7 ms·

Most transit agencies have this problem of the "vicious transit cycle" - people don't take the bus because it's too infrequent/unreliable => more cars make the

by milch 2y ago

Most transit agencies have this problem of the "vicious transit cycle" - people don't take the bus because it's too infrequent/unreliable => more cars make the buses more unreliable => less money because so few people take it => back to start. It's amazing when you're sitting in a bus behind 20 cars backed up over 4 blocks, and you look back and there's 50 people on the bus. Really makes you think why the 50-person bus doesn't get priority over all of the single occupancy vehicles

cyberax 2y ago
Nah. Most agencies have a problem of people realizing that wasting life in buses is not worth it. Transit can never compete with cars on speed in well-designed cities.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  I guess by 'well designed cities' you mean 'cities with copious amounts of parking' For certain high frequency routes in Chicago, I never minded sitting on the bus to get across town. At least once I got off I didn't have to find a parking spot. Now wasting life waiting for a bus is another story.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > I guess by 'well designed cities' you mean 'cities with copious amounts of parking' Yup. Wide roads, plenty of parking, distributed industry and office space, low density.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      "Low density" just means that the entire area is covered in asphalt. That's not what well designed looks like.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        Yes, and? > That's not what well designed looks like. It is more flexible, people-friendly, enables better living. So yeah, "well designed".
        saagarjha 2y ago
        Unless you’re one of those people who can’t drive?
        cyberax 2y ago
        That indeed is the biggest problem. Waymo is already solving it in SF, though.
        saagarjha 2y ago
        People can't afford to spend $20 every time they want to go anywhere.
        cyberax 2y ago
        The thing is, a transit trip's true cost is also around $20 in SF and Seattle. It's just that perverse incentives hide it from users. Waymo taxis deserve the same level of subsidies. It won't be happening any time soon because it'll be a death knell for transit, and will leave thousands of city employees without work.
        saagarjha 2y ago
        This isn’t true, unless you’re willing to consider the subsidies that cars get when it comes to putting in and maintaining roads and doing urban planning around half the city being car surfaces.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  It’s not popular on HN but this is the truth. Cars are fast, and they operate on your own schedule, and they don’t have to make a bunch of stops. There’s just no way transit can compete on travel time. Unless of course, a city decides to purposely underbuild roads relative to population (like what is induced with increased density) or purposely destroys car infrastructure, as San Francisco is doing with absurd speed limits, speed bumps, and other “traffic calming” (or more accurately, anti car measures). And that’s leaving aside all the issues with our of control transit budgets or crime on public transit in many cities.
  - randoomed 2y ago
    Yes and no. Cars are indeed the fastest way to travel, if we disregard some aspects like the time needed to park and throughput limits. (also disregarding very large distances where high speed trains and airplanes out compete them) So for spread out places with lost of space cars will usually be the fastest. However if we look at dense city centres you have a lot of people competing for parking and a lot of people competing for road throughput. Say we want to move from A to B, assuming infinite throughput the car is fastest. Take the same route, but it can handle only 200 cars/hour and 10000 people want to take it, we end up with a lot of cars waiting for each other. In this case, slower but more efficient modes of travel will be faster at getting all these people to their destination. This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other) The hate for traffic calming is an interesting point, as it assumes cars are the only thing that exists. Unfortunately our cars don't exist in a vacuum, but interact with other object in the world like buildings, and people. The goal of traffic calming is to make it so that other things are protected from cars. (mainly by lowering speed in places where there is lots of other stuff, you wont see traffic calming on a highway)
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other) The premise here is that travel time can be the only trade off, but suppose we make a different one: Stop charging fares for mass transit. Then more people take it because it costs less rather than because it's faster and it can be less expensive (and only slightly slower) even when the roads are minimally congested.
- DrBrock 2y ago
  We appear to have very different definitions of "well-designed cities". Cars are the least efficient form of mass transit yet devised. They take up inordinate amounts of space to move very few people. This creates unavoidable congestion problems at very realistic levels of urban density, problems which are only solvable by enabling people to use viable alternatives. This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars. (https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus-ridership-2023 https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus...) (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/manhattan-drivers-face-9-fee-first-such-us-effort-fight-gridlock-2025-01-06 https://www.reuters.com/world/us/manhattan-drivers-face-9-fe...) Speaking of "wasting life in buses", did you know that the average LA / Chicago / NYC driver spends 85 to 100 hours a year just sitting in traffic? Food for thought (https://inrix.com/scorecard/ https://inrix.com/scorecard/)
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > We appear to have very different definitions of "well-designed cities". No comparable European city is even close to Houston in average commute time. Go on, fact check me. > This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars. Manhattan is a hellscape that needs to be de-densified (with some neighborhoods preserved as museums of human folly).
    - Mawr 2y ago
      > No comparable European city is even close to Houston in average commute time. Even if that is true, average commute time is just a single factor. There's also health, cost, comfort, the environment, safety. Comparisons using a single metric are simply invalid. > Go on, fact check me. Ok. Couldn't find any reliable data, could you cite your sources? What I have found is a few sources with wildly different data, e.g.: - [1] puts Houston at 42 minutes, very different from your claim of 28 minutes. - [2] claims the average time for the EU is 25 minutes. Most of the sources I've found are based on self-reported data (surveys) so I do not put much weight on them. Do you have any sources that provide reliable data? [1]: https://www.theworldranking.com/statistics/125/traffic-commute-time-index/ https://www.theworldranking.com/statistics/125/traffic-commu... [2]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20201021-2 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
Niksko 2y ago
And if you look to places like Meixco City and Bogota, their bus rapid transit is very fast and efficient. But good luck taking away a single lane of traffic for dedicated bus services anywhere in the US.
- fragmede 2y ago
  https://maps.app.goo.gl/MrLLq1V4acKnG3RVA https://maps.app.goo.gl/MrLLq1V4acKnG3RVA This road right here in a west coast US city used to be four lanes of car traffic (two in each direction), but two (one in each direction) were taken out and dedicated for bus service.
  - what 2y ago
    Yet there’s now 6 lanes? So they didn’t take out two lanes for bus traffic?
  - nayuki 2y ago
    According to Google street view, the road had 3 general car lanes per direction up to and including Nov 2016. Shortly after, the middle lane of each direction became a bus-only lane, but this was implemented with temporary road modifications. (So each direction has 1 bus lane and 2 car lanes.) The middle part of the road was rebuilt from 2019 to 2020, making this feature permanent.
coldpie 2y ago
> Really makes you think why the 50-person bus doesn't get priority over all of the single occupancy vehicles They're building up more and more Bus-Only lanes here in the Twin Cities, and as a daily bus commuter, the change has been fantastic. Really makes a big difference in speed & reliable bus timings when the bus gets its own space to operate.

by milch 2y ago

cyberax 2y ago

Nah. Most agencies have a problem of people realizing that wasting life in buses is not worth it. Transit can never compete with cars on speed in well-designed cities.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
I guess by 'well designed cities' you mean 'cities with copious amounts of parking' For certain high frequency routes in Chicago, I never minded sitting on the bus to get across town. At least once I got off I didn't have to find a parking spot. Now wasting life waiting for a bus is another story.
- cyberax 2y ago
  > I guess by 'well designed cities' you mean 'cities with copious amounts of parking' Yup. Wide roads, plenty of parking, distributed industry and office space, low density.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    "Low density" just means that the entire area is covered in asphalt. That's not what well designed looks like.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      Yes, and? > That's not what well designed looks like. It is more flexible, people-friendly, enables better living. So yeah, "well designed".
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        Unless you’re one of those people who can’t drive?
        cyberax 2y ago
        That indeed is the biggest problem. Waymo is already solving it in SF, though.
        saagarjha 2y ago
        People can't afford to spend $20 every time they want to go anywhere.
        cyberax 2y ago
        The thing is, a transit trip's true cost is also around $20 in SF and Seattle. It's just that perverse incentives hide it from users. Waymo taxis deserve the same level of subsidies. It won't be happening any time soon because it'll be a death knell for transit, and will leave thousands of city employees without work.
        saagarjha 2y ago
        This isn’t true, unless you’re willing to consider the subsidies that cars get when it comes to putting in and maintaining roads and doing urban planning around half the city being car surfaces.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
It’s not popular on HN but this is the truth. Cars are fast, and they operate on your own schedule, and they don’t have to make a bunch of stops. There’s just no way transit can compete on travel time. Unless of course, a city decides to purposely underbuild roads relative to population (like what is induced with increased density) or purposely destroys car infrastructure, as San Francisco is doing with absurd speed limits, speed bumps, and other “traffic calming” (or more accurately, anti car measures). And that’s leaving aside all the issues with our of control transit budgets or crime on public transit in many cities.
- randoomed 2y ago
  Yes and no. Cars are indeed the fastest way to travel, if we disregard some aspects like the time needed to park and throughput limits. (also disregarding very large distances where high speed trains and airplanes out compete them) So for spread out places with lost of space cars will usually be the fastest. However if we look at dense city centres you have a lot of people competing for parking and a lot of people competing for road throughput. Say we want to move from A to B, assuming infinite throughput the car is fastest. Take the same route, but it can handle only 200 cars/hour and 10000 people want to take it, we end up with a lot of cars waiting for each other. In this case, slower but more efficient modes of travel will be faster at getting all these people to their destination. This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other) The hate for traffic calming is an interesting point, as it assumes cars are the only thing that exists. Unfortunately our cars don't exist in a vacuum, but interact with other object in the world like buildings, and people. The goal of traffic calming is to make it so that other things are protected from cars. (mainly by lowering speed in places where there is lots of other stuff, you wont see traffic calming on a highway)
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other) The premise here is that travel time can be the only trade off, but suppose we make a different one: Stop charging fares for mass transit. Then more people take it because it costs less rather than because it's faster and it can be less expensive (and only slightly slower) even when the roads are minimally congested.
DrBrock 2y ago
We appear to have very different definitions of "well-designed cities". Cars are the least efficient form of mass transit yet devised. They take up inordinate amounts of space to move very few people. This creates unavoidable congestion problems at very realistic levels of urban density, problems which are only solvable by enabling people to use viable alternatives. This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars. (https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus-ridership-2023 https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus...) (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/manhattan-drivers-face-9-fee-first-such-us-effort-fight-gridlock-2025-01-06 https://www.reuters.com/world/us/manhattan-drivers-face-9-fe...) Speaking of "wasting life in buses", did you know that the average LA / Chicago / NYC driver spends 85 to 100 hours a year just sitting in traffic? Food for thought (https://inrix.com/scorecard/ https://inrix.com/scorecard/)
- cyberax 2y ago
  > We appear to have very different definitions of "well-designed cities". No comparable European city is even close to Houston in average commute time. Go on, fact check me. > This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars. Manhattan is a hellscape that needs to be de-densified (with some neighborhoods preserved as museums of human folly).
  - Mawr 2y ago
    > No comparable European city is even close to Houston in average commute time. Even if that is true, average commute time is just a single factor. There's also health, cost, comfort, the environment, safety. Comparisons using a single metric are simply invalid. > Go on, fact check me. Ok. Couldn't find any reliable data, could you cite your sources? What I have found is a few sources with wildly different data, e.g.: - [1] puts Houston at 42 minutes, very different from your claim of 28 minutes. - [2] claims the average time for the EU is 25 minutes. Most of the sources I've found are based on self-reported data (surveys) so I do not put much weight on them. Do you have any sources that provide reliable data? [1]: https://www.theworldranking.com/statistics/125/traffic-commute-time-index/ https://www.theworldranking.com/statistics/125/traffic-commu... [2]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20201021-2 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...

Niksko 2y ago

And if you look to places like Meixco City and Bogota, their bus rapid transit is very fast and efficient. But good luck taking away a single lane of traffic for dedicated bus services anywhere in the US.

fragmede 2y ago
https://maps.app.goo.gl/MrLLq1V4acKnG3RVA https://maps.app.goo.gl/MrLLq1V4acKnG3RVA This road right here in a west coast US city used to be four lanes of car traffic (two in each direction), but two (one in each direction) were taken out and dedicated for bus service.
- what 2y ago
  Yet there’s now 6 lanes? So they didn’t take out two lanes for bus traffic?
- nayuki 2y ago
  According to Google street view, the road had 3 general car lanes per direction up to and including Nov 2016. Shortly after, the middle lane of each direction became a bus-only lane, but this was implemented with temporary road modifications. (So each direction has 1 bus lane and 2 car lanes.) The middle part of the road was rebuilt from 2019 to 2020, making this feature permanent.

coldpie 2y ago

> Really makes you think why the 50-person bus doesn't get priority over all of the single occupancy vehicles They're building up more and more Bus-Only lanes here in the Twin Cities, and as a daily bus commuter, the change has been fantastic. Really makes a big difference in speed & reliable bus timings when the bus gets its own space to operate.