no transferring downtown). I’m also within easy walking distance of the grocery store (with in-store bank and pharmacy), two drug stores, a post office, a mall, a large movie theater, fast food, and about half a dozen dentists, should I ever need that many.

It is possible for me to walk to work, but it takes 45 minutes or so, give or take. Actually the distance doesn’t bother me that much, I used to regularly walk that far home from work when I lived in North Carolina, but the route here isn’t nearly as pleasant, so I don’t walk as often as I used to.

The bus system here is steadily improving. The on-time performance is noticably better than it was 3 years ago. They just installed new fareboxes with some nifty new features, and more buses are on the way next spring.

Of course, the problems start when I want to stay out late and find something to do on a weekend - the bus to my apartment stops running after 5:30, and doesn’t run at all on Sunday. Not that I’d have much of a social life with a car, anyway.

18

Another carless city dweller here. I either take mass transit (not public, the subways and buses are run by private companies), bicycle, or go on foot.

My commute currently takes about 40 minutes door-to-door, with about 25 minutes of subway riding. I change trains twice and the entire ride costs US$3.50 one-way (because I change between company networks. After I move to my new place, I’ll be on the same network as my office and the commute will cost half as much). If I stay out until after the trains stop running (around 1am), I usually take a taxi.

I like driving, but I hate hunting for parking spaces. When you factor in gas prices, tolls, parking fares, annual inspections, excise taxes and so on, mass transit it actually the cheaper option if you’re traveling by yourself.

I can get pretty much anywhere I want to go (not just within the city, but almost anywhere in the country) on mass transit, although most of things I need for supplies and entertainment are within a 10-minute walk from my apartment.

19

The city I live in has bus transportation, but I live on the outskirts and work 20 miles away in what used to be nothing but pasture land 6 years ago. There are no options for me except to drive myself unless you want to count a taxi which is waaaaay too expensive. I’ll carpool with my SO if our hours happen to match up, but that is very rare.

In Germany, however, I used public transportation all the time. That country has a great system of busses, trains, and subways that are nearly always on time (to the minute). In the two years I lived there I never had to own a vehicle.

20

I live in a small town with an excellent transportation system, and I don’t own a car.

I bus or walk somewhere everyday. I have a small commercial area near me, and I am a twenty minute walk from a large downtown area. It takes about an hour to walk across town completely. Other major shopping/entertainment areas are a half-hour bus ride away. No bus ride in town really takes more than forty minutes or requires more than one transfer (we have a central metro center where all the busses meet for transfers). You can get most anywhere in fifteen minutes and I generally choose whether I walk it or bus it based on schedules.

I’m also pretty good at getting around the region on mass transit. I get to and around San Jose, San Francisco, the East Bay and Sacramenot on a fairly regular basis. Even longer trips that require airplanes or multi-day train rides usually begin and end at the bus stop outside my front door.

I hope I never have to live anywhere where I have to own a car, and I absolutely refuse to live somewhere that isn’t within walking distance of anything.