6 ms·

I took the bus home in Austin last night after having drinks with friends. It took a little under an hour, maybe 55 minutes, for a trip that would have taken 1

by dkarl 7y ago

I took the bus home in Austin last night after having drinks with friends. It took a little under an hour, maybe 55 minutes, for a trip that would have taken 15 minutes by Lyft. About twenty minutes of that was spent walking and waiting in <40ºF weather, not a big deal if you're properly dressed, but I know that's something many people will not tolerate if they have a choice. Ten minutes of it was apparently due to unreliable service; Google Maps had me get off to make a connection and but quickly rerouted me to get back on the same line I was on (luckily high frequency, hence only 10 minutes lost) because the next bus on the connecting line was half an hour away. I would never do that to save ten bucks. I only did it because of the appeal of using public transit and because it was nice to relax for a while by myself and read. Not that reading on the bus is a good use of time. I'm not sure why, but roads that are very comfortable in a small car are teeth-chattering on a bus. Reading text that is bouncing around in front of you is very tiring. I have a habit of sometimes very gently biting the inside of my cheek while I'm thinking, and I have to be careful not to do that on the bus because if we hit a bump I might draw blood. I'll still take the bus sometimes, because I feel that as a supporter of public transit, I should know about it firsthand.

rayiner 7y ago
This is just the nature of public transit. Half of car commutes in LA are under 30 minutes: https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute. Just 7% of public transit commutes are under 30%, and 27% are over an hour. Part of this is because U.S. public transit is bad. But driving in the U.S. is still faster than taking public transit in other countries. The average commute in the U.S. (where 5% take public transit) is half as long as in Korea (where 55% use public transit): https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling_to_and_from_work.pdf https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travell.... I used to have what was a pretty great commute. I'd walk a block from my high-rise apartment in westchester to the train station. In 35 minutes I was at Grand Central, and then I'd walk another block to my high-rise office. Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. Maybe in an electric car even.
- helen___keller 7y ago
  > Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. I agree with the appeal, but I've always found the biggest issue with this dream is the need for utter stability. If you quit your job, you might end up with a new one at an office 30 minutes down the highway. If your partner works, it's even harder to keep two commutes low. If you move with each new job, you may have to uproot your kid and send them to a new school.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    For sure.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  Commute time is mostly a function of metro area population, not mode of transportation. Half of South Korea's population is in the Seoul metro (which has a huge population), so the average commute time is very high. Compare NYC to LA: LA is driving dominant and has the longer commute time, despite a smaller population than NYC.
  - adjkant 7y ago
    It's not about population but rather density. LA's big public transit problem (outside of the driving first culture lobbied for by American car companies) is actually one of zoning and building.
    - robomartin 7y ago
      > outside of the driving first culture lobbied for by American car companies Sorry, this is false. Los Angeles simply didn't evolve to favor public transportation in the way a lot of European cities have. A simple example of this is the ridiculous concentration of tech and aerospace companies inside of a zone that requires almost everyone to use the 405 freeway. I know people who would rather have their fingernails removed without anesthesia than do drive the 405 in rush-hour traffic. I might include myself in that group. Who gives out building and business permits? Car companies? No. The city, the county, the State. Why do they allow such concentration? OK, maybe concentration makes sense at some level. Why, then, do they allow concentration where they do? One look at the map --particularly if armed with traffic pattern familiarity-- instantly tells you it isn't a good idea to pile-up so many businesses in these areas. So, no, car companies have nothing whatsoever to do with it. It's about urban planning and design. We could use public transportation but it would take me somewhere in the range of two to three hours longer per day to go almost anywhere and come back. Sorry, my time is far more valuable than that. And, to complete the picture, this means spending somewhere in the range of six hours per day coming and going from the aforementioned tech centers. And then you have to work 8 to 10, if not 12, hours per day.
r00fus 7y ago
Does audiobook/podcast work better for public transit? I know it's the only way I consume literature these days as a car (EV but still car) commuter.
- helen___keller 7y ago
  It works roughly the same. Depending on the form of transit and the duration other in-flight options become viable as well (nintendo switch, smartphone games, web browsing, sometimes even working on laptop, etc)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
I lived in Austin just before the advent of Lyft and Uber, and was thus stuck using the bus from time to time. I found the bus service in Austin to be unusually slow by US standards due to the abnormal number of wheelchair users. why oh why doesn't that city have light rail…
- krn1p4n1c 7y ago
  It does, if you're going from Leander/Cedar Park to downtown it's useful. It takes about the same amount of time as driving in rush-hour, but without the bs. Texas generally sees public-transport as something for poor people and the state is full of armchair libertarians..
  - dkarl 7y ago
    Yep, that's almost the only scenario it covers, along with commuting from east Austin to the Domain. I was at a lecture recently about the things cities do right and wrong when planning public transit, and the speaker used Austin's rail system to illustrate what happens when cities route public transit around political opposition. The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable, and Austin's Red Line is the perfect example: it barely sticks its nose into one side of downtown and then manages to dodge the capitol area, the university, and the dense residential neighborhoods of north Austin. Even the station that seems intended to serve the Domain is actually a ten minute walk from it, twenty minutes to most of the shops and restaurants.
    - NathanKP 7y ago
      I mean its not like they really had much of a choice for the route. They didn't build new tracks, just reused old existing tracks and built stations along the way. I lived in Austin when they were voting to build the rail line and there was so much opposition that they never would have been able to get funding for any serious development of new tracks. There was a proposal for a while to run trains up Mopac, along the train line in the middle of the highway there, but apparently that wasn't possible because there is too much freight traffic on that line. > The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable That actually wasn't the case either. The original proposal was for a roughly $2 billion project, and while it had lots of support in the central city the suburbs voted against it. In the end they got the proposal passed, but with a drastically reduced budget, and were only able to spend about $100 million to build a rail system. So they just slapped together the red line on existing rail tracks
beepboopbeep 7y ago
So the actual time would be around 20 to 30 minutes, but you didn't plan accordingly for the bus...How is that mass transit's fault?
- sunebeck 7y ago
  You can argue that it's not the "fault" of mass transit, but anyway you don't have to plan as much for taking an Uber, giving it an advantage over the bus.
- dkarl 7y ago
  Walking and waiting for connections is inherent to taking the bus. There's nothing gained from planning things tightly when service isn't predictable. In fact, I think it would be a mistake to even think of buses in my city as having a schedule. They just have a rough frequency.

by dkarl 7y ago

rayiner 7y ago

This is just the nature of public transit. Half of car commutes in LA are under 30 minutes: https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute. Just 7% of public transit commutes are under 30%, and 27% are over an hour. Part of this is because U.S. public transit is bad. But driving in the U.S. is still faster than taking public transit in other countries. The average commute in the U.S. (where 5% take public transit) is half as long as in Korea (where 55% use public transit): https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travelling_to_and_from_work.pdf https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travell.... I used to have what was a pretty great commute. I'd walk a block from my high-rise apartment in westchester to the train station. In 35 minutes I was at Grand Central, and then I'd walk another block to my high-rise office. Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. Maybe in an electric car even.

helen___keller 7y ago
> Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. I agree with the appeal, but I've always found the biggest issue with this dream is the need for utter stability. If you quit your job, you might end up with a new one at an office 30 minutes down the highway. If your partner works, it's even harder to keep two commutes low. If you move with each new job, you may have to uproot your kid and send them to a new school.
- rayiner 7y ago
  For sure.
TulliusCicero 7y ago
Commute time is mostly a function of metro area population, not mode of transportation. Half of South Korea's population is in the Seoul metro (which has a huge population), so the average commute time is very high. Compare NYC to LA: LA is driving dominant and has the longer commute time, despite a smaller population than NYC.
- adjkant 7y ago
  It's not about population but rather density. LA's big public transit problem (outside of the driving first culture lobbied for by American car companies) is actually one of zoning and building.
  - robomartin 7y ago
    > outside of the driving first culture lobbied for by American car companies Sorry, this is false. Los Angeles simply didn't evolve to favor public transportation in the way a lot of European cities have. A simple example of this is the ridiculous concentration of tech and aerospace companies inside of a zone that requires almost everyone to use the 405 freeway. I know people who would rather have their fingernails removed without anesthesia than do drive the 405 in rush-hour traffic. I might include myself in that group. Who gives out building and business permits? Car companies? No. The city, the county, the State. Why do they allow such concentration? OK, maybe concentration makes sense at some level. Why, then, do they allow concentration where they do? One look at the map --particularly if armed with traffic pattern familiarity-- instantly tells you it isn't a good idea to pile-up so many businesses in these areas. So, no, car companies have nothing whatsoever to do with it. It's about urban planning and design. We could use public transportation but it would take me somewhere in the range of two to three hours longer per day to go almost anywhere and come back. Sorry, my time is far more valuable than that. And, to complete the picture, this means spending somewhere in the range of six hours per day coming and going from the aforementioned tech centers. And then you have to work 8 to 10, if not 12, hours per day.

r00fus 7y ago

Does audiobook/podcast work better for public transit? I know it's the only way I consume literature these days as a car (EV but still car) commuter.

helen___keller 7y ago
It works roughly the same. Depending on the form of transit and the duration other in-flight options become viable as well (nintendo switch, smartphone games, web browsing, sometimes even working on laptop, etc)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Eric_WVGG 7y ago

I lived in Austin just before the advent of Lyft and Uber, and was thus stuck using the bus from time to time. I found the bus service in Austin to be unusually slow by US standards due to the abnormal number of wheelchair users. why oh why doesn't that city have light rail…

krn1p4n1c 7y ago
It does, if you're going from Leander/Cedar Park to downtown it's useful. It takes about the same amount of time as driving in rush-hour, but without the bs. Texas generally sees public-transport as something for poor people and the state is full of armchair libertarians..
- dkarl 7y ago
  Yep, that's almost the only scenario it covers, along with commuting from east Austin to the Domain. I was at a lecture recently about the things cities do right and wrong when planning public transit, and the speaker used Austin's rail system to illustrate what happens when cities route public transit around political opposition. The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable, and Austin's Red Line is the perfect example: it barely sticks its nose into one side of downtown and then manages to dodge the capitol area, the university, and the dense residential neighborhoods of north Austin. Even the station that seems intended to serve the Domain is actually a ten minute walk from it, twenty minutes to most of the shops and restaurants.
  - NathanKP 7y ago
    I mean its not like they really had much of a choice for the route. They didn't build new tracks, just reused old existing tracks and built stations along the way. I lived in Austin when they were voting to build the rail line and there was so much opposition that they never would have been able to get funding for any serious development of new tracks. There was a proposal for a while to run trains up Mopac, along the train line in the middle of the highway there, but apparently that wasn't possible because there is too much freight traffic on that line. > The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable That actually wasn't the case either. The original proposal was for a roughly $2 billion project, and while it had lots of support in the central city the suburbs voted against it. In the end they got the proposal passed, but with a drastically reduced budget, and were only able to spend about $100 million to build a rail system. So they just slapped together the red line on existing rail tracks

beepboopbeep 7y ago

So the actual time would be around 20 to 30 minutes, but you didn't plan accordingly for the bus...How is that mass transit's fault?

sunebeck 7y ago
You can argue that it's not the "fault" of mass transit, but anyway you don't have to plan as much for taking an Uber, giving it an advantage over the bus.
dkarl 7y ago
Walking and waiting for connections is inherent to taking the bus. There's nothing gained from planning things tightly when service isn't predictable. In fact, I think it would be a mistake to even think of buses in my city as having a schedule. They just have a rough frequency.