> 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 at a given time 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).