I had a dinner in the suburbs this evening. And so in the afternoon today, I opened up Google Maps to figure out how I was going to get there.

I didn’t have my car with me — because I hate driving into the office — so in my mind, I was either going to take transit or take an Uber.

These are the time estimates that Google gave me:

It was going to take me over 4 hours to walk there. Over an hour to drive there. And 47 minutes to take the train there. Interestingly enough, cycling was also going to be faster than driving.

As soon as I saw this, I shut down the app and decided I would take the train. All I was interested in was the absolute fastest option. And for me at that moment, it was the train.

I recognize that this isn’t always the case. Sometimes driving is much faster than taking transit. It depends on a number of factors.

But as a general rule, when it comes to big and dense cities, you really can’t beat trains and bikes for moving the greatest number of people, as quickly as possible.