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Comment by trothamel | Hacker News Reader

To put this in perspective, in the US, adding a principle arterial in a large ubanized area costs between $9M and $35M per mile. (2016 USD)

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/24cpr/pdf/AppendixA.pdf , page A-9.

Makes me wonder if the right answer will be dedicated surface roads with a mix of buses and self-driving cars on them. It certainly seems like transit is overpriced by comparison.

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The problem with that is it doesn’t solve the surface space problem, i.e. unnecessary city sprawl and reduced walkability due to 30% of space being dedicated to roads

certainly agree. but busses at least dont have the associated surface costs of parking, and you can shunt them into tunnels without having to transfer like seattle used to do

Yes buses are a good compromise, especially since you can close the other lanes and give up the space for humans

Buses are only a good compromise as long as car usage remains low.

For example, in Chicago car ownership has increased as wealthy people move back into the city, and quality of bus service has declined because buses are also stuck in all the congestion that the cars generate. The city has started creating dedicated bus lanes, but they aren't actually improving the situation much because painting the right lane red doesn't actually prevent it from being jammed full of cars waiting to make right turns and double-parked delivery and rideshare vehicles.

I was more thinking of separated bus lanes. The idea being that if you can create a separated railroad in a space, you can create a separated bus lane in that same space for significantly less cost.

The cost for rail and roads is about the same. This is more expensive because it isn't on the ground. Building a road on a bridge is vastly more expensive.

what you can do with bus lanes is take an existing multi-lane road, and turn it into a single lane road + a dedicated bus lane. This has the advantage of making things easier for the bus and also harder for cars. So people start to see they can actually save time by taking the bus

Buses are very hard on pavement, once your bus lane is end of life rail would have been cheaper. A bus also has much less total capacity so if it becomes popular you need to.figure out how to get a train there.

Buses are great for roads where there isn't much traffic. However if traffic is bad you have enough demand that a train is better investment.

I have learned to expect buses to be delayed by up to 45 minutes during commuting times. Trains slow down at peak hours, too, because more people getting on and off means more time stopped in stations, but in my experience it typically only adds about 5 minutes to a 20-minute trip.

I am strongly coming to suspect that a lot of the talk about buses being all you need is fueled more by a sort of NIMBYism than by a fully-informed position. Buses are great and good transit systems need more of them than they do trains, but an ideal urban transit system has both.

Yeah you have to really separate the lanes and go heavy with cameras and fines (at least at the start). One thing that never works is when municipalities are too timid to really close off roads/lanes for buses and instead opt for a bit of paint and "cars can still cross here if they need to"

This is why there's so much of a push for bus rapid transit in my city.

Unfortunately, this has disadvantages as well:

- lack of enforcement for bus lanes

- needing to share travel lanes with personal cars occasionally, making keeping the timetable harder

- low cost also means no long-term permanency. would you want to invest in transit-oriented development around a platform that could go away anytime?

Surface streets are much slower because of pedestrians and intersections. This is more expensive, but also much faster as they don't have to stop for other traffic. When you count how many more people can be on this vs a freeway it is a bargin (assuming people use it )

why can’t “the private sector” compete and do it for less?

They could if there wasn't government interface. NYC subways were built by the private sector and made money until the 1920s when the city didn't allow them to raise fares to cover inflation. Also most private railroads have to pay property taxes which goes to subsides the roads they are competing with.

If you go full libertarian the government should not build roads private rail competes well, but I don't see that happening.

NYC subways were all built by the city, but most were not operated by them. There are privately built subways around the world (especially in Japan), but globally it's a rarity. This isn't a surprise, considering that subways are long term investment (and nobody can get money cheaper than a government), should be built with a long term plan to increase network usefulness (and thus the usage of each individual line) without competition between individual lines [1] and, especially if built outside already dense inner cities, should be accompanied by densification along the line to justify the investment (look at china or the danish finger plan for some examples). The operations can be private (they don't have to be, there's no clear "best way"), but the planning, financing and building should at the very least be heavily overseen by the government.

Outside of already very dense cities which heavily discourage using a car (think large asian cities, not montreal), you won't see newly built underground lines built privately. People aren't as captive today and even in the 1900s londons subways weren't very sound financially as companies.

[1]: Transit systems benefit strongly from integration between lines and modes, as well as making interchanges as painless as possible. This is mostly antithetical to multiple companies building lines inside a single city, which often ends up with little fare-integration and annoying interchanges. This can also happen with government built lines, but is less likely.

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