Genuine Question. Even if I look at hungarian Transport, and they to this day use trains from the UdSSR, they come more consistantly then the DB.
They are really Bad sometimes, with like 20 seperate prices: Theres the bayernwald ticket that only works in the alps, then theres the official ticket to the destination. Theres a special offer, but only in the very special APP. You can use a d-ticket, but look! Some random ass slum in the middle of the worlds ass dosent accept that, but it does the MVV zone Tickets. But then you need the MVV zone 11-M, a ticket to the beginning to the Nürnberg zones, and a ticket for the Nürnberg zones.
And yet this shit is better than americas rails? How?
What public transport?
Only large, northeastern, US cities have anything resembling real public transportation.
It may be bad in Germany but its worse in the USA. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has better transit options than the rest of the country. But its limited just to the city of San Francisco itself and maybe some parts outside the city. I just came back from a short trip to Germany, where my family lives. They live in Kassel, a mid-sized city in the north central part of the country. Even a mid-sized city has an extensive tram network and bus system. And a monthly transit card doesn’t cost as much. Getting to Kassel itself was easy by train, though the train was 1/2 hour late. I am very, very jealous of my family.
Lmao what public transport? We don’t have that here.
Really? Like… How do you move around then? Only cars? But if you dont want / have a car? If youre still doing your drivers license?
Fuck you, that’s how. It’s pretty much only cars. Not having a car isn’t really an option here, unless maybe you live in the heart of a big city.
A big city not in the South. Houston and Dallas are #4 and #9. There’s public transit but it fucking sucks both places.
* Big cities are limited to NYC, Chicago, and Washington DC.
I think Boston’s is pretty extensive as well, but that’s more of a mid-sized city and the infrastructure is certainly older
In many places it’s illegal to walk on the side of the road for motorist safety, and no they don’t see value adding sidewalks. Other places don’t like people that’s not from that area walking in front of their house and will call the police every single time.
It’s not that alien is it? People rely on cars pretty heavily in most smaller towns in Germany.
Not German, but close enough - there’s usually at least one bus within walkable distance, even if it’s only like 4 times a day or something, that connects to a larger hub.
I lived in a place where I had to be by the bus stop at 7h30. If I missed that I’d have to wait for the next at 8h15, and if I missed that one, I’d better call to say I wasn’t able to go that day.
However, in smaller towns and in the countryside, with no cars, life is so different to the frenetic chaos of big cities that it’s hard to put into words.
We aren’t just talking small towns though. Any city that isn’t New York, Chicago, or Boston might as well not have any rail service at all. Houston has 22.7 miles of passenger railway that is only located downtown. Columbus Ohio has a metro of 2.2 million people and doesn’t have a single inch of passenger rail. Cleveland has an OK system by American standards, which i use whenever i go to Cleveland, but the only option for me to take a train into Cleveland from where i live in NW Ohio would take an hour longer than just driving there outright.
Dont know, I live in a pretty walkable City where I can bike in 5 Minuten from one end to the other, with a tech store, School, Beach, Bank, etc. Everything you would need. I have a train coming hourly if I want to go to the Beach or munich, but its admittadly way worse (20-30 mins) to bike to the next bigger City.
Last time I visited the Netherlands I thought I was in walkability heaven
Edit: shit, sorry. Forgot you said Germany… But my comment still stands, although I bet Germany is at least as nice as well.
Most cities have a bus service, but they only rarely connect to smaller towns (“smaller” being relative here, like 30,000 people).
To put it in perspective, I live in a suburban apartment outside of a medium-sized city in Ohio. There is a single busline that goes through my neighborhood (which thankfully has a stop right outside my complex). A bus comes by once an hour between 7 AM and 7 PM.
This can get you to work if you’re lucky enough to work a 9-5 next to a bus stop. My work has a bus stop, but I work a 4-12, so no luck.
My favorite bar is in the next town over, a college town about 15 minutes down the road. If I wanted to get there by public transit, I would need to wait for the hourly bus outside of my apartment, get off at a grocery store, wait about a half an hour for a connecting bus from the college town’s bus service, and that’s not even counting the drive time.
And if I don’t leave the bar by 6 PM, of course, I’m stranded without an Uber or something, because even on weekends (not that I have weekends off work) the busses only run till 7 PM.
And there’s other towns nearby that I literally cannot take public transport to. I had to work an event in a smaller city (but still probably within the top 20 in the state for population) about half an hour drive away. There is no bus service that connects me to them. The only options are driving or Uber.
Its almost like you’re taking the piss
Cars only
Ok yeah DB has been woefully underfunded for decades thanks to auto industry lobbying and so now half the trains are late or cancelled, but the fact that you even can get from any city to any other city by train and then get to anywhere within each city by bus/tram is mind blowing to some of us that didn’t grow up in Europe. There are lots of places where you basically can’t live without a car, it’s insane.
Public transportation doesn’t work in the endless suburbs and stripmalls we’ve built. It’s too spread out, and we’ve been doing it for a few generations now. It’s difficult for my countrypeople to imagine living differently, to imagine that our existence may not be their birthright.
People think nothing of living 20 plus miles from where they work or go to school, can’t imagine a world where such a thing is a ridiculous notion. We could have all these nice things. People want a better world, a more functional city.
But ask people to change, to live a smaller life, and be prepared for a deluge of excuses and justifications. We all wake up and collectively decide the world we’re gonna live in today.
I live in the largest city in a Midwestern state. To access amtrak (the only passenger rail in the us)I need to drive 3 hours to the nearest station.
The city is shaped like a lopsided clock. I live in the burbs around 1 o’clock. I work for a fortune 50 company headquartered at 10 o’clock. To take the bus to my job I need to take the bus downtown and wait for an out bound. This would take 90 minutes when I could drive in 25.
America has not made public transit a serious option unless you are in Chicago, NYC or DC.
“American public transport”
Good joke! Best joke I heard since “American democracy”!
Non-existent/Absolutely abysmal
Where I live, there are literally zero public transit options. There are a few bus stops closer to the downtown area, but honestly I have never actually seen the buses that supposedly go there. Usually there are just homeless people hanging out at the bus stops. We do have a small Amtrak station, which is nice, I guess, but it’s way more expensive than driving and takes 4-10 times as long to get anywhere. Then when you get somewhere, you have to figure out how to rent a car. And this is the largest city in my state; most places don’t even have well-paved roads, much less public transit.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is surprisingly historically accurate if you ignore all the cartoons
Smh, we’re still doing toon erasure in 2025?
If the 'toons represent the working class, then ignoring them is very appropos of what the politicians do.
American public transit doesn’t exist outside of a couple major cities.
So yeah. Probably the absolute worst Europe has to offer is a world altering step up.
Am American: this is correct
Yep. I’ve lived in 9 states so far. The only place I consistently used public transit was when I lived in NYC
To be fair, German public transport (and I admit that I’ve only taken it around Berlin) is about average for Europe. Better than Norway not as good as the Netherlands.
From my limited travel around the states I can say that availability of public transport varies a lot from town to town.
Local transport: San Fransisco has a lot of public transport and its pretty reliable. I spent over a week in Shreveport Louisiana and I only saw a bus once. maybe I wasn’t in the right place at the right time of day but it wasn’t everywhere like in a European city. I haven’t been to New York, but I have a new Yorker friend who says the subway stations are essentially a place for homeless people to masturbate when they get banned from the library. The entire state of Wyoming doesn’t seem to have any public transport.
Intercity transport: The greyhound busses are used almost exclusively by people who are not legally allowed to drive (full of meth heads and schizophrenic nuns) the drivers were obviously whichever mentally ill passenger was closest to the front when the previous driver overdosed. They’ll do things like throw their hands in the air and say don’t worry jesus is protecting us! That’s if there is a bus between cities. There isn’t a bus between salt lake city and park city next door for example. The trains have been reduced steadily to the point where the majority of us cities don’t even have a train station.
So yes Germany has excellent public transport, with the exception of having to validate your ticket before you get on the train (That’s an inefficient waste of time).
My only option is the local city bus. For me to go eight miles straight east to where my work is, I’d have to transfer twice, go a couple miles north of where my destination is, and leave home at least two hours before my shift. By car, it takes less than 15 minutes.
What is public transport? I think we need to establish that first. You mean like…the school bus? That’s the only kind I’ve ever seen.
Kids get public transport, education, and sometimes even food
Old folks get walkable communities
College kids (at great expense) also do
The revealed preference is that we could have an excellent quality of life except for voters hating 18-65 year old adults
