Americans can understand if you phrase it differently.
"You know how sometimes, you go to a big event, and the parking is so far away from the event that they have to ferry people from the parking lots to the event using a bus? Well, this is just like that, except you park at home."
Well, even when you park in the parking lot, you have to walk to the area where the bus stops in order to pick you up. For the sake of convenience, let's call that area a "bus stop." So, you simply need to find the "bus stop" near your home.
Okay but when you drive to the "bus stop" near your home, where do you park your pickup truck? And, are there multiple sizes of bus? If not, how will my community know that I'm the manliest man, if I don't roll up in the biggliest vehicle?
What's funny is in my experience in the USA it's not that there are not busses but they take SOO much longer. I had a job that was 2.8 miles away. It took 7 or 8 minutes to drive there(depending on if you hit the one traffic light on red). Theres a bus stop outside the company. There's a bus stop on the corner of my complex. I looked up on the bus provider website how long it would take...9 hours each way.
Years ago I was living in a different state, a friend was throwing a new years party in his college house and invited me. His college was 3 hours away. I thought about just taking a bus since obviously we would be drinking. I checked the bus schedule... It would take 2.5 days with 4 change overs each way.
I ended up just crashing on his couch and drove home after I recovered from the hang over.
Its just not feasible to take buses here due to how long they take.
There's a bus stop just a few blocks from my house, but the bus only comes by once every two hours between 9am-5pm. There's also a very stupid hub design to the routes, so if you live in City B, you need to take a bus 15 miles to the hub in City A, so you can transfer to the bus for City C, even though B and C are less than 5 miles apart.
In truth it's probably a bit of both, there likely aren't enough buses/routes and there are not enough buses on each route. Typically in most US cities, even State capitals, buses just don't have enough usage to justify doubling or tripling them to either create more routes or reduce frequency. In some cities they do have super limited routes that may be meandering, but have less stops, or are short in length to maximize frequency, but generally this is for a very specific route.
I used to live in a large US city in the south east that had a bus route that ran from a designated parking lot to a major industrial area. A one way trip for the bus was around 40 minutes (they had isolated bus only lanes with enforcement) and if you were to drive in traffic it would take 35 min to an hour. On the other hand my bus commute in that city would have been at least 2 hours to and from my workplace because it wasn't that specific route.
Similar situation when I was in college, the main campus was only like 2 miles long. My furthest class was about a mile away, but between waiting for the bus to arrive and then also waiting for it to drive across campus it was generally faster to just walk. After maybe the first week I never rode the bus again.
Sure, I've seen that, so you got me thinking on it. The largest city near me has 1 way adult bus fare at $2.20 one way and express bus fare at $3.00. The city's internal minimum wage is $25/hour. To add an extra vehicle you would need a minimum of 8.3 passengers per hour of service to recoup costs of just the driver's wages. This doesn't include vehicle maintenance or all the other costs of employment (contributions to his 401k, contributions to the pension fund, the employer match for personal insurance, workplace insurance, etc).
Realistically you probably need greater than 12 passengers per hour per extra vehicle you add and that's on speculative hope that if you reach a certain coverage threshold people will use it rather than drive their own car. It explains itself why it's a hard sell to politicians.
I think that generally depends on the city, but most cities will have what are known as Enterprise funds. This generally applies to things like the Utility Departments (water, power, and some cities even run an internet service provider) where rather than running on taxes these programs need to function almost entirely from funds they bring in for charging for their services. Things like road and sidewalk maintenance wouldn't fall into Enterprise fund operation since there is no active service being rendered that can be charged for, though you could have toll roads but they are exceptionally unpopular in the US.
A bus or rail system could be an Enterprise fund, but it probably depends on where you're at. The public transit system in NYC is an enterprise fund because they have enough usage that they can raise funds from services to cover their costs, but a bus system in a rural city might not be an enterprise fund if it's being used almost solely to provide the elderly or poor with transportation.
In addition to Enterprise funds, US cities operate as businesses (ie they must have balanced budgets and operate within their means, they don't get to act like the federal government and just close down). In most cases if you said we're going to triple the buses/vans but now instead of being revenue neutral it's going to lose money it won't get approved.
I have literally walked maybe twice that distance crossing the city central area of London at 4 AM (at time when there's no Tube and just a handful of night buses once every half an hour or so and only for a few bus lines) coming from a night out and it took me a bit over 1h and I was drunk.
Mind you, in cities in Europe you actually have proper sidewalks, even in suburban areas, so maybe the previous poster had not such conditions to just do it by walking. Also it was only the way back - the way in was done far earlier in the day when all public transportation was active.
Anyways, the point being that even 2.8 miles is easilly a walkable distance, even drunk, as long as you have and hour or so to spare.
I went to a college that was 2.5 hours away by car and 6 hours by bus. And that six hours didn't count the half hour it took to get a ride to the bus stop from my college. At least the bus let off in my hometown so my folks didn't have to go far to pick me up.
A few years ago, I was in Texas with family and we wanted to visit NASA. My husband was adamant in taking the bus because my family are notoriously slow to get ready; fair enough. The bus ride took him 3hrs, which included a 20min walk from the nearest bus stop to NASA. It took us 40min to drive.
Exactly! It's nuts. It means that everyone at that facility drives to and from work. None take public transport... at one of the most prestigious engineering bodies in the world.
I worked at a company with about 1000 people at our location... I never saw anyone get off the bus to come to work(there was a bus stop infront of the building and on the side) and on good weather days maybe 3 or 4 bikes there... Everyone else drove.
My small city wants to run its tram line one particularly difficult way just to give fast public transport for the 5000 people who work near the difficult tram stop
I wasnt reading. It was a form on a website where I put in starting location, ending location and expected arrival time. It said what time I should go to bus stop and how long the trip would take.
There is actually a parking garage below. But you are really incentivised not to come by car, but by public transport. The tram tracks are just out of shot.
It still blows my mind when I look at Dutch intersections in Google's street view. They managed to fit cars, bike lanes, and even commuter trains into their intersections without any issue.
In the US, you can only choose 2 of those things. Add a third, someone is going to die.
I have a buddy that went to Amsterdam. He’s a bigger dude and the FIRST thing he told me about his trip was “you have to fucking bike everywhere”. Sounded wonderful to me but his tone of voice suggested otherwise.
I even don’t know what he’s getting at - I’ve never had access to a bike the many times I have been there. Transit and walking are also perfectly viable options and there are still cars outside the center
Every time I visit Amsterdam, first thing I do is take a ferry to Overhoeks, grab a patatje with saté sauce and then proceed to walk through Amsterdam for 8 hours straight. Every time I take different routes. What I'm trying to say here is, it's a damn fine walkable city.
It's almost like it's not black and white. Like I work in a major city. I can walk and bus everywhere I want. But I live in the "countryside", as far as The Netherlands still has "countryside", and there's nothing in walking distance, a few local commodities in biking distance, but I have to take the car for anything serious (like a decent supermarket).
I have a similar situation here in a German village. There are a few supermarkets in 5km distance and more supermarkets + a train station in 10km. But I’m already on the denser country side with having 12 villages in a 5km radius.
I think our bus service is okay as long as it’s not night, weekend or a holiday. With something coming every hour and for 3h half-hourly during afternoon rush hour. How is your bus service?
We don't have a bus, but busses in my area are not fantastic. The coverage is very sparse, with few direct lines. So if you want to go one town over (5km), it might take you an hour or more, because you always have to go through the regional centre (small city).
My town does have a train station, which takes me to the closest big city in 30 minutes (20km). That train departs every 15 minutes, except for weekends and nights. I can't conplain too much about the train service, except that it m's not very fast. But there's plans to run a fast line as well, an "intercity"
We have people that live in a state called Rhode Island, which is 16x smaller than the Netherlands. It’s insane to hear them bitch about not having a car.
*I’m only comparing the Netherlands to a US state (not country) because Texas is 20x larger than the Netherlands.
These kinds of posts are ignorant at best and elitist at worst. The reality is that mass transit is great for specific living conditions and locations. If you don't fit into that then it's worthless and you will need a car. Either these people somehow aren't aware, or they think that everyone should live like they do.
They made a new tram lane in Germany, right at the border, and the tram crosses the pretty busy border. I was like: well that's neat and solves a lot of problems. They put the tram lane on the road and now the tram sits in traffic too
There's a reason we have so many drunk driving accidents. The responsible groups will designate one person to not drink at all so they can drive. You'll see Uber or Lyft a little bit more now too.
Basically everyone just gambles with other people's lives.
@Fabrik872@Sine_Fine_Belli Though we're not the majority, there are plenty of USians who don't live in sprawl hell and there's probably some correlation between going to public downtown events and living and/or working near downtown. Suburbanites who commute to a downtown office are likely to be somewhat more familiar with transit options than their neighbors who never leave suburbia.
Sadly, from my experience in my German city we don't have the upper hand here. All streets in the city center are completely overcrowded between 4 and 10 pm during our christmas market season. Same with parking garages near the city center.
To be fair, that's also then a big motivation to take public transport, when you know you won't find a parking spot. Kind of difficult to fix that without people rushing in to unfix it.
This comment has the exact cadence of a german joke translated to english - and I've been agonizing between trying to decide if it's that german kind of "referential humor derived from the extreme awkwardness that arises from a sarcastic comment delivered with a geometrically straight face" or if there really are drunk teenagers that urinate between the cars and you're just letting us know about that.
There's always an "U-Bahn" station nearby. Public transportation and Americans...WTF...and your damn pick-up trucks and SUVs would not fit in the European parking garages!
huge fucking place basically 50 mini countries who mostly hate each other.
First, stop with the 50 countries crap.
Next, the size of your country has zero, literally nothing at all, to do with transportation within an individual city. Get the "america special" shit out of your brain, please.
New York does 8 million transit trips a day and it’s just a Lil state
If US cities really were so big and busy and extreme compared to the rest of the world like you seem to think, they would have a larger need for rail transit, not a lesser one. A rail line has a higher capacity than a highway lane, by at least an order of magnitude.
I am asking you again, please get the "we are so special and big and extreme nowhere else is comparable at all, no one else could even comprehend it" crap out of your head.
I am in the middle of Kazakhstan right now. If they can manage mass transit despite having fewer people and much more open land, every us city that isn't nyc, DC, and Chicago don't have an excuse.
Such a weak excuse. Why not make the more populous states do the same thing? Oh right I forgot, all your politicians are completely bought by the oil&car lobbies, they DGAF about your safety or wellbeing even a little bit.
This is a common false argument. The size is irrelevant when you build a city for people and not cars. The millions of spare square kilometres are there for farming and other natural uses. The city or town with more than a few thousand people can be built like this just fine. You see if in lots of other countries and cities that have tonnes of spare space.
America is huge but all the people live in cities, just like in EU countries and literally the rest of the world. Look at a population map, nobody lives in most of America
This comment makes no sense in relation to this topic. This is a picture of a winter market in a German city (theoretically, I'm not verifying it but it looks legit). The size of the country as a whole or even really the population makes no difference when comparing this to the US and it's cities. As someone who's lived in multiple cities in both countries and visited far more, the population density is the only distinction and that can be designed for. Kansas city is urban sprawled to hell by design and Berlin isn't all that different, except Berlin has trains galore.
Actually looking up the data on where I live right now, Mannheim, and where I just came from, Kansas City this point is easily driven home.
KC:
825 km2 area
508k people
623 people/km2 density
2.2 mil metro
Mannheim:
145 km2 area
316k people
2186 people/km2 density
2.3 metro
America is the home of the car. Germany isn't even considered to have the best public transit and yet any country with that as a priority thrives in human centric metrics.
It was a nightmare to drive downtown in KC, find parking, visit a handful of shops, and drive home. It took time and money and was generally dangerous.
Going anywhere in the entire metropolitan area of Mannheim takes me max 30 minutes, and that's by tram. I walk most places and that's 1-10 mins of walking for all my needs. I can walk a block to my nearest Christmas market, 5 blocks to the next and something like 10 to the next. Nothing even remotely as communal or friendly in my suburban neighborhood in KC.
I can buy a single ticket and travel from Helsinki to London, by land, for 131€. You can go from LA to New York for under $630. Why not more transport?
This isn't the only event of its kind in Germany, so people aren't crossing the country just for a market. Maybe a few towns over or so. Like a New Jerseyan going to Times Square to watch the ball drop - or to get a better pizza.
As far anti American sentiment goes... the country that comes to mind when thinking of car centric infrastructure is often America so, this sentiment is rather accurate.
Ah yes, taking a tweet from the stupidest person in the country and making it exemplary of the nation. Typical European sensibilities, yes?
Tell me, my friend, will I ever find media from a single idiot German online? Should I search and tell you about how "the German mind cannot comprehend eating all pork products cooked"?
Americans can understand if you phrase it differently.
"You know how sometimes, you go to a big event, and the parking is so far away from the event that they have to ferry people from the parking lots to the event using a bus? Well, this is just like that, except you park at home."
Is that… commonism?
Commuteism
Yep. Textbook.
This is like baby proofing the world for Americans.
Sounds amazing?! The bus just picks you up at home?
Well, even when you park in the parking lot, you have to walk to the area where the bus stops in order to pick you up. For the sake of convenience, let's call that area a "bus stop." So, you simply need to find the "bus stop" near your home.
Okay but when you drive to the "bus stop" near your home, where do you park your pickup truck? And, are there multiple sizes of bus? If not, how will my community know that I'm the manliest man, if I don't roll up in the biggliest vehicle?
That's the good thing about it: you will roll up in the biggliest vehicle, one bigglier than most people will ever drive themselves!
That sounds reasonable. So it's like a meet up point for me, my neighbors, and the bus...
I actually lol'd. (not actually, but I'm in a better mood than I was before reading it, so it's as close to 'lol' as it gets)
Well you have to walk like 5min to the next....
Nevermind, car it is.
I refuse to take any kind of public transport. That's why I carry my own elevator with me in case I need to enter a skyscraper.
Imagine McDonalds Drive in, but instead of everyone has his own car, everyone has 1 big car they ride in.
Socialism it is 😡
I actually love this way of phrasing it so much I've saved your comment.
In America, you have thousands in tiny cars. Weak and undisciplined, unable hold more than four people.
In Germany, one big car on a long steel road carries thousands of people.
What's funny is in my experience in the USA it's not that there are not busses but they take SOO much longer. I had a job that was 2.8 miles away. It took 7 or 8 minutes to drive there(depending on if you hit the one traffic light on red). Theres a bus stop outside the company. There's a bus stop on the corner of my complex. I looked up on the bus provider website how long it would take...9 hours each way.
Years ago I was living in a different state, a friend was throwing a new years party in his college house and invited me. His college was 3 hours away. I thought about just taking a bus since obviously we would be drinking. I checked the bus schedule... It would take 2.5 days with 4 change overs each way.
I ended up just crashing on his couch and drove home after I recovered from the hang over.
Its just not feasible to take buses here due to how long they take.
That sounds like bus routes are either very meandery or they aren't frequent.
Yeah I think it's politics... "look we have busses and no one uses them we are just wasting money on them".
You might want to ask whether they were in the South East USA or elsewhere... there's history.
There's a bus stop just a few blocks from my house, but the bus only comes by once every two hours between 9am-5pm. There's also a very stupid hub design to the routes, so if you live in City B, you need to take a bus 15 miles to the hub in City A, so you can transfer to the bus for City C, even though B and C are less than 5 miles apart.
He probably misread the schedules because I refuse to believe 2.8 miles takes 9 hours. That is some serious "meandering".
9 hours!
Frequency doesn't matter if the route is somewhat direct, unless you say a 9 hour trip includes 8.5 hours of waiting on the bus?
You could walk 2.8 miles in about an hour.
Where ? On the busy road ?
Forgive them, they're probably not American and don't realise how shockingly dangerous by design it is to walk anywhere in America.
Over in Europe, a distance of less than 3 miles will often be best ridden, and if not you'd walk it.
I suspect its, A->B 10 mins, wait at B for 9 hours, B->C 10 mins.
In truth it's probably a bit of both, there likely aren't enough buses/routes and there are not enough buses on each route. Typically in most US cities, even State capitals, buses just don't have enough usage to justify doubling or tripling them to either create more routes or reduce frequency. In some cities they do have super limited routes that may be meandering, but have less stops, or are short in length to maximize frequency, but generally this is for a very specific route.
I used to live in a large US city in the south east that had a bus route that ran from a designated parking lot to a major industrial area. A one way trip for the bus was around 40 minutes (they had isolated bus only lanes with enforcement) and if you were to drive in traffic it would take 35 min to an hour. On the other hand my bus commute in that city would have been at least 2 hours to and from my workplace because it wasn't that specific route.
Similar situation when I was in college, the main campus was only like 2 miles long. My furthest class was about a mile away, but between waiting for the bus to arrive and then also waiting for it to drive across campus it was generally faster to just walk. After maybe the first week I never rode the bus again.
Smaller buses. Some cities just use vans for smaller routes.
Sure, I've seen that, so you got me thinking on it. The largest city near me has 1 way adult bus fare at $2.20 one way and express bus fare at $3.00. The city's internal minimum wage is $25/hour. To add an extra vehicle you would need a minimum of 8.3 passengers per hour of service to recoup costs of just the driver's wages. This doesn't include vehicle maintenance or all the other costs of employment (contributions to his 401k, contributions to the pension fund, the employer match for personal insurance, workplace insurance, etc).
Realistically you probably need greater than 12 passengers per hour per extra vehicle you add and that's on speculative hope that if you reach a certain coverage threshold people will use it rather than drive their own car. It explains itself why it's a hard sell to politicians.
Your public transit has to pay for itself? Are your roads and sidewalks self-funding too?
I think that generally depends on the city, but most cities will have what are known as Enterprise funds. This generally applies to things like the Utility Departments (water, power, and some cities even run an internet service provider) where rather than running on taxes these programs need to function almost entirely from funds they bring in for charging for their services. Things like road and sidewalk maintenance wouldn't fall into Enterprise fund operation since there is no active service being rendered that can be charged for, though you could have toll roads but they are exceptionally unpopular in the US.
A bus or rail system could be an Enterprise fund, but it probably depends on where you're at. The public transit system in NYC is an enterprise fund because they have enough usage that they can raise funds from services to cover their costs, but a bus system in a rural city might not be an enterprise fund if it's being used almost solely to provide the elderly or poor with transportation.
In addition to Enterprise funds, US cities operate as businesses (ie they must have balanced budgets and operate within their means, they don't get to act like the federal government and just close down). In most cases if you said we're going to triple the buses/vans but now instead of being revenue neutral it's going to lose money it won't get approved.
9 hours? Jeez.
Though, for 2.8 miles I wouldn't even consider a bus. I'll grab my bicycle and be there in 12 minutes.
You'd probably die twice there
Get there and die twice? That's a bit extreme
True, totally doable and several people did so. There was even a bike rack installed on the premises.
I have literally walked maybe twice that distance crossing the city central area of London at 4 AM (at time when there's no Tube and just a handful of night buses once every half an hour or so and only for a few bus lines) coming from a night out and it took me a bit over 1h and I was drunk.
Mind you, in cities in Europe you actually have proper sidewalks, even in suburban areas, so maybe the previous poster had not such conditions to just do it by walking. Also it was only the way back - the way in was done far earlier in the day when all public transportation was active.
Anyways, the point being that even 2.8 miles is easilly a walkable distance, even drunk, as long as you have and hour or so to spare.
I went to a college that was 2.5 hours away by car and 6 hours by bus. And that six hours didn't count the half hour it took to get a ride to the bus stop from my college. At least the bus let off in my hometown so my folks didn't have to go far to pick me up.
Yep. It's pretty depressing.
A few years ago, I was in Texas with family and we wanted to visit NASA. My husband was adamant in taking the bus because my family are notoriously slow to get ready; fair enough. The bus ride took him 3hrs, which included a 20min walk from the nearest bus stop to NASA. It took us 40min to drive.
Public transport is pretty hostile in the US.
Yeah, now imagine you work at nasa... You wouldn't take the bus to/from work everyday would you?
Exactly! It's nuts. It means that everyone at that facility drives to and from work. None take public transport... at one of the most prestigious engineering bodies in the world.
I worked at a company with about 1000 people at our location... I never saw anyone get off the bus to come to work(there was a bus stop infront of the building and on the side) and on good weather days maybe 3 or 4 bikes there... Everyone else drove.
And all this from a country founded on rail...
My small city wants to run its tram line one particularly difficult way just to give fast public transport for the 5000 people who work near the difficult tram stop
Public transport is pretty good in Canberra
My friend, I think you need to learn how to properly read a bus schedule.
I wasnt reading. It was a form on a website where I put in starting location, ending location and expected arrival time. It said what time I should go to bus stop and how long the trip would take.
There is actually a parking garage below. But you are really incentivised not to come by car, but by public transport. The tram tracks are just out of shot.
It still blows my mind when I look at Dutch intersections in Google's street view. They managed to fit cars, bike lanes, and even commuter trains into their intersections without any issue.
In the US, you can only choose 2 of those things. Add a third, someone is going to die.
I have a buddy that went to Amsterdam. He’s a bigger dude and the FIRST thing he told me about his trip was “you have to fucking bike everywhere”. Sounded wonderful to me but his tone of voice suggested otherwise.
I even don’t know what he’s getting at - I’ve never had access to a bike the many times I have been there. Transit and walking are also perfectly viable options and there are still cars outside the center
Every time I visit Amsterdam, first thing I do is take a ferry to Overhoeks, grab a patatje with saté sauce and then proceed to walk through Amsterdam for 8 hours straight. Every time I take different routes. What I'm trying to say here is, it's a damn fine walkable city.
It's almost like it's not black and white. Like I work in a major city. I can walk and bus everywhere I want. But I live in the "countryside", as far as The Netherlands still has "countryside", and there's nothing in walking distance, a few local commodities in biking distance, but I have to take the car for anything serious (like a decent supermarket).
I have a similar situation here in a German village. There are a few supermarkets in 5km distance and more supermarkets + a train station in 10km. But I’m already on the denser country side with having 12 villages in a 5km radius.
I think our bus service is okay as long as it’s not night, weekend or a holiday. With something coming every hour and for 3h half-hourly during afternoon rush hour. How is your bus service?
We don't have a bus, but busses in my area are not fantastic. The coverage is very sparse, with few direct lines. So if you want to go one town over (5km), it might take you an hour or more, because you always have to go through the regional centre (small city).
My town does have a train station, which takes me to the closest big city in 30 minutes (20km). That train departs every 15 minutes, except for weekends and nights. I can't conplain too much about the train service, except that it m's not very fast. But there's plans to run a fast line as well, an "intercity"
We have people that live in a state called Rhode Island, which is 16x smaller than the Netherlands. It’s insane to hear them bitch about not having a car.
*I’m only comparing the Netherlands to a US state (not country) because Texas is 20x larger than the Netherlands.
These kinds of posts are ignorant at best and elitist at worst. The reality is that mass transit is great for specific living conditions and locations. If you don't fit into that then it's worthless and you will need a car. Either these people somehow aren't aware, or they think that everyone should live like they do.
Yeah... We're struggling for some reason.
You're getting to choose more than one?!
They made a new tram lane in Germany, right at the border, and the tram crosses the pretty busy border. I was like: well that's neat and solves a lot of problems. They put the tram lane on the road and now the tram sits in traffic too
On a christmas markets or similar action i usually go to drink som alcoholic beverages how does it work in us if you have to drive home?
Options are:
Stay at a friends place
Have someone drive you
Get an uber/lyft/taxi
Drive drunk anyway
Ya in order of least to most likely -_-
There's a reason we have so many drunk driving accidents. The responsible groups will designate one person to not drink at all so they can drive. You'll see Uber or Lyft a little bit more now too.
Basically everyone just gambles with other people's lives.
It’s the American Way ^tm
Wait until you hear about parking minimums at bars.
@Fabrik872 @Sine_Fine_Belli Though we're not the majority, there are plenty of USians who don't live in sprawl hell and there's probably some correlation between going to public downtown events and living and/or working near downtown. Suburbanites who commute to a downtown office are likely to be somewhat more familiar with transit options than their neighbors who never leave suburbia.
The American mind cannot comprehend this
I'll freely admit that I cannot comprehend the temporal ordering of twitter comments.
Never really figured out Tumblr indentation either
I don't get it, it's just a big blur. What's this post say?
Could it be that your mind cannot comprehend this?
Usually it’s transit + walking + park-and-ride, not ‘giant garage under the market.’ When the space is for people, you don’t need to store cars there.
Ironically this specific market has a giant garage under the market
Which one is it?
Dresden.
Striezelmarkt in Dresden.
The worst part is when my fellow Americans are very "we tried nothing and we're out of ideas" about it. Or worse, actively fighting any changes.
You ever think that this meme is just about a moron?
Usually it’s about someone from an hour outside any civilization.
Sadly, from my experience in my German city we don't have the upper hand here. All streets in the city center are completely overcrowded between 4 and 10 pm during our christmas market season. Same with parking garages near the city center.
To be fair, that's also then a big motivation to take public transport, when you know you won't find a parking spot. Kind of difficult to fix that without people rushing in to unfix it.
That happens in every city that has a popular event ever
tl;dr yes there are parking garages nearby, at least in my city
it seems the british mind also cannot, cos imgur's blocked here 🥀
Weird I'm in the UK and have the image.... ah, forget that, while I'm not on vpn now I was earlier and it must have cached
Holy shit... im in uk visiting. Had no idea this is what the internet is like now.
The American reaction will either be confusion or envy, there is no in-between.
I'm the latter.
you missed fear
This American doesn’t want to be around that many people in the first place
Me neither. But I want to be able to choose to be.
Your Hermit accreditation has been revoked.
What if the other people weren't american?
If they’re not American then I’ll give them a chance.
But I still want to live where no one can see me doing yard work in the nude
That is a valid dream to pursue. Best of luck!
winter markets?
Yeah, I was gonna say "my social anxiety mind cannot comprehend this". Just looking at it is making me physically uncomfortable.
That’s Dresden. The Altmarkt. Cool.
But if we are honest, there is a big parking garage right under there xd
I heard drunk teenagers urinate between the cars there. Wouldn't park there.
This comment has the exact cadence of a german joke translated to english - and I've been agonizing between trying to decide if it's that german kind of "referential humor derived from the extreme awkwardness that arises from a sarcastic comment delivered with a geometrically straight face" or if there really are drunk teenagers that urinate between the cars and you're just letting us know about that.
I was gonna say, looks like Philly lol
Or Chicago's Christkindlemarket
Awesome.
Imagine looking at this photo and wondering aloud about the parking. Not very realistic
There's always an "U-Bahn" station nearby. Public transportation and Americans...WTF...and your damn pick-up trucks and SUVs would not fit in the European parking garages!
It's called a Christmas market and we have one in Chicago.
Yeah, busses need to be faster
Last time I was in Germany we drove to the closest Christmas market. But yeah, fuck Americans.
This meme is older than the poster of said meme
Terrible excuse not to build walkable cities
How about china
80 million..
First, stop with the 50 countries crap.
Next, the size of your country has zero, literally nothing at all, to do with transportation within an individual city. Get the "america special" shit out of your brain, please.
3.6 million people pass through this single building once a day every day:
The rail lines in the Greater Tokyo Area serve in excess of 40 million people per day.
If US cities really were so big and busy and extreme compared to the rest of the world like you seem to think, they would have a larger need for rail transit, not a lesser one. A rail line has a higher capacity than a highway lane, by at least an order of magnitude.
I am asking you again, please get the "we are so special and big and extreme nowhere else is comparable at all, no one else could even comprehend it" crap out of your head.
Okay, let's compare to China then, which is both double the size of the USA, and has much more inhospitable terrain.
Car ownership is less there too, and pubic transit is very very popular, and cheap.
It's not a size issue. That's an excuse. It's purely a issue of lack of funding and poor planning.
I am in the middle of Kazakhstan right now. If they can manage mass transit despite having fewer people and much more open land, every us city that isn't nyc, DC, and Chicago don't have an excuse.
Such a weak excuse. Why not make the more populous states do the same thing? Oh right I forgot, all your politicians are completely bought by the oil&car lobbies, they DGAF about your safety or wellbeing even a little bit.
It is like that in the entirety of Europe, which is DOUBLE the size of the entire US combined.
Population has nothing to do with it.
Germany is one of the largest continental nations mate, it's almost as large as Texas, and larger than the majority of USA states
TrueSizeOfNA)
This is a common false argument. The size is irrelevant when you build a city for people and not cars. The millions of spare square kilometres are there for farming and other natural uses. The city or town with more than a few thousand people can be built like this just fine. You see if in lots of other countries and cities that have tonnes of spare space.
If we're being totally fair, Americans do deserve some credit for helping with Dresden's city planning.
America is huge but all the people live in cities, just like in EU countries and literally the rest of the world. Look at a population map, nobody lives in most of America
This comment makes no sense in relation to this topic. This is a picture of a winter market in a German city (theoretically, I'm not verifying it but it looks legit). The size of the country as a whole or even really the population makes no difference when comparing this to the US and it's cities. As someone who's lived in multiple cities in both countries and visited far more, the population density is the only distinction and that can be designed for. Kansas city is urban sprawled to hell by design and Berlin isn't all that different, except Berlin has trains galore.
Actually looking up the data on where I live right now, Mannheim, and where I just came from, Kansas City this point is easily driven home.
KC:
Mannheim:
America is the home of the car. Germany isn't even considered to have the best public transit and yet any country with that as a priority thrives in human centric metrics.
It was a nightmare to drive downtown in KC, find parking, visit a handful of shops, and drive home. It took time and money and was generally dangerous.
Going anywhere in the entire metropolitan area of Mannheim takes me max 30 minutes, and that's by tram. I walk most places and that's 1-10 mins of walking for all my needs. I can walk a block to my nearest Christmas market, 5 blocks to the next and something like 10 to the next. Nothing even remotely as communal or friendly in my suburban neighborhood in KC.
But like, there is no reason you should have to travel further, just because your country is bigger.
In addition, as an EU resident you can travel across the EU like it's one big country. The US is only about twice as large as the EU.
I can buy a single ticket and travel from Helsinki to London, by land, for 131€. You can go from LA to New York for under $630. Why not more transport?
This isn't the only event of its kind in Germany, so people aren't crossing the country just for a market. Maybe a few towns over or so. Like a New Jerseyan going to Times Square to watch the ball drop - or to get a better pizza.
As far anti American sentiment goes... the country that comes to mind when thinking of car centric infrastructure is often America so, this sentiment is rather accurate.
Americans can't comprehend scaling infrastructure, or the diverse make up of Europes population.
Ah yes, taking a tweet from the stupidest person in the country and making it exemplary of the nation. Typical European sensibilities, yes?
Tell me, my friend, will I ever find media from a single idiot German online? Should I search and tell you about how "the German mind cannot comprehend eating all pork products cooked"?
OR WAS IT ALL TROLLING ALL ALONG?!?!