Dumb as it probably sounds, I don't think most Americans know how to take the bus to go places. One place I lived had a very well funded bus route that went between two major cities. It was always empty, all day everyday.
Meanwhile, virtually everywhere I've been throughout Asia had a subway and bus system that was packed full of people and had a very strict timetable with stops along all the major areas.
Kinda feels like people in the US are just conditioned to drive a car everywhere. Even I'm guilty of it.
I think you stumbled on to the correct answer when you said that the buses and subways in Asia follow a strict timetable. I've lived in major cities in the US, some are better than others, but the amount of time the buses just don't show up when they're supposed to is crazy. The bus app or Google will say it arrives in 3 minutes, but then it will get there in 20. It doesn't make any sense.
Best is the bus was like 10 minutes early. When I first got out of college, I didn't have a car, and I relied on the bus to get to work. If the bus was early, it would continue its route until it got to one of three designated stops it can idle and get back to its regular schedule. Nothing like making sure I was waiting for my bus 15 to 20 minutes before it shows up so I'm not an hour or more late for work.
Although, I'd take it being early over it not showing up on an inclement weather day. My work decided to send everyone home after it had been snowing and sleeting for about 2 hours at that point. Why yes, my boss bade everyone safe travels before taking off in his 4 wheel drive winterized SUV without asking if maybe possibly the 2 employees who take the bus might want a ride home instead of waiting 35 minutes for the next bus in an area that had no weather shelters. Naturally, that bus never showed up, and we had to wait the hour for the next buss. That was the day I started looking for second job out of college.
I think you've uncovered a deeper reason for over-use of cars. People waiting for a bus - and people missing a bus - feel undervalued and even abandoned or insulted. Am I not important? The car culture feeds on this alleged empowerment. I've been eligible and able to own a car for 50 years but never bought into the lie my self-worth is bound to owning a rolling box. Just use your legs; You are your car.
Yeah, 20 min car ride turns to 2 hour bus ride for me if i took the bus, not including the 3 mile walk to the bus stop. Id have to get up at 430 to make it to work by 8...
> Kinda feels like people in the US are just conditioned to drive a car everywhere. Even I'm guilty of it.
This is correct. You see it in the design of our buildings:
* Houses with large driveways, only useful for storing private vehicles. What else are you going to park out front? An RV? A boat? Maybe, but most likely a sedan, SUV or pickup truck.
* Office parks _always_ have giant oversized surface parking lots in the suburbs. They even sometimes have parking structures because of how many people commute to them during peak times (like conferences, meetings, office parties, etc).
* Outside of historic downtowns, the most common American shopping/restaurant/entertainment destination is the shopping center. In the 80s these were giant privately enclosed spaces with giant surface parking lots and parking structures to handle the crowds. Nowadays it's the strip mall or big box store. They also have giant surface parking lots, typically no bike parking, poor transit if any exists, and the giant parking lots make it a bitch to walk to unless you live directly next to the center.
* Oh and all of this shit is in separate zones. You live in a neighborhood which is giant, so unless you live on the edge of it that borders another zone like the commercial or office area you won't be able to easily walk anywhere. You _might_ be able to bike if you don't mind the 40 mph speed limits and 0 bike infrastructure though! And transit, if any exists in your town, will serve the entrance to the sub division or be located a few miles away at a Park & Ride, so you _have_ to drive or maybe try and bike if you can manage.
Some changes to zoning laws across the US could fix this over time. I doubt anyone wants to start forcefully tearing down people's houses (see the highways we built that did that; not a great idea) but simply allowing property owners and private developers the option to do mix used stuff could slowly overhaul the US transportation system by just placing shit closer to where people live and work. We can still even be a little car centric if we want, we can just have the option to build out neighborhoods with a small corner grocery store, a small office building and a restaurant and cafe so some people won't have to drive everywhere all the time.
Always reminds me of this quote from the author of a book about that libertarian town in New Hampshire:
> Most of the libertarians that I met were kind, decent people who would be generous with a neighbor in any given moment. But in the abstract, when they're at a town meeting, they will vote to hurt that neighbor by cutting off, say, support for road plowing.
>
> So l guess what I noticed is a strange disconnect between their personalities or their day-to-day interactions and the broader implications of their philosophies and their political movement. Not sure l'd use the word "fanatic," but definitely a weird disconnect.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
The difference is making it an individual choice (they can choose whether or not to help the individual person in that moment) versus being forced to pay taxes and the government deciding who to help.
This sounds appealing in theory (well, until you realize for a lot of these folks it's about not wanting to help those who supposedly don't deserve it), but it just doesn't work in practice because the causes of these problems are systematic and aren't going to be solved by you occasionally giving a homeless person a sandwich.
You mean that homeless person isn't going to help themselves if I give them a set of bootstraps?
In all seriousness though. Libertarianism seems to me to be the ideology of edgy teenagers and old delusional people.
It appeals to the middle class/rich white guy demographic.
As a middle class white guy myself I totally get the appeal. Why not just have the government get out of the way and let people do what they want?
Of course the real world shuts that down pretty quick once you step outside of the middle class white guy bubble.
I think the common theme for all libertarians is that they haven't properly considered or understood the problems facing vulnerable members of society.
Some might just have no empathy and not care. But most of these would try to justify their view somehow.
Externalities. Libertarians have no sense of the idea that their personal actions may impact others. They want all of the personal freedom to act as they wish, and if that's a problem "the market" will take care of it. Introduce one "tragedy of the commons" issue and the entire philosophy collapses.
A culture of personal accountability and meritocracy sounds really great for someone who believes they have merit and has never been held accountable for anything.
There is no disconnect. Day to day, they’re just fake “polite” because if they weren’t people would react to it. Behind closed booths is when their real colors show.
I live in a blue state and the bus line that my wife used to take to work was shortened during the pandemic so it doesn’t come anywhere near us anymore, and the change is permanent. Happened more than five years after we moved in. Like, how do you plan for that? She doesn’t drive, but has to take a ride share to and from work most days. Very frustrating because she thrives on public transportation (unlike me who gets very motion sick, but takes it when I can anyway for environmental reasons).
Wow that really really sucks. That’s one thing that I think is definitely an argument for streetcars. Sure they could stop running the cars or cut service hours, but it’s real hard to just drastically change a route that people have planned their lives around
Happens in blue states as well. Asked a friend inviting me to her family place in upstate New York how to get there without a car. She said that's just not possible. Google confirmed the nearest stop (served once a day or something like that) was a 3 hour walk away which isn't a realistic option with the usual travel luggage.
But if it makes you feel any better, here in Germany we also have politicians also sabotaging transit whenever they get the chance. Because something something personal freedom automotive industry economy.
This is my greatest fear. I’ve always been close to the subway, and those routes don’t tend to change. But now it’s just this one bus route, my only way into the city. It’s been here for decades so I’m not too worried about it changing, but it’s always possible. I would have to sell my house. (or get a car!!!)
100% this.
I’m extremely fortunate to live in a place in my city with nice walkability, but anyone else in my city outside of the center has to go 3 miles to get there.
They’ve been building more apartments here, but those are stupid expensive and everywhere else is really far away.
There was a case a few years ago where a mother and her very young children tried to cross the street near their bus stop, because the nearest crosswalk was half a mile (or more?) in the opposite direction and it was dark. One of the kids was hit and killed by someone who had multiple hit and run/drunk driving charges, but it was the mother was charged in the child's death because jaywalking is baaaad. Doesn't matter that there are a severe lack of sidewalks, crosswalks, or anything else to keep pedestrians safe from homicidal drivers.
But yeah, just use your legs.
When I lived in a small city in China, I used to think walking 20 minutes was too long and too far. Then I came to America and was walking an hour each way to school... wondering why tf it takes so long. but now i know why, because American cities are spread out with canyons and forests and shit in between so it's a literal trek across the earth to get anywhere.
>American cities are spread out with canyons and forests and shit in between
I wish! It's just endless identical houses with identical yards that waste space and resources. It's just a land of people who hate neighbors and want little islands to themselves that they travel between in metal boxes so they never have to interact with another human.
in planned neighborhoods i guess but those communities themselves are like a little town so you're like treking through 3 or 4 towns to get to something.
but where i live it's literally going down and up a canyon to get to school, with cars whizzing by you at 50 mph
I love my walk to the bus stop. 2 feet away from a 50mph road, the wonderful sound of heavy traffic passing by my body. The whoosh of wind with each passing vehicle, the wonderful sprinkling of rain from the puddles they throw up at me. And the smell, so fresh! Like a swamp full of tires that’s also on fire.
I can’t forget the joyous decision I get to make between turning up my music to drown out the cars but then the risk of potentially not hearing the danger. Don’t forget the people who honk at me despite me using the crosswalk as directed, it’s like a wonderful symphony.
I also love that place where the sidewalk disappears and I have awkwardly meander through the edge of several parking lots. Or the spot where I simply can’t walk on that side of the street at all so I have to crossover only to cross back. The majesty of cars turning right on red, while only looking towards oncoming traffic and not the crosswalk!
And because it snowed this week I can look at the blissful beauty of roads that have been plowed and sanded and are now pristine, dry even, for cars. While I slide on the compressed ice on the sidewalk that doesn’t deserve any attention.
All to get to a bus stop where the bus runs every 40 min…I hope. The schedule is different because of the snow.
He’s right, I must hate walking.
It takes like 2 minutes to get a crosswalk to change at most major intersections, which happen to be where the grocery stores are. Then it takes like 30 seconds to cross it because it’s 10 fucking lanes wide (2 left hand, 3 middle, 2 right, 3 opposite direction).
Then no one on the right turns stop for pedestrians making it a dangerous thing because almost no one stops or yield because it’d be ridiculous for someone to cross such a big crosswalk.
Buses are cool and all too, but sometimes they even stop on a 50 mph road in the right lane and block traffic and merge without proper notification. Sketchy stuff they do in south Florida. Need to build less giant “stroads” and more train/tram/bus lines.
Whoever made this meme is truly displaying their ignorance/privilege. If I had to walk everywhere I need to get to, my shortest walk would be 45-60 minutes my other walks would be somewhere around 2.5-3 hours.
Exactly.
It always makes me laugh when non-Americans shit on Americans when they have no idea how shit our infrastructure is here. People who are privelaged enough to have good infrastructure sneering at the rest of us who don't.
My drive to work is 15 minutes, I could bike I guess but: there's only sidewalks on a small portion of the road and the road isn't made for cyclists AT ALL.
But it crosses one of the most accident prone roads in the country and the intersection I need to cross is especially bad.
I've seen people die at that intersection. Motorists, sometimes motoryclists, peds. There's no way to avoid crossing that road either.
The bus ride is TWO HOURS and the stop isn't even within walking distance. I do what I can, I've tried cycling to work but was terrified the whole time so excuse me for not risking dying or trying to have a two hour plus walktime commute to work.
Instead of sneering at people who can't help their infrastructure, why don't you help advocate for actual change instead of bitching on reddit?
Foreigners that have never been to USA, that are coming in for the world cup in 2026, are in for a rude surprise when they want to go to a game in LA and a different one 3 hours later in Philly.
I'm not American and had no idea how much less walkable it is than Europe (my gripe is mostly with the privatisation of UK public transport) but [this blew my mind](https://brenthugh.com/sidewalk-nowhere/) and radicalised me on behalf of Americans
To be fair?
Sometimes "doesn't stop at my house" means, in America, "the nearest public transit is a six-mile walk away from where I live / work / go to school / whatever".
Nearest transit from any kind is 7 miles away, and that's a greyhound stop that has no service and no sign of it coming back (it's still on their website so who knows). But if you don't care about legality there's a CSX freight yard 6 miles.
Edit: If I follow the double tracks I actually end up in a town 32 miles away with an Amtrak stop
The nearest transit stop is 0.4 miles from my house. If I’m driving. If I wanted to walk to it, I totally can. It’s a 2.6 mile, 53 minute walk according to google maps.
Reddit fundamentally depends on the content provided to it for free by users, and the unpaid labor provided to it by moderators. It has additionally neglected accessibility for years, which it was only able to get away with thanks to the hard work of third party developers who made the platform accessible when Reddit itself was too preoccupied with its [vanity NFT](https://www.theverge.com/23323098/reddit-steve-huffman-interview-blockchain-avatars) project.
With that in mind, the recent hostile and libelous behavior towards [developers](https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about/) and the sheer incompetence and lack of awareness displayed in talks with [moderators of r/Blind](https://reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/14ds81l/rblinds_meetings_with_reddit_and_the_current/) by Reddit leadership are absolutely inexcusable and have made it impossible to continue supporting the site.
– June 30, 2023.
Sadly the way some roads are made in north america, it’s sometime really dangerous to walk near them or you straight up just can’t legally do it. They are not meant to be used by people walking.
The drive is a freeway overpass over an interstate. I live literally on the other side of it. It is not something I’d consider walking unless it was an absolute emergency and even then it would likely lead to another one. Plus I’m not actually sure if it’s legal or now to even walk anywhere on there
The freeways were built as barriers to keep poor people from having easy access to rich neighborhoods. There's bridges in New York City that were intentionally built too short for busses to cross under specifically to keep the poor away from the "nice" parks. A lot of urban development in the US was done in a car centric way but also used as a tool to further subjugate the poor, with a heavy focus on destroying black prosperity.
> In my (non American) experience if anything the walk would be shorter because you can take shortcuts where cars don’t fit, like between houses or through a park.
Most US states and jurisdictions don’t have laws similar to other countries that allow the public to walk through open spaces. If they do they tend to be near beaches.
So crossing on the lawns and open areas between peoples houses may be considered trespassing if that land is privately owned. So you’re limited to the sidewalks or any public areas where you’re “allowed” to walk on.
If you haven’t been to America and seen our cities and towns, you should before weighing in very heavily on this. Everything here is built for cars, even if a walk is shorter as the crow flies it is extremely unlikely you can actually safely cross that distance un impeded on foot.
Reddit fundamentally depends on the content provided to it for free by users, and the unpaid labor provided to it by moderators. It has additionally neglected accessibility for years, which it was only able to get away with thanks to the hard work of third party developers who made the platform accessible when Reddit itself was too preoccupied with its [vanity NFT](https://www.theverge.com/23323098/reddit-steve-huffman-interview-blockchain-avatars) project.
With that in mind, the recent hostile and libelous behavior towards [developers](https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about/) and the sheer incompetence and lack of awareness displayed in talks with [moderators of r/Blind](https://reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/14ds81l/rblinds_meetings_with_reddit_and_the_current/) by Reddit leadership are absolutely inexcusable and have made it impossible to continue supporting the site.
– June 30, 2023.
Im not even rural and my choices are walking on roads with no shoulder and 50-70 mph traffic (around 100 kph) or umowed, unmaintained grass and weeds that can get up to 3 feet tall with ticks and potential lyme disease. Im not even joking its a no brainer, I'll take my chances with the cars
There was a park and ride bus stop 6 miles away from my house growing up. All along roads that had no sidewalks and 45 mph speed limits. So functionally no transit lmao.
Where I live the bus stop is on the end of town, outside of city limits but still connected enough. In town the speed limit is 20 but out there it's 35. Luckily the bike path through my town lets you get off right at the bus stop, only problem is what to do with your bike.
It's a thing, but a small thing. I've only met a few people who've done it. Insanely dangerous and the railways here have their own private "police" who will beat the *shit* out of you if they find you on a train and chock it up to you having accidentally fallen off a train where you were trespassing in the first place. These are the same railroads that do everything in their power to prevent passenger service.
With no bike or pedestrian infrastructure. We are dodging cars for that six mile trek.
The nearest bus stop to me is 2.5 miles which would be an easy bike ride except it is blind curves with no shoulder.
Pretty much. Pedestrian infrastructure just slapped wherever to fulfill the checkbox. Near me there is a pedestrian crossing on a highway onramp. So, cars are speeding UP headed towards the crossing.
I've seen a crossing island in the middle of a FIVE-way intersection with at least 2-3 lanes each direction, crossing at an intersection with 8 lanes of traffic and drivers who don't stop before turning right on red. Sidewalks too close to roads where drivers are going 40-60mph. It's simply unsafe in some areas of America and real effort needs to be put into pedestrian infrastructure.
This is my issue. My city has public transit, but to get to it I need to walk down a road with no shoulder (just a guardrail and a dropoff on one side, and brush/woods on the other), and go around a curve that drivers can’t see around before they’d hit you. We have a park a mile from our house, and we walked to it once and thought we were going to die.
America is so fucked up when it come to public transit...
I walk 3 minutes to my bus station and then I get off after 2.5 miles. if I needed to walk 2.5 miles to my station I would have already arrived at my destination
Growing up, the nearest public transit was nearly 20 miles away. The grocery store was 5 miles away - unless I walked down a two lane highway. Then it was 3 miles away.
In my hometown the nearest train station was 11.5 miles away, the nearest grocery was 3 miles away in a different town, and the only other public transit is a bike trail that was no where near me and a shuttle for seniors that services the retirement community and a couple spots downtown
Also it doesn't help that there were like no sidewalks in like a 2-3 mile radius minus some housing complex, which was nice when I wanted to walk two miles to go to the crappy park near me
Some people do not realize how lucky they have it
growing up there was a bus stop right outside the house. only problem was 30 minute frequencies and the fact that because the system was underfunded, sometimes the bus route just kinda got canceled lol
30 minutes isn’t too bad if it’s a reliable 30 minutes. But when I plan for a bus and they just skip that one and it’s another half hour, that’s really pretty tough to deal with.
When I worked in southern Louisiana, the only safe place to walk was the Highway shoulder. It was safer getting hit on by truckers than eaten by crocs, trampled by cattle, or shot for “trespassing” on the semi-private roads that connected to other areas.
We have a public transit stop by our house, and it takes my wife $3 and an hour and a half to get to work a mile and a half away (crossing a stroad with dubious sidewalks.) It costs her $10 to take a 10 minute long Lyft. It's unreasonable to expect her to put her life in danger or add almost three hours a day to work. She tried and tried, and just couldn't make it work.
To get to my work it's a 45 minute walk to the train station then a 1 hour train/bus ride. Driving takes me half an hour. I wish my city had better public transit and based off our city's subreddit other people agree. Conveniently though the university I'll be attending is right across from my work so I plan on riding a bike around campus.
yup, 6.4 miles for me. And then it doesn't really go anywhere that I ever need to go, it basically only exists to just get people in the city into the suburbs because the entire city is a food desert
Not just distances, but **lack of pedestrian infrastructure**. When you not only have to walk 2, 5, 10, 20 miles to reach public transit ... but some or all of that walk is *actively hazardous to your health and life* because of the lack of safe places **to** walk ... yeah: "unwalkable" is definitely the right term.
Yes outside of major cities the closest bus stops could be a long walk which is even worse when streets don’t even have sidewalks and high speed traffic making you walk on the dirt. If it’s raining then you better just call an Uber instead. Texas is the worst at this, they deigned their cities for only car people. The public transit is just there for poor people.
I'd have to walk 3+ miles on a 55mph road with no shoulder or sidewalk, just to wait 3-6 hours for a bus that would take me to *very* select locations. And then getting home would be the whole trauma in reverse.
I once interviewed the head of my county's public transportation system and he had an exceptional plan in place that it ready to launch. It would revolutionize our area's economy. He just needs $10 million that he will never, ever receive because local government considers it a low priority.
And there is no sidewalk or pedestrian infrastructure. If I want to walk from my house to the grocery story, I have to cross 2 4-lane highways with no cross walks, the nearest traffic light is 1.5 miles away, and again, there are no sidewalks. I'm walking on the shoulder of a highway, hoping I don't get hit.
26 miles to the nearest bus, 30 to work checking in.
I'm willing to walk 2-3 miles on both ends if a bus comes that close and can get me there any time between 6am and 9am and back 8 hours later.
> To be fair?
>
>
>
> Sometimes "doesn't stop at my house" means, in America, "the nearest public transit is a six-mile walk away from where I live / work / go to school / whatever".
the subway was 4 miles from my house growing up.
There are a lot of replies from rural/small town folks, but a lot of cities aren't much better. I live in a suburb in a metro area with a 2 million+ population. For a while I took a bus to work. It was a 90 minute commute, and I had to switch busses in the middle (so if my bus was late or the other one was early, it turned into a 2 hour commute). It's a 15 minute drive.
I had a coworker get written up because he was often a few minutes late due to taking the bus. He was a good worker, so we didn't mind covering for him at all, but management wanted him to take the earlier bus, which would mean getting there two hours early just so he wasn't 5-15 minutes late sometimes when the bus was running behind. And then he quit after the second time in a week they kept him late so he missed the last bus home.
I’m in the 4th largest city in the US and transit here is abysmal. There’s a very small radius you can take it but beyond that there’s either 0 transport or it’s just impractical. Some routes that would be a 20 minute drive are an hour and half on bus and require multiple transfers. Also this meme doesn’t take into account that while you may have a bus stop you *technically* can walk to doesn’t mean you *actually* can. Lots of Houston is cut up by freeways and interstates sometimes you can’t even get to places 3 or 4 miles away without hitting a 70mph freeway.
That's an excellent point. Not only is the public transport bad, they're not walkable. I love in the north, and my neighborhood doesn't have sidewalks. That means that if you want to take the bus in the winter, you're walking in the icy, slushy street along with the cars (and the drivers who never seem to remember how to drive in winter).
To get from my house to the city center is a 25 minute drive. To make the same trip on public transit is a 25 minute walk followed by a 35 minute bus ride.
To go from the airport to city center is 15 minutes by Uber, or by public transit is a 25 minute bus ride, but the bus comes every 30 minutes, so if you just miss a bus it's nearly an hour before you get to your destination. Buses also have no bus only lanes so any traffic catches the buses as well.
My city has a light rail and if you live close to it, I've heard it's a good option. As fast as a car, no dealing with parking and 15 minute intervals (not great, but twice as good as the buses), but only the east side of the city has light rail and there's no connections between spokes out of the city center, so literally the only trip it's worth taking is to head into the city center.
They've announced plans to expand the rail system near my house and plan to have it running by 2030... So it'll actually be available in 2035 unless the project gets cancelled first.
It's not just rural areas. My mom lives in the suburbs of Pittsburgh (20 minute drive from the city) and the closest bus stop to her is an hour+ walk (which you can't even walk to because part of it is 55 mph with no sidewalk.)
Edit to add: and let's say she gets to that bus... it only goes into the city. If she wants to get anywhere in a suburb other than hers, she'll have to get at least one connecting bus and it becomes a 2 hour+ bus trip on top of the walk.
A fun way to realize how frustrating this is... Is to use Google directions and select by bus.
You really do not understand the issue then. Some areas of my town are a 1-hour walk away from a bus stop. The bus only goes to a few other small towns, it visits five times per day, and our town is an "on request" town only. So we'd have to plan ahead at least 24hrs, call the bus company for a pickup, walk at least 30 minutes to wait for the bus, and get driven 6 miles on an empty bus.
Driving the same trip takes 15 minutes and can be done whenever. It's not the complete fault of the individual.
Sounds insane. Nobody should be living in such remote areas aside from like 0.1% of the population, like farmers surrounded by their land, foresters, scientists at research outposts. When it's 0.1% in remote areas, then fuck it! use all the cars you need, an airplane or helicopter even. I won't care! It's once a month anyway.
Friend of mine lives in a brand-new neighborhood development out in the middle of nowhere. About 20 minute drive from the nearest grocery store or an hour walk on a sidewalk too close to a road with a speed limit of 45mph.
Oh I'm sorry, let me go back 100 years and tell my great grandparents not to settle in bumfuck Ohio. Not my fault I was born in a place literally 30 miles from a city with public transit. I have no desire to uproot my life and move away from my job, friends, and family to move to a more expensive city just so I don't have to use a vehicle, so I'm still here for now.
For a lot of Americans, no. Not safely or in a reasonable amount of time.
That’s kind of the point of this sub, isn’t it? It’s not about people choosing cars, it’s about people being forced to use cars because the alternatives are not workable. Not exclusive to the US, but it’s kind of an exemplar.
I think a lot of Europeans don't get this as well. I live in the upper Midwest and it's -27C right now with -41c wind chill and the sidewalks are all frozen over. My work is only a mile away and I bike for a lot of the year, but its simply not happening right now.
They don’t get a lot about the basic geography of parts of the US. Even in more temperate part of the country like where I live, there are an absolute metric shit ton of steep forested hills that would make development of reasonably usable footpaths for folks who aren’t going on a hike difficult.
Not impossible, it would still do some good in areas, but it’s not as simple as “just put a path here.”
Even ideally though, the city I live in has a metro area whose physical size is larger than most European capitals, sometimes by 3-4x.
So many Europeans fundamentally cannot grasp that many of our states are larger than some of their countries, and that making even a lot of the major cities here truly walkable for the majority of the population(and not just the rich folks who can afford to live in the nice part of town or near infrastructure) would be a massive project that likely *is* impossible.
And that’s before we start talking about the insane physical scale of rural America.
I live within a 10 minute walk to 6 bus lines and the most frequent route has like 4 minute headways 🙏 bless my neighborhood. It’s not a matter of laziness but ACCESSIBILITY and FREQUENCY
Yeah I'm <10 minutes to a bus exchange and the SeaBus terminal. The absolute nearest bus stop is at the end of the block, but not very many services stop there. I'm glad I'm in one of the few NA cities that actually prioritises transit.
Edit: Grocery store, pharmacy, etc are all ~5 minutes away. There is a 7/11 closer which I never go to, etc.
Sometimes the nearest stop is 5km (3 miles) away and the bus comes a couple times a day at best. This is how most of the rural towns in my state work. There's a bus in and out of almost every town, but it's only there for getting in and out, not regularly scheduled trips.
For a test I used Google Maps, put in my parent's home, and asked to go to the stadium. Google told me I couldn't take mass transit at all. I thought maybe I should pick something closer to them and chose a business 3 miles away. No dice, there were no routes available at all.
The closest bus stop to my parents is 7 miles away. To take the bus to that business you would have to walk past it, go another 4 miles, and fuck off completely because the bus won't stop there anyway.
And this isn't just some random business I pulled from a hat. It's fucking NASA. You cannot go to Johnson Space Center by mass transit.
I would suggest using a bicycle to travel the 3miles but I know how dangerous this can be in the us.
Even here in Germany while you can get to every major city by public transit some cities are only connected when you drive to another big city in the opposite direction.
By riding 5mins of train and 15mins of bicycle I save 40mins on my way to University every day...
Every time I see posts like this I think of the TikTok that went viral over the summer of an American’s European friends visiting and insisting they walk places and they ending up walking on the freeway lol.
My god this sub has gone to shit. It used to be about an interest in dismantling car infrastructure. Now it’s just this victim blaming shit again and again.
Remember, societal problems don't exist and everything is the individual's fault. I'm not saying you can never solve your own problems but in some situations you realistically can't do much by yourself. This is giving "just move LOL" vibes
In literally every other country including mine that is very possible
In America, is both too much (We are talking about 1 hour or more walking), dangerous (Bad pedestrian and cycling infrastructure), etc.
When my dad was in America he was impressed by the fact his company (Who brought him from here to there for a few months) told him straight away to not walk to the office but to take the company car because it was dangerous to go walking... they were literally on the other side of the street to the office, but nearest pedestrian cross was over 10 miles away, this was the 90's and as far as I know, it has NOT improved
steep physical ossified grab money waiting practice rustic shame distinct
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
If you try to take any transit near my house, Google just tells you to get a Lyft. It's 30 minutes away by car, and only goes to the community college campus.
This is part of the point of the sub: to get transit stops in more places so they're actually accessible to people.
People in this sub are sick of poor city planning and are advocating for a better life for our grandkids who will grow up in walkable neighborhoods in 30 yeard
100%
Anyone who blames individuals for not being able to walk doesn’t understand that it’s never the fault of the individual; it’s a failure of policy.
I *want* to take the bus places. I *want* to be able to walk to take the train to work. Except that the nearest train station is 1.35 miles away and in the summer I literally can’t without risking heat stroke, and in the winter they run the trains less often.
Not to mention that it’s a 1.5 hr bus/train ride for what is literally a 15 minute drive.
Some people yeah. but there are plenty, even in these comments that are just acting like people should be okay walking 3 hours to a bus stop for a commute, or they should move to a higher cost of living area so they can be closer to public transit.
For those wondering: -34.4... C
That is a bit chilly. If infrastructure was adequately maintained you could still keep warm-enough while biking (with adequate clothing), but I suspect it isn't maintained.
You’re right. I went to University in Fairbanks, Alaska. There’s a diehard population up there of bike and ski commuters year-round with winter temps routinely at -40 (C/F). They are, quite frankly, mad and impressive. Impressively mad.
(Hear me out before anyone downvotes)
This post is just more evidence that /r/fuckcars isn’t going down the right path. I loved this sub, but after /r/place I feel like the kind of posts that are upvoted changed. I thought this sub was going to potentially offer high level content on how we can take actions in our communities to reverse our car-centric society. Instead, it’s just low quality memes made by folks with very little knowledge of transportation planning issues.
The issue with transit in America has largely to do with land use and density. We don’t build dense enough and we don’t mix uses enough, which makes transit less effective. Less people are within walking distance to transit than in transit rich countries. It’s not a matter of people not wanting to walk, but our inability to build densely around transit resources.
I imagine the more aggressive posters here as either Europeans who can’t fathom what public transport is like in the US, or as the cyclist character Fred Armisen played on Portlandia.
In all seriousness, though. I live in Germany and our friends visited the US before COVID, and were shocked by how bad public transport was outside of NYC. Many really just don’t know. They hear it’s bad and assume that means dangerous or dirty, I guess, and not “unreliable” “poorly connected” or “non-existent”.
I thought this was a shit post at first, it's so fucking stupid. "Can Americans not walk!?!"
The US is fucking huge, I love it when Europeans who have no concept of how large the country is make memes about car usage. "JuSt WALk"
The nearest bus stop to me is actually only like 100 yards away! There's just a few problems.
1. The bus only comes once per hour, and is never on time. It might be 10 minutes early, it might be 15 minutes late. It is constantly stuck in traffic so you never know.
2. The stop is just a sign on the side of a busy road. It offers no protection from the weather for the up to 20 minutes you might be stuck standing there
3. The stop is only a few feet from said road with no shelter. If it is raining, every single passing car will splash water from the gutter onto you.
4. The stop is NOT ON THE SAME SIDE OF THE ROAD AS I LIVE ON. This road is 4 lanes and constantly buried in low-speed-but-not-stopped traffic during the daytime, and there are no crosswalks for over 5 miles in either direction.
5. The bus only runs during the day, when the aforementioned traffic is constant and there's no safe way to cross
6. The bus doesn't *go anywhere*. It takes you to the mall. There are other busses from the mall to other places, but those require even more waiting because they ALL only come once an hour. If I wanted to go to the train station (a 5 minute drive away) I'd need to get on a bus, go several miles in the opposite direction, get off at the mall, get on another bus going back the way I came, get off again at the community college, get on ANOTHER bus to go the last 3 miles, and finally hope I made it in time to catch the train down to the city (only place it goes) that only comes, again, once an hour.
I love public transit. The train is far and away my favorite way to get down to the city, and once I'm there I can take busses or trains wherever I want. Trying to get anywhere on public transit in these suburbs, though? it takes two hours to get to the train station I could drive to in less than ten minutes.
>and there are no crosswalks for over 5 miles in either direction
Even being from American suburbia, I'm flabbergasted they were allowed to build a bus stop with no nearby crosswalk. A bus stop is the entire reason many crosswalks exist at all, because it's egregiously irresponsible to not have one! Same reason school buses have stop signs that deploy.
People who post trash like this are either trolls looking to start an argument or are genuinely ignorant to the situation in the United States regarding Public transport.
It genuinely could be ignorance - reading this thread has really opened my eyes to some of the problems in the US.
Where I live there are ~5 bus stops within 10 minutes walk of my house (the nearest about 3 minutes hoof) with most running every 15 minutes during peak times and hourly outside of that, although one route through the middle of the area goes half hourly. The buses pretty much always run to schedule. There's an app for my city's transport that has live updates and shows delays, prices, schedules etc. I get two buses to and from work, which takes about a forty five minutes, roughly double the drive.
I can walk to my local "shopping village", which consists of two grocery stores, and a bunch of smaller stores. It takes me about 15-20 minutes to walk there, and most of that journey is along quiet streets and through parks. When I do need to cross a stroad, there are regular pedestrian crossings and footpaths alongside them.
Without the comments on a post like this I would have no idea how bad you guys have it.
**ETA** I'm in Australia
And if the ones who can walk did so - and infrastructure was designed to support that - then there would be plenty of room for the remaining cars for people who can’t walk.
I'm in a very public transit-friendly US city and there are like 3 streets in my neighborhood with a sidewalk.
There are far fewer sidewalks than you think, and most car accidents are within 2 miles of your home. While correlation is not causation, I truly believe that walking on streets without sidewalks in that radius gets more dangerous.
To get to my job five miles away from me, I usually drive. It takes about ten minutes.
To take the bus, I’d have to walk two miles to the closest bus station. Then, the closest but stop to my job is around 1 mile away in a neighborhood without sidewalks. I also live in a region that gets extremely cold and snowy winters. The entire trip would take, minimum, 45 minutes. I also have a physically demanding job where I’m walking for most of the day. So, yeah, maybe I don’t want to walk six extra miles a day and be commuting for 1.5-2 hours each day instead of 20 minutes. I don’t think you really understand the problem.
As with all memes, it’s reductive to the point of not effectively making its point.
If we had good infrastructure such that most Americans had safe sidewalks and a 5-10 minute walk to a bus that reliably came in 10 minute intervals? Sure this meme makes sense.
Instead, Americans have bus stops that are often not even attached to a sidewalk along a 4 lane highway with no crosswalks and the nearest one is 30+ minutes from their house and comes *maybe* once an hour. The meme sucks because no one should have to walk that long and that unsafely for something unreliable.
Oh yeah, please, tell me how easy it is for all people to take a six-mile long trek in the middle of the sidewalkless- road across three six-lane highways in freezing cold, horrifically hot, or dangerously wet weather in places, such as the Pacific Northwest, which as of last summer had some of the worst air quality in the world, to get to a bus stop to take a 30 minute ride into work every. single. day. is a good or easy solution for the every day American. Europeans truly do not understand how insane it is to live in America, which unlike much of Europe, was built around the idea of everyone owning a car and if you don’t you might as well just die.
Also, love how blatantly this leaves out disabled people, old people, and people with other health conditions (like asthma) lol.
People have brought up why this can be unsafe because of lack of city planning around walkable routes and those who physically cannot walk, but lets not forget those who are at risk of violence just by being in public.
I think of people like Ahmaud Arbery when I see posts like this, or women who feel like they cant walk without being harassed, often by men in cars, or those who get clocked as trans in conservative areas, or disabled people that can walk but still get accused of being up to no good and get cops called on them because they are assumed to be on drugs or unstable and dangerous.
The danger doesn't magically go away with public transport sure, but having witnesses and being able to get between safe spaces quickly can mean a lot.
A quick google shows me that the nearest bus stop is 1.9 miles from my house. So a 40 minutes walk when work/downtown is 3.4 miles from my house. It's 8 minutes by car or 35 minutes by bike.
A lot of people are making really valid arguments about rural areas and distance
I live in a city and there are bus stations 15 minutes from my house. I still have to drive sometimes because there are a lot of drug addict encampments between the station and my house and it's just not safe to walk at night as a woman. A few people have been shot in my neighborhood this month
There's a bus stop 5 minutes away from my house. I don't take it because the transit system in my area is super underfunded & inconvenient. It can get me to the nearest supermarket and back pretty easily since that's just a straight shot up my local stroad, about a half-hour walk or so, but if I need to get anywhere else besides right on that line, it gets a bit more complicated.
Transfers don't always line up, which leads to long waits at the stop for the next bus to come along, which is less than ideal in the weather that's typical for this time of year. Depending on where I'm going, it may be a few transfers as well. All of that waiting adds up.
Since I live in a suburb, the bus schedule isn't consistent throughout the day. It runs about every half hour or so up until about 8 in the morning, then give or take every hour through the rest of the day, sometimes up to an hour and a half between buses.
The bus only runs between 6 AM and 9 PM, which is fine for everyone that takes it, but does make second-shift workers like myself less inclined to use it.
I've been working from home since the pandemic started, but if I was working in the office, it would take me 4 times as long to get to work by bus than driving does, same with coming back home. On top of that, if I miss my bus on the way back home, there would be no other way to get back besides an Uber.
Urban design problems can't be fixed by individuals walking three hours on sidewalk-free roads to get to the store. This is a very shallow view of the issue
I live in one of the biggest cities in the US but the nearest bus stop to me is a 30 minute walk away. The bus I would need comes every 45 minutes. It drops off only about 5 minute walk from my work but it takes 2 transfers and about 2 hours at best one way. God forbid any delays and I miss my connections. I’d have to arrive at work almost 2.5 hours early or else the next set of connections would be cutting it too close. Coming home during rush hour would put my commute at a 5-6 hours round trip.
One of my would-be transfers is at what used to be a park and ride type hub for lots of bus routes. It’s been repurposed as a construction lot while a major highway construction project is underway (will probably take another 5 years to complete). Instead of getting a protected lot with easy access for the buses, that transfer is now on the side of an access road for a major interstate and interchange. It’s horrendous.
I mean aside from me being disabled, there's literally no bus that comes through my town,
i think it's 12 miles away
I can walk about .27 miles tops without a break,
so ... yeah idk
Many Americans will instinctively reach for their car keys any time they need to leave the house, even if they're just going a few blocks. It's pure car culture.
That said, many places in America make walking a few blocks a miserable experience. Our streets are wide, sidewalks are ill-maintained, cars are fast and loud.
My entire town has no public transit and you're lucky if you even get any sidewalks. Our infrastructure hates people without cars. There's a decent walking track down the road from my grandma's house but she drives there to go walking sometimes, in part because there is no other safe way to get there. (Tho she's admittedly also kinda carbrained). My bf used to bike way more often but he got hit multiple times.
I'm lucky enough to have a sidewalk leading up to the nearest park, but trying to get anywhere actually important is a nightmare.
For most Americans, the nearest bus stop can be multiple miles away, but it's insane the number of people I've seen here in NYC that would rather Uber than walk like 5 blocks. Walking anywhere is such a foreign concept to American, that they won't do it even if it's convenient.
Well I am handicapped and the nearest public transportation stop is 3 miles away. Most of the route has no sidewalks and my app map has me cross two 4 lane roads that don’t have stoplights or stop signs too.
Nearest bus stop is 7 miles away. On top of the distance, I would be walking in a ditch as the only other option is on the road where, while the posted speed limit is 45 mph, most people drive at 55-60 mph, and that’s just the first half. Second half of the walk is along the busiest road in my city, past an airport, then along 5 lanes of busy traffic just to get to a bus stop on a line that frankly doesn’t go anywhere useful.
Saying “just walk, idiot” shows a major lack of knowledge on the issue.
We can, but I rather not walk 15 kilometers to my house from the nearest bus stop...with no sidewalk or street lights on a rural road where the speed limit is ~113 km/h
edit: I love how the European Redditors have no response to this.
Plenty of people have already had their criticism so I won't repeat those too much (but just to add, I looked it up since I was curious, I live in the center of a town with a few hundred thousand people and the closest bus stop is a 40 minute walk away)
But along with "doesn't stop at my house" usually means it's much farther than just down the block, some people also *can't* walk
I *could* hobble that 30-40min with my cane, but I would probably be in too much pain to make the walk back. Anything more than 10-15min isn't really an option for me. Some people's legs aren't an option.
I genuinely support the movement and think better public transportation options would do more for physically disabled people than the current car centric infrastructure is doing (not that I can speak for everyone), but stuff like this is where the accusations of ableism come from
I grew up with no sidewalks and a 55 mph speed limit on my road. I'm all for public transport and stuff, but accept that using public transport isn't a quick simple solution for everyone. Don't blame people for not using public transport that is inadequate or nonexistent.
Absolute shit take ngl. I can’t even walk to the grocery store without crossing a major highway. Ever heard of redlining? Look it up. American cities have been designed to keep upper and lower class people and businesses separated with major highways. It was a way to keep minorities in “their area” so the rich white ppl can drive their Escalades and don’t have to see someone’s shitty Honda.
It would take me six hours to walk to my college according to Google Maps. It takes about an hour to even walk into to town. No, walking legitimately isn’t a viable form of transportation in some parts of the United States
Bought a house on a bus route then the route was cut because my stupid red state cut transit funding.
Freedum
Dumb as it probably sounds, I don't think most Americans know how to take the bus to go places. One place I lived had a very well funded bus route that went between two major cities. It was always empty, all day everyday. Meanwhile, virtually everywhere I've been throughout Asia had a subway and bus system that was packed full of people and had a very strict timetable with stops along all the major areas. Kinda feels like people in the US are just conditioned to drive a car everywhere. Even I'm guilty of it.
I think you stumbled on to the correct answer when you said that the buses and subways in Asia follow a strict timetable. I've lived in major cities in the US, some are better than others, but the amount of time the buses just don't show up when they're supposed to is crazy. The bus app or Google will say it arrives in 3 minutes, but then it will get there in 20. It doesn't make any sense.
Best is the bus was like 10 minutes early. When I first got out of college, I didn't have a car, and I relied on the bus to get to work. If the bus was early, it would continue its route until it got to one of three designated stops it can idle and get back to its regular schedule. Nothing like making sure I was waiting for my bus 15 to 20 minutes before it shows up so I'm not an hour or more late for work. Although, I'd take it being early over it not showing up on an inclement weather day. My work decided to send everyone home after it had been snowing and sleeting for about 2 hours at that point. Why yes, my boss bade everyone safe travels before taking off in his 4 wheel drive winterized SUV without asking if maybe possibly the 2 employees who take the bus might want a ride home instead of waiting 35 minutes for the next bus in an area that had no weather shelters. Naturally, that bus never showed up, and we had to wait the hour for the next buss. That was the day I started looking for second job out of college.
I think you've uncovered a deeper reason for over-use of cars. People waiting for a bus - and people missing a bus - feel undervalued and even abandoned or insulted. Am I not important? The car culture feeds on this alleged empowerment. I've been eligible and able to own a car for 50 years but never bought into the lie my self-worth is bound to owning a rolling box. Just use your legs; You are your car.
I mean, I know how to take the bus. But if i was going to take it to work then it turns a 25 minute drive into a 2 hour trip in my city.
That's why we need infrastructure that isn't an absolute joke.
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Yeah, 20 min car ride turns to 2 hour bus ride for me if i took the bus, not including the 3 mile walk to the bus stop. Id have to get up at 430 to make it to work by 8...
> Kinda feels like people in the US are just conditioned to drive a car everywhere. Even I'm guilty of it. This is correct. You see it in the design of our buildings: * Houses with large driveways, only useful for storing private vehicles. What else are you going to park out front? An RV? A boat? Maybe, but most likely a sedan, SUV or pickup truck. * Office parks _always_ have giant oversized surface parking lots in the suburbs. They even sometimes have parking structures because of how many people commute to them during peak times (like conferences, meetings, office parties, etc). * Outside of historic downtowns, the most common American shopping/restaurant/entertainment destination is the shopping center. In the 80s these were giant privately enclosed spaces with giant surface parking lots and parking structures to handle the crowds. Nowadays it's the strip mall or big box store. They also have giant surface parking lots, typically no bike parking, poor transit if any exists, and the giant parking lots make it a bitch to walk to unless you live directly next to the center. * Oh and all of this shit is in separate zones. You live in a neighborhood which is giant, so unless you live on the edge of it that borders another zone like the commercial or office area you won't be able to easily walk anywhere. You _might_ be able to bike if you don't mind the 40 mph speed limits and 0 bike infrastructure though! And transit, if any exists in your town, will serve the entrance to the sub division or be located a few miles away at a Park & Ride, so you _have_ to drive or maybe try and bike if you can manage. Some changes to zoning laws across the US could fix this over time. I doubt anyone wants to start forcefully tearing down people's houses (see the highways we built that did that; not a great idea) but simply allowing property owners and private developers the option to do mix used stuff could slowly overhaul the US transportation system by just placing shit closer to where people live and work. We can still even be a little car centric if we want, we can just have the option to build out neighborhoods with a small corner grocery store, a small office building and a restaurant and cafe so some people won't have to drive everywhere all the time.
Always reminds me of this quote from the author of a book about that libertarian town in New Hampshire: > Most of the libertarians that I met were kind, decent people who would be generous with a neighbor in any given moment. But in the abstract, when they're at a town meeting, they will vote to hurt that neighbor by cutting off, say, support for road plowing. > > So l guess what I noticed is a strange disconnect between their personalities or their day-to-day interactions and the broader implications of their philosophies and their political movement. Not sure l'd use the word "fanatic," but definitely a weird disconnect. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
Is that the town that cut so much public resource funding that bears basically took over? Edit: should have clicked the link, that's the one!
The difference is making it an individual choice (they can choose whether or not to help the individual person in that moment) versus being forced to pay taxes and the government deciding who to help. This sounds appealing in theory (well, until you realize for a lot of these folks it's about not wanting to help those who supposedly don't deserve it), but it just doesn't work in practice because the causes of these problems are systematic and aren't going to be solved by you occasionally giving a homeless person a sandwich.
You mean that homeless person isn't going to help themselves if I give them a set of bootstraps? In all seriousness though. Libertarianism seems to me to be the ideology of edgy teenagers and old delusional people.
It appeals to the middle class/rich white guy demographic. As a middle class white guy myself I totally get the appeal. Why not just have the government get out of the way and let people do what they want? Of course the real world shuts that down pretty quick once you step outside of the middle class white guy bubble.
I think the common theme for all libertarians is that they haven't properly considered or understood the problems facing vulnerable members of society. Some might just have no empathy and not care. But most of these would try to justify their view somehow.
Externalities. Libertarians have no sense of the idea that their personal actions may impact others. They want all of the personal freedom to act as they wish, and if that's a problem "the market" will take care of it. Introduce one "tragedy of the commons" issue and the entire philosophy collapses.
It’s for the privileged fucks who think they worked hard for what was essentially handed to them.
A culture of personal accountability and meritocracy sounds really great for someone who believes they have merit and has never been held accountable for anything.
There is no disconnect. Day to day, they’re just fake “polite” because if they weren’t people would react to it. Behind closed booths is when their real colors show.
I live in a blue state and the bus line that my wife used to take to work was shortened during the pandemic so it doesn’t come anywhere near us anymore, and the change is permanent. Happened more than five years after we moved in. Like, how do you plan for that? She doesn’t drive, but has to take a ride share to and from work most days. Very frustrating because she thrives on public transportation (unlike me who gets very motion sick, but takes it when I can anyway for environmental reasons).
Wow that really really sucks. That’s one thing that I think is definitely an argument for streetcars. Sure they could stop running the cars or cut service hours, but it’s real hard to just drastically change a route that people have planned their lives around
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Happens in blue states as well. Asked a friend inviting me to her family place in upstate New York how to get there without a car. She said that's just not possible. Google confirmed the nearest stop (served once a day or something like that) was a 3 hour walk away which isn't a realistic option with the usual travel luggage. But if it makes you feel any better, here in Germany we also have politicians also sabotaging transit whenever they get the chance. Because something something personal freedom automotive industry economy.
wow, that's messed up!
This is my greatest fear. I’ve always been close to the subway, and those routes don’t tend to change. But now it’s just this one bus route, my only way into the city. It’s been here for decades so I’m not too worried about it changing, but it’s always possible. I would have to sell my house. (or get a car!!!)
American towns are built so walking everywhere is impossible. Anyone not able to relate to this is lucky.
100% this. I’m extremely fortunate to live in a place in my city with nice walkability, but anyone else in my city outside of the center has to go 3 miles to get there. They’ve been building more apartments here, but those are stupid expensive and everywhere else is really far away.
Not only impossible, but typically dangerous to even attempt
Sometimes even illegal.
There was a case a few years ago where a mother and her very young children tried to cross the street near their bus stop, because the nearest crosswalk was half a mile (or more?) in the opposite direction and it was dark. One of the kids was hit and killed by someone who had multiple hit and run/drunk driving charges, but it was the mother was charged in the child's death because jaywalking is baaaad. Doesn't matter that there are a severe lack of sidewalks, crosswalks, or anything else to keep pedestrians safe from homicidal drivers. But yeah, just use your legs.
I didn’t even realize this until I left the USA for the first time… people don’t even understand what they’re missing
When I lived in a small city in China, I used to think walking 20 minutes was too long and too far. Then I came to America and was walking an hour each way to school... wondering why tf it takes so long. but now i know why, because American cities are spread out with canyons and forests and shit in between so it's a literal trek across the earth to get anywhere.
>American cities are spread out with canyons and forests and shit in between I wish! It's just endless identical houses with identical yards that waste space and resources. It's just a land of people who hate neighbors and want little islands to themselves that they travel between in metal boxes so they never have to interact with another human.
in planned neighborhoods i guess but those communities themselves are like a little town so you're like treking through 3 or 4 towns to get to something. but where i live it's literally going down and up a canyon to get to school, with cars whizzing by you at 50 mph
I love my walk to the bus stop. 2 feet away from a 50mph road, the wonderful sound of heavy traffic passing by my body. The whoosh of wind with each passing vehicle, the wonderful sprinkling of rain from the puddles they throw up at me. And the smell, so fresh! Like a swamp full of tires that’s also on fire. I can’t forget the joyous decision I get to make between turning up my music to drown out the cars but then the risk of potentially not hearing the danger. Don’t forget the people who honk at me despite me using the crosswalk as directed, it’s like a wonderful symphony. I also love that place where the sidewalk disappears and I have awkwardly meander through the edge of several parking lots. Or the spot where I simply can’t walk on that side of the street at all so I have to crossover only to cross back. The majesty of cars turning right on red, while only looking towards oncoming traffic and not the crosswalk! And because it snowed this week I can look at the blissful beauty of roads that have been plowed and sanded and are now pristine, dry even, for cars. While I slide on the compressed ice on the sidewalk that doesn’t deserve any attention. All to get to a bus stop where the bus runs every 40 min…I hope. The schedule is different because of the snow. He’s right, I must hate walking.
Absolute facts right here.
And many times illegal. But yes let’s keep calling Americans stupid and lazy
It takes like 2 minutes to get a crosswalk to change at most major intersections, which happen to be where the grocery stores are. Then it takes like 30 seconds to cross it because it’s 10 fucking lanes wide (2 left hand, 3 middle, 2 right, 3 opposite direction). Then no one on the right turns stop for pedestrians making it a dangerous thing because almost no one stops or yield because it’d be ridiculous for someone to cross such a big crosswalk. Buses are cool and all too, but sometimes they even stop on a 50 mph road in the right lane and block traffic and merge without proper notification. Sketchy stuff they do in south Florida. Need to build less giant “stroads” and more train/tram/bus lines.
Whoever made this meme is truly displaying their ignorance/privilege. If I had to walk everywhere I need to get to, my shortest walk would be 45-60 minutes my other walks would be somewhere around 2.5-3 hours.
Exactly. It always makes me laugh when non-Americans shit on Americans when they have no idea how shit our infrastructure is here. People who are privelaged enough to have good infrastructure sneering at the rest of us who don't. My drive to work is 15 minutes, I could bike I guess but: there's only sidewalks on a small portion of the road and the road isn't made for cyclists AT ALL. But it crosses one of the most accident prone roads in the country and the intersection I need to cross is especially bad. I've seen people die at that intersection. Motorists, sometimes motoryclists, peds. There's no way to avoid crossing that road either. The bus ride is TWO HOURS and the stop isn't even within walking distance. I do what I can, I've tried cycling to work but was terrified the whole time so excuse me for not risking dying or trying to have a two hour plus walktime commute to work. Instead of sneering at people who can't help their infrastructure, why don't you help advocate for actual change instead of bitching on reddit?
Foreigners that have never been to USA, that are coming in for the world cup in 2026, are in for a rude surprise when they want to go to a game in LA and a different one 3 hours later in Philly.
I'm not American and had no idea how much less walkable it is than Europe (my gripe is mostly with the privatisation of UK public transport) but [this blew my mind](https://brenthugh.com/sidewalk-nowhere/) and radicalised me on behalf of Americans
To be fair? Sometimes "doesn't stop at my house" means, in America, "the nearest public transit is a six-mile walk away from where I live / work / go to school / whatever".
Nearest transit from any kind is 7 miles away, and that's a greyhound stop that has no service and no sign of it coming back (it's still on their website so who knows). But if you don't care about legality there's a CSX freight yard 6 miles. Edit: If I follow the double tracks I actually end up in a town 32 miles away with an Amtrak stop
The nearest transit stop is 0.4 miles from my house. If I’m driving. If I wanted to walk to it, I totally can. It’s a 2.6 mile, 53 minute walk according to google maps.
Yeah the nearest bart station from my house is either a 5 minute drive or a 3 hour 8 mile walk.
That's so fucking awful
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Exactly how it is for me right outside of DC. Absolutely ridiculous
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Sadly the way some roads are made in north america, it’s sometime really dangerous to walk near them or you straight up just can’t legally do it. They are not meant to be used by people walking.
The drive is a freeway overpass over an interstate. I live literally on the other side of it. It is not something I’d consider walking unless it was an absolute emergency and even then it would likely lead to another one. Plus I’m not actually sure if it’s legal or now to even walk anywhere on there
The freeways were built as barriers to keep poor people from having easy access to rich neighborhoods. There's bridges in New York City that were intentionally built too short for busses to cross under specifically to keep the poor away from the "nice" parks. A lot of urban development in the US was done in a car centric way but also used as a tool to further subjugate the poor, with a heavy focus on destroying black prosperity.
> In my (non American) experience if anything the walk would be shorter because you can take shortcuts where cars don’t fit, like between houses or through a park. Most US states and jurisdictions don’t have laws similar to other countries that allow the public to walk through open spaces. If they do they tend to be near beaches. So crossing on the lawns and open areas between peoples houses may be considered trespassing if that land is privately owned. So you’re limited to the sidewalks or any public areas where you’re “allowed” to walk on.
If you haven’t been to America and seen our cities and towns, you should before weighing in very heavily on this. Everything here is built for cars, even if a walk is shorter as the crow flies it is extremely unlikely you can actually safely cross that distance un impeded on foot.
Reddit fundamentally depends on the content provided to it for free by users, and the unpaid labor provided to it by moderators. It has additionally neglected accessibility for years, which it was only able to get away with thanks to the hard work of third party developers who made the platform accessible when Reddit itself was too preoccupied with its [vanity NFT](https://www.theverge.com/23323098/reddit-steve-huffman-interview-blockchain-avatars) project. With that in mind, the recent hostile and libelous behavior towards [developers](https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about/) and the sheer incompetence and lack of awareness displayed in talks with [moderators of r/Blind](https://reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/14ds81l/rblinds_meetings_with_reddit_and_the_current/) by Reddit leadership are absolutely inexcusable and have made it impossible to continue supporting the site. – June 30, 2023.
Im not even rural and my choices are walking on roads with no shoulder and 50-70 mph traffic (around 100 kph) or umowed, unmaintained grass and weeds that can get up to 3 feet tall with ticks and potential lyme disease. Im not even joking its a no brainer, I'll take my chances with the cars
There was a park and ride bus stop 6 miles away from my house growing up. All along roads that had no sidewalks and 45 mph speed limits. So functionally no transit lmao.
Where I live the bus stop is on the end of town, outside of city limits but still connected enough. In town the speed limit is 20 but out there it's 35. Luckily the bike path through my town lets you get off right at the bus stop, only problem is what to do with your bike.
Do people actually hitch rides on freight trains or is that a thing that only happens in films?
It's a thing, but a small thing. I've only met a few people who've done it. Insanely dangerous and the railways here have their own private "police" who will beat the *shit* out of you if they find you on a train and chock it up to you having accidentally fallen off a train where you were trespassing in the first place. These are the same railroads that do everything in their power to prevent passenger service.
They sure sound like a jolly bunch of assholes.
They sound like cops.
People do it, but it's dangerous
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With no bike or pedestrian infrastructure. We are dodging cars for that six mile trek. The nearest bus stop to me is 2.5 miles which would be an easy bike ride except it is blind curves with no shoulder.
Pretty much. Pedestrian infrastructure just slapped wherever to fulfill the checkbox. Near me there is a pedestrian crossing on a highway onramp. So, cars are speeding UP headed towards the crossing. I've seen a crossing island in the middle of a FIVE-way intersection with at least 2-3 lanes each direction, crossing at an intersection with 8 lanes of traffic and drivers who don't stop before turning right on red. Sidewalks too close to roads where drivers are going 40-60mph. It's simply unsafe in some areas of America and real effort needs to be put into pedestrian infrastructure.
This is my issue. My city has public transit, but to get to it I need to walk down a road with no shoulder (just a guardrail and a dropoff on one side, and brush/woods on the other), and go around a curve that drivers can’t see around before they’d hit you. We have a park a mile from our house, and we walked to it once and thought we were going to die.
America is so fucked up when it come to public transit... I walk 3 minutes to my bus station and then I get off after 2.5 miles. if I needed to walk 2.5 miles to my station I would have already arrived at my destination
Also random cul de sacs plopped down between point a and and point b
Growing up, the nearest public transit was nearly 20 miles away. The grocery store was 5 miles away - unless I walked down a two lane highway. Then it was 3 miles away.
In my hometown the nearest train station was 11.5 miles away, the nearest grocery was 3 miles away in a different town, and the only other public transit is a bike trail that was no where near me and a shuttle for seniors that services the retirement community and a couple spots downtown Also it doesn't help that there were like no sidewalks in like a 2-3 mile radius minus some housing complex, which was nice when I wanted to walk two miles to go to the crappy park near me Some people do not realize how lucky they have it
growing up there was a bus stop right outside the house. only problem was 30 minute frequencies and the fact that because the system was underfunded, sometimes the bus route just kinda got canceled lol
30 minutes isn’t too bad if it’s a reliable 30 minutes. But when I plan for a bus and they just skip that one and it’s another half hour, that’s really pretty tough to deal with.
Also, have you seen some of the places we're supposed to walk?
When I worked in southern Louisiana, the only safe place to walk was the Highway shoulder. It was safer getting hit on by truckers than eaten by crocs, trampled by cattle, or shot for “trespassing” on the semi-private roads that connected to other areas.
-20 degrees here this week, with -40 windchill. Even a fifteen-minute walk can be hazardous in those conditions.
I am *Intimately* familiar with them, brother. *Intimately*. :'(
Just get a $30 Uber to the nearest bus stop. $30? I might as well just drive I guess.
Well, that's it, isn't it?
We have a public transit stop by our house, and it takes my wife $3 and an hour and a half to get to work a mile and a half away (crossing a stroad with dubious sidewalks.) It costs her $10 to take a 10 minute long Lyft. It's unreasonable to expect her to put her life in danger or add almost three hours a day to work. She tried and tried, and just couldn't make it work.
Not her fault. Blame it on decades of ass-backwards car-centric urban planning.
And there's no sidewalk, street lights, or ped signals at intersection.
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To get to my work it's a 45 minute walk to the train station then a 1 hour train/bus ride. Driving takes me half an hour. I wish my city had better public transit and based off our city's subreddit other people agree. Conveniently though the university I'll be attending is right across from my work so I plan on riding a bike around campus.
I can't imagine taking the car to uni. I lived a 5 min walk from my campus and so did most of my friends.
yup, 6.4 miles for me. And then it doesn't really go anywhere that I ever need to go, it basically only exists to just get people in the city into the suburbs because the entire city is a food desert
The nearest store (period) to me is 30+ min away and the only public transportation to it comes four times a day.
Yeah this is just ignorant. A vast majority of the US is literally unwalkable because of distances
Not just distances, but **lack of pedestrian infrastructure**. When you not only have to walk 2, 5, 10, 20 miles to reach public transit ... but some or all of that walk is *actively hazardous to your health and life* because of the lack of safe places **to** walk ... yeah: "unwalkable" is definitely the right term.
Yes outside of major cities the closest bus stops could be a long walk which is even worse when streets don’t even have sidewalks and high speed traffic making you walk on the dirt. If it’s raining then you better just call an Uber instead. Texas is the worst at this, they deigned their cities for only car people. The public transit is just there for poor people.
>outside of major cities Depending on your definition of "major" city, **sometimes even** ***within*** **them**. :(
Plus no sidewalks and if you miss the bus next one us an hour away
I'd have to walk 3+ miles on a 55mph road with no shoulder or sidewalk, just to wait 3-6 hours for a bus that would take me to *very* select locations. And then getting home would be the whole trauma in reverse. I once interviewed the head of my county's public transportation system and he had an exceptional plan in place that it ready to launch. It would revolutionize our area's economy. He just needs $10 million that he will never, ever receive because local government considers it a low priority.
And there is no sidewalk or pedestrian infrastructure. If I want to walk from my house to the grocery story, I have to cross 2 4-lane highways with no cross walks, the nearest traffic light is 1.5 miles away, and again, there are no sidewalks. I'm walking on the shoulder of a highway, hoping I don't get hit.
26 miles to the nearest bus, 30 to work checking in. I'm willing to walk 2-3 miles on both ends if a bus comes that close and can get me there any time between 6am and 9am and back 8 hours later.
A bike can be a solution if it isn't like 6 miles away
> To be fair? > > > > Sometimes "doesn't stop at my house" means, in America, "the nearest public transit is a six-mile walk away from where I live / work / go to school / whatever". the subway was 4 miles from my house growing up.
There are a lot of replies from rural/small town folks, but a lot of cities aren't much better. I live in a suburb in a metro area with a 2 million+ population. For a while I took a bus to work. It was a 90 minute commute, and I had to switch busses in the middle (so if my bus was late or the other one was early, it turned into a 2 hour commute). It's a 15 minute drive.
I had a coworker get written up because he was often a few minutes late due to taking the bus. He was a good worker, so we didn't mind covering for him at all, but management wanted him to take the earlier bus, which would mean getting there two hours early just so he wasn't 5-15 minutes late sometimes when the bus was running behind. And then he quit after the second time in a week they kept him late so he missed the last bus home.
I’m in the 4th largest city in the US and transit here is abysmal. There’s a very small radius you can take it but beyond that there’s either 0 transport or it’s just impractical. Some routes that would be a 20 minute drive are an hour and half on bus and require multiple transfers. Also this meme doesn’t take into account that while you may have a bus stop you *technically* can walk to doesn’t mean you *actually* can. Lots of Houston is cut up by freeways and interstates sometimes you can’t even get to places 3 or 4 miles away without hitting a 70mph freeway.
That's an excellent point. Not only is the public transport bad, they're not walkable. I love in the north, and my neighborhood doesn't have sidewalks. That means that if you want to take the bus in the winter, you're walking in the icy, slushy street along with the cars (and the drivers who never seem to remember how to drive in winter).
To get from my house to the city center is a 25 minute drive. To make the same trip on public transit is a 25 minute walk followed by a 35 minute bus ride. To go from the airport to city center is 15 minutes by Uber, or by public transit is a 25 minute bus ride, but the bus comes every 30 minutes, so if you just miss a bus it's nearly an hour before you get to your destination. Buses also have no bus only lanes so any traffic catches the buses as well. My city has a light rail and if you live close to it, I've heard it's a good option. As fast as a car, no dealing with parking and 15 minute intervals (not great, but twice as good as the buses), but only the east side of the city has light rail and there's no connections between spokes out of the city center, so literally the only trip it's worth taking is to head into the city center. They've announced plans to expand the rail system near my house and plan to have it running by 2030... So it'll actually be available in 2035 unless the project gets cancelled first.
In rural areas like mine, there are no sidewalks and you have to walk in ditches around winding roads of about 45 MPH.
It's not just rural areas. My mom lives in the suburbs of Pittsburgh (20 minute drive from the city) and the closest bus stop to her is an hour+ walk (which you can't even walk to because part of it is 55 mph with no sidewalk.) Edit to add: and let's say she gets to that bus... it only goes into the city. If she wants to get anywhere in a suburb other than hers, she'll have to get at least one connecting bus and it becomes a 2 hour+ bus trip on top of the walk. A fun way to realize how frustrating this is... Is to use Google directions and select by bus.
And Pittsburgh has good public transit for a medium sized American city.
You really do not understand the issue then. Some areas of my town are a 1-hour walk away from a bus stop. The bus only goes to a few other small towns, it visits five times per day, and our town is an "on request" town only. So we'd have to plan ahead at least 24hrs, call the bus company for a pickup, walk at least 30 minutes to wait for the bus, and get driven 6 miles on an empty bus. Driving the same trip takes 15 minutes and can be done whenever. It's not the complete fault of the individual.
This subreddit puts way too much emphasis on personal choices. That’s not what it’s about, dog.
Sounds insane. Nobody should be living in such remote areas aside from like 0.1% of the population, like farmers surrounded by their land, foresters, scientists at research outposts. When it's 0.1% in remote areas, then fuck it! use all the cars you need, an airplane or helicopter even. I won't care! It's once a month anyway.
Sometimes it's just that's where the housing developer found land to build on, and then that's where people move to because housing is so scarce.
That's true. It's not the individual's fault. The planners shouldnt design city infrastructure like that. It's not sustainable.
the city should zone more land for density and mixed use then. planners can only do what theyre legally allowed to, and the city sets those laws
Sorry i didnt mean "people whose occupation is city planner" but more like "the people who plan the city." Which includes politicians.
But they don't *want* to. If they allowed proper density, then poor black people who can't afford cars would be able to live there.
Friend of mine lives in a brand-new neighborhood development out in the middle of nowhere. About 20 minute drive from the nearest grocery store or an hour walk on a sidewalk too close to a road with a speed limit of 45mph.
It's not remote. It's just built for personal vehicles. The infrastructure is not built around the idea of efficient travel, at all.
There’s no bus stop within an hour walk of where I live on my city (San Diego). Not exactly a rural place, just absolutely no public transit.
Don’t think you understand how short of a distance you cover in an hour walk is in car-centric areas
Oh I'm sorry, let me go back 100 years and tell my great grandparents not to settle in bumfuck Ohio. Not my fault I was born in a place literally 30 miles from a city with public transit. I have no desire to uproot my life and move away from my job, friends, and family to move to a more expensive city just so I don't have to use a vehicle, so I'm still here for now.
For a lot of Americans, no. Not safely or in a reasonable amount of time. That’s kind of the point of this sub, isn’t it? It’s not about people choosing cars, it’s about people being forced to use cars because the alternatives are not workable. Not exclusive to the US, but it’s kind of an exemplar.
Yeah, as a Canadian I’m not walking to a bus stop and waiting in -40 c.
I think a lot of Europeans don't get this as well. I live in the upper Midwest and it's -27C right now with -41c wind chill and the sidewalks are all frozen over. My work is only a mile away and I bike for a lot of the year, but its simply not happening right now.
They don’t get a lot about the basic geography of parts of the US. Even in more temperate part of the country like where I live, there are an absolute metric shit ton of steep forested hills that would make development of reasonably usable footpaths for folks who aren’t going on a hike difficult. Not impossible, it would still do some good in areas, but it’s not as simple as “just put a path here.” Even ideally though, the city I live in has a metro area whose physical size is larger than most European capitals, sometimes by 3-4x. So many Europeans fundamentally cannot grasp that many of our states are larger than some of their countries, and that making even a lot of the major cities here truly walkable for the majority of the population(and not just the rich folks who can afford to live in the nice part of town or near infrastructure) would be a massive project that likely *is* impossible. And that’s before we start talking about the insane physical scale of rural America.
I live within a 10 minute walk to 6 bus lines and the most frequent route has like 4 minute headways 🙏 bless my neighborhood. It’s not a matter of laziness but ACCESSIBILITY and FREQUENCY
Yeah I'm <10 minutes to a bus exchange and the SeaBus terminal. The absolute nearest bus stop is at the end of the block, but not very many services stop there. I'm glad I'm in one of the few NA cities that actually prioritises transit. Edit: Grocery store, pharmacy, etc are all ~5 minutes away. There is a 7/11 closer which I never go to, etc.
Sometimes the nearest stop is 5km (3 miles) away and the bus comes a couple times a day at best. This is how most of the rural towns in my state work. There's a bus in and out of almost every town, but it's only there for getting in and out, not regularly scheduled trips.
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For a test I used Google Maps, put in my parent's home, and asked to go to the stadium. Google told me I couldn't take mass transit at all. I thought maybe I should pick something closer to them and chose a business 3 miles away. No dice, there were no routes available at all. The closest bus stop to my parents is 7 miles away. To take the bus to that business you would have to walk past it, go another 4 miles, and fuck off completely because the bus won't stop there anyway. And this isn't just some random business I pulled from a hat. It's fucking NASA. You cannot go to Johnson Space Center by mass transit.
I would suggest using a bicycle to travel the 3miles but I know how dangerous this can be in the us. Even here in Germany while you can get to every major city by public transit some cities are only connected when you drive to another big city in the opposite direction. By riding 5mins of train and 15mins of bicycle I save 40mins on my way to University every day...
Every time I see posts like this I think of the TikTok that went viral over the summer of an American’s European friends visiting and insisting they walk places and they ending up walking on the freeway lol.
Public transport doesn’t stop anywhere near the village that is close to my house 😭
I live in a place where I can walk or bike anywhere I need to be. It's very convenient. I pay $3000 in rent a month.
My god this sub has gone to shit. It used to be about an interest in dismantling car infrastructure. Now it’s just this victim blaming shit again and again.
Remember, societal problems don't exist and everything is the individual's fault. I'm not saying you can never solve your own problems but in some situations you realistically can't do much by yourself. This is giving "just move LOL" vibes
In literally every other country including mine that is very possible In America, is both too much (We are talking about 1 hour or more walking), dangerous (Bad pedestrian and cycling infrastructure), etc. When my dad was in America he was impressed by the fact his company (Who brought him from here to there for a few months) told him straight away to not walk to the office but to take the company car because it was dangerous to go walking... they were literally on the other side of the street to the office, but nearest pedestrian cross was over 10 miles away, this was the 90's and as far as I know, it has NOT improved
Don't let Canada off the hook, we're just as bad
steep physical ossified grab money waiting practice rustic shame distinct *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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If you try to take any transit near my house, Google just tells you to get a Lyft. It's 30 minutes away by car, and only goes to the community college campus. This is part of the point of the sub: to get transit stops in more places so they're actually accessible to people.
It is currently -30 degrees Fahrenheit where I live, the nearest grocery store from my house is 45 minutes away. Walking is not always an option, no.
"But cars bad, get hypothermia to make a point." Sick of people on this sub not understanding the nuance of anybody else's living situations.
People in this sub are sick of poor city planning and are advocating for a better life for our grandkids who will grow up in walkable neighborhoods in 30 yeard
100% Anyone who blames individuals for not being able to walk doesn’t understand that it’s never the fault of the individual; it’s a failure of policy. I *want* to take the bus places. I *want* to be able to walk to take the train to work. Except that the nearest train station is 1.35 miles away and in the summer I literally can’t without risking heat stroke, and in the winter they run the trains less often. Not to mention that it’s a 1.5 hr bus/train ride for what is literally a 15 minute drive.
Some are, sure. But then there's OP and the 3k people who upvoted them who literally think the problem is "Americans don't walk."
Some people yeah. but there are plenty, even in these comments that are just acting like people should be okay walking 3 hours to a bus stop for a commute, or they should move to a higher cost of living area so they can be closer to public transit.
For those wondering: -34.4... C That is a bit chilly. If infrastructure was adequately maintained you could still keep warm-enough while biking (with adequate clothing), but I suspect it isn't maintained.
You’re right. I went to University in Fairbanks, Alaska. There’s a diehard population up there of bike and ski commuters year-round with winter temps routinely at -40 (C/F). They are, quite frankly, mad and impressive. Impressively mad.
Tell me you’ve never been to the United States without telling me.
(Hear me out before anyone downvotes) This post is just more evidence that /r/fuckcars isn’t going down the right path. I loved this sub, but after /r/place I feel like the kind of posts that are upvoted changed. I thought this sub was going to potentially offer high level content on how we can take actions in our communities to reverse our car-centric society. Instead, it’s just low quality memes made by folks with very little knowledge of transportation planning issues. The issue with transit in America has largely to do with land use and density. We don’t build dense enough and we don’t mix uses enough, which makes transit less effective. Less people are within walking distance to transit than in transit rich countries. It’s not a matter of people not wanting to walk, but our inability to build densely around transit resources.
I imagine the more aggressive posters here as either Europeans who can’t fathom what public transport is like in the US, or as the cyclist character Fred Armisen played on Portlandia. In all seriousness, though. I live in Germany and our friends visited the US before COVID, and were shocked by how bad public transport was outside of NYC. Many really just don’t know. They hear it’s bad and assume that means dangerous or dirty, I guess, and not “unreliable” “poorly connected” or “non-existent”.
Unfortunately a lot of Europeans think dunking on Americans is a personality trait.
I thought this was a shit post at first, it's so fucking stupid. "Can Americans not walk!?!" The US is fucking huge, I love it when Europeans who have no concept of how large the country is make memes about car usage. "JuSt WALk"
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The nearest bus stop to me is actually only like 100 yards away! There's just a few problems. 1. The bus only comes once per hour, and is never on time. It might be 10 minutes early, it might be 15 minutes late. It is constantly stuck in traffic so you never know. 2. The stop is just a sign on the side of a busy road. It offers no protection from the weather for the up to 20 minutes you might be stuck standing there 3. The stop is only a few feet from said road with no shelter. If it is raining, every single passing car will splash water from the gutter onto you. 4. The stop is NOT ON THE SAME SIDE OF THE ROAD AS I LIVE ON. This road is 4 lanes and constantly buried in low-speed-but-not-stopped traffic during the daytime, and there are no crosswalks for over 5 miles in either direction. 5. The bus only runs during the day, when the aforementioned traffic is constant and there's no safe way to cross 6. The bus doesn't *go anywhere*. It takes you to the mall. There are other busses from the mall to other places, but those require even more waiting because they ALL only come once an hour. If I wanted to go to the train station (a 5 minute drive away) I'd need to get on a bus, go several miles in the opposite direction, get off at the mall, get on another bus going back the way I came, get off again at the community college, get on ANOTHER bus to go the last 3 miles, and finally hope I made it in time to catch the train down to the city (only place it goes) that only comes, again, once an hour. I love public transit. The train is far and away my favorite way to get down to the city, and once I'm there I can take busses or trains wherever I want. Trying to get anywhere on public transit in these suburbs, though? it takes two hours to get to the train station I could drive to in less than ten minutes.
>and there are no crosswalks for over 5 miles in either direction Even being from American suburbia, I'm flabbergasted they were allowed to build a bus stop with no nearby crosswalk. A bus stop is the entire reason many crosswalks exist at all, because it's egregiously irresponsible to not have one! Same reason school buses have stop signs that deploy.
People who post trash like this are either trolls looking to start an argument or are genuinely ignorant to the situation in the United States regarding Public transport.
This post is 100% bait
It genuinely could be ignorance - reading this thread has really opened my eyes to some of the problems in the US. Where I live there are ~5 bus stops within 10 minutes walk of my house (the nearest about 3 minutes hoof) with most running every 15 minutes during peak times and hourly outside of that, although one route through the middle of the area goes half hourly. The buses pretty much always run to schedule. There's an app for my city's transport that has live updates and shows delays, prices, schedules etc. I get two buses to and from work, which takes about a forty five minutes, roughly double the drive. I can walk to my local "shopping village", which consists of two grocery stores, and a bunch of smaller stores. It takes me about 15-20 minutes to walk there, and most of that journey is along quiet streets and through parks. When I do need to cross a stroad, there are regular pedestrian crossings and footpaths alongside them. Without the comments on a post like this I would have no idea how bad you guys have it. **ETA** I'm in Australia
it’s not safe
It was deliberately designed to be unsafe. There's no excuse for that.
There's a large number who medically can't
And if the ones who can walk did so - and infrastructure was designed to support that - then there would be plenty of room for the remaining cars for people who can’t walk.
i love being swept under the rug by people who dont care about my quality of life <3 (aka op)
I'm in a very public transit-friendly US city and there are like 3 streets in my neighborhood with a sidewalk. There are far fewer sidewalks than you think, and most car accidents are within 2 miles of your home. While correlation is not causation, I truly believe that walking on streets without sidewalks in that radius gets more dangerous.
To get to my job five miles away from me, I usually drive. It takes about ten minutes. To take the bus, I’d have to walk two miles to the closest bus station. Then, the closest but stop to my job is around 1 mile away in a neighborhood without sidewalks. I also live in a region that gets extremely cold and snowy winters. The entire trip would take, minimum, 45 minutes. I also have a physically demanding job where I’m walking for most of the day. So, yeah, maybe I don’t want to walk six extra miles a day and be commuting for 1.5-2 hours each day instead of 20 minutes. I don’t think you really understand the problem.
Oh, look. A meme putting the onus of solving structural issues on the individual.
As with all memes, it’s reductive to the point of not effectively making its point. If we had good infrastructure such that most Americans had safe sidewalks and a 5-10 minute walk to a bus that reliably came in 10 minute intervals? Sure this meme makes sense. Instead, Americans have bus stops that are often not even attached to a sidewalk along a 4 lane highway with no crosswalks and the nearest one is 30+ minutes from their house and comes *maybe* once an hour. The meme sucks because no one should have to walk that long and that unsafely for something unreliable.
Oh yeah, please, tell me how easy it is for all people to take a six-mile long trek in the middle of the sidewalkless- road across three six-lane highways in freezing cold, horrifically hot, or dangerously wet weather in places, such as the Pacific Northwest, which as of last summer had some of the worst air quality in the world, to get to a bus stop to take a 30 minute ride into work every. single. day. is a good or easy solution for the every day American. Europeans truly do not understand how insane it is to live in America, which unlike much of Europe, was built around the idea of everyone owning a car and if you don’t you might as well just die. Also, love how blatantly this leaves out disabled people, old people, and people with other health conditions (like asthma) lol.
Especially when in the few places in my town where there is a bike lane or sidewalks, they are CONSTANTLY blocked by cars.
People have brought up why this can be unsafe because of lack of city planning around walkable routes and those who physically cannot walk, but lets not forget those who are at risk of violence just by being in public. I think of people like Ahmaud Arbery when I see posts like this, or women who feel like they cant walk without being harassed, often by men in cars, or those who get clocked as trans in conservative areas, or disabled people that can walk but still get accused of being up to no good and get cops called on them because they are assumed to be on drugs or unstable and dangerous. The danger doesn't magically go away with public transport sure, but having witnesses and being able to get between safe spaces quickly can mean a lot.
OP sounds like someone whose never lived in America. Ain't shit within walking distance.
A quick google shows me that the nearest bus stop is 1.9 miles from my house. So a 40 minutes walk when work/downtown is 3.4 miles from my house. It's 8 minutes by car or 35 minutes by bike.
A lot of people are making really valid arguments about rural areas and distance I live in a city and there are bus stations 15 minutes from my house. I still have to drive sometimes because there are a lot of drug addict encampments between the station and my house and it's just not safe to walk at night as a woman. A few people have been shot in my neighborhood this month
There's a bus stop 5 minutes away from my house. I don't take it because the transit system in my area is super underfunded & inconvenient. It can get me to the nearest supermarket and back pretty easily since that's just a straight shot up my local stroad, about a half-hour walk or so, but if I need to get anywhere else besides right on that line, it gets a bit more complicated. Transfers don't always line up, which leads to long waits at the stop for the next bus to come along, which is less than ideal in the weather that's typical for this time of year. Depending on where I'm going, it may be a few transfers as well. All of that waiting adds up. Since I live in a suburb, the bus schedule isn't consistent throughout the day. It runs about every half hour or so up until about 8 in the morning, then give or take every hour through the rest of the day, sometimes up to an hour and a half between buses. The bus only runs between 6 AM and 9 PM, which is fine for everyone that takes it, but does make second-shift workers like myself less inclined to use it. I've been working from home since the pandemic started, but if I was working in the office, it would take me 4 times as long to get to work by bus than driving does, same with coming back home. On top of that, if I miss my bus on the way back home, there would be no other way to get back besides an Uber.
Urban design problems can't be fixed by individuals walking three hours on sidewalk-free roads to get to the store. This is a very shallow view of the issue
I live in one of the biggest cities in the US but the nearest bus stop to me is a 30 minute walk away. The bus I would need comes every 45 minutes. It drops off only about 5 minute walk from my work but it takes 2 transfers and about 2 hours at best one way. God forbid any delays and I miss my connections. I’d have to arrive at work almost 2.5 hours early or else the next set of connections would be cutting it too close. Coming home during rush hour would put my commute at a 5-6 hours round trip. One of my would-be transfers is at what used to be a park and ride type hub for lots of bus routes. It’s been repurposed as a construction lot while a major highway construction project is underway (will probably take another 5 years to complete). Instead of getting a protected lot with easy access for the buses, that transfer is now on the side of an access road for a major interstate and interchange. It’s horrendous.
I mean aside from me being disabled, there's literally no bus that comes through my town, i think it's 12 miles away I can walk about .27 miles tops without a break, so ... yeah idk
Many Americans will instinctively reach for their car keys any time they need to leave the house, even if they're just going a few blocks. It's pure car culture. That said, many places in America make walking a few blocks a miserable experience. Our streets are wide, sidewalks are ill-maintained, cars are fast and loud.
So its a "pure" car culture problem, but also an infrastructure problem?
My entire town has no public transit and you're lucky if you even get any sidewalks. Our infrastructure hates people without cars. There's a decent walking track down the road from my grandma's house but she drives there to go walking sometimes, in part because there is no other safe way to get there. (Tho she's admittedly also kinda carbrained). My bf used to bike way more often but he got hit multiple times. I'm lucky enough to have a sidewalk leading up to the nearest park, but trying to get anywhere actually important is a nightmare.
This is an insanely privileged post lol
I mean I could, but it's dangerous.
For most Americans, the nearest bus stop can be multiple miles away, but it's insane the number of people I've seen here in NYC that would rather Uber than walk like 5 blocks. Walking anywhere is such a foreign concept to American, that they won't do it even if it's convenient.
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Well I am handicapped and the nearest public transportation stop is 3 miles away. Most of the route has no sidewalks and my app map has me cross two 4 lane roads that don’t have stoplights or stop signs too.
Nearest bus stop is 7 miles away. On top of the distance, I would be walking in a ditch as the only other option is on the road where, while the posted speed limit is 45 mph, most people drive at 55-60 mph, and that’s just the first half. Second half of the walk is along the busiest road in my city, past an airport, then along 5 lanes of busy traffic just to get to a bus stop on a line that frankly doesn’t go anywhere useful. Saying “just walk, idiot” shows a major lack of knowledge on the issue.
We can, but I rather not walk 15 kilometers to my house from the nearest bus stop...with no sidewalk or street lights on a rural road where the speed limit is ~113 km/h edit: I love how the European Redditors have no response to this.
Plenty of people have already had their criticism so I won't repeat those too much (but just to add, I looked it up since I was curious, I live in the center of a town with a few hundred thousand people and the closest bus stop is a 40 minute walk away) But along with "doesn't stop at my house" usually means it's much farther than just down the block, some people also *can't* walk I *could* hobble that 30-40min with my cane, but I would probably be in too much pain to make the walk back. Anything more than 10-15min isn't really an option for me. Some people's legs aren't an option. I genuinely support the movement and think better public transportation options would do more for physically disabled people than the current car centric infrastructure is doing (not that I can speak for everyone), but stuff like this is where the accusations of ableism come from
Why is blaming citizens instead of our awful infrastructure being upvoted on this subreddit?
Sure, I'll just walk the 75 miles to the nearest transit stop. That's a real practical solution you've found.
I grew up with no sidewalks and a 55 mph speed limit on my road. I'm all for public transport and stuff, but accept that using public transport isn't a quick simple solution for everyone. Don't blame people for not using public transport that is inadequate or nonexistent.
Absolute shit take ngl. I can’t even walk to the grocery store without crossing a major highway. Ever heard of redlining? Look it up. American cities have been designed to keep upper and lower class people and businesses separated with major highways. It was a way to keep minorities in “their area” so the rich white ppl can drive their Escalades and don’t have to see someone’s shitty Honda.
It would take me six hours to walk to my college according to Google Maps. It takes about an hour to even walk into to town. No, walking legitimately isn’t a viable form of transportation in some parts of the United States