231–240 of 656 posts
If you want to increase ridership, make the seats wider and run more often.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty. A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the same space would (as you rarely get more than 1 person per car in peak hours). I'd rather take buses than the car in any city. Cars make cities dangerous, noisy, polluted, congestions make people nervous behind the wheel, fights are far from uncommon. Finding pa…
always seemed obvious to me that the reason for the disparity is that european buses are a way to get around dense cities and US buses are a welfare program for residents of sparser cities who can't afford cars. the bus lines don't actually go anywhere people care about, they're their just to provide the bare minimum ability to go somewhere. the top comment is right and this article is a good exmaple of what transit…
But to call NYC, LA, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, etc sparse doesn't seem very accurate. Yes, LA is vast, but I wouldn't call it sparse.
At some level this is driven by street design. The reason bus stops are so close in Philadelphia is because they stop every block, and there's a stop sign every block. The blocks are very small. I don't know that 'removing' these as bus-stops would actually change anything. I think a larger question is whether route changes should occur. There was a large effort in Philly called the 'Bus Revolution' [1] that aimed to…
A surprising number of bus routes in Dublin still follow, to a large extent, tram routes laid out in the 1870s. And use the same numbers. This stuff is _sticky_ (partly because significantly redesigning an existing route tends to annoy people; there's a fairly strong tendency to just make a new one and leave the existing one running in some capacity).
One big dream I have is to have some kind of free of cost at the point of service micro transit -- my dream is basically uber pool without the uber. Vans about the size of a Ford Transit or even a fuller size bus up to 40 passengers that picks up and drops passengers where they are or where they want to go to all with the push of a button on their smart phone and lots of patience. The idea is to have a huge number of…
I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false. One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership. This is the central thesis of the article. Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cit…
At risk of sounding like a mindless futurist, I will say that the Transit App has considerably improved my experience of public transit in the US, because it doesn't tell me when the next scheduled ride is, but instead when the next actual bus is, based on realtime data provided by other Transit users onboard the vehicle. The only time in recent memory that this screwed me was in SF trying to get a Muni that I though…
I would recommend Citymapper (https://citymapper.com/) in such a situation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But lots of people _do_ already ride buses! There are already current riders, and potential riders who are making these marginal decisions. Occasional riders will decide between transport modes based on the trip - making marginal improvements (or regressions) would change the rate at which they choose to ride the bus. Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are…
> 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 elderly people. Busses fill two different roles, as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation. They can serve a vital role for cities without the kind of investment it would take to make most typical HN reade…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two groups of people that you can optimize for. One is the group of people who already rides the bus. In most US cities this is a small group of people who have no real alternative. The other is the group of people who might ride the bus if it were convenient. Not just in terms of accessibility to a stop, but also accounting for the journey time. If someone tries riding the bus and finds that a 20 minute dr…
I would ride the bus if it wasn't filled with crackheads. Stopped Bart when it went downhill and all the white collar people stopped riding it and it just became desperate people, homeless, or crackheads.
I feel sorry for Philadelphia transit future, this article is totally delulu. Go to any major European city and look how the public transport works, and you won’t have to reinvent the wheel
I feel sorry for Philadelphia transit future, this article is totally delulu. Go to any major European city and look how the proper public transport works, and you won’t have to reinvent the wheel
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was in SF, my European mind was astonished why bus stops are so often (and why there is a cable to pull, but that's a different thing). Considering that the area was less populated than my city. And we also have speedbuses that stop every second or third bus stop. It was unreal. In my city bus stops have 1km between them (sometimes it is 700m sometimes 1.3km) so about 3200 feet. It is about 15min walk between…
> and why there is a cable to pull, but that's a different thing Huh... How is it set up where you live? I've ridden buses in Europe and I remember them having cables, or at least buttons.