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Comment by Endama | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the uncomfortable truth behind a lot of the problems regarding public transit isn't the transit itself, but the passengers. If you had the choice of riding a public bus with a large collection of the public or paying a few bucks and selecting a preferred subset of the ridership (e.g. chariot in SF, uber, lyft, etc.) I think most will choose the non-bus option to feel comfortable during their ride.

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.

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A sample of the population of people who take transit every day is different from a sample of the population in general. When walking down the street you might occasionally run across people who you're not comfortable walking near, but it's relatively rare. Increase the volume of those taking transit and you'll note that only the volume of people you're comfortable riding with will rise.

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)

Here in London, bus ridership has also been in decline for a few years now. But it's pretty clear the reasons are: 1) the rise of Uber and friends, 2) improvements to the Tube and Rail networks (new trains, better service frequency, longer operating hours, etc), and 3) the increase in popularity of cycling.

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.

Honestly, I don't think London buses have the same problems as US buses.

Agreed, London buses are in a much better state than American in general. But then you should be comparing them with NY.

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.

I wasn't aware London had sunlight.

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but it can be quite pleasant riding on the bus. My trip used to be up the Kings Road.

I wonder if we couldn't have a "business class" option. When I took Muni in SF every day I'd have happily paid a little extra for some more comfort and less likelihood of a homeless person who smells like urine nearby. That money could even be used to subsidize the economy tickets. Maybe it might even work out that we could have a freemium model.

There’s little that irritates me more about my local trains than the fact every one of them has ~20% of carriages dedicated to first class at a huge markup. If they had capacity I’d be fine, but what happens is that you have people standing for a 2 hour journey while there’s empty seats that they’re not allowed to go and sit on.

I don't think my suggestion is appropriate everywhere. I do think it would work well in a place like San Francisco. I also think it would need to be physically secured so that you can only get in with a valid ticket otherwise you are going to keep pleasant, but poor people out and crazy people who she'll like urine would ignore the restrictions.

JR does this with many of their trains. There are green cars that you can get a special pass for at the station platform. I would only buy it for long trips by train, for general commuting I think it's a little unnecessary. That said JR is cheaper than the BART and MUNI but doesn't seem to have many undesirable carriage companions.

Yes but its a virtuous or downward cycle. Really nice buses with wi-fi and improved reliability and frequency (of which the article discussed several possible approaches for) could attract more upper-middle class workers, especially young ones. Not unlike how neighborhoods gentrify.

It's definitely something that plays into how I ride the bus. My route has an express line that runs during peak hours and the same normal route, both get me to my destination within a few minutes of each other. The express route is people going downtown for work. The normal route goes through the rough areas and gets filled up with people hassling the driver for a free ride and people walking on with open beers at 8am and people openly drug dealing. It makes it pretty easy to decide which one to ride.

In a properly functioning system the ratio should be higher. It should cost significantly more for a private transport option.

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.

Sometimes it's not even the passengers... it's the driver.

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.

That story sounds like it goes against intended policy, similar to complaining about a Barista throwing your coffee in your face isn't a really good argument against a chain of coffee shops.

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

I didn't report it. It was very late at night and I just wanted to get home. Plus, I've only had one interaction with authority in Chicago[0], and after that I learned to keep my head down and stay off the radar.

[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."

Refuse to leave the bus, point out that you’re willing to call police and wait for them. Casually mention that the driver will get home faster by finishing their route than forcing you to waste a lot of his time in the process of getting him fired.

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

If you were on an Eastbound 152, the schedule clearly indicates that the last Eastbound 152's of the night only go to Central, so while perhaps the driver may not have communicated it properly, they were right. If it was a westbound 152 then that's ridiculous and you should have called CTA.

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).

It was eastbound. We got chucked out in front of Lane Tech and WGN. I was new to the city at the time and didn't know about the 80. I ended up taking that occasionally in the future (going the opposite direction) when there was bad weather because taking the 146(?) up Lake Shore Drive and connecting to the 80 was better than connecting to the 152 because I could wait in Starbucks for the 80, but the 152 connecting stop is exposed to the winter winds off the lake.

Yeah one disadvantage of buses is that you really have to know the system pretty well... by the time you ask Google Maps how you should get home it might be too late.

I think there's a tipping point where this is no longer the case. I live in Seattle, a great city for bus rides, and at least at rush hour, it's 95% office commuters going to/from work. No problems if you travel at rush hour.

Time and cost affect this calculus though. BART has its fair share of "undesirables" but it's the fastest way to get from downtown SF to Oakland during rush hour, so people tolerate it more than they would otherwise.

Absolutely. What I don’t know is if the problem is a small number of very bad actors who could probably be blacklisted, or the average “co-rider tolerability” of a larger number of people (such that it would require a whitelist).

I'm not sure the issue is either. Yes, there are some bad actors that everyone would rather not travel with for various reasons (those who are aggressive/commit various crimes on public transport for example), but then there's a much larger group that each individual might not get along with or tolerate, and that's a large part of the reason private cars and Uber type services are preferred when available. People's preferences are different, and bus/train services are always going to be a compromise in that aspect.

A fun experiment would be to take a bus line with 20 buses and rather than a uniform $2 fare, do identical buses with a each bus charging one of $0, $1, $5, $10, $50 fares. (Maybe also experiment with something other than just farebox fare — some buses are $50/mo unlimited rides, some are $50 for 10 prepaid rides, etc)

No one's going to publicly agree with you, but they all do.

The public already publicly agrees on this. AB716 gives BART (and other CA transportation agencies) the right to give riders a "stay away" order. If my personal interactions with BARTPD are indications, this law is however designed to keep away people who look like "undesirables," which is why these kinds of things are generally a bad idea.

This is exactly why I take the bus outside of peak hours though! In particular the M20 from State St/Whitehall up 8th avenue. The MTA is so stigmatized by people under 50 here where "only crazy people and the elderly take the bus".

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.

Woah, is this a reverse no true Scotsman? What fallacy is this?

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."

No you wouldn't. When people say 'homeless', they don't care about the residential state of the individual, but the physical state. I couldn't care less if a fellow rider is homeless as long as they don't stink and are not rude or violent. I don't even care if they're drunk as long as they don't interact with me.

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.

Haha, it's wonderful when people speak for me so confidently, because it's the only time in my life I get to justifiably completely negate what is being said to me.

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.

That particular complaint has been around a long time: I heard it from a co-worker in about 1980, before a fair number of the HN readers were born.

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.

Especially if you are a germ-a-phoebe like myself. My friend accidentally sat in a seat soaked in urine by the previous passenger, and had to go back home to change clothes of course. I decided ... nope. And then there is the occasional smoker, so if you have asthma ...

Going by the descriptions here, riding the bus in the US is worse than riding one in India.

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.

>Going by the descriptions here, riding the bus in the US is worse than riding one in India.

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.

I've been there once in 2004. My memory is a bit hazy, but I have definitely never travelled more distance by car in a single week.

Yeah, this shows the other problem in your biased perspective: it sounds like you never actually used the buses here. Coming to the US and driving around in a personal car (esp. if you just go on road trips to remote places like western national parks, as a lot of European tourists seem to do here) is absolutely nothing like what you'll see if you try to take city buses for transit in cities, especially in the poorer sections.

This is one reason why we should be building SkyTran systems instead of pushing more traditional public transit.

Counterpoint: NYC subway. Big fucking deal they're some crazies. The subway is great.

In Paris, night busses have bouncers. (At least the one I used to take)

Why would it be immoral of me to not want to be harassed and threatened on a regular basis during my commute? Because that was basically my experience of depending on busses for ~6 months.

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