What would it ACTUALLY take for you to consider biking or taking the bus, in lieu of motoring?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Everyone has summed up the very reasonable objections. No way any of these can be fixed

Yes, boomers and gen X'ers must keep polluting the planet relentlessly with their personal automobile addiction until they push daisies, because their hubris won't let them admit that the way they architected things led to the current toxic built environment and relentless global warming. Got it.

Don’t blame Gen X for setting things up this way. Honestly, some of the build architecture choices around our cities and suburbs aren’t even Boomers’ fault — the interstate highway system and the development of car-friendly suburbs was the result of choices their parents’ generation made.

+1. I'm Gen-X. For most of my time in the DC area, I've taken public transport to work (bus or metro, depending on where I was living). But things change when you have kids or marry someone that (gasp) works on the opposite side of the city as you. Seems like some Gen-Zers haven't had to grapple with those realities yet.

There are open minded people in all generations who are doing the right thing (just like their are millennial or gen z'ers who drive tons too), but on average boomers drive way more than millennial or gen z'ers at similar life stages and have kept their driving rate into old age higher than the generation before them. Gen X falls close to boomers by a lot than to millennial, and gen z is coming in even lower than millennials so far.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0965856421003165

More opinion. Go outside. Touch grass. Maybe talk to a professional. You’re perseverating.

[Anonymous]

Why can’t Gen Xers function in society? Why are they too scared of public transit?

Gen X here, and I took public transit for many years. Shortly before the smoke inhalation incident on Metro where the woman died, I was trapped on a train that filled with smoke. We managed to pull into a station, which also started filling with smoke. Metro, in its infinite wisdom, refused to open the gates and then shut down the escalators so everyone had to walk to get out. People were starting to panic, and it was the only time in my life when I feared that someone was going to be trampled. Incompetent Metro employees just stood and watched. When the smoke inhalation incident happened a few months later and the woman died, and then the information came out that Metro employees were not receiving training, I was not surprised.

So, yeah, at a minimum functional, safe public transit with minimally competent employees who have actual safety training would be required.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not having children. Before kids we rented an apartment in Cleveland Park (no yard, no home maintenance) and walked or took the Metro almost everywhere. What else did we have to do besides eat brunch and workout? Nothing!
I lived for years without a car in Cleveland and Chicago as well.

I live in a fairly walkable area. I can walk to the post office, library, bank, hair salon, dentist, a few restaurants, and a small grocery store that has basics like milk and eggs.

It is not practical to use the bus to shop at Target or to pick up a week of groceries for a family of 4. My kids have activities and I work full time. My office and my home are both a block from Wilson Blvd in Arlington and are less than 3 miles apart. I could take the bus except my kids need to be places at specific times and I don’t have time to wait for the bus and then walk from the bus stop to their school. Even if a bus came every 7 minutes, it only takes me 6 minutes to drive from my office to their school.

I can use my car to carpool in my fuel efficient car and plan my errands to batch them up and shop as close and local as possible - OR I could use the bus and Metro and buy everything from Amazon. I am pretty sure having shampoo shipped to my doorstep in a cardboard box is more wasteful than a shared trip to Costco with my neighbor every 3 months.

Public transit is not always automatically better.

People actually do this, though. Many people can't drive or don't have cars, and that is what they do. Maybe "inconvenient" would be a better word.

Well yes- so the only reason I would take the bus to do these things at this time in my life was if I had no other option. Otherwise I would waste way too much time on simple tasks like going to Target. It IS too inconvenient.

And I’m someone who took the bus a lot when I was single and lived in a well connected area. To work, the gym, and often did pick up things from the store before getting in the bus to come back home. But I was shopping for one person and again, lived in an area well connected by buses. Both of those things are different now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Why can’t Gen Xers function in society? Why are they too scared of public transit?

Gen X here, and I took public transit for many years. Shortly before the smoke inhalation incident on Metro where the woman died, I was trapped on a train that filled with smoke. We managed to pull into a station, which also started filling with smoke. Metro, in its infinite wisdom, refused to open the gates and then shut down the escalators so everyone had to walk to get out. People were starting to panic, and it was the only time in my life when I feared that someone was going to be trampled. Incompetent Metro employees just stood and watched. When the smoke inhalation incident happened a few months later and the woman died, and then the information came out that Metro employees were not receiving training, I was not surprised.

So, yeah, at a minimum functional, safe public transit with minimally competent employees who have actual safety training would be required.

You would need to double metro's budget if you want trained AND competent employees. Currently, metro is a pension plan that also happens to run a subway.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I drive an electric car. You should take a break because this is an unhealthy obsession.

Electric cars solve one of the problems with cars, namely: tailpipe emissions. But that's the only one.

E-bikes and Electric cars have the same environmental impacts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I drive an electric car. You should take a break because this is an unhealthy obsession.

Electric cars solve one of the problems with cars, namely: tailpipe emissions. But that's the only one.

E-bikes and Electric cars have the same environmental impacts.

That's similar to saying that mice and whales are both mammals, therefore they weigh the same and occupy the same amount of space.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:PP again, no one I know who bikes to work drops their kids at school. They either don’t have kids or their spouse drives the kids to school.

When I bike to work, my elementary school kid often bikes with me as far as school. (Or I walk the bike with them to school and then ride from there.) There are a bunch of regular bike commuters who do the same, much more often than I do (I metro more than I bike).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I drive an electric car. You should take a break because this is an unhealthy obsession.

Electric cars solve one of the problems with cars, namely: tailpipe emissions. But that's the only one.

E-bikes and Electric cars have the same environmental impacts.

No, this isn’t true at all. Yes, both of them have environmental costs from battery mining, but e-bike batteries are so much smaller than car batteries that comparing them is silly. E-bikes are clearly the far superior environmental choice to electric cars (and I say that as someone who has an electric car, and also a non-electric bike).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Biking works well for people who don't have to pick up and drop off kids, don't have to carry a lot of stuff, can roll into work looking like they just biked there and have that be professionally acceptable, live relatively close to work, don't have to do grocery shopping for a family after work, have place to safely store their bike at home and at work, have a safe route to work (bike lanes alone don't do it, unless they go door to door), and who know how to ride and bike and feel comfortable and are physically able to do so.

Biking doesn't work for me for the vast majority of these reasons. But I will admit; I am physically fit and could ride a bike, especially if I practiced, but it seems hella dangerous and sweaty and unpleasant to me. I'd rather live a mile from work and walk, which I'd do happily when it's over 30 and under 85 degrees.

There are people who do pickup/dropoff, carry stuff on a bike, look professionally acceptable, and grocery shop on a bike. So it's definitely possible to do all of those things on a bike. Especially on an e-bike! I think the most important things are a safe route and secure bike storage.

Just this week I had to pick up my kid after school at 5:30 PM in NWDC and get them to an appointment at 6:00 PM in Kensington. So no, it’s not possible. Thanks for the advice though.

How late were you?

LOL - "I schedule appointment that are nearly impossible to achieve and then complain that transportation can't get me there in time" 😂😂

I very strongly prefer public transit and biking over driving, but having read the PP's later reply in this thread makes it clear that this response is an example of blaming individual people for systemic failures. Is it theoretically possible for the PP to have found a way to make their schedule work around public transportation in this case? Yes. But the fact that it would take either leaving work early or finding a different medical provider for their kid means that current transportation options don't leave them much choice. You can point to many reasons for that problem -- generations-ago planning decisions, decades of underinvestment in public transportation, a pathetic infrastructure for cycling, etc. -- but people like PP who don't choose to completely upend their lives to make a trip by public transit rather than driving are not the main cause.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Biking works well for people who don't have to pick up and drop off kids, don't have to carry a lot of stuff, can roll into work looking like they just biked there and have that be professionally acceptable, live relatively close to work, don't have to do grocery shopping for a family after work, have place to safely store their bike at home and at work, have a safe route to work (bike lanes alone don't do it, unless they go door to door), and who know how to ride and bike and feel comfortable and are physically able to do so.

Biking doesn't work for me for the vast majority of these reasons. But I will admit; I am physically fit and could ride a bike, especially if I practiced, but it seems hella dangerous and sweaty and unpleasant to me. I'd rather live a mile from work and walk, which I'd do happily when it's over 30 and under 85 degrees.

There are people who do pickup/dropoff, carry stuff on a bike, look professionally acceptable, and grocery shop on a bike. So it's definitely possible to do all of those things on a bike. Especially on an e-bike! I think the most important things are a safe route and secure bike storage.

By people, you mean you? Did you have to plan your entire existence (living space, daycare, workplace, grocery stores) around having safe biking routes between all of these things? Do you have a bike trailer that could pull two kids or have one of your youngsters riding their own bike in traffic at age 4?

Or by "people" are you being theoretical and actually have no direct experience?

[Anonymous]

I would take transit over driving if it were safe, efficient, and reliable. Honestly though, I fear the bike lanes on Connecticut Avenue will foreclose the possibility of express buses, so I will likely continue to drive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I drive an electric car. You should take a break because this is an unhealthy obsession.

Electric cars solve one of the problems with cars, namely: tailpipe emissions. But that's the only one.

E-bikes and Electric cars have the same environmental impacts.

No, this isn’t true at all. Yes, both of them have environmental costs from battery mining, but e-bike batteries are so much smaller than car batteries that comparing them is silly. E-bikes are clearly the far superior environmental choice to electric cars (and I say that as someone who has an electric car, and also a non-electric bike).

Are you capable of not trying to claim your opinion as fact? The PP that said you are perseverating was correct.

Here are some facts. Once you have opened a mine, the marginal impact of the additional materials is less significant. You still need one mine for one E-bike and one mine for one electric car. It is the same for the whole supply chain. The rest of the materials are also the same: steel, rubber tires, etc. The only major material that cars have that e-bikes don’t is glass, but that is the most easily and best recycled material in the world.

So do you have any facts or just more opinions?

[Anonymous]

I would need affordable housing and better schools in DC to live near enough to my job to bike.

For metro: I suppose I could drive and park at the metro and then metro to work - but that would take longer than driving and cost more than gas (I get free parking at work).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Biking works well for people who don't have to pick up and drop off kids, don't have to carry a lot of stuff, can roll into work looking like they just biked there and have that be professionally acceptable, live relatively close to work, don't have to do grocery shopping for a family after work, have place to safely store their bike at home and at work, have a safe route to work (bike lanes alone don't do it, unless they go door to door), and who know how to ride and bike and feel comfortable and are physically able to do so.

Biking doesn't work for me for the vast majority of these reasons. But I will admit; I am physically fit and could ride a bike, especially if I practiced, but it seems hella dangerous and sweaty and unpleasant to me. I'd rather live a mile from work and walk, which I'd do happily when it's over 30 and under 85 degrees.

There are people who do pickup/dropoff, carry stuff on a bike, look professionally acceptable, and grocery shop on a bike. So it's definitely possible to do all of those things on a bike. Especially on an e-bike! I think the most important things are a safe route and secure bike storage.

By people, you mean you? Did you have to plan your entire existence (living space, daycare, workplace, grocery stores) around having safe biking routes between all of these things? Do you have a bike trailer that could pull two kids or have one of your youngsters riding their own bike in traffic at age 4?

Or by "people" are you being theoretical and actually have no direct experience?

I'm the PP you're responding to. Yes, I have done school pick-up/drop-off on a bike (with my child old enough to bike), carried stuff on a bike (either in a backpack or with a trailer), looked professionally acceptable (keeping in mind that I don't work in TV or make court appearances), and grocery shopped on a bike (either in a backpack or with a trailer). I also have a car. I don't make every trip by bike, but then I also don't make every trip by car. In addition to myself, I also know other people who also do these things.

[Anonymous]

All buses should be less than 5 minutes apart.
All bus lines that disappeared in the past 10 years should be reinstated.

We would dramatically cut on traffic in the city if :
1. we ensured that all public and public charter middle and high school students, could get to their school anywhere in the city within 60 minutes on public transit (so more bus lines, and more frequent service),
2. all public and charter elementary school students, and those older students whose public transit access doesn't get them to school within 60 minutes, had access to school bus routes.