Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

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This is a basic contradiction which I am not sure is solvable. If the stops are too far away, you (or somebody for whom walking is harder, like older people, less physically fit people, etc.) won't be able to use it. If stops are too close, getting through them takes a lot of time. I know there is a body of work that tries to find optimal setup for such cases, but I'm not sure it's possible to make everybody happy here. If you want good coverage, you'd have to sacrifice speed, the bus can't go everywhere and be fast at the same time, at least not within a single mode of transportation.

In SF, this is made worse by the people's behavior. There is a dedicated line for the buses, but cars routinely drive on it to turn, get in/out parking or just feeling they can outsmart everybody by doing so. So in fact, the bus stops not once but 3-4 times per block to deal with these. And then there are traffic lights of course. And yes, as a result it's not too much faster than walking (though somewhat more relaxing, if you get a seat :)

> This is a basic contradiction which I am not sure is solvable.

Why do people say things like this? Have you ever been to a major European city? Most have well designed public transit systems that are much more convenient than driving. They usually manage this through a combination of local subways, regional trains to go into and out of the city core, and high speed rail to travel between cities. Chinese and Indian cities are implementing the same thing.

If SF actually cared about making public transit convenient (i.e. if Transit First was anything other than an empty slogan), they would have police ticket those cars that drive in the bus only lanes.

I just don't understand this bizarre behavior of insisting that problems are insolvable, when plenty of others have implemented adequate solutions.

To be fair, European cities are often terrible for driving, because the road system is poorly designed. And expanding public transport takes precedence.

That is also technically achievable in US, but much less politically achievable.

One partial solution is to have local and express trains/busses using the same route. Muni does this in SF, but the express busses generally only run in small windows around commute hours.

It's not a contradiction. The buses only go down main roads. But on those roads they stop at every block. I'd be happy to walk three or even four blocks to catch a bus. So the bus could stop every 6-8 blocks on the roads it goes down. Now that those buses are faster we might be able to add additional routes on roads that were previously more than 3-4 blocks from a stop.

Also other countries were able to solve this. It's a uniquely American problem.

If we kicked cars out of the city, the buses would be less delayed, and more passengers would me an more frequent routes.

Yes, there is a tradeoff to more vs fewer stops. A stop at each small city block is still too far in the fewer direction: very few lost riders, very slow effective speed.

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