3mo ago

If americans come to germany and act like german public Transport is the best, how frickin bad is american public Transport?

Genuine Question. Even if I look at hungarian Transport, and they to this day use trains from the UdSSR, they come more consistantly then the DB.

They are really Bad sometimes, with like 20 seperate prices: Theres the bayernwald ticket that only works in the alps, then theres the official ticket to the destination. Theres a special offer, but only in the very special APP. You can use a d-ticket, but look! Some random ass slum in the middle of the worlds ass dosent accept that, but it does the MVV zone Tickets. But then you need the MVV zone 11-M, a ticket to the beginning to the Nürnberg zones, and a ticket for the Nürnberg zones.

And yet this shit is better than americas rails? How?

154 comments

Lmao what public transport? We don't have that here.
- Really? Like... How do you move around then? Only cars? But if you dont want / have a car? If youre still doing your drivers license?
  
  Fuck you, that's how. It's pretty much only cars. Not having a car isn't really an option here, unless maybe you live in the heart of a big city.
  
  In many places it's illegal to walk on the side of the road for motorist safety, and no they don't see value adding sidewalks. Other places don't like people that's not from that area walking in front of their house and will call the police every single time.
  
  Outside of like NYC you have a car. It's a bad system economically, ecologically, and socially, but many people are kind of stupid and reactionary. You show them how putting in a bike lane and adding a bus stop will lower car traffic, improve air quality, and increase economic activity and they just go "no because I feel so". Or, "one time I had to move a refrigerator so we need to prioritize large privately owned vehicles".
  
  Where I live, you can drive across town in 30 minutes. I once worked with a coworker who lived about a 15min drive from work (less than 8km), and it consistently took him 2 hours to get to work by bus.
  
  We do have it in Germany and the local public transport is perfectly good, albeit a bit expensive in some cities, but its the interregional, long distance train network that has massive issues in Germany. Trains are constantly delayed or even cancelled, pricing is absurd, still no level boarding on the high speed trains, etc.
  
  It’s not that alien is it? People rely on cars pretty heavily in most smaller towns in Germany.
  
  Most cities have a bus service, but they only rarely connect to smaller towns ("smaller" being relative here, like 30,000 people).
  To put it in perspective, I live in a suburban apartment outside of a medium-sized city in Ohio. There is a single busline that goes through my neighborhood (which thankfully has a stop right outside my complex). A bus comes by once an hour between 7 AM and 7 PM.
  This can get you to work if you're lucky enough to work a 9-5 next to a bus stop. My work has a bus stop, but I work a 4-12, so no luck.
  My favorite bar is in the next town over, a college town about 15 minutes down the road. If I wanted to get there by public transit, I would need to wait for the hourly bus outside of my apartment, get off at a grocery store, wait about a half an hour for a connecting bus from the college town's bus service, and that's not even counting the drive time.
  And if I don't leave the bar by 6 PM, of course, I'm stranded without an Uber or something, because even on weekends (not that I have weekends off work) the busses only run till 7 PM.
  And there's other towns nearby that I literally cannot take public transport to. I had to work an event in a smaller city (but still probably within the top 20 in the state for population) about half an hour drive away. There is no bus service that connects me to them. The only options are driving or Uber.
  
  Its almost like you're taking the piss
  
  Cars only

Public transportation in cities varies. But inter-city transportation? In most of the USA you simply cannot travel between towns or cities on public transportation. There are a few inter-city bus options (Greyhound, Flix, Megabus), but those don't go everywhere.
The rail options outside of the NE corridor (Boston to Washington DC, basically) are very sparse. Here's the map: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/Maps/Amtrak-System-Map-020923.pdf
That's it. Most of those routes are at most once per day in each direction. So if you city even has a stop (which it probably doesn't) the train may only come through in the middle of the night. Some routes are only 3x/week. And because of the massive distances involved and old equipment, it takes at least 70h+ to travel from coast to coast (more really, since connection times are long) and costs twice the price of a 6h flight ($250+ vs $80-120).
Trains are often on schedule, but can be many hours late. Once they are off schedule they are at the mercy of the freight train lines (who own the tracks) for passing. You can get stuck behind a slow moving cargo train for many hours.
Why is it like this? It's complicated. But it starts with very low population density, large areas/distances, and a very different relationship between the individual and the state in the US vs most of Europe. Add the rise of suburbs in the automobile right when many US cities were growing. Another factor is public attitudes. People think that public transportation is for poor people. I know people who have never ridden a city bus, and I live in a city that probably has above average public transportation for the region.
Anyway, as a public transportation rider-by-choice I feel your pain. Having spent a few weeks in Germany recently (with a DT for travel), and having ridden extensively on US train and bus networks, yous is definitely much, much better. Resist the politics of privatization and decay.
- Resist the politics of privatization and decay.
  Too late. Railways have been converted to a public-private partnership in the 90s, and are trying to get broken up into a competitive market these days anyway, and local public transportation is also run by public-private companies. In the countryside, it's usually managed by a private company in the first place, often organized in local organizations of several firms that offer the same fares - which usually has hard borders and can for example lead to villages next to each other having a 5 h connection time through railways, which don't follow these area bounds.

If it exists, it is better than American public transit. Here is my daily commute to work, as estimated by Google Maps:

Even Google goes “lmao use a fucking car, peasant.”
It’s technically possible for me to take public transit, but it would be about the same as walking. Here is a quick sketch of the route I’d need to take, compared to my drive:

That route is because there are no east/west lines between me and my job. It starts by walking/riding my bike the wrong direction to get to the nearest bus stop. Then it takes me south-west through two cities, then north-west through two more cities. Then I’d have a ~20 minute walk to transfer rail lines, because my job is serviced by a different rail system than the one that my bus service touches. After that walk (and waiting for the next train) I take it north and then have to walk another 10-15 minutes to finally get to work.
Not counting wait times, it would take me nearly 2.5 hours to use public transit. When you consider the fact that some busses and trains only run once every 20-45 minutes, it actually stretches closer to 3-4 hours, if the schedules don’t line up. Or I could just fucking drive 10 minutes. Yeah, it’s no wonder Americans use cars for everything.
- USA.jpeg right there. That image is for everyone who lives there except for like three cities. And the bike route is actually crossing several major roads.
  
  And the bike route is actually crossing several major roads.
  It’s worse: The bike route is on a two lane highway with no shoulder. I’d be dead on Day 1 if I actually tried to walk/ride a bike.
- My commute; this is a fun way to show how car centric America is lol
- I used to just walk 1.5 hours to work sometimes because it was the same time the bus would take, to only drop me off 75minutes early for my shift, or ten minutes late. So I'd just walk.

"American public transport"
Good joke! Best joke I heard since "American democracy"!

Here's a fun comparison: Tennessee vs Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania
They have very similar population density (70/km² vs 65/km²). Tennessee is roughly 4x the area and population.
There are only 2 inter-city train stops in Tennessee, in Memphis and a small town to it's north, both on the 1x/day service between Chicago and New Orleans. The largest city (and its state capitol) Nashville has no rail service.
The entire state of Tennessee has only 10 inter-city bus stops. Ten! Serving 7M people. The 4th largest city in the state is Chattanooga (181k), and it has no inter-city bus and no rail.

American public transit doesn't exist outside of a couple major cities.
So yeah. Probably the absolute worst Europe has to offer is a world altering step up.
- Am American: this is correct
- Yep. I've lived in 9 states so far. The only place I consistently used public transit was when I lived in NYC

American public transport
The what now?
I mean, it's three words. You can put any two of them in a sentence. But not the third.
- American Public? Public American?
  
  Er, I think they mean:
  American public (we exist)
  Public transport (not much here)
  American transport (cars)

I'm 30 years old and have taken a bus once in my entire life. Not because it sucks but because it's simply nonexistent. I'd have to drive 30 minutes just to get to the place that had the public transport and at that point I might as well just drive all the way there. And I don't even think the US has any trains that go between cities anymore except for commercial trains. I literally live next to a train track and it's all cargo trains. I've never seen a passenger car on a train in my entire life. Could just be where I live, but I've driven from coast to coast and the only trains are cargo trains.

Not too long ago, I saw a map showing where each train is in USA. Someone also posted a similar maps from Switzerland. Can you guess which one had more trains?

If americans come to germany and act like german public Transport is the best, how ~~frickin bad~~ non-existent is american public Transport?
FTFY. I was pretty blown away by it but I can get excited by a sidewalk.
- Yeah I'm not sure if everyone realizes this. There's all these states where there basically aren't sidewalks outside of maybe small areas. Like entire miles and miles of residential areas with no sidewalks whatsoever.

What is public transport? I think we need to establish that first. You mean like...the school bus? That's the only kind I've ever seen.
- Kids get public transport, education, and sometimes even food
  Old folks get walkable communities
  College kids (at great expense) also do
  The revealed preference is that we could have an excellent quality of life except for voters hating 18-65 year old adults

I live in an area know for having some of the better public transport in the states. My drive to work is about 25 minutes. I can bus to work, but it takes almost three hours and three separate busses, and then I cannot bus home after work.
- I live in an area that also has decent bus coverage with stops all over, although I've never actually taken the bus. I can't take the bus to work because there aren't stops where I need to go. I also attend school 19 miles away, and depending on traffic it's anywhere from a 30-45 minute drive. Last year my car broke down and I looked into taking the bus to school for the few weeks I would be carless. It would have been a 5 1/2 hour trip each way, I would have had to take 3 or 4 buses, transfer between 2 different companies, and I would have had to walk several miles in between stops to get from the first bus company's stop to the second's. Realistically, I couldn't have even left on time to make it to class or gotten back home while the buses were still running, even if I wanted to waste my life riding buses. I worked an extra 100 hours of OT that month to pay for my rental car.

America is owned and operated by rich people. They couldn't make money running passenger trains so once we were ordered to invest in car-only infrastructure the trains were mostly disbanded and shut down. There's a ghost of a system left with just a few corridors that could be considered bare minimum service in a developed nation.
How many kilometers of high speed rail does the US have? Zero. We have some that gets close, but not really.
My mid-sized city has two trains per day, one each direction, and they both leave between 1am and 2am. In Germany you would have 30+ trains per day in a city this size, likely a notable S-Bahn network, and also some trams and/or U-Bahns in the city to compliment busses. I've got busses in town, but they operated about every 30-45 minutes each, with evening service being every 60 minutes. Here's the fun part: our busses are the most used public transit system for a mid-sized city in the US right now and it's still pathetic when compared to even basic services in Europe.
DB needs to keep getting investment. Germany must get to a dedicated passenger rail network to separate out the freight trains. DB should also be re-nationalized and operated as a national service, not a for profit system that will inevitably fail as a commercial venture, leading to yet more terrible service. Here's hoping the latest German Parliament follows through on investment money that they pushed through at the start of the year! Also, keep the Deutschland Karte! That's such a great resource for everyone.

Its so bad its use is (wrongly) looked down upon as poor person transport unless its a large city. Everything is car culture and you are fucked without a car except in the largest metropolitan.
Shit does not run on time, its more expensive than it needs to be, and it goes very few places. It takes huge huge work to get it expanded because of NIMBYs and car companies fighting it.
Amtrak is doable but it takes as long or longer than driving a car.
There are no high speed trains and busses are a joke in cities. It can take hours to traverse a city because bus routes are terrible and constantly cut.
This is seriously all to do with car companies forcing out public transport in anyway possible as well as buying up a lot of city transportation portions and shutting them down as "not profitable". Americans defend it because "public good" has been vilified here. Its so dumb.
- Just to make this more explicit, I lived near a mall growing up. The mall actively fought against getting a bus stop put in near by. Why? Because if there is a bus stop near the mall, then, gasp, THOSE PEOPLE might come to the mall. And by those people, I think we all know I'm talking about.
- Urban busses will be slower than driving in most situations since they have to stop every few blocks. That's not really unique to the US. The exceptions are where there are BRT routes which can avoid commuter traffic, and this is becoming more common in the US but still lags behind the best European systems.

I live in the largest city in a Midwestern state. To access amtrak (the only passenger rail in the us)I need to drive 3 hours to the nearest station.
The city is shaped like a lopsided clock. I live in the burbs around 1 o'clock. I work for a fortune 50 company headquartered at 10 o'clock. To take the bus to my job I need to take the bus downtown and wait for an out bound. This would take 90 minutes when I could drive in 25.
America has not made public transit a serious option unless you are in Chicago, NYC or DC.
- Ooh, lemme guess: live in Westerville, work for JPMC?
  
  Jpmc is at high noon.

Only large, northeastern, US cities have anything resembling real public transportation.

And yet this shit is better than americas rails? How?
Where I live there are 3 mass transit options. The airports, inter-city busses, and Amtrack. We generally get around by car.
Amtrack costs as much as taking a plane but takes as long (or longer) than the busses and is really only a viable option in the North East US. The US does have an extensive rail network that covers a most of the US, but it's mostly used for heavy freight. Most towns and cities don't have a passenger rail terminal anymore. We only have this option only because we are between Atlanta and New Orleans. Most places in the US don't have this option. Here's a map of the US rail network. If you go to layers you can hide everything except Amtrak routes to see what I mean. Link doesn't work in Firefox as a heads up.
The inter-city busses are usually only once a day (sometimes only once a week) and take forever to get anywhere and often have long layovers on the way. But they do go almost everywhere in the country. Company is called Greyhound if you want to look them up.
And finally, we have the local regional airport. Imagine what Berlin might have been like during the middle of the Cold War. It's probably not too far off the situation at our airports. Show ID at the entrance, Strip, Walk through the scanner while your stuff is riffled through, dress, Show ID again at the gate, and pray you don't get picked for a more thorough search or harassed by TSA which might cause you to miss your flight. Granted, I haven't flown in over a decade, but my last plane trip made me decide to never fly again if I could at all help it.
- Your description of flying is still accurate.
  
  They added an option to pay the gestapo so you don’t have to take off your shoes. That’s the only change in the last decade.

What public transport?
- This is the true answer, hence I don't need to sarcastically form my own.

I had a bus skip my part of the route in US.
They literally took a whole different route that skips over the stop sign I am waiting at so they can get to the last stop faster and clock out.
I was using dart which gives live maps view of where the bus is.
Also sometimes busses malfunction and can't work but still go through all the stops, just don't let people in. Dart doesn't tell you they malfunctioned. You have to see for yourself when bus rolls by.
As far as drivers are concerned, someone's phone wasn't working so they restarted it to show the ticket. Our driver called the police for "delaying the bus." Entire bus had to walk to next stop.
Yippeee

I live in a smallish town with decent public transport in the US. Free, highly reliable busses that go to nearly every part of town and a couple of the connected suburbs as well. The locals hate it, I guess they're still mad it messed up traffic? Idk I just tell them if they hate the traffic so much use the free bus that is supposedly making their life so much harder.
This is abnormal in the US, having decent public transport. Its basically only available in MAJOR metro areas like NYC, LA, Seattle, Chicago. Most of the country barely has functional public transport, let alone reliable.
- Please, tell me where you live!
  
  But my opsec!

In a lot of areas it's virtually non-existent. In my medium size'd city. A bus stop is about 2 miles away and comes every 50 minutes.

i mean, can you get where you want to go, and back, by transit? if so it's kilometers better than most american transit.
eta: wait, you're talking rail specifically? then if you have any passenger rail, that's already way better than most american cities.

American rail doesn't exist outside of like two cities. To take public transit to work, I'd have to walk about 12km to the train station. From there, I could catch a train that runs every hour to downtown. I think that train takes about 45m, but I have no idea how often it runs. From downtown, I could transfer to light rail for 20m, transfer again to a bus for 15m, and then I could walk the last 6 blocks or so. Not counting the 12km walk, it would take at least 1:20 plus time spent waiting on transfers.
Or I could drive there in 45m of horrible traffic.
- The part a lot of people miss in these threads is that European commutes are often also an hour on public transit, but that one hour radius is wider and there is actual useful last mile service in the suburbs. That's the big thing the US frequently lacks - the development patterns mean there's no way to run frequent busses that don't just get stuck in traffic. So in the US that one hour transit commute can easily turn into 90 minutes or more if you don't make connections, whereas in European cities it's much easier to plan around.

I am lucky enough to live along the rail line that connects the east coast to Chicago. It is the main connection between population centers. There are only 2 train lines that pass through, each line only has one train in both directions. (total 4 a day, 2 east, 2 west) No service during the day, only early morning and late night.
Rail service is a joke here.
Our buses are more of a suggestion even if they go to where you want.
- My city has two trains per day: one each way. They leave at 1am and 2am. The US train system is hilariously bad.
  I know that DB in Germany is horrible compared to the rest of Europe, but at least it has trains that run during daylight hours!

What rail? We have Amtrak but it's laughable even compared to the poorest European countries. It's cars or nothing baby.
- Amtrak doesn’t own the rail line in most areas, so the trains are regularly halted to allow commercial cargo to pass. I think the Zepher is last to its destination most of the time.

Red head kid "y'all have public transit?" Meme.

Once Kansas City had apparently a fantastic streetcar. Then the car companies bought it up and tore out the rails. Now we're getting a streetcar being built again but it's just doing downtown on one street. I'm not near the streetcar.
So I drive to work. It's 12 miles, about 30 minutes (or 20 miles, 30 minutes if I take interstate around the city... honestly this city is weird, EVERYTHING is 30 minutes away.) If I wanted to take the bus, the shortest time frame would be 1 hr 35 minutes... not including that I'd have to get halfway there to get to the first bus stop.
Cities... if I wanted to take the train, I can go to Chicago for relatively cheap using Amtrak... but gotta plan that 3 months in advance, and the 8 hour ride we HOPE doesn't get extended because Amtrak doesn't own the rails it's on. Flipside, driving is 8 hours. Other cities, St. Louis, Wichita, basically I have two train lines, one in state, and one cross country. If I want to go to Denver... it's not happening.
So to answer your question, I want you to try to imagine how bad you think our public transportation is. Then lower your expectations.
- So to answer your question, I want you to try to imagine how bad you think our public transportation is. Then lower your expectations.
  Sounds like a line from a Terry Pratchett book
- But they are expanding the street car! ……a few blocks north. ヽ( `д´*)ノ
  Also, Gladstone cancelled their bus contract entirely. If you want to take a bus in Gladstone, you have to call some weird company contracted by the city to drive you to the bus stop.
  Everything is awful.
  Edit: I just remembered. If you live in Blue Springs, the bus only comes twice a day. 6am and 3pm. If you take the bus, you ride for a few hours, get to work at 9am, leave work at 12pm to get back at 3pm.
- Exactly this. Public transport in KC is effectively non-existent unless you live in the middle of downtown KCMO.
  Also as far as Amtrak goes, my biggest annoyance is that I can't travel with my dog via train. In Europe many train systems allow dogs with varying regulations and costs, and sometimes you have to buy your large dog a seat which I think is fair. Amtrak in the US doesn't allow large dogs at all. Now with no domestic airline flying large dogs either (they stopped that during Covid and never brought it back), my only option to travel with my dog is driving. I would happily buy him his own seat on a plane or train, and he's a certified good boy (CGC and SPOT-ON certificates) so he knows how to behave in public, but nope, not an option.
  For me, not having a car will never be an option as long as I live in the US, not because I couldn't manage to get around without one, but because I like taking my dog on adventures and what little public transportation we have in the US is not dog friendly at all.
  
  See, I'll drive for the most part, because to add on to my removed about public transportation.
  One time had to go to a place for work training. It was 12 hours away. I wanted to drive, company says no, they have me tickets.
  It took me 14 hours to get back home from what was a 12 hour car drive. And flying always ends with me pissed off.
  So it's all just absolute shite.

DB: "At least we're not National Rail."
National Rail: "At least we're not Amtrak."
- Amtrak: "At least we're not VIA Rail."

It may be bad in Germany but its worse in the USA. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has better transit options than the rest of the country. But its limited just to the city of San Francisco itself and maybe some parts outside the city. I just came back from a short trip to Germany, where my family lives. They live in Kassel, a mid-sized city in the north central part of the country. Even a mid-sized city has an extensive tram network and bus system. And a monthly transit card doesn't cost as much. Getting to Kassel itself was easy by train, though the train was 1/2 hour late. I am very, very jealous of my family.

My city only has the bus, which is super unreliable and the times might as well not exist half the time, or what happened to me recently was they changed stops for a route and Google maps never updated. It's typical to wait for an hour for a bus, sometimes they zoom right past you, or you need to transfer between lines. They're also planning on cutting 35% of bus lines next year, raising the fare, and stopping service at 11 pm, all due to lack of funding. You can read more here:
https://www.rideprt.org/2025-funding-crisis/funding-crisis/
There is a train, but it only goes to the suburbs outside of the city. The bus is your only option when you're in city limits.
I would take some more confusing steps over there not being an option at all.

Threadbare. In cities like NYC, it approximates European transport, though is somewhat more dysfunctional. Elsewhere, you have things like “commuter rail” (like a regio/S-bahn, only with next to no off-peak service, running solely as a shuttle between CBDs and dormitory suburbs). There’s Amtrak, but it’s slow and infrequent and runs on tracks owned by freight railroads, and often is delayed by hours from waiting for freight trains to pass. Bus services have a stigma, associating them with poor (and typically non-white) people, to the point where people who have a choice avoid them, and vote to minimise the amount of their tax money that goes to pay for them. And in some Republican states, the government has scrapped even buses, replacing them with Uber vouchers mailed to households.
So yes, DB is creaking and needs investment to bring it up to scratch, but its service levels (even when wracked by delays) are utopian compared to most of the US.
- DB needs to stop to pretend to be a global player and buy fricking bus lines in England and other places that are just a waste of money. If you can’t operate without accumulating debt then maybe you shouldn’t fucking be doing that. They fucked up a working system for profit and made it worse for everyone.

I happen to be a prime example of how bad US Rail is this week. I'm taking my son from near Fredericksburg (the real one), up to Ballston for a summer camp. We have a couple options:
Drive
Distance: ~70 miles one way, ~140 round trip
Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes one way, with traffic. ~3.5 hours round trip.
Cost:
4 gallons (US) of gas @ $3.50/gal: $14
Wear and tear: estimate at 0.5 gas cost: $7
Parking: $11
Total: $32/day

Virginia Railway Express (VRE) and Washington Area Metro (WMATA)
Distance: N/A
Time:
Drive to Fredericksburg station: 20 minutes
VRE (Fredericksburg to L'Enfant station) - 1 hour 20 minutes
WMATA (L'Enfant to Ballston) - 20 minutes
Total: 2 hours one way, 4 hours round trip

Cost:
Drive: we'll just ignore this, it's close enough to zero.
VRE: $23.56/person * 2 people: $47.12
WMATA: $3.45/person * 2 people: $6.90
Total: $54.02/day

So, for the low, low cost of about 1.68 times the cost of driving, we can take slightly longer to get to our destination and have zero control over our schedule, which makes the actual time devoted to travel considerably longer. We tried the public transit route last year, and it meant leaving earlier in the morning (about 30 minutes) to catch a train to get us there on time, and getting us home around 45 minutes later. And this is right around the US Capitol, which has some of the better transit options. Needless to say, we're driving this year.
I really want to be able to take transit, but it's basically dead in the US. Earlier this year, I needed to go to Boston for work. Catching a train from Washington, DC to Boston meant an 7 hour train ride (using the "high speed" Acela line) at ~$500 round trip. Flying was 1.5 hours and cost ~$300 round trip. Wanna guess which option I used?
Basically, all of the incentives are stacked against transit options in the US. Except within certain metro areas, driving or flying is always cheaper and faster. Yes, inside those metro areas, public transit can be great. I used to work in Washington, DC and used the VRE I mentioned earlier to get there and then WMATA or the Capital BikeShare to get to my office. That was great, since I didn't have to drive into DC every day, which sucks big donkey balls. But it probably wasn't cost effective and wasn't really time efficient either.
- I think Americans have a somewhat distorted view of what trains do.
  I live in Sweden's second biggest city, and visit Stockholm the capital regularly as I have family there. I can tell you that the price for flying often is cheaper than the train, and the train takes about 4 times as long to arrive to Stockholm. But I can't think of a single person I know that doesn't take the train to Stockholm from here.
  There's more to travel than the number of minutes on the mode of transport. There's getting yourself to the airport here, and from the airport in Stockholm. There are security checks in airports that take time and are often frustrating. There's the crammed space where you sit very uncomfortably. There's the bad air in the plane itself. Planes are just a frustrating exoerience. The train takes me from the train station at the center of my city to the center of the destination, it's spacious, it's comfortable, you can move around in a train, you can even do a lot of work during the trip if you want to. Trains are a pleasure to ride, planes are a pain. So just looking at the ticket cost and travel time on the transport mode itself ignores the many advantages trains have over planes. Hell, even my dog is always with me on the train, while he'd be staying at home if I was flying.
  
  As a Dutchie, I was amazed at the night trains in Sweden and Finland.
  Especially Finland was crazy: 92 eur for two in a private sleeper to get from Helsinki to Lapland (with interrail) is nothing compared to a seat in the sleeper train from Amsterdam to Vienna (50+ eur p.p. for a six person dorm).
  Although coming back it's weird that we whine about the Dutch railroads. Those are crazy reliable, I must never realised.

While in college, I needed to attend an event at another campus two hours away by car. I had no car. But I did try to look for a bus route:
Four hours down to the nearest major city with a bus terminal
Two hour stop in said city
Five hours back up to the starting latitude at my destination
Arrive Friday, attend the 6-hour function on Saturday, find somewhere to stay, and wait until Monday afternoon to make the same trip again in reverse.
I eventually found a friend who could drive me there and back, but we still had to get up at 05:00 on a Saturday to make it in time. Also, no Uber or Lyft, it was too rural to have drivers available at any given time. How glamorous it would have been if I could just hop on the train to the next town.

By your content I’m going to discuss regional, not local service. For context I’m in one of the top 10 most populous cities in the country. There is no regional rail service. That’s how bad it is. In order to catch a train, it’s a 2 hour drive to a much smaller city.
But let’s look at a train trip I wanted to take. All west coast, Portland, OR to San Diego, CA. There is at least rail service that would do it. I think it took 48 ish hours with a middle of the night layover in Los Angeles. The drive is about 16 hours. The flight is about 2.
When it exists, it’s slow and super inconvenient.

I thought it cute when I believed you were comparing bus service, but laughed out loud at "america's rails"

DB is the definite proof that German efficiency is a lie, but tourists using urban transports in big cities will usually have a good experience. Even the public transports in Berlin have got their shit together in the last few years, even if S-Bahn/DB are still a level below BVG.

Where I live, there are literally zero public transit options. There are a few bus stops closer to the downtown area, but honestly I have never actually seen the buses that supposedly go there. Usually there are just homeless people hanging out at the bus stops. We do have a small Amtrak station, which is nice, I guess, but it's way more expensive than driving and takes 4-10 times as long to get anywhere. Then when you get somewhere, you have to figure out how to rent a car. And this is the largest city in my state; most places don't even have well-paved roads, much less public transit.

if there is some kind of service to the general benefit of the public, you can presume America either does not have it, or will lose it within 5 years

My only option is the local city bus. For me to go eight miles straight east to where my work is, I'd have to transfer twice, go a couple miles north of where my destination is, and leave home at least two hours before my shift. By car, it takes less than 15 minutes.

What’s American rail?
Our side of town has zero rail, and it would take about two hours on a bus to get home from downtown, 7 miles away. Oh, and the Amtrak train 7 miles away shows up once a day at 2am. And I could probably hitchhike to where I’m going faster than that shit train would get me there.

The infrastructure is set up for cars, and then everyone has to drive their own car because we can't share a space respectfully. The only time I'd consider riding the bus is if I didn't have a car and if I had to for work. In the states the view towards public transportation is that if you depend on it you're not doing too well, which is sad. I commute 70 miles 1 way to work and would love to have a bullet train or something as an option. But as it is now, no, it's not even an option. I had a previous coworker that took 2 buses to work every day, and he was always telling me about the "interesting" people he'd run into on the bus, like a guy with a puppet at 7:00 in the morning, or the drivers that didn't know the schedule so they couldn't tell him when another bus would be coming. No thanks.

To be fair, German public transport (and I admit that I've only taken it around Berlin) is about average for Europe. Better than Norway not as good as the Netherlands.
From my limited travel around the states I can say that availability of public transport varies a lot from town to town.
Local transport: San Fransisco has a lot of public transport and its pretty reliable. I spent over a week in Shreveport Louisiana and I only saw a bus once. maybe I wasn't in the right place at the right time of day but it wasn't everywhere like in a European city. I haven't been to New York, but I have a new Yorker friend who says the subway stations are essentially a place for homeless people to masturbate when they get banned from the library. The entire state of Wyoming doesn't seem to have any public transport.
Intercity transport: The greyhound busses are used almost exclusively by people who are not legally allowed to drive (full of meth heads and schizophrenic nuns) the drivers were obviously whichever mentally ill passenger was closest to the front when the previous driver overdosed. They'll do things like throw their hands in the air and say don't worry jesus is protecting us! That's if there is a bus between cities. There isn't a bus between salt lake city and park city next door for example. The trains have been reduced steadily to the point where the majority of us cities don't even have a train station.
So yes Germany has excellent public transport, with the exception of having to validate your ticket before you get on the train (That's an inefficient waste of time).

I live in a bigger US city that does have a metro. It’s not bad for doing longer trips in certain directions, when it’s working. But it breaks down at least a few times a year, and if you have to make a transfer to another train to make it to your destination, it’s often literally faster to walk.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is surprisingly historically accurate if you ignore all the cartoons
- Smh, we're still doing toon erasure in 2025?
- If the 'toons represent the working class, then ignoring them is very appropos of what the politicians do.

American Public what?
I kid. But it's damned bad. I used to live just south of a major city (Baltimore, 500k people) beltway and worked just north of it.
We have a "subway" that has 3 stops, between one single suburb community and an area that was the city center decades ago.
We have one Lightrail. It goes North/South through the center of the city. I was extremely fortunate to live and work within walking distance.
There's a commuter rail that just follows the freight rail tracks south and east, and tickets are expensive and the trains only run a couple of times a day.
I was 32km from work, via lightrail, it took at least an hour and up to 3 hours each way.
It was 60km to drive around the beltway, that took roughly 30 minutes
Bus coverage is pretty good in poorer neighborhoods, and nearly non-existent when the neighborhoods reach non-poverty level. You'd literally need to walk down an expressway to get to the nearest bus stop where I am now. No sidewalks anywhere.

American public transport either doesn't exist or is considered to only be for poor people and migrant workers [sic].
The only place this isn't true is in a big city.

San Francisco has a pretty good bus/trolley system. There might be other cities with decent busses but I’m unaware of them.
Some major cities like New York, Boston, Philly, Chicago have acceptable subways, and commuter rails. You can probably get a daily train from one city to the next. Example: you can take a train from Boston to NY once a day - it’s fairly ok, and probably preferable than driving for most people.
Most cities have busses that suck, and literally zero trains and subways.
Most Europeans don’t realize how big the US is, and how much of it is quite rural. It doesn’t make sense to build a rail to service the few dozen families in east bumfuck nowhere.
Getting a license to drive is, generally speaking, pretty easy from most states. Usually just a written test and a road test where you just have to drive around the block without breaking any rules.
Some city dwellers survive without cars, but they are kind of stuck in the city. When they want to get out, they’ll rent a car for the day.
- Just took a look at some population density maps, and I must say that the kind of density you have between Boston and Washington DC is approximately what most of Central Europe looks like. Other parts of USA are pretty sparsely populated.
  Apart from the large cities, you could say that anywhere east of Dallas looks a lot like northern Scandinavia in terms of population density. Even Poland has a higher density than the gaps between major cities such as Phoenix and Denver. To me, it seems like nearly everyone lives in one of the big cities, and there's hardly anything in between them.
  
  The worst part, from a transportation perspective, is that our low density rural areas in the US are often isolated homesteads. Fully scattered single family farms and ranches, miles from the next family. We don't have as much village centric rural areas as in Europe. So it makes delivering services (transportation, education, health care) to our rural population much harder.
- Boston to NY is more like hourly - Amtrak has a lot of trains going on the line from Boston to/from DC (DC also has a very good transit system for the US at least from what I've heard).
  The problem with those trains is that they're expensive and slower - the Amtrak northeast regional costs $75-300 (depending on the date and time, as Amtrak is a company and charges more around holidays and during peak travel hours 🙃) each way from NY to Boston and takes ~4-4.5 hours. Driving can take 3.5-4 if you plan around rush hours in both cities.
  
  Yup - I was thinking the fast train, which isn’t fast at all compared to the rest of the world. I think that one is only once or twice a day - could be wrong though. Price aside, it’s not a terrible experience.
  I’d rather dig my eyes out with a dull spoon than take the others. Snail’s pace and stops every 5 min.

When I was in Australia, a bunch of people asked me about the public transport here and all of them were baffled when I told them how shit it was...
I have no idea where this perception that everything must be perfect in Germany or Europe came from but it is sooo outdated.
Speaking of tickets; in NSW you just tap your Opal card when entering/leaving train stations. It makes so much more sense and is so much easier.
- Because compared to America everyone else’s “shit” is 10x better than our “none at all”.
- Don't even need an Opal card- just tap your phone or your bank card.
  The network is also massive. You can tap on in Kiama and tap off in Scone. That's about 400km, roughly equivalent to Berlin to Frankfurt, on regular metro trains. Might take a while, but you can do it.
  
  That's even better then. I just used an Opal card, I'm sure my credit card would've worked fine but I tend to be extra cautious when It comes to things like that, plus it's a nice souvenir

Public transportation doesn't work in the endless suburbs and stripmalls we've built. It's too spread out, and we've been doing it for a few generations now. It's difficult for my countrypeople to imagine living differently, to imagine that our current existence may not be their birthright.
People think nothing of living 20 plus miles from where they work or go to school, can't imagine a world where such a thing is a ridiculous notion. We could have all these nice things. People want a better world, a more functional city.
But ask people to change, to live a smaller life, and be prepared for a deluge of excuses and justifications. We all wake up and collectively decide the world we're gonna live in today.

In a few cities it's good. NYC, Chicago, where white people live in DC, and maaaybe SFO come to mind. (LA your subway is only for movies, F off). Literally everywhere else it's a travesty of busses designed to institutionalize and reinforce classism and poverty. So it's bad, and no one wants to use a bus system (lack of tracks? Lack of charm!) of it served wealthier neighborhoods.

Hell, I've heard of Americans coming to Vancouver Canada and being pleasantly surprised about our public transit. We don't even technically have a proper heavy metro, and the SkyTrain is classified as automated "light" metro, AKA the kind they have in tiny German towns that are too small for heavy metro or S-bahn, AKA basically the same as an airport peoplemover but built out for a metro area of 3 million people.

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