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Comment by riffic | Hacker News Reader

as awful as they were they allowed all sorts of people the ability to get around without owning a personal car. Interurbans[0] allowed people to get from city to city.

All of this has been thrown out and there are all sorts of negative externalities imposed by massive use of automobiles and automobile-centered planning.

[0] Interurbans were rad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interurban

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I don't see how they're better than a bus though. Both need to travel by road. Buses are just easier to swap out and replace as far as I can tell. Also you probably don't need a platform to board a bus.

It does seem to be almost some kind of stigma or classism with buses rather than an actual functional difference in technology. We have electric overhead-line buses and they're just the same as streetcars except you don't need dedicated lanes or putting in rails in the road (which are expensive, limit expansion, and present a real hazard to biking).

Have you ridden the bus in a major US city lately? Safety and hygiene are serious issues, depending on the city and sometimes the specific line. Despite owning a car, I used to ride buses whenever remotely feasible as a point of civic pride. That stopped after a number of encounters with other agressive, combative, smelly, and/or visibly ill passengers. This is all tied up with homelessness, drug abuse, and high crime in urban communities which political polarization has prevented the US from addressing. It's disheartening, as the economic and environmental advantages of public transit are numerous.

This sort of thing is the problem:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220214165552/https://www.seatt...

Okay but this is as fixable on buses as it is on street cars. Street cars may seem cleaner but I think it's because they are generally just kind of impractical for daily commuting and are sort of kept around as a tourist activity in some cities.

Yes, I agree that the problem is fundamental to both modes of transit. If street cars were more common, the same stigma would apply for the same reasons.

> does seem to be almost some kind of stigma or classism with buses rather than an actual functional difference in technology

I attended a talk on the effects of new bus versus light rail routes on property values. The fact that rail is fixed increases them much more. The switching cost is a feature. Nobody moves to a neighbourhood because the city opened a new bus route to it.

Something similar might occur with citizens’ give-a-shit factors. I get furious when my local subway station gets messy. I have no idea which bus routes go by. If a bus route became problematic, I imagine my neighbours would petition to move or cancel it before considering cleaning it up. You can’t do that with laid track.

You can look at it like this: a light rail line is a promise that transit will serve that area for decades to come.

And so when a light rail line comes through, the areas around the stations begin to develop, and quite rapidly, too. An example can be found here: https://goo.gl/maps/kEkn615bp5nUGVmv6 - that trolley stop was literally in the middle of an empty field when it was built, and there wasn't much around on the nearby roads, either.

A bus line gets added to where people already are, and can disappear as quickly as it came; there's no permanency.

The infrastructure necessary for streetcars naturally assigns priority to them on roads, demoting motor vehicles to waiting for streetcar signals and not the other way around. This grants efficiency guarantees assuming no sabotage.

Again, this is about the replacement of streetcars with buses. Anything streetcars did, buses did better and for more people.

The idea that an interurban was superior to a humble Greyhound bus is a bit of wishful historical fiction.

I grew up riding the bus. I still ride the bus. Buses are the unsung hero of public transit. We don't need them reinvented by people who refuse to ride them.

The nugget of my reply you're moving past concerns automobile-centric planning and its extreme toll on the built environment, and those external costs.

https://www.planetizen.com/definition/car-centric-planning

I don't really have time right now but I'm sure you could dive pretty deeply into things like racial prejudices in destroying neighborhoods to build freeways, or in how people who live near busy roads have increased rates of asthma or other health related issues. I really don't have time to do this but I'll leave the convo open for others to jump in if they'd like.

I like buses too but I'm pretty pissed off how short-minded planners were in the early to mid-20th century when they decided to trash some really valuable infra.

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