Hacker News Reader

Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

Public transit that is not subway on rails suck big time.

I have wasted thousands of hours waiting for the bus that either came early, or is late, under 100 degrees of sun and under snowstorms. Add to that the <10mph average speed that a typical bus that stops every 2 minutes achieves, and a 2mile commute can last easily 45 minutes.

I have walked thousands of miles because the bus stops do not align with my destinations.

Since I got a car and live in the suburbs, I pay much lower housing costs, I start exactly 20’ before my punch in time, I park under my office building and I am never late (maybe 1/300 due to an accident). Oh and I always arrive dry.

Commuting in general is bad. Commuting by bus is one of the worst things that us peasants have to deal with on a daily basis.

View on HN

Public bus systems can be good; most cities and municipalities simply don't bother to make it so (because "polite society" drives everywhere).

NYC's buses have their own flaws, but they demonstrate many of the necessary conditions for success: dedicated bus lanes, split-service (local and express on the same route, with corresponding bus sizes), and multimodal connections (light rail, streetcars, subways). This is all in contrast to how many bus networks in the US operate: they pick you up on the side of the highway, drive with the rest of traffic, and drop you off on either the highway or in a bus depot in the middle of nowhere.

It's definitely a perception issue that's borne from some reality. Having taken buses in a few cities, I can say some buses were perfectly fine, clean, and felt dignified to ride. A utility of the commons. Some other cities, it felt like taking a vandalized back alley vending machine to work.

Sounds pretty good, if you overlook people smoking meth or crack, publicly urinating and defecating on the bus, violence, etc. Not unique to buses for sure. Thanks, but I'll keep my "polite society" vehicle and properly planned highways in Orange County.

You don't see that during rush hour.

I have never once seen any of these on a public bus, either in my city or others. What you're describing sounds like a civic problem where you live, not some kind of intrinsic quality of public transportation.

Definitely saw a foilie in use on the bus yesterday evening.

The issue is that my city promotes itself as a good example of public transit and receives accolades from public transit folks, and naive people take it as archetypal.

I’ve lived in 3 Canadian cities and 1 major US city. Regularly used public transit in all of them. Used transit around both Canada and the US as a tourist, plus a few locations in Europe, Australia.

For any location where I was using it for more than a week I’ve encountered something unpleasant. Various degrees and extremes, but in my experience (not OP) it certainly seems to be intrinsic to public transit.

Some of these could arguably be a net good (it’s much better that the drunk is on the bus rather than driving himself!) and I continue to prefer transit over driving myself when available, but I would never deny that it’s not always an enjoyable experience

To be fair: I've seen plenty of unpleasant things on public transport. Subways, in particular, are a different world from public buses in NYC.

When I think about these things, I interrogate my frame of reference. At least for the US, the most appropriate contrast is the road trips I've taken, during which I saw no shortage of drunk drivers and general mishegaas at gas stations and rest stops.

Totally agree. But to run with your frame of reference point if I may, it’s also important to look at those events from other’s POV. I’m a larger, older man. What I find mildly uncomfortable on a late night bus alone might feel absolutely dangerous for my wife. Or someone with disabilities, etc.

Yeah, that's a great point, and a source of bias. On top of that, it would be a real contortion for me to claim that NYC's public transit is even remotely accommodating to people with disabilities.

Same. I've travelled by bus in many cities on three continents and never experienced anything like that. The worst bus I've been on was in San Francisco but even that was pretty clean and decent.

I haven't owned a car for three years and public transit has been fine most of the time, but I live in a city that prioritises public transit. On the rare occasion that I can't get a bus somewhere there is a car sharing service I can fall back on.

Sounds like they need to put toilets on the bus. People poop, it's normal.

> Thanks, but I'll keep my "polite society" vehicle and properly planned highways in Orange County.

Ah yes, my fondest memories of the US are passing the dead and the dying in their little metal boxes after the long backup of other funeral gazers.

Yeah, same in Chicago, really the same as mass transit anywhere: You need density to make it work. My little town of under 100K population tries to do city bus services but it's a joke. Most routes run once or twice an hour which is not often enough to be convenient. Busses drive around empty or with one or two riders. It's a service that costs millions of dollars a year to operate and is used by a tiny minority of the people. It's a sacred cow though.

Sounds like the problem is cost. Once we can eliminate the salary of the driver with autonomous buses, it will be much easier to run more of them.

Taking the bus to Javits Center will quickly show how even NY with their subways and buses fall short. I ended up walking about 10 NY city blocks b/c the bus wasn't running.

I won't excuse Javits: they built it in one of the most inconvenient neighborhoods in Manhattan for public transit (presumably because it's a convention center, meaning that most of the expected traffic is out-of-towners staying at nearby hotels). That being said, the 7 to Hudson Yards is (IME) the best way to get there, and is among the more reliable subway services.

Edit: That being said, 10 city blocks is half a mile. That's an ordinary walk in NYC.

> because "polite society" drives everywhere

In other words, because they are currently bad.

Chicken and egg; we've (in the US) culturally encoded public transport as inconvenient, inefficient, and for "poor people," all but ensuring that it remains that way. Other parts of the world don't have that stigma, and are better off for it.

No, public transit systems can only be good on paper. Then they get implemented, the fares are held artificially low for equity reasons, bums move in, polite society abandons the system and it turns into a rolling cesspool. Every time.

My private car however has only my germs. No drugs. No needles. No piss. No stinky bums laying across the seats. My music. Air conditioning. Goes where I want, when I want it.

The only difference is cost. My private car costs me a lot. Your public transit dream also cost ME a lot.

As evidenced by functioning public transport virtually everywhere else in the world: the things you're describing are civic problems, not problems with public transit. It's no particular coincidence that the US, with its car-dominated culture, has more civic problems on public transit than just about any other nation.

> Your public transit dream also cost ME a lot.

Are you operating under the misapprehension that my local, state, and federal taxes don't pay for your roads? We can play that game all day, but I don't think it's going to be a very fruitful one. And that's before we even get to the question of externalities, via which your car costs me a great deal.

> No, public transit systems can only be good on paper. Then they get implemented, the fares are held artificially low for equity reasons, bums move in, polite society abandons the system and it turns into a rolling cesspool. Every time.

Have you been to London? Paris? Zurich?

I'm trying to understand the basis for your absolutism and pessimism. In those cities, polite society definitely hasn't abandoned the public transit systems; at least not when I had been.

I am a resident of Bengaluru. We have a city bus service that is quite good, has air conditioning on some routes, and is quite cheap (I spend about 50c to go about 25km).

Our government subsidises the operations of BMTC, so it is cheap.

The central government spent a whole lot of money in cleaning up the country, and I am glad to report that a lot of changes did take place.

All things considered, our cost of living is lower, we try to ensure that there are not too many homeless folks, so that is there.

I used to commute by bus rapid transit. It was great. The buses were every 5-10 minutes during peak times, the stations and website gave spot on updates, the air conditioning always worked, the buses were clean, you had internet the whole way and generally everyone could find seating. When there was an accident or road construction the bus... went around it.

When I moved to a subway-oriented city the trains were a bit more frequent and not subject to street traffic, but they were more crowded, the internet/phone service regularly failed; and when things went wrong, they REALLY went wrong, which occurred monthly. A 15 minute ride turning into hot crowded 1h+ mess was not uncommon. And the regular track and station closures created all sorts of chaos that I never dealt with on the bus.

Bus rapid transit is one of the most underrated modes of transportation and light rail easily the most overrated, IMO. It's not bad, but it has captured the public's attention in an unhealthy way.

Of course, now I work from home and walk to about 50% of the places I need to go, even in the deep suburbs.

> Bus rapid transit is one of the most underrated modes of transportation and light rail easily the most overrated

Bus rapid transit is great and vastly cheaper than anything on rails upfront, but even really well designed ones like Curitiba's one has lower capacity (albeit at a higher frequency, in their case). However until electric buses become the norm BRT has a few other massive downsides - pollution, noise, maintenance, emissions.

Overall, each transportation method (bike, e-scooter, BRT, regular buses, trolleybuses, trams, light rail, heavy rail, commuter rail, car) has it's own set of advantages and disadvantages, and they are often location and urban design specific. The best public transit systems are those with a mix that works for them.

The biggest problem with most bus systems is that they use the same roads as private traffic. This means that for any individual person taking the car is faster than taking the bus. Of course all of these people who live in car-dependent suburbs already have a car so the additional cost to drive is low and they will get there faster and arguably more comfortable (sure, you can't read a book but you have your own personal environment). The end result is that the roads are full, need constant expansion and no one takes the bus.

Subways on rail are often faster than driving so they tend to be incredibly popular and greatly reduce traffic on the road. But subways on rails are not the only way to ensure that public transit is fast.

> a 2mile commute can last easily 45 minutes.

at 10mph average, which includes stops, I doubt a 2 mile commute could take 45 minutes. It should take... 12 minutes. Let's call it 15.

> I have walked thousands of miles because the bus stops do not align with my destinations.

It's probably good for your health.

Seriously, now: I get your point. The

> under 100 degrees of sun and under snowstorms

is the worst part, I guess.

I commuted by bus only occasionally in my life, and I've luckily been telecommuting for the past ~15 years or so. But I can relate.

You don't take the bus, it probably is 45mins. You are not including time walking to/from the bus stop at both ends. Time spent waiting for the bus- this is probably the biggest one. Time for people getting on and off at bus stops and paying- in some places, for example in London, there are stops every couple of hundred meters on the route, it is kind of ridiculous.

Having them close together is a massive help to people with mobility issue, bags, and /or small children. TFL policy is to reduce journey times by keeping stops less than five minutes’ from homes, and closer in town centres. The buses also won’t normally stop unless there is someone boarding or alighting.

> I doubt a 2 mile commute could take 45 minutes. It should take... 12 minutes. Let's call it 15.

We can look this up. For instance, going from somewhere random in Tribeca to a random bar 2 miles away is a 42 minute walk or a 37-42 minute bus ride (with 1 change, with busses running every 15 minutes). This is a good example of a failure mode if the bus doesn't go exactly where you want it to.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/''/40.7237156,-73.9777888/@4...

What if you do a perfect straight line single bus for 2 miles from Tribeca it's still 24 minutes, with busses every 15 minutes, so between 24-39 minutes.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/''/40.7437799,-73.9917792/@4...

The subway option is much faster (original comment is comparing busses to subways)

> Public transit that is not subway on rails suck big time.

Are you talking about the US? I found buses to work quite well in France, Japan, London, Switzerland. Even in the US, they work fine in dense areas.

In Eastern Europe they are pretty good, moving like 80% of public. Way faster than 10mph, I couldn't beat it by bicycle (I tried) on most routes.

> Public transit that is not subway on rails suck big time.

Bus Rapid Transit called. It promised 95% of the raw speed and 4x the service frequency at 25% of the cost.

Bus Rapid Transit calls when you are proposing a subway or a tram, promising great things at a low price. After you agree to settle for a shinier bus line instead of the nice, fast, reliable transit system you originally wanted, the value engineers get to work compromising the design, and you end up with... another bus route. Maybe it has a different color of paint this time.

It sounds like you were just going to end up with a mediocre, compromised system anyway. "Light rail" is still bringing us things like the Santa Clara VTA system at best, and the Virginia Beach "Tide" at its worst. Likewise cities with "real" subways include such luminaries as Atlanta and Miami. Have you tried to take the metro system in Miami?

Both Seattle, WA and Ottawa, ON built out dedicated BRT infrastructure that was later repurposed for light rail. So I wouldn’t say it’s always just a new coat of paint.

The downtown Seattle transit tunnel is an unusual beast; it was built from the start as a hybrid bus and rail system, though the city did not yet have any plan to build a train network. The builders designed the tunnel and its stations for train service and laid tracks anyway, expecting they would eventually be needed.

So... where BRT is a proposal to save money on transit by building cheaper infrastructure - a promise it can always keep, since bus service can be degraded as far as necessary to fit a budget - the DSTT project instead used the promise of future rail service as a motivation to spend more money on transit, building better infrastructure than they actually needed at the time.

The city of <50k residents from the article is never going to have a subway system on rails. This is a solution for small cities that replaces the terrible bus service you've experienced. The microtransit system described specifically eliminates the bus stops that you cite as drawbacks.

Public bus transit and private car transit are inherently in conflict. You basically can't run them on the same streets and expect the bus to not suck.

You could, of course, run the bus in a dedicated, separate right-of-way to solve that problem. But like you said, just build rail at that point

> You basically can't run them on the same streets and expect the bus to not suck.

That's just nonsense or specific to some areas. I spent a couple of hours on the Stagecoach buses today travelling from Paignton to Kinsgwear and then Dartmouth to Totnes and back to Paignton. The same journey by car would probably have been more expensive because of the cost of parking the car in busy tourist towns and it wouldn't have been much quicker. Some of the roads are barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other yet the buses still keep to their timetable.

Quite. Bus schedulers are very well informed on traffic patterns and account for this. Some days when things are faster then usual this means they will ask drivers to stop for a bit in order to avoid running early.

Dedicated lanes are still cheaper than an entirely new right of way such as transitway, tunnel, or above grade upper deck road.

That sounds specific to where you live. In London the buses are amazing.

Why is rail any different? If one train goes down on a subway line, all of the trains after it are pretty much stuck too. A few lines can sometimes route around pain, but that's kind of rare.

In general, public transportation is just pretty inconvenient. (Now, I like walking so it's a bonus for me, but I can see how it's not for everyone.)

I still remember when I as a full time public transit commuter well into my adulthood. When new friends who didn't own cars would begin spending significant time with me we'd have to naturally public transit around town. Many of these individuals never really spent significant time outside of a car or a building having to stand around waiting outdoors. This became obvious when the weather got rough in winter and it was revealed they didn't own a proper coat to spend time freezing outside. I've lent out many of my extra coats in these situations.

Except in Switzerland.

You know it's not by accident, right?

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

Under "Counterarguments" section it's been argued that the streetcar lines were already on a downward decline by the time GM bought them, so blaming GM seems tenuous.

US streetcar lines were in the 'transit death spiral' in no small part because they were largely built before cars were common, and became dramatically slower once car traffic started obstructing their right-of-way, which they were usually required by contract to maintain.

(There were many other factors, including their overexpansion during a securities bubble and that their concessions were usually for a 'nickel fare' with no inflation adjustment, which lead to declining real revenue over time)

Streetcars, combining the routing inflexibility of trains with the vulnerability to traffic of busses. We could have saved them if we'd banned cars from city centers and you can argue that if you want to but it wasn't GM that did them in.

"Vulnerability to traffic" can be alternately expressed as "right of way violated by individual cars." The history of the decline of streetcars in the US is the history of automotive companies convincing the public that cars take priority over all other forms of transportation, consequences for the commons be damned.

The same reason they invented the crime of “jaywalking”.

I’d argue Jaywalking is probably one of biggest reasons traffic in India is so chaotic.

People simply walk on the street and it wrecks traffic flow, reducing all flow to stop and go with accompanying honking.

I, for one, wish jaywalking were treated as a crime on Indian streets.

Maybe then we’d fight to take back the pavements currently used by hawkers and for parking.

Side note: how does one reverse the tragedy of the commons? How do we make people treat roads and public areas like a shared resource?

Some European cities, especially in the Netherlands, found a solution, and I think it works quite well.

You mean bikes? India is usually too hot to cycle.

Here’s another statistic which amazed me when I first heard - apparently 70% of working age Mumbaikars (Mumbai-ites?) walk to work.

That could be another reason why there are so many people on the road all the time.

I think they probably meant the Netherlands' general urban planning principles. Cycling access is one small part, but there are lots of other things that can be copied: making it impractical to drive in city centers, restricting commercial traffic to highways and off-hours stops, fully separating pedestrian and cycling crossings, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com