Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

My favorite line ever from any kids book of all time "The Bus is For Us" https://www.amazon.com/Bus-Us-Michael-Rosen/dp/0763669830 "The bus is the best, the best is the bus, the bus is the best because the bus is for us!"

Exactly this.

When I moved to Portland (from NYC, unfortunately), I hoped that I would have access to the MAX, but if not then I'd be able to take the bus to work. I ended up being about 20 blocks from the nearest MAX stop, but there was a bus stop right outside my apartment. I took the bus maybe a dozen times before I realized that it really is a non-option; what takes me ~15 minutes (20 on a extremely rare bad day) in a car takes me at least 45 minutes (to an hour) on the bus.

It's really all about what bus route you're on, and your ability to find housing on the bus with the most direct line to your office (in a city like Portland). That's usually not super easy. I have coworkers that have 15-30 minute bus rides from farther out because they're on efficient bus routes.

There are lots of those in Seattle and King County. They even close down an entire avenue during rush hour and turn it into a bus-only street.

  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.

For what it's worth, this is only the case if you live near a station with overlap (or live in SF itself). I lived in West Oakland and had a train practically every 3 minutes.

Then I moved to Berkeley. Commute in is every 15 minutes, 50/50 I have to take a transfer on the way in. Commute home is a nightmare: BART has a carriage shortage so they try to shave off cars from longer routes (such as the Richmond line). This means things get really crowded on occasion, and there's a point where a car being crowded begets more crowding, as it takes longer and longer to offboard/onboard people and therefore each subsequent stop has more people to cram on. A majority of the time on my way home when I get a transfer (as there seems to be a Richmond train from SF only for an hour span at the peak of rush hour), the trains are almost an entire cycle late, meaning I've got another 15 minute wait to see two trains come through one after the other.

The point of this is: the problems you raise with busses are also with trains/BART. Some of them are even worse for BART: you have to steeply limit the service area because putting down tracks is stupendously expensive.

The challenge here is riding the bus is inferior in convenience and comfort, fundamentally, vs other options. Unless price (likely by eliminating any subsidies for other methods; today even a $0 bus fare would still not be enough) or other features (bypassing traffic) make up for it, why would a rational person take the bus? There are probably places on the margin where buses are more acceptable right now (in a downtown core area where they replace a long walk, where other methods are inconvenient), but if the goal is wide usage, this has to be addressed.

Private bus networks with access limited to certain people (employees of companies or groups of companies, universities, etc) seem to work ok; what generally doesn’t seem to work are public buses.

Is the problem density (I doubt Google employees across Bay Area are denser than bus riding public overall within SF) — probably not.

A lot of the unpleasantness is other riders. Without the ability to ban certain riders (either via a whitelist or blacklist), bus ridership will remain limited. BART is bad enough, but whenever I’ve taken muni or peninsula bus service (very rarely)it made the case for this.

Transit agencies are also highly political — unionized labor, political appointees running it, expensive contracts for everything, inflexible policies — so I doubt they could provide the same service as private bus companies.

The solution is probably not public transit, but possibly is multi passenger vehicles. Something like Lyft Line with more passengers, dynamic routing, etc, plus some core routes with scheduled higher capacity service.