Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

I took the bus home in Austin last night after having drinks with friends. It took a little under an hour, maybe 55 minutes, for a trip that would have taken 15 minutes by Lyft. About twenty minutes of that was spent walking and waiting in <40ºF weather, not a big deal if you're properly dressed, but I know that's something many people will not tolerate if they have a choice. Ten minutes of it was apparently due to unreliable service; Google Maps had me get off to make a connection and but quickly rerouted me to get back on the same line I was on (luckily high frequency, hence only 10 minutes lost) because the next bus on the connecting line was half an hour away.

I would never do that to save ten bucks. I only did it because of the appeal of using public transit and because it was nice to relax for a while by myself and read. Not that reading on the bus is a good use of time. I'm not sure why, but roads that are very comfortable in a small car are teeth-chattering on a bus. Reading text that is bouncing around in front of you is very tiring. I have a habit of sometimes very gently biting the inside of my cheek while I'm thinking, and I have to be careful not to do that on the bus because if we hit a bump I might draw blood.

I'll still take the bus sometimes, because I feel that as a supporter of public transit, I should know about it firsthand.

This is just the nature of public transit. Half of car commutes in LA are under 30 minutes: https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute. Just 7% of public transit commutes are under 30%, and 27% are over an hour. Part of this is because U.S. public transit is bad. But driving in the U.S. is still faster than taking public transit in other countries. The average commute in the U.S. (where 5% take public transit) is half as long as in Korea (where 55% use public transit): https://www.oecd.org/social/family/LMF2_6_Time_spent_travell....

I used to have what was a pretty great commute. I'd walk a block from my high-rise apartment in westchester to the train station. In 35 minutes I was at Grand Central, and then I'd walk another block to my high-rise office. Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. Maybe in an electric car even.

> Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care.

I agree with the appeal, but I've always found the biggest issue with this dream is the need for utter stability. If you quit your job, you might end up with a new one at an office 30 minutes down the highway. If your partner works, it's even harder to keep two commutes low. If you move with each new job, you may have to uproot your kid and send them to a new school.

For sure.

Commute time is mostly a function of metro area population, not mode of transportation. Half of South Korea's population is in the Seoul metro (which has a huge population), so the average commute time is very high.

Compare NYC to LA: LA is driving dominant and has the longer commute time, despite a smaller population than NYC.

It's not about population but rather density. LA's big public transit problem (outside of the driving first culture lobbied for by American car companies) is actually one of zoning and building.

> outside of the driving first culture lobbied for by American car companies

Sorry, this is false. Los Angeles simply didn't evolve to favor public transportation in the way a lot of European cities have.

A simple example of this is the ridiculous concentration of tech and aerospace companies inside of a zone that requires almost everyone to use the 405 freeway. I know people who would rather have their fingernails removed without anesthesia than do drive the 405 in rush-hour traffic. I might include myself in that group.

Who gives out building and business permits? Car companies? No. The city, the county, the State. Why do they allow such concentration? OK, maybe concentration makes sense at some level. Why, then, do they allow concentration where they do? One look at the map --particularly if armed with traffic pattern familiarity-- instantly tells you it isn't a good idea to pile-up so many businesses in these areas.

So, no, car companies have nothing whatsoever to do with it. It's about urban planning and design. We could use public transportation but it would take me somewhere in the range of two to three hours longer per day to go almost anywhere and come back. Sorry, my time is far more valuable than that. And, to complete the picture, this means spending somewhere in the range of six hours per day coming and going from the aforementioned tech centers. And then you have to work 8 to 10, if not 12, hours per day.

This isn't true though. There used to be light rail in LA, it was bought up and then shuttered by Ford and the like.

I said a lot of things there, which part isn't true, that it would take me six hours to take public transport to some parts of Los Angeles from where I am?

With regards to the myth of car companies driving or forcing urban development in a place like Los Angeles (really, think about that for a moment), here's the most complete research on Los Angeles mass transport I have ever found:

https://media.metro.net/projects_studies/crenshaw/images/pre...

There are an array of interconnected competing interests that drive the evolution of a city or region. For example, good union jobs building highways, suburban home developments and driving buses (one train = one conductor; 100 buses = 100 union jobs), etc.

No, car companies are not that powerful. Los Angeles did this to itself over a very long period of time and for a number of reasons not having much to do with this fable of a car company promoted car culture. The simplest explanation is: It just happened.

This isn't unlike the internet, which just exploded at one point and it is what it is. If we had to design it from scratch today with the benefit of hindsight we would likely change quite a few things. Same with cities. You get what you get, unless someone early enough had enough vision or was naturally restricted in some way to take a more favorable path.

EDIT: I stand corrected. I just checked with Google Maps. There is NO way to take public transport of any kind. Well, at least Google can't solve the routing problem. I think there might be a way if I took something like three buses to get close to where I might be able to reach light rail. Plain and simple, Los Angeles didn't evolve to favor mass transportation.

That’s false. The LA street car was already failing by the time GM bought it. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/06/be-careful-ho...

> A case study can be made of Los Angeles, where Snell focused a good deal of his attack. But contemporary accounts suggest that a transformation from streetcars to buses was underway long before GM and its affiliates entered the scene circa 1940. As early as 1923, the Pacific Electric rail line was buying buses to replace some of its routes. The city's board of public utilities encouraged this trend — calling the use of motor buses "a foregone conclusion" — and by 1930 the city's big bus conglomerate carried 29 million riders a year.

> The scholar Sy Adler once wrote, plain and simple, that everything Snell suggested about transit in Los Angeles "was wrong."

> A simple example of this is the ridiculous concentration of tech and aerospace companies inside of a zone that requires almost everyone to use the 405 freeway.

That's a reason why mass transit in LA doesn't work now, not how it came to be that way.

You seemed to have stopped reading before I literally said the current problem was zoning and building (aka urban planning). I lived in LA myself and have felt the length of a trip taking the expo line all the way in/out and how it isn't a viable commute. The sprawl of LA renders the bus system nearly useless as well.

> Sorry, this is false. Los Angeles simply didn't evolve to favor public transportation in the way a lot of European cities have. > So, no, car companies have nothing whatsoever to do with it. It's about urban planning and design.

Urban planning doesn't exist in isolation, it is shaped by those in power at the time, in every city. The motor industry absolutely was a power player that had a vested interest in pushing urban planning towards a vision of a city that meant cars coming in from suburbs instead of dense urban areas where public transit would actually be effective. LA is not alone in this within the US. Of course they weren't the only factor, a good example being white flight hitting cities pretty hard as well. But to say the car industry was not involved is 100% false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

> Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.[3] Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland.

> You seemed to have stopped reading before I literally said the current problem was zoning and building (aka urban planning).

You are absolutely correct. Sorry. That was dumb.

Yeah, not sure who comes up with the idea of tossing everything within the same 5 square miles (or whatever) and expecting life to be great.

Check out this document I found on LA transportation history, interesting.

https://media.metro.net/projects_studies/crenshaw/images/pre...

I mean city life isn't for everyone but I personally love dense urban cities and you can 100% have a great QOL there, especially when well designed. I live in NYC and would point to Lisbon, Paris, Copenhagen, Budapest, and Amsterdam among others. A lot of the negatives that can come with dense urban areas are bad execution that can sometimes even be fixed within one city. Montreal for example does a great job solving for lack of green space.

I love cities for availability of so many things quickly, diverse people and cultures that can only really be accomplished with large numbers of people, large social pools, high arts density, public transit so no need for a car, etc. If you're looking for a large space to live in, a backyard, lots of nature, then most cities won't hit that. Just depends on values but neither is wrong.

I love cities like NYC, London, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires and others. Los Angeles is very different. The ideas that work elsewhere don’t work here, which is a darn shame.

> Now, I dream of working at the suburban office park I can get to in 5 minutes (during rush hour) from my house, which is right across the street from my kid's day care. Maybe in an electric car even.

Personally, I find you need some kind of minimum time separation from work, otherwise you don't get the sense of separation between work and home life. I had a 5 minute walk from my house as a work commute once, and I much prefer my 30 minute bus ride today, because by the time I get home I'm in "home mode".

The main issue with transit time in the US is that American cities have made intentional policy decisions that result in land uses being far apart and sprawling areas, so a nonstop car trip is the only reasonable option. But everyone making nonstop car trips doesn't scale, which is why the Lincoln and Holland have hour-long waits into the tunnels more often than not.

Tunneling could let nonstop car trips scale. If the Boring company can produce a similar improvement in tunneling costs that SpaceX is on launch costs, it could be a reality.

They can't though. There isn't enough 3d space under the earth that can be practically reached.

What? Sure there is. There's an enormous amount of space under every city to dig through before it becomes impractical to reach.

The problem is access/exit points to the surface.

Graded ramps are high capacity but take up a lot of space since the grade can't be all that steep.

Elevators don't take up a lot of space but are really slow, and have worse reliability issues due to the moving parts.

How many spots on the surface exist that you could just take a chunk out of for either? Most land in existing cities is already being used for buildings or roads or sidewalks.

You can have stations underground where the automatic cars/busses stop and drop off people and then the people exit to the surface.

IE a subway. Which works well for trains. No need to call them cars or buses, since they never leave the guide way and there are advantages to trains in fix route situations

They can leave far out in the suburbs and other areas of low density and then switch in areas of high density. This would be something new. Hard to realize but a hybrid of the current system that can be the best of both.

That's what subway stations are today. They are absolutely massive to move people quickly in and out, and are the main component of subway building costs.

This metro station being built in Paris is 300,000 cubic meters: http://www.leparisien.fr/val-de-marne-94/villejuif-la-gare-c...

Remote worker here. I struggled with the same problem when my commute went from 20 minutes to 20 steps. I've found the best way is to stay in my office, log out of my computer, and read for 20 minutes. I don't have the hassle/expense of a commute, and I get an education every day. It's not bad.

I think this is all correct, but I'd just encourage people to think through the tradeoffs in play. Nothing can compete on time with an extensive point-to-point road network. But a city designed that way is going to be less healthy, harder to walk or bike in, more polluted, noisier, more spread out, and with far more transportation-related deaths and injuries.

Why not just move closer to work?

It can be tough to do that when both you and your partner work.

This. When I lived in Phoenix, my wife worked 30 miles south of downtown. I worked 20 miles north of downtown. Fortunately, we both loved the older neighborhoods downtown and schools weren't a factor at that time in our lives. If they had been, we would have lived 5 miles from her job and I would have had a two hour commute each way or needed to find another job closer to home.

Now you dream of an absurd and unsustainable lifestyle.

That drive would’ve been 1.5 hours probably.

I lived in Austin just before the advent of Lyft and Uber, and was thus stuck using the bus from time to time. I found the bus service in Austin to be unusually slow by US standards due to the abnormal number of wheelchair users.

why oh why doesn't that city have light rail…

It does, if you're going from Leander/Cedar Park to downtown it's useful. It takes about the same amount of time as driving in rush-hour, but without the bs.

Texas generally sees public-transport as something for poor people and the state is full of armchair libertarians..

Yep, that's almost the only scenario it covers, along with commuting from east Austin to the Domain.

I was at a lecture recently about the things cities do right and wrong when planning public transit, and the speaker used Austin's rail system to illustrate what happens when cities route public transit around political opposition. The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable, and Austin's Red Line is the perfect example: it barely sticks its nose into one side of downtown and then manages to dodge the capitol area, the university, and the dense residential neighborhoods of north Austin. Even the station that seems intended to serve the Domain is actually a ten minute walk from it, twenty minutes to most of the shops and restaurants.

I mean its not like they really had much of a choice for the route. They didn't build new tracks, just reused old existing tracks and built stations along the way.

I lived in Austin when they were voting to build the rail line and there was so much opposition that they never would have been able to get funding for any serious development of new tracks. There was a proposal for a while to run trains up Mopac, along the train line in the middle of the highway there, but apparently that wasn't possible because there is too much freight traffic on that line.

> The political opposition is typically strongest exactly where transit is most valuable

That actually wasn't the case either. The original proposal was for a roughly $2 billion project, and while it had lots of support in the central city the suburbs voted against it.

In the end they got the proposal passed, but with a drastically reduced budget, and were only able to spend about $100 million to build a rail system. So they just slapped together the red line on existing rail tracks

They could have found the money if people weren’t opposed to the route the money would have enabled. The university was very strongly opposed, NIMBY residents in north Austin were opposed to having nearby transit, and lots of people who owned or rented commercial land along the route were opposed because businesses would lose a lot of business during construction. Many of the people who were opposed found cost to be a convenient grounds for opposition, and the cheaper alternative happened to conveniently coincide with making the least number of people upset.

Haha yeah, I rememeber the NIMBY's in North Austin. I was living out near the Domain area back then, so I was glad to at least get the Kramar station. Honestly the biggest shame is still no rail line out to Austin Bergstrom.

Buses in bay area and in SF take forever as well

This is a real problem, and hard to raise without coming off (or being accused) as an insensitive clod.

The number of handicapped and mentally ill / incapacitated users who take public transport is a really big problem when combined with a system's stated need to serve everyone equally.

They take up stopping time, slow the bus down, antagonize other riders, which leads to people not wanting to take the bus, making it seen more and more a transport mode of the dysfunctional. Then depriving it of funding, and into a spiral of decline. On a train or bus, you can't allow 1 person to delay 50 or 200 by multiple minutes during every ride.

People who take public transport (the poor, those with no alternative) are the very people whose time is precious and wasting it with delays is really irresponsible.

There needs to be a way to handle the outlier cases who slow the system down, to maintain confidence and reliability of the system for the bulk majority of passengers.

Well there is: a separate system for the disabled. It's better for the average user--it speeds up the system. It's better for the disabled--the handicapped van comes directly to their house to pick them up and takes them directly to their destination.

Toronto handles this in part with a separate fleet of buses for wheelchair users. It’s effectively a taxi service with the same cost as a bus fare. It’s not perfect, it has to be booked in advance and times / availability can be unpredictable, but it is there.

http://www.ttc.ca/WheelTrans/index.jsp

All regular buses are still wheelchair accessible, but in practice I cannot remember the last time I saw a wheelchair user on a bus.

Does audiobook/podcast work better for public transit? I know it's the only way I consume literature these days as a car (EV but still car) commuter.

It works roughly the same. Depending on the form of transit and the duration other in-flight options become viable as well (nintendo switch, smartphone games, web browsing, sometimes even working on laptop, etc)

So the actual time would be around 20 to 30 minutes, but you didn't plan accordingly for the bus...How is that mass transit's fault?

You can argue that it's not the "fault" of mass transit, but anyway you don't have to plan as much for taking an Uber, giving it an advantage over the bus.

Walking and waiting for connections is inherent to taking the bus. There's nothing gained from planning things tightly when service isn't predictable. In fact, I think it would be a mistake to even think of buses in my city as having a schedule. They just have a rough frequency.

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