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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

It seems very LA to need a car to get to the nearest bus stop.

It's due to the sheer size of the city (it's the largest metropolitan region in the US by area). The "last mile" problem now turns into last 3-4 miles (or more!) often necessitating a vehicle of some sort.

This is pretty much spot on.

I live in LA and am an avid driver, motorcyclist, and bicyclist. I'm also a huge proponent of public transport, and use it whenever I can.

That last bit is often a bummer; it's very rare that I truly can use public transport to get to where I'm going.

The nearest train station is a 15-minute walk from my apartment. That gets me onto a pretty good train system that can take me to Santa Monica and Downtown Los Angeles on one train, but not many other places. Changing trains adds time, and then they also go to a limited number of places.

Buses are a bit all over the place, and victimized by the very traffic I try to avoid by using public transport.

My current office is about 9 miles from my apartment (Mar Vista to West Hollywood). This translates into 35 minutes by car, 20–25 minutes by motorcycle, and 1 hour and 20 minutes by public transit, involving at least two different methods. It would be a great 1-hour bicycle ride if I could shower at work.

I start a new job in a few weeks, and that office will be only 4 miles from my apartment. This should translate into 12 minutes by car, 10 minutes by motorcycle, and 40 minutes by public transit. It might also be a relatively sweat-free (low-sweat?) 25-minute bicycle ride.

Most people aren't as fortunate as I am.

My biggest problem with the buses is frequency. My gf lives just off Glenoaks in Burbank/Glendale, there's a bus that comes right by, but it's so infrequent that it rarely makes sense. "If I head out now, I might make it to the bus stop in time, if I don't I can walk to my destination quicker than the next bus will come. Am I willing to take that risk?" (The answer is almost always no.)

I looked at taking the bus from BUR to her place. There's a great route, right from the airport to San Fernando Road, just down the block from her, maybe a 5 minute walk. Except the bus only stops at the airport HOURLY. Google maps was saying the ride would take over an hour, because the next bus wasn't coming for nearly an hour. If you set the "Leave by" time to when the next bus arrives though? The bus takes maybe 3-4 minutes longer than a lyft to that stop.

If sweating is the primary thing keeping you from riding: get an eBike.

Sweating is the primary thing keeping me from riding to work. I solved that with a motorcycle, which does many things an eBike wouldn't.

Riding a purely-manual bicycle would be awesome because of the exercise, something an eBike wouldn't provide.

Yep sorry, thought that the ride to work was assumed. You can always turn off the assist so you get exercise on the way home, but don't sweat on the way there?

I've commuted via bike for 4 years now - 6mi with a big hill each way. Started on an ebike but moved to nonmotorised pretty quickly.

I guess the split (on there, off home) would kinda work, but it seems like half measure when I already have a road bicycle for serious rides and a motorcycle to get around the city.

9 miles you could run in a little over an hour, by bicycle it should be more like 35 minutes, no? (Assuming it's not too hilly.)

I'm a fairly fit person and I am not going to run for an hour twice a day. 30 minutes by bike is fine but if I am gonna get on my bike I might as well go all the way to work which is what I do. Public transport is just no use to me until I move somewhere with better access.

You must be in incredible shape. Biking at an average of 24 km/h for 30 mins twice a day is not that easy. Same for your running times.

Ouch, looks like my mental milesToKm() hit a logic bug and multiplied by 1.1, not 1.6... Yes, my times up there are pretty crazy.

Cool. I thought you are a smug marathon professional who doesn't understand that not everyone can run a marathon under 2:30 :-)

Here's a link for reference: https://goo.gl/maps/qTq3CfWFUrm (not my exact address, nearby intersection)

Having done that route in a car and on a motorcycle, I can say that Google is being a bit optimistic about the cooperation of traffic lights and the safety of traffic.

Wtf? Running 9 miles in an hour is under 7 minutes per mile. That's a very high level of fitness.

That doesn't make any sense. LA is dense. The suburban areas from satellite look like wall-to-wall housing for tens of miles in all directions. How can that not be enough to support a bus-stop every half-mile? How can my little town in the UK support a bus depot but a small area of LA cannot?

> LA is dense.

LA is ludicrously sparse for a big city.

> The suburban areas from satellite look like wall-to-wall housing for tens of miles in all directions.

Yes, the suburban areas (pretty much all of LA) are often wall to wall low density (single family or small, 2-3 story apartments) housing for miles in all directions.

> How can my little town in the UK support a bus depot but a small area of LA cannot?

LA has bus depots, and thousands of of stops.

So with all of that, how does the last mile problem turn into '3-4 miles (or more!)'?

LA has about 10 bus stops per square mile. It looks like Metro's Google Maps API key expired but there's a nice map here[1]. Most of the gaps are uninhabited areas or cities that have their own transit systems. But just because there's 5 bus stops within a half mile of your house doesn't mean that those 5 (or more) bus lines take you to your destination. It's like a graph, as the number of bus stops increases linearly there's n^2 ways to connect them. Traveling somewhere that isn't directly North/South/East/West usually requires 1 or more transfers, and most of the bus lines are subject to the same traffic that you'd experience if you drove yourself.

[1]: https://www.metro.net/interactives/gmaps/bus_routes/bus_stop...

It can. The people complaining are generally those that chose to live far away from transit. There are plenty of us that barely drive; we just don't complain.

LA is incredibly spread out. It's almost only single family homes with a few exceptions.

It can’t be more sparse then my town in UK which manages to support local bus stops fine.

small area of LA? lol.

Yes for any given small area in LA why can’t it have as many bus stops as the same sized area somewhere else?

Busstops are generally planned in a number per so many people. Not in a number per city, regardless the size of it.

many of these "bus stops" are BRT (bus rapid transit), which uses dedicated infrastructure like grade separated bus only lanes. Its more like a subway that doesn't have rails and uses busses instead of train cars.

"Park and Ride" is a fairly common thing for commuter rail in the US. Using it for busses is a new one though.

Is it? Maybe for busses that stay inside a city but all the "commuter" busses that go into and out of a city have parking lots. There isn't any other way to get to them.

Seattle has been doing bus park and ride for decades, although they are extending the rail to one of the biggest park and ride stops and I think other rail extensions will go past several others.

> "Park and Ride" is a fairly common thing for commuter rail in the US.

It's a fairly common thing for commuter transit generally in the US, not just commuter rail.

> Using it for busses is a new one though.

No, it's not. There's lots of Park and Ride locations in CA (and.I would assume elsewhere) that are served by bus exclusively or are at multimodal transit centers that include bus along with ferry and/or light rail.

It's a fairly common thing for commuter transit generally in the US

Yep. I've used park-and-ride to get to buses in New York and New Jersey.

FWIW, NJ Transit has operated Park & Ride bus stations for as long as I can remember.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NJ_Transit_bus_routes_...

We have "Park and Ride" for GO buses in Canada.

The GTA is also generally leading north america in adoption of dedicated rights-of-way for buses, such as the mississauga transitway and the bus lanes for Viva.

Train-like travel times, with bus-like frequency and construction times.

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