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Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

Are they? It's always seemed to me that frequent stops, circuitous routes and long travel distances are the reason the buses are slow relative to cars. After all, cars have to deal with other cars as well. And for comparison, to the south, San Diego has much better traffic than LA, but the buses are still quite slow (e.g. I recently considered taking the bus rather than a 15-minute drive in San Diego, but it would have been over an hour by bus).

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Buses have to stop to be useful. Any theoretical bus route will be circuituous for some subset of users.

The solution to these issues is to provide bus signalization, dedicated lanes, and/or queue jumping opportunities. These changes minimally inconvenience cars while significantly speeding up buses. It makes it so that a bus route, while longer, can be time-competitive with driving (or rather, closer enough that it overcomes the inconvenience of walking to/from stops and sometimes having to wait for your bus)

You guys are both right. Removing cars from a bus lane makes the buses go faster.

And having frequent stops makes buses go slower.

Traveling long distances doesn't make the bus any slower; it just limits the frequency you can revisit a stop on the route without increasing the number of buses on that route.

I didn't mean long travel distances make buses go slower, I meant they amplify the disadvantages of buses, and America tends to have a lot of distance between things. If a trip would take one minute and it takes four instead, that's probably fine. If a trip would take 15 minutes and it takes an hour, that's a bigger problem, even though it's the same relative slowdown.

I have exactly that problem:

- Motorcycle to work: 15 - 20 minutes door to door (driving generally ~30 minutes, but 40 minutes or so during busy periods)

- Bus to work: > 60 minutes (7 minute walk, 5 minute wait, 45 minute average bus journey, 7 minute walk)

Cycling would, I reckon, take me about 45 - 50 minutes door to door until I got fitter, but that would be fine because I'd be getting loads of exercise, so the trade-off becomes worthwhile even though it takes longer. (The reason I don't cycle is there's no safe route.)

Presumably it just depends on whether the road is congestion. Roads are essentially non-rivalrous (my use of the road doesn't reduce your ability to use the road), until the road is congested.

Presumably most congested roads are used mostly by cars, so I suppose you could say that "cars cause congestion and congestion makes buses slower." But of course, the congestion also makes the cars slower as well.

There are different bottlenecks in buses depending on the situation, and I'm not familiar with LA. However, the places where I've tried using the bus, the latency involved in walking to the bus stop, waiting for the bus, getting off and walking to the transfer bus stop, waiting for the bus, then walking to my destination far exceed the delay added the stops the bus had to make. In many cases it exceeded the total time on the bus altogether. Increasing the frequency that buses run a route has huge impact on travel time, but there is a limit as to how much you can do that without adding a dedicated lane. The small improvement in speed caused by not having to deal with cars is just icing on the top.

I was pleasantly surprised with LAs bus system the last few times I've been. They have both express buses and ones that hit every stop. I also find LA to be very walkable.

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