Walking: 3 hr 15 min. Public transport: Apparently 5 days!

August 3, 2023 9:49 AM

"There are places where the public transport instructions tell you which day of the week the bus will be, but don't include waiting for the right day in the travel time." New game, find two points in the UK on Google Maps where it says it is quicker to walk than to catch public transport. Furthest distance/time wins. (SL Twitter thread).

"Quite a few on the outskirts of Norwich where radial bus routes mean going into the city and out again."

Apologies couldn't figure out a non-Twitter option!

posted by spamandkimchi (18 comments total)

Related: if you like Dan Reeder, here's a song about waiting for a bus.
posted by brachiopod at 10:15 AM on August 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

One of my favorite NYC jokes is that we say "do you want to walk, or do we have time for the bus?"
posted by anhedonic at 11:24 AM on August 3, 2023 [14 favorites]

I feel like this wouldn't be much of a challenge in the U.S.
posted by rhymedirective at 11:46 AM on August 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

I feel like this wouldn't be much of a challenge in the U.S.

No joke. I live in a U.S. city with a population of over 2 million people and a famously terrible public transportation network. I live just outside of the downtown area, and was recently called for jury duty. Thought it might be cool to take the bus and skip the hassle of driving and parking downtown. Nope. Drive time is less than 10 minutes, but it would have taken me over an hour to get there on public transport.
posted by Silvery Fish at 12:46 PM on August 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

One of the reasons that this strikes a nerve in the uk is that, up until recently, the UK had a very workable bus system. Then the neoliberal craze for privatisation happened, and buses turned from something that could get you somewhere, to a punishment for being poor.
posted by The River Ivel at 4:09 PM on August 3, 2023 [19 favorites]

To emphasize The River Ivel’s point, neither of my grandparents ever learned to drive and did not live in cities. My grandad’s street now is completely packed with parked cars. There is one exactly one car in the picture they sent when they moved into their house the week I was born in the mid-1980s. When I was a kid, the bus into town came down their street. Now you have to walk out to the main road. That seems inconsequential, but it became a barrier to my grandad going into town. (I don’t think the (small) bus would be able to fit down the road with all the parked cars!) And you still can’t get a taxi at the shift change because they’re up on the industrial estate, which seemingly never had bus service.

For scale of where my grandad lives, the leading contender for “ways the destruction of the welfare state is going to kill my grandad” was the fact they closed the A&E at the hospital. The A&E he’d once walked to at 3am with his throat swelling closed from a never successfully diagnosed face swelling… thing. (He’s not allergic to anything that has ever been identified, or really narrowed down, beyond occurring without fail at least once on every visit to the US.)
posted by hoyland at 7:21 PM on August 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

The problem in the US is that to have walking take longer than public transit you have to have public transit.

My opening bid in the US: 1:58 by transit, 1:51 by walking - Atlanta suburbs, all the local bus routes are circuitous, or you can go in towards Atlanta and back out. (Transit times are different at different times of day, though, so this game isn't well-defined. Between the same destinations leaving at 8 AM you can do transit in 1:28.)
posted by madcaptenor at 8:28 PM on August 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

I've lived in the same town in the West Midlands since 2006, and in that time local bus fares have more than trebled as well as route coverage getting significantly worse.
posted by Dysk at 10:53 PM on August 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

You should score by ratio of public transit time divided by walking time, no? A tweak to madcaptenor's route gives 2:40 transit vs 1:40 walking.

It's artificial though since often google simply gives the walking route as the public transit route, maybe when the real public transit route contains enough walking.

We really need gasoline to increase in price 10x like everywhere, without electric cars providing a viable replacement.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:52 AM on August 4, 2023

jeffburdges: I agree that scoring as the ratio (or maybe the difference) is a good idea. That route right now is showing for me as 1:42 transit vs 1:40 walking - I suspect Google Maps gives transit times assuming you're leaving right now, and which route it suggests for this trip seems really time-dependent.

This is my neck of the woods. In reality I don't think anybody wants to go from the bad Wal-Mart (they only sell food, not stuff, which we discovered to our chagrin when we moved into this house and didn't have furniture and were having people over, so I ran out to get a card table, and had to go to Target, which offended my Arkansas-born wife) to the Dunwoody Nature Center that much. It's a great park! My kids love it! But we have a car.

Honestly if I stare at maps of American suburbia enough I end up concluding that it need less dead ends. There's no good way to construct a bus network because nothing's on the way to anything else.
posted by madcaptenor at 7:29 AM on August 4, 2023

I'm not sure the ratio is as useful a measure. Sure, something that's 2 minutes to walk but 20 minutes by bus looks bad, but it still leaves the person without a car the option of getting somewhere in 2 minutes. 3 hours 45 versus 3 hours 30 is a much shittier and more unreasonable position to be in, even if the ratio is closer to 1:1.

If you think of the question as "what's the most unreasonably long journey that you'd still be best off doing by foot" maybe?
posted by Dysk at 11:09 AM on August 4, 2023

If you have a bicycle, you can beat the bus nearly every time in most places I've tried it. Might have to bend a few rules though.
If you need a wheelchair, or even are just on crutches, the bus is what's available. If you are disabled in any way, even temporarily, society seems to figure your time is worth less... or even worthless.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 12:27 PM on August 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Anecdotally, Berlin U-bahns travel 15-20% further per unit time than NYC subways or Paris metros, but you pay by having a somewhat longer walk to a U-bahn station in Berlin. Yet, there are inexpensive monthly passes for bikes in Berlin, so if you simply bring your bike on the train then you often beat even car travel times. It essential to have a light weight road bike though because those stairs would be a killer if you've a heavy piece-of-shit city bike.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:59 PM on August 4, 2023

I would like to see the data on 'bus decline in the UK. I'm sure it's an issue in rural communities, but in my city I feel like it's never been great and I'm not sure it's got worse. I am feeling rather jaundiced about it in though as someone recently told me off for making a telephone call on the 'bus (I apologised if I was loud, he said "you weren't loud at all, just really, really boring", then called me a cunt). There is also the island factor in one trip I make regularly, which is not the most expensive ferry crossing in the world, but is still quite financially painful.
posted by paduasoy at 1:11 AM on August 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's going to vary by where you are, to a huge extent. Buses in London are still pretty great, for example. The Birmingham metro area fares pretty well also. Warwickshire though, much less so. If I want to visit my mate in Southam, I'd better be so it during office hours. All buses stop at about six. Then you'd better have a car is you want to get in and out of that town. Ten years ago, those buses ran to nearly 11. It's indicative of how it is out here in general. I get the impression that it's towns suffering more than cities, but I could be wrong.
posted by Dysk at 2:15 AM on August 5, 2023

From the BBC: "Across Britain, the local bus network has shrunk by an estimated 14% between 2016-17 and 2021-22, BBC analysis of Department for Transport figures suggests. The total distance covered by buses each year fell by 210 million miles (338 million kilometres)."
posted by knapah at 12:20 PM on August 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

My opening bid in the US: 1:58 by transit, 1:51 by walking

This route is currently showing as 1:51 walking, but 1:27 by public transport (I guess it's easier to do this during the day, not at 8:30pm). HOWEVER (note to google programmers) - The next 103 bus leaves at 3:02pm... in about half and hour, so the total public transport time is actually closer to 2 hours if one wanted to leave NOW.

Our local elected officials do the bike/bus/car race (SLYT, 10 years old) with the invariable conclusion of how easy and convenient it is to take a bus around Iowa City ... if your start time just happens to coincide with the twice-a-day bus schedule...
posted by Dotty at 11:30 AM on August 9, 2023

Thanks, knapah, for answering my question about data on decline. That is quite compelling.
posted by paduasoy at 1:41 AM on August 19, 2023