If you can afford a car to begin with you are already at a different level of broke than people stuck taking the bus even when transit is shitty and comes once an hour. Waiting an hour for a bus each way for your daily commute is nothing like spending a few minutes in a traffic jam (which the bus would also be subject to!) or looking for a parking spot.
Comment on Being poor is expensive
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago… buses don’t come hourly there. They come far more often.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Waiting an hour for a bus each way for your daily commute
Adding an hour-long commute turns an 8 hour day into a 10 hour day, for no extra pay. A $25/hr job turns into a $20/hr job.
For the bus rider, avoiding that “commuter tax” strictly limits employment options to those employers on the same line(s) as their home. Adding a transfer slashes the hourly rate even faster.
Further, those bus lines only operate in dense urban areas, where housing costs are also at an exorbitant premium for the space acquired.
The driver can choose to work in less dense areas, where traffic jams simply don’t occur, parking is easy to find, and housing costs are considerably lower. The bus rider can’t: buses tend not to serve such areas.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
A few minutes in a traffic jam? Pah, that isn’t a traffic jam. They last for far longer.
I never need to wait an hour for a bus - at most it’s 20 min and that’s late in the evening.
I think it’s a big sign of societal poverty when people are condemned to cars!
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
That sounds nice for you, but that’s not how public transit works in most American cities. I’ve been stuck in standstill traffic in a bus, and in a lot of areas here dedicated bus lanes are rare.
When that’s the state you’re stuck in as a poor person, it doesn’t matter that there are all these negatives attached to taking a hollowed out public transit system; if you don’t have the money for a car you either take it (and spend an extra hour or two commuting each way due to delays or wait times) or you don’t go anywhere. Someone with the money to buy and maintain a car is objectively not more impoverished than the person who is scrounging for $1.75 to pay fare.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Again, that is a policy failure. Do not blame the public transit & pro-walkability/bicycleability organisations, but the car lobbies.
Also, c’mon, a car is more expensive to maintain - it impoverishes you more. You have to pay for petrol/electricity/hydrogen, have to face traffic jams and still focus during travel, find parking spots, waste a ton of your local currency on paying it off, and so on.
No fucking thanks.
5ibelius9insterberg@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Where do buses come far more often? Do you think everyone lives in the middle of a big city with working transit? Also no one said driving a car is good or a sign of wealth. Your right about cars being shitty, but that does not contradict the point which is made in the posted screenshot.
faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
The only reason I got my driver’s license is because the bus was over an hour late and I missed an interview. The transit agency had the gall to tell me that I should have taken the 6am bus for a noon appointment if it was so important the 9am bus was on time.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
And there it hits again: the core of the issue is not the bus agency, but the lack of support for excellent public transit.
Build another car lane, it gets filled up immediately.
Build a bus lane, have buses drive regularly between areas of cities, connect cities with each other by train, and you’ll see it’s much better. Lack of bus lanes, bicycle lanes and paths, trains, is a policy failure caused by RINOs like those MAGAhats of Trump, who vote for bootlicking the petrolobby.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
I don’t control the busses. I don’t dictate to the busses when they need to come. I don’t dictate to the busses what routes they take, or where they will actually go. I can only accept whatever level of service they are willing to provide.
I do control my car. I do dictate to my car when it needs to go. I create the level of service I will receive.
The monetary price of a bus fare is significantly less than the cost of a car trip. But even with the absolute best public transit system, the opportunity costs vastly exceed the difference. An hour commute turns a $25/hr job into a $20/hr job. Employment and/or housing choices are limited: Job and home need to be on the same bus line, because a twice-daily transfer is just going to kill hourly earnings. And, of course, there is the premium on urban housing.
Between the time costs, the housing costs, and the restrictions on employment choices, busses are a massive cost borne primarily by the impoverished.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Most people do live in cities, yes. I live in a town with like ‘only’ 20k people and yet there’s decent public transit.
Cars and their lobbies are the problem.
5ibelius9insterberg@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Not the problem OP was posting about.
RoquetteQueen@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
My 20k people town only has hourly bus service.