They ARE awesome, but often come at the expense of time. I live in Tokyo, which has an amazing public transportation network.

Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way -- that's over 2 1/2 hours of my day.

If I take a taxi directly from my apartment to work, it takes about 15-20 minutes to get directly to work. Let's call it 40 minutes of my day.

I can get back two hours of my life every single day with point-to-point transport. That's two hours I could be catching up with friends, reading a book, cooking, exercising, etc. It matters so often to me that I end up paying the 4000 yen or so it costs to take a taxi twice a day a horrifying number of times.

This is to say nothing of the fact that I can sit in the taxi and read a book or something rather than being crammed and crushed in public transport.

> Including walking to/from stations and bus stops, taking the bus/train costs me around 80 minutes of my day each way

That's not actually how we define "amazing public transportation network". My experience of public transit in Seattle is "about 5 minutes away from a bus stop, anywhere, and about 30 minutes to anywhere I care to go in the city, and maybe an hour if I go across the lake to Bellevue or Redmond".

The fact that it takes you longer for traveling within the city than it does for me to change cities suggests to me that Tokyo's public transit is either ridiculously bad or you have an extremely unusual case.

That 2 hour trip to the airport? At least 1.5 hours of that is subway/train.

I think people who haven’t lived with such infrastructure don’t understand that it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Sure, the train may get you from point A to B very quickly, but you still have to get between your office and the train, then from the train to your housing. That’s three trips total, unless you’re lucky enough to live right next to the stop.

And it adds up: That's actually six trips total for a single day (round trip). If they don’t line up perfectly or you miss one, that’s four different places you have to sit and wait.

This is many why people still drive even when they have access to such transport: You spend so much time going through all the transitions and in-between transits that a long drive no longer sounds so bad.

I tried to use my laptop on the train, but the best I could do was answer a few emails before packing up for the next transit step. Better than nothing, but it’s much more complicated than the internet ideal version of taking a high-speed train straight from your apartment to the office.

This problem has been solved for awhile now, at least since the 1960s when the first intra-city/province shinkansen came online. Just because some other countries suck as badly as the USA at it doesn't mean it is an unsolved problem.

I don’t think this is true. People take airplanes and rent a cars all the time. The same could be true for train travel. All of the ways someone would leave a train station generally exist.

People don’t take trains for two reasons: 1. They take too long. 2. They are too expensive.

For example sf to la takes at least ~9-13h and costs between 50-80 dollars. Versus a southwest flight for ~140 that takes an hour. For most people that extra 60 dollars for 7-11 hours is worth it.

I've done that.

Its busy for sure. But it works. Even if crowded, its still punctual and high-frequency.

Still preferable to a London rush-hour.

You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!)

In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.

I spent some time in Tokyo and found the subway both amazingly useful and cheap. But I also must compare it to the public transit in the US where I live (non-usable bus system), and that of San Francisco -- which was much more expensive and not nearly as well maintained.

When the usual for me is a $6 Uber one-way to a bar that's barely 2 miles away, it blew my mind that I would regularly get across Tokyo for ~$5-10.

I returned from Tokyo with a loathing of the overwhelmingly car-centric cities of the U.S.

Assuming you live close to a station and don’t have to carry anything with you. It’s a fools errand to expect a country the size of the US to have stations that connect everything. We also have extensive and ubiquitous air infrastructure as well for long distance travel and airplanes can be rerouted based on demand a lot more easily than fixed rail infrastructure. If there is a big event in some city or town, it’s fairly trivial to add flights, but it’s impossible to add more tracks. Airplanes can better handle seasonal traffic. For commuter traffic, rail can be more efficient, assuming point A to point B. As soon as you need a point C and point D (such as taking kids to karate practice or visiting your aunt Sally, trains become far more painful.

Subways / trains in Tokyo are faster than driving, same in London.

No stop lights, no intersections, no delays on the road.

Buses aren't faster, but once you go underground, the speed improves dramatically. Even if there is a 2 minute stop once every mile, that is still less time waiting than comparable stop lights in a car.

That's how a proper public transport network works too. For example in London, when I want to go somewhere, I just whip out an app that plans for me the best combination of busses/subway/train/walking to accomplish that and I'm immediately on the go. The wait times are minimal (under 2-5 minutes) most of the time.

Sure, but using public transport is a heavy trade-off in time. Where I am now, at peak hour a train (to my chosen destination) arrives every 15m. The bus/shuttle to the nearest station arrives as often as they can, which can be between 10m and 15m.

My last trip (from suburbs to a CBD +-20km away) during peak hour involved 30m total of waiting for the next shuttle/bus/train. That's 30m without the actual time in transit (on the train its quite fast - about 10m transit. On the bus, it is not, about 15m transit because it has many stops to make).

The next day I drove instead, and took a total of 30m to get to my destination.

Commuter transit systems work wonderfully for people who want to do things during transit but otherwise have no other use of their time.

For me, and a lot of people who opted to live in child-friend homes in child-friendly suburbs, an extra 60m-90m spent in transit is 60m-90m of time we lost with our family.

I don't care that I can read during that time; I can always simply read after my kid has gone to bed after all. I care that I get to spend those few extra hours per day with my kid.

I have taken the "California Train" which runs from San Francisco to San Jose, and advertises its capacity to carry bicyclists. Numerous times, however, bicyclists were denied boarding (each had paid for his ticket) because the carriages had become overcrowded, with the subsequent train arriving in forty-five minutes' time.

This experience made me understand why many commuters in that region embrace the automobile in spite of its many drawbacks.

I'm wagering that most everyone who thinks this way is mentally comparing against their most familiar American city. In Germany and Switzerland (and probably others), the trains and buses run on a schedule, and if a train is more than about 30 seconds late, you'll see the locals starting to anxiously cross-check their watches with each other.

When you can plan down to the minute, using public transport becomes much more convenient and efficient (This is easier with trains than buses, though the buses do stop and wait at stops until it's time for them to proceed).

Japan is the size of California.

> You factor that into your plan and travel comfortably and peacefully.

If train travel became as popular as air travel in the US, the TSA would pay just as much attention to making it as miserable as air travel.

This reminds me of the London Underground. It really seems like no matter where you are in London it is going to take roughly 40-60 minutes to get from A to B.

Airports are far, but we have tons of buses and trains that take you out of the city (including a train that takes you to the airport).

This assumes the public transportation is competently run, which is a rarity in the Anglophone world. In the UK I think the only good one is TfL.

Meanwhile Birmingham has a million people and no metro.

The one time I visited NYC the subway seemed third world.