9 ms·

The bus system has to make pretty aggressive tradeoffs in order to be useful to commuters. You can't make it stop at every block in order to make it take less w

• j2kun 8y ago
  Plenty of cities (Chicago, in my experience) have parallel lines 1-2 blocks apart. For the record, I take the transbay bus to work most days, and it's a similar deal (plus I can almost always get a seat). Slightly less convenient with the schedule (every 10 minutes instead of 5)
  • bunderbunder 8y ago
    It sounds like you're talking about downtown Chicago. There are a lot of bus lines that converge in that area, along with every single train except the yellow line, because the city is hyper-centralized so that's where everyone's commuting to. In most the city, buses just run along the major thoroughfares, which typically means they are spaced 4-ish city blocks apart.
• mmanfrin 8y ago
  Like, I take the BART every day into work. It's fantastic. I walk for five to ten minutes to get to the station, a train comes every 5 minutes so I don't have to worry about the train schedule, then I walk another five to ten minutes to get to the office. If the bus experience could match that, it'd take over a lot of commuting. For what it's worth, this is only the case if you live near a station with overlap (or live in SF itself). I lived in West Oakland and had a train practically every 3 minutes. Then I moved to Berkeley. Commute in is every 15 minutes, 50/50 I have to take a transfer on the way in. Commute home is a nightmare: BART has a carriage shortage so they try to shave off cars from longer routes (such as the Richmond line). This means things get really crowded on occasion, and there's a point where a car being crowded begets more crowding, as it takes longer and longer to offboard/onboard people and therefore each subsequent stop has more people to cram on. A majority of the time on my way home when I get a transfer (as there seems to be a Richmond train from SF only for an hour span at the peak of rush hour), the trains are almost an entire cycle late, meaning I've got another 15 minute wait to see two trains come through one after the other. The point of this is: the problems you raise with busses are also with trains/BART. Some of them are even worse for BART: you have to steeply limit the service area because putting down tracks is stupendously expensive.
  • JansjoFromIkea 8y ago
    Had the same experience when I lived over there too. Was pretty surprised West Oakland was as cheap as it was relative to anywhere North Oakland/Berkeley considering how much more access it had to everything. The price of places under ten minutes from a BART station further out were sharply different to further out in the same area too. You could shave some time off by cycling but then you're the guy with a bike on the packed train. Seem to recall 20+ minute waits for trains in Berkeley on weekends too (it'd be handy if they let you know this somewhere in the station before you pass the ticket point, but that's another thing), with a transfer required to get into SF? SF is far from the worst area for public transport, but it'd never come near my best.
  • hug 8y ago
    This is less a "problem with trains" than it is a "problem with rail in the United States", or maybe just with SF. Melbourne Metro, for example, has roughly the same amount of weekday riders as BART, 415,000 vs 446,000 respectively, with nearly 5 times(!) the amount of track, at 540mi vs 112mi. This is, of course, excluding light rail services -- another 150mi of track in Melbourne with some 1,700 stops, and non-Metro heavy-rail services to the other nearby commuter hub cities like Geelong and Ballarat. Berlin is, from my knowledge, more similar to Melbourne than to SF in this respect. But y'know what the funny thing is? Everyone in Melbourne hates the bus service. Makes me wonder about what they think about buses in Berlin.
    • dasil003 8y ago
      The problem with BART is that it runs 4 out of 5 lines on the same single stretch of track through SF. So even with the most modern signaling, there will still be 1/4th the maximum train frequency after the individual lines split. The Pittsburg-Bay Point line counteracts this during rush hour with trains that come just into the city and then turn around, but it's still only an average of ~7 mins between trains. Compare with the Victoria line in London which I believe runs 36 trains an hour!
    • adrianN 8y ago
      Buses in Berlin are okay, but trains are usually twice as fast. Buses serve the last mile between the train station and your destination.
• stefan_ 8y ago
  That's exactly the problem, buses can never match that. They can't have too short a route or too fast an interval, it doesn't work when you have huge variance due to personal cars, lights etc. impeding them.
  • SilasX 8y ago
    They can do bus-only lanes though. Ideally, also toll the roads high enough so that the traffic is never backed up. (And, even more ideally, have no toll when when the road is below capacity.)
    • s2g 8y ago
      Force the middle class out of the city, give them shitty transit options, then tax the hell out of them when they decide to drive. Wonderful.
      • SilasX 8y ago
        The idea is that the bus wouldn't be shitty if it weren't having to compete on equal terms with the rest of the choked traffic.
      • wool_gather 8y ago
        You have a point, even though I disagree in the long view. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Making transit really good is very hard until cars are deprioritized. And until transit is really good, deprioritizing cars screws a lot of people over.
      • kcorbitt 8y ago
        Buses works great as a middle-class transit option in lots of places. When I lived in Barcelona I used the city bus as my primary method of short- to medium-distance transit, as did, I believe, the majority of middle-class residents. Taking the bus doesn't have to be the terrible experience it has devolved into in many US metro areas.
      • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
• dllthomas 8y ago
  I used to take the bus into the city (NL line), and while it's a little slower I found it a much nicer experience than BART.
• pgtan 8y ago
  > You can't make it stop at every block a solution for this is kind of "stop on demand" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi
  • emj 8y ago
    This does not work if you want to speed up routes in rush hour, because people will demand stops at every block. Usually people are not alturistic enough to get off in bulk if they have the option to stop everywhere. Busses work great even in low density environment if you build infrastructure that is good for busses. Bicycles + buss makes it posible to serve quite large areas fast and simple.
    • pgtan 8y ago
      > This does not work if you want to speed up routes in rush hour, because people will demand stops at every block. Actually, this is exactly how Marshrutkas work, at least in Sofia/Bulgaria. They do not stop on "every block", they stop only if they are not full enough or someone wants to get off. But normaly, this persons tell their destination early enough to the driver, so he or she can plan better the few stops. Nowadays most people prefer the Metro over the Marshrutkas though.
• Shivetya 8y ago
  Buses can be adapted far easier and cheaper to changes in transportation needs that any light rail system. even if you toss in road maintenance as its already performed for cars it is still cheaper to operate than rail. buses can also reroute easily if there are problems with their route and a broken down bus or fire doesn't block the route for other buses. plus BART has about ten billion dollars in maintenance backlog. the only rail system in the US which works well is NYC and we get horror stories about it regardless
• KozmoNau7 8y ago
  >"You can't make it stop at every block in order to make it take less walking to get to the bus stop" You absolutely can, that's how the main bus lines in Copenhagen operate. Some of the stops are only a couple hundred meters apart, and during most of the day the schedule isn't fixed, it's just signed as 5-8 minutes between buses. The main A and C bus lines criss-cross the city on bigger streets, usually parallel to each other for a lot of stretches, and occasionally on the exact same streets for short stretches. In addition to this, there are a number of lines that service smaller streets on longer intervals, with the stops a little further apart. Of course we also have the S-trains and Metro, which step up in distance and grid size, compared to the A and C bus lines. It works. I rarely have to walk more than a couple of minutes from a bus/train stop to get anywhere I'm going in the Copenhagen area. And this is with stops basically every other block, buses every 5 minutes in rush hour on the main lines, occasionally parallel lines (where it makes sense) and no artificial limits on the service area.
• jameshart 8y ago
  First of all, those objections seem very context-specific. Buses work great already in plenty of cities without those problems. It seems like you’re looking for ‘how can buses be better than BART for my specific commute’, not ‘how can buses be better than driving or ridesharing for everybody who doesn’t have another mass transit option already?’ But to your point about stopping in every block: optimizing a bus route along a major avenue in a block-based US city seems like a similar problem to elevator scheduling in a high-rise building. I wonder if similar models to ‘sky lobbies’ and destination selection could be applied to get people more efficiently to their destination.
• zimpenfish 8y ago
  London is doing a decent job of covering your points: > You can't make it stop at every block in order to make it take less walking to get to the bus stop. How big's a block? London often has bus stops a few hundred metres apart even out in the sticks. > Similarly, you can't have parallel lines a block apart. London often has multiple routes serving the same area in addition to parallel routes nearby. > You have to limit the service area so that you can afford to run busses every 5-10 minutes. My most frequent bus (53) goes from Central London to Plumstead Station (~11 miles) on a 6-12 minute schedule during the day. That's not uncommon for London. > And you'll want to improve streets so that busses can run down the center and pick up passengers from protected islands Slowly happening over London - couple of stops near me have had their inset bus stop bays pushed out into the road to block traffic when the bus is stopped.
• evandijk70 8y ago
  In my city, a new project was started that did precisely that. Dedicated bus lanes for almost the entire route, bus stops spaced about a mile a part, and 8 busses per hour. It received massive criticism when it was constructed, as there already was a functioning network and the project was quite expensive compared to other bus lanes. It did become a massive succes, as its a viable alternative to the train for commuters due to the shorter travel time. They are in the process of replacing the diesel busses with electric busses, first on the short routes and in 2020 on the longer routes.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]