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Why do buses not count? Because you don't like them? Your definition of transit is not shared with most people.

I love buses as a transit option. They go directly to parking lots of places like grocery stores and ride smoother than a lot of trains/subways/etc I've been on. If the routes are useful then people will use them and they're as simple to scale as buying more buses and very easy to dynamically adjust, unlike train lines.

In a word, it's time. If I want to drive somewhere in my town, it takes at most 15 minutes. A bus is easily 30-45. I think over long distances rail allows you to save time, or at least break even.

A train route was much slower than driving an ~80 mile stretch in my experience

Highly dependent on where you are in the country. Trains win in highly congested areas due to the dedicated right-of-way. With no congestion, cars almost always win.

> Why do buses not count?

I think at least in some places in the US, this is a class thing, though few people will admit it. Buses are associated with lower-class people, whereas rail (especially heavy rail) is associated with middle class people.

Which ironically results in massive public subsidies for middle class people when heavy rail is operated at huge losses.

Excepting a few toll roads, roads for cars operate exclusively at a loss. They recoup no revenue at all, and are funded entirely by the public.

Sure, but (1) roads benefit everyone, while rail benefits wealthier people disproportionately; and (2) rail is subsidized much more heavily per passenger mile than driving.

You often hear that we spend much more on roads than rail, which is true, but we drive much much more than we take the train. For example, the D.C. metro receives about a $0.42 per passenger mile subsidy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/not-a-dime-more-for-.... Meanwhile, state and local governments spend $155 billion on roads, about half of which is paid for by usage fees (tolls and gas tax). Given the 3 trillion miles driven on roads every year, that works out to just $0.024 per passenger mile of subsidy: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pressroom/fhwa1704.cfm.

The cleaning lady who drives 10 miles to work costs the government $0.24 for each trip. When a white collar worker takes Metro 10 miles to work,[1] it costs the government $4.20.

[1] The median Metro rider has a household income of over $100,000 and 80% have a college degree. That's because the people who take Metro can afford to buy expensive housing near a Metro station, and go to white collar jobs downtown. The cleaning lady, and other lower income workers, can't afford to live near a Metro station, and many work the 90% of jobs in the metro area that aren't downtown.

Urban busses, yes. Commuter busses (public agency or private "Google Bus" variants) not so much.

There are transit districts which run entirely different coaches on commute vs. urban or general transit routes. Commute have comfortable seats, overhead briefcase stowage, reading lights, and. often wifi. Urban transit: hard seats, no amenities, often standing-room only.

"Why do buses not count? Because you don't like them? Your definition of transit is not shared with most people."

Don't shoot the messenger.

There is a vicious cycle of under-investment (fulfilling transit goals with half-assed bus routes instead of making real investments in lightrail/subway) poor service, and resulting lack of utilization among middle class voters ... which leads to further under-investment (since none of us are going to take the bus) ...

I am not talking about SF or NYC. I am talking about every other city in the US that matches this description perfectly.

Then just fix this and you don't have to spend millions digging up a bunch of land and building train lines/stations. Market the buses better, make them nicer, enforce rules better on them, get things like charging outlets in them.

The single biggest thing you need to do is make bus commutes faster than a car commute. This requires enforced bus lanes and possibly transit signal priority, which has been a hard thing to maintain politically. The buses can be nice and well-marketed, but if driving is significantly faster, then people who can afford it will still drive.

Trains do have the advantage that they don't have to deal with road congestion. Since buses have to use the same streets as cars unless there are bus only lanes it's pretty much always going to be faster to drive than to take a bus because the bus probably won't be doing directly to your destination and will be making stops where you won't in your car.

I wouldn't say they don't count but buses tend to be much slower than driving while trains with dedicated tracks can quite easily be faster than driving if traffic is bad or its hard to find parking at the destination.

Now, high quality bus services with dedicated lanes can be pretty decent but most bus services aren't like that.

[I'm a bus proponent, but...]

It's turned out to be very politically difficult to establish and (just as importantly) enforce bus lanes in communities in the US. People get very upset at the prospect of giving up either street parking or travel lanes, and local politicians and the traffic enforcement bureaucracy has mostly sided with the people who complain. The result is either no bus lanes, or part-time bus lanes with no effective enforcement, which is basically the same as no bus lanes.

A bus that's able to use bus lanes (and possibly transit signal priority) to bypass traffic is a great thing, and would be appealing to people across the socioeconomic spectrum. A bus that's stuck in the same traffic as the cars has no benefit other than cost, and will only appeal to those who can't afford to maintain a car or are very ideologically committed to transit.

Buses would be amazing with bus lanes in congested areas and automated camera-based enforcement of those lanes. However, the inability of the political system to make that happen even in Manhattan makes me fairly pessimistic for that outcome in other places.

I still think it's worth investing in buses for those who need them, but if they can't bypass traffic they will be stuck at a low mode share almost everywhere.

I'd rather a bus driver sit in heavy traffic while I get to use my phone/laptop than be the one driving. For going to conventions I still take the bus even though I have a car now.

The problem with bus lanes is that they require failure in order to operate. If you implement bus lanes and they succeed in relieving traffic congestion but the congestion was the only reason people weren't driving then people go back to driving and you go back to having congestion. There is no way for them to actually relieve the congestion because having congestion is the method by which they operate. But they can make it worse by wasting a travel lane during the times of day when there would have been enough road capacity if not for the bus lane.

If you want to make buses actually work, make them work like Uber. You go to the bus stop where there is a screen you can input your destination (or you use your phone), and the nearest minibus going in your direction stops to pick you up, which each carries eight passengers rather than forty. Then it drops you off at your actual destination instead of four blocks from there, and picks you up faster to begin with because there are five times as many buses of a fifth the size and they can be diverted from nearby routes to pick you up as soon as you summon them.

At that point they're almost as good as a car most of the time, only they cost a lot less and only take up an eighth of the space on the road per passenger. And you don't have to operate huge wasteful 40-passenger vehicles during off-peak hours just to carry 3 passengers.

If you paint a lane red and make it buses-only, that gives commuters an alternative to driving. Traffic might still be terrible and congested, but commuters have the option to skip the traffic and take the bus instead.

Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive. Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus full-size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.

> If you paint a lane red and make it buses-only, that gives commuters an alternative to driving. Traffic might still be terrible and congested, but commuters have the option to skip the traffic and take the bus instead.

Except for all the ones who don't, because one of the endpoints isn't anywhere near the bus route even if part of the path between them goes along it.

> Uber-style minibuses don't work because the human bus driver is expensive.

Apparently they do, as demonstrated by all the people who use Uber in preference to buses.

> Once you're already paying for a driver, it makes sense to make the bus full-size so that you can maximize the number of riders per bus.

Unless that requires you to have less frequent service that covers fewer areas, which in turn causes people to choose single passenger cars over your buses.

You can also eliminate the driver cost by doing what Uber was originally billed as -- ride sharing. You're going to drive your car from your home to your workplace and back, but if you get up fifteen minutes earlier you can make a few bucks by picking up some of your neighbors and dropping them off at work. That's a lot less than the cost of a full-time bus driver with benefits but at scale it still results in a fraction of the number of cars on the road during rush hour.

In the majority of US cities, bus networks are optimized for coverage instead of frequency. A bus route might only run a few times a day at commute times - but city planners can check the public transportation box for all the neighborhoods along the route. With that methodology, it becomes impossible to reach a destination that requires a transfer or get to a job at an off time. Therefore anyone with the means to avoid the bus will.

Of course some cities have BRT routes, dedicated lanes, and high service frequency. If you have access to a bus network like that, indeed it can operate as well or better than a rail system (and often at a lower cost). But that is the exception in the US, not the norm. Whereas most commuter and urban rail in the US operates with high frequency and dedicated right-of-way. Hence the presumption that buses "don't count".

That would be a waste of money. Building transit lines without people to ride them means that they reach their end of useful life from old age without serving enough people to be worth them. It would be environmentally sound to build another freeway - at least that somewhat reduces congestion caused pollution (until the city grows and you need a new one).

Build high density around a bus stop, and some of the people will take the bus. Those additional riders mean the bus is making more money and can afford to add more routes. More routes means the bus is useful to more people who start riding the bus... Eventually you have enough people on the bus to switch to a better transit mode. The bus rider levels also show where people want to go which guides where you put the trains instead of a guess and prayer. But this all requires enough density to start the cycle in the first place.

"That would be a waste of money. Building transit lines without people to ride them means that they reach their end of useful life from old age without serving enough people to be worth them."

Agreed. Forgive me - what I meant was, build new transit lines on point to point routes that already make sense, then in-fill the intermediate stops as needed.

Those in-fill stations can then be the anchors for transit oriented, high density development which completes the cycle because the line is already in place.

I think they have basically succeeded with this in the University St. Paul <--> MPLS lightrail route. The route already made sense point-to-point and now they can choose the intermediate stops that make sense to organically grow the corridor.

This is how most successful rail corridors in the northeast US were built. A line was built to connect two cities, then suburbs spread along the existing right of way.

>No actual transit (the kind that runs on rails)

What an arbitrary way to decide what "actual" transit is. There are about a thousand other, very valid, very useful, very modern ways of building transit that have nothing to do with rails. If you're saying rails but meaning grade-separation, you're still wrong about non-grade-separated systems being somehow inherently inferior or unworthy. Look at any list of top transit systems in the world, the majority of modern systems incorporate non-grade-separated systems like trams, busways, or even regular old busses, because they work and they're cheap. People with your mindset are why this country may never have widespread transit systems, because you think insanely expensive infrastructure is the solution to a culture, marketing, and economic problem.

"What an arbitrary way to decide what "actual" transit is. There are about a thousand other, very valid, very useful, very modern ways of building transit that have nothing to do with rails."

I think you're missing my point - it's not about a fetish for rails ...

In the United States, outside of two or three cities[1], there has been almost zero serious investment in public transportation[2] and that transit infrastructure is always some bullshit sideshow that checks a box but does not provide any kind of meaningful service that would allow car culture to change.

Here is everything you need to know about public transit in the United States in one quick commercial:

https://www.ispot.tv/ad/wy2O/state-farm-backstory-truck-song...

What is special about rail infrastructure is that you can't half-ass it. You can't sort of put the subway in or sort of build a lightrail line. If they are putting down rails there is serious, meaningful work being done that requires a lot of related investment in the entire ecosystem of transit.

In the United States, buses don't count - not because buses are inherently bad but because in our car-centric environment that kind of service will never have the funding or the political backing to actually be useful.

[1] NYC, Washington DC ... places with subways.

[2] Seeing some halting progress in places like Denver and Minneapolis ... and I say "progress" with some qualifiers - after 25 years now has a second lightrail line and MPLS has one rail line that actually makes sense for commuters...

Here in Kitchener-Waterloo the project approval to build a light rail system included automatic upzoning for a radius around each of the stations and easier approvals for high density development. Tying the rail and zoning together was a deliberate choice to drive density in areas served by transit and prevent as much NIMBY interference as possible.

The construction took several years and the trains have just started running, but the city has already transformed. Many dense buildings went up while the rail lines where being built and many more are under construction right now.

It will be many years before the true success and failure of the project is known, but the signs look good to me. I'd like to see general loosening of non-safety related zoning restrictions to help keep housing prices in check, but this program was a good compromise since developers were guaranteed an investment of transit and other city services and could take more risk.

> housing units will exist at high end prices

People who can afford to buy these new high-end units will move out of their previous, less high-end units and the result is more affordable housing because the supply is closer to meeting the demand.

Good news - San Diego is well on its way to extending the trolley system from downtown to UTC.