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Comment by vladojsem | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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