Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not popular on HN but this is the truth. Cars are fast, and they operate on your own schedule, and they don’t have to make a bunch of stops. There’s just no way transit can compete on travel time. Unless of course, a city decides to purposely underbuild roads relative to population (like what is induced with increased density) or purposely destroys car infrastructure, as San Francisco is doing with absurd speed…
Yes and no. Cars are indeed the fastest way to travel, if we disregard some aspects like the time needed to park and throughput limits. (also disregarding very large distances where high speed trains and airplanes out compete them) So for spread out places with lost of space cars will usually be the fastest. However if we look at dense city centres you have a lot of people competing for parking and a lot of people co…
The premise here is that travel time can be the only trade off, but suppose we make a different one: Stop charging fares for mass transit. Then more people take it because it costs less rather than because it's faster and it can be less expensive (and only slightly slower) even when the roads are minimally congested.