"...is that you're on the bus, surrounded by the sort of people who take the bus."
I take the bus. Champaign's bus system is pretty decent, I get to ride for free thanks to the University, and it stops right across the street from my house and drops me off a block from work, so really, there's no logical reason not to take the bus. Especially when the University has decided that the way to take care of the parking problem on campus is to charge up the wazoo for it, and a parking space on campus now costs only slightly less than just paying the 75 cent an hour meters. Yes, it takes about a half hour to get to work and more like 45 minutes to get home, but I can read or whatever and don't have to pay attention to driving.
On the other hand, there are many days when I realize why the American car culture exists, or at least, why it is self-perpetuating. The bus I take is usually pretty full and drives from way out on the ass-end of town where I live, through campus and then back out on the ass-end of Urbana on the other side. This gives you an interesting cross-section of humanity. Maybe I'm just a giant jerk, but sharing my morning commute with people who find it necessary to have conversations with their friends at the top of their lungs, complete with raucous laughter, the borderline crazy people who sit there and talk to themselves or hum constantly at a volume that is slightly too loud to ignore, and the high school and college students who find it necessary to have loud conversations on the cell phone (yes, I know I sound like an old woman, but for crying out loud, no one wants to hear about how completely drunk you were and what you did that you just can't believe), along with people who haven't been introduced to the wonders of modern hygiene and smell like the men's room in a gas station, do not make the experience pleasant on many occasions. To be fair, I'm sure I just remember the bad days more than the normal ones, but....
Now, here's the big question for me. Why is it that the bus is like this, while the subway seems to be a transit system that has a much wider cross-section of people? Whenever I take the bus, it never seems to have too many "professionals" -- doctors, lawyers, businessmen, etc -- but when I visit Boston or Washington DC, everyone rides the T or the Metro. I get the feeling it's that way in New York and a lot of other cities as well. Now, to be fair, I would do anything I could to avoid driving in Boston too, but is it just that driving is far less convenient? That the parking is impossible to come by? The subway doesn't seem to be as easy to catch -- buses, at least in Champaign, seem to be a lot more accessible. I sort of wish I had taken the bus in Seattle when I was there, since it's a large city without a subway or commuter rail (no, the Monorail doesn't really count) to see if it was the same.
Am I a bad person because people on the bus drive me nuts?
I take the bus. Champaign's bus system is pretty decent, I get to ride for free thanks to the University, and it stops right across the street from my house and drops me off a block from work, so really, there's no logical reason not to take the bus. Especially when the University has decided that the way to take care of the parking problem on campus is to charge up the wazoo for it, and a parking space on campus now costs only slightly less than just paying the 75 cent an hour meters. Yes, it takes about a half hour to get to work and more like 45 minutes to get home, but I can read or whatever and don't have to pay attention to driving.
On the other hand, there are many days when I realize why the American car culture exists, or at least, why it is self-perpetuating. The bus I take is usually pretty full and drives from way out on the ass-end of town where I live, through campus and then back out on the ass-end of Urbana on the other side. This gives you an interesting cross-section of humanity. Maybe I'm just a giant jerk, but sharing my morning commute with people who find it necessary to have conversations with their friends at the top of their lungs, complete with raucous laughter, the borderline crazy people who sit there and talk to themselves or hum constantly at a volume that is slightly too loud to ignore, and the high school and college students who find it necessary to have loud conversations on the cell phone (yes, I know I sound like an old woman, but for crying out loud, no one wants to hear about how completely drunk you were and what you did that you just can't believe), along with people who haven't been introduced to the wonders of modern hygiene and smell like the men's room in a gas station, do not make the experience pleasant on many occasions. To be fair, I'm sure I just remember the bad days more than the normal ones, but....
Now, here's the big question for me. Why is it that the bus is like this, while the subway seems to be a transit system that has a much wider cross-section of people? Whenever I take the bus, it never seems to have too many "professionals" -- doctors, lawyers, businessmen, etc -- but when I visit Boston or Washington DC, everyone rides the T or the Metro. I get the feeling it's that way in New York and a lot of other cities as well. Now, to be fair, I would do anything I could to avoid driving in Boston too, but is it just that driving is far less convenient? That the parking is impossible to come by? The subway doesn't seem to be as easy to catch -- buses, at least in Champaign, seem to be a lot more accessible. I sort of wish I had taken the bus in Seattle when I was there, since it's a large city without a subway or commuter rail (no, the Monorail doesn't really count) to see if it was the same.
Am I a bad person because people on the bus drive me nuts?
In big cities, trains are faster and easier than cars. They have dedicated tracks that they don't have to share with the rabble and they run long distances. If buses were used for suburb <-> city trips and had their own roads, you'd probably see the same people on them.
Around here, there are fewer people commuting for shorter distances, so the roads are able to accommodate the daily rush hours and (as you've noted) buses will not be faster than cars.
Now if you turned your observation into an argument for building a monorail system, I might be able to get behind that.