Comment on Being poor is expensive
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours agoIf 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.
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!
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.
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.
Do you know the phrase that you can’t get blood from a stone? Someone who can’t even afford the car has a worse quality of life in places without good public transit, that’s why for the most part everyone who can afford it chooses to drive in those areas. I blame the state and the federal governments for improper funding, not transit agencies. Someone who can choose to spend money on driving a car instead of rent is not somehow worse off than their neighbor who can’t afford a car but still has to get to their job with an added 1-2 hours tacked on to their commute each way.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 12 hours ago
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.