I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false.
One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership. This is the central thesis of the article.
Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget. They’re asking themselves how much they have to spend on buses. This is the core of the problem: low cost services are in a death spiral in the US. Budget cuts -> services get worse -> reduced users -> more cuts.
In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile. Further, the arrival times are not reliable and are often a long time apart. This means you need to arrive ~10 minutes early and time your bus so that you also arrive at your destination early. You will be wasting possibly 20+ minutes each way. Of course you are also standing in the sun or the cold or the rain while you wait, and probably walking on a hostile stroad and across several lanes of traffic before that point.
So while the number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter. If you want to improve ridership, you need to make the bus an attractive option for more people.
But lots of people _do_ already ride buses! There are already current riders, and potential riders who are making these marginal decisions. Occasional riders will decide between transport modes based on the trip - making marginal improvements (or regressions) would change the rate at which they choose to ride the bus.
Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are always "new adults" learning to get around and forming opinions.
So I strongly disagree: marginal improvements DO matter. And I agree with the author that this would be a relatively easy improvement to deliver for many cities.
I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year!
Marginal changes cut in both directions. The transport duration between A and B is only one part of the calculation. A rider also needs to get from their starting point to A, and from B to their destination.
Decreasing the number of As and Bs by half might reduce that 20% start/stop time by half, shaving 10% off the total time. (This is ignoring the fact that more people will need to board and leave at each stop, which might mean in reality you’re saving like 8%.)
But you will also increase the distance walked to the bus stop. That means battling cars and weather.
You could just have two bus stops. People who live and work at both ends will be very happy. But everyone else gets thrown under the bus.
Why stop there. Build enough buses for everybody so they can choose where those two stops are.
I also live in Chicago and wouldn’t mind walking extra to another stop, but Chicago also has a massive traffic problem, particularly post pandemic. During rush hour, the bus is stop and go already.
I’m really curious how this would pan out here, but it can’t be the only solution.
I think the only way to solve this is to invest much more into making buses nicer & increasing the numbers, and then instituting bus-only lanes on major arterial roads so that taking the bus becomes faster than fighting traffic.
San Francisco put in some bus only lanes and those routes have greatly improved bus speed and ontime performance.
The traffic downtown is really nuts now that the bridges are all shut down.
> I'm personally able to walk a block or two further
“A block or 2” each way at the start and destination is a significant difference (4-8 blocks) for most elderly people.
Busses fill two different roles, as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation. They can serve a vital role for cities without the kind of investment it would take to make most typical HN reader consider them as a primary means of transportation.
As such latency isn’t necessarily as critical vs coverage here.
I think this is a US-centric perspective.
In the US, buses (and public transport in general), are thought of as social programmes. Anyone can use them, but they are really for people who can't drive or are too poor to own a car.
The rider makeup then looks like that. The elderly and the poor, sadly. Services run at a huge loss and are dependent on massive and unpopular government subsidies. Quality of service is bad. There's a stigma to using it. You end up with long, slow bus lines because this allows as many of the current demographic (elderly, poor) to take the bus. And there are always bailouts or brutal cuts on the horizon. You end up at a sort-of local maxima of inadequacy.
In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving.
This alternate universe is a city like London. Transport for London has a balanced budget, and despite what grumpy Brits like to say, quality of service is on an ever-upwards trajectory.
In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term. You make public transport attractive to more demographics.
Spot-on analysis. I agree that transport should operate on a basically break-even basis, but offset in two ways:
1. Where the Government wants to subsidize some group (e.g. help the disadvantaged by giving them discounts) they should pay the fair price to the transit agency out of the budget of Welfare, not drag on the financials of the transport agency. In other words, it shouldn't be possible that the transport agency is insolvent only because most of their customers are paying next to nothing. Discussions about whether we should spend a certain sum on subsidizing the poor to ride the bus/train/etc are purely welfare budget discussions.
2. The Government should move additional money into the system when they realize an expansion of transport helps further societal goals: e.g. congestion pricing funds should help to expand transit, or the government pays part of the cost to build new rail service to reduce congestion on the roads.
Incidentally, London has a "Freedom Pass" (free transport for retirees), which is funded in the way you describe.
Instead of TfL being forced to take the loss, they are reimbursed by local government cost of the transport.
As an aside, I also take some issue with this pass being completely free to use. In my experience, people end up using it to go a single stop just because it's free, so why not -- which slows bus service for everyone else. I think it should be 20p per journey or something like that.
Taking such a fee also has transaction costs, in the time if nothing else.
To liken this back to the old days - the difference in time between flashing a valid transfer slip (of paper) and having to drop change into the automated till.
> In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving.
The problem with this in the US is that it's nearly impossible for the bus to be faster than a car without making the car slower on purpose, and the latter is the thing which is going to create the most opposition, because you're essentially screwing people over during the transition period -- which would take years if not decades.
In the meantime people still can't take the bus because the higher density housing that makes mass transit viable where they live hasn't been built yet etc., and as long as they're stuck in a car they're going to fight you hard if you try to make being stuck in a car even worse.
Meanwhile, cars are expensive. ~$500/mo for a typical car payment, another $100+ for insurance, another $100+ for gas, you're already at $8400+/year per vehicle before adding repairs and maintenance etc. For a two-car household that's more than 20% of the median household income. Make mass transit completely free and people start preferring the housing where mass transit is viable, which means more of it gets built, which is the thing you need to actually make it work.
Even in a dense city with no parking, it takes an unusually fast and frequent bus to compete with a brisk walk, and a heavy-rail subway to beat a fit or electric-assisted cyclist.
That's assuming you're only going a short distance. The average commute is around 15 miles. That's something like a five hour walk.
And the average commute duration is around 27 minutes. If you happened to live in one of the very few places in America where there even are 15 urban miles to cross, doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.
It's a chicken and egg problem. The way to make buses competitive is to build bus only lanes. But to do that you end up removing a lane for drivers and dedicating enforcement resources to keeping bus lanes free of private vehicle traffic.
The usual pattern is when a bus only lane is proposed, drivers complain because they view the bus as a social program. Local legislators often take the drivers' side because they also view the bus as a social program. Even if you get the political capital to push a bus only lane, traffic enforcement will routinely ignore bus lane violations. LA is making waves on the latter problem by attaching cameras to buses which automatically write tickets for cars blocking the bus lane.
Ultimately it's a politics problem. If nobody wants to spend political capital on running a bus system as a transport program, it ends up as a social program.
Bus lanes solve for variability during peak traffic, but speeds even in free-flowing traffic are far from good enough.
This idea occurred to me while I was traveling in Europe. Many of their trains have two classes of cars, where the first class is just slightly nicer. This could be done with buses too. Just alternate buses on the same route, that are expensive and free. The poor can take the free bus, and those who want a more exclusive social experience can pay for the expensive bus.
I can't make any excuses for the social and class implications, but if it got more people on the bus, it might only need to be a temporary measure.
Busses get tiny subsides in the US.
It’s a large percentage of total bus revenue by design, and a significant expense for some local governments. But the number only look large because of how we split the vast majority of government spending into federal and state budgets with local budgets being relatively anemic by comparison.
The farebox recovery ratio in the US is awful. Most cities are somewhere between 5-25% of operating expenses coming from fares.
Perhaps the tiny subsidies (in absolute terms) are because the bus systems are just so small?
SFMTA's farebox recovery is around 25%. London Underground is about 130%. Osaka Subway is 209%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
Buses are implicitly subsidized by road maintenance spending. Road wear and tear occurs according to the fourth power of axle weight, which effectively means almost all of the wear and tear is incurred by the heaviest vehicles, which include buses.
Roads still need maintenance even if nobody uses them, so a significant portion is split evenly across all traffic.
Busses are light compared to 18 wheelers and other heavy equipment, they also replace many cars and SUV’s which keep getting heavier.
Finally that rule of thumb isn’t really that accurate, “A 1988 report by the Australian Road Research Board stated that the rule is a good approximation for rutting damage, but an exponent of 2 (rather than 4) is more appropriate to estimate fatigue cracking.” Rutting really isn’t that significant in most cases, but can instantly destroy road surfaces when fully loaded construction vehicles etc drive over something once.
> Busses are light compared to 18 wheelers and other heavy equipment, they also replace many cars and SUV’s which keep getting heavier.
They don’t replace nearly enough cars and SUV’s to make up for the difference in fourth power of axle weight. But yes, 18 wheelers are worse.
>They don’t replace nearly enough cars and SUV’s to make up for the difference in fourth power of axle weight
A modest bus holds 40-50 people. Most commuter traffic is single driver, single vehicle. I don't know to which power the difference in axle weight would have to be to surpass the efficiency gains of replacing 40 to 50 American sized SUVs with a city bus, but I suspect it's more than four.
Private car ownership is a better everyday solution for almost anyone who can afford it, which includes the vast majority of Americans. If buses tried to compete with cars, they would lose. The only remaining niche for the bus is as a public accommodation for the poor, disabled, and elderly, or occasionally in dense city centers.
At least that’s what I think. But if you’re right, and there’s a version of bus transport that’s viable without subsidy, then there should be a market opportunity for a private business to provide that type of bus transport. This actually exists for long range intercity buses already, but you’d think it should be possible inside of some cities. I haven’t looked into this in a lot of detail but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was effectively impossible to try and start a private bus service in most cities, specifically because that would reduce ridership of city transit and threaten all of the unionized public sector jobs in that system. In which case the bus system isn’t really even for the poor and elderly anymore; it’s for the transit workers union, which undoubtedly is a player in city politics.
But this comes down to how your city is planned. Amsterdam and the Netherlands in general is making it much less attractive to be a driver, for example. Public transportation has its own dedicated roads and even entire regions where cars aren't allowed, bicycles are first class citizens that take equal if not more consideration when streets are designed, streetside parking is limited and getting even more so with basically every city having as a goal the reduction of the number of parking spaces.
Of course, there's still plenty of drivers, but the nice thing is that you have options here. Why would I want to drive if I can just take the metro, or tram, or train, or hell just cycle? Within Dutch cities cycling is often much faster than any other mode of transport, and the great thing is that everyone uses the cycling infra, young or old, rich or poor, able bodied and otherwise.
I think it isn't as absolute as you suggest, and that it depends on city planning. I own a car but in the city I live it is not a better solution for everyday trips. Walking, cycling, or bus/tram are all far more convenient - it is only when leaving the city that the car becomes better.
(Even then, it depends on the destination - if it's to another city then the intercity trains are still better but for 2+ people it ends up being the premium/expensive option and the car is cheaper.)
Private car ownership is better everyday for suburbs and rural areas but in cities that is not true. Public transit can improve downtown access and reduce congestion. You need some density for transit.
> as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation
One bus route can't wear two hats. Faster, sparser routes are typically complemented by slow, meandering collector routes which provide the kind of backstop you describe. Moreover, elderly and disabled people can use paratransit [1], which exists precisely to serve people with mobility issues too severe for regular transit.
Anyway, I reject the notion of buses as a second-tier transit option reserved for poor and disabled people. The only way poor people ever get decent service is when they use the same infrastructure that affluent people do. A bus system that doesn't serve the middle class is a system that will quickly lose its funding and become inadequate for anyone to use.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratransit
Around 1/5 of the US population is elderly ~1/4 by 2050, add in moderately disabled people and this isn’t a small population we are talking about.
Paratransit is for a far smaller percentage of the population due to the significant expense.
Having lived in SF I've seen many cycles where the SFMTA says "We'd like to make (insert any changes)..." and the 'advocates' immediately come out of the woodwork to make the argument you're making, about how walking another block or two is impossible for some constituents.
Fundamentally as another commenter here said, a bus "can't wear two hats." In most large US cities, the bus, and sometimes the subway (if one exists), is mostly a welfare program, and its target demographic is the elderly, the poor, and the homeless. Two of those groups are rarely in any hurry.
The fact that urban professionals also rely on transit to actually get to work is not very much considered in the decisions ultimately made. This is why any changes to it are so fraught.
To actually serve both populations, you'd need to have two independent systems, but that would represent a tremendous amount of incremental cost. That's why they used to have (do they still? I'd guess not, post-pandemic) buses paid for by Apple, Google, Facebook etc. to shuttle people to work -- it's something the city government could never accomplish because the choices that make transit useful to those with jobs make it problematic for the other group.
The US already has a completely separate model where we send yellow busses to pick up and drop off school kids which involve buses going to a large fraction of US homes 4 times a day 180 days a year for minimal expenses that’s free at the point of use.
Nothing stops you have adding express bus routes, thus allowing busses to work for yet another population. Further, bus networks are inherently cheap as long as they see reasonable ridership numbers it’s more economically efficient than cars.
In Seattle large employers still run their own private busses. This has been going on since long before the pandemic. These busses often tie in to existing transit options. They take you from the office to a neighborhood transit hub.
Sure, lets have the minority of the population force us into design choices that are detrimental to the majority of bus users.
When living in many a European city, I have chosen to walk instead of using a bus route due to the frequent stops making the bus trip a lot more expensive and marginally quicker. I have also lived in places where the eldery get a separate service, tailored to them, if they need it. Works a lot better IMO.
How about a compromise:
Alternate buses stop on the one-mile points only.
I live in Japan, where most people are old, and I can confidently say you’re wrong
> I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year!
Until there' a snowstorm, and no one shovels. And you have a broken leg, or are elderly, or disabled. Sure, it might save you personally some time, but we live in a society and should try to help out the one's who need help.
It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house. It's unavoidable that most people are going to have to walk a bit. How far is reasonable, is a matter of trade-offs. It also depends on how fine grained the network is. If there are buslines every block, it's annoying if they don't stop there. But you have to walk a block or two to get to a bus line anyway, walking that bit more to get to the stop itself, matters a lot less.
> It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house.
And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient, if you can afford to use it. (That load-bearing "if" is important, though.)
> And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient
Point-to-point transportation is faster and more convenient because:
1. we don't have bus lanes so buses are forced to sit in the same traffic as cars and 2. buses are often underfunded so have slow/infrequent service.
Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right. I can count on my fingers the number of times I used an Uber or drove a car in the 1 month that I stayed in Europe - this was going out every day, in multiple cities, rural and urban, and across different countries.
This is a good thing! If more people use public transit when it's possible, it opens up the roads for the handful of people who actually NEED to use a car.
Bus lanes still seem like the thing people who hate cars propose to intentionally screw over the people who have them. "Hey, we have this road with two or three lanes in each direction but it's fairly congested. Each of the lanes is carrying something like 50 cars per minute during the day! Why don't we impound one of them so we can have a bus carrying 40 people drive on it once every 15 minutes?"
If you have enough density to justify a bus lane, you have enough density to justify a subway.
> If you have enough density to support a bus lane, you have enough density to support a subway.
Not at all. Building a subway in most US cities right now is very expensive. Raising the tax revenue alone is probably a non-starter.
Moreover you're going to have to close the road down anyway to do any form of cut-and-cover or even deep bore construction, which means every business on the corridor and every person who lives on it is going to get angry for as long as the subway is being built.
There's no painless way to do infill public transport. The problem is that nobody in the US is willing to compromise.
> Building a subway in most US cities right now is very expensive.
This is true but seems like a problem worth solving. It's also true of more than subways; we have the same problem with bridges, housing and many other things. Better to get on with fixing it than use it as an excuse for doing something worse.
> Moreover you're going to have to close the road down anyway
That's a one-time cost, and you're not required to close a 500 mile stretch of road for years on end. Dig one block, install the tunnel, cover it, dig the next block.
I agree with you (and importantly you can't make a subway political football the way you can make a bus lane), but my experience doing transit advocacy points otherwise. Americans in dense areas are feeling the HCOL pinch and are not very willing to float extra taxes to fund transit expansion.
IMO it comes back to the fact that Americans are just not willing to accept change of any kind right now. The economy feels too shaky, the electorate too divided (even within states and municipalities), and there's too little faith in government to architect the kind of change you'd need to build subways, underground metros, or even BRT. We need a larger feeling of unity even at a state level to make the changes necessary, which is why municipalities continue to do bare minimum maintenance of roadways and pretty much nothing else. The last big set of constriction in dense urban areas was funded by the Obama stimulus from the GFC which was passed 17 years ago.
> If you have enough density to justify a bus lane, you have enough density to justify a subway.
That assumes a linear city, where everyone lives within a short walking distance of the same street.
In actual cities, bus lines from different neighborhoods converge on main streets. While individual lines may have 10–15 minute intervals, bus traffic on the main streets may be high enough to justify dedicated bus lanes.
Then, as the city grows, it can make sense to replace the bus lanes with light rail and direct bus lines with collector lines connecting to the rail line. Which should be cheap, as a dedicated lane is usually the most expensive part in building light rail.
But you generally want to avoid building subways until you have no other options left. Subway lines tend to be an order of magnitude more expensive than light rail lines. Travel times are also often higher, as the distances between stops are longer and there is more walking involved.
> That assumes a linear city, where everyone lives within a short walking distance of the same street.
Isn't that the assumption you're making? That there is a single primary street that everything converges and then diverges from which is common to every bus route? Meanwhile in practice any given person standing on the You Are Here dot could want to go in any of the eight directions from where they currently are.
A route that goes east-west isn't going to have much in the way of shared route with one that goes northeast-southwest except for the one point where they intersect, and isn't it better to have multiple routes intersecting in multiple places in terms of minimizing trip latency and maximizing coverage?
> Which should be cheap, as a dedicated lane is usually the most expensive part in building light rail.
But that's the thing that makes the bus lane so expensive!
By the time you have an area with enough congestion to be considering a bus lane, the problem is generally that you can't add a lane because the land adjacent to the existing road is already developed and not available, otherwise you would just add an ordinary lane that buses could use too. But converting one of the existing lanes in an area which is already congested makes the traffic exponentially worse than putting the new thing underground.
Essentially, if you can add a lane then you add an ordinary lane and if you can't add a lane but need one then it's time to dig.
> Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right.
Only if you're also intentionally making point-to-point worse.
Note that I'm not comparing to "get in your own car and drive", which has the disadvantage of having to park. I'm comparing the ideal taxi-shaped thing to the ideal bus-and-tram-and-train-shaped thing.
Self driving cars for hire (Waymo, Tesla, others) can be that point-to-point system that is affordable. We will just have to build tunnels to deal with the increase in traffic. Hopefully the Boring Company or someone else can get tunneling costs way down.
I generally agree that self-driving cars are going to take this niche, but not with tunnels. Tunnels add the same dedicated infrastructure problems as mass public transit.
I'd suspect most car trips today are 1 or 2 passengers with the back seat and trunk empty; we'll eventually see new form factors of on-demand vehicle that trim off unneeded space. If you need to get from A to B alone, no cargo to speak of, you order a ride that covers that class and it's small. If you're taking a shuttle from the airport with your whole family and luggage, you order a ride with those specs.
If you are not being facetious, what you are describing is closer to a subway system, which has the disadvantage of being very expensive.
Hopefully someone else, so it actually happens and isn't overpromised and underdelivered.
(Also, tunnels are useful not just for the increase in traffic, but for moving car traffic away from non-car traffic, which makes both kinds of traffic safer, faster, and more efficient.)
As long as one of those points is a transit stop then yeah, robotaxis make sense. In that model you don’t need the tunnels.
They make even more sense if they are a bit larger and can accommodate multiple people at once. Something like a large van or small bus.
No, it's not unavoidable. Just ditch the buses and switch to cars, soon to be self-driving.
Even the rush hour traffic is trivially solved by mild carpooling (small vans for 4-6 people).
Not Just Bikes makes a compelling argument that self driving cars are not the answer, and will almost certainly make things worse
Would you care to summarize their argument?
Self-driving cars still take up space on the road. Even more than human-driven cars, because now there will also be cars transporting 0 people. It's going to make congestion worse. Public transit is the solution to congestion. Well, one of the solutions, because bikes are probably a better solution for most people: they do start in front of your home, can park anywhere, and don't cause congestion the way cars do.
We're talking about cities, of course; in rural areas, nothing beats cars.
> Self-driving cars still take up space on the road
This is a false argument. Think about this: a bus every 10 minutes is effectively 500-900 meters long! It easily "takes" as much space as 100+ cars. In other words, nothing would change from the traffic perspective if instead of 1 bus every 5 minutes, you had 100 individual cars.
The "people in the shape of a bus" argument makes sense only when you're talking about the performance in a very narrow case of transporting people in a steady, uninterrupted stream of buses. Or if you need to size your traffic bottlenecks.
Moreover, a bus route necessarily is unoptimal for at least some people on a bus. They are effectively "thicker" than other people because they take up more "effective space". But wait, there's more! Buses also necessarily move slower due to stops, so the "effective length" of a bus becomes even longer because cars will clear the road faster.
But wait, there's even more! A single bus needs about 3 drivers to be effective. So with the average daily busload of around 15 people, you have almost 20% of the bus taken by the drivers on average. This makes bus trips pretty expensive. Not quite to the level of Uber/Lyft, but surprisingly close.
And these problems are fundamental. That's why urbanists like NJB don't like to talk about that.
> a bus every 10 minutes is effectively 500-900 meters long!
uhhhhhh what. What does every 10 minutes have to do with this at all
> It easily "takes" as much space as 100+ cars.
are you ok??? have you seen a bus before??
> A single bus needs about 3 drivers to be effective
I have never ever seen a bus with 3 drivers in it. If you're talking about 3 drivers over the course of 24h, those drivers are not in the bus at the same time, and therefore don't make up 20% of the passengers on the bus. If you're saying the average bus route serves 15 people per day, you are certainly mistaken.
> uhhhhhh what. What does every 10 minutes have to do with this at all
See the word "effective". Think about the road space that a bus requires but doesn't use if it is just once per 10 minutes.
> I have never ever seen a bus with 3 drivers in it. If you're talking about 3 drivers over the course of 24h, those drivers are not in the bus at the same time, and therefore don't make up 20% of the passengers on the bus.
Yes, I'm talking about the drivers that are needed for a reasonable 16-hour bus service. And the typical ratio is actually a bit more than 3 drivers per 1 bus.
> If you're saying the average bus route serves 15 people per day, you are certainly mistaken.
No. I'm saying that on _average_ there are 15 people in a bus. More during the rush hour, fewer during the off-hours.
> See the word "effective". Think about the road space that a bus requires but doesn't use if it is just once per 10 minutes.
Excepting the case of a dedicated bus lane, the amount of road space a bus is preventing other cars from taking up is equal to the size of the bus. Technically, it's less than that in the case of bus stops littered amongst parking. In the case of a dedicated lane, it reduces the maximum throughput of the thoroughfare, but it's not a simple thing to model as there are other effects that the bus can have to reduce the number of cars when the rate limit of thoroughfare would be pertinent (i.e. usually rush hour). Just saying "think about it" when saying a bus takes up the space of 100+ cars doesn't really substantiate such a bold claim.
> Yes, I'm talking about the drivers that are needed for a reasonable 16-hour bus service. And the typical ratio is actually a bit more than 3 drivers per 1 bus.
> No. I'm saying that on _average_ there are 15 people in a bus. More during the rush hour, fewer during the off-hours.
If there is an average of 15 passengers on the bus during the operations of the bus and there is an average of 1 driver on the bus during the operations of the bus, then it is 1/16th occupied by driver(s). For it to be taken 20% by driver occupancy, then it would require there to be an average of 4 passengers on the bus during operations.
> We're talking about cities, of course; in rural areas, nothing beats cars.
Where I grew up in NW Scotland, it's a five hour round trip to go to the supermarket. You pretty much need a car for that.
Where I live right now it's a five minute walk to the supermarket, but I still need a car because the things I work on are a long way from where I live, often up steep muddy mountain tracks.
When I lived in the middle of Glasgow people used to come up and have a go at me about driving a massive V8 4x4 in the middle of a city. What am I supposed to do with it? Bike to the suburbs and then go and drive up a mountain?
"But why not get a job where you don't need to drive hundreds of miles in a massive 4x4?"
Because then the things on the tops of mountains don't get fixed when they break, and the radios don't work properly, and then people like you die in a fire.
Sometimes it's hard for people to grasp that just because their not-really-a-job tapping numbers into an Excel spreadsheet all day can be done from home or from an easily walkable city centre location, it doesn't mean that everyone's job looks like that.
I do wish I could usefully use a cargo bike. Those things are awesome.
What people really misunderstand in these discussions is that no one is talking about completely killing off driving as an option, and no one says that public transportation works in literally 100% of circumstances.
We just want there to be viable public transportation options for situations where it makes sense. This even makes it easier for the people who do have to drive, like you, as there will be less congestion because a single bus can replace literally dozens of cars, combine that with a single tram and a single metro car and you're replacing literally hundreds of cars that would otherwise be on the roads instead.
> What people really misunderstand in these discussions is that no one is talking about completely killing off driving as an option
I find this statement utterly hypocritical. Sure, we're not killing off driving. We are just choking off the roads with bike lanes, forcing extra-high density ("just build more"), removing parking, forcing the drivers to pay for transit that they don't use, and just to pay in general.
But no, we're not preventing driving. Not at all.
Urbanists want to stop people from using cars as much as they can force that.
You call it "choking off" roads; I call it basic geometry. Reallocating a lane of traffic to bikes or transit moves exponentially more human beings through the exact same amount of physical space. But sure, pretend that a single occupant dragging around a 4 ton metal box to buy groceries is the absolute pinnacle of spatial efficiency.
And the fact that you're complaining about "removing parking" is hilarious. Street parking is objectively the most useless, wasteful allocation of already limited public space imaginable. You expect cities to dedicate premium real estate to act as a subsidized storage locker for your private, empty vehicle for the 95% of the day you aren't even using it. Then you complain about non-drivers "forcing" you to pay for transit, while everyone else's taxes are literally subsidizing the free public storage of your personal property.
Let's also talk about your entitlement to those roads. When you complain about "choking off" streets, what you're really whining about is that cities are finally prioritizing actual residents over commuters who are just driving through. Most car traffic in urban centers is just people transiting. Why should a neighborhood sacrifice its safety, noise pollution levels, air quality, and public space just to act as a high-speed shortcut for people who don't even live there?
And please, spare me the inevitable "but what about rural areas" argument. We are talking about dense cities. Nobody is coming for your car in bumfuck nowhere; you can keep driving there all you want. (Though honestly, here in the Netherlands, you don't even have to drive in the countryside because you can usually just grab a train or get anywhere by bike, but that's beside the point.) Urban planning applies to urban areas.
I live in the Netherlands. Millions of people here take transit and ride bikes every single day. And guess what? Nobody banned cars. In fact, it's widely considered one of the best places in the world to drive specifically because everyone who doesn't want or need to drive isn't forced to be on the road getting in your way. We just realized that sacrificing huge swaths of our cities so commuters can treat our neighborhoods as a shortcut is incredibly stupid, and there are infinitely better ways of using the limited space in cities than to let drivers park their cars there.
Giving people viable choices isn't a totalitarian conspiracy to oppress drivers, it's just good urban design. It's wild that you are so used to forced car dependency that simply offering people an alternative feels like a personal attack.
P.S., I'm also a driver, I just don't need to do it 90% of the time because I live in a sane country where I can just bike to the other side of the city in 20 minutes.
> Reallocating a lane of traffic to bikes or transit moves exponentially more human beings through the exact same amount of physical space.
Except that bike lanes in the US, on average, carry fewer people than car lanes that they replaced. So yes, it's indeed "choking off". It's done to force the density increases. After all, if you can't commute anymore (roads are sabotaged and transit is slooooowwww), you'll have an option to live closer to the workplace. In a new expensive apartment in a high-rise.
Bike lanes also kill businesses. There were studies showing otherwise, so I replicated them, and they now show the opposite. Places in Seattle and Portland with bike lanes that displaced traffic lanes are declining faster than areas around them. The previous positive results were caused by spurious correlations during the general upswing in the urban economy after the 2008 crisis.
> Then you complain about non-drivers "forcing" you to pay for transit, while everyone else's taxes are literally subsidizing the free public storage of your personal property.
There is no free parking around me anywhere. And I'm also paying around $2000 a year in car tab and property taxes for transit that I don't use. And before you ask, in my state user fees pay for 90%+ of the total road maintenance expenses.
> We are talking about dense cities.
Yeah. They need to be _de_-densified in the longer term. But even dense cities will benefit from removing bike lanes and adding self-driving taxis.
> I live in the Netherlands. Millions of people here take transit and ride bikes every single day. And guess what? Nobody banned cars.
I got my driving license at the age of almost 30, and I lived in several large cities. And I _also_ lived in Amsterdam. People ride bikes in Amsterdam because there usually are no other comparable options. Transit typically takes ages longer, and car parking is non-existant. Of course, people justify that by telling themselves how they love to ride bikes even in cold wind and rain.
So... Should the bus stops be even closer together?
Does Chicago not mandate people shovel their drives ways? In most towns/cities in upstate new york you can get a fine if you don't shovel your sidewalk.
I'm not in Chicago but where I am you have 24 hours after the snow stops to shovel your sidewalk. And realistically, they don't start handing out fines until at least a few days after that, if at all.
What? Why do they care whether people shovel their driveway?
The solution for that is offering express routes not forcing everyone onto a slow frequently stopping local bus and making everyone worse off for it.
that's right, the best solution is probably something like every other bus (excepting very low frequency buses that have fewer than 5-6 buses per hour) to only stop at every other stop (of course always including interchange points).
As an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty.
A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the same space would (as you rarely get more than 1 person per car in peak hours).
I'd rather take buses than the car in any city. Cars make cities dangerous, noisy, polluted, congestions make people nervous behind the wheel, fights are far from uncommon. Finding parking, paying for it is another issue, common in Europe where (luckily) city centers are often millenia older than cars.
At no point of me living in the US I found the car-centric model anywhere better.
Maybe it goes without saying, but the reason you don’t mind the bus in Europe is not because you are European but because the European buses are nicer.
The things you say about noise and pollution are also true in the US, and American drivers are acutely aware of them. But the alternative is not a European bus, so people drive.
But also too, packed with junkies who, at best, behave erratically and at worse assault randoms.
Taking the bus around sf makes it immediately clear why (not all, but most) people who have options choose them.
Honestly, there aren't that many crazy people on the SF Muni/busses. The detractor for taking these services is speed and frequency.
Even factoring in parking, traffic, and bus lanes, it's much faster to drive within SF than take the bus. Stopping every 2 blocks and missing every other green light kills throughput.
My local bus stop to connect to BART supposedly had service every 20 mins, but often a bus would be out of service and the wait would be 30-40 minutes. Unless a bus was right there, it was faster to walk.
The crazy people depend a lot on routes, the part of the city, and the time of day. E.g. the 1 (Sacramento St/California St) is basically fine all the time. The 38 (Geary) and 14 (Mission) are OK during the commute rush since they are packed full of commuters, but outside of those times, you will eventually see all kinds of unsocial behavior (shouting, fights, defecation, etc.), especially closer to civic center/tenderloin/mission.
You don't need that many crazy people on SF Muni/buses for it to cause a problem for everyone else who might want to take a bus.
But yeah the fact that it's often faster to walk (and definitely faster to take a bike/scooter) is also an issue.
> Honestly, there aren't that many crazy people on the SF Muni/busses. The detractor for taking these services is speed and frequency.
Everyone can form their own opinion on the acceptable number of visibly intoxicated people they’d like to encounter. That said, my understanding of the law is that the correct number is zero. So seeing more than zero is an indication that laws are not being enforced.
People can debate whether particular laws regarding drug use are justified. However, if enforcement itself is optional, one might reasonably question whether that applies to other, less controversial laws as well.
People always claim this and then talk about their car as a perfect save heaven. When in reality road rage incidents are also incredibly common. People taking out their guns or starting fights. And of course generally accidents kill a lot of people.
That said, if you only look at driving in a city like SF, this is likely less of an issue.
>> Maybe it goes without saying, but the reason you don’t mind the bus in Europe is not because you are European but because the European buses are nicer.
Actually I think it is both. Car culture in Europe is nowhere as dominant as it is in the US. Many Europeans grow up with public transportation as the default mode of getting around. So they are more likely to be accustomed to things that become grievances for Americans.
I was born and raised in Turkey, and now live in the US. In Turkey when you take a bus or train during rush hour you’re often packed like sardines. No concept of personal space. Same with many cities in Europe. That type of thing wouldn’t fly anywhere in the US, except maybe NYC. Even then though New Yorkers tend to dislike it.
There's an intimidation factor that a lot of Americans won't quickly admit to when it comes to taking the bus. They don't know if they can tap with their phone to pay, if they need cash, if they can use change, if they need exact cash/change, if they need a specific transit card etc. They don't know the etiquette for asking to get off the bus and sometimes it varies by bus design. They don't know the routes or the time schedules and find it confusing and overwhelming and often have a low tolerance for the embarrassment that can come with publicly learning something.
Yes. As long as we're looking for relatively easy or cheap improvements, I believe that UX is a huge one. Buses have a long tradition of user-hostile design. "Exact change only", unhelpful and condescending and impatient drivers, unwritten etiquette rules, and everything else you listed.
It has always baffled me why they make it so hard for first-time users in particular. Sure, they mostly care about the regular customers who make up 99% of their passengers, but everyone has to be a first-timer before they can be a long-timer. It's not just UX papercuts, the experience seems designed to be maximally hostile. Is it because one more marginal person is a little more delay, a little more crowding, etc? It feels like there are perverse incentives at work.
It's the same in Europe. There are many car drivers who would never admit that, but they just don't want to leave their comfort zone and learn how to use public transport. But when asked they will say stuff like "well, we live a bit outside the city", or "now with kids you basically need a car".
> public transportation as the default mode
Do you have any sources on that? In basically any European country the car dominates and is used far more than public transport. Even in cycle-friendly Netherlands the majority of people go to work by car.
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe...
That's not majority of trips, it's by distance travelled.
Basically in the Netherlands, if you're within 5-10km, you go by bike. If public transport is reasonable, which it mostly is in urban areas, you take it. You'd almost never choose car within a major city, unless it's on the outskirts.
Point still stands that public transportation is not the default mode. There isn’t a country with the cycling infrastructure of The Netherlands. And The Netherlands only has that cycling infrastructure due to its urban sprawl and low density cities. In most places in Europe you walk to your doctor, supermarket or cafe.
https://www.pbl.nl/en/latest/blog/putting-dutch-urban-sprawl...
And this starts in primary school.
Make it legal for kids to move around on their own and take transit to school, just like they do in most of Europe and beyond. Parents are lazy, so many kids will. That's a lesson in public transportation use right there.
> Make it legal for kids to move around on their own and take transit to school
... it is legal though? But if you live in the typical US suburb then good luck with that. You'll catch a district provided bus to school and if your parents don't want to drive you somewhere you'll ride a bike or just not go.
Taking the bus in the suburbs often means walking 15 minutes, waiting on 45+ minute service, and switching routes at a transfer station. It's an ordeal to say the least.
Yeah suburban bus service really just doesn't work. Not enough density. I live in a small town and they try but it's the same issue. Most buses drive around nearly empty and just slow down the cars that are following.
Rush hour CTA in Chicago is packed like that at least on some routes in and out of downtown. Or rather it used to be, I have not lived there in quite some time so not sure about today.
There is also the monetary angle. How many european households can afford a car for both parents and a car each for two kids, registered, insured, paid for to park wherever they go?
Even if you are poor in the US cars are remarkably accessible. You can finance a used car with no credit and a couple dozen dollars a month.
And the parking angle.
Europe builds apartment complexes which are ~3 to ~10 stories tall, the US builds sprawling suburbs, zoned so that there's no grocery store in sight.
If you're packed 3 to an apartment in a 10-story complex, it's unlikely there's enough parking for all of you.
Many more households could afford it then want to afford it. Its just a huge waste of money. Cars are assets that massively deprecate in value and are utilized a extreme minimum of time. They are a horrible investment of large amounts of money.
In the rare cases where you need a second car, you can rent one extremely easily.
> Even if you are poor in the US cars are remarkably accessible. You can finance a used car with no credit and a couple dozen dollars a month.
This partly true but also really ignores a lot of issue that it creates.
The amount of car debt in the US is crazy. Lots of people get cars at absolutely absurd interest rates because their credit is bad and the need a car. Stretching out payment over many, many years. Its extremely predatory.
And then because of the arms race where everybody needs an ever bigger car or get killed, people buy more and more expensive cars all the time.
And of course because of the lack of safety inspections, people driving these really badly maintained crap cars that cause issues for everybody.
And even worse, people are so afraid of being without a car that people rather give up their homes and live in their cars then the other way around. Letting people slip into homelessness because if they want any hope in the future they need a car.
People paying interest on car loans rather then investing in their 401k isn't a great deal for society.
So yeah, my parents could defiantly afford two cars, but very, very rarely did we have 2 cars. And the only in special circumstances where that second car would be shared with some other people as well. Its just bad business and not that useful.
I calculated this back when I commuted daily. I was spending €700 a month on my car. Public transport would have been only €450 a month.
Still went by car. Car was 35 minutes door to door in a climate controlled environment with a good seat and good stereo system. Public transport was two hours, multiple legs with various trains and busses, various payment systems, problems with missing connections, waiting outside in the cold, being packed with others.
Gladly paid that €250 a month for 31 hours of my time and having a peaceful commute.
Plus a weekend trip was typically around €30 for four people versus €150 for four people by public transport.
And a lot of Americans sit in their cars in start stop traffic for hours every day. With road rage and stress from road rage being a huge issue. You only need to look across most of American popular culture to see how deeply ingrained this is.
I would also not say that 'there is no concept of personal space'. Even in rush hour most of the time its not that bad in place I have been. You are sitting next to people, and rarely standing next to people. But its usually not a big issue.
Its often more comfortable then flying in a plane.
You are stating unequivocally that every bus in every European country is nicer than the average bus in the US?
Mexican third tier town bus beats Atlanta airport shuttle.
It is not even controversial or anormal. If nobody cares about an infrastructure and reluctantly maintains it only because it _has_ to (e.g. by federal mandate), then yeah, you get bottom-of-the-barrel service and a negative feedback loop (no ridership → cuts).
Successful transit systems work when the political will is there to support it.
Yes!
always seemed obvious to me that the reason for the disparity is that european buses are a way to get around dense cities and US buses are a welfare program for residents of sparser cities who can't afford cars. the bus lines don't actually go anywhere people care about, they're their just to provide the bare minimum ability to go somewhere.
the top comment is right and this article is a good exmaple of what transit people do. they get so excited about transit and how awesome it is that they forget about some of the more fundamental issues.
Which of the cities used as examples in the articles are "sparse"? LA? Pittsburgh is one of the smaller ones listed and while the bus network there is very hub and spoke, it's also still semi usable.
But to call NYC, LA, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, etc sparse doesn't seem very accurate. Yes, LA is vast, but I wouldn't call it sparse.
LA is sparse by European standards, or rural by Asian standards.
http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf CTRL+F for "BUILT-UP URBAN AREAS BY URBAN POPULATION DENSITY: 2025"
America is the exception for population density in general.
This argument doesn’t mesh with what I experience in my daily life.
Busses go places I care about: two blocks from my work, and to the airport.
My US city is dense. Not like Europe, but unless the argument is that major metropolitan areas in the US are not dense enough (LA?), I don’t buy it.
Bus transit has problems, but I don’t think it’s as simple as the parent is asserting.
This is highly location dependent with how unequal the US transit infrastructure is. It'd help to add your city for anecdotes to mean much.
I lived in Columbus Ohio as an exchange student and I really disliked the car-centric nature of...everything.
I wish it had better public transport in general but I honestly wish that about pretty much any place.
Typing this from a suburb of Columbus now.
COTA provides decent service to get around in the downtown and directly adjacent neighborhoods, but it drops off sharply as soon as you get outside of that area.
Part of the problem is the typical US sprawl of the place. The area inside the beltway is ~200 square miles - https://urbandecisiongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/fc...
I live just outside the beltway. Driving to the OSU stadium just north of downtown would take me about 25 minutes. According to Google maps, the nearest COTA stop is a 20 minute walk away, then it's an hour and ten minutes to get to the stadium.
Agreed it would be lovely to be able to hop on a bus or train and get somewhere within a reasonable amount of time.
I know I'm a corner case on this, but there are two cases where our car life significantly improves your quality of life.
1: you live with ADHD: "Oh my God, I need to leave five minutes ago" scheduling method. To anyone who says, "You just need to be more disciplined about time," I refer you to the part about ADHD.
2: If your quality of life depends on activities that are more wilderness/far away from cities, such as hiking, astronomy, camping, bird watching, and don't include (actively exclude?) urban experiences that require amenities.
3: Friends and family live 30 minutes to 6 hours away.
I have no problem with improving bus service for people and getting them out of cars because that means there'll be more room for me to go to where I want to go when I want to go.
Half of all dutch people own cars (10,062,194 cars / 17,904,421 people). The majority of people still ride bikes or take public transport to move around except when they need to take their car. For comparison, a majority of americans have a car (259,238,294 cars / 333,287,557 people). Note that the denominator includes children in both cases.
You're not asked to give up going to the wilderness.
Regarding scheduling, in my eyes public transport where the mean time between busses is not under 15 minutes is not public transport. Running after a bus is a signal that the frequency is too low. "I need to leave five minutes ago to take the bus I intended" should be followed by "if I leave now I'll be a few minutes early for the next one".
You are right, I was not asked to give up going to the wilderness; I just want to go to the wilderness of my choosing and not be constrained by someone else's transportation.
Funny thing about scheduling. I have to plan to leave an hour earlier than I need to, and even then, I'm frequently late. Yet, my hyperfocus kicks in when I sit in the car and go through the rituals of "I'm driving now." The vigilance can be exhausting, but usually only bothers me when I'm leaving an observing site at 3 o'clock in the morning or I'm driving at twilight in deer country.
1. Makes sense.
2. This is why non-car-centric countries don't ban cars. If you're that kind of person (and not everybody is), you buy a car. You may not use it beyond these wilderness activities though.
3. Trains.
Good points. A few years ago, I visited a friend in Estonia, and even though he was in Tartu proper, they still drove almost everywhere. Essentials were only available by car.
Trains are an interesting subject. For them to be useful, you would need to have rails covering the same destinations and paths as the highway system. One should also be aware of network effects when adding another layer of transportation services, including how they affect the distribution of services and residences. From experience, we know that roadways encourage spread because they allow you to cover a greater area with little time cost. Rail will likely encourage denser development and a higher cost of living due to a greater influence of rent-seeking entities.
One of the tensions one would need to explore is the tension between the need/desire of a chunk of the population to keep their distance, keep their living space separate from others, and be acoustically and physically isolated from them, while still needing services a 30-minute drive away.
Living with ADHD also increases your chances of getting into a car accident substantially. I can't find the numbers now, but the increase is non-trivial and there are some clear mechanisms (inattention, impulsivity and risk-seeking behaviors).
ADHD is a big part of the reason I don't drive. I'm lucky enough to live in Berkeley which is very walkable with decent transit, and I would hesitate to move anywhere more car-oriented exactly because I have ADHD.
Yeah, ADHD does affect one's ability to drive safely. On the other hand, I've been driving for over 50 years. I've had one accident that I was responsible for. Various other vehicles have been involved in five other accidents where the other driver backed into my parked car.
I think the reason I've been hypervigilant about safe driving practices is that my father owned a rigging company, and I was driving forklifts and stake trucks in the yard from about 13. I understood the impact a vehicle could have on other things, people included. Living in that world from about age nine on teaches you to be obsessive about properly securing a load (Molding machines, air handling units, lathes, etc.).
I've often thought people would be better drivers if they started their driving experience with the motorcycle safety training course curriculum and drove for a year on motorized two wheels, taking up the lane and keeping up with traffic.
When I was younger I was lucky enough to live somewhere rural where I got into a couple of single car accidents that I walked away from. Now my ADHD hyper focus is super attentive when driving.
Successful transit means a very regular schedule and ponctuality.
Your first point does not apply to, say, Switzerland. Missed your train? Just wait 5-10 minutes. 30 if you're in bumfuck nowhere.
Why are you assuming that it's a binary A or B?
I want good public transport in urban areas as I don't want to take the car, but I still own one for many uses.
I hate it to be mandatory to live.
1: This "ADHD" issue is because you've never seen properly ran bus system. I used to live in big European city, riding bus to work everyday, and I never even knew the bus schedule. I did not have to. They would come every 15 minutes, or every 7-8 minutes during the rush hour. So I could just show up at the stop anytime and be sure that a bus will appear quite soon. Zero advance planning required.
The ADHD issue is because I always think I can get more done in the time before I need to leave, and I end up hyper-focusing and missing the leave time. Another ADHD factor is that if I don't sit and watch every stop go by, I am likely to miss it because I'm reading and not paying attention. This is not a problem when driving.
Yup, can relate. And not having to get behind the wheel, defrost, maintain the car, park, ... This is so relaxing.
I live in Berlin and strongly prefer the bike over the bus because buses are slow and unreliable. I wish we had a lot more bus lanes and aggressively towed cars blocking them. More subways would be even better though.
When I was in Mexico City I was blown away and inspired that their bus lanes were actually physically separate from car traffic, sometimes they were even elevated a foot or so alongside car traffic. It made the buses so much faster! I wish bus and bike lanes in the USA were equally separated from car traffic. Different color paint and intermittent bollards don't cut it.
If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right and physically separate bus lanes is doing it right.
Nice idea but it quickly runs up against budget realities.
Bus lanes are usually not a budget problem. The problem is car centric laws and regulations that make it hard to impossible to take space away from cars.
I'm not a fan of busses and use em only by necessity. Otherwise I prefer trams and bicycles much more. Trams are more chill due to less hard turns and more space, bicycles are a beast for fast arrival if infra is ok. In Zurich trams are very nice, but bike infra comsi comsa up to bad depending on area.
Trams have the same problem trains have. If something happens on a tram line (and these are a lot more integrated with roads than train lines, so things do happen), a big segment of the network comes to a standstill. They're not like buses or cars that can drive around a major accident in an emergency, even if that meanns they'll skip a stop or two.
My experience of public transport modes in various cities is at odds with this.
Trams and trains generally offer far more reliable schedules, frequencies and journey times than busses because they either have completely dedicated alignments or have priority where there is any interface with normal traffic.
Most buses inevitably bunch (see https://setosa.io/bus/ for a nice simulation) and/or get stuck in traffic as a matter of routine. The inconvenience may be less per delay but busses are delayed far more frequently than trams and trains on most of the public transport systems I've used. So for regular users, the cumulative inconvenience is much worse on busses than on trains/trams. Which is why people flock to trains and trams when available as an alternative to busses.
Specifically with regard to the parent, the frequency at which unplanned outages happens with tram services in Zurich is extremely low in my experience - certainly planned changes to schedules or routes (for maintenance, upgrades, etc.) are far more frequent. And when "something happens" (i.e. a traffic accident), the path for trams is cleared as quickly as possible - often in 30 minutes or less - so you'd really have to be unlucky to be inconvenienced by such an occurrence.
In most situations you want trams to have own lanes and semaphore priority which reduces collision chances to a minimum. Worst case you can have some spare busses to provide temporary replacement services for such situations or you can divert some buses from other lines to provide services in problematic sector till situation isn't resolved.
I sometimes take a peak into European busses but I don't see 25-30 people sitting in there on average. That is a lot of people.
Busses, at least the one where I live in Europe, are very loud, noisy and smelly. I'd rather have 20 cars pass my home than one bus. I don't hear or feel those cars but once that bus passes my coffee cup visibly shakes. I also don't mind cycling behind most cars but cycling behind a bus is a terrible experience. You feel the heat blasting out of the rear-right side and the diesel smoke is terrible.
Europe is made up of a lot of different countries, even in the UK there's a big difference in bus provision depending on where you are.
As an European I really _do_ mind buses. I try to avoid riding them as much as possible. They are dirty, smelly, and really cramped with little legroom. I would really hate living somewhere where I was forced to use them, and would rather move elsewhere.
> A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the same space would (as you rarely get more than 1 person per car in peak hours).
Some animated GIFs illustrating how much space automobiles take up compared to alternatives:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ft67...
* https://torontolife.com/city/transit-versus-cars-gif/
> Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget.
But that’s not at all what the article is about? The thesis is not that having bus stops with music and heating and free drinks will make more people take the bus, it’s that in the U.S., the slowness of buses is making them an unattractive option. And stopping too often is a major reason.
As someone living in SF I 100% agree. The bus stops all the time. The muni is also crazy slow on the west side because it has to mark every single stop at every block just like any car instead of just having priority.
I'm confused, do you mean the bus stops at stops where no one is waiting to get on AND no one has asked to get off the bus?
It does that, but the parent means stop signs. San Francisco where there aren't traffic lights mostly blankets every intersection with 4 way stop signs. The parent is likely referring to The Sunset district, which looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7569397,-122.5007035,3a,75y,...
Yes, that’s what I meant and yes I was referring to the N line in the sunset as the worst offender (in my commutes)
Sorry, in the case of the bus there are too many bus stops (although there are more express lines now), so the bus stops a lot instead of having less stops where more people get off and walk one more block (what the article talks about).
The muni (tram), stops at stop signs at every block on the west side like the N line, so it’s extreeeemly slow. A system where the tram has priority over cars and does not need to stop at every single block would be life changing.
The muni…because it has to mark every single stop at every block just like any car instead of just having priority.
What? I see English words, but it’s still not parseable.
There is technology at least with traffic lights so that buses get priority by detecting an oncoming bus and either extending the green or shortening the red.
Much more clear, thanks.
There is weird stigma in the US about buses but not trains (entirely). If you ride the bus you’re assumed poor or pathetic. I was in Colorado for work, they had me stay in Boulder and I would take the bus in the morning to Lafayette. A few people were on the bus in the morning when I got on and by the time we left Boulder city limits I had the bus to myself. Pretty fast, smooth, and cheap. I would then explain to my coworkers how I arrived that day; they were confused why I wouldn’t take an expensive Uber or rent a car and demanded that I accept a ride back to the hotel from them instead. Some even offering to drive 40minutes round trip since they didn’t live in Boulder. They said the “buses weren’t good” with no explainer as to why. I personally think they just wanted to show-off their cars. Just bizarre.
I took a Greyhound a couple of times when I was in the US, and the experience immediately showed me why Americans hate buses and coaches.
My first transfer was in Sacramento. The entire bus got held up for over an hour because someone saw a man with a knife and security had to search absolutely everyone to try to find it.
Half the stations were literally crumbling, as in the ceilings were falling down and covered in water stains and flecks of black mould. The drivers often turned up hours late, which is apparently expected and normal. The stations tended to be in exciting hotspots such as Skid Row, to cater for the desperate clientele who had no choice but to run the gauntlet.
Also, after the first time I rode it and told everyone about the knife that nobody ever found, people started showing me news stories about the man who got beheaded on a Greyhound in Canada.
Overall I think they have very patchy bus and coach systems and over-index on the worst examples.
Just want to mention that the type of bus I'm referring to is the local municipal bus system in Colorado not Greyhound-type national bus lines. The national bus lines like Greyhound are indeed in disrepair, even in Nyc the bus stop is essentially the parking lot you leave from. It can be 100F or 0F and if you get a delay it's miserable. The main difference being the local municipal system is under utilized and the private corporation system is probably squeezing pennies for service.
I live in a relatively large Canadian city. Not as a suburbanite, but right in the heart of the city.
I have a car, which I use when the weather is not nice, or when it would be inconvenient to take public transportation.
Otherwise, on sunny week-ends i often chose public transports. Here they are efficient , clean, secure and most importantly predictable. We have apps for payment and bus status that show us , on the phone, exactly where every bus is at any moment.
You know your bus will be there for you in exactly 2 minutes. Like a Uber, but much much cheaper.
Predictability is a game changer.
Works very well.
Predictability and reliability is as important, perhaps more important than security.
One reason that trains "work" is that the rails on the ground is a promise that a train is coming.
At risk of sounding like a mindless futurist, I will say that the Transit App has considerably improved my experience of public transit in the US, because it doesn't tell me when the next scheduled ride is, but instead when the next actual bus is, based on realtime data provided by other Transit users onboard the vehicle.
The only time in recent memory that this screwed me was in SF trying to get a Muni that I thought was a surface route and was in fact underground. So I was standing at a trollybus stop directly over top of the station where I was missing my train.
The one major gap I still feel a lot as a visitor is wanting a transit-aware business search. In Google Maps the "search for X in this area" is a completely distinct workflow from "how to get to X by <mode>", and implicit in the first workflow is that you can infer how long it will take based on the crow-flies distance. And that assumption is very much not true if you are using transit. For example, I would love to be able to be like "show me three-star hotels ordered by transit convenience to X airport and Y event venue" and have it figure out both rides, and call out which ones will have what service level in the evening, overnight, etc.
Another failure mode I've seen is a tourist with their phone set to their home timezone having their Google Maps mentioning bus lines I wasn't familiar with (which were the late night service that wouldn't go by any time soon). This seems like a weird failure mode for the app to have, as it clearly had network connectivity and should have noticed the discrepancy (or at least provide a notice).
>"how to get to X by <mode>"
I would recommend Citymapper (https://citymapper.com/) in such a situation.
Appreciate the recc but what I'm trying to get at in the parent comment is that by that time you've picked X without having an overall picture of the transit story, you've often already lost. Basically, current route planning works well when you already know where you're going, but is much more limited when you're exploring the problem space that is where could I be going.
My internal thought process as a tourist is that I have a starting point and end point in a city, and some number of hours in between. I want to do some touristy things in that time, and I don't want to waste it all waiting for transfers. I'm not asking Google Maps to be a tour operator for me, but it also can't even help when I have a specific thing I need of which there are many instances, and I'm like... I don't care which electronics store I go to, I just need an electronics store and would like one that's convenient to where I am by transit. Or like, there are four Apple Stores in this city, which one is fastest to get to by transit?
Another recent example was having a seven hour layover in Tokyo where I had to do the Narita -> Haneda shuffle, and wanted to eat something not-airport-food during that time. I really struggled with getting Google Maps to show me where would be a good point to aim for a stop that was convenient by train to both airports; in the end I asked ChatGPT which suggested Ueno Station and I ate monjayaki which was delicious.
The problem with buses is always not enough buses. If a bus came every 5 minutes you wouldn't need to spread out the stops as they would naturally spread out with fewer people getting on/off due to more busses. It would make transfers more tolerable, missing a bus wouldn't matter, buses wouldn't get packed around rush-hour, etc. Buses could be a great public transportation system but I don't think any city cares enough about public transportation to properly fund it. It's easier to pass single, large funding bill for some light-rail boondoggle than it is to continuously fund a working solution.
I think that's where BEV and L4 autonomy comes in once it's commodified. Buses are huge in part because of having to amortize the driver and that makes them very crude. An autonomous mini-bus that can fit 10 people would fit more organically into cityscapes, destroy the pavement less, be run at 20% of current headways, etc, etc. Honestly the only big issues there I can think of are seatbelts (lower mass means that it may decelerate much more rapidly than a normal bus in an accident) and accessibility.
> One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership. This is the central thesis of the article.
n = 1 but this is precisely why I seldom rode the bus in college. Except for going clear across campus in the evening to apartment complexes that were a semi-substantial trek down the highway it was always quicker to walk. Walking 1.5 miles in 25 minutes was faster than a bus that made 14 stops before it got to where you were going.
I like light rail. It has the advantages of cutting through traffic and being more efficient to boot. I'd say we should adapt buses to a similar modality but anecdotally bus-only lanes don't work as well as they ought to because, as a surprise to nobody, people are bad drivers and interfere with their operation.
They could work, but in countries where they do work you have some combination of police actually willing to write traffic citations and cameras.
did we not read the same article? i saw three main claims in the article:
- removing stops makes the bus faster: obviously true.
- bus stops in america are closer together than bus stops in other places: backed up by data in the article.
- making the bus faster makes it better for riders. subjective, but as a bus rider i very much agree.
i don't understand how you can read this article and come to the conclusion that it's about making bus stops "nicer". that's just a little tangent it mentions. it'd be nice if bus stops were nicer.
>One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership. This is the central thesis of the article.
With all due respect, I feel the one asserting things without argument might be you. The whole article is about how number of stops is too high and so drives low ridership.
I am incapable of even trying to provide quotes from the text, as that would mean simply restating the text in its entirety.
As others have pointed out a mix of express (and even "rocket") services, rather than physically removing bus stops, already works wonders outside of the US.
Combine that with improvements to things like waiting areas (i.e. introducing shade), frequency of services, price (in my closest city they introduced essentially free public transport for all - it's been a boon), and you've got something that can be effectively weighed against other forms of transport.
No it doesn't fit all situations and people, but it serves the majority well.
The article mentions that other countries have much higher spacing between stops to begin with, so in that sense they don’t remove bus stops today because they already have.
You've got a point, but the article's thesis is still correct.
The article points to case studies where reducing stops increased ridership: clearly this does make a difference
But I agree that truly good bus service requires commitment and budget. A city that only improves its transit in fast, cheap ways is doomed to bad transit.
I will say in my city I tried the bus twice and the number one reason I never used more is that it was incredibly slow. And the frequent stops were absolutely a contributing factor. People could pull the chord to get off nearly anywhere and did. And a trip that might take 15 minutes by char could take 45 minutes to an hour and fifteen.
That said, I do agree that this being the number one issue everywhere or even where I live is far from certain.
As a driver, the number one thing I hate are bus stops near intersections without dedicated bus lanes.
The number of stops inversely affects speed, and the bus is really slow compared to driving in pretty much all of the US. A 15 minute car drive is a no brainer compared to a one or two hour bus.
It is possible to have faster buses, even time competitive ones. Though stop spacing is only one component of such a system, the other being dedicated infrastructure and traffic priority.
> In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile.
This depends very much on where you are in the world.
Full disclosure: I have visited a lot of cities/countries, approx 70k flown miles last year. I almost always try to use public transport where possible.
The last "not nice" experience in a bus was in SFO, travelling back to my hotel from the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption. Make of that what you will.
Having lived in Vancouver and NYC and now LA I think I’ve seen both sides of things, and I don’t think these things are quite as insurmountable as you think.
I don’t think public transit is ever that pleasant, but I rarely felt unsafe in Vancouver or even NYC compared to LA.
One thing that I disagree with is the timing. In a lot of cases I’d rather spend 20 minutes more on the bus than driving. It’s much easier to hop on a bus, listen to music and walk to my destination than deal with traffic or parking. Also, in cities that have properly invested in transit, there are things to do around the transit points. Grocery stores, coffee shops, general stores etc, so I’m often doing 2-3 things in a single trip. Whereas in LA, each of those things is a separate car journey away for me, so overall things are less efficient.
I'm from the East Coast. I lived a bit in Vancouver. The bus is the place to be. Everybody from all walks of life is on the bus.
I went to Seattle for one weekend and experienced the sad view of only the poorest people taking the bus. It was enlightening and changed my outlook on life.
> One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US.
That's not what I read. The article is saying that you can get meaningful service improvements via what is essentially a free measure: cutting the number of stops. I personally regularly take a route in San Francisco that would unquestionably be better off by cutting a swathe of stops through the Mission, where it stops every two blocks on a street with painful light cycles and tons of pedestrian traffic.
The result is that by the afternoon, two or three buses on this route have piled up, one right behind the other, and passengers have to wait 45 minutes for the next one if they miss one of those.
At least in Melbourne, the tram network genuinely does have too many stops. Stops which are only a few minutes walk from each other.
Which results in the trams being incredibly slow compared to driving even if they are frequent, clean, and generally nice. Since the network already needs total overhaul to be wheelchair accessible, there has been a plan to combine 3 stops in to two wheelchair accessible ones. Which will also speed up the trams since they don’t have to stop as often.
I used buses most of my life before remote work, even having a car, because I lived in place were this is feasible, and for me it is a no-brainer that more stops means a slower trip. It does makes a huge difference.
I feel like you have completely mischaracterized the main thesis of this article, and thus I couldn't disagree more.
A primary issue of buses competing with other forms of transportation is simply that they're too slow, and the main thrust of the article is that intelligently reducing the the number of stops only increases walking time a very small amount but can reduce travel time significantly.
This is certainly my main issue with taking buses sometimes - I often think taking a bus would be easier than driving (e.g. no parking, I could read or do something else while traveling, etc.), and I'd be willing to do that is the bus took, say, 1.5x driving time, but often times it's just much slower than driving.
Marginal improvements do matter, because any improvement in usage you get from slightly improved service gets more people invested in making the bigger, more important changes done.
In other countries there is like the main bus system you take and there is another that take you to the main stops
This is the coverage vs. capacity trade-off.
Buses running between full on stations are faster than buses that comprise the network edges. Because the core of the network is focused on capacity. Buses that meander around to provide coverage, minimize walking, and stop every other block are really slow. Like 6 MPH end to end, no faster than riding a bicycle! Do we want a bus network to compete with walking/biking or with driving downtown?
These buses are for the disablities elderly problem, regular people prefer to walk a little than wait for those buses.
> The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile
Low ridership actually makes public transit feel even worse. Encourages loitering and restricts ridership to only the most desperate people. In NYC at least the buses tend to be pretty heavily utilized and I've personally never felt unsafe or put off by the condition of a bus. It's marginally more pleasant than riding the subway.
Stop frequency is too high on most of my trips. I might have 60 stops in front of me for certain trips I make on bus. It contributes to a ton of time all that dwell time adding up. Where there are express routings offered on top of local routes with maybe 1/4 the stop frequency, time savings are like 1.5x by my estimate.
The buses in SLC are clean and friendly. The only buses I have experienced hostility with are Greyhound, and that hostility came exclusively from the workers. What's the difference between my city and yours? Budget? Population? Probably a mix of both.
It's incredibly unlikely that there is one coherent cause for low or high ridership. All we can do is improve the utility of the service. That means improving comfort (keeping it clean), reliability (running on time with minimal detours), throughput (carrying enough people), speed (minimizing the number of stops on the route), latency (minimizing the wait until the next bus), availability (more stops that service potential destinations), and coherence (more routes that take you directly from A to B, minimizing transfers).
Personally, I feel most undeserved by latency: the routes that are convenient to me run every 30min, and the routes that run most often run every 15min. I would ride the bus way more often if routes ran every 10min. I would ride them all the time if they ran more often than that. This seems like a pretty obvious opportunity that will never happen so long as prospective budget is determined by current ridership.
> the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership.
This is an odd argument to make. Just as a correlation doesn't prove that there is a causal relationship, the lack of a correlation cannot prove that there isn't.
> I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported
You believe wrong. The article gives examples of cities that have already done that, and have seen average speeds go up and total ridership go up as well.
> Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget.
Lol, dude.
funnily enough, buses in philadelphia are IMO pretty nice. Especially the current fleet. No more hiking up narrow stairs. They sit low to the curb, easy on and off, go to a lot of locations, and they're clean inside and out.
Compare that to the subway which several stories below city hall, nasty, dirty, filthy, stinking air, human excrement, rats, etc... I love the bus
> the number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter
The central argument of reducing stops is increasing bus speed, not reducing margins, It's in the second paragraph.
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Top comment is a straw man, attempt to correct course downvoted... I'm not sure how much value HN has left for useful discourse, who the fuck are you people, if you even are people.
You're being downvoted because you misunderstood the post you're replying to. They aren't referring to profit margins, but marginal utility—i.e. incremental improvements to stop spacing (purportedly) would not be enough to fix a fundamentally broken system.
In my experience buses are safe and clean, despite what people say and assume in my city both online and in real life. However they are not on time or predictable and that is a huge problem.
They're no dirtier than subways, which people don't mind. People have a very negative association with buses though. The streetcar experience for example is pretty much identical minus the bumps, but they're perceived much more positively. The timing and routes are indeed brutal though. If I wanted to ride the bus to my work the best route is 20 minutes of walking, 10 minutes of riding on a bus that runs every half hour, then another 20 minutes of walking. This is definitely not a rural area or anything either.
What I find interesting is that people have a negative relationship with buses but not with trolley cars, like the old SF trolley cars where you could almost hang off them. If we injected some fun or joy into busses like trolley cars would that improve people's relationships or perspective of them too?
> The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile.
Americans think everything is unsafe, except for things that actually are unsafe.
> I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false.
...but then your "In my experience..." section repeats the article's assertions? As in, everything you list as a drawback of riding the bus is exactly what the article claims can be improved by intelligently cutting out some percentage of stops.
Also, I didn't see the claim that "too many stops is the main cause of low ridership." That would be an overreach. The central claim that I see is that optimizing the number of stops, which turns out to result in a net reduction in pretty much all major American cities, is a relatively easy way to marginally improve many aspects of bus systems.
I think your counterarguments are valid, but they're just fleshing out the article's thesis. Simply reducing bus stops and holding everything else constant would not magically improve ridership and the overall experience. And as you say, reducing bus stops and removing money supporting the system will definitely not result in improvements. (And I agree that it is the likely way it would transpire politically.)
You would need to reduce stops and direct the savings into improving the remaining stops. You would need to convert the change into more reliable schedules. To make sense, that would need to increase ridership, and adjust the demographics of riders to include people who don't have to accept "dirty, unsafe and hostile" because they have no other choice. There's little incentive to improve things when the audience is captive and powerless. Also, increased ridership leads to more resources to accomplish the rest.
Of course, the dependencies between all these changes make the improvements more speculative and harder to achieve politically, so I do agree that you can't "just" reduce the number of stops and improve everything. As you said, that would more likely just drain more blood from an already anemic system. But the article is talking about a relatively cheap and easy way to improve things; everything else transit agencies can do is harder and/or more expensive.
> So while the number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter. If you want to improve ridership, you need to make the bus an attractive option for more people.
That first sentence says marginal improvements won't matter. The second sentence says that marginal improvements ("an attractive option for more people") are what are needed. Maybe you're saying that marginal improvements have to reach a threshold in order to be worth doing or achieve any noticeable gains?
I think you missed the core arguments of the article. Fewer stops mean faster bus and faster bus helps with regularity and wait time. It also means you can do more loops with the same number of buses and drivers so it reduces cost per trip.
It's not marginal at all. Stops rebalancing actually address your core issues. Less stops also mean more money per stop to provide nice shelters which solves your second issue.
> Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer.
Not buy itself, but as a strategy for the operator to focus on fewer high quality stops, over time that will have an effect.
> So while the number of bus stops might matter at the margins
You are ignoring that some of the things you complain about would be helped by fewer stops.
> we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter.
Its crazy to say marginal will not matter. Then nothing will ever matter. There is no revolutionary solution anywhere in sight. You need to improve on the margin with the budget you have.
> you need to make the bus an attractive option for more people.
... by marginally improving every aspect as much as you can.
Why have bus stops at all, waymo should build a transit bus or large van and run them autonomously. Then they could optimize the fleet as they please. Bus stops were a solution to a lack of connectivity and demand.
Demand-responsive transport (DRT) has been tried a bunch of times in all sorts of different environments and pretty much never lives up to the promise. Predictability is really important and ridership drops as soon as users start having to plan too far ahead, which in the past has been essential to DRT routing.
Autonomy could improve responsiveness to demand but you still run into other issues. DRT usually won't be able to take advantage of things proven to make buses faster and more consistent (bus lanes, reducing stop count, transit priority signals). Futher, consistency and response times gained by dynamic routing can easily be overshadowed by increased variability in trip time as the route adjusts to add new passengers or make out of the way drop-offs.
I've seen it work pretty well in a number of places in the form of privately owned minibuses/vans that can rapidly go where the demand is needed.
As an example, all throughout the Eastern Caribbean this system works really well (in my experience better than most centrally planned bus systems in large cities). On any given island you can go to any main road and within a few minutes a minibus will come along. Most of the time if your aren't familiar with the geography, you just tell the conductor where you are trying to get to, and they will make sure that you get off in the right spot to get where you are going or connect to another minibus. Typical cost was ~$2.
Predictability was pretty low, but because of the small size of busses, there were a lot of them roaming around, I don't think I ever waited more than 15 minutes, and that was in very out of the way places.
It's really not ideal. Similar systems are common in Central Asia. They make it difficult for travelers to predict journey times, it's unfriendly to tourists, and it's much less accessible to other populations (e.g. the disabled). They also don't scale well to large urban environments or out of the way journeys in my experience.
Yes, like all systems, it has tradeoffs. Although I would argue that some of the downsides you highlight are worse with traditional bus systems (e.g. the Caribbean bus conductors will happily guide tourists, and I have seen them go off-route frequently to drop off someone with limited mobility. Large cities in other parts of the world have managed to scale the system out to fill in gaps with other forms of transit like Lima, Peru)
The GP was arguing that it NEVER works out, and I'm just pointing out that it does work in many places.
I would much rather rely on the Caribbean minibus systems than try to rely on transit in cities like Phoenix.
> They make it difficult for travelers to predict journey times
How do scheduled bus routes standardize a journey time vs a demand shuttle?
> out of the way journeys in my experience.
How do buses fair in this regard?
> It's really not ideal
Are buses?
I believe this is also how it works in many Mexican cities.
> has been tried a bunch of times in all sorts of different environments
Has it? When, where and with what technology?
> Predictability is really important and ridership drops as soon as users start having to plan too far ahead
Uber etc have proven this to be patently false. Existing buses are experiencing dropping ridership - Uber is not.
> won't be able to take advantage of things proven to make buses faster and more consistent
You're replacing buses with auto-shuttles. Just let the shuttles use the bus lanes.
> bus lanes, reducing stop count, transit priority signals
All of these are usable if you widen the scope to include auto-shuttles.
> consistency and response times gained by dynamic routing can easily be overshadowed by increased variability
What is the difference between Busing and Shuttles here? A bus user can keep yanking the stop cord, there can be 1 or 2 disabled passengers who take several minutes to board, there can be 50 children getting on / off. These issues are constants and all are improved with demand based shuttles.
Those busses still need designated spots to stop at. They can't be stopping in the middle of a street
Indeed. And if you want a lot of people to board the bus efficiently at the same time, you need them to agree to congregate somewhere before the bus arrives. One might call such a meeting point a “bus stop” :)
> you need them to agree
The app would say - meet here.
> One might call such a meeting point a “bus stop” :)
Call it what you want, it could be in a strip mall parking lot, a convenient corner or just in front of the apartment building. Optimized for traveling distance between the passengers.
What’s the point of making this dynamic? Go find a city where people are out, having fun, and not buried in their phones, and where the city isn’t full of strip malls and parking lots. There will be people who want to be picked up during busy hours, and having a shelter from the sun or rain is nice, and having a place where there isn’t a parked car or an uber in the way is nice. Lots of Asian capitals are like this.
> people are out, having fun, and not buried in their phones and where the city isn’t full of strip malls and parking lots.
Are we still talking about how to optimize public transportation on city streets?
I think a bus could stop in the middle of the street, but a bus stop still removes dependence on a smartphone and protects from the weather.
No it couldn't, for legal liability reasons, usability for the travellers, etc...
Taxis/Ubers/... can and do stop in the middle of a street. Why would that be different for a bus picking up a single person?
yes, and it keeps blocking my bus. Fortunately it is now legal in Chicago for drivers to get fined for stopping in bus stops/bus lanes automatically via cameras on the buses. Not sure if it is actually happening though..
What if it's 5 people? 10? What if instead of many huge buses like today it's 5x as many smaller buses?
You can't just have buses stopping randomly everywhere, it doesn't scale.
The assumption is that a "waymo bus" would be hailed by an app and the service would plan routes on demand. In such case, bus stops would be needed only in busy areas or in places where it would be dangerous to stop.
This is based on the observation that people, including police, tolerate taxi drivers stopping at places where it's technically illegal.
funnily enough, they get designated spots and they still just stop in the middle of the street
If you keep asking self driving bros questions you can get them to eventually reinvent buses and trains. It’s fun!
Autonomy isn’t necessary, but aside from cost there’s nothing stopping a city from operating a bus more like a shared Uber ride. Having fixed stops at fixed times is fairly primitive. They would be smaller shuttles.
Autonomy is necessary to get the unionized bus drivers out of the way, the cost of running a bus is dominated by staffing costs.
Waymo is worth nothing if there’s congestion. That’s the problem public transportation solves, not lack of connectivity
Wait until you're waiting in the wind and snow with a toddler, and you'll prefer a bus shelter.