Reason #1 Why Americans Don’t Ride Transit: Transit Is Slow
9th January 2017
There’s a myth that Americans have some kind of irrational love affair with their cars, and they don’t ride transit because of that irrationality. In fact, there are very good reasons why autos provide well over 95 percent of mechanized travel in urban areas while transit provides less than two percent.
One of the most important reasons is that transit is slow. According to the American Public Transportation Association’s Public Transportation Fact Book, the average speed of rail transit is 21.5 miles per hour, while the average speed of bus transit is 14.1 mph (see page 7). So-called rapid transit, known to the Federal Transit Administration as heavy rail, averages just 21.1 mph, while light rail is 15.6 mph and streetcars are a pathetic 7.7 mph (see page 40).
Public transit takes you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be at a time inconvenient for you in the company of people whom you’d normally pay money to avoid.
And it takes between two and three times longer than driving.