public transportation...what's it like where you live?

In our more rural small village public transportation is non-existent!
Larger towns in out state have bus systems although just within the city limits.
Traveling to other states by train we depended on buses (and walking) for getting around and in most towns farther west the systems were extensive, affordable and some even out into the counties.

...and trolleys in San Francisco!

thoughts and experiences?

Where I live, there is no public transportation infrastructure. It is rather rural and you either have some mode of transport or you use the ole shoe leather express.

When I went to college in the capital of my state, there were buses that went all sorts of places at all sorts of times. It was a little intimidating at first but I grew to appreciate them.

Like the others, where I live public transportation is non-existent.

Not even Yellow Cab or Uber ...

When we go to town, I do see a Bus like Greyhound headed to/from El Paso, Tx.

When I lived in Dallas many years ago I rode the Bus System to work for many years.

I live off the rez, just barely. My northern property line is the southern boundary of the Fond Du Lac band reservation. They have a public transportation program, I'm assuming it's just for band members, but not all their enterprises are -- we get propane and gigabit fiber from them. I've never looked it up. Our county has a program for elderly and disabled people where a van with an elevator will move you around. But again, I don't know the details. There is a bus/shuttle van company that runs 12(ish) vans per day from the MSP airport to Duluth and back and that route is only five miles from my house -- so I can get on a van and take it into the near city or the farther big city. But really, I just drive everywhere. I'm three miles from the closest place I can buy anything which is just a small market and post office and two-pump gas station.

We have rural transit in name only.  If I were to use it, I would have to schedule my trip 5 days in advance.  To get to where the van would feel safe picking me up I would have to walk a minimum of 1/4 mile.   The van is rather famous for not showing in time.   When it did show, it probably would not be able to take me where I wanted to go.  This has to do with linking with other rural transit systems.  It is fully possible…likely….that a trip of 30 miles would take me more than one day.  Finally, there are the direct costs involved. …I think it is $5 one way.  If I wanted to go to the grocery store 4 miles away, it would cost me $10, and I would have to schedule it a week in advance.  Of yes, our local rural transit company has received multiple awards for being the best in the USA.

If I were without my own  transportation, I would be far better off paying someone to take me where I wanted to go.

The above is not a complaint, just a realistic assessment. It is the price I pay for deliberately living in a remote area.

None, including no uber. The largest city in WNC, Asheville, has a bus system that does not cover much of town and the buses run infrequently. Rideshares are available as well in Asheville, but not many of the surrounding towns.

Our UK town has a decent train service to London, it takes less than an hour to get to the city with trains every thirty minutes 5.30am to midnight, but nothing overnight. It's about a fifteen minute walk to the train station. The main problem there is there's no step-free access - it's not easy for anyone mobility impaired or a parent with a baby in a pushchair to access. The bus service is a twenty minute walk away and the key issue there is that it's trying to be both an in-town and a between-town service, which means a trip to the main regional town that would be less than thirty minutes by car takes ninety by bus as it wends a circuitous route through back streets of our town, the next small town, and all the villages en route, plus diversions to villages that are nowhere near en route. It's also expensive. There's allegedly a taxi service, but it's almost impossible to get a taxi to come out, and there are never any at the taxi rank at the train station, either. There are a few decent private hire car services which need to be booked well in advance and are useful for trips to the airport or hospital if we're feeling extravagant or just can't face travelling by public transport. Thirty minutes to the airport by car, but by public transport the trip takes at least two and a half hours and requires a walk, a train, a walk, and then a different all-round-the-houses 90 minutes bus ride!  The trip to the "local" hospital is the same. We need to go tomorrow to have lab draws, as despite living in a town of 20,000 people, it's not currently possible to have a routine blood sample taken at the GP surgery, and will need to leave the house at 11 am to be sure of getting to the hospital by our 1.30pm appointment! We do have a car, but I'm no longer able to drive due to a health problem that affects my speed and distance perception. Hubby has become a nervous driver who stresses out about driving in our own town and can't cope with driving anywhere else now. So we're quite reliant on public transport to get us anywhere we can't walk to.

Our tiny Bulgarian village is blessed with a mini-bus service three times a day Monday to Friday, it's less than twenty minutes to get to the nearest town, which has almost everything we need, and from there we can take frequent buses to the regional city and on to the big city. We've figured out the timetable for the village buses at last at missing them a few times! The route on Tuesday and Thursday is different to the other days, and the mid-afternoon bus leaves 20 minutes earlier than the scheduled time those days because it turns around at our village rather than continuing on to the next village out! There's no official taxi service, and my Bulgarian isn't good enough yet to phone for one to come out from town. But asking in the village cafe will usually result in someone willing to drive to town for a reasonable price. Thinking about aging in place once we move there, we chose a house that's close to the village centre, only a couple of minutes walk to the bus stop, the village shop, and the cafe. Provided the bus service continues, it will be easier to manage there without a car than it is in the UK!

Portland metro has great public transportation. We have light rail, buses, commuter rail, uber, lyft, and lots of cabs. You can bring your bike on any bus, light rail, or train.
John s
Pdx or

Nearby is a great public transport system in Athens GA. After recent improvements they run 7 days per week and everyone rides for free.  The city shares some 9f the cost with UGA.  Go Dawgs.  

Also the bus has a bike rack on the front, and we have a local bike non profit rebuilding and selling used bikes that are in perfect shape. We volunteer there and offer to support the cause.   I often see 1000$ bikes going for 300, others for less; the shop is such an awesome resource.  So riders can commute with two options combined, thus increasing flexibility

Kudos to manager/expert Scott, and GO BIKE ATHENS!!!

During the week, our largish rural village has four buses coming through at intervals (three come once an hour somewhat staggered, the other twice an hour), but only two at weekends.  Weekdays we can reach four towns and multiple villages surrounding us by bus.  In our county, bus fares are capped at £2 per journey:  a steal if you ask me.  The buses do run fairly reliably at present though this hasn't always been the case.  I work part time in the next village over which is an easy 15 minute e-bike ride in good weather, and a 10 minute bus journey if necessary.

We have a train station at the nearby small town to which three of the four buses go;  this links to two nearby cities and each train runs once an hour every day.  The husband used to bike to the station and take the train to work, a much less stressful option than driving though we weren't sure if it was cheaper or not;  he's in the same job but works from home now, the best kind of commute.

Closest bus service to us is around 20km away. Some places in rural Tasmania get buses if they are on a route between a city and some towns, but other places get no buses at all. There used to be a passenger rail service going to some areas, but it is only used for freight now.

In the United States: I'm in a City with a University and a population around half a million. My city has a streetcar connecting the University, Downtown, and a Marketplace with restaurants and shops. We have some bus infrastructure and some cool "Bike Boulevards" (streets made to be easier/safer to bike down), but the bus is often late/infrequent depending on where you are (downtown is pretty good, but once you get further out, you wanna either have a Plan B or some flexibility built into your schedule). That said, my home town (population of around 10,000 residents, but with millions of visitors a year) has no streetcar and the bus comes even less there. That said, the hometown did come up with a shuttle to get people who are hiking from a centralized parking lot out to their trailheads and has some other stuff they are trying to roll out. People want changes to our transit system in the home town, that said, local politics can be discouraging when sometimes you get a few loud voices drowning out what everyone else has to say. I'm not really trying to comment on who is at fault (we could all work on being more civil in how we discuss certain matters), but everyone seems to blame "the other side." I think it is sad that people waste their effort to creatively (or not creatively) insult their adversaries rather than trying to bridge the gap and actually solve problems.

Ok, first let me state that I have ridden public transportation all over the world. Buses, trains, trollies, ferries.
I have also worked public transportation as a rail policeman, likely logging more hours on trains than a daily commuter would in their entire lives.  From birth to death, I have experienced or witnessed  most of the big ticket human experiences while on public transportation.
I live very remotely.  There is a daily shuttle service that runs up and down the one through road that goes north to south. I wish it would stop immediately and permanently.  The shuttle invariably brings vagrant homeless drug addicts down from  Portland or up from California.  Having no investment in the community, they litter terribly. Their camps become little garbage dumps. They use the rivers as sewage disposal places, and they start wildfires.  The larger towns in both directions give them tokens for that shuttle so that they will leave the larger  towns for a while and plague us instead.
Again, my knowledge of this situation is not theoretical. I have ridden that shuttle from one end to another several times. I have watched it discharge these people into my village scores of times. Most of the local people I know who might need the service are elderly and too scared by the constant high pressure begging or the bizarre behavior to use it.  My friends all give these elderly rides to their doctors appointments, etc, so they don't get victimized on the shuttle. It does nothing for us as a community  and only brings us big city problems.
This essentially mirrors my experiences of the commuter trains in a metropolitan area. They were very nice, as long as we brutal railroad bulls were constantly on watch. If a train line didn't  have saturation level coverage of armed, aggressively patrolling cops with full power to toss miscreants/arrest  trouble makers, those lines became places where women weren't safe, fecal matter in the cars was a daily event, and crime skyrocketed. It wasn't any better on the buses, we would often respond to panic alarms from the bus drivers who pulled into the train terminals. The poor people that were forced to ride the bus DREADED it. Imagine getting up three hours early to wait for a bus in the cold and being afraid of the chaos and violence that can just appear in such a system. Then after a hard day's work, back on the bus for more.
I seriously doubt that this situation has gotten any better in the ten years since I left the cities.
Transportation is like energy production or food growing or any other permie style activity. Everybody should do it for themselves as much as possible.  Private transportation maximizes a person's time, and lets that person control who they come into contact with.  Private transportation is resilient, flexible, adaptable, humanizing, and freeing. Public transportation can be good, but not without forceful authority that cost the taxpayers too much for what they get.  In another day and age, I am sure it was different. Perhaps in some more homogenous societies, with enforced cultural norms and values, it remains different. But not now and not in any portion of the US where I have been.  

I'm writing this post while on public transportation, so at least around me in the suburbs of Chicago I would consider the public transportation into the city pretty good. The trains are clean and comfortable with decent Wi-Fi. When I moved to the area, proximity to a train station was one of my key priorities since I would be working in the city and was still recovering from a job with a hellish driving commute.

While it's easy to get into the city by public transit, the local town has none. Having to drive 15 minutes to do just about anything is kind of annoying, but at the same time it does keep the town more secluded which is nice (especially during the Covid years).

Because I'm legally blind public transit is a must for me.  I live in a suburb of Portland OR and we have quite good transit here in Clackamas, it runs until about 11:15pm.  Not perfect, but doable, and all 7 days a week.  I wish I could be like so many of you and live in the country, but I don't have that privelidge.  

I live a few blocks from my city's regional train station (not the central one, but the one if you want to head further north in Germany, etc.).  I can catch a train there to Stockholm or Budapest, and everywhere along the line.  Because of the regional trains, the station also hosts a subway station that can get me to most places in town, there's also a small bus center ditto, and a taxi stand out front.  The city runs a ride share service (that actually pays its drivers well), I can call a taxi, and I can rent a car by the hour (there are probably 20 within a few blocks walk and I can drop it anywhere in the city).

My employer switched our subsidized transit passes to the Deutschland Ticket when that became available - were I to buy it myself, it would cost under 60 euros/month.  It allows me to use any public transportation in Germany (excepting high-speed intercities and some obscure tourist lines).

Not at all rural, which is fine by me - bless those of you who love rural life, though, and you deserve better public transportation!

There was/is a not for profit in Iowa that encountered a problem  with the rural transit in its region.  The official public transit organization ran hours …like.. 9 to 5.   Not very doable for most jobs.   And, it refused to expand its hours. The not for profit began running its own vans 6am to midnight.  It ran the official rural transit out of business. Then it spun off its transit service as an independent company.  It is doing well.  

The village I'm closest to has a bus three times a day. There's a fourth time for school days which is different to the 2 extra times on saturdays and school holidays.

The absolute earliest you can catch it is 8:35am, on maybe 1 in 5 days. If you want to do something on a sunday, you can wait till 12:30 and you had better get it done by 3pm.

In short, it's pretty unusable unless you're a school child or retired.


I'm also really salty that megabus stopped running coaches pretty much anywhere in England and Wales. This has meant that I've cancelled plans to see my parents about 5 hours away because the trains are prohibitively expensive, easily 5, sometimes 10 times the cost of a coach.  


Could be worse. My parents regularly drive to a village that has a bus... once a tuesday.

I have a couple questions/comments. To clarify, I'm coming from a place of trying to understand someone's viewpoint, not trying to be hostile/pick a fight on an internet forum. First of all, do you think that all public transportation is inherently unsafe? For example, issues with violence on public busses or unsanitary conditions on/near public transit could be seen as a symptom of a larger social issue. For example, dumping effluent in rivers or defecating in a public place don't seem like behaviors that someone with access to sanitary facilities. How often did incidents of violence on public transit occur? Obviously, hearing about something bad happening on transit is enough to give people a bad taste about the situation, but I'm curious whether this is a regular event or something that happens sometimes, but gets blown out of proportion (ex: getting attacked by a shark or dying in a plane crash would be awful, but both are very unlikely). You speak of situations where people are pulling panic alarms on busses frequently and the issues are at the point that elderly do not feel comfortable taking public transit. I haven't been on the public transit in the Pacific Northwest, but in my city, it's not like that. There are some homeless people who take the streetcar (probably to take shelter from extreme weather conditions) but they tend to keep to themselves and don't tend to cause problems for other riders. I use the streetcar daily and I have never been in a situation where I felt scared for my safety. As a woman, I carry pepper spray and have taken a self-defense course, but I have not been in any situations where I feared I would have to use either. Obviously, the situation is different depending on which transit you are using and where, but what you are speaking of is not my experience at all.

Jeff Lindsey wrote:Ok, first let me state that I have ridden public transportation all over the world. Buses, trains, trollies, ferries.
I have also worked public transportation as a rail policeman, likely logging more hours on trains than a daily commuter would in their entire lives.  From birth to death, I have experienced or witnessed  most of the big ticket human experiences while on public transportation.
I live very remotely.  There is a daily shuttle service that runs up and down the one through road that goes north to south. I wish it would stop immediately and permanently.  The shuttle invariably brings vagrant homeless drug addicts down from  Portland or up from California.  Having no investment in the community, they litter terribly. Their camps become little garbage dumps. They use the rivers as sewage disposal places, and they start wildfires.  The larger towns in both directions give them tokens for that shuttle so that they will leave the larger  towns for a while and plague us instead.
Again, my knowledge of this situation is not theoretical. I have ridden that shuttle from one end to another several times. I have watched it discharge these people into my village scores of times. Most of the local people I know who might need the service are elderly and too scared by the constant high pressure begging or the bizarre behavior to use it.  My friends all give these elderly rides to their doctors appointments, etc, so they don't get victimized on the shuttle. It does nothing for us as a community  and only brings us big city problems.
This essentially mirrors my experiences of the commuter trains in a metropolitan area. They were very nice, as long as we brutal railroad bulls were constantly on watch. If a train line didn't  have saturation level coverage of armed, aggressively patrolling cops with full power to toss miscreants/arrest  trouble makers, those lines became places where women weren't safe, fecal matter in the cars was a daily event, and crime skyrocketed. It wasn't any better on the buses, we would often respond to panic alarms from the bus drivers who pulled into the train terminals. The poor people that were forced to ride the bus DREADED it. Imagine getting up three hours early to wait for a bus in the cold and being afraid of the chaos and violence that can just appear in such a system. Then after a hard day's work, back on the bus for more.
I seriously doubt that this situation has gotten any better in the ten years since I left the cities.
Transportation is like energy production or food growing or any other permie style activity. Everybody should do it for themselves as much as possible.  Private transportation maximizes a person's time, and lets that person control who they come into contact with.  Private transportation is resilient, flexible, adaptable, humanizing, and freeing. Public transportation can be good, but not without forceful authority that cost the taxpayers too much for what they get.  In another day and age, I am sure it was different. Perhaps in some more homogenous societies, with enforced cultural norms and values, it remains different. But not now and not in any portion of the US where I have been.