[consteval]

Buses and trams do that as well, or at least extremely close to it. If the next bus is in a minute, and it's going to the block you're going to, guess what - you can go where you want, whatever time you want.

This is the case in many areas. When I was in Romania, between buses, trams, and rail I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. There was always an option available, typically multiple overlapping options. Keep in mind this is a poor eastern European country.

Keep in mind it's also fast, like very fast. Going across the city was a 10-minute affair. Try driving across a big city like Dallas.

[erik_seaberg]

From Fremont, CA, the Sunnyvale office is a 40-minute wait for a 16-minute bus to a 12-minute wait for a 14-minute train to a 14-minute wait for a 48-minute bus (making 34 stops). Google estimates I could get there in two and a half hours. Getting home after 11 PM is more like four hours.

It's only 22 miles. A replacement for a car should be able to do this in about 32 minutes. But it would have to go point-to-point on demand, they can't cover the spanning tree of n^2 possible trips with any reasonable frequency (mostly because n^2 taxpayers don't exist, nor housing for them).

[consteval]

Right because the US is car-centric, so everything is designed to be an inefficient as possible. Things are far away not in spite of cars, but because of them.

> A replacement for a car should be able to do this in about 32 minutes

Right, again, I was able to go across the capital of Romania in maybe 10 minutes end-to-end. Because Bucharest isn't car centric. And I'm able to reach any arbitrary point in the city trivially.

Also, as a side note, your car couldn't do that in 32 minutes. There're people in CA that commute MUCH LESS than 22 miles that spend 1.5+ hours in traffic a day. Because, again, cars are the most inefficient means of transportation imaginable, so they have awful throughput and bandwidth.

This is mostly a case of US car brain. There're countless examples of places all over the world that are able to achieve this, and more, without a car. The biggest factor to remember is that distance doesn't scale like you think it does - due to the extreme inefficiency of motor vehicle infrastructure, the majority of our space is wasted on not-useful things. 22 miles in the US isn't equivalent to 22 miles somewhere else, because somewhere else those 22 miles have 10x as much stuff, so you wouldn't need to travel 22 miles in the first place.

[erik_seaberg]

That system doesn't seem to take you to every Bucharest address in ten minutes, only popular ones. I picked a few buildings at random in Google Maps and got hour-long L-shaped trips (detours into downtown) that would have been fifteen-minute drives. I don't think any pre-scheduled routes can cover n^2 trips well.

[consteval]

This wasn't my experience when you cross-reference the systems (bus, tram, metro) and consider walking also works.

> would have been fifteen-minute drives

Yes, if everyone on Earth magically disappeared. If you've never driven in a dense city, it's often faster to just walk alongside the cars than be in the cars.

This is because, again, cars are so unbelievably space inefficient that the space saving of human people versus cars can make up for the multiple order of magnitude difference in speed.