Cities and cars just don’t get along. Cities are compact, maximally utilizing space for their human residents, while cars aren’t — they take up precious space just sitting parked, and carry few people while moving. We’ve already seen that motorcycles are faster than cars for getting through vehicle-friendly Los Angeles, but a new set of tests from Chicago, LA, and New York City shows that cars lose nearly everywhere.
Writers with the Wall Street Journal took on the challenge themselves, taking various transport routes from their cities’ centers to local airports: O’Hare, LAX, and LaGuardia. They used cars, rideshares, bicycles, trains, and busses, and came to some unsurprising results: Cars only win out under very specific circumstances.
The New York race featured four writers, all traveling from Times Square. One took a Citibike, another an Uber Shuttle, a third on trains and busses, and a fourth in a yellow cab. The ebike won, taking just 52 minutes to get to LaGuardia, while the taxi came in second. Uber’s shuttle tied with the MTA at 64 minutes total. Granted, that victory from the ebike came from a writer who was fully prepared, from the WSJ:
Travel editor Adam Thompson, a bike-sharing devotee, bragged from the start that he was going to win the race from Times Square to LaGuardia pedaling 9 miles on an e-bike from New York’s Citi Bike system. There are stations surprisingly close to the airport.
He was insufferable, even stress-testing the system before the race. In both directions.
In Chicago, a writer in an Uber went up against another driving a personal car and a third taking the train. The results were even more pro-transit — the train took 64 minutes, while the Uber took 92 and the personal vehicle 100. Driving that personal vehicle, too, was described as unenviable, per WSJ:
John Keilman got the worst assignment: driving. He got off to an ominous start when Apple Maps sent him through Chicago’s Downtown and North Side neighborhoods instead of straight to the frequently jammed highway.
In LA, the WSJ compared a driver, Uber rider, and bus passenger. LA was the only city where a car won, with the Uber taking 46 minutes to the personal car’s 56 and bus’s 57, and now we begin to see the pattern emerge: Cars are only fastest when professionally driven, and some small experience with the area doesn’t count, per WSJ:
Three reporters from our Los Angeles bureau gamely volunteered to see who could get there fastest from Union Station in Downtown L.A. Anne Steele had a feeling she would win in an Uber, but worried about competition from colleague Sara Randazzo in a city-run express shuttle bus and Joe Flint in his Mustang GT 5.0.
All know LAX well enough to plan their airport approach from the south on Sepulveda Boulevard to avoid getting tangled in the airport In-N-Out Burger drive-through line on the north end.
Folks who spend their lives behind the wheel, practicing their shortcuts and honing their traffic skills, are fast through cities. Yet, in areas with robust transit, they’re still slower than those other options — even slower than a New York Citibike, which aren’t exactly known for their strict adherence to maintenance schedules. Knowing what we do from the RevZilla test, about the time-saving nature of lane splitting, one has to wonder how much those times could be shaved down if we all took lane-filtering motorcycles to the airport. The full piece from the WSJ is worth a read, with its visual layouts of who’s winning which race, but the takeaway is this: Your car is a slow way to get through your nearest city.
