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The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders

nytimes.com

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Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders

#51

Post by DanBC »

frandroid wrote: post #48
mirimir wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vaguely remember reading about buses that board ~like subways, through multiple doors, from ~stations. Maybe in Brazil?

Toronto now has open boarding (i.e. you can enter at any door) through all its streetcar lines and many bus lines. The new streetcars have totally separated the drivers from the passengers, so payment is more of an honour system + fare cops* proposition, compared to the old "show the pass/pay the driver" paradigm. Boarding speed and fare evasion have both increased. *: "Revenue Protection Officers", a totally non-Orw…

A little known fact: bus ticket systems are designed to keep the drivers, not the passengers, honest.

Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders

#52

Post by carapace »

austhrow743 wrote: post #46
tdy721 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is ineffective about addressing the issue locally? Why “the feds”?

Unless the solution being proposed is to brutalise the homeless to make them move elsewhere, then it needs to be enacted at the level with control over freedom of movement of people. If SF creates policies to help the homeless, more will move there than already do so.

First, the feds should not limit the freedom of movement of a human person even if said human person does not own or rent a house. One of the messed up things about being homeless (I was for several years) is people thinking of you and treating you like some other kind of creature, less than fully human. SF is doing it right now by making a special "homeless card" complete with computer-aided bureaucracy to manage the permanent underclass more efficiently. There's a tech company implementing it for them. To me it's so weird that a city that really is kind and caring will mess up on implementation.

Second, let's say that SF's $250B homeless policies work, meaning people get their lives together, get off the drugs or into a place where they can cope w/ their mental|emotional|physical problems or whatever it is that messed them up in the first place (and a lot of people just need a home, as they are perfectly normal and capable but e.g. some debt or a death in the family or something threw them for a loop and now they're stuck living in their car or the park or something and it's hard to get back on your feet w/o a support network, etc.)

Let's say it works, and more homeless people do move here to take advantage of it. That is a good thing. God forbid ol' San Francisco should become a continent-wide renovation center for human lives, eh?

Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders

#53

Post by austhrow743 »

carapace wrote: post #52
austhrow743 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the solution being proposed is to brutalise the homeless to make them move elsewhere, then it needs to be enacted at the level with control over freedom of movement of people. If SF creates policies to help the homeless, more will move there than already do so.

First, the feds should not limit the freedom of movement of a human person even if said human person does not own or rent a house. One of the messed up things about being homeless (I was for several years) is people thinking of you and treating you like some other kind of creature, less than fully human. SF is doing it right now by making a special "homeless card" complete with computer-aided bureaucracy to manage th…

Not interested in your moral prescriptivism.

Whether the US federal government enforces its borders or not is entirely separate from the question of of it does. It can and does. San Francisco can't and doesn't. If it does a lot to help the homeless nation wide then the levels get impacted nationwide. If SF does a lot to help the homeless in SF then rates start the same or rise as move homeless move there from elsewhere in the US.

That being a good thing in general is entirely out of the scope of getting the homeless off of public transport.

Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders

#54

Post by jerven »

mirimir wrote: post #44
alexhutcheson wrote: post #7

In New York, specifically, it's not much of a mystery - the incredibly close stop spacing and inefficient boarding procedures make it so the bus is barely faster than walking. Most buses stop almost every block, they board through a single door, and they use the two slowest payment methods available in almost any system (cash and magnetic strip cards). However, I don't expect this to change anytime soon, because many…

I vaguely remember reading about buses that board ~like subways, through multiple doors, from ~stations. Maybe in Brazil?

Genève and many Swiss towns does this. Bus tickets are from a machine (sometimes in the bus, otherwise at the stop) or SMS or app. Most locals have an yearly pass.

Fare control is done by six or seven controllers getting on the bus at once. Check is very quick. In the night they will be joined by a security guard.

Boarding is very fast because of it. Also makes it easy to get in with a baby carriage or wheelchair (relatively).

Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders

#55

Post by carapace »

austhrow743 wrote: post #53
carapace wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, the feds should not limit the freedom of movement of a human person even if said human person does not own or rent a house. One of the messed up things about being homeless (I was for several years) is people thinking of you and treating you like some other kind of creature, less than fully human. SF is doing it right now by making a special "homeless card" complete with computer-aided bureaucracy to manage th…

Not interested in your moral prescriptivism. Whether the US federal government enforces its borders or not is entirely separate from the question of of it does. It can and does. San Francisco can't and doesn't. If it does a lot to help the homeless nation wide then the levels get impacted nationwide. If SF does a lot to help the homeless in SF then rates start the same or rise as move homeless move there from elsewhe…

> moral prescriptivism.

What "moral prescriptivism"? What does that mean in plain English please?

I'm not sure what you're saying.

In any event, there's no legal way to stop homeless people from riding the bus. How would you even know? Brand each homeless person with a big "H" on their foreheads? Require proof-of-residence each time people board a bus?

Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders

#56

Post by gpapilion »

As a bus rider in San Francisco for the last 30 years, there a a few things that made the experience way worse.

The design of munis modern fleet has reduced the seat and isle space. Standing is hard because your always in the way, and the redesign to accommodate more handicap seating has really reduced regular seating that could be perpendicular to the length of the bus.

Reliability is the other issue. Main lines are very reliable, but meandering cross town routes make a two bus commute undesirable.

Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders

#57

Post by lotsofpulp »

carapace wrote: post #52
austhrow743 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the solution being proposed is to brutalise the homeless to make them move elsewhere, then it needs to be enacted at the level with control over freedom of movement of people. If SF creates policies to help the homeless, more will move there than already do so.

First, the feds should not limit the freedom of movement of a human person even if said human person does not own or rent a house. One of the messed up things about being homeless (I was for several years) is people thinking of you and treating you like some other kind of creature, less than fully human. SF is doing it right now by making a special "homeless card" complete with computer-aided bureaucracy to manage th…

> Let's say it works, and more homeless people do move here to take advantage of it. That is a good thing. God forbid ol' San Francisco should become a continent-wide renovation center for human lives, eh?

Obviously something is wrong with your calculations, otherwise that would be reality. And the error is in the assumption that a tax base of a single city will sit around and pay the amount of money required to rehabilitate and/or house the mentally ill for the nation.

Labor is extremely expensive, especially labor where one might have to deal with dangerous mentally ill people who may have criminal pasts. It’s ludicrous to suggest a single city could possibly tackle the issue and shoulder the tax burden of the rest of country shipping them it’s most destitute citizens.

This is not even taking into account the legal matters that would need to be resolved on a federal level with involuntary housing of the mentally ill homeless population.

Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders

#58

Post by alex_c »

DanBC wrote: post #51
frandroid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toronto now has open boarding (i.e. you can enter at any door) through all its streetcar lines and many bus lines. The new streetcars have totally separated the drivers from the passengers, so payment is more of an honour system + fare cops* proposition, compared to the old "show the pass/pay the driver" paradigm. Boarding speed and fare evasion have both increased. *: "Revenue Protection Officers", a totally non-Orw…

A little known fact: bus ticket systems are designed to keep the drivers, not the passengers, honest.

Can you explain?

Re: The Mystery of the Missing Bus Riders

#60

Post by kevindong »

jellicle wrote: post #50
alexhutcheson wrote: post #7

In New York, specifically, it's not much of a mystery - the incredibly close stop spacing and inefficient boarding procedures make it so the bus is barely faster than walking. Most buses stop almost every block, they board through a single door, and they use the two slowest payment methods available in almost any system (cash and magnetic strip cards). However, I don't expect this to change anytime soon, because many…

For some reason car drivers always think that bus service needs to be reduced (fewer stops) in order to provide "better" bus service. The studies show that decreasing stops has minimal effect on transit times. Two stops with ten people each only takes a bit longer to board than one stop with twenty people. You save a couple of minutes across the entire length of a bus route. And each stop removal increases rider comm…

> The studies show that decreasing stops has minimal effect on transit times. Two stops with ten people each only takes a bit longer to board than one stop with twenty people. You save a couple of minutes across the entire length of a bus route.

As someone with only empirical evidence: 2 stops with 10 people each vs. 1 stop with 20 people isn't a fair comparison. The fair comparison is 10 stops with 1 person each vs. ~2 stops with 5 people each. Over a longer route, the majority of a bus's travel time comes from stopping at/departing a stop.

When I lived in Chicago, I would sometimes take a bus to work. The route I took, 29, had a minimum of one stop per block. In some cases, there were two stops per block. In one particularly bad case, the distance between the stops was literally [0]: Go to this link, select route 29, and look between Cermak Rd. and 23rd St. for the two stops in between: http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/map/displaymap.jsp

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