[Permik]

You seem to forget that all the people on public transit essentially get their time back. It's so much more efficient than everyone having to use their own time to all individually make that effort.

I made some calculations like a year ago using public data from Finland in the year 2023, the people lost collectively 55k years to driving cars. If we could take all that time back by doing minimum wage work in Finland, that'd add 4,841,511,500.55€ to the GDP and add approximately 164,006,202.08€ of taxable income to the state.

Of course that's just an approximation which presumes everyone could do their jobs while commuting and that you could get 100% efficiency. (But many of the values in the data were rounded down, so this is technically just a lower bound on the value ROI)

E: fixed mafs

[cyberax]

> You seem to forget that all the people on public transit essentially get their time back.

Can I use the time in subway while commuting to work to get groceries or to get my child to a doctor's appointment?

> I made some calculations like a year ago using public data from Finland in the year 2023, the people lost collectively 55k years to driving cars.

Now do that with transit. Keep in mind, that transit is typically 2-3 times slower than cars in well-designed cities (i.e. not Manhattan-style hellscapes). It absolutely is true of Helsinki. Try dropping 100 random points on the city map and plot the routes between all of them, for both cars and transit. You'll find that cars are typically 3x faster.

[jakelazaroff]

> Can I use the time in subway while commuting to work to get groceries or to get my child to a doctor's appointment?

Can you use the time in a car while commuting to work to do the same?

> Keep in mind, that transit is typically 2-3 times slower than cars in well-designed cities (i.e. not Manhattan-style hellscapes).

What makes a city "well-designed" in your eyes?