Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever • Hacker News Board

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#121

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Thu, May 10, 2018, 12:58 AM UTC

dbasedweeb wrote: post #87

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In warm and dry parts of the world with good roads. All you need are good roads. Bicycling in the winter in Helsinki or – even further north – Oulu is completely mainstream. People know how to dress for the outdoors, and as long as the bike lanes are cleared of snow, cycling is not viewed as the major inconvenience that people in warmer countries expect it to be.

“All you need are good roads.” That’s a Big expensive undertaking. In Canada (which is ever so slightly bigger than Finland) the roads range from excellent to abysmal. In the US the roads often have potholes and little accommodation for cycles, and the U.K. has some of the worst roads I’ve seen outside of a developing nation. Finland is also a small country with a population which all lives in the same climate. Count…

Note that I mentioned Oulu. The bike lane infrastructure constructed there – the sheer total distance of lanes versus the city’s population – makes it preposterous to claim that Toronto (the example city in the grandparent post) cannot also have decent winter cycling.

We are talking about one city; no one is suggesting that Canada’s rural areas – which is the only place it would be relevant to bring up distance or low population density like you did – need bike lanes, too.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#122

Post by photojosh » Thu, May 10, 2018, 12:59 AM UTC

paulgerhardt wrote: post #36

stefan_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the problem, buses can never match that. They can't have too short a route or too fast an interval, it doesn't work when you have huge variance due to personal cars, lights etc. impeding them.

Citylab's push here is in response to South American cities doing exactly that with great success[1]. Initially developed in Curitaba, follow on initiatives in Bogota have been very popular[2]. Basically, treat the bus like a metro. Give them their own lane. Make sure the platform is level with pickup. And you've got a massively cost down subway system. For an inspiring documentary you should check this[3] video out.…

I experienced the bus rapid transit in Quito, Ecuador as a kid. [0] It was superb. The stations are enclosed with payment as you enter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Quito

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#123

Post by jboles » Thu, May 10, 2018, 1:05 AM UTC

gascan wrote: post #89

stevejb wrote: post #82

One thing that seems to have not been addressed here is noise. I was just on a quick walk in downtown Sydney, Australia. It was so loud on the sidewalks, with buses seeming to contribute a huge portion of noise. Additionally, the diesel exhaust can be stifling particularly in these urban corridor situations where the buildings trap the fumes. I would much rather be walking next to 50 Prius/Camry taxi cabs and a few p…

Electric buses and CNG buses are already here, and they are quieter. It might take some time for Sydney to retire old diesel buses, but they won't be that loud & fumey forever.

CNG buses don’t seem to do as well as diesel with hot weather and lots of hills, two things Sydney has an abundance of. A few have also caught fire. That said, Sydney’s CNG buses are pretty old now so maybe the tech is updated.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#124

Post by dsfyu404ed » Thu, May 10, 2018, 1:15 AM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #106

kpil wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kind of works for Venice, it's so nice to be in a car free town with a slow but nice public transport (the vaporettos) so I started to dream about if it would be possible to a similar thing with buses, combined with the existing subway and trams, and just exile all cars. The thing is that where I live, the bus network is heavily funded and I'm suspecting that it's probably operating already with too little efficie…

"Further, large diesel engines running heavy start-stop duty cycles like buses probably generates unproportionally more particles than just about everything else." The good news: electric busses are coming. City busses will be huge winners from electrification, both for economic and environmental reasons. Greatly reduced fuel and maintenance costs, improved ride quality, less noise and pollution.

Electric cars are coming too.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#125

Post by kalleboo » Thu, May 10, 2018, 1:15 AM UTC

paulgerhardt wrote: post #36

stefan_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the problem, buses can never match that. They can't have too short a route or too fast an interval, it doesn't work when you have huge variance due to personal cars, lights etc. impeding them.

Citylab's push here is in response to South American cities doing exactly that with great success[1]. Initially developed in Curitaba, follow on initiatives in Bogota have been very popular[2]. Basically, treat the bus like a metro. Give them their own lane. Make sure the platform is level with pickup. And you've got a massively cost down subway system. For an inspiring documentary you should check this[3] video out.…

They did this where I lived in Sweden too. The city wanted a tram line, but couldn't afford it. So they built a bus line. Bought massive triple bendy busses. Even used tram signals at the stoplights. Worked great.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#126

Post by downer68 » Thu, May 10, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

Buses fucking suck.

Buses make you wait in the rain.

Buses get stuck in traffic very easily.

Buses create traffic and make it worse with their size.

Buses idle diesel fumes as they stand in traffic.

Buses are noisy and idle outside of homes.

Bus stops in front of homes are filled with noisy people.

Buses that permit requested stops go nowhere slower than ever.

Buses are a half measure.

Buses fucking suck.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#127

Post by InitialLastName » Thu, May 10, 2018, 1:30 AM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #78

reaperducer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They can't have too short a route or too fast an interval, it doesn't work when you have huge variance due to personal cars, lights etc. impeding them. Lots of cities have found ways around this. Express buses with dedicated rights-of-way in Pittsburgh, for example. Or Chicago's 146 Outer Drive Express and J14 Jeffrey Jump routes are also good examples. Too often the biggest problem with buses getting around isn't t…

Which itself is a symptom of infrastructure not meeting capacity. If there were enough parking people wouldn't park illegally.

If there were an appropriate price for parking illegally (please pay this big fine!) people wouldn't park illegally.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#128

Post by cozzyd » Thu, May 10, 2018, 1:42 AM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #72

Endama wrote: post #5

I 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 s…

Sometimes it's not even the passengers... it's the driver. Riding the 152 in Chicago one snowy night (about seven years ago), the bus suddenly stopped and the driver made everyone get off into the snow because it was the end of his shift. When we asked when the next bus was, he said there wouldn't be once because he was the last bus of the night. I ended up walking about a mile to the nearest Blue Line subway station…

If you were on an Eastbound 152, the schedule clearly indicates that the last Eastbound 152's of the night only go to Central, so while perhaps the driver may not have communicated it properly, they were right. If it was a westbound 152 then that's ridiculous and you should have called CTA.

Not much use to you now but the the parallel 80 (Irving Park) and 77 (Belmont) are each half a mile away (in opposite directions) and both run more more frequently and later (the 77 runs almost all night... just a ~2 hour gap between 2 am and 4 am).

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#129

Post by hug » Thu, May 10, 2018, 1:55 AM UTC

mmanfrin wrote: post #27

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #9

The 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 pic…

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 li…

This is less a "problem with trains" than it is a "problem with rail in the United States", or maybe just with SF.

Melbourne Metro, for example, has roughly the same amount of weekday riders as BART, 415,000 vs 446,000 respectively, with nearly 5 times(!) the amount of track, at 540mi vs 112mi.

This is, of course, excluding light rail services -- another 150mi of track in Melbourne with some 1,700 stops, and non-Metro heavy-rail services to the other nearby commuter hub cities like Geelong and Ballarat.

Berlin is, from my knowledge, more similar to Melbourne than to SF in this respect.

But y'know what the funny thing is? Everyone in Melbourne hates the bus service. Makes me wonder about what they think about buses in Berlin.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#130

Post by cozzyd » Thu, May 10, 2018, 1:57 AM UTC

nordsieck wrote: post #118

wool_gather wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall reading an article a few years ago about Bogotá's transit, where the mayor (I think) said something very interesting. Among other arguments, he made a moral argument about the dedicated lane for transit. Roughly, there's 40 or 50 people on the bus, vs 1-2 per car, and you get, what, 3? 2? cars in the space of a bus. He found it completely unjustified to let the convenience of those 45 people be outweighed by…

> Roughly, there's 40 or 50 people on the bus, vs 1-2 per car, and you get, what, 3? 2? cars in the space of a bus. He found it completely unjustified to let the convenience of those 45 people be outweighed by the convenience of the 4 or 5. That's only true if the lane is as full of busses as other lanes are full of cars.

Yes, but if the bus is faster, more people will take the bus and so you will add more buses. In places like Quito with dedicated busways, there are buses basically non-stop. Buses can follow one another better than trains too because you don't have the signal system reducing headways.