Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes

Check out Warsaw, Poland. Public transit is excellent, clean, and basically gets you anywhere via bus, tram, subway, or one of 4+ ridesharing apps. Bike lane coverage is also pretty good. It's obviously an order of magnitude smaller than Shanghai, but so are most Western cities.

Good overview of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kn2tL51bBs&t=8s

Warsaw really is booming, visiting from Berlin feels like stepping ten years into the future.

Lots of real (and not paper) economic growth.

Hah, yeah I do really like Berlin, but traveling from Warsaw to Berlin does feel like going back in time, infrastructure and mentality wise.

I mean the public transport infrastructure here is great, and there's a lot to love about the place (it's why I'm still here after all).

But spot on about the mentality. A lot of that great infrastructure here was inherited, and the attitude around it's continued development has been super conservative. Not to mention the Berlin government is borderline insolvent.

Just look at the cluster fuck that was car free Friedrichstr.

Warsaw is great, need to visit Poland again, have a huge soft spot for pączki.

ObWikipedia: pączi are a Polish filled doughnut [1] that seems awesome. Thanks.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki

They are indeed awesome, and once a year, everyone eats donuts for Fat Thursday.

https://culture.pl/en/article/fat-thursday-polands-tastiest-...

How does taking transit versus car compare for travel times?

Even in Lisbon, it seemed that public transit was a much bigger hassle, both in time and cost, than a ride-sharing app.

We had a family of 4. Fares are about €3-4 each so €12 per ride in one direction. Ride-shares were about €9. We also abused the intro ride-share offers by creating separate accounts and got that down to €4.50.

Generally I think the subway is much faster if you’re going more than 2-3km, and the tram is slightly faster than cars because you have a designated lane. Tickets are time-based, not trip-based. A 20 minute ticket is about 94 euro cents and an unlimited day pass is maybe 4 euros?

I only use ride sharing for longer 30+ minute trips, and usually that is between 10 and 15 euros one direction.

4 people, for a short term stay is about where it starts to make sense to ride share. Long term, you would have an longer term pass, vastly reducing the cost of a busride, and you would often travel in smaller groups. So in my experience there are times when bus/tram can be much faster and convenient than a car. Of course there are many cases where it is the other way round (and going out of the cities that ratio changes dramatically for a car). Good city design tends to favor a ratio in favor of public transport over cars.