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.

These are mostly women in their 80s. They do find fast driving taxis scary.

Most of the younger ‘pensioners’ I know 65-75 don’t use buses at all, they drive.
I was a regular bus user and found younger people outnumbered pensioners on the bus considerably.

It's cheaper and quicker to get a bus for us, however they run at stupid times so we'd either be late or super early every day plus they are so often cancelled or come early (our bus stop is the second stop) and we end up missing it.
If they ran more regularly, came at the right times and weren't just unreliable, I'd get the bus everyday!
DH drops me off at his work every morning and I was over to my work (30 minute walk) so we do car share!

In my town its cheaper to get a day ticket than a return..

The area I live in is between the city and quite a deprived area. So they do a really cheap wheel ticket. Like £6 a week to use between the area and city.. Because my ds school was in the middle. I used to park at mums after drop off and get the £6 weekly ticket.. But I hated it. Always a packed overheated bus. Often didbt show up. And what would be down the main dual carriage way to city a 10 min drive. Was about an hour all tolled by public transport.

I ended up using the car. Not cheaper but stress free

There's no way for me to get a bus to work - I looked it up once. I start at 9.30am so to be there on time I'd have to leave at 7pm the night before!

To get home from work, the only bus leaves at 2pm - I finish work at six! Then when I get home, I'd need to turn around and come straight back to work. The quickest route by bus takes 4 hours and three changes!

Public transport is great if you live in a city or town with decent routes. In rural areas there's just not the option. The above 4 hour journey on a bus takes 40 minutes by car and costs £30 a week in fuel. If I got the bus it would be over £20 a day!

Public transport is expensive because it's privatised, and slow because of all the private cars on the road. Both of those can and should be changed.

Those who can avoid driving (i.e. aren't disabled in a way that prevents them using buses, or doctors on call etc) should.

Things won't get better till the relatively privileged stop killing 40,000 people per year with their fumes and blocking up all the roads and public space and running people over. It's selfish to drive if you don't have to (everyone thinks their own journeys are justifiable, but most of them are not).

Various cities are implementing clean air zones that will affect buses but not cars. So buses will get less polluting anyway.

Yanbu. I cycle to work. 2 miles each way, secure, shuttered parking.
I'd like to drive my car, but parking is too pricey as a p.t worker.
I used the bus (brilliant as it stops outside my house) but it was a 10 min journey for £3.50 and full of college students. Too busy and noisy for me tbh.
But until public transport becomes more useful and cheaper, folk will always default to their best option.

It's not a question of selfishness, rosie, some people cannot afford to use the public transport as it stands now, money and timewise. That's how it is. People have to make a living and pay rent.

In our town it's mostly pensioners on the bus, Urgh. So the council keeps cutting because they're not getting the revenue.

To PP who mention cycling - also not possible when you live rurally!

90% of my journey is on twisty NSL country roads with poor visibility, blind corners and a lot of hills (yay Cumbria!)

It would take well over two hours each way and wouldn't be doable at all in winter due to roads not being gritted and a total lack of street lights!

How do you decide what a justifiable journey is then, @rosiejaune ? Work? Or should people just live where they work and vice versa?

Hate public transport it's slow, inefficient, often dirty, full of smelly weirdos, and not safe for women in many cases. Car all the way. And with driverless cars about to emerge there's no chance anyone will abandon traveling in private and they barely pollute

Or should people just live where they work and vice versa?

Oh, yes, the world according to such Planet Unreality dwellers, adaline, you should just live nearby no matter what the rents or if you get made redundant and need to change jobs, you're supposed to move (never mind your kids' schools, friends, your spouse's job, etc) rather than use a car.

helacells the problem is that even electric vehicles do pollute - they shed tiny particles from their tyres, their brake pads, etc (recorded as PM2.5 in pollution data). There is mounting evidence that PM2.5 is at least as bad for human health as the forms of pollution we have worried about up till now: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4740125/

I never get the bus because it costs about 3 million pounds a ticket and is so painfully slow.

However I disagree with driving in cities and try and avoid it if I can so I walk everywhere. Sometimes it takes hours and I have to leave very early but at least I am getting exercise and it is often still quicker than the same journey on the bus would be.

Yanbu public transport is shocking. Where I work in an out of town business park the council in their wisdom decided to give a green grant to the developer if they deliberately undershot the amount of car parking needed for the offices occupied at full capacity. This was to encourage fewer people to use their cars.

But, like I said, it's out of town and the only bus that runs there is a shit unreliable service that doesn't go through any residential areas, just from the centre of town, so anyone who uses it has to actually get another bus first and then get on the shit unreliable service. So the developer pockets the cash, the council pats itself on the back for being environmentally friendly, and everyone who works there relies on crap, expensive public transport that takes forever and has a shit, stressful time getting to work and back every day.

Oh yeah and you can't bike it because it's a dual carriageway.

yanbu
but by driving you are part of the problem.
still think that politically there can be improvements, but enforcement is needed.
example netherlands: to commute into amsterdam by car, even if sharing with another person, is much more expensive than taking the bike & train. but the expensive parking is only possible because parking is strictly enforced, so you have no other option than to use the hideously expensive parking garage.

If i didn't take my car to work i doubt I'd be able to work full time. I can drop my kids at school and be in the office for 9.45, if i had to take the train it would be 10.30, if i took the bus it would be 11.30, as theres no direct service.
I can leave at 6.15pm and be home for 6.50pm, the trains are so unreliable if i left my office at the same time its a lottery as to when i would get home, which i can't do with kids.
It costs me £7.50 or £12 per day depending on the carpark i get a space in and a few pounds in diesel. The train is £7.80.
The half hour i have in my car to and from work is the only time i get to myself and I'm not prepared to sit on a train and share the with strangers.

Most (3/5) short journeys are made by car. And many cars are occupied by only one person. Most of those people could travel some other way (or yes, just travel less, in some cases). And it would be more pleasant and safer for them to walk or cycle if there were fewer cars on the road.

It may be cheaper to fuel a car than to pay for the equivalent cost of miles on a bus, but fuel isn't the only cost of a car.

An unlimited annual bus ticket for the main operator in my area costs £600. Does the cost of a car, its insurance, tax, MOT, maintenance, fuel, parking, cleaning, fines etc come to significantly less than that?

One estimate online says it costs £160 per month (i.e. £1920 pa) to run the average car. And that's excluding the cost of the actual car. So it's still cheaper to buy annual bus tickets for two adults and two children than just to run a car, let alone buy/lease it in the first place.

Even if it did cost less to drive, you're also paying hidden costs in the form of e.g. increased tax to fund health care for those affected by fumes, and your own health (you actually inhale more of them inside the car than as a pedestrian).

An unlimited annual bus ticket for the main operator in my area costs £600. Does the cost of a car, its insurance, tax, MOT, maintenance, fuel, parking, cleaning, fines etc come to significantly less than that?

Well, in my area if I forked out £600 for a bus pass, I would also be down about £1500 a month as I'd lose my job! Your views are very city-centric and just don't work when you live rurally with no viable bus service. Lots of rural villages have no bus routes at all, let alone train stations, and any buses that do run only go once or twice a day, stop around 5pm and don't run at all in winter or on a Sunday.

I certainly agree that if the bus or train is affordable and practical then it makes sense but that's simply not the case for huge areas of the country.

Depends where you live I suppose. In my case it would be madness to drive because the public transport is faster and more convenient. But that’s in London. I think under investment in public transport in many areas discourages the use of public transport which is a pity. But you can’t blame people for opting to take their cars when the public transport alternatives are so poor.

if the bus company did an annual pass where I used to live (they don't) it would get me to the local sixth form college 10 miles east for 8:30 and home again at 4:30 termtime only then I would have to catch another bus going past my village going in to the city and a third to work

And it takes best part of an hour just to do the first journey

Laughable!

Not to mention the fact that in most places that 600 ticket might get you into the nearest city but nowhere else. I think our local bus service does unlimited for about 800 but it's only good value if you want to go to the city centre and nowhere else every day of the year. It's no good if I want to go to the town 5 miles to the north, or the city 10 miles west, or the leisure centre or to visit a friend in a neighbouring village etc.

rosiejaune you may live in an area where walking or cycling to shops, doctors, work etc is feasible, but read all the posts above where it isn't.

I don't class as disabled, but my arthritis is bad enough so walking more than about a mile a day hurts pretty badly. Half a mile walk to the bus stop, wait up to 20 minutes standing at the bus stop (hurts my back), around 30 minutes in a seat that does me no favours (assuming I get a seat) costing £7.00 return, come back carrying heavy bags. Or get in my car that was chosen partly because the seats suit my back, 10 minute drive, couple of pounds parking (parking is only around £6.50 for the whole day), don't knacker my back carrying stuff. That gets me to the "town centre" sized shops, if I want to do a supermarket shop you can either add 5 minutes to the drive & take off parking costs, or add 10 minutes to the bus and 5-10 minutes walking at the other end.

A very large number of jobs local to this town are at a business park about 14 miles away. Driving around 20-30 minutes depending on traffic. Public transport over 2- 2.5 hours each way with a choice of 3 buses and a train, or 1 bus a train and another bus plus additional walking. One end of the business park to the other is around 5 minutes drive, so a LOT more walking if you aren't at the station end. Not sure of the cost, but of course all these buses and trains are run by different companies and I gather it would be around £15-£20 return when a relative without a car worked there a few years back.

Our local annual saver bus ticket is around £1k, so be thankful for your £600!

my last job started at 9am it was 17 miles away,

driving leave home 8.25 arrive 8.55
public transport catch 7.25 bus to town
catch 7.55 train to X arrive 8.10 wait for 8.25 train to Y arrive 8.35 walk 8 mins to work arrive about 8.45 however if bus is even 2 mins late would miss train then would be at work 15 mins late as trains only every 30 minutes, there is no earlier bus, why would anyone do that also driving is actually cheaper even at government rate of 45p per mile ( i have an older car so depreciation is negligible)

An unlimited annual bus ticket for the main operator in my area costs £600.

It's over double that out here, and you miss the point that the fucking public transport isn't there for the times and days it's needed in a lot of places outside cities. Very narrow-minded and city-centric thinking there.