Would You Ride a Bus from SF to LA If You Had Your Own Bed? | Hacker News Reader

Would You Ride a Bus from SF to LA If You Had Your Own Bed?

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45 pointscurtis54 comments

I once took SF -> NYC red-eyes every Sunday for four months in a lie-flat seat (and back home every Thursday). All my friends and fellow consultants pitied my tremendous commute, but truth told I loved it - it was the furthest to time travel I had ever come.

I hardly remember a single flight - a Dramamine, eye mask, and ear plugs allowed me to pass out before take off and wake up in Manhattan.

In sum, I'd absolutely take this - if I could board at 10th & Market around midnight and wake up in Santa Monica bright and early, I've wasted absolutely no waking hours (as opposed to at least 3.5 hours wasted end-to-end: Uber from home to SFO, security, taxiing, plane, taxiing, Uber from LAX to destination).

I, of course, can fall asleep just about anywhere - I can see how this would be somebody else's worst nightmare if they couldn't.

I hope I can one day have a self driving car show up at my doorstep in San Francisco on a Friday night, hop in, fall asleep, and wake up in Seattle, at a friend's doorstep, on the Saturday morning - and do the reverse to head back to work on Monday.

Even just sleeping in a car instructed to drive along the coast all night long would be delightful.

This is why everyone is going to live in a self-driving RV.

The first thing that everyone is going to want in a self-driving car is a bed. And after that, a bathroom.

Soon everyone is going to live in an RV in their employers' parking lot, occasionally to leave on short trips.

It could cross with Tinder and Uber so that you could hail a ride, a ride and a nights kip all at once.

> a nights kip

Is that what the kids are calling it now?

lol no

This is exactly what I believe too. I lurk reddit.com/r/vandwelling and there's some really interesting stuff there sometimes, but I truly believe that once the self-driving car revolution takes hold, you'll see a manufacturer make a a van that has a queen sized bed, a shower and toilet with a large water tank, that is largely soundproof, and has enough power for desktop PC usage, and you'll eventually see a huge adoption.

> And after that, a bathroom.

If we can automate driving, I hope we can also automate the chemical toilet emptying process.

Seriously though, this is an awesome vision of the future. If you expanded your idea to blog post length I for one would love to read it.

For your fantasy's sake, I'd hope these cars can do 180mph safely. You're more likely to spend all day Saturday watching Oregon and NorCal zoom past at 60mph, and arrive that night.

Source: Drove UW-UCB once while in college.

It's about a 13 hour drive from Seattle to UCB. A lot of I-5 (sans Oregon) is 70 mph, so the flow of traffic is 80 or more.

When I drove down with a friend we left Puyallup, Washington at about 11 AM and made it to Los Angeles by 4 AM the following day. UCB is 3 hours before LA, and we had to stop for > 30 minutes due to construction on I-5 before Castaic.

I think it's doable even without super fast cars. If you leave at 8 PM you'll get there at around 8 or 9 AM.

Could almost just do with a train.

> wake up in Santa Monica bright and early

the best urban place to wake up and work in the entire country, in my opinion!

Can you elaborate on why you believe this? I've never been there.

because it's real nice.

It's amusing to see this as something of a novelty. In India, buses like these ply regularly[1] (for example between Bangalore and Chennai, or Bangalore and Hyderabad) and are pretty popular. But then, the reason for the popularity might be the fact that flight tickets (arriving at approx. the same time in the morning) cost about 3x that of a sleeper bus service[2]. WiFi isn't included though.

1. http://www.ksrtc.in/AWATAROnline/jqreq.do?hiddenAction=Handl... 2. https://www.cleartrip.com/flights/itinerary/6830699ffb-d1f9-...

It's not that it's novel. It's that it might work despite the nature of the economy. That's to say, buses were a not uncommon mode of inter-city travel up and till the late 50's after that cars dominated and left cheap buses (and passenger rail) behind.

So, most Americans of upper lower class and above more or less dismissed buses as only something really poor people, some students and geriatrics used.

Buses, in most people's minds had had their golden age, peak bus was behind us. So, in that atmosphere betting on buses is bold.

It's like someone betting on airlines in some poor region (it's bold but with the right circumstance, it might work).

As a tourist in CA in 2009, I had to catch a train from LA to SF. I was stunned to find that a train service for these two heavily-populated metropolises only ran every second day. Had to catch a bus to Bakersfield to get a connecting train. Different story on the right coast, where inter-city trains are much more part of life (though yes, the distances are generally smaller).

> Why would you sleep on a bus for six-and-a-half hours when you could sleep on a plane for one hour? Well, um, hmmmmm. I’m not actually sure.

Because the time from take-off to landing is only one hour, but the time to "catch a plane from X to Y" is considerably more - getting to the airport (usually not in a convenient location), going through check-in/luggage and security, boarding, alighting, luggage collection, getting from the airport to your destination... whereas buses tend to start and finish in the centre of town, where there's usually easy transport everywhere else.

That's not correct -- the Coast Starlight runs daily from Oakland/Emeryville to Los Angeles. Amtrak hates to run non-daily trains.

The twin problems of the route are (1) the train is very late very often and (2) the route is inefficient (because the geography is inconvenient) and takes all day to traverse.

Perhaps things have changed, or perhaps there was an interruption to the schedule when I was there? The 'every second day' thing was from the ticket seller at Union Station in LA.

Not a chance. It's a short, easy, and cheap flight. The airport is a pain, but not enough to extend the trip by that much just to avoid it.

It's overnight. Since you sleep then, you waste close to zero waking hours.

With flying, which takes an hour itself, you have to add airport transfers, security, and expected delays, all during waking hours.

That said, maybe this is not the best city pair to start (?)

So, in my experience, to get to and from Santa Monica & San Jose, you are looking at burning 3 hours when you can't really sleep, with maybe half of that having a shot at being somewhat productive time. The costs are much higher than airfare too, particularly if you have three bags worth of cargo and pay for more leg room.

Not saying we've got a great solution here (ironically it would be more appealing if the trip were a bit longer... like 8.5 hours). There is an argument to be made for it.

Speak for yourself... as a tall & fat guy... I can't stand planes... If I can drive somewhere within a day's travel, and have the time, I'd do it every single time over flying a couple hours.

I'd much rather commute overnight than take a flight... especially given than when I tend to fly it's only a day or two notice, and first class is sold out (even at 3x the cost of a ticket). I also happen to like driving, not sure how well I'd do in a moving bus... but just took a road trip up from Phoenix, through Portland and Seattle and back...

I find it's more of a chance to decompress... flying is all stress, and I'd rather avoid it.

Absolutely. There's nothing like a chance to sit back and just code while the world passes by. I highly recommend a laptop/book/sketchpad and a trip on the amtrak over the course of a couple days to relieve a lot of stresses. This is just a tiny burst of the same idea, depending on the hours. I'm doing the trip to NYC pretty soon on it, actually. :)

Not really sure why the author thinks this is somewhat of an outlandish idea, honestly.

Agreed, though I actually love driving... given I have enough time that I'm not rushed, there's no better way for me to just decompress, and leave work thoughts behind... I've been doing 9-day trips for a few years now, just got back from a 2-week road trip, it was great...

That and a non-stress trip vs. a relatively short flight with a lot of added stress (and higher chance of baggage issues), it sounds awesome. Hopefully we'll see an extended set of routes via Vegas and/or Phoenix...

I would love to do Amtrak, but it is just so horribly slow and not at all cheap for as slow as it is (at least in CA). LA to San Jose takes 10 hours on Amtrak, and tickets start at $60 for a plain seat. That's almost double the drive time and almost double the gas cost, or only about $20 cheaper than flying.

Well, for what it's worth, none of the people I talked to went on it expecting it to be the fastest fast, especially with cost considered. Lots of folk there just wanted to reflect on life in some shape or another.

This is very common throughout Southeast Asia. I did it multiple times recently but a few of us would always end up discussing how we would fare if we were in an accident

Considering the mass ratio, assuming you'd most likely hit a much lighter vehicle, pretty well most likely.

I'd say not too good. This reminds me of the death of Cliff Burton (the first bassist of Metallica): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Burton#Death

Heck yeah. My mother in law does the Megabus shuffle twice a week because she's a trooper, but this would definitely be a wanted upgrade. Too bad the endpoint down south is Santa Monica and not LA proper, with many more options for the final leg.

I would love to see this catch on all over the country. There always have been, and always will be trade offs that often do make rail travel (in the abstract) superior to commercial air. 75 year long story short, the implementation in the US is broken, and will never be fixed. This should be marketed, and envisioned as a competitor to rail and existing bus lines.

I also think they should research route combinations that have terrible or no commercial air options. There are hundreds of these. Think about flying between two tier 3-4 cites. Or places where people take road trips to popular destinations from tier 1 cites. For that matter you might do well with families.

I definitely wouldn't use it all the time (sometimes I'd fly; sometimes I'd drive...maybe once or twice I'd take the train), but it would be a nice option, and I could see using it sometimes.

The best use case is if you are injured or otherwise unable to fly (scuba diving?)...this presumably is more comfortable than a car, once flying is ruled out. If the schedule worked out perfectly, I'd consider using it instead of driving/flying otherwise -- if it saves a night in a hotel, could be a win.

Scuba divers are a very limited market. There are only a few thousand at most who dive along the California coast with any regularity, and few of those need to travel long distances. The standard recommendation is to allow 24 hours between diving and flying, but in reality if you've done a proper ascent it's safe to go straight from the dive boat to the airport. I've done that several times.

Just traveling somewhere while you sleep sounds pretty great (since you waste no time). The problem with doing this for anything business related is that I kind of want to take a shower, brush my teeth etc. after getting up. Not sure how that would be handled, otherwise it sounds like a pretty great thing for any two places that are connected by roughly a good nights sleep (Berlin<->Paris).

Maybe AirBnBs at the hop on/off points could offer morning cleanup as a service?

The Berlin-Paris overnight train had showers in the first class car. Alas it was cancelled last year.

Public swimming pools have showers, why couldn't lounges at a bus station. Included in the slightly premium lie-flat service.

If silicon valley put it's weight against a new investment boom in mass transportation (of any kind) it would do this country a world of good.

It has. The twin bets are called Uber and driverless cars.

I know that's not what you meant, but that's absolutely what silicon valley had put its weight behind to solve that problem.

I really want to see what could happen if we could take the principles and lessons of uber and automated vehicles and apply them to mass transit use cases, like on-demand buses to fill in situations where rail lines are deficient, agile new strategies for restoring or expanding rail service in places it's been neglected etc.

Use the knowledge gained from the uber on-demand logistics revolution to fill in the gaps in car-free transportation options to get us on par with europe. And so forth

Why does it need to be car-free... if uber were actually ride sharing, it would pool people based on destination, cut relative per-person costs, and work pretty well.

There's no reason localized governments couldn't get behind a localized initiative, that was more volunteer driven.

The Uber CEO described his vision for a 'perfect uber' last year, and what he described was a bus. I'm sure he sees it differently, as some revolutionary concept, but the description was definitely of a bus on a loop.

Heh, I know what he means, but the quote still makes me want to give him a shake and say 'this is a bus, the thing you're describing is a bus'

> Uber CEO Travis Kalanick often talks about his dream of the perfect Uber trip. "It's the perpetual trip, the trip that never ends," he said at the Digital-Life-Design conference in Europe last October. "The driver picks one passenger up, picks another passenger up, drops off the first passenger, but then picks up passenger number three and drops off passenger number two."

Hyperloop as well, down in SoCal (though still super early).

And electric cars.

I don't particularly care if its a bus or a self driving car, but without a doubt a lot of places where we fly for a quick trip we may decide to drive. I am more compelled by self driving cars with beds though as they will still solve all the annoying last mile problems, time independent/flexible, and be a bit more private.

well... it's my routine... with a train

http://www.trenitalia.com/tcom/Altri-treni/Intercity-Notte

pics or it didn't happen

I did this in Korea. It even had wifi.

Not as comfortable as you might think.

Do the power outlets work?

Better than even money even the ones near my Greyhound seat are busted whenever I travel.

Or fumbling in the dark for the outlet and gambling that you don't feel something sticky. In my Megabus experiences anyways.

> But even the worst airport and vehicle traffic experiences in the world wouldn’t take 6.5 hours door-to-door.

Has this guy ever used an airport before? It certainly can take a lot longer than that.

But the type of equipment failure/missing vehicle that will result in extended delays can happen to a bus as well.

Presuming everything is on time - you take 45 minutes to get to SFO, 60 minutes before your flight, 90 minute flight, 30 minutes to get out of LAX, and then 30 minutes to Santa Monica. That means, normally, you are looking at 4 1/2 hours, door to door. Most of it pretty miserable airplane travel, hassle going through airport.

I would totally sign up for the sleeper bus.

Does the bed have a seatbelt?

Then no, thank you, I'd rather not increase the risk even further.

It's likelu less risk than a mid-size or smaller car with a seatbelt, because of the relative mass of the bus and the other most-likely vehicles that would be in an impact collision.

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