8 ms·

The thing I hate about buses in many cities is that they take longer than driving to get somewhere. I think if this can be changed, more people will use them.

The thing I hate about buses in many cities is that they take longer than driving to get somewhere. I think if this can be changed, more people will use them. Cities like Sydney get it right, by having dedicated express lanes on many highways for buses (and taxis). When it becomes faster to catch the bus in peak hour because they can drive in lanes that bypass the gridlock, there is an incentive to leave your car at home if you know you'll be leaving work during peak hour and need to be somewhere ASAP. Interestingly, this has also allowed taxis to have an edge over Uber et. al. Just recently I was catching a ride to the airport in an Uber and forgot about how bad peak hour traffic would be. We were stuck in awful traffic for over an hour, and meanwhile, all these buses and taxis were flying past us in the transit lane. The fare of the Uber ended up costing more than the fare it would have been in a taxi due to how much longer it took. If transit lanes can be put in more places, bus lanes created at more intersections (so that buses can get ahead of traffic), and fares set at the right amount, I think that with the rising cost of fuel, insurance etc., more people will be willing to catch public transport, especially if it is more convenient to do so.

malandrew 7y ago
I understand privileging buses but under what pretenses should we privilege taxis over transportation network companies? If anything, only pool ridesharing companies should get the benefit of these intracity HOV lanes.
- Thorentis 7y ago
  My comment wasn't a justification of allowing taxis to use those lanes, I was just pointing out how well they worked anecdotally. I think the transit lanes can be used by buses, taxis, chauffeured cars, etc. Mainly for politicians/important people to get the airport or city quickly I suppose. I think since taxis pay heavy license fees to the state (whereas Uber etc. cars only pay car registration like all other cars) allowing them to use the lanes has been justified by the city. But of course, these licenses aren't open to Uber or other providers so it's a difficult situation that does stifle competition.
  - fyfy18 7y ago
    One reason why only licensed taxis can use those lanes is to prevent regular people using them. If you just needed to sign up to be an Uber driver, and you could use the HOV lane, everyone would do it. Even if you had to do that and pay a fee of $5000/year, there would be plenty of people who could justify that over the time saved in traffic (but probably not Uber drivers).
- shermozle 7y ago
  Can't say I agree with it but the thinking goes that taxis are an alternative to owning/using your car so are privileged in various ways like this, dedicated short-term parking in ranks etc. It's not _only_ rich people who use taxis, so the thinking goes. (Rich people are also banned from sleeping under the bridges, just like poor people...) When Uber et al took all the value out of the expensive taxi number plate one of the few ways the government had to compensate their owners is that advantage they still have, so they haven't leveled the field there. That conversation might open up the entire concept to evaluation though.
- wahern 7y ago
  Particularly for airports, prices for licensed taxies are usually regulated to be within a very narrow, predictable range. Opening up the Uber app, the estimated price for an UberX to SFO from my current location is $47.30, which is almost exactly what a taxi would be--$45-50 in this part of the city. Licensed taxis are, at least to some extent, a deliberately planned component of the public transportation infrastructure. And as I about to post this, the price for UberX changed to $49.80. Thanks for the illustration, Uber.
privateSFacct 7y ago
This - enforce carpool lanes and give buses priority access. Immediate positive. Secondly and more importantly for me (and I know unpopular) - kick off the drunk / other rule-breakers and anyone who threatens people even if its just a result of mental illness. No one wants to start their day next to someone yelling - "I'll f* you up... etc" on a crowded bus. At least where I am the bus drivers don't do anything from small - blasting music -> to larger - nonstop threats of violence. I have only small anecdotes but other places seem to empower the drivers etc more. And the jitney cabs in the Caribbean would flat out leave people on the side of the road if they were sloppy drunk.
- oakesm9 7y ago
  Some of this is down to the driver being the only staff member on the bus. They should be fully focused on driving as a bus hitting anything is bad news. Stopping to kick people off just delays everyone on the bus getting where they need to go. If there was a conductor on the bus then they could deal with inappropriate behaviour, but no bus company wants to pay two members of staff when they can get away with one.
  - baroffoos 7y ago
    Would be interesting to see if we can create self driving buses and have the driver change roles to become payment management and enforcing a safe area in the bus.
    - mycall 7y ago
      If no one is driving, it makes citizens do more of the work.. in a crowded bus, a group of normal people could throw the asshole off. Eventually, the assholes won't ride the bus.
      - erik_seaberg 7y ago
        In the current climate, an untrained unlicensed bouncer is just begging to get sued. They work under strict rules that most people don't know. How many commuters are even armed? A shocking number of offices have begun to forbid it.
perl4ever 7y ago
"The thing I hate about buses in many cities is that they take longer than driving to get somewhere." In my experience they take within a few minutes of walking somewhere, and perhaps three times as long as bicycling, never mind driving. Perhaps someone will say that this indicates my local bus system is terrible, but I don't see what could be improved about it. If they want to serve the people who actually ride the bus, they have to go on routes with riders, and stop at all the places people want to get on and off. But I've tried riding the bus on trips ranging from <1 mi, to 3.5 miles, to 6-10 miles, and there's just no point, except in the case where I need to go get my car and I have no alternative (or if I didn't own a car). For a longer trip, it means sacrificing an entire evening for what would be a 10-15 minute trip going directly. For the longest trips (>6 miles) which coincide with a single route, the bus can be substantially faster than walking, but it's still way too long to be a viable commute. And shorter trips are very comparable to walking. People say or imply that something could be different that would make a typical bus system in a US city more effective for people who have alternatives, but what? The idea of the bus being "more convenient" with a few tweaks seems wildly implausible to me based on my experience.
- vidarh 7y ago
  Buses are most viable when combined with a well developed rail system. Then it's worthwhile as an alternative to dealing with parking at the train stations and because you won't have your car on the other end of that rail journey.
  - m3jia 7y ago
    Buses i most US cities just aren't viable. A lot of cities really don't work well if you don't own a car at all, and if you own one a bus will never win driving and parking in the big lot. In NYC, buses work, and people take them because they have to. They could be better but the alternative is hundreds of dollars in parking if you think about owning a car.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      You have to at some point accept that the vast majority of people, while they don't live in nowheresville, Montana, also don't live in the very largest cities. A million or two people within say 10-15 miles is the sort of place a large portion of the country lives, and changing that on a national scale seems very far fetched to me. 85% of the country by population is outside the metro areas of NYC, LA, Chicago, and Dallas. Regarding them as a small group of people many miles away from civilization is not reasonable, but it's also not reasonable to assume the resources exist for infrastructure like the largest cities.
drdeadringer 7y ago
> The thing I hate about buses in many cities is that they take longer than driving to get somewhere. I've found the same with walking in some cases.
bigger_cheese 7y ago
Do buses run to Sydney airport? I usually take the train to the airport and I hate it. For whatever reason the airport line is privatized and they absolutely gouge you on ticket price. It costs me $22 to get train to the airport (it's around $17 from central station to airport). I can get a flight to Melbourne for ~$70 it shouldn't cost 1/3 of my plane ticket. If there are two people traveling in a group taxi is cheaper and depending on time of day faster.
- jakecopp 7y ago
  Yep the 400 bus does! It goes via Mascot Station and then via UNSW and Randwick to Bondi Junction. A good hack is getting off the train at Mascot, walking across the road and catching the 400 one stop. They come every few minutes and you save the airport train station fee!
xivzgrev 7y ago
I agree. The other problem is density which turns into chicken or egg problem. People will ride when it's faster than car. To be faster than car to most people, you need a dense network of bus routes that map to a lot of A->B routes (instead of hub and spoke model where almost every ride goes downtown, you transfer, and go back out to where you need to go). More buses = more money. To justify money you need ridership. And around we go.
btashton 7y ago
I'm a firm believer that we need to get the private busses out of the express lanes. In Seattle it is really bad, all of the Microsoft and Amazon busses crossing east west have destroyed demand for quality public transportation across that corridor. Every day going to work I drive the same route as a Microsoft bus, the current alternative is three busses for 90min best case. This is also the only HOV Lane in the state that is 3+, further limiting carpooling incentives, which I have a hard time not believing stems from lobbying from the companies that run these busses.
- Zanni 7y ago
  Why? Private buses are solving the same problem as public buses--taking cars off the road and reducing traffic. You could make them unpalatable, but I'm guessing most Microsoft and Amazon employees will revert to cars before public buses, which makes traffic worse for everyone, including you.
  - btashton 7y ago
    And incur the extra 15-20min of drive time each way? I doubt that.
- iso1337 7y ago
  You do realize that if you get rid of those busses then the traffic will be even worse right? Even if all of those people end up carpooling, they'll occupy way more space in the HOV lane. The real solution should be to expand the number of HOV lanes.
  - btashton 7y ago
    My point is they have effectively become restricted public transportation where there was demand for a viable real public transportation. This has made it so the average person no longer has an option. These routes are not viable for both a public and private option. Everyone coming from the West side to work at my office both drives and is a short walk from a Microsoft bus pickup.
  - 7y ago
non-entity 7y ago
I'm not even worried about longer commutes as much as reliability. Most cities in the US have bus lines, but I've heard absolute horror stories about buses being / early late and people having to wait an hour before another one comes.
zulln 7y ago
> Interestingly, this has also allowed taxis to have an edge over Uber et. al. Why is this wanted? We have bus/taxi lanes here as well, but Uber is allowed to go there as well (they require the same taxi license as anyone else).

malandrew 7y ago

I understand privileging buses but under what pretenses should we privilege taxis over transportation network companies? If anything, only pool ridesharing companies should get the benefit of these intracity HOV lanes.

Thorentis 7y ago
My comment wasn't a justification of allowing taxis to use those lanes, I was just pointing out how well they worked anecdotally. I think the transit lanes can be used by buses, taxis, chauffeured cars, etc. Mainly for politicians/important people to get the airport or city quickly I suppose. I think since taxis pay heavy license fees to the state (whereas Uber etc. cars only pay car registration like all other cars) allowing them to use the lanes has been justified by the city. But of course, these licenses aren't open to Uber or other providers so it's a difficult situation that does stifle competition.
- fyfy18 7y ago
  One reason why only licensed taxis can use those lanes is to prevent regular people using them. If you just needed to sign up to be an Uber driver, and you could use the HOV lane, everyone would do it. Even if you had to do that and pay a fee of $5000/year, there would be plenty of people who could justify that over the time saved in traffic (but probably not Uber drivers).
shermozle 7y ago
Can't say I agree with it but the thinking goes that taxis are an alternative to owning/using your car so are privileged in various ways like this, dedicated short-term parking in ranks etc. It's not _only_ rich people who use taxis, so the thinking goes. (Rich people are also banned from sleeping under the bridges, just like poor people...) When Uber et al took all the value out of the expensive taxi number plate one of the few ways the government had to compensate their owners is that advantage they still have, so they haven't leveled the field there. That conversation might open up the entire concept to evaluation though.
wahern 7y ago
Particularly for airports, prices for licensed taxies are usually regulated to be within a very narrow, predictable range. Opening up the Uber app, the estimated price for an UberX to SFO from my current location is $47.30, which is almost exactly what a taxi would be--$45-50 in this part of the city. Licensed taxis are, at least to some extent, a deliberately planned component of the public transportation infrastructure. And as I about to post this, the price for UberX changed to $49.80. Thanks for the illustration, Uber.

privateSFacct 7y ago

This - enforce carpool lanes and give buses priority access. Immediate positive. Secondly and more importantly for me (and I know unpopular) - kick off the drunk / other rule-breakers and anyone who threatens people even if its just a result of mental illness. No one wants to start their day next to someone yelling - "I'll f* you up... etc" on a crowded bus. At least where I am the bus drivers don't do anything from small - blasting music -> to larger - nonstop threats of violence. I have only small anecdotes but other places seem to empower the drivers etc more. And the jitney cabs in the Caribbean would flat out leave people on the side of the road if they were sloppy drunk.

oakesm9 7y ago
Some of this is down to the driver being the only staff member on the bus. They should be fully focused on driving as a bus hitting anything is bad news. Stopping to kick people off just delays everyone on the bus getting where they need to go. If there was a conductor on the bus then they could deal with inappropriate behaviour, but no bus company wants to pay two members of staff when they can get away with one.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  Would be interesting to see if we can create self driving buses and have the driver change roles to become payment management and enforcing a safe area in the bus.
  - mycall 7y ago
    If no one is driving, it makes citizens do more of the work.. in a crowded bus, a group of normal people could throw the asshole off. Eventually, the assholes won't ride the bus.
    - erik_seaberg 7y ago
      In the current climate, an untrained unlicensed bouncer is just begging to get sued. They work under strict rules that most people don't know. How many commuters are even armed? A shocking number of offices have begun to forbid it.

perl4ever 7y ago

"The thing I hate about buses in many cities is that they take longer than driving to get somewhere." In my experience they take within a few minutes of walking somewhere, and perhaps three times as long as bicycling, never mind driving. Perhaps someone will say that this indicates my local bus system is terrible, but I don't see what could be improved about it. If they want to serve the people who actually ride the bus, they have to go on routes with riders, and stop at all the places people want to get on and off. But I've tried riding the bus on trips ranging from <1 mi, to 3.5 miles, to 6-10 miles, and there's just no point, except in the case where I need to go get my car and I have no alternative (or if I didn't own a car). For a longer trip, it means sacrificing an entire evening for what would be a 10-15 minute trip going directly. For the longest trips (>6 miles) which coincide with a single route, the bus can be substantially faster than walking, but it's still way too long to be a viable commute. And shorter trips are very comparable to walking. People say or imply that something could be different that would make a typical bus system in a US city more effective for people who have alternatives, but what? The idea of the bus being "more convenient" with a few tweaks seems wildly implausible to me based on my experience.

vidarh 7y ago
Buses are most viable when combined with a well developed rail system. Then it's worthwhile as an alternative to dealing with parking at the train stations and because you won't have your car on the other end of that rail journey.
- m3jia 7y ago
  Buses i most US cities just aren't viable. A lot of cities really don't work well if you don't own a car at all, and if you own one a bus will never win driving and parking in the big lot. In NYC, buses work, and people take them because they have to. They could be better but the alternative is hundreds of dollars in parking if you think about owning a car.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    You have to at some point accept that the vast majority of people, while they don't live in nowheresville, Montana, also don't live in the very largest cities. A million or two people within say 10-15 miles is the sort of place a large portion of the country lives, and changing that on a national scale seems very far fetched to me. 85% of the country by population is outside the metro areas of NYC, LA, Chicago, and Dallas. Regarding them as a small group of people many miles away from civilization is not reasonable, but it's also not reasonable to assume the resources exist for infrastructure like the largest cities.

drdeadringer 7y ago

> The thing I hate about buses in many cities is that they take longer than driving to get somewhere. I've found the same with walking in some cases.

bigger_cheese 7y ago

Do buses run to Sydney airport? I usually take the train to the airport and I hate it. For whatever reason the airport line is privatized and they absolutely gouge you on ticket price. It costs me $22 to get train to the airport (it's around $17 from central station to airport). I can get a flight to Melbourne for ~$70 it shouldn't cost 1/3 of my plane ticket. If there are two people traveling in a group taxi is cheaper and depending on time of day faster.

jakecopp 7y ago
Yep the 400 bus does! It goes via Mascot Station and then via UNSW and Randwick to Bondi Junction. A good hack is getting off the train at Mascot, walking across the road and catching the 400 one stop. They come every few minutes and you save the airport train station fee!

xivzgrev 7y ago

I agree. The other problem is density which turns into chicken or egg problem. People will ride when it's faster than car. To be faster than car to most people, you need a dense network of bus routes that map to a lot of A->B routes (instead of hub and spoke model where almost every ride goes downtown, you transfer, and go back out to where you need to go). More buses = more money. To justify money you need ridership. And around we go.

btashton 7y ago

I'm a firm believer that we need to get the private busses out of the express lanes. In Seattle it is really bad, all of the Microsoft and Amazon busses crossing east west have destroyed demand for quality public transportation across that corridor. Every day going to work I drive the same route as a Microsoft bus, the current alternative is three busses for 90min best case. This is also the only HOV Lane in the state that is 3+, further limiting carpooling incentives, which I have a hard time not believing stems from lobbying from the companies that run these busses.

Zanni 7y ago
Why? Private buses are solving the same problem as public buses--taking cars off the road and reducing traffic. You could make them unpalatable, but I'm guessing most Microsoft and Amazon employees will revert to cars before public buses, which makes traffic worse for everyone, including you.
- btashton 7y ago
  And incur the extra 15-20min of drive time each way? I doubt that.
iso1337 7y ago
You do realize that if you get rid of those busses then the traffic will be even worse right? Even if all of those people end up carpooling, they'll occupy way more space in the HOV lane. The real solution should be to expand the number of HOV lanes.
- btashton 7y ago
  My point is they have effectively become restricted public transportation where there was demand for a viable real public transportation. This has made it so the average person no longer has an option. These routes are not viable for both a public and private option. Everyone coming from the West side to work at my office both drives and is a short walk from a Microsoft bus pickup.
- 7y ago

non-entity 7y ago

I'm not even worried about longer commutes as much as reliability. Most cities in the US have bus lines, but I've heard absolute horror stories about buses being / early late and people having to wait an hour before another one comes.

zulln 7y ago

> Interestingly, this has also allowed taxis to have an edge over Uber et. al. Why is this wanted? We have bus/taxi lanes here as well, but Uber is allowed to go there as well (they require the same taxi license as anyone else).