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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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"

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.

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