Comment by mrangle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrangle | Hacker News Reader

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Public transportation isn't exactly cheap when used every day. Then factor in your time and frustration. Nothing is as expensive as your time.

Cars are amazing at their current cost, comparatively. And as I said, we should work on making them cheaper.

Toward an ultimate goal of making everyone "richer". Which begins with reducing hidden poverty taxes like unavoidable multi-hour public transportation commutes.

My ultimate dream for society, as a whole, is for everyone to "be rich". I don't necessarily mean having a disgusting surplus of money in the bank, but rather to eliminate the innumerable aspects of being "not rich" that boil down to an endless string of otherwise unnecessary daily sacrifices, sufferings and indignities. Then, at least, we'd begin to see the trauma of poverty be reduced and hopefully eliminated.

In this case, that means turning a gimlet eye to the human cost of unavoidable mass transport that isn't rail. Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category. This opens up easier access to work, relationships, housing, and food including breaking down the barriers of food deserts.

Thanks. The commute time was more an aspect of the innate slowness bus transportation combined with the unavoidable route through city side streets. In other words, it would be hard to improve upon. By car, the route is thirty minutes.

> Public transportation isn't exactly cheap when used every day. Then factor in your time and frustration. Nothing is as expensive as your time.

Public transport is cheap for an individual, and when many people use it, it reduces traffic and pollution.

Cars have the opposite effect. They are expensive for an individual, and when many people use them, it increases traffic and pollution…

Don’t aim to increase cars on the road, it’s better and cheaper for everyone to improve public transport

> Nothing is as expensive as your time.

Then public transport should be way cheaper than driving, as on transit you have some downtime where you can scroll through your phone, listen to some music, or perhaps even crack open your laptop if you're on a proper train. Driving requires constant attention, so you can't relax or do anything else in the meantime.

Scrolling through your phone is not exactly quality time. In general the time spent on any form of commuting is a net cost to be minimized.

Depends on what you're doing. I frequently use my rides to go through email.

Which you can also do during any of the time you don't spend commuting, without having to do it on a noisy train car.

At the limit the optimal commute is work from home.

I do work from home, actually. Regardless, I still have places to be at times that are not my house.

If scrolling through your phone were worthwhile enough that being able to do it made up for the loss of time, people would deliberately take trains instead of cars just so they could take a little longer but be able to scroll through their phones.

The bottom line is that it is geometrically impossible to get everyone in a city to work by car. End of story.

You can lament all you want, but the difference in space between a car and an apartment/office building makes the problem you're discussing completely unsolvable.

So, if you really care about making everyone richer, the only question you can ask is how to improve public transit. Anything else is pure make-believe.

    > Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category.

This is insane. How would any dense city work without mass transit?

this is just bizarre. cars are extremely expensive, polluting, dangerous and highways aren’t good for nature or human living.

nobody should live in a sprawl or rural area so far they need to commute two hours. make transit and trains fast and cheap and frequent, build opportunities in cities, and design cheap housing in desirable areas.

Fully agree! Instead of bringing the middle class down, instead lift everyone up. The alternative is pure and irrational evil.

The alternative to good public transit for everyone is bad public transit for the majority and cars for a few.

You don't get to imagine an alternative like "cars for everyone", because it's simply not possible.

That is literally what we have now.

I don't recall receiving my tax-funded F-150 from the government this year.

No, in most cities most people by far use public transit for their commute. And in most cities, especially where this is not exactly true, car traffic is already hellish at rush hour.

I wonder what most of the commuters do at work? Sit in front of a computer maybe?

What does that have to do with anything?

I do agree that work-from-home should be a part of the transit solution. But not even the entire software industry can work from home, nevermind all the other industries that sometimes use computers.

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