7 ms·

Doesn't take deep learning to realize that car infrastructure is never going to be cheap or safe compared to prioritizing mass transit and density.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
btilly 4y ago
As H. L. Mencken said, "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong." A full bus is indeed far more efficient than a car. But buses run pretty empty most of the time. As https://reason.org/commentary/does-bus-transit-reduce-greenhouse/ https://reason.org/commentary/does-bus-transit-reduce-greenh... estimates, in 2009 buses emitted nearly double the CO2/passenger mile as cars! Prioritizing buses, meaning adding more, makes that figure even worse. And therefore as simple as the bus logic looks, it doesn't actually work out to better in the real world, in most American cities. There are ways to fix that particular problem. But the place to really start is in housing permitting, NOT the streets. When you get sufficient density of housing in one place and work in another, then mass transit becomes efficient. But people involved in traffic planning seldom have the authority to overcome NIMBY obstacles to building denser housing. And so they have to operate under constraints that make additional mass transit a generally worse option.
- ericmay 4y ago
  Not sure why you are focusing on busses here, they're just one option. Also we can do housing and transit improvements at the same time. I'll note I'm also not sure that "people involved in traffic planning" would be expected to have authority over housing, though maybe they should, provided that they have a mandate to not consider automobile traffic in any of their planning.
- byyll 4y ago
  If (in theory) buses are shit, slow, dangerous, stuck in traffic, not punctual, don't expect people to use them regardless of density.
  - digging 4y ago
    And if we had less cars, buses would be less of all of those things.
  - btilly 4y ago
    This is a problem that can be addressed by dedicated bus lanes. But if you're going to have dedicated lanes, then it may make sense to go all of the way to light rail. Also dedicated lanes get push-back from unhappy car commuters. Who tend to have an outsized influence. Many cities worldwide have had luck combining dedicated bus lanes, with "park and ride" lots, and congestion parking in downtown. Now you're providing both carrots and sticks to push people towards a hybrid trip that starts with a car, and then switches to bus in the high density areas. But it is a combination that tends to be politically unpopular in the USA.
    - decafninja 4y ago
      My commute route has semi-dedicated bus lanes. They're not exclusive for bus use, but because there are many buses, most car drivers avoid that lane unless they are masochistic enough to plod along behind a slow bus. Which raises my other point - even with a semi-dedicated bus lane like this, the buses are still at least half as slow as driving a personal car on the same route. I blame this on 1.) the bus itself being slow that it barely accelerates up to 20mph before it has to stop again, and 2.) there are too many stops. Having done the route, I would say even bicycling it would be faster than the bus. I'm sure even just reducing the number of stops would improve speeds significantly, but then I'm sure there will be tons of people complaining that the bus doesn't stop within X feet of their building. Now that electric scooters have become so common, I've met more than a few people who now choose to do this commute route via electric scooter rather than take public transportation, claiming it's much faster and less stressful. I believe them. Bicycling is probably not as feasible of an option due to 1.) fitness levels, and 2.) theft risk.
- Scalene2 4y ago
  The things required to increase passengers per bus to the required 3-4 average to beat cars are well known. More frequent service, better route coverage, reduced prices. As these variables move that way, average passenger counts tend to go up. The layout of cities usually does not need to change at all in order to make public transit function well.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    More frequent buses tends to have a split effect. The first-order effect is linearly fewer passengers per bus. The second-order effect of people now switching to buses has to be quite strong (and often is) to overcome this direct effect. I happened to travel from Amsterdam to Boston today (missing King’s Day). There was no chance I wouldn’t take the train to the airport on the Amsterdam end. There was equally no chance that I would take mass transit on the Boston end, despite living in Cambridge.
  - btilly 4y ago
    I haven't looked at the research recently, but my understanding is that while more frequent service is strongly correlated with higher average passenger counts, the causation seems to be that higher average passenger counts justify increased bus service, and not that increased bus service generally results in higher passenger counts. Better route coverage likewise. Reduced prices are complicated. That does increase usage, until the prices drop so far that you attract homeless people who your would-be passengers are scared of. It turns out that making mass transit passengers feel safe is a very important consideration.
- scythe 4y ago
  There are roughly a million buses, total, in the United States. Compared to auto electrification, it would take a relatively minuscule effort to replace them all with electric vehicles — that's roughly the number of vehicles that Tesla alone sells in a single year. By contrast there are about 280 million cars in the US. In general a new bus costs about ten times as much as a new car, so you're looking at a much lower expense. In practice, it's my understanding that most municipalities are buying new buses electric anyway.
  - btilly 4y ago
    First of all BOTH buses and cars last an average of 12 years. As a society, replacing one fleet takes similar time to replacing the other. Second, electric vehicles are currently 7.2% of all new cars sold in the USA, and only 2% of new buses sold in the USA. See https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q1-2023-ev-sales/ https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q1-2023-ev-sales/ and https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in-electric-heavy-duty-vehicles https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in... for verification. So while there is great fanfare and publicity around cities switching, by and large they haven't chosen to yet. Why the discrepancy? There are a lot of reasons, but I wouldn't discount the fact that buses spend a larger fraction of their lives actually being driven, and so the fact that fueling is faster than recharging matters more for buses than cars. Therefore even though it costs more to replace all of the cars in America, economics suggest that this will happen before the buses all convert over.
    - scythe 4y ago
      >Second, electric vehicles are currently 7.2% of all new cars sold in the USA, and only 2% of new buses sold in the USA. You are comparing a centralized decision to a decentralized one. It is very easy to get 20% of the population to do anything; it is extremely difficult to get 90% on your side. The purchase of electric buses is a choice that can be made by governments.
- digging 4y ago
  I'm glad you got to show off your neat quote and link. But I wish you would have given it more thought. You could have started by finishing reading my comment - it wasn't very long, and it highlighted [housing] density. You could also imagine that in 2009 we didn't have viable electric vehicles, but in 2023 it's easier to electrify a bus fleet than hundreds of thousands of cars in a given metro area. You could also wonder why buses are so underused in America, the land of underinvestment in bus routes and overinvestment in car propaganda. Lastly, you could consider why you chose to lash out at buses when I said "mass transit". Is your point to vilify all mass transit by picking on the weakest member? Do you only have a single data point on buses and zero on other forms? Or was it just the fact that you didn't really read my comment? Perhaps it's something else. I'm being meaner than I need to be. It's just that I get a little prickly about watching cities and ecosystems die for the profits of crooked car dealership owners.
  - markandrewj 4y ago
    In other countries such as Japan public transit is generally faster then private transportation. I think one of the reasons you see a low adoption of public transportation in some North American cities is because it can do the opposite and extend your trip duration by a significant amount. Safety is obviously another factor. It seems like in a lot of places pedestrians are treated with disregard. Pedestrians being able to safely commute within their communities shouldn't be controversial, but for some reason it is.
  - btilly 4y ago
    Pause. You're the one who dismissed gathering evidence about real usage of streets because the only sensible solution is to live in dense housing and use mass transit. Which fails to recognize that solving the density problem involves major political battles that make it a generally nonviable solution to real problems that cities are faced with. Refusing to consider a politically workable solution because it is not your preferred one is counter-productive. And your preferred solution is NOT politically workable. Second, in my reply to a sibling comment I showed evidence that electrification of cars is proceeding faster than electrification of bus fleets. So even though there are more of them, electrifying cars is actually proving to be politically easier. Third, I picked on buses because they are the easiest form of mass transit to move to from cars. If buses can't be made to work for a particular metro area, then nothing else is likely to work either. And buses are failing to work very well in most places where they are used. And fourth, the big problem with buses in America is population density. We're driving mostly empty buses that make little environmental sense. This is a sign that we're not actually underinvesting in bus routes. But it is hard to make mass transit work when people aren't all in one place. And as much as you might wish it otherwise, we're not inclined to congregate in a small area for convenience.
- screye 4y ago
  I agree with your solution, and that densification is the most important piece of the puzzle. However, it is a chicken and egg problem. The second you build new housing in an area that requires a car, the person sinks in the cost of a spare car. That very second, public transport stops being a competitive because it becomes an added cost. Additionally, the spare cars demand lanes and storage that destroy any dream of densification. Densification has to start with low-occupancy buses. Most of the US has low occupancy buses because there are just few enough buses that no one wants to ever ride them. Buses suffer a self-fulfilling prophecy of occupancy rates. Bus occupancy in Europe is consistently high [1] and there is nothing to indicate that the same cannot be achieved in US cities of similar density given enough time. It is fair to use these numbers. [1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/occupancy-rates-of-passenger-vehicles/occupancy-rates-of-passenger-vehicles https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/occupancy...
  - btilly 4y ago
    It is unfortunately more complicated than that. First, the density of a city is different than the density of the area over which people live who commute to that city. Even American cities with comparable density are not necessarily as dense on that apples to apples comparison. Second, you have to look at commute distance. The average American commutes around 40 miles each way. The average European commutes around 9 miles each way. 4x the distance = 16x the area, which means that adding a bus from A to B is likely to be helpful for about 1/16 the people. And that, right there, is going to explain a HUGE difference in ridership on mass transit.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

btilly 4y ago

As H. L. Mencken said, "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong." A full bus is indeed far more efficient than a car. But buses run pretty empty most of the time. As https://reason.org/commentary/does-bus-transit-reduce-greenhouse/ https://reason.org/commentary/does-bus-transit-reduce-greenh... estimates, in 2009 buses emitted nearly double the CO2/passenger mile as cars! Prioritizing buses, meaning adding more, makes that figure even worse. And therefore as simple as the bus logic looks, it doesn't actually work out to better in the real world, in most American cities. There are ways to fix that particular problem. But the place to really start is in housing permitting, NOT the streets. When you get sufficient density of housing in one place and work in another, then mass transit becomes efficient. But people involved in traffic planning seldom have the authority to overcome NIMBY obstacles to building denser housing. And so they have to operate under constraints that make additional mass transit a generally worse option.

ericmay 4y ago
Not sure why you are focusing on busses here, they're just one option. Also we can do housing and transit improvements at the same time. I'll note I'm also not sure that "people involved in traffic planning" would be expected to have authority over housing, though maybe they should, provided that they have a mandate to not consider automobile traffic in any of their planning.
byyll 4y ago
If (in theory) buses are shit, slow, dangerous, stuck in traffic, not punctual, don't expect people to use them regardless of density.
- digging 4y ago
  And if we had less cars, buses would be less of all of those things.
- btilly 4y ago
  This is a problem that can be addressed by dedicated bus lanes. But if you're going to have dedicated lanes, then it may make sense to go all of the way to light rail. Also dedicated lanes get push-back from unhappy car commuters. Who tend to have an outsized influence. Many cities worldwide have had luck combining dedicated bus lanes, with "park and ride" lots, and congestion parking in downtown. Now you're providing both carrots and sticks to push people towards a hybrid trip that starts with a car, and then switches to bus in the high density areas. But it is a combination that tends to be politically unpopular in the USA.
  - decafninja 4y ago
    My commute route has semi-dedicated bus lanes. They're not exclusive for bus use, but because there are many buses, most car drivers avoid that lane unless they are masochistic enough to plod along behind a slow bus. Which raises my other point - even with a semi-dedicated bus lane like this, the buses are still at least half as slow as driving a personal car on the same route. I blame this on 1.) the bus itself being slow that it barely accelerates up to 20mph before it has to stop again, and 2.) there are too many stops. Having done the route, I would say even bicycling it would be faster than the bus. I'm sure even just reducing the number of stops would improve speeds significantly, but then I'm sure there will be tons of people complaining that the bus doesn't stop within X feet of their building. Now that electric scooters have become so common, I've met more than a few people who now choose to do this commute route via electric scooter rather than take public transportation, claiming it's much faster and less stressful. I believe them. Bicycling is probably not as feasible of an option due to 1.) fitness levels, and 2.) theft risk.
Scalene2 4y ago
The things required to increase passengers per bus to the required 3-4 average to beat cars are well known. More frequent service, better route coverage, reduced prices. As these variables move that way, average passenger counts tend to go up. The layout of cities usually does not need to change at all in order to make public transit function well.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  More frequent buses tends to have a split effect. The first-order effect is linearly fewer passengers per bus. The second-order effect of people now switching to buses has to be quite strong (and often is) to overcome this direct effect. I happened to travel from Amsterdam to Boston today (missing King’s Day). There was no chance I wouldn’t take the train to the airport on the Amsterdam end. There was equally no chance that I would take mass transit on the Boston end, despite living in Cambridge.
- btilly 4y ago
  I haven't looked at the research recently, but my understanding is that while more frequent service is strongly correlated with higher average passenger counts, the causation seems to be that higher average passenger counts justify increased bus service, and not that increased bus service generally results in higher passenger counts. Better route coverage likewise. Reduced prices are complicated. That does increase usage, until the prices drop so far that you attract homeless people who your would-be passengers are scared of. It turns out that making mass transit passengers feel safe is a very important consideration.
scythe 4y ago
There are roughly a million buses, total, in the United States. Compared to auto electrification, it would take a relatively minuscule effort to replace them all with electric vehicles — that's roughly the number of vehicles that Tesla alone sells in a single year. By contrast there are about 280 million cars in the US. In general a new bus costs about ten times as much as a new car, so you're looking at a much lower expense. In practice, it's my understanding that most municipalities are buying new buses electric anyway.
- btilly 4y ago
  First of all BOTH buses and cars last an average of 12 years. As a society, replacing one fleet takes similar time to replacing the other. Second, electric vehicles are currently 7.2% of all new cars sold in the USA, and only 2% of new buses sold in the USA. See https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q1-2023-ev-sales/ https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q1-2023-ev-sales/ and https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in-electric-heavy-duty-vehicles https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in... for verification. So while there is great fanfare and publicity around cities switching, by and large they haven't chosen to yet. Why the discrepancy? There are a lot of reasons, but I wouldn't discount the fact that buses spend a larger fraction of their lives actually being driven, and so the fact that fueling is faster than recharging matters more for buses than cars. Therefore even though it costs more to replace all of the cars in America, economics suggest that this will happen before the buses all convert over.
  - scythe 4y ago
    >Second, electric vehicles are currently 7.2% of all new cars sold in the USA, and only 2% of new buses sold in the USA. You are comparing a centralized decision to a decentralized one. It is very easy to get 20% of the population to do anything; it is extremely difficult to get 90% on your side. The purchase of electric buses is a choice that can be made by governments.
digging 4y ago
I'm glad you got to show off your neat quote and link. But I wish you would have given it more thought. You could have started by finishing reading my comment - it wasn't very long, and it highlighted [housing] density. You could also imagine that in 2009 we didn't have viable electric vehicles, but in 2023 it's easier to electrify a bus fleet than hundreds of thousands of cars in a given metro area. You could also wonder why buses are so underused in America, the land of underinvestment in bus routes and overinvestment in car propaganda. Lastly, you could consider why you chose to lash out at buses when I said "mass transit". Is your point to vilify all mass transit by picking on the weakest member? Do you only have a single data point on buses and zero on other forms? Or was it just the fact that you didn't really read my comment? Perhaps it's something else. I'm being meaner than I need to be. It's just that I get a little prickly about watching cities and ecosystems die for the profits of crooked car dealership owners.
- markandrewj 4y ago
  In other countries such as Japan public transit is generally faster then private transportation. I think one of the reasons you see a low adoption of public transportation in some North American cities is because it can do the opposite and extend your trip duration by a significant amount. Safety is obviously another factor. It seems like in a lot of places pedestrians are treated with disregard. Pedestrians being able to safely commute within their communities shouldn't be controversial, but for some reason it is.
- btilly 4y ago
  Pause. You're the one who dismissed gathering evidence about real usage of streets because the only sensible solution is to live in dense housing and use mass transit. Which fails to recognize that solving the density problem involves major political battles that make it a generally nonviable solution to real problems that cities are faced with. Refusing to consider a politically workable solution because it is not your preferred one is counter-productive. And your preferred solution is NOT politically workable. Second, in my reply to a sibling comment I showed evidence that electrification of cars is proceeding faster than electrification of bus fleets. So even though there are more of them, electrifying cars is actually proving to be politically easier. Third, I picked on buses because they are the easiest form of mass transit to move to from cars. If buses can't be made to work for a particular metro area, then nothing else is likely to work either. And buses are failing to work very well in most places where they are used. And fourth, the big problem with buses in America is population density. We're driving mostly empty buses that make little environmental sense. This is a sign that we're not actually underinvesting in bus routes. But it is hard to make mass transit work when people aren't all in one place. And as much as you might wish it otherwise, we're not inclined to congregate in a small area for convenience.
screye 4y ago
I agree with your solution, and that densification is the most important piece of the puzzle. However, it is a chicken and egg problem. The second you build new housing in an area that requires a car, the person sinks in the cost of a spare car. That very second, public transport stops being a competitive because it becomes an added cost. Additionally, the spare cars demand lanes and storage that destroy any dream of densification. Densification has to start with low-occupancy buses. Most of the US has low occupancy buses because there are just few enough buses that no one wants to ever ride them. Buses suffer a self-fulfilling prophecy of occupancy rates. Bus occupancy in Europe is consistently high [1] and there is nothing to indicate that the same cannot be achieved in US cities of similar density given enough time. It is fair to use these numbers. [1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/occupancy-rates-of-passenger-vehicles/occupancy-rates-of-passenger-vehicles https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/occupancy...
- btilly 4y ago
  It is unfortunately more complicated than that. First, the density of a city is different than the density of the area over which people live who commute to that city. Even American cities with comparable density are not necessarily as dense on that apples to apples comparison. Second, you have to look at commute distance. The average American commutes around 40 miles each way. The average European commutes around 9 miles each way. 4x the distance = 16x the area, which means that adding a bus from A to B is likely to be helpful for about 1/16 the people. And that, right there, is going to explain a HUGE difference in ridership on mass transit.