Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

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I just did a search to see “what if I had to take public transit to my old office to arrive by 9 AM?”

If I left at 7:09 AM, I could walk 5 minutes, catch a bus, change to a train, change to a another bus, and walk 5 minutes to arrive at 8:18, paying $3.40 one way.

Or I could leave at 8:30, walk 1 minute out to my car, drive 20 minutes, and walk 2 minutes to arrive by 8:55, paying whatever 8.5 miles of car ownership and operation costs me. Is it worth $1.58 (at GSA rate of $0.585/mile) to buy myself 81 minutes at home? Hell yes, it's worth $1.17/hr!

My office is one of the better ones, with a bus stop nearby on both ends. From my prior apartment and office, it would be 7:19 departure, half-mile walk, subway ride, bus ride, and a one mile walk to arrive at 8:32. Or a 24 minute (in morning traffic), 10 mile drive. In both cases, I could leave my house later than I’d have to arrive by public transit and still make that 9 AM meeting.

IMO, to the extent “buses are for poor people”, it’s because they’re terribly inefficient for the riders’ time. Maybe if they were more time-efficient, more people would choose to use them?

Yeah, this is spot on. I'd go further and say it's also a completely undependable mode of transportation, even near bigger cities.

I remember going to a town just north of Boston (Everett) for vacation and every day I took the bus into the main Boston area. It was about a 30 minute ride based on distance but all-in it was a little over an hour when accounting for the time you leave your residence to arriving at your destination -- this was being ~5 minutes from the bus stop too.

That's only accounting for 1 way too, there's that time penalty on the way back as well.

Plus there were times where I watched the bus completely skip stops on the way into the city near the end of the route because it was full, so you could end up waiting +30-45 minutes at the bus stop and this is fully out of your control. I was only there for 5 days and I saw it happen twice (fortunately the route started near where I was) but you could see the the look of disgust on the people's faces when the bus didn't stop for them.

>just north of Boston (Everett) for vacation and every day I took the bus into the main Boston area

FWIW - I live in Everett and commute to downtown Boston (Seaport), so I feel like I should weigh in on this. Bus (either the whole way, or to Wellington subway station transfer) is slow. Bike to Wellington, then subway is still pretty bad because of which where the subway runs if you don't transfer. Subway transfer is slow. Uber is very expensive during rushhour.

By far the fastest, cheapest and most convenient way is for me to motorcycle from my door to the Seaport office where I squeeze between 2 cars to park (for free... haven't been ticketed yet). So that's what I generally do if it's not winter. And this is in a city that actually does have decent public transit compared to most of America.

I don't know if motorcycling is the future or not. It's admittedly more dangerous than driving and requires more coordination. There are safety advancement (automated emergency braking on some brand new KTM's... although that won't help if you overshoot a turn). There are now auto-clutches or non-geared electric motorcycles that are easier for beginners. It would basically take no changes to infrastructure and I've seen it work in Ho Chi Minh (although, again, crashes do occur and are worse when they do).

This is exactly what gets car-centric infrastructure built in the first place. It makes sense.

But then as an American metro area grows, the car-centric solution is sticky and public transit seems impossible to build later. I one-way commute 55 miles by car twice a week and there is no vaguely sensible public transit option. I'm doing rings around the SF Bay Area. The public transit should be better around here by now.

I feel like many public transit systems in the US are designed as radial lines from a city center (constant theta, varying r) and relatively few axial/circular routes (constant r, varying theta).

Car routes (and placement of shops and offices) take advantage of the random route ability of cars to specifically avoid the downtown congestion, enshrining the “quick and convenient to drive from one suburb to the neighboring suburb, but incredibly painful to use public transit for that trip”.

Buses suffer a time penalty naturally along their route, but if you add a “take a bus in a direction you don’t want to go, change buses, take that bus back-tracking the wasted motion, and only then get closer to your destination”, it’s pretty much bound to suck.

In Japan and Europe, I’ve seen more axial service lines and/or more of a mesh covering the areas rather than a bicycle spokes looking transit map.

It isn't impossible. People would be more than happy to use public transit for e.g. commuting, if metro made public transit for commuting.

I wouldn't mind the HOV lane being buses-only and having ramps to bused-only lanes/roads if it also meant busses were faster and highways only needed 2 lanes of travel lanes instead of 4+.

The problem is there's no money in doing it until you get enough ridership, and your not going to get ridership from "tweaking" the routes like most cities try. And no one wants to spend more tax money on the homeless transportation plan.

It's just a shitshow, and there won't be improvement until the chicken and egg cycle can be broken.

I always say that people only choose public transit over driving when it's (A) cheaper, (B) faster, OR (C) more practical. And ideally it needs to be two or even three of those.

In the US, it's pretty rare that any of those three are ever satisfied outside of major urban cores.

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