Comment by direwolf20
Comment by direwolf20 9 hours ago
Taxis daily! In a country without trains, is that normal?
Comment by direwolf20 9 hours ago
Taxis daily! In a country without trains, is that normal?
not everywhere in the US except NYC. People take trains in Chicago, for example.
They do, at a much higher rate than the US as a whole, but cars are still dominant. Transit mode share in the city of Chicago is around 21%, down from 28% pre-pandemic, while driving is at 44%. For Chicagoland as a whole, driving is 63%, transit only 9%. The usual source for this data is the American Community Survey; I pulled these numbers from https://api.census.gov, but the same source is also cited in e.g. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...) and Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-22/how-ameri...)
According to [1] the median Bay Area big tech worker earns $272k/year - or $130/hour.
According to [2] Uber drivers make $15 to $25 an hour, before expenses like fuel.
So while it's not normal it's certainly plausible that some people take taxis on a daily basis.
More broadly, as levels of wealth inequality rise in a given society, more people end up working in the personal service sector doing things like cleaning, food delivery, taxi driving etc.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra... [2] https://www.triplog.net/blog/how-much-do-uber-drivers-make
Driving to work is the most common way of commuting everywhere in the US except NYC. So in that sense, no, taking a taxi to work daily is not normal, just as walking, biking, and taking public transit aren’t normal.
When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.