I can’t make excuses anymore, because I got an injury that made it so I can’t drive. (It’s a vision/eye problem).
It’s really hard being a Canadian who can’t drive. Your job search gets SEVERELY limited because all those jobs a 40-minute drive from your house become a 2-hour bus ride away. Moving becomes a nightmare because all the affordable apartments are in the middle of nowhere. And socializing when all of your friends want to live work and play in suburban neighbourhoods with awful transit ... don’t even get me started. Not being able to drive kiiiiind of ruins your life. Plus I used to work in an industry that basically requires driving on the job, so I had to change careers...
But despite all that, it’s also taught me that transit... isn’t as bad as everyone says it is.
Driving in traffic used to be my personal hell because I have ADHD and get bored extremely easily - now I can’t even remember what it feels like to sit in traffic, because I’m so busy enjoying reading or watching movies on my phone that I don’t even look out the bus or train window long enough to notice if there’s traffic or not.
Parking also used to be hell and now I never have to worry about that again. Instead of circling the block 8 times and then trying to parallel-squeeze into a parking space that barely fits my car, while people sit in the lane behind me honking, and then walking 5-6 minutes back to where I wanted to go... I hop off the bus 2 doors down from my destination and walk 20 seconds.
And the three things people complain about most when it comes to transit, don’t even affect me:
Crowded/dirty/noisy/etc buses: Where? Haven’t seen em. I find a seat 99% of the time I’m on transit, and most of the time the bus is so empty that there isn’t even anyone sitting next to me. This probably says bad things about the financial sustainability of the local transit system... ;) but it works great for me!
The bus taking a long time: Yeah, like I said, finding jobs on bus routes is fucking impossible. Most of the places I’ve worked over the past decade have been a 90+ minute bus ride from home. But sometimes, taking transit actually wins. I live a 25 minute drive from downtown (with no traffic)... or a 30 minute train ride, at any time of day (including rush hour). Even when I drove, I took the train whenever I needed to go downtown, for obvious reasons. A lot of my favourite destinations are actually a lot closer on transit than I thought they were. In a lot of cases, taking transit only takes a little bit longer than driving would’ve taken me.
Having to wait for a long time between buses... surprisingly, I rarely have to. Theres a huge amount of frequent bus lines, not to mention overlap of multiple routes - for example there’s 4 bus routes by my house, and each of them is a 15-30 minute frequency, but they’re all staggered so in reality I can catch a bus in 5-8 minutes pretty much anytime. Seeing how I’m used to having to spend 5 minutes warming up my car and scraping my windshield anyway, having to wait a little bit of extra time to leave the house doesn’t bother me.
If i had a platform where a large amount of people would listen to me, like if I was famous or something, I’d probably say this: “Yes, owning a car is great, and taking transit is often terrible. But it’s not all black and white. You don’t need to pick one or the other - why not reduce your driving just a little, and take transit once in a while? Not every transit trip takes 4x as long as driving... not every bus is crowded and stinky... and sometimes, depending where you live, you actually CAN walk out the front door and hop on a bus without checking the schedule because they arrive really frequently. So, large crowd of people who inexplicably cares about my opinion, here is my advice to you: give transit a chance. Catch a train next time you go downtown. Look up the bus route home from your favourite bar. Compare travel times. Don’t automatically assume it’s going to be bad. Oh, and stop buying homes on the opposite side of town from your job when there’s equally affordable and nice ones closer to work [that part is directed more towards people in small cities since I know torontonians and vancouverites have no choice].”