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Comment by alyx | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm missing something,

But I honestly don't understand the point of spending billions of dollars building light rail, when the solution seems much simpler.

Roads? Check

Busses? Check

Busses are way more flexible than rail. They can utilize existing road infrastructure. With some investment into dedicated bus lanes in high traffic areas, and more busses/bus routes, people can be moved around with significantly less capital investment.

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If you lived in Seattle and ever had to ride the #8 bus, you wouldn't say this:

* Yelp reviews for the #8 (1.5 stars): https://www.yelp.com/biz/seattle-metro-route-8-seattle

* CHS: http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/05/the-bus-stop-the-8...

* Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/2ex4q6/the_no8_bus...

The recent split of some parts of the 8 help, but the greatest remaining issue with it is that Denny is constantly gridlocked, and the 8 is stuck in traffic.

Regarding dedicated lanes: there's literally nowhere to put a dedicated bus lane on Denny. It's just never going to happen. A gondola from Capitol Hill to SLU will happen before this does.

Travel around and look at what type of public transportation has worked for large, advanced societies.

Or even tiny, backwards societies. The capital of Uzbekistan has a metro, as does the principal city of Kazakhstan.

Why are more roads the immediate answer when talking about transit investment? People get it totally wrong. Less roads means less cars on the streets. We need massive transportation systems and bike paths.

is this a serious statement?

it's because of traffic. trains move the same speed regardless of who is on the roads or accidents or weather.

i travel around the US and i see that ALL cities of a certain size in the US are perma-fucked 7 days a week with traffic now, have you noticed?

that's why the light rail resurgence is happening.

And, even setting aside the traffic issues in major US cities, traffic is always unpredictable and public transit aims to provide some sort of dependable, predictable schedule.

buses would be predictable if it weren't for the traffic!

The roads are already overcapacity in Seattle, and have horrible gridlock.

Some key roads, such as Denny, only have two lanes of traffic headed in each direction, which makes it basically a non-starter to remove one of them for dedicated bus traffic.

That seems like quite an odd conclusion, since converting half that road to an exclusive busway would increase the capacity of the road by a factor of 10.

It wouldn't if you understood why Denny was such a shitshow at rush hour. It's basically the only way for thousands of workers to access I-5. Yes, I guess they could drive up to Mercer, but Mercer is even more of a shitshow than Denny.

Dedicated bus lanes (Bus Rapid Transit) has its own weaknesses, particularly in pre-built up urban areas. To make the best of your system, you need 4 lanes wide of dedicated bus space at the stops, or else you get really inefficient performance, that WILL NOT SCALE.

At that point, once you've discovered that tunneling is the only option to get effective mass transit through your downtown core area, then you may as well just go light rail, since tunneling costs so much already anyways - may as well give the system a higher capacity ceiling, and higher speed.

Okay. So we create dedicated bus lanes. And buses have right of way on the traffic light (we have proximity sensor - when bus approaches the light turns green). And we triple the buses on the roads.

This could work and will indeed be cheap.

So the only roadblock is how to disenfranchise the drivers so they would not vote out the administration in a nanosecond. And we may also put to good use the riot and other military gear the police is stockpiling

It is politically impossible.

Busses will never catch on in the US until we do something about our homeless and mental health issues.

Agreed - one urine soaked person can disrupt over 40 other passengers.

I attempted to bus to work, but my sad conclusion was that I could never ensure I'd show up on time. It's a shame too because it would save me a ton of money.

I agree with this quite a bit.

I'd like to see a US city facing traffic/growth problems right now really embrace BRT[0].

To me it seems like the pragmatic solution, given the already extensive freeway networks in most US cities, and the incredible capital outlay required to get any sort of rail system up and running, not to mention the 20+ year timelines.

But I think most Americans have a much stronger stigma of buses than subways, so maybe it's just too uncool for the US to ever embrace.

[0]: Bus Rapid Transit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit

Seattle already has a pretty expansive bus network, including express busses and a combined light-rail/bus tunnel.

And yet... the roads are still gridlocked.

So, why aren't more people taking the bus?

Is service too infrequent? Is the network too small (not enough stops)? Is it over-capacity - more buses needed? Is the city just growing too fast for transit to keep up?

Has there been any analysis on why it isn't helping?

Seattle's bus system sucks - and it's not just gridlock.

There aren't enough running to make it make sense. This is probably because there aren't enough people actively taking the bus... because there aren't enough running.

It would be ideal if they raised the gas tax significantly and funneled the money into a better bus system. Get cars off the street and add more buses.

Who's gonna vote for that, though?

Montreal is planning to implement a BRT line by 2018 on one of the major north-south routes (Pie IX):

https://www.amt.qc.ca/en/news/projects/pie-ix-bus-rapid-tran...

Because light rail is big and shiny.

Light rail is extremely comfortable. People actually open their laptops and do work. There are a bunch of reasons for that which were discussed in another thread yesterday. From there, it doesn't matter whether it's 20% faster (which it actually is, compared to busses, not even counting additional capacity).

Not only that, but the rail project will be finished right around the time autonomous vehicles are coming online. Nothing about any aspect of either mass transit or personal transportation will be the same after that.

It's insane to start a new rail project at this point in time, IMO. Total waste of money.

> any aspect of either mass transit or personal transportation will be the same after that.

That is utter nonsense. The physics of how many cars you can fit on a road, how fast you can get from A to B and the distribution trip patterns won't change that much.

Really? What makes you think that'll be the case, once the cars are talking to each other? Get rid of every stoplight in your town and see what the "physics" looks like then.

The basic capacity of a busy road is not significantly less than that of a train, and we already have thousands of roads. We just don't use them very intelligently.

Or, to put another way: a fleet of networked autonomous vehicles is a train. Put money into making that happen, and I'll vote for it. I'm definitely not voting for $50 billion choo-choo trains, or whatever 1890s-era solution the urban transit planners in Seattle are dreaming up this week.

Simple geometry argues that you can fit more people on dedicated train cars than a fleet of independent vehicles. You don't get 100% of the benefit of stop-free transit in the real world because there will be pedestrians - you need a dedicated right of way. The argument for independent vehicles was made with rail PRT too, and it only ever reached a niche campus-and-airport market.

What you get from autonomous vehicles is improved flexibility, and that improves all transit modes while only slightly changing the dynamics that make rail vs. bus vs. car interesting.

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