Not personally, although I did hire cabs quite a lot.

I often was staying with my friend in Chiswick, and it often took me almost 90 minutes to get to the British Museum. By car it was barely more than 30 minutes.

It actually doesn't matter as much as you think it does. Go on, play with the isoline API or with Google Transit. Transfers kill the average speed, even if they are streamlined.

Indeed. Transit can ONLY be optimized to transfer people between The Downtown and the outlying living areas. It mathematically can't do anything else efficiently. This creates malignant runaway centralization by providing incentives for companies to build offices in The Downtowns. In turn, driving up prices within the distance of comfortable commute.

Random lon/lat selection from the bounding box (ignoring the curvature of the Earth, not important at this scale), then filter them using the bounds of the city area (Greater London or London Postal District). Then plot the routes using Google Transit API. There's also a great visual tool: https://www.geoapify.com/isoli... - select a point in Downton London and check the isochrones for transit and cars.

The key to look here is the _areas_ of the zones. Cars can reach more points compared to transit within the given time, even with all the congestion. This is indeed a highly counter-intuitive result, but it's actually in textbooks for urban planning.

Why everybody doesn't use cars then? Because of the cost of parking in cities.

Now? Sure.

Here's the map of Brexit votes: https://www.bbc.com/news/polit... Do you see anything unusual? How majority of people outside of the London area voted to leave?

I'm not conflating anything. Transit enables higher and higher density. Higher density causes more misery for _everyone_ (and not just for minor towns outside of large urban areas). The causation chain is there.

I used to go to London every weekend for almost half a year when I was living in Amsterdam.

Correct. With the caveat "on average". And this is true of London, btw. Try dropping 100 points in London randomly and plot routes between them, during the rush hour for buses and cars. Then compare the average times. I just did that (I'll upload scripts to Github) and cars are faster by 2.5 times during the rush hour.

On the contrary. Without the transit system, London would have been much better, as fewer people would have moved there. With more jobs in smaller cities, resulting in less inequality between rural areas and London.

Yes, and it works so well that most of these 3 billion passengers can't ever have enough money to buy a house anywhere close to their commute destination. With the average commute time now creeping up to 1.5 hours.

While smaller cities just 3-4 hours away are dying. Great success. BTW, how's that Brexit thing going?

Can you provide me examples of well-designed large European cities that have oh-so-great transit? Here are the facts: the average commute time for small American cities is almost TWO TIMES faster than the fastest commute time in large European cities. Even the average US commute is faster than the fastest European commute in large cities. Cars also provide greater variety of possible employers and accessible businesses.

Yes, I have citations and data. But you live in a world of "alternative facts" that just _feel_ right. And you just dismiss anything that disagrees with them outright, just like our dear MAGA friends.

It would be hilarious if it weren't so sad. Western democracies, strangled by bike lanes.

Apart from climate change, the rest of the issues are just symptoms of the decreasing quality of life. And it's the universal reason in the Western world, from the US to Germany. And it provides fertile ground for all kinds of populists who offer easy solutions. Like Trump, or AfD in Germany, or Le Pen in France. Or now Mamdani in NYC who campaigned on rent freezes and state-run groceries.

In some specific cases? Sure. On average? Nope. This is especially true for cities that were not designed during the Middle Ages.

Have you ever reflected on what you're told about urbanism? Why do you think anything that differs from your opinion is trolling? Have you considered that you might be just wrong?

PS: I actually have studied urbanism and urban planning in a real classroom setting in a real credentialed university.

Except that buses are NEVER competitive with cars. The only time researchers found any decrease in congestion is when new fast transit lines parallel a busy arterial. And even that was transient, going away within 3 years.

I got my driving license at the age of 29 and my first car at 30. Before that, I lived in various European countries only using transit.

Nope. I sincerely believe that urbanism, and transit as its enabler, are a blight that will eventually result in the downfall of the Western democracies. And btw, I did provide you a link that completely confirms my statement: transit does NOT reduce congestion.

No. It's from actual urbanist textbooks. See: "induced demand". Or here's an actual publication from cray-cray socialism-pushing urbanists: https://archive.strongtowns.or...

In short term, transit just results in more people moving through the area and the same number of cars. Longer term, it results in more congestion, as developers start building dense "transit enabled" housing. And people in "transit enabled" housing typically very soon don't want anything to do with the transit and eventually get cars.

Yep. 5 minutes for the first transfer, 5 minutes for the second one. And then the same for the ride back. And that's in case all the conditions are just perfect.

And just that one hop from a local bus to an express bus, adds additional ~20 minutes to the daily commute. This makes it useless as a time-saver for the majority of people.

Buses fundamentally suck. And always will. There's nothing that can be done to improve them.