I'm not saying that this is a morally acceptable thing, I just suspect this is a significant reason why bus ridership has been declining.

The massive disincentives to take public transit has slowly built up this self-fulfilling prophecy.

(As a brief supporting empirical note, up here in vancouver I rarely run across such folks when commuting in from New West, while I often run across them in downtown buses. There is a much higher volume moving people in from new west than moving local traffic in downtown)

Yes, sometimes there are weird people on the bus who might make you feel uncomfortable. Yes, sometimes the bus isn't clean and it's full of litter. Sometimes someone has decided to leave their stinky orange peel, banana skin, or chicken bones on the seat. Yes, the bus is powered by a stinky noisy diesel engine with fumes that make you feel nauseous.

But none of this is anything new - it's always been that way! It's just that people have more alternatives now.

The main issue of London buses is that they can be slower over long distances.

But over shorter distances, you are normally less crammed in, have a view with sunlight rather than tunnels, don't have to go all the way down to the tube and back up.

Take Tokyo, which has grrat public transit. 2 stops om a train may cost $2-$3 but the same rpute by taxi will cost you $30-$40.

Riding the 152 in Chicago one snowy night (about seven years ago), the bus suddenly stopped and the driver made everyone get off into the snow because it was the end of his shift. When we asked when the next bus was, he said there wouldn't be once because he was the last bus of the night.

I ended up walking about a mile to the nearest Blue Line subway station, since the Blue Line runs 24/7.

If you reported the incident, do you know if the driver was reprimanded?

[0]: On the day I moved to Chicago, I called 911 to report a drug deal in the alley behind my building. The cops arrived an hour later and the officer told me that I was wasting their time. I'll never forget him saying, "We don't do that in the big city."

Not much use to you now but the the parallel 80 (Irving Park) and 77 (Belmont) are each half a mile away (in opposite directions) and both run more more frequently and later (the 77 runs almost all night... just a ~2 hour gap between 2 am and 4 am).

Tl;Dr don’t put up with that shit. Ever.

Just to instantly dismember your argument, which hinges on the word "they all," I'll put my hand up as a "I'd ride next to homeless every day if it saves me transit money."

I take the bus to work everyday here in UK and besides some people squashing too close to me when they sit down (which is more to do with the size of the seats, to be fair), it's perfectly fine.

So once again: yup, I would. Pissy, shit covered insane people. Whatever.

I hope you remember before trying again that people exist that clean up blood and shit for a living and are unfazed by it. There's also the homeless outreach teams that have already "seen it all."

For the record, I do already ride the bus and Bart when it's the convenient option, and I've already had to deal with all the shit those above are claiming are impossible to handle.

I'm guaranteed a nice, quiet ride where I get a seat the whole way. It's a little slower, but not much. Meanwhile, the subway is just about unbearable always.

The tricky part is getting the bus driver to even stop for you if you don't "look like you take the bus". 80% of the time I'll be waving them down at the stop and they'll just blow past it if nobody requests the stop inside.

These days, I commute by bus, unless I walk to or from work. That puts me on the bus between seven and ten times a week. The riders vary by hours, but I seldom see a rider I really don't want to sit beside.

In Germany, smoking on a bus is unthinkable, and the bus drivers (and other passengers) will throw you out pretty much immediately if you lit a cigarette.

I've also never heard of people peeing in the bus, let alone encountered that, even though I regularly use public transit at all times of day and night.

You seem to be under the impression that the US is an advanced country full of civilized people like Germany, Norway, Japan, etc. You've obviously never been here.

Like, I take the BART every day into work. It's fantastic. I walk for five to ten minutes to get to the station, a train comes every 5 minutes so I don't have to worry about the train schedule, then I walk another five to ten minutes to get to the office. If the bus experience could match that, it'd take over a lot of commuting.

  Like, I take the BART every day into work. It's fantastic. 
  I walk for five to ten minutes to get to the station, a 
  train comes every 5 minutes so I don't have to worry about 
  the train schedule, then I walk another five to ten minutes 
  to get to the office. If the bus experience could match 
  that, it'd take over a lot of commuting.

Then I moved to Berkeley. Commute in is every 15 minutes, 50/50 I have to take a transfer on the way in. Commute home is a nightmare: BART has a carriage shortage so they try to shave off cars from longer routes (such as the Richmond line). This means things get really crowded on occasion, and there's a point where a car being crowded begets more crowding, as it takes longer and longer to offboard/onboard people and therefore each subsequent stop has more people to cram on. A majority of the time on my way home when I get a transfer (as there seems to be a Richmond train from SF only for an hour span at the peak of rush hour), the trains are almost an entire cycle late, meaning I've got another 15 minute wait to see two trains come through one after the other.

The point of this is: the problems you raise with busses are also with trains/BART. Some of them are even worse for BART: you have to steeply limit the service area because putting down tracks is stupendously expensive.

Melbourne Metro, for example, has roughly the same amount of weekday riders as BART, 415,000 vs 446,000 respectively, with nearly 5 times(!) the amount of track, at 540mi vs 112mi.

This is, of course, excluding light rail services -- another 150mi of track in Melbourne with some 1,700 stops, and non-Metro heavy-rail services to the other nearby commuter hub cities like Geelong and Ballarat.

Berlin is, from my knowledge, more similar to Melbourne than to SF in this respect.

But y'know what the funny thing is? Everyone in Melbourne hates the bus service. Makes me wonder about what they think about buses in Berlin.

The price of places under ten minutes from a BART station further out were sharply different to further out in the same area too. You could shave some time off by cycling but then you're the guy with a bike on the packed train.

Seem to recall 20+ minute waits for trains in Berkeley on weekends too (it'd be handy if they let you know this somewhere in the station before you pass the ticket point, but that's another thing), with a transfer required to get into SF?

SF is far from the worst area for public transport, but it'd never come near my best.

This is just crazy. Compared to the cost of new track some additional rolling stock should be almost insignificant. You couldn't come up with a better example of penny wise, pound foolish...

But to your point about stopping in every block: optimizing a bus route along a major avenue in a block-based US city seems like a similar problem to elevator scheduling in a high-rise building. I wonder if similar models to ‘sky lobbies’ and destination selection could be applied to get people more efficiently to their destination.

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.

For the record, I take the transbay bus to work most days, and it's a similar deal (plus I can almost always get a seat). Slightly less convenient with the schedule (every 10 minutes instead of 5)

In most the city, buses just run along the major thoroughfares, which typically means they are spaced 4-ish city blocks apart.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/26/curitiba-braz...

[2] http://www.kpbs.org/news/2016/mar/21/bogotas-bus-rapid-trans...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3YjeARuilI

I'm not sure that it stacks up perfectly logically, but it's an interesting way to think about it. And it looks like they have a pretty good system.

That's only true if the lane is as full of busses as other lanes are full of cars.

1) The density of people per unit road area is about 10 times greater than with cars. A bus lane only needs to carry 1/10th as many buses to come out ahead (and a bus occupies considerably less space than 10 cars).

2) The relevant metric isn't people (or vehicles) per unit road area. It's the lane's flux of people per unit time. On that metric, an free flowing carpool lane will beat a congested regular lane every time (even when the carpool lane appears empty to the layman).

You can do your own back of the napkin calculation, but vehicles have to packed roughly 5 to 10 times denser in the congested lane to achieve the same vehicle flux per unit time.

That means a free flowing carpool lane (>=2 people) only needs about 1/20th the vehicle density per unit area to come out ahead of a congested single-occupancy lane.

It's just no contest with an uncongested bus lane: Buses will win on a people per time metric with only 1% as many vehicles per unit area. To visualize this, 100 closely packed cars (remember, they are not touching!) is about three city blocks long.

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 reason the Mayor gave was at best hyperbolic and at worst maliciously deceptive.

> more people will take the bus and so you will add more buses.

In a well run business that would be true.

In the first world, most busses are heavily subsidized. This means that the more busses that are run, the more money the system loses (not strictly true, but roughly).

What you say should make sense, but it doesn't for important institutional reasons.

So what? Transportation infrastructure for single-passenger vehicles is also subsidized in the US (the gas tax doesn't come anywhere near paying for roads, for instance), and it gets more expensive with more users too (in the form of increased wear on roads requiring more maintenance, or the need to expand roads to accommodate increasing use). But we do it anyway, because transportation infrastructure is a public good. I've never understood the inclination that public transit should stand alone among transportation modes and operate without subsidy.

These are precisely the places where dedicated bus lanes and BRTs exist. BRT is called bus rapid transit because there is a planned frequency for these buses - therefore a need for consistent, uninterrupted rights of way.

>In a well run business that would be true. In the first world, most busses are heavily subsidized.

Only because highly popular bus routes (and train routes) subsidize unpopular routes that exist for the public good and not to make money - neighborhood routes, night buses, etc. In the US, routes are highly subsidized because of a lack of density compared to Europe or Asia.

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.

In Europe this is predominantly true (maybe not the UK outside London). There's still massive traffic jam problems but buses certainly during rush hour are full and special lanes are provided for them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Quito

You're not still there are you?

Lots of cities have found ways around this. Express buses with dedicated rights-of-way in Pittsburgh, for example. Or Chicago's 146 Outer Drive Express and J14 Jeffrey Jump routes are also good examples.

Too often the biggest problem with buses getting around isn't the buses. It's cars driving, turning, or parking illegally in bus lanes.

I wasn't a daily user but it was decent enough - along the route I used to use most often a bus came every 3 minutes during peak times.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitway_(Ottawa)

It received massive criticism when it was constructed, as there already was a functioning network and the project was quite expensive compared to other bus lanes. It did become a massive succes, as its a viable alternative to the train for commuters due to the shorter travel time.

They are in the process of replacing the diesel busses with electric busses, first on the short routes and in 2020 on the longer routes.

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

a solution for this is kind of "stop on demand"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi

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.

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

How big's a block? London often has bus stops a few hundred metres apart even out in the sticks.

> Similarly, you can't have parallel lines a block apart.

London often has multiple routes serving the same area in addition to parallel routes nearby.

> You have to limit the service area so that you can afford to run busses every 5-10 minutes.

My most frequent bus (53) goes from Central London to Plumstead Station (~11 miles) on a 6-12 minute schedule during the day. That's not uncommon for London.

> And you'll want to improve streets so that busses can run down the center and pick up passengers from protected islands

Slowly happening over London - couple of stops near me have had their inset bus stop bays pushed out into the road to block traffic when the bus is stopped.

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, dry places to sleep have barricaded themselves inside emergency exit stairwells in stations, leaving behind trash and human waste. Elevator doors coated in urine have stuck shut. Mentally ill and high passengers have assaulted bus drivers and other riders."

"More than 1 in 5 current passengers has been harassed on the train. In a 2016 survey, 29% of former riders told Metro they stopped taking transit because they felt unsafe."

"Sim said she saw a man pull down his pants, squat over the edge of a platform and defecate onto the train tracks at Union Station. She said she has sat in urine on the subway, “hopscotched through peoples’ feces” on sidewalks, and endured verbal and sexual harassment on the train."

"In one more serious case, Loew said, LAPD officers used a Taser on a man who was brandishing a knife and threatening passengers."

"He kept riding, until he sat down one morning on a seat that was wet and hot with urine. With no change of clothes on hand, he wore the urine-soaked pants to work. Then he started driving to work again."

Even so, it's very common for people to get on the bus without paying and make everyone else uncomfortable. I've seen harassers, people vaping and shooting up, obviously unstable people yelling and making a scene. That's not to say anything of the people who just bring an awful odor or take up a whole row with absolute junk. I've never seen feces or urine, but definitely seen vomit. There's no enforcement against this kind of thing most of the time, and riders are too afraid to speak up on their own.

If I'm given the choice between a 30 minute walk and a 10 minute bus ride, I'll almost always walk if it's not just pouring rain. Luckily Seattle sidewalks and pedestrian friendliness in general is pretty great.

It's a drastically different situation from my hometown, Charlotte NC, where the buses don't get much use and it really is due to service stinking and general perception of the bus being for poor people only. Also cars are fairly cheap and ubiquitous. I would frequently be the only white person on a crowded bus, but even though I sometimes got weird looks, I was never harassed or made to feel in danger like I've experienced in Seattle. It was mostly just working class folks or people and some people with DUIs going to work, city services, or community college (which was my reason for taking it, I just hated driving though). An improvement in service and getting some nicer buses probably would have helped, but now that light rail is a thing (just barely though), I do think they are putting all their resources there instead.

I would like to also mention that my experience doesn't match yours. I ride the bus almost exclusively (there's no light rail near my house and never will be) and have only, rarely, encountered what you describe. I'm certain it exists, but not to the extent of calling it very common. Two routes, RapidRide E and route 7, stand out as being the most likely "culprits," which is, I think, less of a function of riding a bus and more of where those two routes happen to serve. The streetscape of the part of Aurora that the E runs down looks a lot like the inside of the E's bus.

Funnily enough, this happened last weekend at a friend's housewarming. That said it was in Clapham so it wasn't entirely surprising.

I get on, play with my phone, and get off 25 minutes later. I don't have to fight traffic driving myself and I can multi-task if I choose.

The problem comes when trying to take the bus to any other part of the city. It's slow, stops at every block, and is unpredictable when it arrives. It's a mode of transport that supports everyone and that inherently makes it less useful to the individual.

Personally I'd like to see bus systems get more fine-grained about their routes, timing, and size of vehicle. We should be able to model some optimizations that improve service while remaining accessible for everyone.

It'd be a shame if over the last several years major cities haven't been collecting the required data to make this possible. If not, now would be a good time to beging recording this data.

When I moved to Portland (from NYC, unfortunately), I hoped that I would have access to the MAX, but if not then I'd be able to take the bus to work. I ended up being about 20 blocks from the nearest MAX stop, but there was a bus stop right outside my apartment. I took the bus maybe a dozen times before I realized that it really is a non-option; what takes me ~15 minutes (20 on a extremely rare bad day) in a car takes me at least 45 minutes (to an hour) on the bus.

It's really all about what bus route you're on, and your ability to find housing on the bus with the most direct line to your office (in a city like Portland). That's usually not super easy. I have coworkers that have 15-30 minute bus rides from farther out because they're on efficient bus routes.

I've long been an advocate to bury the MAX downtown (via cut-and-cover, not tunneling), but obviously even that could cost billions of dollars.

I wouldn't say that it's inherently less useful to the individual.

In lots of the UK we have dedicated bus lanes. Usually there's some leeway over who can use them, but it's often just buses/taxis/cyclists/motorbikes. They're often only restricted during peak hours, and there's cameras set up which will send fines to drivers who misuse the lanes.

This works fantastically because it actually makes the bus faster, or a similar speed, to driving. Therefore people use it more, which puts less cars on the roads, which makes every form of transport faster for everyone.

Private bus networks with access limited to certain people (employees of companies or groups of companies, universities, etc) seem to work ok; what generally doesn’t seem to work are public buses.

Is the problem density (I doubt Google employees across Bay Area are denser than bus riding public overall within SF) — probably not.

A lot of the unpleasantness is other riders. Without the ability to ban certain riders (either via a whitelist or blacklist), bus ridership will remain limited. BART is bad enough, but whenever I’ve taken muni or peninsula bus service (very rarely)it made the case for this.

Transit agencies are also highly political — unionized labor, political appointees running it, expensive contracts for everything, inflexible policies — so I doubt they could provide the same service as private bus companies.

The solution is probably not public transit, but possibly is multi passenger vehicles. Something like Lyft Line with more passengers, dynamic routing, etc, plus some core routes with scheduled higher capacity service.

The good case is when they're: frequent, run on arterial routes (no meandering), don't stop excessively often, have routes designed to avoid big bottlenecks like left-turn waits (or have strategically placed bus-only bypasses for those trouble spots), stop in the rightmost travel lane rather than in pullout bays that require merging back into traffic, and have a streamlined payment system (the last two combining to give low dwell times at stops). Doesn't even have to be BRT, but let's say halfway to BRT.

Two cities with those kinds of buses that I've personally experienced recently: Washington, DC, which has nice arterial routes up/down main roads like Massachusetts Ave and 16th St, and Copenhagen, which has a network of "A bus" [1] routes.

[1] https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-bus (in Danish)

I would have to walk significantly further from most parking garages to where I'm going, that from the nearest bus stop.

This talk of banning certain people is nonsense. The whole point of public transport is that it's for everyone. And what you're suggesting with "multi passenger vehicles" already exist in many countries. Here we call the "telebus", and it's working quite well in less densely populated areas. Just you know, without the rampant disregard for workers that Uber and Lyft display.

[1] Unlimited traveling in the city zone and the zone I live in for DKK375/month ($60).

This sounds like an argument for restricting transit access to the most privileged members of society. The real reason private buses are successful is because they have a limited amount of stops, it's more like riding a train than a local bus that stops at every block. If anything cities should be investing way more in BRT, as the private sector has proven that high quality buses can work.

Building bus rapid transit lanes makes more sense than spinning up a light rail infrastructure almost any way you measure: capital costs, energy, maintenance, flexibility...

I also wonder how much sense intercity rail even makes for most trips. If you could set aside a lane for buses only on I-95 Boston to DC (for example), you could have a bunch of routes that go directly from various neighborhoods to other neighborhoods at mostly 110 mph.

I would really like to see a citation, because I find that extremely hard to believe.

But you also have to factor in that most buses run for a lot longer than the average car, sometimes decades and millions of kilometers. Most of the time they're not even "put to pasture" because they're worn out, but because newer buses are more efficient and have more creature comforts. So the older buses are brought in when for instance there is rail maintenance and you have to replace a train line with buses. In comes the old stock, still pulling its weight.

This also ties in to the environmental load of producing new cars/buses, you need a lot less raw material to make a bus that moves 60 people, compared to the cars needed to move 60 people.

That's why old stock is cycled out regularly, to improve efficiency and reduce pollution on the busiest lines. The the older buses get moved to more sparse routes, with less busy schedules and less stop-and-go.

Where I live, a surprisingly big problem is actually that too many people ride the buses during rush hour. Sometimes you just have to wait for the next bus to come and hopefully have some space for you. I'll admit that's really a luxury problem to have.

Public transport is vastly better for the environment and for congestion, unless nobody uses it. That takes investment, but politicians are way too quick to say "well no one's using it now, why should we invest?".

In actuality and outside of those artificial limitations, rail is one of the most efficient forms of transport we have, especially electric rail.

As for the rest, that is due to historical reason, back when those networks were established, we didn't have the electrical grid and power available. We do now.

The main reason they still use diesel is because it's cheaper to keep the existing gear running, rather than replacing everything. Electric trains are so much more efficient (in modern kV systems), it's not even funny.

The problem is you need a critical mass of people using them before anyone puts any real effort into making them not awful.

There are too many cities that have a few rubbish busses, but they aren't on Google Maps, they don't have live departure boards at bus stops, everybody pays in cash, they follow terrible routes that cater to people with no alternative (children and OAPs), they're infrequent and unreliable, no bus lanes, etc. etc.

That said I don't think the future of transport is busses. They're just too slow and shit in general.

City councilmember: why should we allocate even more funds to the busses? Nobody's riding them!

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 efficiency most of the day and most lines - basically a lot of buses driving around nearly empty at times.

Since I bike in the city, I can't fail to notice that buses also seems to generate most of the dust, if not all of it - sometimes you basically have to stop and wait a few minutes if you are biking behind a bus, since it's not possible to neither see or breathe. Even on an at least nominally clean tarmac road. I haven't noticed that behind a Nissan Micra.

Further, large diesel engines running heavy start-stop duty cycles like buses probably generates unproportionally more particles than just about everything else.

Since this city have one of the highest count of both PM10 and PM2.5 - source could be either oil or dust - this also have got me thinking.

Where I live, the focus on buses is driven by a political agenda - basically the environmentalists and the left have defined buses as "good" and cars as "bad" - and I suspect regardless of any facts in the matter, exemplified in an interview where one politician admitted that they'd really love to ban cars even if the had no environmental impact at all.

I'm not particularly fighting for more cars and less buses, but I like my facts straight before implementing public policy. I haven't been able to find any official published statistics in fuel consumption per passenger mile for the public transport in the region - should be somewhat trivial to calculate now that every passenger conveniently carries a tracking device with them.

I also haven't been able to find any studies about particle emissions for buses and if it's possible to find any correlation between the ratio of buses to other traffic and particulates.

Unfortunatly, I suspect that research on topics like those is probably heretical and a thought crime in most Universities' departments for environmental studies.

Still, electric buses on the larger streets instead of vaparettos on the Grand Canal is a lovely thought.

That's a bit of a strawman argument, but nevertheless there are strong and indisputable benefits to public transport over cars.

One is the pollution. Per passenger, even diesel buses pollute a lot less than cars, and electric buses are being phased in. There are also some buses that run on cleaner-burning natural gas, but those are more of a stopgap measure.

Secondly, congestion is markedly reduced by getting more people on public transport and bikes. People simply take up less space when they're not driving around a mostly empty car.

Regarding the dust, it's not really produced by the buses, but it does get whirled up more by large vehicles. The dust is produced by everything; cars, buses, trucks, bikes, even pedestrians to some extent. Reducing one of those sources, by for instance getting thousands of people to take the bus instead of driving their cars alone, will significantly reduce particle pollution.

>"Unfortunatly, I suspect that research on topics like those is probably heretical and a thought crime in most Universities' departments for environmental studies."

That's nonsense. My girlfriend studies at our national technical university and there is plenty research being done on all environmental factors.

And I'm not questioning reduced pollution in fully laden busses or reducing congestion in crowded routes in the rush hour, but I haven't seen anything about total system effects in "saturated" systems where the total seat factor is low, and where additional "conversion" will require more buses that will run emptier.

Although that seems to only consider diesel-powered buses. CNG or electric buses are better.

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.

The good news: electric busses are coming. City busses will be huge winners from electrification, both for economic and environmental reasons. Greatly reduced fuel and maintenance costs, improved ride quality, less noise and pollution.

Combined with the fact that the roads are heavily sanded and salted half of the year, and that they are swept rather than washed, for some reason often only once in the year, the roads are dirty.

I know that other cities wash the streets more or less constantly, but here they claim it won't help which seems questionable to me.

Winter tyres with studs are allowed here (in the winter) and are getting a lot of attention since they generate a lot of particles in laboratory tests - but it would be interesting to see what 3 months of grinding sand and salt in snow slush with heavy weight wheels will generate, with or without studs.

But yes : electric busses would be nice. With a soft driving filter applied...

It is also the fact that they are grossly inefficient space-wise. The majority have only the driver (and maybe, maybe a single passenger) in an otherwise empty car. Congestion would be vastly reduced if we could get most of those people on public transport or bikes instead.

I always thought it odd that MBTA buses announce the stop they're currently passing (too late to ask the driver to stop there) rather than saying which stop is coming up next.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(app)

Number one is an image problem - they aren't sexy. Here in the States, we are obsessed with the 'European' way of life. Most major European cities have some form of streetcar system or underground metro, if not both. To us, those are sexy. Nevermind that those cities have buses, too.

The bus _could_ be more sexy. BRT with dedicated lanes, priority signaling, clean & modern interiors, at-grade egress, and most importantly, consistent and reliable service. Those changes would go a long ways towards making the bus 'cool' enough to ride.

The other is that because buses are inherently at least a little inconvenient, there has to be an incentive to use them. For most people, the main driver is financial. Ten years ago when the economy was shaky, I, a consistent multi-modal commuter, saw a huge uptick in the number of people riding the bus. When the economy got stronger and more surefooted, buses started to empty out again. Now I see fewer and fewer people of 'means' on the buses - the ones that remain likely don't have other options. When people can afford _not_ to be inconvenienced, they won't be - whether that means buying a parking pass, ponying up for gas & insurance, or taking rideshare everywhere.

Honestly, if more bus systems simply got wifi and nice seats, that would be a huge step forward. I've taken the Muni buses before, and they are frankly disgusting. I actually look forward to my bus commute each morning now.

Also, the Marin system still deserves commendation. First of all, while it is a rich county, there is still a large wealth gap. There is a substantial number of obviously poorer people on the buses as well. Some routes mainly serve disadvantaged areas. Yet, the buses serve everyone, and people still want to ride them. And they're still pretty nice. Why punish people who may already be struggling with an awful bus ride?

Secondly, the counties to the south of San Francisco are pretty darn rich (probably richer than Marin, TBH), and their public transit options suck. I spent many years in south bay, and despite all the money people throw around there, the bus system was awful.

There are certainly poorer areas in the United States where the main factor limiting adoption and tech improvements is a lack of funding. However, there are also plenty of really rich counties (in California at least) where the lack of a good bus system is simply due to a complete unwillingness to invest in good public infrastructure.

It seems that there aren't many counties richer than Marin. And, a large wealth gap may just mean, there are some rich people, and some really rich people. Are the "obviously poorer people" still on iPhone 6's and 2015 MacBooks? (ok that part is sarcasm).

The point is, if you are getting the bus in Marin county, you are getting on the bus with others who are also in Marin county. That is going to heavily bias the experience because of the people, not the quality or cleanliness of the bus.

Many people in San Rafael and Novato are fairly solid middle class. Outlying areas range from redic wealth to rural poor.

There's wealth, yes, but as with that future of Gibsons, there are somme kinks in the distribution.

No... Marin has some really poor parts.

> The point is, if you are getting the bus in Marin county, you are getting on the bus with others who are also in Marin county. That is going to heavily bias the experience because of the people, not the quality or cleanliness of the bus.

But this still doesn't explain why the buses in Santa Clara and San mateo county aren't up to par.

No, it's not the same, and though the State of California is among the indirect funders of both, it's not the government directly responsible for either. The government funding GGT is the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District.

The government funding Muni is the City and County of San Francisco.

I promise that's a "blue state" phenomenon. It's just America is exceedingly good at creating cultural bubbles so it seems like a broader American inclination.

They go through all the busiest areas to maximize passenger numbers, which is what makes them slow.

Delays compound; since per-stop timetables are unpredictable due to traffic, buses normally just try to make the best time they can. Which means you wait for the bus, possibly for a long time. So a late bus becomes later, as it takes longer to board the extra passengers, and then the next bus catches up, and you get bunching.

You're much better off walking or cycling to a rail option if you have it. Buses in busy cities are barely faster than walking at the worst of times, especially when you add in waiting time.

As a result, the bus works best for those people who can't walk or cycle - old people, mothers with buggies - and poor people who have little choice but to sit in a bus for an hour or more as it crosses town.

Point to point longer distance, special purpose buses that don't need to follow main routes can work much better. Airport shuttles, work shuttles, that kind of thing.

The only times it gets a bit busy and bunched up is during rush hour, but I've rarely had to wait more than 10 minutes for the next bus, even in the worst cases.

It convinced me more than ever that I will always prefer car/uber/lyft to public transit. Wait, hear me out.

Yes, buses and bikes were wonderful. But, they do not stop at my door, and they do not stop at where I want to go. Sometimes they stop close, sometimes a few blocks away. Lots of people will argue that this is OK, but it really is not when the weather is a freezing rain. So basically to subscribe to your vision of the future city, I have to subject myself to walking and waiting in freezing rain?

No thanks. Car/Uber/Lyft for me.

PS: I am not saying let's stop having buses. Just that everyone who claims that everyone should be on buses and we should ban cars from cities is delusional or a masochist.

[bring on the downvotes, thanks for proving the point that no rational debate can be had here]

But they come at significant cost, and these costs are also often opaque.

People advocating for public transit are often motivated by things like walkable downtowns, more compact neighborhoods, reduced public spending on roads, less traffic, and fewer parking lot oceans. Perhaps additionally public health, climate change, or air quality.

I think ultimately it's not about how public transit is itself so amazing; it's really more about the city you could have, if cars & car infrastructure were not so dominant.

I bought an electric bicycle recently after years of being a staunch car supporter. I am now convinced that the electric bicycle is the perfect mode of personal transport for non-rural areas. It takes up hardly any room, it doesn't make much noise, it doesn't go fast enough to be a danger to anyone, it doesn't get stuck in traffic, you can park it anywhere for free. You can even take it through pedestrian-only zones if you get off and push. Being electrically-assisted, it can actually get you up hills at a fair speed without making you arrive at your destination sweaty and smelly. Being a bicycle, it can still be used even if you ride it so far that the battery goes flat (well over 30 miles).

It's personal transport of the future. Everyone should get one.

Edit: and if you want to try out an ebike, there's almost certainly a bike shop near you that will rent you one for a day.

All you need are good roads. Bicycling in the winter in Helsinki or – even further north – Oulu is completely mainstream. People know how to dress for the outdoors, and as long as the bike lanes are cleared of snow, cycling is not viewed as the major inconvenience that people in warmer countries expect it to be.

Needless to say, this creates a host of issues you won’t find in Helsinki, where 1.2m of Finland’s 5m inhabitants live. A bunch of very similar people living in the equivalent of one American state or small Canadian province, speaking the same language and sharing the same culture and weather can make roads and cycling a priority. Good luck scaling that.

We are talking about one city; no one is suggesting that Canada’s rural areas – which is the only place it would be relevant to bring up distance or low population density like you did – need bike lanes, too.

There is a "National Cycle Network" of cyclepaths and roads that are exceptionally well-suited to cycling (low traffic etc.), and it is signposted well.

(But, again, I hadn't noticed any of this until after I got the bike).

https://www.sustrans.org.uk/ncn/map

Some people understand that cars are dangerous, and would see the risk of killing people with your car as a downside to using a car.

The parent specifically mentioned 'it doesn't go fast enough to be a danger to anyone' as an advantage for the bike.

But I didn't even know they existed until after I got the bike and started planning routes for journeys.

Even if the cycling infrastructure near you is unsuitable, there are still lots of people in places that do have good cycling infrastructure but either don't realise it or just haven't tried it.

Those people should strongly consider trying out an ebike!

I think it's reasonable to expect a commuter to walk 4-5 blocks on either end of a ride unless they happen to be handicapped. And winter jackets, boots, and umbrellas are available for the conditions you've mentioned.

No one is saying we should ban private cars from cities. Those will be needed, but they should definitely not be the default mode of transportation for most urban dwellers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17034959

> 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).

  > No one is saying we should ban private cars from cities. 

I am actually saying that, at least for the city centers.

Ban private cars, or charge a non-trivial congestion fee. Let commercial vehicles with a business purpose drive there, for deliveries and work, and let taxi services operate. But get rid of the space-hogging private cars.

Hong Kong seems like a better example of a place where transit clearly wins. Higher density, inferior roads, and better transit.

I live a 10 minute bike ride from a park-and-ride bus stop where I have several bus line options to get to work, my bike+bus commute is faster than my driving commute because the bus takes the express lanes (and can legally drive on road shoulders in some places). I do a full bike commute some days, but it takes about twice as long by bike as it does by bike+bus, so I don't do it all the time. If I didn't want to bike to the bus, there's a local bus that runs a block away from my house that I could take to the park and ride.

But I didn't end up with this transit accessible commute by accident, I purposely chose where I live so I could take transit.

If you like your car and you don't like buses, why would you pay any attention to the buses when choosing where to live?

You don't win people over by saying they need to go out of their way to come over to your side, you win people over by showing how good your alternative is.

Buses are great if you're poor, but otherwise they're very inconvenient everywhere I've ever lived.

But I'm already working on it, actually. Rentable covered trikes and quadricycles with electric motors and storage. Slim enough to fit two to three units per road lane. Capable of multiple trips across town up steep hills before needing to be recharged, and remaining light enough to pedal (the default mode being lightly assisted power). Tow trailers and rear sidecars are an option, too.

Cars are two-ton balls of complexity that last decades, operate in any environment and require mostly non-renewable energy. They've very costly, they take up a lot of room, they're expensive and complicated to maintain, and they're dangerous enough that you can't operate one without a license and we need laws and officers to regulate and police their use.

My vehicle is basically a four wheeled electric bicycle with a plastic cover. These already exist in many places with slightly different design. They've just never been designed specifically with dense urban transportation in mind.

Also, they're not intended to replace public transit. You can not get more efficient than a train, light rail or a bus. My vehicle is intended to provide the kind of personal transportation that a car is used for in cities while allowing for denser and more efficient transportation while also being safer and pollute less, to say nothing of parking, and cost of ownership.

http://setosa.io/bus/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching

The fix is to prioritize trains over all other street traffic, especially cars. (I suppose you could do this with buses, too, but people don't really see it that way because they have rubber wheels just like cars...)

Anything on rail is just way more suited to nonstop use! People in cars can (or should) more easily understand that trains/streetcars can't just start and stop just for them.

With Light Rail, you are essentially buying people part of their lives back in the form of a shorter commute. That is quite important, as time spent driving in traffic is pretty well wasted.

You're probably thinking of trams ("streetcars" in North America), which don't have a fully segregated right of way.

Light rail systems don't share track with heavy rail (which can include freight services, etc), so the regulatory requirements for things like crash safety are often reduced.

All of this reduces the cost of the light rail systems compared to heavy rail.

But these are dying trends - but they will be baked into our cities by concrete and tarmac for decades.

I travel by coach from outside London (basically they drive round a commuter belt town picking up about 30 people then hop on a motorway. Dozens maybe more of similar coaches run each day). And I work in the City and right now there are, I kid you not, a major 50+ storey building going up on each point of the compass at work. London is adding major office space.

But the jobs will become more remote working - and the infrastructure can barely take it - funnelling millions of people from suburban beds to inner city offices is what half the infrastructure of a city is for.

When this stops, it will stop suddenly.

Remote working is nicer. you spend more time with your kids, you walk, take part in your community, see people.

It wins hands down.

So when something shifts, and remote working hits that tipping point, what happens?

My last position almost everyone did one day a week from home. Turn that into three at home and 2 in meetings and coffee and ...

I'm sorry there is a point i am making but it's late and i need to think on it

I don't disagree that we should probably all remote more, but don't think it it all up sides.

I'm not sure it's economically feasible but if service to wheelchair users improves too then it might be something you could sell as a good thing above and beyond the improvements to the bus service.

  instead give them a city/state-run uber-for-wheelchairs service

As it turned out, they just let anybody ride who has the gall to call them. 90% of their trips amount to a taxpayer-subsidized cab service for the self-important.

The award of the contract was suspect, too, and the subcontractor had to be dumped at great expense... just like the county's ambulance contract with Rural/Metro.

My biggest issue is I systematically underestimate the time it takes me to get to the stop (I use bus trackers and leave with the minimum amount of time required to make it to the stop), so I often end up running or sometimes barely miss the bus.

They're driven by professional drivers who don't drink, have strict rules about the amount of rest, don't speed and typically (far more than amateurs) drive in a predictable sensible manner.

Certainly in Belgium it's down to single figures per year. The crashes that do occur are usually caused by amateur drivers in cars, the driver falling unconscious or something like a tire blowout.

I think passive neural networks can be trained to take over if the driver becomes unwell (this was one of Musk's claims for the Autopilot in the Tesla Semi) and I think they can be trained to handle the situation of a tire blowout better than a human.

The final issue is amateur drivers. Not much can be done about them until we reach level 4 automation.

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

Buses make you wait in the rain.

Buses get stuck in traffic very easily.

Buses create traffic and make it worse with their size.

Buses idle diesel fumes as they stand in traffic.

Buses are noisy and idle outside of homes.

Bus stops in front of homes are filled with noisy people.

Buses that permit requested stops go nowhere slower than ever.

Buses are a half measure.

Buses fucking suck.

There's this thing called a bus shelter. They're actually really inexpensive to put up. Ask your city why they're not putting them up.

>"Buses get stuck in traffic very easily."

No more easily than a car. Bus-only lanes work amazingly well to mitigate the problems of traffic and congestion.

>"Buses create traffic and make it worse with their size."

Buses take up much less space per passenger than cars, so it's kind of ridiculous to make that argument.

>"Buses idle diesel fumes as they stand in traffic." >"Buses are noisy and idle outside of homes."

Natural gas buses and electric buses and being phased in, they're both quieter and cleaner than diesel buses. And bus lanes reduce idling time significantly.

>"Bus stops in front of homes are filled with noisy people."

Oh no, people. How horrible.

Are more expensive than driving.

Are regulated in such a way that prevents a competitive market.

Are run by profit making companies that demand subsidies from government.

Don't run at night.

Are full at rush hour.

Spend ages at the bus stop while everyone buys tickets, argues with the driver, asks which bus this is etc etc.

A single ticket can't be used on buses from two different companies.

I cycle. The buses seem like a threat to my safety because they are too big to overtake safely on a busy street. Also their engines are at the back, so I can't hear when they're sneaking up behind me.

Once they don't need a driver and are electric, most of these problems could be solved. I'll re-assess then.

Don't blame public transport as a concept, blame private profiteering and corruption.

https://www.nationaltransitdatabase.org/national-statistics/

I just don't see how you convince people to ride the bus vs rides haring. The bus is virtually always incredibly inconvenient and slow. It really is a last resort mode of transportation. It's no surprise that virtually all transit agencies across the country are seeing dramatic declines in bus usage since 2014.