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In San Francisco the current standard is 800–1,360 ft between bus stops depending on the grade. Street car stops are every 2–3 blocks. The MTA's spent years t
by inferiorhuman 3y ago
In San Francisco the current standard is 800–1,360 ft between bus stops depending on the grade. Street car stops are every 2–3 blocks. The MTA's spent years trying to cull stops because many are much closer than that, so no… walking to a Muni stop in San Francisco is perhaps one of the easiest things you can do in the city.
Edit: ca. 2008 the policy was 800–1,000 ft for bus stops and 1,000–1,200 ft for street car stops. On grades between 10–15% the standard is 500–600 ft for bus stops, and on grades above 15% the standard is 300–400 ft. Trunk routes have 24x7 service, and (I can't find it now) there are standards about the amount of service on the other routes but it's something along the lines of 80% of residences are supposed to have frequent service ~18 hours a day and reduced service in the wee hours. Currently the tightest headway I can find is 8 minutes for travel during peak hours along the busiest routes.
Muni is often inefficient but it can get you pretty much anywhere in the city (including places you can't walk to like Treasure Island) for most of the day.
Edit: For reference San Francisco is roughly 7 miles by 7 miles. So you're talking about transiting halfway across town.
Cars (with or without drivers) are competing for the same right of way as the bus, so more of them will simply slow everyone down. A 60ft bus can fit, what, about 100 people? A self-driving car can fit, what, 5? The current quantity of Lyft/Uber/Waymo/Cruise vehicles already has a negative impact on traffic. Put enough self driving cars on the street to make up for the capacity that buses provide and you're going to make traffic much, much worse.
- alooPotato 3y agoTwo really popular locations, 3 miles apart, with a direct bus route servicing them and still 40 min travel time. This doesn't work: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dolores+Park,+Dolores+St+%26,+19th+St,+San+Francisco,+CA+94114/Marina+District,+San+Francisco,+CA/@37.7768012,-122.4338673,14.93z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x808f7e1779aa70a7:0xa618e4eff1228d60!2m2!1d-122.4271145!2d37.7597704!1m5!1m1!1s0x808580d79ae5a51b:0x3c50fe8f3930832!2m2!1d-122.4370011!2d37.8043849!3e3?hl=en&entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dolores+Park,+Dolores+St+%26... I'd argue that we'll be able to make this much better with driverless cars than with public transit.
- Panzer04 3y agoIt's a capacity issue. You just can't transport as many people with cars. In a completely empty city, the first car handily beats transit. Of course. In a traffic-laden city, separated PT tends to determine how long it takes to travel instead. 12AM it takes me 25min to get into the centre of the city - at peak hour it's more than an hour. Curiously, the train also happens to take approximately an hour to get into the city. If public transit exists, it becomes the upper-bound for traffic travel time as if it takes longer than that people start to take the constant-time PT trip instead of the variable car trip. In a software sense you can usually view decent PT (ie. not busses stuck in traffic) as having a high but constant time cost, whereas cars have a low but increasing cost corresponding to the traffic load (with non-separated transit incurring the same costs but being worse due to traffic stops :()
- alooPotato 3y agoFair argument. Public transit caps downside case and upside case. Cars can have downside but have upside too. I want to have my cake and eat it too and I think we can with driverless cars. Lots of software tricks we can do with a network of driverless EVs + city traffic lights to dramatically increase capacity. My roadmap for SF would be: - allow waymo and others to scale driverless cars - stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it) - give the same per passenger subsidy to riders of driverless cars that current public transit passengers receive per trip - require that driverless cars in SF should send realtime destination info to the traffic light network - remove parking spots on high traffic streets effectively creating two more lanes - allow bus lanes to be exclusively used by driverless cars - tax driverless car rides based on occupancy+distance+time of day so you can traffic shape
- alooPotato 3y agoAll of these are possible to implement in a really short amount of time (because its mostly software) compared to public transit (10+ years to make a bus lane on van ness)
- 3y ago
- anticensor 3y ago> A 60ft bus can fit, what, about 100 people? It can actually fit 150.