Hacker News Reader

Comment by stetrain | Hacker News Reader

There are two groups of people that you can optimize for. One is the group of people who already rides the bus. In most US cities this is a small group of people who have no real alternative.

The other is the group of people who might ride the bus if it were convenient. Not just in terms of accessibility to a stop, but also accounting for the journey time. If someone tries riding the bus and finds that a 20 minute drive becomes an hour with stops every single block, they might never ride it again.

In most US cities (outside of the few big ones with decent transit), public transit is basically treated as a welfare service for those who cannot get around by any other means. Not saying that this service doesn't have value, but making all decisions in that mindset isn't going to attract more ridership from those who could choose to drive instead.

View on HN

In my experience, the problem was long wait times between buses and unreliable pickup times. That meant you realistically had to add buffer at each end of your trip: in case the bus was early and in case the bus was late. Not only was that more than 20% of my trip time, it was also mental overhead of worrying whether you already missed the bus.

The bus might come 2x per hour. Maybe 2:18 and 2:48. But it might come at 2:15 or 2:25. So you need to arrive at 2:13 and possibly wait 12 minutes. Or if you arrive late you might be waiting 30+ minutes.

Make the buses fast and safe.

Removing unnecessary bus stops is a prerequisite to making busses fast. You can't run a fast bus service if the bus is stopping every single block.

There are 2 big prerequisites for fast bus service :

1. Dedicated bus lanes (speed, predictability).

2. Traffic light priority ( speed, predictability).

How many US cities implement even one of those?

Regardless of exclusive RoW or signal priority, it is physically impossible for a bus route to:

1) stop every few hundred feet to pick up and drop off passengers

2) maintain an effective speed significantly faster than running

Dedicated bus lanes that are physically separated from car traffic specifically, like the BRT system in Mexico City.

Not nearly enough

That optimizes speed, not latency.

I don't care how long it takes to get off the bus nearly as much as I care how long it takes to get on.

For fixed route transit, speed is latency. The faster the bus can make the average trip, the tighter the timetable can be given the same number of buses. Fewer stops also improves consistency which means you can plan to arrive at the stop closer to the scheduled time, and timetables can be tightened even more by reducing the layover times that keep the bus synchronized with the time table.

Separately, the variability problem can be somewhat solved with the real-time location updates that many agencies provide. You'll still have to wait the same amount of time, but some of it can be done comfortably in your house when the bus is running late.

It helps with latency too or schedule padding. Bus schedules are unreliable because of all the stops which slow them down and encourage bunching of busses on a route with a lot of service.

Bus bunching is often blamed on traffic or scheduling, but in my experience in NYC, a lack of enforcement and/or accountability plays a role too. I live near one end of a bus line and commute to the other end 5 days day a week. On a daily basis, there are large gaps where buses miss their scheduled times. Then, as they approach the end of the line, they arrive and depart in groups of three or four, which only worsens the problem.

For a fixed number of busses, the faster the busses are traveling the less time there is between busses.

Right, but for a fixed schedule...

Schedules get adjusted based on budgets. Faster busses yield better schedules.

There already are “express” buses that don’t stop at every stop. They don’t solve the issues I described above. Cutting the time between bus arrivals would be a much more effective solution.

Making buses faster can improve frequency though, and it's likely cheaper to improve frequency by making them faster than buying and operating more buses. The speed is almost directly correlated with the interval between buses, going 20% faster means ~20% less time between buses.

A bus route that is made twice to be twice as fast (whether through stop consolidation or some other means) will mechanically be twice as frequent, given the same number of service-hours. Slow buses are either more expensive to run, or come less frequently.

I reliably pickup times are amplified by the number of stops that are made. The stop and go time is fixed. The amount of time it takes 2 people to exit a bus versus four is lot linear. It depends on how full the bus is. But it definitely does slow down when people are getting off and on at every single stop.

I would ride the bus if it wasn't filled with crackheads. Stopped Bart when it went downhill and all the white collar people stopped riding it and it just became desperate people, homeless, or crackheads.

The public services death spiral is real. Services get defunded -> they get worse -> reduced user base -> more cuts. The only way to break the cycle is to improve the services.

Safety is only one of the issues. Convenience and comfort are others. Basically a city needs to decide whether it wants people to use the bus, and then act like it.

I was in SF middle of last year and was on the BART a good bit, and it was... fine? It remains the most objectionably noisy mode of transport I've ever been on, but it didn't feel any less safe than when I've been there previously.

Mass transit systems generally reduce anti-social behavior with either fare gates or heavy policing. For whatever reason, when you crack down on fare evasion you filter out a lot of troublemakers.

BART is full of white-collar people who use it to commute and to travel around the area (alongside all sorts of other kinds of people, as you would expect for a broadly used service).

Ridership collapsed in 2020 because of the pandemic, for obvious reasons, but it's hard to really blame that on the service itself, or the riders.

Ridership has been gradually recovering since then. Total trips are now up to something like 70% of 2019 levels, and continuing to rise. Number of unique riders is actually above the 2019 level now.

Maybe you haven't tried riding BART again within the past several years?

I left SF ~2021, but even in 2019 it was kind of in a death spiral. Hopefully it's better now, loved it back when I lived there. But still hear mixed reports from friends.

Crackheads are what's left after everyone who demands more convenience leaves. The more convenient you make public transit, the more non-crackheads will be on the bus with you.

There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is.

And in this example, how many stops would you have to cut to turn an hour-long bus ride into a 20 minute one, to compete with the car? You're effectively cutting it down to two stops - where you board, and where you disembark. That's just not a plausible way to organize a bus route, aiming it at one person with a car.

> There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is.

I find this very unlikely to be true for people who have spent any amount of time driving in a city.

I think the majority of city residents tend not to own cars, but I could be wrong about that.

They don't own cars because owning a car in the city sucks in a lot of ways, more so than in rural areas.

So yeah, if your point is that if you take away all the bad parts of using a car, and leave public transit as is, then using a car comes out ahead. Splendid.

That feels like you've made a tautology here. In places where public transit is more convenient than driving (and parking), many people choose not to own and drive a car.

Owning a car is not mutually exclusive with commuting via transit.

> I think the majority of city residents tend not to own cars

This depends a HUGE amount on the city. NYC/London/Paris probably true. LA? It is not uncommon for a household to have more cars than drivers

Counterpoint: many people are driving cars they cannot afford and car loan delinquencies are at record highs. People would take public transit if it were an option.

If public transit was super convenient I think way more people would take it. There are things and places I don’t frequent purely because of parking and public transit isn’t convenient.

But I don’t want to drive three miles to park in a sketchy lot to hop on a train that will drop me off a mile from the venue.

> There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is.

Yeah, no, this simply isn't true.

People don't take transit in America because largely that transit is sparse, infrequent, unreliable, and slow. When a twenty minute drive becomes a hour and a half of buses and walking, virtually nobody rational will willingly choose that.

You’re assuming parking is free. Donald Shoup’s shade is shaking its head at you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com