Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

citylab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 248 posts

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#181

Post by Shivetya »

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…

Buses can be adapted far easier and cheaper to changes in transportation needs that any light rail system. even if you toss in road maintenance as its already performed for cars it is still cheaper to operate than rail. buses can also reroute easily if there are problems with their route and a broken down bus or fire doesn't block the route for other buses.

plus BART has about ten billion dollars in maintenance backlog.

the only rail system in the US which works well is NYC and we get horror stories about it regardless

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#182

Post by Zanni »

wool_gather wrote: post #107
paulgerhardt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

I've seen this same argument about buses only taking up the amount of space as a handful of cars, but I think it's based on an incorrect assumption. Namely, it's only true in a static picture. If you look at the dynamic picture, cars and buses in motion, then buses take up a lot more "room." They're slow to accelerate. They stop frequently. They block traffic when they stop. They're huge, and people can't get around them as easily as they can around cars. They impede traffic in all sorts of ways that cars don't. Buses might still have an advantage, but I don't think it's as large as is claimed. (Separate peeve: it's always assumed that buses are nearly full and cars are nearly empty.)

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#183

Post by emj »

nordsieck wrote: post #135
cozzyd wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the record I'm a huge fan of busses and highly skeptical of trains. I'm sure that there are some places in the world where the Mayor's statement is true. Those places are rare. In a downtown corridor during rush hour? Sure - I could totally see a lane full of just busses. However, most dedicated bus lanes won't be that busy. This isn't to say that there aren't good reasons for dedicated lanes - just that the reas…

> In the first world, most busses are heavily subsidized.

Public transport makes it possible for more people to use the roads it makes it faster for people that have to go by car. So what you call subsidized is actually a way to activate capital sunk into expensive infrastructure and make it more effective.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#184

Post by KozmoNau7 »

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…

>"You can't make it stop at every block in order to make it take less walking to get to the bus stop"

You absolutely can, that's how the main bus lines in Copenhagen operate. Some of the stops are only a couple hundred meters apart, and during most of the day the schedule isn't fixed, it's just signed as 5-8 minutes between buses.

The main A and C bus lines criss-cross the city on bigger streets, usually parallel to each other for a lot of stretches, and occasionally on the exact same streets for short stretches. In addition to this, there are a number of lines that service smaller streets on longer intervals, with the stops a little further apart.

Of course we also have the S-trains and Metro, which step up in distance and grid size, compared to the A and C bus lines.

It works. I rarely have to walk more than a couple of minutes from a bus/train stop to get anywhere I'm going in the Copenhagen area.

And this is with stops basically every other block, buses every 5 minutes in rush hour on the main lines, occasionally parallel lines (where it makes sense) and no artificial limits on the service area.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#185

Post by emj »

Zanni wrote: post #182
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…

I've seen this same argument about buses only taking up the amount of space as a handful of cars, but I think it's based on an incorrect assumption. Namely, it's only true in a static picture. If you look at the dynamic picture, cars and buses in motion, then buses take up a lot more "room." They're slow to accelerate. They stop frequently. They block traffic when they stop. They're huge, and people can't get around…

What you bring up stems from two things, infrastructure needs to prioritize busses, and second comparing busses to single car does not work. Since we are obviously talking about rush hour. At a traffic light in a busy intersection where I live there will be max 15 people in cars, 50-400 people in busses, and about 100 more on the streets walking and bicycling. I think 5 times more people in busses is a pretty good advantage.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#186

Post by pgtan »

emj wrote: post #180
pgtan wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't make it stop at every block a solution for this is kind of "stop on demand" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi

This does not work if you want to speed up routes in rush hour, because people will demand stops at every block. Usually people are not alturistic enough to get off in bulk if they have the option to stop everywhere. Busses work great even in low density environment if you build infrastructure that is good for busses. Bicycles + buss makes it posible to serve quite large areas fast and simple.

> This does not work if you want to speed up routes in rush hour, because people will demand stops at every block.

Actually, this is exactly how Marshrutkas work, at least in Sofia/Bulgaria. They do not stop on "every block", they stop only if they are not full enough or someone wants to get off. But normaly, this persons tell their destination early enough to the driver, so he or she can plan better the few stops. Nowadays most people prefer the Metro over the Marshrutkas though.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#187

Post by KozmoNau7 »

prostoalex wrote: post #34

> such as L.A. and Denver, are watching transit ridership decline across the board, in part because investment in buses has trailed so far behind the commitment to trains That's not completely true for LA (and for the record, train ridership in LA is on decline as well, while the population is growing). Here's the actual reason http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-metro-homeless-2018... "People looking for warm,…

You don't have a public transport problem in the US, you have an underlying societal problem of people not giving a shit about other people.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#188

Post by imgabe »

With the push for self driving cars, I'm surprised I haven't heard anything about self driving buses. It seems like it would be a slightly simpler problem to have a self-driving vehicle along a predefined route.

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#189

Post by icc97 »

imgabe wrote: post #188

With the push for self driving cars, I'm surprised I haven't heard anything about self driving buses. It seems like it would be a slightly simpler problem to have a self-driving vehicle along a predefined route.

There are, Mercedes has built one [0]. But this suffers from the same problem as Autopilot/Uber crash that it's not fully autonomous so the bus driver has to stay alert whilst doing nothing.

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/18/self-driving-mercedes-benz...

Re: Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever

#190

Post by rerx »

kpil wrote: post #98
busterarm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God I would love it Manhattan banned Uber and all non-commercial traffic (exile all civilian traffic to the highways and parking garages alongside them) and upped the number of buses. Clean new yellow cabs too and tougher requirements to drive them (raise the fares, I don't care).

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…

"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."

At this point Venice is basically an open air museum for tourists. It can hardly serve as an example for regular cities that house people who live and work there.

Post reply on HN