• awwwyissss@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      41
      ·
      9 months ago

      No need to spend so many billions of taxpayer money expanding roads if people use buses.

      • magiccupcake@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        9 months ago

        But people don’t use buses, mostly because they are slower than driving, and too expensive. Free buses would save money in the long run because you wouldn’t spend as much on roads.

        So buses are not treated as a serious solutions transit (except for few places with dedicated bus lanes) , and neither are trains.

        • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          32
          ·
          9 months ago

          Kind of a catch-22: public transport sucks after decades of neglect and underfunding, to the benefit of private transportation like cars.

          As it is, it’s seen by most as the solution for people that can’t afford cars, so it’s got quite a reputation hurdle to overcome too.

          I’m from Montréal, and it’s a shock how unusable public transport is in the US. Everything’s a solid 30+ minutes away by foot even when bordering the city, and buses are so slow and infrequent you’re still better off walking. So, I take the car, and I can understand how people that never experienced good public transport would be hesitant to fund it any further.

          Classic America to be fair: butcher every public service until it’s unusable and then use that politically as a demonstration of how terrible it is and how we should just hand it off to private companies.

          • KlavKalashj@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            8
            ·
            9 months ago

            Classic America to be fair: butcher every public service until it’s unusable and then use that politically as a demonstration of how terrible it is and how we should just hand it off to private companies.

            This is happening in Sweden too right now.

            • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              9 months ago

              According to Das Kapital it’s an inevitable outcome of any system that rewards the owning class when they present capitalist solutions. Representatives depend on experts to represent, and the owning class will promote and endorse experts trained to justify their interests.

              Ultimately, regulatory departments get captured by the industries they are supposed to corral.

        • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          9 months ago

          People would use buses if the government spent our tax money on public transportation instead of roads. There would be more, faster, safer buses.

    • vividspecter@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      9 months ago

      Unless they have their own dedicated lanes then they are not a viable alternative to driving. If they were converting existing lanes into bus lanes than that would be an affordable and reasonably effective option.

    • biddy@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      9 months ago

      Not those roads, highways. Highways are designed to enter, stay on the highway without stopping except to wait in a traffic jam, then leave. This is terrible for buses which need to stop in-between.

      Ideally they would take the opportunity while building the highway to build a parallel busway, but that tends not to happen