[withinboredom]

lol. I used to think the same when I lived in the US.

Now, I walk 5 mins to a bus to the train station, another 5 mins to my train, wait 5 minutes, then enjoy the half-hour ride (while reading a book) to the next train station, and finally hop on a bus that takes me 5 minutes from work. Total commute time: 45 + 15 minutes walk.

By car: 70-90 minutes.

Why? The train goes 180 km/h while cars only go 120, and there is usually a traffic jam during rush hour.

If you put bus stops where people actually live and work, you can get pretty good coverage.

[fjsjaia]

I basically have the same commute here in LA as you. ~50 mins between walking, waiting, and taking transit to get to work. However its simply faster to drive straight there. I can do it in 35 mins, but I opt for the transit to read a book and not pay to park at work (free parking you pay in time looking for it). Most peoples car commute in LA is only about 30 mins because of how polycentric the job network is in LA county (which makes it hard to create extremely in demand transit routes if everyone is going everywhere all the time vs a centralized hub and spoke city).

[tomjakubowski]

Hub and spoke has disadvantages. A perfectly efficient transit system has two-way flow all day long: otherwise parts of the system are being overused or underused.

Jarrett Walker over at humantransit has written extensively about this.

https://humantransit.org/2010/02/the-power-and-pleasure-of-g...

And on LA in particular: https://humantransit.org/2010/03/los-angeles-the-transit-met...