Out of curiosity, for people who live in small towns/villages in Germany, how much driving is expected on a typical day? Most Americans commute about half an hour, twice a day, right?
Not German, I live in a Swiss village and drive zero km a day. But I spend almost an hour/leg in public transport traveling door-to-door to the office when I go there (well, before covid much more often). I can also work in the train most of the time - 45 minutes of said hour - so that it counts as work time too. So, no reason to drive at all. I only take the car at weekends for doing shopping or doing some visits, even then not always.
The reason I ask is that there's a stereotype that German-speaking Europeans especially all go everywhere with hyper-efficient trains that come every three minutes and are only a little bit less on-time than the ones in Japan, and that can't actually be true out in the countryside.
And yet, it is true. Not everywhere trains obviously, but you'll have bus links to every dump - at least 5-6 a day and the closer you get to civilization the more often (up to every half an hour or whenever you have the train to the nearby station). They do come within a few minutes of schedule, no legend here - sometimes they even come a bit earlier and sometimes also wait hehe.
Edit: my village has trains to the main city every half an hour and I can walk 10 minutes to the station or take a bus if the weather is nasty.
I'm from a medium-sized city on the US midwest, so my experience is that bus drivers sometimes decide "Fuck it, I'm not coming today," on a route where the schedule says they should be there every 30 minutes. I think most Americans outside of large cities have a similar experience. I was really struck going on vacation to San Francisco how together the bus schedule was, compared to how "meh" laid-back the city institutions I interacted with were about everything else.
Granted, I was trying to go up Grant in Chinatown, but you clearly haven't tried a crosstown bus in Cincinnati. Scooby Doo would have an easier time making a cake.
Anecdata: A lot of people I know take about 20m (suburb to a major city) or about 30m (rural countryside), one way. My dad drives ~1h because in the country side he doesn't find a job in his area of expertise (now that we kids have left, they think about selling the house and moving to a better location).
Better data: https://de.statista.com/infografik/13644/laenge-von-arbeitsw...
Can't find how to change the language, even though it's an international page. The graph shows minutes per single way. The pie diagram seems to be a popular vote on "maximum acceptable time".
I live in a small city and work in a nearby larger city.° The distance is 45km and it takes me about 45mins to drive the car, door to door.
Public transport is pretty good on this connection, but overall it takes me 75-90 mins, because I need to change twice and there are wait times.
° Well, I'm working from home now...
I used to live in a different, larger, city, and worked on the opposite side of the same city. Distance 13km. Driving commute 30 mins (middle of the night) to 45 mins (rush hour) each way. Public transport 90 mins...
If you're living in the surrounding area of a larger city where you're working, I'd say half an hour to an hour is normal/average. With traffic jams sometimes double that.
I've lived in a village in Germany and I never drove. The village center and Straßenbahn stop were a five minute walk from my apartment. And that tiny little village had more independent butchers and bakers than most large American cities. It also had everything else you might need day to day. So the only real reason to take the train besides entertainment was commuting. Depending on where you worked that would be about 10-30 minutes one way by transit.
I live in a village 15km from the next big city (33th in terms of population).
If I take the bus it'll take 40min because they take the longest route and stop at every little village with multiple stops each.
The next town is 5km from my village and about the same from the city and the train takes 7-13min, depending on whether it's an RB or RE (they have more stops). Both train and bus arrive on a 30 min schedule from roughly 05:00 to 01:00.
Edit: As a student I pay 90€ for a "semester ticket" once every 6 months.
A US liquid gallon is defined as 3.785411784 liters, the US dry gallon is 4.40488377086 liters, while the imperial gallon is 4.54609 liters. And that's just the currently used definitions...
If I ask Google for "1 gallon in liters", it assumes Imperial gallons which would account for a good chunk of the error.
Thank you for the correction. I should have done my math a bit better. I do appreciate this community for calling out incorrect data. One of the very few communities left that call errors out in a thought out way.
Yes it is extremely expensive. However I don't think most people who have a car will use it. The trains will be extremely crowded and to get to any notable destination you will probably have to change a couple of times. I think people will just prefer using their car instead of having to stand in crowded trains for hours.
> The trains will be extremely crowded and to get to any notable destination you will probably have to change a couple of times.
That's not true at all. There's lots of direct service to notable destinations. It's rather if you want to go to un-notable destinations (which is of course something that people do a lot in their daily lives) that you can expect to have to transfer.
When I was still in school about a decade ago an exchange student from the US was flabbergasted at our gas prices when she found out that the signs at the gas station would display the prices in €/l and not €/gallon. Quick googling shows that €/$ was 1.45 around that time and gas prices were around 1.42€/l which would be a little over 2.06$/l or 7.79$/gallon. At the time the gas prices in the US was 2.79$/gallon.
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