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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

Mass transit becomes much more useful if all that waiting could be reduced.

Especially when a transfer or two is needed.

One of my favorite counter-intuitive things about mass transit is that well-designed transfers tend to reduce overall travel time for everyone, even without timed transfers:

https://humantransit.org/2009/04/why-transferring-is-good-fo...

People still hate them though, because of the mental effort involved in needing to manage multiple trips with handoff friction.

If you watch stations with transfers, like Naka-meguro, you’ll see that departures are synchronised, especially for express trains. That transfer looks like this [0] with the Hibiya (grey) line on the left, and Toyoko line on the right. You just need to cross the platform, so the transfer doesn’t take any longer than a regular train stop.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Naka-Meguro_Station_Pla...

My first day commuting on the Tokyo subway the train stopped two stations short of my destination. Everyone got off the train and it was clearly being taken out of service so I also got off. I didn't know why the train was out of service so I went to the map to see what my options were. By the time I figured out that my line ended and I needed to transfer to the train across the platform it was pulling away. I was the only one left on a platform that seconds earlier had what seemed like a thousand people. A few minutes later I caught the next train but it was a briefly terrifying experience.

...and now I want to go back to Japan.

The key is to have a regular interval timetable, with "pulses" to allow easy transfers:

http://sydneyferry.blogspot.com/2017/09/six-benefits-of-regu...

The Swiss are masters of this. I recently had a complicated 4-leg journey from Zurich airport, from a mainline InterCity train to a rack railway up a mountain, and every single transfer was timed at exactly 5 minutes.

In Seattle it helps to tell your bus driver you need to make a connection so they can honk at the bus in front of you to tell them not to pull away.

I have never been to Swiss, is every transfer the same difficulty? Having all transfer being exactly the same doesn't make sense to me.

In Japan there is a predefined minimum transfer time between each lines, so the timetable use that to coordinate departure (and if incoming train is late, then the designated connecting train will wait that predefined time for connecting passenger)

Switzerland does something called the takt, which I suppose in English would best translate in cycle.

Swiss timetables are calculated so that trains make stops on a very consistent hourly, half hourly, or quarter hour cycle. Coordination points are at major hubs; every train shows up within the same five minute period, so one can walk down the stairs and head to a different platform to catch any possible number of trains that have stopped at the coordinated time.

The waiting tends to only be about 5 minutes in my experience (10 on the really uncommonly used lines, and only if you just managed to miss one). I've been in worse traffic jams.

That and the scheduling is so unbelievably strict that if I leave at the same time every day, I can make the transfers in my sleep.

Frequency is freedom

- transit advocates

yep, the Seattle light rail has a much less convenient route for me than the busses, but the the train is so much more frequent (and usually isn't 20 minutes late) that I always go for the train

I live in West Seattle so the light rail rarely works for me, even to the airport. Recently I met some friends in the U District and the train was actually a viable option. I was floored by how convenient it was. I can't wait for the network to expand further. Would be nice if the SoDo station had any kind of weather shelter...

There used to be an express route straight from the junction to SeaTac, but it looks like you have to take line c, transfer, and it takes an hour now. It is too bad, since west Seattle is really close to the airport by car.

I live in Ballard, and we are both waiting until the late 2030s for light rail (at least according to the current schedule).

I used to live in the Alaska Junction so that was easier to get around the city. Now I live in Alki so I have to take the 50 to the Junction. I can take the 50 direct to the SoDo rail station so I don't bother with a transfer to the C if I want to catch a train. The train is fine on the way to the airport but I never trust the bus to be there on the way home. The SoDO station has no weather protection so I end up hiring a car every time.

In the summer when the weather is nice I can ride my motorcycle to SeaTac and get free parking, assuming I am only traveling with a backpack.

I think the West Seattle light rail is scheduled to open in 2032 so "only" a decade away. I guess the East Link opens next (this?!) year which will make Bellevue closer but I'm not sure that will do anything for me.

The bus that goes from west Seattle to SeaTac also goes to downtown Bellevue (via Renton), it still might actually be faster than the east link. It’s one of those weird routes I’ve had to rely on since my aunt has lived near the junction since the late 80s (though the 560 started in the 00s) and I stayed at hotels in Bellevue when working for Microsoft.

Weird, I’ll keep that in mind. I almost never need to go to Bellevue anymore and when I do I just drive.

When I worked over there my office was in Mercer Slough so it was easy to drive. Maybe next week I will take the bus over there and have lunch at one of the old favorites.

Ya, there isn’t really a lot of demand for a bus between west Seattle and Bellevue, which makes the route so strange, probably just one of coincidence (both Bellevue and west Seattle need airport routes, and combining them makes for a nice half circle).

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