You have to experience it to understand.
And here’s an example:
Drive time from Kid b to tennis club: 8 minutes
Public transport time: 25 minutes walking, 20 minutes waiting between buses, 20 minutes on buses (which take the highly populated route, not the less busy route): resulting time minimum 1hr 5 minutes.
The railways system is radial; it’s mostly designed to get commuters to the centre and out again. But the people who live in the city have few benefits from that.
This is the problem in cities like London. Buses must go on the routes used by the maximum number of people. But these are also the routes most used by cars and cyclists. The buses add to the congestion (when a bus stops, maybe fifty cars stop behind it.)
If you send the buses down the less congested streets, people have to walk to them and this disadvantages the elderly, women with small children and so on - outside commuting time, the main bus users.
One obvious answer is to knock down the city and start again, but then you won’t have the population density to support the transport system.
The other is self driving taxis which offer the only hope of keeping cities functional in the long term. Which is why so much money is being thrown at them. A SDT can go down less congested routes and doesn’t cause the annoyance to houseowners of a bus. Roads are used more efficiently. With electric power there are few efficiency downsides.
But until then people in congested British cities will park on the road because they have no space to do anything else, because they have to get to jobs, schools and so on and they can’t spend hours every day on public transport.
I know it’s just an example, but how long would it take to walk to tennis? Ride a bike? Too dangerous? Get rid of the street parking to make cycling safer.
I am obviously generalising here. Apologies if I offended you. Everyone’s “needs” are indeed different.
There was no offense taken, I was just giving an example.
No problems. It’s a good example.
I assumed it had already been going on for a while when filmer started filming.
I see. The situation seems stuck in a bad state because there’s no apparent way to a better state (arguably: I mean more public transport, better fit to needs, therefore more used) that wouldn’t make the current problems outright unmanageable in the short term.
If that’s the case, then wow. But if I saw someone having such a time of it, even though they’re face isn’t identifiable from the angle, I wouldn’t splash their difficulties on YouTube. It seems a bit callous to laugh at people for this.
No. I think self driving vehicles will be the answer. Buses are too big for many English roads but taxis are too manpower intensive.
I think it is this way because it didn’t have to be the way you imply (i.e. close to all of: family, friends, workplace, recreation). Choices.
Choices that involve not having our horizons limited, allowing our family to be mobile not trapped. Welcoming others, not fearing the other in our parochial localism. I do understand your apparent frustration that bloody everybody has the temerity to want to go places that are not amenable to cycling, walking or public transport, but I wonder if the only time/place your vision was ever true was some sort of mythical/historical agrarian idyll.
And distance IS time.
Congratulations on the huge amount of choice you have been able to exercise. Others’ choices are more restricted and a car greatly expands them.
Yeah as a bike rider I am sensitive to parked cars opening their doors. I hate to think what an opening door would do to those kids.
I love to travel and would hate to have my “horizons limited”, but equally, I hate the waste of time and resources that would be caused by travelling the same large distances over and over again as a part of my routine life. So I choose a more “local” life for my day-to-day existence. Each to their own.
Yes, to an extent. My point is the opposite. Distance costs us time. When we developed faster transport, we didn’t bank the time, we moved further away from family, friends, work and play. (Example is that the development of cheap air travel has resulted in my generation having friends all over the world. My parents knew virtually no-one overseas, but they weren’t short of friends.)
Yeah, I agree.
But I admit, my thinking went from “why would anyone want to watch someone fail at parallel parking” to “whoever filmed this, put it to music, and posted it on Youtube is an asshole” to “omg, this person really has no idea how to move the car. Trial and error should have taken care of this by now.”
Maybe you’re right and it was staged.
On the one hand, that’s really cool. On the other hand, I keep thinking, “now pull the car out the the spot, smart guy”.
(In my neighbourhood we have to parallel park a lot. One of my pet peeves is when someone parks with a good amount of room fore and aft, only for subsequent drivers to hem them in.)
When I lived in Canberra and didn’t have a car, I occasionally helped a friend who gave scuba lessons at a nearby pool. Once (and only once), I got fully dressed in my scuba gear at home and bicycled to the pool. My only compromise was to carry the fins rather than try to pedal with them on.
Do I infer correctly that you think that driving them around to the various rinks is more dangerous than the hockey itself? (Because I agree fully with this. When I lived in Canberra, it was an hour down to the coast to go scuba diving. My friend who owned one of the scuba stores in Canberra always made a point to students that the most dangerous part of diving for them was going to be the drive.)
For a Canadian, suggesting that one refrain from playing ice hockey is like telling a fish to avoid getting wet. I have a brother who didn’t play and I used to introduce him to people as, “this is my brother Andrew; he can’t skate.”
