NearToTheSky's ramblings

Public transportations: Environment friendly should be user friendly

In this post, I'll bring up a point that has peeved me for a few years now, namely, the fact that no matter how much public transportation are better for the environment, people won't use them if they can't at least in some way compete with driving a car.

In Norway at least, the government has been trying to encourage people to use the public transportation system when going to work, in Oslo in order both to be more environment friendly and to reduce the traffic jams. They have generally been doing so by making driving a car more expensive, mainly by increasing the road toll that needs to be paid when entering Oslo and also by trying to make parking in Oslo in general more expensive.

Despite all of this, their success has been minor at best and some have come to the conclusion that car drivers are just too lazy. The truth is however that the public transportation system in Oslo can be so troublesome that taking a car is often better, if only to preserve one's sanity.

Currently, I am usually going to work by car but occasionally need to take public transportation anyway and the painfully obvious is that in the average case, it takes slightly more than an hour for reaching my destination using busses and metro while by car, it takes 40 minutes at most, in rush time. Knowing the roads where there isn't too much traffic helps, but even so, traffic jams in Oslo are nothing compared to what they can be in other big European cities.
In addition to this, when one has to switch from say a bus to a metro and that the metro comes only every 15 minutes and that sometimes the bus is slightly delayed so that it comes right after the previous metro has left, that means an additional 15 minutes where I get to do nothing else than standing around and freezing in the cold weather rather than doing something productive. This happens more often than it should.

The real deal breaker however in addition to this is that public transportation is not cheap. In fact it is so expensive that you can anyway be somewhat close to covering the cost by being two people in a car. Which is not very difficult to achieve.
So, the public transportation companies are getting in quite a lot of money. You would imagine that they could improve their services quite fast but instead the improvements have been rather marginal and instead, they have been spending a lot of money over many years trying to set up new ticketing systems. They made quite a lot of failed attempt that were all quite expensive. Now they have a system that is almost working but has its quirks, which means that some passengers have been unfairly treated due to their new system failing. I won't go into details here but their implementation is shaky at best.

So, the reality is: one is always better off using a car if possible. You might spend a little more but you save a lot of time, you don't have to deal with grumpy ticket controllers who risk to make your life even harder if somehow the electronic ticket you paid for decides to stop working. I'm sure many people out there would like to behave in more environmental friendly ways, but for this to happen, it must be ensure that it isn't such a hassle.

The logical responses would be: Either, make the public transportation system a reliable service and ensure people are treated properly, make sure the diverse vehicle come frequently enough that no one needs to wait for them and so that they don't end up stupidly crowded (and thus unpleasant) and make sure people are generally treated decently. Or, keep it as it is and make it cheap or free.