Honestly, there aren't that many crazy people on the SF Muni/busses. The detractor for taking these services is speed and frequency.

Even factoring in parking, traffic, and bus lanes, it's much faster to drive within SF than take the bus. Stopping every 2 blocks and missing every other green light kills throughput.

My local bus stop to connect to BART supposedly had service every 20 mins, but often a bus would be out of service and the wait would be 30-40 minutes. Unless a bus was right there, it was faster to walk.

There's an intimidation factor that a lot of Americans won't quickly admit to when it comes to taking the bus. They don't know if they can tap with their phone to pay, if they need cash, if they can use change, if they need exact cash/change, if they need a specific transit card etc. They don't know the etiquette for asking to get off the bus and sometimes it varies by bus design. They don't know the routes or the time schedules and find it confusing and overwhelming and often have a low tolerance for the embarrassment that can come with publicly learning something.

> public transportation as the default mode

Do you have any sources on that? In basically any European country the car dominates and is used far more than public transport. Even in cycle-friendly Netherlands the majority of people go to work by car.

https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe...

And this starts in primary school.

Make it legal for kids to move around on their own and take transit to school, just like they do in most of Europe and beyond. Parents are lazy, so many kids will. That's a lesson in public transportation use right there.

Rush hour CTA in Chicago is packed like that at least on some routes in and out of downtown. Or rather it used to be, I have not lived there in quite some time so not sure about today.

There is also the monetary angle. How many european households can afford a car for both parents and a car each for two kids, registered, insured, paid for to park wherever they go?

Even if you are poor in the US cars are remarkably accessible. You can finance a used car with no credit and a couple dozen dollars a month.

Mexican third tier town bus beats Atlanta airport shuttle.

Yes!

LA is sparse by European standards, or rural by Asian standards.

http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf CTRL+F for "BUILT-UP URBAN AREAS BY URBAN POPULATION DENSITY: 2025"

America is the exception for population density in general.

Typing this from a suburb of Columbus now.

COTA provides decent service to get around in the downtown and directly adjacent neighborhoods, but it drops off sharply as soon as you get outside of that area.

Part of the problem is the typical US sprawl of the place. The area inside the beltway is ~200 square miles - https://urbandecisiongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/fc...

I live just outside the beltway. Driving to the OSU stadium just north of downtown would take me about 25 minutes. According to Google maps, the nearest COTA stop is a 20 minute walk away, then it's an hour and ten minutes to get to the stadium.

Agreed it would be lovely to be able to hop on a bus or train and get somewhere within a reasonable amount of time.

You are right, I was not asked to give up going to the wilderness; I just want to go to the wilderness of my choosing and not be constrained by someone else's transportation.

Funny thing about scheduling. I have to plan to leave an hour earlier than I need to, and even then, I'm frequently late. Yet, my hyperfocus kicks in when I sit in the car and go through the rituals of "I'm driving now." The vigilance can be exhausting, but usually only bothers me when I'm leaving an observing site at 3 o'clock in the morning or I'm driving at twilight in deer country.

Yeah, ADHD does affect one's ability to drive safely. On the other hand, I've been driving for over 50 years. I've had one accident that I was responsible for. Various other vehicles have been involved in five other accidents where the other driver backed into my parked car.

I think the reason I've been hypervigilant about safe driving practices is that my father owned a rigging company, and I was driving forklifts and stake trucks in the yard from about 13. I understood the impact a vehicle could have on other things, people included. Living in that world from about age nine on teaches you to be obsessive about properly securing a load (Molding machines, air handling units, lathes, etc.).

I've often thought people would be better drivers if they started their driving experience with the motorcycle safety training course curriculum and drove for a year on motorized two wheels, taking up the lane and keeping up with traffic.

When I was younger I was lucky enough to live somewhere rural where I got into a couple of single car accidents that I walked away from. Now my ADHD hyper focus is super attentive when driving.

Good points. A few years ago, I visited a friend in Estonia, and even though he was in Tartu proper, they still drove almost everywhere. Essentials were only available by car.

Trains are an interesting subject. For them to be useful, you would need to have rails covering the same destinations and paths as the highway system. One should also be aware of network effects when adding another layer of transportation services, including how they affect the distribution of services and residences. From experience, we know that roadways encourage spread because they allow you to cover a greater area with little time cost. Rail will likely encourage denser development and a higher cost of living due to a greater influence of rent-seeking entities.

One of the tensions one would need to explore is the tension between the need/desire of a chunk of the population to keep their distance, keep their living space separate from others, and be acoustically and physically isolated from them, while still needing services a 30-minute drive away.

Nice idea but it quickly runs up against budget realities.

My experience of public transport modes in various cities is at odds with this.

Trams and trains generally offer far more reliable schedules, frequencies and journey times than busses because they either have completely dedicated alignments or have priority where there is any interface with normal traffic.

Most buses inevitably bunch (see https://setosa.io/bus/ for a nice simulation) and/or get stuck in traffic as a matter of routine. The inconvenience may be less per delay but busses are delayed far more frequently than trams and trains on most of the public transport systems I've used. So for regular users, the cumulative inconvenience is much worse on busses than on trains/trams. Which is why people flock to trains and trams when available as an alternative to busses.

Specifically with regard to the parent, the frequency at which unplanned outages happens with tram services in Zurich is extremely low in my experience - certainly planned changes to schedules or routes (for maintenance, upgrades, etc.) are far more frequent. And when "something happens" (i.e. a traffic accident), the path for trams is cleared as quickly as possible - often in 30 minutes or less - so you'd really have to be unlucky to be inconvenienced by such an occurrence.

In most situations you want trams to have own lanes and semaphore priority which reduces collision chances to a minimum. Worst case you can have some spare busses to provide temporary replacement services for such situations or you can divert some buses from other lines to provide services in problematic sector till situation isn't resolved.