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by gydfi 3400 days ago
Yes but that's a bus. Public transport is intrinsically a worse and less convenient experience than having a private driver.
2 comments

Not at all. I can work or read on a train. I can't do that in a car. Nor does the car take me to London in 1hr15, at up to 125mph, like the public transport from our town[1] does.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_180

Why can't you work in a car? You're guaranteed to have a seat, for one, unlike public transport.
Motion sickness. If I read in a car (whether paper or screen) then I feel like crap for the rest of the day, basically. It's not at all uncommon.

Plus the train has tables, 240V sockets, wifi (which selects the best from several different providers, so better coverage than my phone), all of that. There are seats available from our station on pretty much every train, and the journey time is more reliable than the car.

I'm a huge fan of trains and hate cars, but the motion sickness bifurcation you describe is unusual, so I would avoid trying to use motion sickness to carry water in pro-train arguments.

The vast majority of people who experience motion sickness in cars will also experience motion sickness in trains.

It took years for me to really understand why so many people don't love trains like I do: motion sickness makes the freedom, relaxation, and ability to focus on work I experience not universally shared.

Sure. In this particular thread I'm just answering two generalised statements ("Public transport is intrinsically worse", "Why can't you work in a car?") rather than making a universal case.

I'd be genuinely interested to know stats for car and train motion sickness, though: I haven't found any on a quick Google. Motion sickness in general appears to be ~30% of the population. Obviously it's not a simple scale: my wife, for example, will get car-sick (without reading) on a fast, bendy journey more easily than I will; neither of us get train-sick; I get sea-sick much worse than she does.

Maybe this is true for you where you live, but it is certainly not true in other places.
I dunno. Go anywhere in the world and look at how billionaires and Presidents get around. Do they catch buses or do they choose to get around in private, possibly chauffeured, vehicles?

(Let me just pre-empt someone's example of some billionaire somewhere who loves catching buses, I'm sure there's one out there somewhere.)

Frankly who cares how Presidents and billionaires get around? It's entirely irrelevant to your unsubstantiated claim that "public transport is intrinsically a worse and less convenient experience than having a private driver."

For what it's worth, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte cycles to work just like most everyone else in the Netherlands.

Netherlands, of course, being an example of a place having public transport which is exceptionally good and quite often more convenient and more practical than having a private chauffer.