Mine is only 15-20 minutes. But recently leadership gave an employee at a different office an award for something else. The guy had to give an impromptu speech about it. He mentioned the usual stuff but then commented on how his commute was an extra hour compared to his previous job, but “so worth it”. I wanted to reach through the screen.
Yeah but some trains come every two hours like the commuter rail. So like wait two hours for a train or be in traffic for three hours and then and then that’s not even taking into account the travel time which could be up to another two hours. … There’s no fuckin’ winning
What could take an hour on a good traffic day can be a four hour total trip by public transportation.
If your commuter rail in a major city comes only every two hours your system is simply bad. I commute a good distance and there is a fast train every 30 min, from early morning to late night, every day. Frequency gets only worse to places that are already outside of reasonable commuting distance and even then there is usually a train every 60 min.
Why wouldn’t you just leave 2 hours later and not wait at all in that situation?
Not the person you’re replying to, but if you happen to miss a train or it gets cancelled you generally are already at the train station. Depending on travel time and conditions it might be safer or more convenient to wait at the station, even if it’s for two hours.
I’ve never had to wait for a next train for longer than 30 minutes (maybe once it was an hour because it was a very small train station and during the weekend), but I live in a place with a pretty dense railway network and have mostly lived near one of the biggest routes.
the local trains are the most convenient the Orange, Blue, Red and Green with delays up to about 20 minutes but a lot of people tend to wait for an Uber (again someone with a car) if it’s over 20 minutes of a wait.
Commuter Rail depending on your arrival station and your destination station, your wait time can be 2 hours okay yeah if you miss a train you’re waiting the 2 hours but I gave an example below of a short shopping trip where you’re fucking yourself taking the commuter rail out to a dispensary that can be an hour and a half round trip by car vs 4 a 4 hour round trip by public transportation/the equivalent to a flight to Denver.
LIke doing groceries by public transportation sucks too, I usually call an uber, again the person with a car and a personal storage area where you can load up your own shit.
You can’t attach a camper to a bus and go to Maine, right? You can actually have like freedom to do shit and experience life when you have a car. You can take public transportation for fun and make it something to do for fun when you have a car. You still appreciate it, it just doesn’t suck to be an individual. Again, this is coming from the 16 years of doing it and i’m just good on it.
I don’t even drive, I don’t even own a car yet, I’m still biking and using the T, my back fucking hurts at 33 and I’m really sick of it. After a while you start questioning a lot of things but I won’t lie I love biking and I end up always being thrown that bone by nature and life and having those moments where my music syncs to my surroundings and/or everything feels perfect like I’m the only one on the planet or just everything has that, “it’s for me,” feeling and for that i truly don’t hate being a cyclist. and there are times on public transportation where i get to see crazy shit happen, like the last time on the orange line there were two boneheads jumping back and fourth between moving carts after they opened the door between the two, I don’t 100% hate public transportation it’s just over time you start to need to get around a little easier is all
It’s not that i absolutely fucking hate it it’s unreliable for absolute needs. Like doctors appointments, getting to work, getting groceries, getting cannabis from the dispensary that has the strain that actually helps. If my mom was taken to the hospital that’s an all day affair for me to get there by public transportation, she could die by the time I get there, if I drove it’s less than 45 mins away.
Commuter rail usually comes more frequently than that, no? And if you know when it comes and it’s not two hours late then you’re waiting around for it unless you’re way too fuckin’ early.
it’s quicker for the city but if you’re going into Woburn for a dispensary run, that takes less than 10 mins to perform the transaction (saying for the sake of actual example that I’ve been in, the dispo workers are the best and I didn’t mean they’re slow) and takes 10 mins to walk there from the CR stop, that’s less than 40 mins away by driving so lets say about an 80 minute round trip, that’s an hour and twenty minutes round trip. If I take the commuter rail that’s 20 minutes to the city using the local train , the 15 minute wait at North Station (because YOU DO want to be early for the commuter rail and that’s if you know your schedule and you know you’re gonna make it, sometimes there’s games and you lose out waiting at the fare gate lines), and about an hour and a half there and then a two hour wait after the short shopping trip.
So to put it into perspective: That’s half your day wasted for what could be an hour and a half there and back. Traffic with driving could maybe add about 25 minutes but the amount of time I use on a single dispensary run to Woburn and back using the local train and the cr, I could take a plane to Denver, not even kidding about that, I just used Google Maps and double checked that flight time.
Ok? Really just sounds like the commuter rail could come more often which is a very easy fix. Public transit is pretty much only ever bad because governments won’t fund it, car-centric infrastructure is highly propritized and its peak is still trash.
Traffic is bad enough here, adding the million people who use just the metro per day to that would be the end of it all, and that’s not to mention our bike network and ability to walk to so many things. We upgrading our commuter rail to a proper high-frequency, dual-direction light rail system that will connect much of the island that has never been properly served. It’s gunna pop the hell off.
Example
It’s cause of where it goes that it takes so long. The cr uses so much power you hear the full capacity kick in when they come into the station and everything vibrates, they’re the most powerful and they’re the fastest trains we have in my state.
The main use of the cr, is to get out of the city which is why it takes so long. Purple line https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/2025-03/2025-03-24-commuter-rail-map-v.42f.pdf
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Not a Honda Accord, but a Honda Ridgeline.
However, it’s the only comfortable seat I own, so I don’t mind it.
Trains where I am suck because the seats are too small, and no matter how little space there is next to me in a train seat, some fat guy always sits there. Usually right after he’s eaten a meal of nothing but raw garlic.
On a related note, never trust your GPS on I-95 driving near Washington DC.
Being Canadian in what is one of our larger (not major to be clear like 150k people) cities, when I went to the office it took 10ish mins. I moved a bit so had varying times. I work from home now so doesn’t really matter.
That said I love listening to audiobooks in the car. My android phone has been odd for connecting but working lately so I just continue on whichever book I’m listening to, for about 3mins to the store. I don’t go far heh. Bit longer if I drive closer to the office for a car wash every few weeks.
Meanwhile I do a delivery job and blare Free bird while going 90 in my 01 Tacoma. If it makes it any better it only goes 90 on gods forsaken desert roads while Free bird is playing, I got it to accelerate so fast the front lifted up last time
Unless you’re being transported somewhere as cattle, traveling for work is a choice.
Uh, it’s like comparing the best life you could have in Western Europe with the worst life you could have in American suburbs.
It’s no different from comparing an American surgeon earning 400k yearly in Manhattan to a person surviving in Belarus or Albania. Same bias but flipped in opposite direction.
Both comparisons would be unfair.
I am not saying life is worse in the EU than in the US, but there are many better ways to argue that more logically using data.
See, what you’re not getting is that the average US experience is just incredibly fucking mid. I live in Canada, specifically Montréal because the rest of the country is very much like the US. Cars are the only way to get around, you can’t even safely and confidently ride a bicycle in most North American cities.
The best the US has to offer is worse than pretty good but not the best in the EU. The worst the EU has to offer is nowhere near as bad as a fairly common, even if not universal, experience in the states.
Nothing from of either of our comments even fuckin’ matters though because this post is specifically calling out the people who think sitting in traffic “freedom” but 15 minute cities are tyrannical overreach.
Taking a train to work isn’t a luxury only afforded to the 1%, not only are they a better experience, trains are cheaper than driving in most of the world.
“Best life” is when one has to commute to work by train?
Pretty sure it is about the Alps and the wine.
Didn’t have wine every day when I went to school by train.
Fair enough, although I thought OP was talking about just general travel, while the guy I’m responding to made it about commuting.
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Ikr. People aspire to get cars so they don’t have to take the fucking stupid ass unreliable public transportation. Back in my day the only people who relied on public transportation were poor people, retards and immigrants but I guess with the mental health crisis and the economy tanking, we’re all poor retards.
If you saw how expensive and shitty our trains are you’d pick the accord too
No… No I wouldn’t. At least if you’re from Europe. Been a lot of places and theyre all nice.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Soft Sleeper trains in China are quite nice and like 10USD/100 miles.
Yes it does, sadly. Our trains are basically set up to fail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U
Wait you just posted a video about how the system was intentionally designed to fail.
If it can intentionally be designed to fail then it can be redesigned to succeed. There is no reason it has to be the way it is
There are billions of dollars aligned against fixing the problem though so its going to look bad on paper to start fixing things, at least at first. You’d need to fix the political system to allow that kind of multi election cycle thinking to exist.
Yeah, but money has lost elections before.
It’s not money controlling the issues. It’s hatred of minorities and mistrust of the government (that people voted in), as well as of course a slew of other issues. But it starts with mentalities, not dollars.
Wait 'til you hear about the ice cream machines at McDonald’s
Probably an intenet myth. But I have somewhere in my memory, that the machines are hard to clean. So enployees mark them out of order to not have to clean them.
Urban Legend. Probably.
It doesn’t happen to ice cream machines at other fast food franchises nearly as frequently, and the machines at McDonald’s give unhelpful error codes and are generally designed to require pricey field technician visits (that are helpfully provided by the manufacturer) to resolve.
There was a third party device that was created to get around the error code issue, providing actual details of what was wrong and saving franchise owners thousands of dollars. So naturally the manufacturer sued the creator and petitioned McD’s corporate to disallow its use.
TIL. Thanks for the reply.
In theory yes, but there’s far too much vested interest in seeing that our trains fail.
It doesn’t have to be that way but it currently is, and that’s why Americans don’t take trains. Have you seen Amtrak? It’s like an 1800’s coal train; the LA Metro (light rail) is great if you want to get stabbed by a tweaker on the way to work.
I used to take Amtrak between Philly and DC. It took about 2 hours which is a bit shorter than driving if you’re lucky enough to not hit major traffic. The problem was that if it rained you had water pouring into the car from multiple spots in the ceiling. Just an amazing thing to see in 200-year-old technology. Even Amish buggies don’t leak like that.
I thought about taking the Acela on that route once. Cost 4X as much and shaved a whopping 10 minutes off the time.
I do not understand Amtrak at all. The Keystone has been the absolute best thing about moving back east for me. $25 to Manhattan, grab a bagel, see a show, $25 home. And the Keystone is the crappy commuter train, the Pennsylvanian is way nicer. I’ve done it tons of times and it’s only been late once, and no leaks on the rain.
Getting to DC costs hundreds each way and isn’t any faster than driving. I’m better off buying a ticket to Baltimore and then taking the $7 commuter to DC…
Omg, the soft sleepers. Took them all over China. Hangzhou, yinchuan, chengdu, kunming. Once completely fucked up with language and took a slow train hard seat to Xian from Beijing. More than 24hrs over May Day/labor week. People were crawling in the windows in the middle of a field. Cannot recommend that.
Was it just absolutely packed and the window was the only way to make it inside? Maybe you ended up spending hours pressed against other people? Not sure if folks would be motivated to try to board without a ticket
Yes. Climbing in the windows and sitting in the aisle. I went to the bathroom once. It was like those puzzles with one piece missing, including those standing in the bathroom.
It was like those puzzles with one piece missing, including those standing in the bathroom.
Perfect visual :D
What’s that adjusted for income?
Somewhere between 40 and 100 USD depending on location.
But as wages increase and the market is able to bear higher prices, its unlikely to increase to those prices, since the rail network isn’t run for profit.
Prices will still go up as labor costs increase, just not as much as they could, similar to rent and food.
There are of course far cheaper options such as hard sleepers, soft seats, and hard seats, which pack 6 beds per birth, 8 seats, or ~12 seats respectively, and also a more expensive option on some trains that’s 2 beds per berth.
Intrigued by the different options. I can search images of each of the four seating option types to compare… I am curious if you might find it a good use of your time to share photos of each of the options as you remember them, maybe with little annotation wherever is relevant?
Also quickly in my defense, the soft sleeper Wikipedia article features a hallway photo instead of a bed photo. :)
Sorry, I don’t have pictures I took myself that show the layout, but the app has examples. I think the top business class pic is actually Premium Business Class.
Theres a few other layouts, but you get the gist.
spoiler
High speed from Beijing to Shanghai:
And for slow trains:
Most slow trains have a dining car in my experience.
Put a smile right on my face, a hundred pics & all better than web image search results :D asked the right alcoholicorn
So - And then there’s standing!
Great look into all those options, American Amtrak has a fraction I think
No problem, I would have taken pictures myself if I expected anyone to care. Maybe when I return in 3-4 months.
Unrelated, here’s a simulator at a train museum in Tokyo.
At least you recognize that the system is forcing you to make that choice, and not your “individual freedom”.
Its really mixed tbh. Some make sense others cost a lot.
Expensive? Sure. Shitty? Not so much. I like our trains, at least the major lines.
I drive my car to work so I can afford a car so I can drive to work so I can afford a car
That’s nearly a line in Metric - Handshake
Buy this car to drive to work, drive to work to pay for this car.
There’s also some great movies about American poverty, and it feels like there’s always a scene where car trouble of some kind tips their life into an immediate downward spiral. They need it to get to work to sustain everything else, making one traffic stop the moment of despair.
The one I really appreciated, as heart wrenching as it was, is called Straw.
The worst part is that scenario you mention is a real thing that can happen and does happen to a lot of people in the US. You should see some of the cars in my deep red no-vehicle-inspection state. I once witnessed a car running on four donut spares, one headlight, and one taillight. And probably no insurance. The alternative is possibly losing a job and becoming homeless.
Too real. Barely avoided that trap once myself.
This is why rednecks are always shadetree mechanics of some stripe or another. Me too. I grew up poor, so I got real good at working on cars.
While that’s an excellent life skill, in Straw, the “car trouble” amounted to being harassed by a racist cop and having her license suspended.
In many cases the penalty is genuinely the driver’s fault, but it’s easy to happen when they’re always driving and always stressed.
I believe 20% of household spending in the US was for cars. So people could seriously work a day less every week, if they got rid of their car.
Really I wish I could live without one. Ive decided on harm reduction instead.
I learned something weird about cars and money and such just this last week. I got tired of working on a truck just to spend more money dumping fuel in it, and I took what I considered the nuclear option. I traded the truck in. On a used 2nd generation Nissan Leaf.
The car wasn’t expensive. I could easily afford it. But as I was working on the required financial gymnastics to fit a car payment in my budget, I saw that the truck has been using $200 of gas every month. And the auto insurance dropped by about $100 each month. The car payment is $200. It costs something like 70 cents to charge it after my commute.
The silly car isn’t cheap. It’s free. And its so quiet and smooth, no wonder people get evangelical about their EV’s.
How much is your car payment…?
The silly car isn’t cheap. It’s free
If you don’t count maintenance and insurance, parking, etc. Add those and it’s once again expensive.
I don’t understand your argument.
The truck I traded in had those same costs
And it got 15 mpg.
And the tires cost more.
And the insurance was twice as expensive.
And it needed oil changes
And it needed transmission fluid changes.
Sure its more expensive than owning no car at all. Owning no car at all just isn’t an option for a lot of people in the US. So instead of spending money on tires/brakes/insurance/fuel/oil/fluids/tires for an F150, I’m paying for tires/insurance for a dorky little EV. And I have an extra ~$400 in my budget.
Have you looked at a depreciation curve? For newish vehicles, the biggest “expense” is depreciation. Its higher for luxury cars and EVs than trucks.
Yeah, but I didn’t buy a new ev…
Correct, so you dodged the 25-35% cost of driving out of the lot, but unless its so old the resale value is like 5-10% of the og cost, depreciation is still going to be your greatest loss, likely 10-20% per year. Thats a few thousand dollars.
The silly car isn’t cheap. It’s free
I don’t understand your argument.
The car is not free. The car is still expensive. Even if it is a necessary expense. Even if it’s cheaper than the truck.
So its hair splitting then.
No, it’s talking about how cars are expensive, not free.
I got a shiny car. I like shiny things lol. That’s all it’s got going for it. I would rather be drunk on a train haha
This reminds me of when my parents made me get a job to pay for auto insurance at 16, though I didn’t have a car or plan to get one right away. Their rates would go way up unless I had a separate plan, so I had to get one. And then I needed to get a car to get to a job, so I had to spend everything I had saved up as a kid to get a barely functioning car and insure it. I will say that it was sadly a good intro into life as soon to be adult in America.
Yes but at least Trump is saving me money with the Freedom Fuel Network™
proceeds to pay >$100 to fill up the emotional support truck
/S massive giant /s since there are idiots who really think this, even after the Iran war erupted
emotional support truck
I’m going to start calling them this now. It’s perfect. Thank you. I usually call them Compensators or “Ferd F-Teen Thousands”
You just grew a 3rd ball.
I love picnicface.
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You just grew yourself a 4th ball.
it’s wild to me that americans don’t use propane as a car fuel
Could have sworn I remembered a video of a sedan, maybe in Russia, that had allegedly been converted to run on something like propane and the tanks were stored in the trunk. Sure this was more affordable than regular vehicle fuel, but when it got rear-ended… it exploded!
YouTube isn’t full of these videos by any means so maybe it’s safer than I thought?
it’s very common in turkey italy mexico and a couple other countries that sell lpg (propane-butane mix) at lower prices than gasoline, nothing explodes these tanks need to be certified (varies by country) and gasoline is already flammable so nbd
in a city where i live most of taxis are hybrids modified to run on lpg so it has to be both safe and durable
Propane-butane, interesting!
Oh good
its a mix that varies by season because in winter higher pressure at the same temperature is needed, and in summer the opposite. and also in winter gasoline has a little butane dissolved, because it’s cheaper and has high octane number, and makes engine startup easier. its a bit complicated but it works
Ah!
Are you familiar with the way California has winter and summer blends? I think it’s a slightly different principle, focused on being environmentally friendly in the summer when it shouldn’t be too hard for engines to start.
every country has these seasonal changes (except those near equator) both for gasoline diesel and lpg and this is before we get into renewable components
gasoline and lpg are changed for the same reason, it is to keep vapor pressure at the same temperature lower in summer and higher in winter. too low and it’s hard to start, too high and volatile components bubble out = gasoline degrades and makes smog in the city. diesel is more complicated because it gels out at lower temperatures but how exactly this happens depending on several things, and mitigations are different
It’s wilder that we don’t use gasoline in our barbecue grills.
Hank, you use real charcoal or it’s off to jail with you!
We tried it pretty well back in the 1970s. It was not uncommon to see LP powered conversions on the road. People even experimented with wood gas systems. The problem with LP, at least where I lived, was those engines didn’t start well in cold weather. And the second issue was regulations required fueling stations to have someone(s) trained and dedicated to doing those refills. It was deemed not safe to let the common man, (you know morons), do that. That added to the cost. And finally, with an LP tank in your car, you could be driving around with a possible bomb or at least a BLVE under your ass. Which is not safe for those around you.
Sometimes to day you will still see LP powered delivery vans rolling down the road. So it hasn’t totally gone away.
if liquid lpg is injected, not gas then it can start on lpg only no problem. this kind of thing appeared later so maybe it was not available at that time, and there are cars that use lpg as only fuel. most of cars just carry extra container for lpg and leave gasoline tank as is, and it works as backup
We use bald eagle urine instead
Some of those Americans are washing their gas station sandwiches down with gas station wine too.
gas station NACHOs.
You might be joking but I saw a guy a few years back in an old SUV drinking the last remnant of wine out of the bag from some box wine on the highway.
and gas station dick pills
A gas station that does not sell beer and ammunition is not some place I will buy gas from!
like an american would drive a vehicle as small as an accord
This made me laugh because I do indeed drive an Accord. I hate that sedan’s seem like they’re dying.
think about how I feel, with wagons pretty much already dead for the past decade
They’re still popular here in Europe. My last car was a wagon.
I’m still grieving horsedrawn carriages. 😔
Plenty of Accords in the US. It’s a pretty popular car over here.
for the poors, maybe /s
I like four-bangers, I like short shifters, I like si’s, subarus, lancers, pop pop pop on the downshift, stomp click click vrooom.
Do I get stuck in traffic sometimes? Ehh, once a week maybe.
Would I give it all up for the betterment of humanity as a whole, and hang my childhood on the memory rack forever?
…yeah. The irony of that, though is that being American and living in the rural south gotta throw the glowies a bone every now and then It’s barely even considerable, at all. There is no bus route. There is no train. There’s no carpool, I work third with one other person who lives on the other side of the city.
So, if I have to drive, and my preferance is 32mpg little cars, and for now… I have to, and I enjoy it,…
then I’m gonna.
Would I give it all up for the betterment of humanity as a whole, and hang my childhood on the memory rack forever? …yeah.
Unsarcastically, the world needs more people like you.
There’s a few on this board who would disagree, lmao, but thanks. Man’s gotta live in the world he’s given, not stamp his foot and demand it bend for him. I wasn’t the first here, I won’t be the last.
I read this entire post as if it was country music and I regret nothing.
Making superior options for long distance travel, commuting, and random short-distance trips doesn’t mean cars go away, it means the 98% of people who aren’t into cars get off the road for the rest of us.
Depends on who you talk to. Seems the more rabid members of fuckcars want to ban cars completely, and jail anyone who resists lol
I, unfortunately, have to commute 35 miles one way, usually on my Honda motorcycle. I wish we had any semblence of mass transit at all. But we do not.
I am not brave enough to ride
Riding is best learned with the appropriate amount of respect, a motorcycle safety foundation certified riding course, and lots and lots and lots of practice.
Or you can just hop on a bike for the first time in SEA, where even children and grandmas ride, and its treated with the same cultural reverence as a minivan.
Honestly, traffic in most India and SEA makes me really really not want to get anything that can fall over.
India is tough, but everyone goes slow in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia so most accidents are relatively minor. Lotta people texting with phone in hand while riding. They’re cracking down on drunk driving at least.
random gravel patch on an otherwise perfect road at 3AM
“oh fu-”
I’ve had my spills on mopeds as a teenager, having them at 55mph – ehhhh.
I see the fun in it but man do I not trust other vehicles on the road even in my own car half the time
I don’t blame you. I hope I didn’t sound like I was minimizing your concerns. Motorcycles are absolutely more inherently dangerous, especially for the rider, than cars. Not only are motorcycles harder to see, but sometimes just being around them seems to [occasionally] make other drivers act dumber for some reason. You have no cushion around you like you would with a car. You have to put a lot more effort into being visible, thinking ahead, and anticipating danger zones. If you’re in an accident, you don’t have the luxury of four walls, a seatbelt, and airbags.
Then there’s the “physics” which are very different from the physics of a four wheeled vehicle. You not only have to understand those, you also have to basically beat your own instincts out of yourself so you automatically respond correctly when you do inevitabely find yourself in an emergency situation.
Statistically, the majority of motorcycle wrecks occur at speeds under 30 mph (~48 kph). Usually because someone didn’t see the rider and/or the rider either wasn’t aware of or didn’t know how to apply the appropriate technique. As a rider, you will be much safer with proper training and safety gear. But you will never be as safe as in a passenger vehicle. I don’t blame people who look at motorcycles and go “Nope. Hard pass.” at all.
