To think that no-one will choose to swap cars for public transport when it's still easier / cheaper / faster to drive?

[BogstandardBelle]

Since starting a new job 18 months ago I have used public transport to get there and back 3 days a week. I leave my house, walk 10 minutes to the metro, spend around 20 minutes on the metro with one change in between, then walk around 15 minutes at the other end to arrive at work. I always assumed that (living in a big busy city) it was cheaper and easier to travel this way and never really considered driving.

This morning I needed to take some heavy bags into work, so I decided to drive. I left around 15 minutes later than usual and still arrived at the same time! And I didn't need to walk anywhere or share my space with hundreds of coughing / sneezing / inconsiderate / odd people en route. The cost was negligible compared to the 64 euros I spend each month on a metro ticket.

I'm really disappointed! I know that the exercise is good for me, and god knows the air pollution problem in my city doesn't need yet another single occupancy, short distance car journey being added to it. But it was so much easier / more pleasant than using public transport... and now I know how easy it was, there's going to be a little voice saying "just take the car...".

So it is unreasonable to expect people to give up their cars when public transport is actually more expensive, less convenient and overall harder work than driving? I used to think that all the motorists clogging up the roads / causing the pollution were BU, but now I'm not so sure.

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"If I was to get the bus it would take an hour (2 buses) and cost £5 a day. I drive, it takes 20minutes and costs about £2 a day in petrol. "

That's not counting the cost of buying the car and maintaining it and possibly also having a place to put it like a garage or a drive.

I hate buses, I much prefer going out in the car. I went into town with DM a few weeks ago and she suggested taking the bus as DH was away with our car and hers was in the garage (I suggested going a different day ).

It cost £6.90 each for DM and I then £3.40 each for the three DC we had between us (two of my DC and my nephew), so £24 before we'd even gone anywhere and it took three times as long to get where we were going compared to when we go by car.

I once went to a meeting with my local MP about local public transport (about 10 years ago tbf).

When told about the issues caused by 2 hourly bus services not joining up, this making already slow journeys absolutely unbearably lengthy, his response was to suggest people spent the wait in a cafe doing work on their laptops.

I mean for fucks sake. Where to even start with that?? Not everyone has money to spend in cafes. Not everyone can pay for childcare for a 4 hour each way commute when earning NMW. Not everyone has a job that involves working on a laptop. Not everyone even has a laptop! But to him, that was a perfectly reasonable solution.

The UK weather is a big factor for me. I don’t want to arrive at the office all sweaty, wet trousers at the ankles from the rain, muddy splatters up the back of my tights from walking along wet muddy pathways in court shoes. Straightened hair going frizzy where sideways rain has blown under the umbrella or hood. I have to carry IT equipment, so carrying a change of clothes and shoes as well - would need a large rucksack - i’d look like I’m going camping! Having to redo my makeup when I get there. Plus the commute time (1 hour vs 7 minutes in the car), and children that need to be dropped at primary school en route. Complete no brainier.

I'm disabled. Not enough to get a blue badge but enough to make using public transport with all its poor connections, delays and overcrowding impossible. Walking to the station from home carrying my bag would be tiring, standing on a bus or train is hard with balance problems and by the end of a day at work, I would be struggling to walk home from the station.
So I drive. Measures designed to force people out of their cars impact on people who have no choice but to drive.

Due to city centre parking costs and the horrendous serious of road restrictions and speed limits. Train/bus/cycling win every time.
Probably takes about 40 minutes by car and then have to pay around £20 - £30 to park all day. Bus takes 30 minutes (it can swoosh past the traffic in bus lanes). Cycling takes 30 minutes. Train takes 7 minutes!
If all the places near you put the cost of parking up and/or added driving restrictions I suspect the balance would fall in favour of public transport. So now is the time to campaign for better public transport because I suspect local authorities will see travel by car as an easy way to raise money. They can claim attempts to reduce travel by car are part of a green initiative. #cynic

I live 3 miles from where I work. I drive and it takes me about 10/15 minutes. My car is an older diesel that costs me about £10 a week in fuel.

If I took the bus it would take me 3 miles in the wrong direction, then around 5 miles to work. That journey would take almost an hour with a walk of about 10/15 minutes at the end. A day pass is £4.40

Except I couldn't do it in any case because the first bus is at 0730 and I have to be at work for 8.

We have something like 2 buses a week, plus a supermarket bus. Public transport is out of the question for work. There are a few car shares going on, but I can't, as my hours are variable, due to after school activities, home working, etc.
The village post office has been closed, the local GP has withdrawn their weekly surgery in the village hall, one village shop has closed, the other is on its last legs. I was contemplating either giving up my vehicle, or going down to one between DH and me when I retire, but I don't think it'll work. I wonder if an elderly woman will be safe when hitchhiking....

You need a new MP... ours is very different. She organised a meeting with the head of Northern Rail. What she didn't tell him was it was going to be on our local commuter route. She has lent on the local council and Network rail to improve lighting and parking. We are waiting for her to start tackling the appalling bus services.

I can fully understand why people choose to drive - it is only recently that our services have improved enough that I can take the bike. This change has only taken place because me and several others in the area wrote to her to ask if she could help us.

Now to see if we can get her and other MPs to work across party lines to make the whole cycle commute safer. On the road you get daily road rage from drivers who are stuck in a traffic jam (1st & 2nd gear for 16 miles) or choose the off road route and get mugged - especially if you are a woman. Again I can understand the fury of being stuck in a traffic jam - but it is not the cyclist's fault. It is the people who got up 5 minutes earlier than you that is causing the delay.

I live in the suburb of a small city. Bus routes A go through the neighbourhood are fine to take 30 mins to wind their way to the city centre. About every 15 mins in the day. I used to use them when the DCs were free as a bit of a novelty as the adult fare was fairly comparable to the starting rate of car parking. Bus routes B & C pass by the edge of the suburb and connect to nearby towns. B is about every 15 mins at peak times. C is allegedly every 30 mins. Alledgedly because like route A, they are run by different companies who won't transfer tickets, so that halves the frequency of the buses for the return leg.

When I was still recovering from a difficult EMCS, I had to get baby to the opposite edge of town for a hospital appointment. It took about 2 hours to connect two bus services in the city centre. It's a 20 min drive. A taxi would logsitically have been better, but I was still very weak and struggling with lifting baby/ car seats/ pram chassis so felt better to roll the pram on and off with no lifting.

I've tended to work in suburban locations and small towns, plus lugging books, laptops etc, so driving was a no brainer. With DCs and childcare mixed in, time was too critical to mess about with busses.

The flat rate costs of owning a car, buying, insurance, tax are static regardless of additional transport used.

We now have those e-bikes, but there is no hub to access them from my neighbourhood, so pretty pointless at present. I see people using them to get out here. If I could get one from here, that would help access to the train station 3 miles away... no help transporting a family though!

Another in the rural so what public transport camp.
I would love to be able to give up 1 car, but if we did then I would be stuck at home with no transport while DH is at work.
As a student in Kent I loved using public transport, buses and trains made life so much easier, and I travelled around Europe using public transport (mostly a lot superior to the UK), However now I am back in Devon on the edge of the moor, public transport is barely existent, and the buses that do still run, seem to stop when they feel like it at the stop nearest me, rather than there being a sensible timetable.
Trying to go to the local city for a hospital appointment is a nightmare as they are trying to be a green city, so won't allow the hospital to put more parking in, and say to use park and ride. The last 3 times I have tried this (once to take my son to A&E on advice of HV and having already driven around the hospital to try and find a space before driving to the other side of town to go to the park and ride) and there are no or next to no (usable) spaces left.

I hate driving. Always have. Was in a bad car accident 9 years ago that nearly killed me and my brother, and has left me with ongoing pain in my pelvis from where it was broken. If I had a choice I would never have driven again, but there is no choice. If I don't drive I can't work, I can't get out without DH driving and what if something happened while he was at work (an hour away, with Terrible phone signal).

Captain Brickbeard, your experiences mirror mine.
In addition, the recent 9 days of rail replacement buses meant that journey times went from unreliable train 20 mins to unreliable bus, up to 150 mins.
Why don’t more people used public transport?
Unavailable
Unreliable
Expensive
Overcrowded
Carrying heavy objects
Coping with foul weather
DD often finds the company intimidating, especially at night or before/after football matches.

"YANBU. Rather than whinge at people who don't want to spend over an hour on two busses when they could drive in 20 minutes it's better to campaign for more public transport so it becomes the better option for more people".

This.

There's no way I could go to work by public transport. I work in 7 different places every week, some for only a couple of hours, most of them fairly rural. Not cyclable either.

In my previous job I could drive the twelve minutes, so leave my house 15 mins before start time if I was having a slow morning, pay a pound for petrol and park at the door. Or I could walk 8 mins to the train station, get one of the trains that ran every half hour, twenty minutes train trip and a 5 min walk to work. So a 35/40 min journey. Which is OK. But it cost three times as much and I had to leave 50 minutes before work began, not 15. And hope the 8:15 train actually arrived because the following one, 8:45 would have left me late for work. So I always took the car

We relocated to Manchester from London and one of my main criteria in choosing where to live was good transport links as I was so used to not driving in every day.
I get the tram to work which takes 25 mins, if I was to drive into the city centre at that time of day it would take well over an hour, and I can use the time to clear my emails or read a book - far preferable to driving!

I'm fortunate to live someone with "good" public transport. A day ticket for 2 adults and up to 3 children is only £8.50 meaning you jump on and off loads of buses and trams all day.
Kids are free on the train off-peak with an adult traveling. So that really helps too.
If we want to take the car into town we do on a Sunday when the parking is free but have to be up there really, really early.

Public transport is a disgrace if you don't live in London. I don't drive so have to use trains and buses to commute. It's expensive, unreliable and time consuming. I live semi rurally so options are minimal. I'd love to cycle more but it's too dangerous.

YANBU. I work 40 miles from home in a rural county. Public transport between towns and villages is woeful. I would love to use public transport at least some of the time but it just doesn't exist

Public transport is a disgrace if you don't live in London

It really is.

Where I am, buses to town Monday to Saturday are one every thirty minutes between 6am and 10.30pm. On a Sunday it's one an hour between 10am and 10pm so you're fairly fucked if you start work any time before 10.45am (the earliest time it would reach the city centre) and - inexplicably - no bus at all on a Sunday between 12pm and 2pm so if you miss the 12pm one you've got a two hour wait for the next one. Bank Holidays are Sunday service, they all finish by 6pm on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, and there are no buses at all on Easter Sunday, Christmas Day (fair enough), Boxing Day (bit shit when retail workers need to get to town), and New Year's Day.

DS has regular appointments and his last one was at a clinic around 12 miles away. Twenty minutes by car, nearly three hours by public transport as it's three bus journeys to get to that location and one of them is a semi-rural route in and out of various villages for an hour and a fucking half.

My husband and son drive to work/school in the morning despite having a bus service at the end of the road that could take them there. The reason is that the petrol costs are cheaper than bus fares and takes ten minutes less to do the journey which is a huge amount when battling with an autistic child who has zero sense of time or urgency.

I have a long commute (2.5 hours each way), but only have to do it twice a week. I always travel by train and apart from the occasional hiccup, I much prefer it to driving. The morning train journey enables me to slowly wake up with a cup of tea, newspaper, book etc, before getting to my destination at 8:45. A brisk 15 minute walk to the office means I've woken up when I get there. In the afternoon I get to leave the office an hour early because I compensate for this by working on the train home.

My DH also commutes by train. We do have a car but neither of like to use it all that much, so when we last moved house we only looked at neighbourhoods that would allow us to avoid driving as much as possible (not only to commute, but also in walking/cycling distance of shops, supermarkets, etc).

I used to not care for driving but a few years ago we got an automatic car. LOVE it! So much nicer now. DD has dyspraxia so wants to go straight for the automatic.

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