[habosa]

I’m an American who lived in London for 3 years and was also impressed, but as someone who only had to use national rail for leisure (got around London by bus/tube) I was oblivious to two things:

1) Commute hours are brutal. Trains are packed and even a few minutes delay can feel like ages when you’re missing a meeting.

2) The cost of 5x weekly round trips is enormous. The average annual pass for someone commuting into London from outside is like £4000. That’s in a country where the average wage is around £40,000. That’s a huge amount of money to spend on public transportation. I know a car would be more but I’ve never met a single American who spends that fraction of their income on public transportation.

Still though … I’d rather have expensive and unreliable trains than no trains at all.

[xnorswap]

Also it's hard to state how much, and especially when it comes to transport, that London isn't England.

London is it's own bubble with "Transport for London" running all transport.

It has lots of investment, cheap busses, frequent trains and a reliable underground. It has synchronisation between different forms of transport, and timetables that make sense.

The rest of the UK, the rest of England especially, has incredibly expensive buses, might be lucky to get one train an hour in some places, and might have 3 different bus companies serving a small town, meaning you can't even travel on a day pass, as you'll find that one bus company refuses to accept your ticket because it's a different bus company. Or you find you have to wait much longer for your return journey as the "wrong" company buses turn up first.