alt Hacker NewsAs an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty.
A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the same space would (as you rarely get more than 1 person per car in peak hours).
I'd rather take buses than the car in any city. Cars make cities dangerous, noisy, polluted, congestions make people nervous behind the wheel, fights are far from uncommon. Finding parking, paying for it is another issue, common in Europe where (luckily) city centers are often millenia older than cars.
At no point of me living in the US I found the car-centric model anywhere better.
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always seemed obvious to me that the reason for the disparity is that european buses are a way to get around dense cities and US buses are a welfare program for residents of sparser cities who can't afford cars. the bus lines don't actually go anywhere people care about, they're their just to provide the bare minimum ability to go somewhere.
the top comment is right and this article is a good exmaple of what transit people do. they get so excited about transit and how awesome it is that they forget about some of the more fundamental issues.
This is highly location dependent with how unequal the US transit infrastructure is. It'd help to add your city for anecdotes to mean much.
I know I'm a corner case on this, but there are two cases where our car life significantly improves your quality of life.
1: you live with ADHD: "Oh my God, I need to leave five minutes ago" scheduling method. To anyone who says, "You just need to be more disciplined about time," I refer you to the part about ADHD.
2: If your quality of life depends on activities that are more wilderness/far away from cities, such as hiking, astronomy, camping, bird watching, and don't include (actively exclude?) urban experiences that require amenities.
3: Friends and family live 30 minutes to 6 hours away.
I have no problem with improving bus service for people and getting them out of cars because that means there'll be more room for me to go to where I want to go when I want to go.
I live in Berlin and strongly prefer the bike over the bus because buses are slow and unreliable. I wish we had a lot more bus lanes and aggressively towed cars blocking them. More subways would be even better though.
I'm not a fan of busses and use em only by necessity. Otherwise I prefer trams and bicycles much more. Trams are more chill due to less hard turns and more space, bicycles are a beast for fast arrival if infra is ok. In Zurich trams are very nice, but bike infra comsi comsa up to bad depending on area.
I sometimes take a peak into European busses but I don't see 25-30 people sitting in there on average. That is a lot of people.
Busses, at least the one where I live in Europe, are very loud, noisy and smelly. I'd rather have 20 cars pass my home than one bus. I don't hear or feel those cars but once that bus passes my coffee cup visibly shakes. I also don't mind cycling behind most cars but cycling behind a bus is a terrible experience. You feel the heat blasting out of the rear-right side and the diesel smoke is terrible.
As an European I really _do_ mind buses. I try to avoid riding them as much as possible. They are dirty, smelly, and really cramped with little legroom. I would really hate living somewhere where I was forced to use them, and would rather move elsewhere.
> A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the same space would (as you rarely get more than 1 person per car in peak hours).
Some animated GIFs illustrating how much space automobiles take up compared to alternatives:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ft67...
Maybe it goes without saying, but the reason you don’t mind the bus in Europe is not because you are European but because the European buses are nicer.
The things you say about noise and pollution are also true in the US, and American drivers are acutely aware of them. But the alternative is not a European bus, so people drive.