3 ms·
Not sure about the States, but in many other places buses require / strongly prefer a separate public lane. Driving more busses in a congested city will probab
by crabbone 2y ago
Not sure about the States, but in many other places buses require / strongly prefer a separate public lane. Driving more busses in a congested city will probably increase congestion because buses are "clumsy" compared to smaller city cars.
Adding buses to already congested streets might just make the situation worse.
Israel ran into this problem, and they are desperately trying to recover by building light rail in big cities.
- Retric 2y agoDedicated bus lanes are designed to increase a city’s total throughout. As in by removing a full lane of traffic and only sending bus down that lane things improve. That seems counterintuitive, but bus utilization and congestion occur at the same time. So one bus is replacing 20-60 cars in busy periods. At 2AM an empty bus may be taking up a lot of road, but the streets are practically empty.
- xnx 2y agoExactly. We would never tolerate this type of waste in other infrastructure like buried copper. We should maximize utilization of built roads.
- crabbone 2y agoMy gut feeling is that it's hard to tell, and could be case-by-case thing. It might depend on many things, like whether the bus actually goes anywhere useful, or the would-be passengers would still have to travel far from their stop (and would prefer to drive a car, as bus doesn't solve their commute problem). Would be especially problematic in areas with single-family houses spaced far apart. Very infrequent bus service may also be a factor that would sway would-be passengers to drive cars instead, but it would be hard to justify more buses on the line. Well, I'm not a city planner, just trying to imagine the potential problems. Bet people who deal with this would know better.
- whimsicalism 2y agoin SF at least, bus lane enforcement is pretty much non-existent.