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Comment by rtlfe | Hacker News Reader

> but it also takes longer to drive anywhere.

Great. Driving should not be convenient in cities.

Driving is just one mode of transportation. Buses can take 3 or 4 times as much time to reach any destination, which is far too much to be a viable alternative to people with a choice.

Ask yourself if you would like to spend 45 minutes aboard the bus system as opposed to 15 min. in a car

> Ask yourself if you would like to spend 45 minutes aboard the bus system as opposed to 15 min. in a car

Ask yourself how the options would be different if cities weren't so focused on cars.

Edit: To be less vague - my choices to get to work are 20 minutes on bike basically for free, 25 minutes via metro for ~$100 a month, or 40 minutes by car for about $500 a month in tolls and parking plus thousands a year for the car itself and maintenance. There's no reason this can't be the norm in the US aside from local politicians deciding they don't want it.

> my choices

You are a very lucky person then, and your situation is by far not the norm, regardless of which city (or country, for that matter) you live in.

> your situation is by far not the norm

Yes I acknowledged this in my previous comment. But it could be normal for every city with some pretty simple changes that no mayor is willing to make.

If a full lane is dedicated to buses instead then that bus would be much faster than the cars stuck in traffic, while moving significantly more people.

Public transit is significantly slower than driving, unless both endpoints are immediately close to a skytrain station.

Idk if you think that statement somehow refutes my point, but it certainly doesn't.

In general, I agree with you. In specific, I drive almost everywhere despite being a supporter of public transit, because I can't afford to live near a skytrain station and the 'last mile' adds an hour to a trip. If we had more buses, and most routes had dedicated lanes, sure. But since we're half-assing it all, more gridlock is just more gridlock. Which, among other things, means more pollution.

edit: compare to a city like Seattle, which has similar weather, hills, density, etc. A notable feature of the transit centers there is a Park & Ride: a place where folks can park their cars (for free, when I lived there) and get into transit. Vancouver does not have anything of the sort. If you want to park somewhere and take transit into the downtown core, there are extremely limited options. So you get too many drivers. Disincentivizing cars usage is great when there is a viable alternative -- in the absence of such an alternative, it's just flagellation for its own sake.

Huh? The only park & ride in Seattle is in Northgate that's pretty new. They're only really seen outside the city in the suburbs

It's not that new, there's been a park&ride there since the 90s[1]. And, my apologies, I'm referring to the greater metropolitan area as Seattle.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northgate_station_(Sound_Tra...

Sure, you're making a reasonable choice given the current reality. But it doesn't have to be that way. When I say driving should be difficult, I don't mean just make the roads worse without any other changes. I mean improve active transportation, transit, and housing density/affordability. In the short term, each improvement here will cause some pain in making driving slightly harder, but after sufficient time the other options will be good enough that nobody will miss driving.

Of course it does. Crappy for cars means crappy for buses which are public transit.

> Crappy for cars means crappy for buses which are public transit.

Not if you give sufficient priority to buses.

Cleveland has an excellent center-running BRT line: https://nacto.org/case-study/euclid-avenue-brt-cleveland-oh/

And NYC is starting to implement busways: https://www1.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/routes/14th-street.shtml

This is not an obvious thing. Cities can (imo should) give more priority to buses in the form of dedicated lanes and traffic signal priority.

Sure, but the commonality is both need roads and at some point they'll be an interaction between cars and buses.

If the situation is crappy for cars, it will impact the buses at some point.

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