(to explain my critique, people who grew up in suburbia and consider cars as The Way You Get Places are understandably going to struggle using transit. Rather than get mad at them for "not getting it" or whatever I'd rather we spend some effort making transit more obvious & less "a thing to learn")
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If it doesn't have a train, it needs a train.
Moving trucks back to rail, building on mass passenger infrastructure and bullet trains, and more!
TRAINS!
You could save so much energy on a train! You could have a party on a train! Rolling wonder machines for everyone!
I'm curious what efforts would go into making transit more obvious.
Would that be an education thing? A restructure to our approaches on building transit infrastructure?
The gold standard is seating with a shelter and a real time display showing the wait time for the next bus
Buses are straight up the worst possible option where I live
My dad uses an SMS text based schedule system and can’t figure out the app.
I never bothered for the longest time because I would have had to carry cash, and didn't have access to any
Using transit is a skill.
I'm not saying insults are therefore productive, to be clear. Just that it's hard.
Some people in transit enthusiast circles are like "EMV so slow! What about faregate throughput"
It's frustrating, literally and figuratively putting up barriers to new riders.
The use cases for taking public transit in the suburbs feels really limited. Commuting to the train station for work and... anything else?
Metra may be scrappy and a *lot* of it could do with some upgrades, but even with their ancient trains you can get well into DuPage county in 30 minutes, which you cannot by car.
The old, slow trains aren't a problem.
The Metra was a godsend while I went to grad school at Elmhurst