9 ms·

> I'm personally able to walk a block or two further “A block or 2” each way at the start and destination is a significant difference (4-8 blocks) for most eld

• eptcyka 8mo ago
  Sure, lets have the minority of the population force us into design choices that are detrimental to the majority of bus users. When living in many a European city, I have chosen to walk instead of using a bus route due to the frequent stops making the bus trip a lot more expensive and marginally quicker. I have also lived in places where the eldery get a separate service, tailored to them, if they need it. Works a lot better IMO.
  • LorenPechtel 8mo ago
    How about a compromise: Alternate buses stop on the one-mile points only.
• bccdee 8mo ago
  > as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation One bus route can't wear two hats. Faster, sparser routes are typically complemented by slow, meandering collector routes which provide the kind of backstop you describe. Moreover, elderly and disabled people can use paratransit [1], which exists precisely to serve people with mobility issues too severe for regular transit. Anyway, I reject the notion of buses as a second-tier transit option reserved for poor and disabled people. The only way poor people ever get decent service is when they use the same infrastructure that affluent people do. A bus system that doesn't serve the middle class is a system that will quickly lose its funding and become inadequate for anyone to use. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratransit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratransit
  • Retric 8mo ago
    Around 1/5 of the US population is elderly ~1/4 by 2050, add in moderately disabled people and this isn’t a small population we are talking about. Paratransit is for a far smaller percentage of the population due to the significant expense.
    • bccdee 8mo ago
      So elderly that they can't walk to the bus? I suspect your data mean retirement age, i.e. 60-65+. They don't all need paratransit.
• iamcalledrob 8mo ago
  I think this is a US-centric perspective. In the US, buses (and public transport in general), are thought of as social programmes. Anyone can use them, but they are really for people who can't drive or are too poor to own a car. The rider makeup then looks like that. The elderly and the poor, sadly. Services run at a huge loss and are dependent on massive and unpopular government subsidies. Quality of service is bad. There's a stigma to using it. You end up with long, slow bus lines because this allows as many of the current demographic (elderly, poor) to take the bus. And there are always bailouts or brutal cuts on the horizon. You end up at a sort-of local maxima of inadequacy. In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving. This alternate universe is a city like London. Transport for London has a balanced budget, and despite what grumpy Brits like to say, quality of service is on an ever-upwards trajectory. In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term. You make public transport attractive to more demographics.
  • xp84 8mo ago
    Spot-on analysis. I agree that transport should operate on a basically break-even basis, but offset in two ways: 1. Where the Government wants to subsidize some group (e.g. help the disadvantaged by giving them discounts) they should pay the fair price to the transit agency out of the budget of Welfare, not drag on the financials of the transport agency. In other words, it shouldn't be possible that the transport agency is insolvent only because most of their customers are paying next to nothing. Discussions about whether we should spend a certain sum on subsidizing the poor to ride the bus/train/etc are purely welfare budget discussions. 2. The Government should move additional money into the system when they realize an expansion of transport helps further societal goals: e.g. congestion pricing funds should help to expand transit, or the government pays part of the cost to build new rail service to reduce congestion on the roads.
    • iamcalledrob 8mo ago
      Incidentally, London has a "Freedom Pass" (free transport for retirees), which is funded in the way you describe. Instead of TfL being forced to take the loss, they are reimbursed by local government cost of the transport. As an aside, I also take some issue with this pass being completely free to use. In my experience, people end up using it to go a single stop just because it's free, so why not -- which slows bus service for everyone else. I think it should be 20p per journey or something like that.
• xp84 8mo ago
  Having lived in SF I've seen many cycles where the SFMTA says "We'd like to make (insert any changes)..." and the 'advocates' immediately come out of the woodwork to make the argument you're making, about how walking another block or two is impossible for some constituents. Fundamentally as another commenter here said, a bus "can't wear two hats." In most large US cities, the bus, and sometimes the subway (if one exists), is mostly a welfare program, and its target demographic is the elderly, the poor, and the homeless. Two of those groups are rarely in any hurry. The fact that urban professionals also rely on transit to actually get to work is not very much considered in the decisions ultimately made. This is why any changes to it are so fraught. To actually serve both populations, you'd need to have two independent systems, but that would represent a tremendous amount of incremental cost. That's why they used to have (do they still? I'd guess not, post-pandemic) buses paid for by Apple, Google, Facebook etc. to shuttle people to work -- it's something the city government could never accomplish because the choices that make transit useful to those with jobs make it problematic for the other group.
  • Retric 8mo ago
    The US already has a completely separate model where we send yellow busses to pick up and drop off school kids which involve buses going to a large fraction of US homes 4 times a day 180 days a year for minimal expenses that’s free at the point of use. Nothing stops you have adding express bus routes, thus allowing busses to work for yet another population. Further, bus networks are inherently cheap as long as they see reasonable ridership numbers it’s more economically efficient than cars.
    • bandrami 8mo ago
      Unfortunately DC found out something does stop you from doing that, namely activists who flood your public meeting and say that a new bus line designed to meet the needs of young urban professionals is a gentrification accelerant and must be prevented.
  • mulmen 8mo ago
    In Seattle large employers still run their own private busses. This has been going on since long before the pandemic. These busses often tie in to existing transit options. They take you from the office to a neighborhood transit hub.
• amrocha 8mo ago
  I live in Japan, where most people are old, and I can confidently say you’re wrong
• behringer 8mo ago
  It also completely eats up their time savings.