Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever
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Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever
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Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever
#2I would if it didn’t smell terrible, have extremely limited routes across the state and ran a little more often...
Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever
#3I love the bus because it runs express from my Chicago neighborhood directly into the loop.
I get on, play with my phone, and get off 25 minutes later. I don't have to fight traffic driving myself and I can multi-task if I choose.
The problem comes when trying to take the bus to any other part of the city. It's slow, stops at every block, and is unpredictable when it arrives. It's a mode of transport that supports everyone and that inherently makes it less useful to the individual.
Personally I'd like to see bus systems get more fine-grained about their routes, timing, and size of vehicle. We should be able to model some optimizations that improve service while remaining accessible for everyone.
It'd be a shame if over the last several years major cities haven't been collecting the required data to make this possible. If not, now would be a good time to beging recording this data.
Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever
#4I have mixed feelings towards the bus. The light rail is okay, the underground is great, but the bus experience is...greatly variable.
Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever
#5I suspect the uncomfortable truth behind a lot of the problems regarding public transit isn't the transit itself, but the passengers. If you had the choice of riding a public bus with a large collection of the public or paying a few bucks and selecting a preferred subset of the ridership (e.g. chariot in SF, uber, lyft, etc.) I think most will choose the non-bus option to feel comfortable during their ride.
I'm not saying that this is a morally acceptable thing, I just suspect this is a significant reason why bus ridership has been declining.
Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever
#6I love light rail, not the bus:
Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever
#7Me: I would ride the bus if it was available more than once every 30 minutes. At this point it's faster for me to Uber.
City councilmember: why should we allocate even more funds to the busses? Nobody's riding them!
Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever
#8I love light rail, not the bus: http://setosa.io/bus/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching
In Portland, OR, the light rail does 'train bunching', with the exact same consequences (inconsistent schedule, overcrowded trains followed closely by empty ones, etc).
Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever
#9The bus system has to make pretty aggressive tradeoffs in order to be useful to commuters. You can't make it stop at every block in order to make it take less walking to get to the bus stop. Similarly, you can't have parallel lines a block apart. You have to limit the service area so that you can afford to run busses every 5-10 minutes. And you'll want to improve streets so that busses can run down the center and pick up passengers from protected islands, rather than fighting with parking and turning traffic for space.
Like, I take the BART every day into work. It's fantastic. I walk for five to ten minutes to get to the station, a train comes every 5 minutes so I don't have to worry about the train schedule, then I walk another five to ten minutes to get to the office. If the bus experience could match that, it'd take over a lot of commuting.
Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever
#10I love light rail, not the bus: http://setosa.io/bus/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching
In Portland, OR, the light rail does 'train bunching', with the exact same consequences (inconsistent schedule, overcrowded trains followed closely by empty ones, etc).
Yup!
The fix is to prioritize trains over all other street traffic, especially cars. (I suppose you could do this with buses, too, but people don't really see it that way because they have rubber wheels just like cars...)