501–510 of 656 posts
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It's different per country, and even per city within the country. As a rule of thumb, big cities don't have buttons/cords, smaller ones do.
I've never seen cords in Europe, neither in a big city nor little towns.
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> If you have enough density to justify a bus lane, you have enough density to justify a subway. That assumes a linear city, where everyone lives within a short walking distance of the same street. In actual cities, bus lines from different neighborhoods converge on main streets. While individual lines may have 10–15 minute intervals, bus traffic on the main streets may be high enough to justify dedicated bus lanes.…
> That assumes a linear city, where everyone lives within a short walking distance of the same street. Isn't that the assumption you're making? That there is a single primary street that everything converges and then diverges from which is common to every bus route? Meanwhile in practice any given person standing on the You Are Here dot could want to go in any of the eight directions from where they currently are. A…
A typical direct bus line starts from somewhere, goes through a number of neighborhoods, reaches a major street, and follows it to a central location. The number of directions that need a bus line is typically much higher than the number of streets reaching the central location. (For example, you need ~10-degree intervals at 10 km from the center to guarantee a reasonable walking distance to the nearest bus stop.) Hence the bus lines eventually converge.
Once you have enough bus traffic that a dedicated lane makes sense, transforming an ordinary lane into a bus lane will make the traffic faster for the average person. It's not a Pareto improvement, as the traffic will become worse for those who drive on that route. But it's not a huge loss for them either. If you already have 20+ buses/hour making frequent stops during the rush hour, the throughput for that lane will already be much lower than for the other lanes.
Meanwhile here in central Austin, it's a 0.9 mile walk from my door to the nearest bus stop that I can use to commute, walking along major stroads some of which don't even have sidewalks, much of the year in Texan heat with no scrap of shade. Then it's up to a 30 minute wait for the delayed or canceled bus, then almost exactly a 1-hour ride on the express 801 to go 7 miles to work downtown. Somehow we combine inacces…
But that does also reinforce the point. Even at max convenience, with two good options (rail, rapid bus line), it was still about 15% slower than driving. Add a single connection or your situation and you're losing an hour a day round trip.
I'm pretty sure it's the car-centric design of American cities that are the root cause of European buses having higher ridership.
Nevertheless I agree with the basic premise of bus stops being spaced further apart where they are not.
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Yes! "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" is not inspiring! Mamdani threw cash at the problem of snow on the streets and now, huh, suddenly there's not so much snow on the streets of NYC compared to previous blizzards, who would have thought.
The issue is that all money-throwing needs to be balanced by careful thought. This cycle the money-throwing at snow plowing worked. Next cycle, it will not be as effective, as more people who want to "game" the rewards will enter the equation. So every cycle, along with money, some thought will need to go into improving the system or coming up with alternate solutions.
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It's really not ideal. Similar systems are common in Central Asia. They make it difficult for travelers to predict journey times, it's unfriendly to tourists, and it's much less accessible to other populations (e.g. the disabled). They also don't scale well to large urban environments or out of the way journeys in my experience.
> They make it difficult for travelers to predict journey times How do scheduled bus routes standardize a journey time vs a demand shuttle? > out of the way journeys in my experience. How do buses fair in this regard? > It's really not ideal Are buses?
How do buses fair in this regard?
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> We're talking about cities, of course; in rural areas, nothing beats cars. Where I grew up in NW Scotland, it's a five hour round trip to go to the supermarket. You pretty much need a car for that. Where I live right now it's a five minute walk to the supermarket, but I still need a car because the things I work on are a long way from where I live, often up steep muddy mountain tracks. When I lived in the middle of…
What people really misunderstand in these discussions is that no one is talking about completely killing off driving as an option, and no one says that public transportation works in literally 100% of circumstances. We just want there to be viable public transportation options for situations where it makes sense. This even makes it easier for the people who do have to drive, like you, as there will be less congestion…
But growing up in a rural area where there are two buses a day none of which are useful for anything other than high school pupils (although they're not school buses) it does tend to limit everyone's options.
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What people really misunderstand in these discussions is that no one is talking about completely killing off driving as an option, and no one says that public transportation works in literally 100% of circumstances. We just want there to be viable public transportation options for situations where it makes sense. This even makes it easier for the people who do have to drive, like you, as there will be less congestion…
> What people really misunderstand in these discussions is that no one is talking about completely killing off driving as an option I find this statement utterly hypocritical. Sure, we're not killing off driving. We are just choking off the roads with bike lanes, forcing extra-high density ("just build more"), removing parking, forcing the drivers to pay for transit that they don't use, and just to pay in general. Bu…
If you live in a city, you probably don't need a car.
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You could just have two bus stops. People who live and work at both ends will be very happy. But everyone else gets thrown under the bus.
Why stop there. Build enough buses for everybody so they can choose where those two stops are.