Comment by vinay427 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinay427 | Hacker News Reader

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This doesn't even seem to follow, in my experience, and their argument definitely makes sense to me as someone that's lived in an urban European city, an urban American city, and some American suburbs and traveled around all of these places extensively.

Why do trains work well in many European countries? When there's farmland between stations (or even between some bus stops in the city where I currently live), it means that because you normally want to go somewhere that's not farmland, you're very likely to want to go somewhere near a station. The density around specific points (train stations, bus/tram plazas, etc.) is particularly high which makes the last-mile or last-kilometer problem largely a non-issue.

If you build this in the LA metro area, it might serve the people who live very close to stations well, but everyone else who lives somewhere in the middle between two stations (which would be a higher percentage than people living in European farmland) would need to find a way to get home from the station.

Density would rapidly increase around stations if planning allowed for it. See all along the Skytrain in the Greater Vancouver area (British Columbia). For people in between or away from stations, you need good integration with the bus network. Anywhere where there is enough traffic to cause congestion has enough traffic to support good public transit which definitely covers most of LA.

I agree with you. In the case of LA metro area, it is just too spread city = badly designed.

If you imagine even fast public transport, to get from one side of LA to the other side, it would still require a lot of stops in the low population density areas. Let's say every stop would cost you 5 minutes which means that even a car could be faster than public transport.

There is no way every stop costs you 5 minutes, more like 1 minute. I am not a fan of buses because they are in the same traffic as cars plus they have to stop as you say. There are some mitigations like dedicated bus lanes that can swing the speed equation back in favour of buses. What you really want, however, is feeder buses taking people to the train, and it is easy to design a rail system that beats cars for speed in a city (basically any urban rail I've ever seen).

1 minute with the vehicle slowing down and speeding up again? If it is bus it goes to the bus stop, other cars have to allow it to go back to the main road.

Edit: 5 minutes would be way too much if I think about it again - you are right.

You don't have to allow cars to go on the same lanes as buses. In Europe it is very common with separate bus lanes.

You can have a distinction between local and express trains, where the express trains skip all the small stops

In practice, this is solved by having two layers of lines on the same tracks - one which stops everywhere and one express line connecting bigger stops.

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