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Re: [OM] - OT - back to cars and commuting

Subject: Re: [OM] - OT - back to cars and commuting
From: Volkhart Baumgaertner <kyu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 02:07:57 +0200
Yo,

on Mon, 04 Sep 2000 09:54:12 +0000, Dirk Wright wrote:

>Those of you in Europe commute 2 hours one way to work?? 

Some do. While most of the concerned do not deem it acceptable, the German
unemployment agency does, which means that if you reject an offered job
because it's 2 hours away (which may well mean a distance of up to about 200
km = 125 miles), they will stop your unemployment payments.

>I thought those 
>countries were so small that you could travel border to border in that time??

I live in Germany - it's not really _that_ small. From Garmisch to
Flensburg, which are practically the southern and northern border towns,
it's about 1000 km (625 miles), in east-western direction it's about 380 km
(237 miles) wide at the narrowest point and 690 km (430 miles) at the
widest. Certainly there are some states in the U.S. that are much larger,
but there are also some that are considerably smaller. In any case, feel
welcome to give a try to driving the 237 miles in 2 hours. If you make it,
I'll pay for the beer we'll have afterwards, if you don't it'll be on you.
;-)
 
>And what about this public transportation problem? When I was in England, the 
>public transportation was outstanding.

I don't know about England. What place were you at - London?
In Germany, public transportation is outstanding if you're in the large
cities (> 500 000 inhabitants); in most others it's at the very best
mediocre, and if you live only a few km outside in the rural areas you're
usually lost if you don't have your own transportation. For instance: I live
in a village about 8 km (5 miles) East of Bamberg (Bamberg has approx. 75000
inhabitants and would be considered a mid-sized city in Germany), and I
teach computer classes, mostly in the evening from 5 to 9 or 9:30. While I
could go there by bus (not taking into account that I sometimes have large
amounts of gear to carry) if I were willing to accept a time of 45 to 60
minutes to get there (time on the bus, plus time walking to/from bus stop),
after 9 there is no bus that would get me back home. Or: For a while I
worked in Bayreuth, which is about 50 km East from where I live, 45 - 50
minutes by car. I checked into the possibility of using public
transportation to get there because I thought I might save some money.
Result:  there is no direct train connection, so I'd have had to go either
via Nuremberg or via Lichtenfels, and of course pay for the extra distance
I'd have preferred not to travel, so it actually would not have saved me any
money, rather to the contrary. And: 25 minutes to walk to the bus stop and
get to the train station by bus, 30 minutes of waiting for the train, 30 to
60 minutes to get to Nuremberg or Lichtenfels by train, 45 to 60 minutes
waiting for the train to commute to, 60 minutes to get to Bayreuth, 15
minutes to walk to work from the train station - total: 3.5 to 4 hours - one
way! Do I need to tell you what means of transportation I decided to use?

> Don't tell me that you have started to 
>create "suburbs" like us across the pond? As I recall, the typical European 
>lived in a tiny house or apartment in an urban environment. 

Nice cliché. A lot of us do, actually, though most of the houses and
apartments are not any tinier than the average American house or apartment.
But just as many live in rural areas, either because that's where they're
from, or because they moved there because they built a home and couldn't
afford the real estate prices in the city (please consider this: when I
lived in Columbia, SC, I could have bought a nice home with garden and
double garage in one of the best residential areas for about $ 80000.-,  a
sum that would not buy me more than a fifth of the lot, without any building
on it, in a comparable residential area of any German state capital, may be
half the lot or a little more in a rural area, still with nothing on it) -
so yes, there's many of us that live outside the cities. And yes, it does
bother us that the gas taxes we are forced to pay because we do not have the
alternatives the city-dwellers do are not used to improve the sorry excuse
of public transportation we have, but instead go into improvements of the
already excellent transportation systems in the cities.

Sorry for further extending this OT thread, but there seem to be some
misconceptions as to the quality of our transportation system (which one
really can't blame someone overseas for when even our own politickians
justify their anti-car-politics with the excellent public transportation in
the large cities which they claim makes cars unnecessary, simply refusing to
acknowledge the fact that half of the population does not live there and
consequently can't use it).


MtFbwy,
Volkhart

--
Volkhart Baumgaertner     email: kyu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
                                 MausNet: @MGN

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