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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

There is this story that nobody takes the bus in L.A. but when I go there and ride the bus the bus is always full. It is not bad at all to ride the bus from Beverly Hills to Hollywood but the bus does not stop at Rodeo Drive, you have to pick it up on the next street over.

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Surprised to hear the bus is always full. I took the Metrolink train from Union Station to San Bernardino recently, during an hour when people ought to be going home from work, and it was spookily empty. The one single other passenger in sight told me it was usually so empty. I thought of how crazy it was to offer this huge rail infrastructure - which really did seem cheap and convenient - for so few people to use.

You have to provide public transport infrastructure _first_ if you want people to use it. You can't get rid of your car in the hope that 8 months down the line you can get a train; unless your boss is happy for you not physically attending work for 8 months, at least.

That line had over 10k daily riders in 2019, before people stopped commuting to office jobs and it dropped to about 1500. https://metrolinktrains.com/globalassets/about/agency/facts-...

It's still less than half its previous average at 4700 daily riders now. https://metrolinktrains.com/globalassets/about/agency/facts-...

that is honestly very little, barcelona is a lot less populated (1.5M) and even during non-tourist season we get 2 million riders per day (not deduped and people coming from nearby areas). I dont have stats of any particular line, but dividing that between the approx number of routes gives you about 50k riders per line. Some routes will have less, some routes will have way more (particularly subway lines)

>There is this story that nobody takes the bus in L.A. but when I go there and ride the bus the bus is always full

By that they mean "no middle class and up white person takes the bus".

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