Today we went out to visit some museums and we had to wait two minutes for our subway train to show up. Two minutes! It's outrageous. Yesterday there was a three-minute wait for our tram and then a four-minute wait on the way home. Do they think we have nothing but time on our hands?
On a more serious note, the Vienna subway is fast. From our hotel to the museums is about 10-15 minutes on the tram and about 3-4 minutes on the subway. The subway doesn't have a lot of stops; doesn't stay in stations very long; and accelerates to pretty high speeds on long straightaways. Very impressive.
Sounds bad. Luckily George Will warned us about this and we've been spared the nightmare of cheap, fast, comfortable, and reliable public transportation.
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Don't know if Vienna has this yet, but another good trend in European public transport systems is the use of contactless credit cards for fare collection. London has had this for several years, and New York City adopted it recently.
Makes your life much easier. Just make sure you have a contactless credit card with no foreign exchange fees and tap it when coming in or out. At least in London, you will always get the lowest possible fare at a favorable exchange rate (I've checked). And things like day passes and zone maximums are automatically figured in. So if you use enough fares to make the day pass rate, you will automatically only be charged for the day pass and any more rides will be free. No need to decide whether to buy the day pass or not - if you use it enough you will automatically get the day rate.
A couple of years ago I was in London and found the contactless payment system in the Tube very convenient. One time, however, my phone somehow switched out the credit card I was using with my flexible health spending account debit card and it went through. Unfortunately when I got home, my FSA card had been blocked on account of these weird foreign subway charge and it took goddamn forever to get a customer service rep on the phone to whom I could explain what had happened and unlock my account.
So: always check what card your phone is using.
Personally, I prefer not to pay by phone - I always use the physical card. Avoids exactly that kind of situation.
Here in Munich, the tickets for public transportation can be bought via an app (recommended) or at one of the many vending machines, which all have NFC payment. But no turnstiles, instead the various companies use spot checks to catch ticketless riders.
And Kevin, if you can read this, know that you have a faithful reader here in Munich, who would be happy to show you around the city after you're done with your Danube cruise.
Vienna has a marvelous public transit system. Between that, it's cultural life, and well-maintained public housing system it's regularly ranked as the city with the highest quality of life in the world. They've had their challenges lately with the huge influx of Middle Eastern and African refugees, and like in most places since the pandemic, costs have risen a lot more than many can comfortably afford (it's still cheaper than Paris or London by a long shot, but less than it used to be). But on the whole, it's a great place to visit and a lovely place to live and work.
Unless you are a Russian dissident.
In ages past when the dinosaurs were discussing timing of public transport service, I remember something about Disney optimizing wait times. I also remember that less than 5minutes headings would be required.
In my small town in Germany (under 4000 residents), we have two trains every 30 minutes going opposite directions to larger cities nearby, which then have frequent connections to still larger cities. Buses connect the other towns to various stops on the rail system.
It's amazing what's possible with investment and planning.
More directly to your point, though, you point out one of the main lessons that transportation expert Alon Levy is always preaching: frequency is everything!
Yeah, though German media (and rural Germans themselves) complain about how buses to their small towns only run once an hour, or how service was cut because it was underused. Things are changing, though, with some towns introducing on-call buses and taxis.
Welcome to 21st century transportation infrastructure
Vienna has had excellent public transit since the 20th Century. Most of our peer countries have, especially the ones that don’t speak English. (Something about speaking English seems to discourage investment in transit in all but London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Vancouver.)
https://www.wienerlinien.at/web/wl-en/120-years-of-public-transport-in-vienna#:~:text=1969%3A%20After%20100%20years%20of,as%20Vienna's%20first%20underground%20line.
My 7 mile commute includes an 11 minute wait at an LRT station. It's outside, and January temperatures for the morning commute are often below zero (and windy!). Yesterday my train was a couple minutes late to the station, so I had to choose between a 20 minute wait for my regular bus or a 4 minute wait plus a mile of walking with the alternative bus route.
Transit in the US sure isn't convenient.
After experiences like this sink in, I've come to the slightly downer conclusion that its not really apples to apples to compare US cities, which were developed for the most part after the invention of the car, with European cities, which were developed when the way to get around was walking.
Its just astonishing when you compare actual distances. In Madrid, from the royal Palace to the Prado is a 2.1k walk. That covers like the entire Madrid city center along the way. Within 2.1K from my house in LA is a ton of other houses and about one restaurant.
Within the same 2.1K in Madrid are like four subway lines, whereas in LA the 2.1K does not even get you to one station on the Gold line from my house, and as to the gold line, the South Pasadena and Highland park stations are 4K apart, and the next closest metro rail line is ...... I mean there isn't even any point.
Its not an argument against trains for me, its just wow, the dependency on the car really screwed us.
I'm unfamiliar with either Madrid or LA, but it appears you're using an unfair comparison. Your starting point in Madrid is the city center, whereas your starting point in LA is your house. A fair comparison would involve a starting point at the LA city center.
Downtown LA was, until relatively recently, almost 100% office buildings, with courthouses and City and County administrative buildings included as well. Some people lived there, now, more do. Until a while back there was not even a grocery store.
What was completely clear was it was designed to have 20,000-50,000 drive to work, and the same people leave every day. So, there had to be space for all those cars to park. To some degree, the metro lines have helped with that part of the equation.
My point being, that in the same area of Madrid people have always (for like 500 years) both lived and worked, and the city is designed accordingly.
Both downtown LA and LA in general are designed, comprehensively, for people to drive around in cars. That's not to say there would not be a demand for a Vienna level public transport, just that the coverage area would need to be much, much greater in terms of square km.
Many US metropolitan areas are not as utterly postwar and car dependent as LA is. Virtually none in the northeastern US are. Even SF isn’t. Perhaps you just need to get out to more US cities to find plenty of American city centers not as devoid of housing, restaurants or transit as LA? (LA is second to only Phoenix in my mind as being totally anti urbanist. Endless sprawl in search of a center.)
Most European cities were in ruins after WWII and chose to rebuild in an urbanist fashion. It was a choice for (mostly sunbelt) American cities to develop so sprawled out. Rust belt American cities are often 300+ years old and have the prewar density to support a radius of 2km or more of walkable urbanity, if only the entirety of federal and most states’ policies weren’t so anti urbanist. (Most European and Asian countries don’t just let their cities fall into disrepair and become crime hellholes. But America did just that from approximately 1950 to maybe 2000 or so.)