You do realize that by driving, you're making the problem worse? The real solution is to just get more cars off the road. There are few excuses to be driving alone in a city.
Clearly, stephengillie gave the bus a more-than-honest try. Having done so and finding that it simply didn't work for his needs, he doesn't deserve your criticism.
In my area, public transit is something that people who don't use it themselves love to criticize others for not using, either.
It's little used specifically because it is badly planned and operated with an eye toward political positioning, not serving would-be passengers.
No one is handing out boy scout patches for trying. I'd prefer we charge singular car commuters the actual price of their destructive habit but for now I will happily settle with shaming their antisocial behavior.
Guess what, the moment this nonsense becomes indefensible or plain too expensive is when that train or bus suddenly starts working and running on time.
You really have an axe to grind. You would obviously rather I bus to work than walk, which is absolute nonsense.
Please, regail us with tales of your bus ridership.
Do you enjoy being squished between people, unable to move? Do you like to "accidentally touch" people on the bus? Or do you get on the bus early and "silently judge" the people who have to stand? Do you pretend to read or work during the ride? (The bus bounces around too much to do any actual work, and that's if you can get a seat.) Or are you one of those annoying people that won't stop talking about Tuscany?
Have you been on a bus when it's had to pull over on the freeway, and turn itself off and on again, to "reboot the bus"? Ever wonder what state the bus has entered that it needs a reboot? What is the driver seeing, or not seeing? How many screens went blank and controls stopped working at highway speeds?
I wish this weren't the case, but I don't take the bus because it triples my commute. A trip that takes 25 minutes by car takes an hour and fifteen by bus for me. I test it every time I need to have my truck repaired.
It's because it's a reverse commute, and so while everyone is trying to get into the city I'm trying to get out. The bus would be pretty good if I lived south of Northgate and worked in the city.
Buses require a circuit to operate, unlike cars which can operate in single-vector mode. Thus, they can be impacted by seemly-non-systematic events such as distant traffic in the other direction.
It's got nothing to do with traffic delays. There are plenty of buses at each leg in my route. My specific problem is that I have to ride for 20 minutes in the opposite direction to get to a transit station where I then transfer to an express bus out to UW Bothell. But the bus from UW to my office isn't synchronized with the express bus so I either wait 15 minutes or walk a mile and a half across I-405.
On the other hand it's very efficient for getting in to the city, as I can hop on a single bus and be in Green Lake or the U district in about 15 minutes, and it's another 10 to cross the canal.
That is a fruitless battle. You are asking people to behave superrationally to escape a collective action problem. That's not how people work. People behave according to their individual self-interest. If it's faster or overall better (comfort, privacy, safety) for them to drive, they will drive.
Make transit better than driving and the problem will solve itself. People are rational.
When I worked downtown in SF, the options were clear. Take transit or deal with ridiculous traffic and costs of close to $600 a month.
Now that work south of SF, I can either take the company shuttle, which takes 40 min and if I miss it, I have to wait another hour. Or, drive my car which takes 20 min and I can arrive/leave whenever I please. Easy decision.
You can't fault people for making a rational choice.
"I can either take the company shuttle, which takes 40 min and if I miss it, I have to wait another hour. Or, drive my car which takes 20 min and I can arrive/leave whenever I please."
For people who can make full use of their time on the shuttle, driving is a 20-minute loss of productivity each way.
The value-math works differently for different people.
> For people who can make full use of their time on the shuttle, driving is a 20-minute loss of productivity each way.
If it's anything like the commuter buses, you can try to open your laptop on your lap with no elbow room, but the bus bounces too much to focus on what you're coding/reading. What you wind up doing is "work theater" where you appear to be working but aren't productive.
And that's if you can get a seat on the bus. For bus companies to make money, they have to pack in commuters like a mosh pit. And you're trapped there; a literal prisoner of the bus. Will the shuttle pull over if you need to step out for a moment?
The commuter routes subsidize all of the mostly-empty city buses that less-able people ride. (These are people who won't/can't walk/drive 6 blocks to the store.)
Most people who do this (taking the car) realize that (if we all take the bus, it would be a pretty smooth ride) - but first of all not all people CAN take the bus (mostly those coming from further away) and second, I can't fault them. If your commute is like 30mins by bus and 15mins by car... easy choice for ~22 days per month
A 30 minute bus commute sounds very optimistic. BART is the only system that has ever made me confident I won't waste 30 minutes before even being picked up.
I took the bus for about 2 years, mostly commuting from First Hill to Factoria. It's about an hour each way, if you don't miss the bus. If you do, it's more like 1.5 hours each way. MLT was an hour there and 2 hours back on the bus, plus a 30-minute hike before and after each way. Bellevue was an hour each way but I went to the gym between commute and work.
After driving for 6 months, I moved across the street from my workplace (literally). Since then, I've moved onto another job in Redmond, which is just 15 minutes down 520. And the traffic on that part of 520 is so good that half of the drivers go 70 until they reach Microsoft.
