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Comment by fy20 | Hacker News Reader

> The odd thing is that nearly everyone in the community still drives everywhere, and some own multiple cars. Parking is a disaster and everyone complains about it, but these were all new builds and the buyers all should have known that parking would be limited.

This sounds a lot like communities built during Soviet times. At the time the idea was everything you needed was in your community, and if you ever needed to travel outside you could use public transport.

This worked fine during Soviet times, as they could house people near where they worked, but nowadays that doesn't work. We still have pretty good public transport, but who wants to take two buses for 45 minutes when you can drive for 20 minutes? The green spaces between buildings have been converted to car parking, but it's still not really enough. As such all new developments within the city have to have underground parking.

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In most American cities the bus schedules are like every 15-20 minutes and buses arrive at a near random distribution over that time. So even if traffic is so bad that driving is consistently 40 minutes, the bus-to-stop-to-bus trip is really anywhere from 40-80 minutes depending on your luck. I think people really value being able to estimate their commute and buses add a lot of variance.

That's an entirely self inflicted problem. Just run the busses every 5 or 10 minutes, and have twice as many busses.

Yes but it’s expensive and they already lose money. I think it’s worth it, but I guess most don’t. Maybe self-driving can handle bus routes at least.

The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability.

Planning for coverage allows you to tell individual taxpayers that they're "served" by the transit they help fund, but most will never use it because it's infrequent and the routes take forever to get anywhere. Optimizing for ridership means you focus on a smaller number of straight-line routes that are highly useful and run them at high frequency so that a smaller pool of people come to rely on them and use them regularly, instead of as a last resort.

A primer from transit consultant Jarrett Walker: https://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe

> The issue is that a lot of transit planning is politically motivated and done to maximize "coverage" rather than more meaningful metrics like ridership, usefulness, and profitability.

That's definitely my experience in York Region (north of Toronto for those unfamiliar) and Ottawa. Far too many bus stops, but wait times > 15 minutes _per route_ outside all but the most peak parts of rush-hour. Including on their "bus rapid transit" trunk lines. You almost end up feeling like a patsy every time you decide to take public transit.

Busses are the thing that needs to be self-driving first (after trains, which can already be). Combined with automated passing spots.

The worst about busses is when they come every 30 min, but already arrive full. Or when they have more than one bus for a given timeslot and don't dock the less-full bus first.

I enjoy taking LRT and buses in Waterloo Region, especially with my kids, but I think I go in expecting that there's a tradeoff— longer wait/travel time in exchange for being able to read on my kindle or play games on my phone on the way.

In Seattle, a typical local bus trip costs the transit company around $10, while the ticket costs around $3. Running twice as many buses would result in cost of something like $18-20 per ride, which would make it require even more subsidies than it already receives.

Does that assume that no more people will use the frequent (convenient) bus service than were using the infrequent (much less convenient) service?

The "farebox recovery ratio" for cars is also low: taxes and user fees only pay for only ~50% of the cost of roads, at most. The rest comes out the general fund.

That assumes the buses would be similarly packed. With a denser and reliable schedule you get more people using the bus and it can actually require fewer subsidies.

(In other words: instead of a half-empty bus every 20 minutes you end up with packed buses every 5 min)

I really think the answer to this is to run much smaller and cheaper buses instead of the extremely expensive big ones that only have a few occupants. Shuttle buses cost around $60-70k vs >$600k for a new full size bus. Of course, driver labor is also a significant cost, but I think it's easier to find shuttle bus drivers as it only requires a class B license.

Luxembourg made all public transit free.

Including commuter rail.

And it all runs pretty regularly (bus, tram, train)

If you need twice the time on public transport than in a car, then your public transport is just not very good.

Which country? In both of my post-communism neighborhoods citizens decided to keep all the green areas, and there is a better public transit than it used to have.

Most people still take bus/subway to work, although the car traffic increased.

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