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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

The thing that kicked off this week's controversy about NYC in particular is a geniune attempt to improve transit by focusing on how to move the most people as fast as possible. What is angering drivers is that the city turned much of 14th St into bus-only lanes, and removed some street parking in the process as well.

And, it seems to have worked, at least from early indications! Buses now move much faster! If that holds up, it would ideally allow for even more improvements, like running more buses, speeding up official bus schedules to account for the lowered congestion, which hopefully will in turn result in more ridership, etc. https://www.wsj.com/articles/buses-cruise-through-manhattan-...

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> And, it seems to have worked, at least from early indications! Buses now move much faster!

The speed of buses is not the appropriate metric by which we should be evaluating policy. Speedy empty buses are not exactly a win. Instead, we should be asking how much time and money does it take to get from point A to B.

I agree in general, though bus route in question (The M14) has around 26,000 riders per day on an average weekday, making it one the busiest in the city. It doesn’t lack for people using it — it’s just been really slow until now.

http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/ridership_bus.htm

I agree, though weighted by actual people moved, not per-vehicle.

A guess: I'd be very surprised if speeding up the buses doesn't end up a net win here, given the density. In fact I believe that was evaluated in the proposal to make this change, but I haven't read it. I have been reading some preliminary proposals for new bus lanes in Washington, DC, and on the 16th St corridor there (which is less dense than Manhattan by a large margin), buses already, without dedicated bus lanes, account for 50% of passenger throughput during rushhour, despite being only about 3% of vehicles. At those kinds of ratios, it becomes fairly easy to come up with bus-prioritization schemes that end up as a net-win for commuting hours saved, even if you completely discount environmental impacts.

> I'd be very surprised if speeding up the buses doesn't end up a net win here, given the density.

I'm not so sure, especially on 14th street. 14th Street is one of the few east-west streets that has decent crosstown subway service, the L train. Even with faster buses, I suspect it's still faster to hop on the train to get across 14th than to take a bus.

But this doesn't have to be an rhetorical argument, it can be clearly backed by data. If, in 6 months, the MTA shows that more people are moving more quickly across 14th St than before the car ban, I'd support it. If it can't show that, I'll be against it. If it just says that its buses are moving faster without citing the number of people moved, I'd be very suspicious.

The restrictions on 14th Street were literally proposed as a mitigation to the L train upgrade. Have you seen an L platform recently? It's currently struggling to move as many people as it needs to.

The M14 buses are packed though. It's hard to imagine how you could have a speedy bus line in Manhattan that wouldn't be packed. If it's a good option people will definitely take it.

Another metric to optimize for would be safety. Having the occasional bus driven by a rules-abiding, professional driver is much safer than having constant cars whizzing by.

Do you think there are less people on those buses than there was before the ban?

> Do you think there are less people on those buses than there was before the ban?

There probably are more people on buses, but that's the incorrect question to ask. You should be asking whether the additional people on buses is greater than the decreased people on cars. If before the policy, there were 3,000 bus riders and 10,000 car drivers, and after the policy there were 10,000 bus riders and 0 car drivers, that's still a net loss.

This was discussed yesterday, but I wonder if there is any economic analysis for how much a bus ticket should cost if they are operating on dedicated roads.

Whatever it costs to maintain 14th St between 9th and 3rd Ave, if it’s restricted to mainly buses, bus fares should pay to maintain it, like fuel tax and excise taxes from personal vehicles pay to maintain roads.

The idea that bus/subway fares should pay for X crumbles in the face of facts. They're not luxury, they're not useless, they being people to work and remove cars from the streets. The better and faster they are, the easier it is for a city to thrive. In fact, plenty of studies suggest that public transportation in big cities should be _free_, because when we'll managed, the benefits they bring far outweigh their cost.

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