Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

>drive

There is your problem. Personal automobiles aren't a feasible method of transportation past a certain population density.

View on HN

Buses also are useless. Thry routinely waste you hours due to their slowness and inconsistency.

The choices really are two: subway (or any dedicated rail thing) or car.

Buses are only slow and inconsistent because of cars.

Exactly, a bus that doesn't have its own lane is a failure, as they get stuck in traffic it'll always strictly slower than cars. So people—if they can help it—drive cars, making more traffic, making buses slower, causing people to prefer more cars...

While if they run in dedicated lanes there is a counterbalance: the more people drive the worse traffic is, making the bus a comparatively better option, making people drive less... :)

Not true. In my city in sweden they underpay drivers, and don't want to pay for them to do the bus driving course. So they have no drivers… so busses don't show up. So when they show up they might already be full.

beyond lack of dedicated lanes, the schedules in L.A. are just terrible. Most run hourly and don't really run late.

Buses can be very dependable and cheaper than rail if they run in dedicated bus lanes.

You’re right that they aren’t much use if they get stuck in the same traffic as everyone else.

Not many places have room for an extra lane that is only used a tiny percentage of the time

That "tiny percentage of the time" is roughly once every 15 minutes when done well, and transports (in my city) roughly 150 people during rush hour.

Every bus lane you build is ~800 cars you don't have to deal with in traffic, assuming an approximately two hour rush hour

Or get this, a bike (in case you live under ~10 km away). Just rolls the gym hours into the commute for double efficiency, and you can be always on time since traffic can't really affect you.

Not really sure how this is possible unless there are dedicated bike paths that use different roads than what the cars use. Otherwise, bikes get stuck at intersections just like cars do except for the asshats that think traffic rules do not apply bicycles causing more problems. Dedicated paths are only slightly less logistically than rail to install after roads have already been in use.

There are dedicated bike paths, separate from cars. Where they cross each other, there are traffic controls. And, as I understand it, in Amsterdam at least, any collision between a car and a cyclist is automatically the car driver’s fault: so drivers are very careful.

These countries have been doing this for a long time.

I bike every day to work because I finally live in a place where there's bike paths/roads almost everywhere there's car roads.

I would never dare to do so where I lived before: I'd almost certainly be a blob of blood and guts splattered on the road by now.

It's infuriating how little thought is given to anything that is not a road for The Car. Billions of taxpayer money spent on massive road construction and repair but god forbid we build bike paths for 1/20th of the cost and 1/100th of the upkeep.

The majority of people can't rely on biking. They're too old, too fat, the weather is bad, or too hot, or too cold, they're going too far, or they have to take two kids somewhere and pick up groceries, etc.

If biking works for you, where you are, great. But it's at best a pretty small part of the solution.

You're looking at it wrong. The mere fact that you have to chauffer your kids around everywhere until they're old enough to drive is a consequence of the fact that everything revolves around the car, as is the fact that you have to shop on a big box 10 miles away instead of walking 5mins to the store.

In the Netherlands kids bike everywhere with their friends, because it's safe and comfortable to do so. If they want to play sports they grab their bikes and go, they don't have to sit in traffic for 45mins in the back of their parents SUV. The Netherlands also has some of the happiest children on earth according to studies. Go figure :)

glad the Netherlands are nice like that. I'm in Los Angeles and it's dangerous living downtown with kids. Even if things are walkable I would never let my theoretical kids walk around on the streets. There's a lot more than urban planning that needs to be fixed before a walkable city becomes a reality here.

Agreed on that point, but very few places in the US—safe or unsafe—are walkable. Even the safest upper middle class suburb is totally untraversable without a car. So the problem clearly isn't just crime.

And bring a change of clothes and find a shower at the office for when you show up all sweaty.

People seriously overestimate how sweaty you get if you use a tiny bit of antiperspirant and don't drive like a maniac.

You are seriously underestimating the amount of sweating a normal, healthy man does if he trained consistently for some time and his body learned to quickly adapt to minimal physical stress (heck, I sweat profusely even if I merely slowly walk). Let alone if there are any kinds of hills.

TIL, I've looked it up and apparently you're right. The more fit someone is, the more they sweat. That's so counterintuitive tbh, I would've thought that it would be the opposite since you don't need to strain as much, but I guess there must be some baseline energy use and more muscle mass equals more heating, plus a faster learned cooling response.

Ironically that makes cycling a much better choice for people who aren't fit. Finally something where being lazy gives you an advantage.

The better performance of a fit person is partly explained by more muscles (incl. heart), but a significant part of performance boost is the fact that body autoregulates (e.g. by sweating and keeping the temperature perfect for activity, instead of letting body overheat, which results in a performance drop) itself so much better.

Raising the heart rate much faster is also part of a better self-regulation of a fit person.

Buses utilize the same roads/infrastructure the personal cars do which is a huge advantage for scaling. Subway/rail requires dedicated rights of way, are very expensive to scale, require much more money for the smaller/less used end product.

Buses are great as long as providing a good level of service is a priority for transportation planners.

I think they're right to complain that cities should be fixing that by building the public transportation more?

Or, heaven forbid, make living near office affordable.

ironically enough, if living near the office was affordable then there wouldn't be so many RTO mandates. Real estate are on their death throes trying to recover their tax deals over this

But that doesn't seem like what they're suggesting:

> congested, underbuilt roads

I'm not picky about the solution and of course it's a complex issue.

- If a safe, reliable bus or train went to and from close to my house to close to the office, I'd take it. Key is safe and reliable.

- If the roads were designed with enough capacity and planning in mind such that groups of vehicles are not stuck driving 15 MPH on a 70 MPH speed limit stretch of highway for 30 minutes or longer every day, that'd be fine.

- If zoning laws/tax laws/whatever were such that it would be easier to build away from yet close to city centers and have smaller or additional offices closer to where people live, that'd work for me.

- If city apartments were in reach costwise or even somehow subsidized by my employer in an equitable way (don't really know how that would look), and crime was not an issue, I would consider moving within walking distance of my workplace.

I'm just curious, what about your local bus and/or train is not safe? Do you mean it could crash at any moment? Or it is usually full of unsavoury characters?

I don't have a local bus or train, what I provided were examples.

> Do you mean it could crash at any moment? Or it is usually full of unsavoury characters?

Both. Buses/trains should be secure places and properly maintained at all times.

Probably the latter. There doesn't tend to be good enforcement of social norms and etiquette on public transit.

Homeless people in my area (LA). I don't blame them individually at all, it's a societal issue that some at best got kicked out of their living spaces when rent doubled in the last 5 years. Or at worst were fed fentanyl and had their lives ruined just to line the pockets of some skeevy "medical company" (thank goodness they are having the books thrown at them).

But regardless of fault, they aren't mostly just some people down on luck that at best ask for some change like in my childhood. enough are dangerous, unpredictable, and mentally unwell that public transportation is a non-trivial risk here.

Unfortunately it’s not possible to build roads “with enough capacity” in major cities. Beyond a certain point, the geometry of space does not allow enough capacity to satisfy the needs, because growing the roads by enough to have capacity requires spreading things further apart, which means more traffic must go further, which means more cars on the road, and more lanes means more merging and lane-changing, which slows things down further.

> If the roads were designed with enough capacity and planning in mind such that groups of vehicles are not stuck driving 15 MPH on a 70 MPH speed limit stretch of highway for 30 minutes or longer every day, that'd be fine.

If you build that, then more people see that there is a nice quick road between where they work and a place where they can buy a more affordable home. The road gains more commuters until the congestion returns.

Your other suggestions are more scalable. If housing is expensive, there should be more, denser housing. If commutes are long, we should be zoning such that houses can be near workplaces, and conversely workplaces can be near housing.

If you create pockets of higher density housing and workplaces, instead of only building large swaths of low density single-family residential, you can preserve the options to live in a city, a walkable town center, or a more quiet location, while still having dense enough groupings to make transit lines viable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com