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Comment by francisofascii | Hacker News Reader

For the West Coast, the simplest solution is electric buses with dedicated lanes. Buses better serve the existing low density sprawl than trains. Lack of infrastructure is not the problem, the roads are already built. The real problem of course is lack of political will. Every road with two lanes gets at least one dedicated bus lane. Single occupant traffic would slow to a crawl making the buses faster. Buses would run on time because they have an empty lane. Additional bus routes would be added everywhere, paid for by significant increases to gas taxes. It would certainly work and be more efficient than our current mess, but of course would never be politically viable.

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Dedicated lanes don't do much to help; the capacity of virtually all city streets is limited by the capacity of the intersections, not the streets themselves.

Give buses priority at intersections, or even better build them dedicated overpasses if you want to see buses really move.

>Dedicated lanes don't do much to help;

Actually, they do. Take a look at the MetroBus infrastructure in Mexico City[0] for example. Buses run on time, on an extensive, dedicated lane network.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrob%C3%BAs

Good example, they have dedicated and priority intersections.

Of course it would help, since an overloaded intersection causes a large backlog and waiting in line (for multiple light changes) is how each vehicle pays the cost of the backlog.

With dedicated bus lanes, you skip the backlog and cross on the next light, so intersections do not undo the advantage of dedicated lanes.

You don't have to take my word for it - just ride any good dedicated lane system at a high traffic time and note your relatve speed of progression versus car traffic.

I ride a dedicated BRT lane system every day. Part of the way they have overpasses and it's super fast. Then they hit downtown and have dedicated lanes but have to deal with normal intersections. It's dog slow.

It's all relative.

Do you mean it is slow compared to the portion with no overpasses, or slow compared to vehicles w/o dedicated lanes passing through the same intersections?

Passing through intersections is never particularly fast (except perhaps at night on empty reads with sensors far enough away to turn the light green before you even get there) - but at peak times dedicated lanes help a lot even when intersections are involved because you skip the queue.

It's slower than the car lanes; there are so many buses that the bus lane is more backed up than the car lanes. They are in the process of building a subway that'll take many of those buses out of downtown, though. (Ottawa, Canada).

Yes - a single dedicated bus lane doesn't work if there are so many buses that lane is busier than the car lanes! That would be a fairly unusual case in my experience though.

>Give buses priority at intersections,

Or just give them the IR transponders that emergency services use to trigger the light in some places and have it go green for the bus rather than red for everyone. You'd accomplish almost the same result with less trade-offs.

Giving one vehicle priority tends to increase complexity and causes a distraction which increases risk of accidents (which clog up the road making the bus late). This is why the modern doctrine for EMTs is to drive in traffic like everyone else and use lights/sirens only in the most time critical cases and when doing so will substantially affect travel time.

Seattle has bus priority at multiple intersections and it does not cause problems.

At those intersections busses arrive at the curb lane to pickup/dropoff. Then a special light tells the bus driver that it is ok to proceed into the intersection, while all other cars have a red signal. The bus pulls out and leapfrogs traffic.

I am envisioning this more for urban arterial roads that typically have 35mph and two to three lanes of traffic in one direction. Most of these roads have light priority already.

Ottawa managed this by building a massive BRT system with its own roads and off grade bypasses, as well as dedicated lanes in the downtown area. They're beginning to implement light rail [1], which is fairly simple for them as they can upgrade the existing BRT lines with rail, increasing the capacity and decreasing maintenance costs. As you said, they faced initial political opposition, but I think the political will problem is a one-time cost -- once you have the network in place and the benefits are realized it becomes easy to change or upgrade it.

Both BRT and LRT don't necessarily solve the first- and last-mile problems, though. Many US cities are using park-and-ride stations, but that can just spread traffic out instead of eliminating it. It's important to create networks for short trips to and from transit stations with things like bikes and scooters.

[1] https://www.stage2lrt.ca/

Simplest solution for the transit planner, maybe; but for people who want to get around, who wants to be stuck in a bus? Why should we settle for a crappy, minimally-functional experience? Let's build good transit that people will actually want to use.

. . . I like riding the bus though. You get a window instead of being stuck in an underground tunnel. It's quieter than the train. And the drivers can actually make detours and improvise if there are problems.

The only issue is traffic, which dedicated lanes and automatic right of way takes care of. There is also the issue of having to wait outside in bad weather for it, but if you keep headways low that's not so bad if you're already committed to having to walk to the bus shelter.

>It's quieter than the train.

Huh? What kind of trains have you been riding? Buses are noisy and have herky-jerky motion because they drive in traffic and have noisy diesel engines and are constantly accelerating and braking and turning. Trains ride on metal rails with no traffic in their way.

Of course, the shitty subways in America's east coast cities somehow manage to be extremely noisy and bumpy; I'm not sure how they manage that. Subways in better places don't have this problem in my experience.

>What kind of trains have you been riding?

Subway trains roll on tracks in concrete tunnels that reverberate sound. They're extremely loud. It's metal on metal with grinding disc brakes.

>Buses are noisy and have herky-jerky motion because they drive in traffic

Buses are huge. They're generally too huge to accelerate or decelerate rapidly, so I have no experienced this herky-jerky motion you're talking about. That's much more likely in a car.

>and have noisy diesel engines

At this point most big cities I've been in the buses run on CNG, which is still super loud but burns much cleaner. Eventually they'll be all electric fleets though, and should be predictably quiet.

>Subway trains roll on tracks in concrete tunnels that reverberate sound. They're extremely loud. It's metal on metal with grinding disc brakes.

The German subways I've ridden manage to be reasonably smooth and quiet.

>Buses are huge. They're generally too huge to accelerate or decelerate rapidly, so I have no experienced this herky-jerky motion you're talking about. That's much more likely in a car.

I guess you've never ridden a bus in a city. Buses can brake very effectively, like most vehicles with air brakes, and lots of riders have to stand on them, so you get thrown around a lot more than a rider in a car who's belted into a bucket seat.

>The German subways I've ridden manage to be reasonably smooth and quiet.

That's probably more about good soundproofing for inside the train. But even in Tokyo I found the trains to be rather loud.

>I guess you've never ridden a bus in a city.

I ride one every morning, usually standing. It hasn't been a problem and I actually find our subway trains to be more prone to hard stops and starts. Intra-city buses rarely exceed 30 miles an hour anyway. I usually feel bad for the elderly, the injured, and the pregnant because it actually can be hard for them if they're stuck standing. But my ire is usually reserved for people who fail to give up their seats rather than the concept of riding a bus.

Buses are universally horrendous.

If buses arrived every five minutes and had a dedicated lane, people would not be stuck anywhere and people would certainly want to use it. Here is a thought. Walk to your nearest busy street. Assume you could convert half the number of cars to buses and that a bus would have about 20 riders. When you count 40 cars go by, that is how often the bus would arrive.

No, it won’t. Even routes that are consistently bursting at the seams get no more than 3-4 departures per hour around here.

"paid for by significant increases to gas taxes." Enjoy your yellow coats :)

I guess "paid for by the ridership" is out of the question?

Infrastructure can't be sustainably paid for by usage fees. There are too many externalities for any individual person to have to shoulder.

The benefits of a transit system accrue to people who aren't using it as much as to people who are. A bus that transports 60 people means you just took at least 30 vehicles off the road (and that's a super conservative estimate). That extra capacity is a benefit to people riding bikes, walking, and driving. So why would you expect only the bus rider expected to pay into the system while everyone else benefits?

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