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Comment by kkitay | Hacker News Reader

There's a middle ground between buses and rail: building defacto rail lines by transforming far-left lanes and middle dividers into dedicated bus tracks and semipermanent bus stations.

Urbanized (Gary Hustwit, 2011) highlights the TransMilenio bus system, which serves the city of Bogota. It specifically covers elevating the experience and status of taking the bus by adopting positive aspects of rail systems: covered waiting areas, dedicated transit lanes, more reliable service. Except it's less expensive to implement and more flexible.

TransMilenio bus and station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Av_Am%C3%A9ricas_Transmil...

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio

With so much road already laid, LA is a perfect candidate for a system like this!

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Bus themed solutions would definitely be an improvement over LA's status quo.

However a better idea would be to reduce the need to travel long distances by building denser. LA roads are super wide right now, so the easiest way to raise density would be by putting buildings in the middle of the road, leaving a Really Narrow Street (tm) along either side. Ground floors of new buildings could be commercial, upper floors residential. (Some LA roads are so wide we could put 2 or more blocks of Really Narrow Streets in the space consumed by a single car-oriented surface street).

This would reduce housing prices by bringing a crazy amount of inventory online, and would greatly lower maintenance expenses by severely curtailing the number of square feet of publicly-funded roads, traffic lights, signage etc. If we structured this correctly, the city could make a giant pile of money in both land sales and new real estate taxes. Maybe they could then use the surplus money to build a real train system or just reduce taxes. Lastly, there would obviously also be large environmental benefits such as smog reduction, CO2 emission reductions etc.

Yes, I realize this will never happen, and yes, I realize I'm proposing turning LA into old Paris. Old Paris is great, we should copy it more.

I stole these ideas from [0].

[0] http://newworldeconomics.com/the-eco-metropolis/

By old Paris, I assume you mean the area inside the Peripherique? Apart from Montparnasse Tower the building heights inside the Peripherique are limited to seven floors. This has the same effect as San Fran on restricting the density of the inner city, which means most people can't afford to live there and put up with....long commutes.

I spent three months working in Paris and many of the younger people lived further out and had a 45min - 1hr commute by public transport or driving.

The link you posted talks about narrow streets, this is true in some areas of the city, but Paris also has many wide boulevards.

The traffic during peak hour was pretty bad - the French driving on the footpath meme has some truth to it.

Also old Paris can be like it is because the CBD is located just outside the Peripherique at La Defense.

Bus Rapid Transit expansion is a near-term fix that can happen in a year or two. Rezones and construction to densify a city take longer. I don't think these two solutions are incompatible - they address the problem at different time scales.

Zoning is inherently racist, designed to keep the poor and working class out of areas of the city. It stunts economic growth to boot, and should be done away with entirely.

That being said, the roadways are public property, and should be redesigned to be on a road diet, but building structures in the middle is perhaps not the best idea. Parkifying some sections, expanding others into plazas (while infilling parking to densify) and selling the edges of the roadway to new development so it may be denser would be better approaches.

Not sure where you're going with the "zoning is racist" comment - I'm not talking about redlining here. In places like Seattle, much of the city is still zoned single-family, which is exclusionary to the poor and working class.

The rezones happening in our city boost the building density permitted in most of the city while requiring that some of that extra capacity be dedicated to low-income units. It's net positive for those in need of affordable housing and lets developers build bigger, which hardly hurts the economy.

Dedicating units to low income housing means you've failed to build enough units despite demand, and zoning is likely at fault. Whether it be height caps or parking minimums jacking up the price, they need to go.

Agreed that lack of units is at fault. This kind of mandatory affordable housing is an attempt to mitigate displacement within neighborhoods dealing with gentrification. In my case, this is Seattle, which has no parking minimums, but has suffered from too many single-family zones and not enough dense zoning. The rezones are an attempt to correct these issues.

Seattle needs to dezone MLK, Interbay and other major transit corridors and allow these areas to densify. The transit is there, and the property is either empty parking lots or 1 story slum commercial as the zoning restricts the area to a certain use. These areas should be replaced with dense, mixed use development.

We can have $800 apartments inside the city if we so choose, but with zoning forcing developers to build skinny dual towers and similar, we are forcing the minimum apartment price skywards.

That's the plan! https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/HALA/Policy/MH...

No, the areas will still have restrictive height caps that will stave off tall buildings per that HALA overview doc, we need these areas de-zoned, not rezoned.

I feel like you're letting great be the enemy of good, but we can agree to disagree. With few exceptions, all cities have zoning to keep some consistency and continuity within neighborhoods. Within that frame, I'm happy the city is pursuing "larger than normal" upzones and converting some SF zoning to mixed-use.

Its a temporary bandaid though, that is the issue. With a lack of zoning, like we had not even 100 years ago, we'd have much more core development, and it'd prevent much of the extremely destructive single family home infill that is occurring.

Zoning adds risk to projects and creates an overheated housing market, where the cost of housing is land cost, construction costs, & zoning cost plus whatever the seller can get thanks to the artificially constrained supply.

"They aren't making more land" is entirely due to zoning ensuring most of the city is underdeveloped.

Here's hoping that NY, LA, and other major US cities adopt "Old Parisian" urban planning methods. Wishful thinking.

Because housing is so cheap in Paris.

It doesn't have to be perfect to be better.

Paris has a set of issues like any major city but when it comes to managing urban density it does it broadly better than LA, for that matter so does New York.

My impression is that yes, housing in Paris is cheaper than in LA.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Those numbers are really outdated for LA.

LA already has some BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) lines like you describe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Metro_Busway

These systems operate mostly in dedicated right-of-way. There are more planned. I think they have been quite successful, for the reasons you describe.

They are not ideal though. Travel times can be close to double using the orange line.

It's something I imagine people using only they're not in a hurry or can't drive for whatever reason.

Ditto for Quito, Ecuador: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Quito

I'm now back in Australia, and despairing because my small city is putting in a light rail solution when a bus rapid transit option would be so much cheaper, given our low ridership. But buses aren't cool. :(

Which city is doing LRT? These can be more cost-effective in the long run at certain ridership levels, plus they're usually a better experience for the passenger.

Busses just plain suck.

Given the mention of "small city", I presume this is referring to Canberra: https://www.transport.act.gov.au/light-rail-project

I don't think it's a bad idea as such, particularly if you consider it planning ahead for projected growth, but there are a lot of much larger cities in Australia that could use the same money more usefully.

Building a BRT in Canberra now would be kind of pointless, since traffic jams are essentially non-existent, making ordinary buses rapid enough already.

When I lived in Canberra a year ago I noticed some backed up traffic in peak time near EPIC - however I realised there was only one car lane in each direction, and one bus lane in each direction.

I don't agree that we should always build more roads if there is traffic, but building a light rail solution when the bottleneck is one congested car lane each way seems a bit unusual.

http://www.metrolinx.com/en/projectsandprograms/transitexpan...

Yes, Toronto, Australia. Obviously.

Is it even still on any rail network? I know it use to be way at the top on the Cityrail posters but a quick check now and it looks like it's been replaced with a coach service.

Sydney is doing them, and it seems okay.

Newcastle is doing a 4km line...

It could well be the Gold Coast, too, which has just finished its light rail in preparation for the Commonwealth Games next year.

Salt Lake City, Utah, has had very good success with light rail.

I'm sitting right next to where they've been drilling on Devonshire street for the past 4 months to move a power cable to central station!

I've taken busses through Sydney for years, and to be honest, I'm really hoping the LRS does what they promise it will, because the bus system here is so bad.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, one-third of buses will still be required when the light rail starts operating in 2019 due to insufficient capacity, rising to 80% of current buses by 2031!

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/sydney-cbd-and-south-east-light-ra...

I never really thought that light rail would replace buses completely.

One can't help but imagine how many more buses we would need without light rail, no?

True, but if we built any other sort of infrastructure (water, sewage, electicity) that operated at above over 100% capacity from day one, wouldn't we consider a solution with more capacity?

With the light rail already blowing out as of November last year from $1.6bn to $2.1bn [1] I can't help but think of the merit of heavy rail.

My understanding is heavy rail is very expensive, but how much more? I haven't been able to find a comparison of a heavy rail design on this route.

[1]: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/sydney-cbd-and-e...

I think it'll be fine for Sydney, but I'm in Newcastle and it seems so daft...

Maybe future capacity planning?

O-Bahn might work quite well - combining benefits of rail and buses...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Bahn_Busway

It's fast, comfortable and those buses are able to collect passengers in suburbia.

The general idea (open-access busway) works well, but guided buses specifically do not, since you combine all the disadvantages of rail (expensive, compatible vehicles) with the disadvantages of the bus (much lower capacity, much higher labor requirement, etc.) Brisbane is a much better example of this: http://humantransit.org/2009/05/brisbane-a-short-tour-of-the...

This has been done in the York Region adjacent to metro Toronto. Unfortunately, transit fares are quite high there and usage is low because of infrequent service. The lesson here, I guess, is that if you build it, there really isn't any guarantee that they will come. IE, there's still a cultural shift involved in convincing a car-centric culture to adopt transit en masse.

If you enjoy urban plannning docs like 'Urbanized', check out 'The Pruitt Igoe Myth' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pruitt-Igoe_Myth

They have the same thing in Istanbul: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrobus_(Istanbul)

If you need statistics for the maximum people this system can take, you can ask the municipality of Istanbul. They also can't increase the number of buses because of congestion. Here is a well-known joke about it: http://imgur.com/5ZFMoMZ

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