Europe only has good public transport in very few selected cities and you have to ignore strikes in France to pretend its working well and is reliable. The city with the best public transport in the world is probably Tokyo in terms of frequency and service reliability but it is constantly over capacity and things are not getting better. Crowded trains are hell.
so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywhere.
> you have to ignore strikes in France to pretend its working well and is reliable
This is the same argument has "what about the rain ?" for people who don't want to commute by bicycle.
Yes, it happens. But it's only a few days a year. Contrary to traffic. So you can adapt. Human is supposed to be great at adaptation.
And the rest of the year it just works.
As for rain, the average where I am is about 120 days a year. While some of those days are "not much rain", it's still enough that walking/biking to/from work would be fairly annoying a large number of days per year. Plus... winter and snow (which is included in the number above, but more of an issue).
To imply that in some parts of the world (desert climate, reliable public transit service), the disruption is infrequent and manageable, and in others (wet and cold climates, unreliable public transit service) the disruption is significant enough to render the bicycle or the public transit economically non-viable for some users.
>Europe only has good public transport in very few selected cities and you have to ignore strikes in France to pretend its working well and is reliable.
Well, until recently I've lived in a very much French city for twelve years and I've never had to face a strike or any problem besides bus traffic being shifted around due to road work. To the point I've now got to get a driving licence in my thirties, as I've never needed it before. Maybe that was just luck.
I'm French and maybe experienced a strike once or twice in my life. That being said, people who commute daily using public transportations maybe affected a few days a year. Usually, strikes are mostly planned in advance. Technical incidents are more an annoyance.
> Europe only has good public transport in very few selected cities and you have to ignore strikes in France to pretend its working well and is reliable.
It's working well and reliable enough.
> The city with the best public transport in the world is probably Tokyo in terms of frequency and service reliability but it is constantly over capacity and things are not getting better.
Things absolutely are getting better; crowding is better than it was. A healthy growing city will always have some capacity issues at any given time, but that's the same as anything.
> so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywhere.
Not at all proven. Most people choose not to live right next to their workplace even when that's an option. 15-30 minutes' separation is helpful IMO. Even if I'm not commuting, it takes me that long to get my head out of "work mode", and having my home be my workplace makes that worse. "You don't take your work home with you" was always something I looked for in job applications.
I live somewhere in central Tokyo, and as long as I’m fine with a max 1hr commute I can reach pretty much anywhere else in central Tokyo (which is where the jobs are).
If your job is on the red line, and your house is on the red line, it's an easy commute, maybe 20 minutes. Calm, relaxing, easy to zone out.
If you change jobs, the new office might be on the purple line. Which does not cross the red line. So now you need to take the red line, to the green line (15 minutes + 10 minute layover = 25 minutes), and then change trains again to get to the purple line (15 minutes). That's assuming there are no delays, weather, construction/remodeling at any of the stations. If your morning coffee takes too long you might miss your connection, and now you've blown out your schedule by another 15-20 minutes, especially if part of your commute takes one of the less-frequent suburban lines.
End result is your 20 minute commute to your old office, has turned into a 40+ minute commute one way, assuming no delays. On a good day. Plus walking to and from the station.
My old office used to be on Castro Street in Mountain View, a 5 minute walk from the Caltrain Station. Then they leased a large building in the warehouse district, a 20 minute walk away. My old train commute + walk was almost exactly 1 hour from San Francisco; with the new office relocation it turned into 1 hour 15 minutes each way, which meant when I got home in the evening, the tram I wanted to take home had already stopped running, meaning either walk 45 minutes, or take a $9 (probably $15 in today's economy) uber home.
What point was he making? Well, switch jobs, and just move closer to your new office! Easy! Just never buy a house and only switch jobs at the end of your lease term, and rent forever.
Agree that you want to be living somewhere with enough employers within tolerable commute range, and obviously it's hard to compete with access to the whole world. I don't find a single change to be beyond the pale (maybe I would if it was a 10 minute wait), and I find that in dense cities with decent networks you can be in range of "enough" employers, but YMMV.
Around this German state, a 30 minute drive turns into 2 hours commute into each direction if I go with public transport.
And this is one of the places with best connections.
Back home in Portugal, and many other southern countries, good luck with the bus connections that only come around once per hour, and better not skip the 2nd connecting bus/train.
I don’t know why this is downvoted. This is very much true. Outside of a handful of largest cities, Europeans are as car-dependent as Americans, and if they drive less, it’s mostly because they are poorer, while cars and gas are more expensive: instead of replacing what in the US would be car trips with public transit, they simply travel less and stay home more. As European nations get wealthier, car ownership rises, and people drive more kilometers. If you use public transit outside of a handful of major cities, you’ll find that it’s full of students and retirees, instead of commuters.
Seems to me that many people here simply project their tourist experience while vacationing in London of Paris, as a result getting a wrong image of how people in Europe actually live their lives.
> Outside of a handful of largest cities, Europeans are as car-dependent as Americans, and if they drive less, it’s mostly because they are poorer, while cars and gas are more expensive: instead of replacing what in the US would be car trips with public transit, they simply travel less and stay home more.
Citation? I think we travel less far, but that's not because people choose to stay home so much as because you don't have to travel so far to achieve the same things (e.g. we probably travel less far to visit relatives than Americans, but still visit our relatives more often and spend more time with them).
I’d like to point out that the correlation between size and public transport isn’t always applicable. Helsinki has a fantastic and uncrowned public transport system. It’s also affordable (50-60e) a month. And it’s a tiny city when you compare to other capitals.
I know nothing about commuting in Finland but is Uusimaa not roughly equivalent to "the economic gravity well of Helsinki"?
Sounds like you two are nit picking over the difference between the I495 loop being the "DC area" vs everything east of Fredricksburg/Front Royal/Fredreick being the "DC area".
I've no idea of the Geography you are referring to in the DC area, being European. That said Uusimaa is a region, Helsinki is a (capital city). Helsinki spans quite a large geographic area and is fairly densely populated but primarily in a metropolitan area. Take a look on google maps and you'll see it's tiny, say compared to London, Paris, Berlin etc. Uusimaa covers a much bigger area with huge amounts of space between the edge and the metropolitan area (mostly covered with fields, private land and forest).
[EDIT:] So, sure, most of those cars must be owned by inhabitants of the Greater Helsinki area. Heck, I live in Helsinki proper, and I have a car. But... Up until last year, when I still worked at the office in the more central parts of town, my daily commute there was by bus and metro (and will possibly be again sometime soon). And AFAIk I was(/am/will be) far from alone in this combo. [/EDIT]
> As European nations get wealthier, car ownership rises, and people drive more kilometers
I'm not sure this is true. Ireland went from one of the poorest nations in Western Europe to one of the richest from 1990 to now. In Dublin, commuting to work via car has been falling since at least the late 90s, driven by increased traffic, and greatly improved public transport and cycling infrastructure (though still quite bad by European standards); it hit 30% by 2018. The number of cars per capita is still, as far as I know, rising, but they're being used to commute to work less.
Rural areas of the country are much more of a mixed bag, and prosperity did drive an increase in driving there (though it has started to fall off a bit during the recovery after the financial crisis). But in urban areas, prosperity does _not_ seem to drive increased car use.
> In Dublin, commuting to work via car has been falling since at least the late 90s, driven by increased traffic
Ah, the classic joke, "nobody drives in Manhattan; there is too much traffic there".
> The number of cars per capita is still, as far as I know, rising, but they're being used to commute to work less.
Alas, 75% of Irish workers commute by passenger car, either as driver or as passenger. Only 10% of workers commute using public transit. That's what I meant when I said that Europeans are very much car dependent too: even in Dublin, the capital, most of the workers drive, and small minority uses public transit. Outside Dublin, cars dominate even more.
We can take Hamburg for example #1. Beautiful city, working public transportation, BUT there are congestions, and try getting anywhere from other end of the town early morning (rush hour) or late at night. Sometimes almost impossible.
#2 I live in Zagreb, Croatia - recently drove from Austria back through Slovenia to Zagreb, ended up spending more time in Zagreb traffic at 11:30 am then driving across three countries.
Hm. I agree to #1 mostly, but it could be better. More light rail like Hochbahn & S-Bahn would be good.
OTOH they extended the Metrobus and Expressbus like mad, at least it felt so after my initial disappointment from around 2004.
Most bus stops have an electronic timetable, dynamically updating their 4 rows. The busses are prioritized on traffic lights and partially have their own reserved lanes.
For when- and whereever I need to go I simply don't care when exactly, because a few minutes later the next one is coming, which applies the same way for sometimes necessary switches.
30mins max from outlying suburb to core, rather 20mins, maybe 50 to 60min from my edge to another edge of town, not necessarily through the core.
Only at night the intervals are getting longer, and the net is less 'dense', but not catastrophically so.
And it is fu****g expensive for single tickets :-(
When was the last time you used the HVV?
Besides that usually I want to ride my bicycle, bicycle, bicycle... ;)
He, actually I prefer the outer suburbs for bicycling because downtown is insane. In the suburbs I can tone the paranoia that everyone is out there to kill me at least down a little :)
Even in another much smaller German city of only ~50k inhabitants, my school commute for years was ~40-50 minutes (dependent on season etc.; EDIT: 40-50 minutes per direction, also on mondays and another weekday my schooldays started at 07:05 not at 08:00) when the trip by bicycle to the same school would only take me ~20-25 minutes.
Add to that the rapid aging of the population combined with the old people having the absolutely stellar idea to go by bus during the 07:15 morning school rush. Not like they have the whole day free to schedule their appointments... oh, wait
And after years of having to deal with these fossils (most with that creepy perpetual half-smile-half-smirk) who think they're entitled to demand that people of all pre-pension ages (sometimes even heavily pregnant women) vacate their seats for them instead of literally just walking one or two steps further to the next seat, thereby not only clogging up the bus corridor while everyone has to shuffle around but also being a general nuisance I've got enough and for years haved avoided riding busses in this city like the plague.
I've seen public transport done differently and better in other cities, one key feature for working better AFAICT being tram lines with low intervals, not like in the above example relatively short busses every ~15-20 minutes per line.
so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywhere.