06-27-2024, 04:21 PM
(06-25-2024, 12:51 PM)Acitta Wrote:(06-25-2024, 11:25 AM)creative Wrote: It comes down to convienience for us. It is a 5 minute drive or 25 minute bus ride from our house.
I don't understand how a 25-minute bus ride is a problem.
It's a lot of wasted time, that's why it's a problem. Let's say a person has a 55 minute bus commute each day. Let's say they commute a total of 260 weekdays a year just for work. Let's also say they never choose or are able to drive, so they do this for 55 years of their life. That comes out to...well...a heck of a lot of days in your life wasted not only ON the bus, but waiting for the bus and going to and from the bus.
Now sure, for a one off thing a couple times a year - a concert at CITS or a sports match - that may not seem like a big deal. But for most people, they sure as heck don't want to waste months to years of their time on earth riding around on some bus to get where they need to go. Unless someone is a fan of buses, I don't see why anyone would choose this over owning a personal vehicle (even if it's just a bicycle). One could make the argument that it's still preferable for many reasons - environmental, safety - but at the end of the day unless someone has nothing better to do, they aren't going to want to use public transit if they don't have to...at least in a city like ours. If we had the sort of transit system in Berlin or Kyoto then sure, it makes more sense but even there people want to drive.
Of course there is a ton of nuance to all of this and the choices we make, either at a personal level or because the city in this region really sucks all things considered. Regardless, convenience is going to triumph. Maximizing our time and making it faster to get from A to B has been something that we as a species have always strove to achieve. Automobiles may come with a lot of problems, but they're here to stay and save having some sort of pro-car authoritarian government rule us and ban personal automobiles, we're going to continue to use them. We CAN absolutely make improvements, though, but it has to be done right.
Anyway this is all a bit off topic.