this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Lmao what public transport? We don't have that here.
Really? Like... How do you move around then? Only cars? But if you dont want / have a car? If youre still doing your drivers license?
Fuck you, that's how. It's pretty much only cars. Not having a car isn't really an option here, unless maybe you live in the heart of a big city.
A big city not in the South. Houston and Dallas are #4 and #9. There's public transit but it fucking sucks both places.
* Big cities are limited to NYC, Chicago, and Washington DC.
In many places it's illegal to walk on the side of the road for motorist safety, and no they don't see value adding sidewalks. Other places don't like people that's not from that area walking in front of their house and will call the police every single time.
Outside of like NYC you have a car. It's a bad system economically, ecologically, and socially, but many people are kind of stupid and reactionary. You show them how putting in a bike lane and adding a bus stop will lower car traffic, improve air quality, and increase economic activity and they just go "no because I feel so". Or, "one time I had to move a refrigerator so we need to prioritize large privately owned vehicles".
Where I live, you can drive across town in 30 minutes. I once worked with a coworker who lived about a 15min drive from work (less than 8km), and it consistently took him 2 hours to get to work by bus.
When I worked two jobs, I'd take the bus from one to the other and it would always take like an hour and a half. One day I decided to walk it, cause it was only a couple miles (also cause the bus driver straight up passed right by me while I was sitting on the bus stop bench waiting for them), maybe a little more than a mile and a half. Took me 45 minutes, maybe.
Cars only
It’s not that alien is it? People rely on cars pretty heavily in most smaller towns in Germany.
Not German, but close enough - there's usually at least one bus within walkable distance, even if it's only like 4 times a day or something, that connects to a larger hub.
I lived in a place where I had to be by the bus stop at 7h30. If I missed that I'd have to wait for the next at 8h15, and if I missed that one, I'd better call to say I wasn't able to go that day.
However, in smaller towns and in the countryside, with no cars, life is so different to the frenetic chaos of big cities that it's hard to put into words.
I would imagine they all have busses? All rural areas in Scotland do at least.
And rural areas tend to be situated around villages with main streets - rather than random houses built outwards.
Dont know, I live in a pretty walkable City where I can bike in 5 Minuten from one end to the other, with a tech store, School, Beach, Bank, etc. Everything you would need. I have a train coming hourly if I want to go to the Beach or munich, but its admittadly way worse (20-30 mins) to bike to the next bigger City.
We aren't just talking small towns though. Any city that isn't New York, Chicago, or Boston might as well not have any rail service at all. Houston has 22.7 miles of passenger railway that is only located downtown. Columbus Ohio has a metro of 2.2 million people and doesn't have a single inch of passenger rail. Cleveland has an OK system by American standards, which i use whenever i go to Cleveland, but the only option for me to take a train into Cleveland from where i live in NW Ohio would take an hour longer than just driving there outright.
We do have it in Germany and the local public transport is perfectly good, albeit a bit expensive in some cities, but its the interregional, long distance train network that has massive issues in Germany. Trains are constantly delayed or even cancelled, pricing is absurd, still no level boarding on the high speed trains, etc.
Its almost like you're taking the piss
Most cities have a bus service, but they only rarely connect to smaller towns ("smaller" being relative here, like 30,000 people).
To put it in perspective, I live in a suburban apartment outside of a medium-sized city in Ohio. There is a single busline that goes through my neighborhood (which thankfully has a stop right outside my complex). A bus comes by once an hour between 7 AM and 7 PM.
This can get you to work if you're lucky enough to work a 9-5 next to a bus stop. My work has a bus stop, but I work a 4-12, so no luck.
My favorite bar is in the next town over, a college town about 15 minutes down the road. If I wanted to get there by public transit, I would need to wait for the hourly bus outside of my apartment, get off at a grocery store, wait about a half an hour for a connecting bus from the college town's bus service, and that's not even counting the drive time.
And if I don't leave the bar by 6 PM, of course, I'm stranded without an Uber or something, because even on weekends (not that I have weekends off work) the busses only run till 7 PM.
And there's other towns nearby that I literally cannot take public transport to. I had to work an event in a smaller city (but still probably within the top 20 in the state for population) about half an hour drive away. There is no bus service that connects me to them. The only options are driving or Uber.