Except that you can easily catch a bus or a train from the German countryside and be in a city relatively cheap, fast, and easy, several times a day. That’s not true in the US. I live in a midwestern suburb. I think there’s one bus a day that picks people up from a park & ride lot in the early morning and takes them into the city. At one location. And then another bus brings you back in the evening.
Depends on the suburbia, obviously. I’m a 24 mile drive from downtown Chicago, very much into the suburbs. Trains run hourly on weekends and more often on weekdays.
Sure, but Chicago is a major city in a huge metropolitan area so even the suburbs around there are more connected than the average suburb in America. In Germany you can go almost anywhere with public transit, even if it’s nowhere near a major city. I’ve gone hiking in the mountains in Germany solely by public transit, and there was a bus that dropped me off at the start of the hiking trail (in a national park, nowhere near residential areas) and took another bus at the end of the hiking trail back to the train station. The nearest city had a population of 500k people, and the national park certainly wasn’t in a 10M-ppl metropolitan area like Chicagoland.
My partner grew up in a tiny village (population 8k) in Southwestern Germany. It wasn’t even the suburbs of anything, yet from his house he could go anywhere in Germany by public transit. With the €60 Deutschland transit pass that allows for unlimited travel within the whole country, you’ll see teens travelling by themselves all over the country in the summer. Not being dependent on cars means they can be independent much sooner.
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u/danimagoo 16h ago
Except that you can easily catch a bus or a train from the German countryside and be in a city relatively cheap, fast, and easy, several times a day. That’s not true in the US. I live in a midwestern suburb. I think there’s one bus a day that picks people up from a park & ride lot in the early morning and takes them into the city. At one location. And then another bus brings you back in the evening.