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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

> So its like a more expensive version of public transportation,

Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares. The true cost of a bus ride can be many times the ticket price. If the services doesn't provide enough value for the service, let the customer decide.

> that also causes more traffic congestion and pollution because you've got a ton of cars on the road doing the job of a single bus/trolley/train

Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).

Public transit agencies want to outlaw services like Chariot (https://sf.curbed.com/2019/1/10/18177528/chariot-san-francis...) because they don't want the competition.

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Your criticism of buses is correct only if there is only the driver on board. Your typical large bus route has more than enough riders (except at the end where they are turning around) to more than make up for all the problems buses cause. You just don't see how much worse traffic / pollution would be if those people were driving a car instead.

Buses are very efficient at peak times, but run mostly empty the rest of the day. Better to have a system that can scale with demand.

A mostly empty bus still generally has more than enough people to be more efficient than private cars (which is the real competition). And a mostly empty bus all day means people can trust it should something happen that makes them take an off-peak trip.

Which is to say a mostly empty bus scales down very well. The limits to scaling a bus are up not down - a problem more cities should have.

Buses can scale with demand and often do. This is a function of planning and has little to do with the mechanism of public vs private ownership.

Transit agencies are also capable of demand response. For example, you'll see more articulated busses at peak times in Austin. Also, large transit stops are used as queues to maintain consistent headways.

A great example of this in action happens each year for the Austin City Limits Festival [1]. A few routes have substantially more busses during those two weekends to deal with a couple hundred thousand extra passengers.

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[1] -- https://support.aclfestival.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405461498...

Yes. Buses are great at scaling up (much better than trains) for special events. They are bad at scaling down. A bus with less than a van-full of passengers is a huge waste of resources and roads space. In times of low utilization, buses shouldn't be blindly running their routes.

A bus route needs to run reliably all the time so that people can depend on it. There is little difference in the cost of running a large vs small bus so running a large bus all the time is almost always the best answer. And cities around the world discover that running reliable all day service means that you end up with more than enough passengers all day as to be worth it.

In wealthy countries 2/3 of public transit costs is hiring drivers. Peak demand determines how many drivers and buses you need. If vehicles are completely filled customers will have to wait for the next one. So using smaller vehicles don’t save as much money as one would think.

Buses are a service to take you from point A to point B. Your taxes fund them. It is a cost center. I don’t know why people think it must continually generate profit. A good transit system should be able to move people and generally helps stimulate local economy. The better the service, more people use it. Most buses and trains are electric now too, so they don’t pollute either.

> Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares. The true cost of a bus ride can be many times the ticket price. If the services doesn't provide enough value for the service, let the customer decide.

What about the true cost of cars? I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership, including the storage of vehicles in public spaces. The various externalities — pollution, congestion, deaths, excess asphalt — are not included in the true cost of private car ownership.

>I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership

You still rely on roads, either for cars driven by other people to take you places or to service you with package delivery and fire and medical services at a minimum.

I rely on mass transit or walking for most of my transportation, so it is very rare for me to be driven in a car. Maybe 2 - 4 trips/month in a Waymo, and a monthly trip to Costco. Everything else is done on foot or transit, including thrice weekly commute and weekly grocery shopping.

I have no problem with roads in the abstract for public services, including for fire protection and buses. I do have a problem with using my taxes to subsidize private car ownership. Again, why should I help pay for someone to store their private vehicle on city streets? I also have a problem with all the externalities of private car ownership that make me less safe.

Yes, transit is subsidized in the US. However, I won’t ignore the fact that private car-ownership is just as heavily subsidized - if not more so — as mass transit. If we are having a conversation about the efficiency of one form of transportation over another, we need to look at them both through the same lens.

It's true that there is tax money that is spent on infrastructure to support cars, but taxes are also collected from the use of cars through gas taxes and annual registration fees. If you include those taxes and fees it's not obvious how much other taxes are used to subsidize cars.

It will be different in each state, since each state imposes different levels of gas taxes and has different registration fees.

Fuel tax and registration only covers half the cost of roads. Then there’s the cost of all the land for parking. In many cities half of downtown is parking.

>In many cities half of downtown is parking.

Sure but it's rarely free parking, and when it is, it's generally because the property owners are essentially paying for it.

>private car-ownership is just as heavily subsidized - if not more so — as mass transit.

I don't believe that's true.

It's likely correct that mass transit is directly subsidized at a greater percentage than any specific aspect of private car ownership. However, there are significant indirect subsidies due to the centrality of private cars that not only dwarf transit subsidies, but simultaneously make transit less economical.

A simple example is minimum requirements for parking. Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up. This means less people in catchment areas for different types of transit.

>Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up.

Sure but that's not a subsidy being borne by tax payers, that's being paid by people that want cars to be at their house or business. I suppose you have some argument that the legally required minimums might be more than necessary but generally they reflect the need as it exists, not what we want it to bed. Allowing businesses to not have to supply parking wouldn't force people to use mass transit, it'd just force them to park further away in a space not paid for by the business they are frequenting.

No - it is a subsidy to make life more convenient than either the purchaser or shop is willing to pay for. If the shop needs people to arrive in cars, then it’s worth it to them to put in parking.

And parking minimums are constantly criticized for being higher than necessary. How could they possibly not be higher than necessary in a significant percentage of use cases, when they don’t allow anyone to say “we don’t serve people who arrive at my locavore socialist workers co-op by car so we don’t need parking” - instead they get the same amount of parking as any other restaurant, which is too much.

> Sure but that's not a subsidy being borne by tax payers

When the cost is being borne by every single tax payer, then it's functionally equivalent.

Cars are easily one of the most subsidies goods in America. It's absolutely absurd how many trillions of dollars we dump into making automobiles work, even if they make no sense.

Now do parking minimums and how much they increase the cost of rent for business and residential properties

Strong agree, we need to keep central planners from meddling with what would naturally be built.

What does that mean? What would a city look like that was “naturally built”? How are roads laid out? What about sewage and water? How do police, fire, schools, and hospitals get located and built? Can a person build a slaughter house in the middle of a residential neighborhood?

Which city is more natural — New York or Houston — and why?

> What would a city look like that was “naturally built”?

Urban sprawl, and it's fucking awful.

Having driven around Houston trust me, nobody wants a city like that. Cities should be centrally planned, because otherwise you just expand out forever in pursuit of cheaper and cheaper land. Until you have to drive 2 hours to get from one side of town to the other.

But your logic assumes first designing for cars, then looking at transport. A ton of infrastructure and design is subsidized for the convenience of cars, to the detriment of all other options. Putting in dedicated bus lanes make thing inefficient for cars abut make buses much faster. A bus that is only a quarter full (10-12 people) takes 3 to 4 times less space than the cars it replaces, and that is just bumper to bumper. With safe following distance, that is at least 8 times the space on the road for those cars driving. One diesel engine is better than 10+ car engines. Ten people moving by bus are 10 parking spaces we don’t need for the cars, which means you can build closer together and avoid sprawling parking lots, which means you can walk between things easier. In lower speed areas, bus lanes can be shared by bikes (or have bike lanes next to bus lanes instead of traffic lanes), which is a lot better than being right up next to the constant flow of distracted drivers.

All those extra roads and extra parking spaces and extra land are subsidized for cars.

This is all wrong. At any given moment, the average bus will replace at least a dozen cars, so a bus "blocking a right turn" for a few seconds is significantly less of an obstacle than a dozen or more cars in that lane.

Buses make slow left turns, yes. But not much slower than normal cars, and it's far more likely that you'll miss a left turn due to a normal driver staring at Instagram on their phone instead of watching for the green turn signal.

Buses do not take up more than their lane in the U.S. Also, buses and bus stops were around before bike lanes, which (being generous) serve 1/100,000th as many people.

One diesel-powered bus still pollutes less than the vehicles it replaces.

And finally, Chariot wasn't outlawed. It just couldn't compete on the basis of real-world economics even though it was charging a multiple of what Muni charged for the same routes. To put it bluntly: the private company so inefficient that it couldn't make the numbers work even charging 5x what the public agency was charging. (SF did suspend Chariot for a weekin 2017 because Chariot was found to have been employing drivers without licenses.)

> the private company so inefficient that it couldn't make the numbers work even charging 5x what the public agency was charging.

That's not surprising because the public agency is mostly tax supported. Fares never reflect the true cost of the ride on public transportation.

personal vehicles are also massively subsidized. the price of gas, registration, insurance, parking, purchasing, etc don’t reflective of their true cost

to a degree but most of those things you've mentioned, the owners do pay the full cost of.

I posted about this above [1]. But the gist is that the most significant subsidies for private car ownership are indirect like parking minimums.

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[1] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43988252

>Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares.

As a homeowner this is abundantly clear by looking at your tax bill, and something that I suspect renters don't think about. I don't grumble much about paying my taxes, but when you look at the breakdown, it's insane how much goes to things I don't personally use or even get much benefit out of. I like the idea of public transit, but the design of the system in my area seems to be to get the poor where they need to go, not as an alternative transport method for people who can afford private vehicles.

>Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).

They also something like 20x the damage to roads that cars and trucks do because of the way the weight is transferred to the axels. I think buses are important, but a lot of negatives are ignored because they are absorbed by the overall system.

> get the poor where they need to go

The poor would probably be much happier with a $250 Uber voucher than a bus pass.

> They also something like 20x the damage to roads that cars

This is very evident in my city where they had to install huge concrete pads at every bus stop because of the deep ruts and potholes busses cause when they start and stop.

In my city a $250 Uber voucher wouldn't go very far, I could take maybe 8 or 9 meaningful trips with that amount of money.

> but the design of the system in my area seems to be to get the poor where they need to go

I don’t understand… do you not go to places where the poor go? Is there no transit to take you to parks and malls and theaters and stadiums? I suspect it’s more that taking your private vehicle is easier and faster, and not because there isn’t service - it probably just sucks.

In general the public transit system in the US is so underfunded and badly executed when compared to road infrastructure that only disadvantaged people that can't afford car transportation will even consider using it.

Yes but that’s not by “design” like you alluded to. It’s because the advantaged people with cars don’t really care about funding the transit system. So if anything the “design” of transit, only taking the poor to where they want seems purposefully molded by the privileged.

By your logic we should get rid of trucks and have all freight delivered by car.

My logic is trying to use the most efficient method to safely, efficiently, and affordably transport people. Deliveries are already scaled to the items they carry. No one is delivering a pizza in a semi-truck.

Which is what buses do. They are the lesser polluters, safe, efficient. For reasons unknown you are assuming buses are statistically empty when comparing them.

They're empty at night in the parking lot!

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