I’m in Albuquerque, NM. They did a test last year of Free Buses. Then made it permanent this year.
I’ve never used the bus, because the city is very much built for driving. But I do like that that the bus is free. Just wish I didn’t have to walk a mile, and up a big hill to get to my closest stop.
Over here we already have plenty of memes based on “What if Breaking Bad happened in Europe? It’d been very underwhelming because we have public healthcare.” But I’m glad Albuquerque can at least say “well we could maybe have mitigated some of the car shenanigans in the series now.”
The joke here is that Canadian Breaking Vad is the same TV show, except he is trying to pay for parking.
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Every hospital has along term parking solution you just need to ask about.
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Take public transit.
The Canadian version would be still getting into cooking meth to afford housing now.
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How do you like living in Albuquerque, if I may ask?
I like it. But I seem to be in the minority. Everybody around me complains about all kinds of stuff. Mostly crime. But they do that in every city.
The weather is pretty mild. I do not miss dealing with feeet of snow every year.
There is plenty to do. Though I did hear someone from LA complain they were bored. But I came from a small town.
rising gas prices
Most of my local public transport is electrically-powered now, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
who buys tickets with cash anymore lol
I did recently when I lost my travel card. Some people also travel using cash habitually for privacy reasons (What if someone has an abusive partner watching bank card transactions and transport card accounts? What if there’s a data breach? I recall a few years ago one train network voluntarily gave aggregated trip data to a student researcher which could pretty easily be deanonymized.)
Maybe it’s different where you live, but cash certainly lives here.
Most public transportation systems are funded by subsidizes. Fares only make 1/10th of most revenue.
That’s why they aren’t private transportation systems 😉
There are few. They usually subcontract all the shit the public systems don’t want to do. They do it for margins and do it with crap pay to the drivers and service.
Most of my local public transport is electrically-powered now
Which is kind of my point. Over the years our public transport has been proudly advertising their use of biodiesels and bio gas, CNG and LNG. And apparently battery-electric buses are coming too. (Sorry, Adam Something. Apparently our city cannot into trams, as fucking awesome as it would be! But apparently the Green Party is proposing TRAINS)
cash certainly lives here
Yeah, and that was kind of a pointed example on my part. I don’t think cash is going away entirely. That said, vast majority of our public transport is already apparently either going on prepaid cards or debit so, eh.
I hate you all! (not really)
I had to travel to the hospital this week for an appointment. It had been snowing for a few days before, so I used public transport instead of taking the motorbike.
It cost me £14.90 in tickets, which is enough to fill my tank and ride about 150 miles, and it took a little over two hours in each direction, rather than about 45 minutes. I travelled for about 45 miles in total.
The first bus, according to Google Maps, stopped 43 times and only took me about half way. The second bus was much better, and only stopped seven times, and the third bus was so late that I walked the last half a mile or so and got told off for having high blood pressure 🙈
The first bus was freezing cold, and both were quite cramped with no tables, so the idea of working on the bus was out of the window before I started.
Coming home, the trains were running, so I caught a bus to the nearest station on my line, thinking it would be a better option.
The bus, like the others, had no indication of which stop we were at, so I spent the whole time checking Google Maps and looking for street signs. Google tried to tell me that the train station was underneath a bridge and in the middle of the train tracks, but was pretty good apart from that. The train was quite crowded, but I managed to get a seat.
Luckily for me, my mother was picking my kid up from school as the train was pulling in, so picked me up from the station rather than me having to catch a bus for the last leg.
All in all, I was travelling for about four hours, and had to drag my disabled arse for a mile or so between stops and stations. I genuinely envy those of you who have decent public transport systems, but I can definitely see why people don’t use them here at least 🙁
Bad public transport is bad. This is done on purpose. It shouldn’t be up to people to deal with bad public transport. It is on us to pressure our governments to improve it. When it’s better people will just use it.
We also need to make people aware of how much money car infrastructure costs. It’s mostly invisible to them, but in reality they pay a ton of money for it. Good public transport would save them money.
Oh, definitely. I don’t know how much is deliberate and how much is incompetence here though.
I’m in Wales, so we’ve had the speed limit change to 20 mph. The point was supposedly to encourage people onto public transport, but the lower speeds have slowed the buses down to the point where services have dropped from every 10 to every 15 minutes. It might not sound like much, but when you’re standing in the rain at one of the many stops without shelters, it makes a difference.
The much promoted electrification of the new South Wales Metro line has caused problems too. The train used to run on the same line to Cardiff and back, but now takes a different route to return. It now loops around Cardiff, taking an extra 30 minutes or so if you’re coming from the stations before Cardiff Central.
I haven’t been on one of the new trains yet, but apparently they’ve removed the toilets, claiming that the trains run every 15 minutes. The problem with that is, they only go to the nearest big town, Pontypridd. If you’re travelling further up the line than that, they’re still every 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the time of day.
It’s a shit show, and doesn’t seem to be getting better.
Sorry, that turned into a bit of a rant…
I wish public transport was more of a thing where I am. I personally really enjoy driving for leisure, but it’d be really nice to have the choice.
I should look up my local bus lines and operating hours. I think there are some around me, it’s just extremely sparse from what I understand
The bus here would be pretty nice, it’s around $2 for a one-way ticket or (I think) $5 for a day pass which includes the LRT.
The problem is, I have to drive to the bus stop or walk about 3 miles down a very dangerous, rural road that doesn’t have space to walk on the side of it most of the time… and the bus arrives “every 30 minutes” which ends up actually being about once an hour.
The LRT portion of it is great though aside from having to drive to the station. It’s much faster than driving and is consistently on time so I do use it whenever I’m trying to go somewhere near one of its stopsDriving to the station can be a good solution for more rural or spread out areas to still have access to transit in denser areas. It helps keep the cars away from the denser areas. It isn’t perfect but its better than funneling cars straight downtown.
Would biking help bridge that gap?
Biking helps but still is very dangerous with little to no biking infrastructure (Just a painted line that varies from generous amounts of space to literally no space at all forcing you in the road) where drivers just love driving 60+mph in a 45 zone lol.
and the inconsistency of the bus being on time makes the risk just not worth it most of the time so I just end up driving everywhere and feeling bad about it haha
Meanwhile here in the Midwest the cities are opting to not even continue service because the bus company wants too much. Last I heard four cities had done so in my area. The busses still run their same routes through my city. They just don’t stop.
I miss having a bus. Even tho the nearest stop was about a mile and a half walk.
banlieusard de Paris frérot on t’a reconnu 😏👌🤜🤛
So have cities cut a deal with the feds for untaxed diesel? I always wonder. The feds might be down.
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Did you factor in the cost of ownership, maintaince, insurance, and parking or just the gas?
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Why don’t you register your car or pay insurance? Do you have magic tires that never need to be replaced? Is gas approximately $0/gal where you live? Or does you car get such insane gas milage that driving any distance uses approximately 0 gallons of gas?
That doesn’t even take into account the ridiculous cost to tax payers of maintaining roads for personal vehicles. Even worse you’re completely ignoring the latent expenses like the terrible health costs associated with air pollution from exhaust and tires, the stress of traffic, and the sedentary life style that your little metal box demands of you.
I think your car costs a lot more for you to operate than you realize but you’re so conditioned to paying a subscription fee to exist you happily fork over your money without a second thought.
That’s like saying you ride your car 29 days for free because it was paid off for this month on the first day.
Eventually you’ll change cars. It has a daily cost, you’re just amortizing it.
Even when a tire blows? Or your transmission gets old?
The oil lasts forever, it just keeps getting thicker
Your privilege is showing.
I’m Canadian and my lower-bound estimate is 25¢/km(~€0.17/km), so 50km would be $12.50(€8.44). And I think it’s a lot more expensive to drive in Europe.
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Incorrect
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Correct
Just google maps a trip, and notate the time difference in driving by car and getting there by bus. If you make more than $10/hr, you’ve already made that back by getting there that much sooner. and you didn’t have to deal with the guy masturbating in the corner, or the creeper trying to look up your skirt.
You must be a prime, USAmerican specimen to expulse such rambling against public transport.
And are these people who masturbate in the corner or who are creeping up your skirt in the room right now? (Not seen 'em here is what I’m saying.)
You joke, but depending on the area transit can range from really good to REALLY bad.
Things have gotten really shitty in my city (Calgary, Alberta), my friend takes transit so I hear the horror stories. Homeless people openly doing drugs, screaming at people walking by, sometimes ODing and dying. I’ve had to leave work to pick up my friend after a homeless guy tried to grab her and was following her with two of his buddies until she went into a restaurant to call me.
The last time I had to take transit on my own they hadn’t cleaned the blood off the wall from the stabbing a couple weeks prior (2023 had a transit stabbing every few weeks).
I seriously wish I was making this up as it’s been cartoonishly awful the last couple of years.
Who is paying you $10/h to stay home for an extra 15m before work? Or does your job pay you extra for showing up before you’re scheduled?
Comparing travel time to your hourly rate is a nonsense argument because you cannot practically monitize that time.
Alternatively, you could look up the travel time by car, and realize that is all wasted time. You can bring a laptop and work on a train. That is not possible when driving.
If you drive an hour a day that’s costing you $10 of lost productivity, plus the $5 or so of gas, and the insurance, depreciation, and wear on your vehicle, all in all, it costs significantly more than the transit ticket.
I prefer just having Jeeves drive me in my Ford F250. I’ve converted the bed into a mobile office, so I wake up, drink a breakfast shake, and begin producing. Then my kids tap me on the shoulder and help guide me to my F250 while I keep producing. Once I’m in the back, I’m producing like never before. I’m dropped off at our main office door, and I switch to mobile and use voice recognition to notate my production during my breakfast and morning ride, and I’m in my office before I finish.
I then produce for 10 straight hours with a 5min break for my lunch shake. By the time the day is over, I summon Jeeves again, and I load into the back and I produce all the way home. My wife makes me my dinner shake, and I finish some emails in my home office while I drink it. I close out my day notating my production for future review using voice recognition while I pat my children on the head and kiss my wife goodnight. Then I immediately sleep to get exactly eight hours so I can wake up and produce again tomorrow.
Hey, trigger warning on nightmare fuel, please.
Buses move more people per square foot. They are exponentially more efficient. So having greater adoption across the board is a net gain, even for car drivers.
For me, parking alone would be a quarter of the trip time. Plus I don’t get paid hourly so this dynamic doesn’t apply to me, plus I can use the trip time for reading, organizing my day, replying to messages and other work instead of focusing on the road the whole time.
