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

Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

worksinprogress.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 656 posts

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#641

Post by cyberax »

gpvos wrote: post #624
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is a piece of ground I own "heavily subsidised"?

Well, you're parking it in other places as well, I assume, unless you're only making pleasure rides with no stops at all. I am speaking more generally than just about your particular situation, which I obviously don't know. But in case you live in an American suburb: their entire financial setup is unsound, which arguably means even your own ground is subsidized. I find the arguments of Strong Towns and Not Just Bike…

Stronk Towns and NJB are just propaganda outlets.

Suburbs are _cheaper_ than dense cities. In fact, they generate most of the wealth of the country. It's easily proven by checking the amount of personal income taxes from suburbs versus cities.

People who claim that "suburbs are subsidized" typically check the _corporate_ taxes that are paid (surprise!) usually at their headquarters' locations. Usually in downtowns. But _people_ who create wealth overwhelmingly prefer suburbs.

And yeah, if your goal is to maximize the profit that you're extracting from companies by exploiting people, then dense cities are perfect.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#642

Post by Retric »

coryrc wrote: post #629
Retric wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closely space axels work fine for road surfaces they don’t help on bridges but that’s a separate concern. You can see a plethora of heavy military vehicles etc which use extra axles to avoid getting stuck in the mud due to plastic deformation IE rutting. EX: The 22 ton KTO drives has to deal with rutting on vastly worse road surfaces like mud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTO_Rosomak But this is where you need to do…

> Level of ruts you see are considered acceptable or they would be replaced. I guess you don't know how the USA works, and Seattle in particular. We are spending a fraction of what is necessary to keep infrastructure from failing. We had a major bridge nearly collapse and was out of commission for years. https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-dep... Many of our roads are not what we call acceptable.…

> We are spending a fraction of what is necessary to keep infrastructure from failing.

I can’t help but chuckle at the idea you actually believe that. Stop reading headlines and do some actual research into what’s actually going on.

If the US was utterly failing in maintenance you’d see ~6,000 random bridge failures per year based on the number of bridges in existence instead they are incredibly rare showing that we are actually doing a great job overall.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#644

Post by jltsiren »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #638
jltsiren wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit depends on the assumption that some trips are more common than others. If any given person is equally likely to go to any direction, public transit becomes too expensive to build. And it becomes impossible to make the city dense without turning the traffic into a nightmare. A typical direct bus line starts from somewhere, goes through a number of neighborhoods, reaches a major street, and follows it to…

> Public transit depends on the assumption that some trips are more common than others. Public transit depends on the assumption that there is enough density along a given route to justify its existence. Take a look at the NYC subway map. In the highest density boroughs (Manhattan and Brooklyn) the routes basically go from everywhere to everywhere. Even more so for the Manhattan bus map. That's what you want in a lar…

High density over a large area is a rare exception. Public transit is mostly used in regions that are locally dense but have low-to-moderate population density over the entire region.

Consider a low-density urban area with 1500 people / square km (~4000 people / square mile). You could achieve that with a uniform sprawl of single-family homes on half-acre lots, or with a network of towns / villages / neighborhoods surrounding the city center. The former generates more car traffic, while the latter makes public transit useful for a large fraction of trips. And the latter also makes local services viable, as there will be enough population within a walking distance.

And if you have a 2+2 lane street with enough bus traffic to justify bus lanes, most of the capacity is in the inner lanes not used by the buses. Urban buses stop frequently, making the traffic flow much worse than in lanes without buses.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#645

Post by pocksuppet »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #635
pocksuppet wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fare-charging for public transit has significant frictional overhead. I think in Luxembourg they just made it all free and it didn't cost much money because they didn't need to spend anything on collecting fares. The D-Ticket in Germany too: in some cities, almost everyone has a D-Ticket so the frequency of ticket checks was drastically reduced. Another counterpoint: if the bus isn't overloaded, taking an additional…

The cost to taking an additional passenger is latency. The bus has to stop, let the passenger on, and later let them off. This affects everyone else on the bus and reduces the quality of service.

Then you need more doors.

You can see that a long-distance train has doors only at the end of carriages, and stops for several minutes, but a subway has doors about every 10 seats, and stops for 20 seconds.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#646

Post by sfink »

simoncion wrote: post #623
sfink wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Buses have a long tradition of user-hostile design. "Exact change only"... > On every pay-in-cabin bus I've ever ridden, this is synonymous with "No change given". The machines are quite happy to accept more money than is needed for a single ticket, and the reason for that is pretty obvious....the most useful information about fares is posted on the paybox inside the bus That's fair, but (1) when I was a kid and s…

I see. Your complaint is that in vehicles that are staffed only with a driver, the driver refuses to handle change, and that -in your youth- your parents didn't provide you with any information (whether directly from them, or published by your local transit authority) about how mass transit worked in your area. There's not much the transit authority can do about your parents' decision to leave you ill-informed. I can…

Your post is a good illustration of the type of hostility I'm talking about. "If you don't already know, it's your fault, and if it's not your fault, it's your parent's fault."

I don't want the driver to handle change. I want to know what the price is before I board the bus and possibly discover that I do not have the right change (or enough money at all). Yes, I would also like the machine to give me change if I overpay. I'm demanding.

My parents do not know so cannot teach me. They live on a farm. When they visit cities, they rely on their social ties and meet someone to take them around. Plus, well, it was a farm; I had no need for buses until I moved away. There is no mass transit in the area I grew up, so there's no literature to peruse.

I apologize for not being gifted with the evidently superior parents you had.

I was not unusual. Many rural people moved to cities and ran into all this implicit knowledge that they were looked down on for not possessing. It's ok; we laughed at the city folks who came visiting or relocating to the country too. We also helped them with a straight face, or at least helped those who could be helped. The social contract is stronger in the country than in the city.

But anyway, this is veering away from the crappy UX of most buses. It is true that I could have researched bus systems before I ever encountered one and trained myself such that I could survive the bad UX. But that's kind of the point, right? UX design should require as little prior knowledge or understanding as possible (as in, as possible without harming the experience of regular riders too much or increasing cost excessively; I acknowledge the existence of tradeoffs.) You try to make it useful to country bumpkins, non-native speakers, youth, the poor, etc.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#647

Post by panick21_ »

SoftTalker wrote: post #594
panick21_ wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. The infrastructure in much of the US is already there. All you need is willingness to enforce it. All you need maybe is a bit of paint. Police could actually make some money.

You need more than paint to build physically separated, elevated bus lanes.

Elevated bus lines are car infrastructure. You need enforcement and paint. And maybe a few concrete liners.

If you are elevating, don't use a bus.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#648

Post by panick21_ »

retired wrote: post #602
panick21_ wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you taking into account depreciation of the car and interest? Are you taking into account the cost of your parking spot? Also, you example is just that. It will depend on many things. In places that are properly designed often the difference is nowhere near as large and the difference in money is bigger. Also, in places where there is lots of public transport, when you get a universal ticket, you can also use it…

That was including all associated cost for both forms of transport. This was in The Netherlands, which has one of the best public transport in the EU so I expect it to be worse elsewhere. If you already have a car, you typically do your other activities by car as well since you already paid for insurance and road tax and it is significantly cheaper to go by car as you only have gas, wear and depreciation to pay for.…

> This was in The Netherlands, which has one of the best public transport in the EU so I expect it to be worse elsewhere.

First of all, you are still talking about a single point to point example.

In the Netherlands you have the happiest drivers exactly because the government invests so much money into public transport and bikes. That takes massive amount of cars of the road, making it more pleasant to drive for you.

And thankfully data pretty clearly shows that people tend to take what is better for that situation mostly based on time. So the fact that so many people choice public transport (or bikes) is a clear indication that it works for some people. And that helps you as a driver. If everybody thought like you, it would be worse for everybody.

If on a society we followed your logic and everybody would drive, then you would have the problem the US has, just 10x worse because in Europe, unlike in the US we don't have cities splatted over so much space with gigantic roads everywhere.

Netherland is the perfect example that proves that large investment in public transit and biking pays of for everybody. I would argue cars are still subsidized to much. And Neiterlands while doing many things well still needs a huge amount of improvement, specifically outside the cities and Randstad.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#649

Post by panick21_ »

rickydroll wrote: post #368
miki123211 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Makes sense. 2. This is why non-car-centric countries don't ban cars. If you're that kind of person (and not everybody is), you buy a car. You may not use it beyond these wilderness activities though. 3. Trains.

Good points. A few years ago, I visited a friend in Estonia, and even though he was in Tartu proper, they still drove almost everywhere. Essentials were only available by car. Trains are an interesting subject. For them to be useful, you would need to have rails covering the same destinations and paths as the highway system. One should also be aware of network effects when adding another layer of transportation servi…

> For them to be useful, you would need to have rails covering the same destinations and paths as the highway system.

Its funny to me that you suggest that trains need to cover what they highway system covers. When of course trains existed first and already covered many more places then highway system ever covered in most places. And with buses countries got the opportunity to cover things away from train-station and that was really not all that expensive even in rural areas.

Its just that in some countries, many of these trains were removed and the countries focused all their finances on new highway systems. And often demolished large part of productive cities to achieve it. For more so then trains ever did.

> Rail will likely encourage denser development and a higher cost of living due to a greater influence of rent-seeking entities.

No actually when you do it properly, then rail makes it so you can have a dense core around each station where you have everything you need locally while also having access to a city center in a short time.

While you subburb example misses that all subburbs are massively subsidized and make negative money. Its the poor people in the cities that are paying extra to finance these subburbs. Urban3 has done tons of analysis of this. The subburbs are the rent seekers, you just don't think of them that way because you see it as 'normal'.

There are plenty of examples, for example how in the 60s Sweden used subway trains to build massive amounts of housing alone those new lines.

> between the need/desire of a chunk of the population to keep their distance

You can have that, but you will find that once you properly account for the cost, people are much less willing to spend that money. That's why before extensive zoning codes, minimum lot sizes as requirements, parking minimum, free street parking, free highways people lived closer together. And of course the massive federal top down intensive given subburban development Post-WW2, along with the redlining of cities. All these are hidden cost on society that you simply hide and put on county, state and federal taxes.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#650

Post by wussboy »

cyberax wrote: post #641
gpvos wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you're parking it in other places as well, I assume, unless you're only making pleasure rides with no stops at all. I am speaking more generally than just about your particular situation, which I obviously don't know. But in case you live in an American suburb: their entire financial setup is unsound, which arguably means even your own ground is subsidized. I find the arguments of Strong Towns and Not Just Bike…

Stronk Towns and NJB are just propaganda outlets. Suburbs are _cheaper_ than dense cities. In fact, they generate most of the wealth of the country. It's easily proven by checking the amount of personal income taxes from suburbs versus cities. People who claim that "suburbs are subsidized" typically check the _corporate_ taxes that are paid (surprise!) usually at their headquarters' locations. Usually in downtowns. B…

Good lord it's like you've taken everything that's actually true and claimed the opposite.
Post reply on HN