I live in Cambridge, MA (a city for sure) and used to work in an office near the Waltham/Lexington line. Not some out in the rural woods places at all.
I looked up and wrote up my “what if I tried to commute on public transit to make a 9AM meeting?”
It probably depends a lot on your circumstances, location and other factors!
In my case, in Rīga (the capital of my country, Latvia), it was approximately:
- leave apartment at 7:45
- walk to stop in around 5 minutes
- wait 5 - 10 minutes for a trolley bus
- ride in it for 20 - 30 minutes
- walk from stop to work for 10 minutes
With a car, the same trip would be around 20-40 minutes.
For comparison's sake, walking would mean upwards of 100 minutes for that trip.
Regardless of whether in a car, or using public transportation, coming home in the evening often included waiting in traffic jams for close to an hour. In comparison, when coming home before 4-6 PM, the streets were relatively empty and there were no such traffic issues. Fewer cars, fewer issues of that sort.
But what holds here true doesn't hold true elsewhere and vice versa. Once you go past a certain scale of the city in question, transfers and other complications become unavoidable. Just how much of an issue it is, depends on many other factors as well (car ownership cost, possibility of accidents, the disadvantage of not being able to easily transport things when not owning a car and so on, lack of freedom without a car, especially when you want to visit less popular rural areas).
Neither beats rolling out of bed at 8:45, turning on the computer and brewing some coffee or tea, doing a morning shower and "being at work" 10 minutes later, though.
Random route service is difficult to efficiently serve with mass transit. Public transit doesn't have to be specifically mass transit, but the collective need of "I need to go from random place A to random place B and later return" is almost never going to line up with a mass transit solution.
Having high frequency mass transit service and decent transfers is better than the current situation, but it's really, really hard to compete with "sub-minute latency, personalized perfectly random route".
True, but I still firmly maintain that with good transfers you can get transit close enough to car levels of service so that it doesn't matter. Of course such service is a lot more expensive to run than current service - but it is still cheaper than the costs of owning a car.
I looked up and wrote up my “what if I tried to commute on public transit to make a 9AM meeting?”
It’s ugly to the point where no one would voluntarily choose it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197