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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

the simple fact of the matter is the Waymo is a better public transport solution for Dallas than the bus. The bus doesn't work very well in endless cul-de-sac suburbia, and that's what the Dallas/Fort Worth area (and indeed most of America) is. Like, you have to understand that most of Dallas isn't even commuting into downtown Dallas every day to work. They are just commuting to other suburbs and then back to their suburb. If your public transport solution is step 1. nuke the place and start over, it's not really a solution.

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Why is a bus not fit for endless culdesac suburbia where people are commuting between the suburbs instead of to the downtown?

I really don't get it. Pretty much everywhere outside of US buses work no matter the city layout. Just add some stops and run some buses.

because you can't fill the buses!

1. Cul-de-sacs and surburbia lack through-streets. So it forces heavy long buses to navigate winding narrow loops. This makes your routing complex and slow.

2. When commuters travel suburb-to-suburb instead of hub-and-spoke downtown, origin-destination pairs are too scattered to support fixed routes with meaningful frequency.

3. Low passenger volume per mile makes fixed-route bus operations financially unsustainable.

4. Disconnected street networks and long setbacks force residents to drive just to reach a bus stop. Like seriously pull up google maps. There are a million suburbs in the greater DFW area where you need to walk 15 minutes just to get out of your neighborhood to the nearest main road where a bus stop would be placed. When it's a thirty minute round trip of walking, (not to mention what the walking situation looks like at your destination), and you throw in stopping at every bus stop on the route, every commute takes several hours instead of 20-30 minutes driving.

1. I promise you that a bus can get through winding narrow loops just fine. All medieval old towns are like that.

2. You either create loops or hubs where people transfer. The hub can be just a regular bus stop where lines meet.

3. Looking up the density of Dallas suburbs I can tell you that buses can work well in far less dense places.

4. The math doesn't add up, if you can get somewhere by car in 20 - 30mins driving then even with 15 minute walk on either side the bus will take you there in less than 'hours'. And walking 15 minutes to the bus stop is not the end of the world. There would also be plenty of people living/working closer to the stop.

From your original comment I got the idea that you think buses need to be these massive heavy vehicles, but that's not really the case either. I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats. I don't think they were actually much bigger than american pickups. But I think a regular bus would work alright.

I can't say for a properly designed system but I can get anywhere in my city (~90k population / ~0.25m metro) in 15 minutes via car. (Some days traffic effects a bit.)

Many bus stops are up to 1:45 away.

Can and implemented are often worlds apart.

A 12 seater is not a microvan. That is in full size van territory.

Just scale your small bus further down and you get a cybercab/waymo. It gets full easily but its routes are fully customizable and you never have to change lines and it runs at all hours with no wait. Ohh and its actually way cheaper to run per passenger mile. IMO shared, electric, autonomous AVs are the best solution for mass transit for 90% of the routes

Lots of single user "busses" cause dramatically lower road wear and microplastics than a many user bus. Those scale with axle weight to the third and fourth powers respectively.

It works in some countries with a low gini coefficient. In places like Germany or Spain people use public transport because everyone, broadly speaking, is in a very similar socioeconomic status. In some other countries, the wealth inequality is much higher, and people with a higher economic standing don't want to share space with crackheads or mentally ill (a direct consequence of not having access to cheap or free mental health). Some societies are set up in a way that public transport can work, and others don't, it's just the way it is.

> I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats.

Right-sizing the vehicle is smart. Why not also allow 4 person buses that run on demand to and from any point?

Sure, but the Dallas residents still don't have the autonomous on-demand bus while they could have had a normal bus decades ago.

And I doubt that 4 or 12 is the ideal bus size in that place.

Microvans exist. However they are not cost effective. Drivers are expensive and they don't get much better fuel economy than a bus that holds several times the number of passengers. Waymo changes the driver costs but not the other costs of running transit. Worse for the van, it holds few people so you dare not let it get popular because it can't handle a random surge of just two families trying to go somewhere at the same time. Your 4 person bus cannot handle my family of five, which is only slightly above average, there are bigger families in every neighborhood.

A larger bus is needed for useful transit.

What happens, is your underserved bus has to increase stops per loop for viability.

You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot; so you need a stop or two in the zone.

Now you have a short walk to the stop; but if you want this to be a viable alternative, you need some frequency of service.

And that means that the routs need to be active across the whole week, not just the hypothetical peak (otherwise everyone needs a car anyway).

So how do you actually get a high average number of riders per bus? More stops?

But if each stop needs to go in and out of a cul-de-sac, the travel time goes up.

Eventually people stop tolerating the extra time, and get cars.

So you end up with a case of empty busses running... Seems much worse than a waymo.

"You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot…"

Holy shit, you have to walk a mile from a cul-de-sac just to get to a street with an intersection?

Who the hell designed these streets? (I guess Big Auto?)

Chicken and egg problem. If you start with the assumption that you have a car, they are pretty great. Quiet, no through traffic and can become neighbourly, potentially large blocks. Somewhere to park your car...

Basically trying to retrofit busses to a development built around cars is stupid.

Sadly yes. Normally it isn't a cul-de-sac. It is a neighborhood with several streets, but the streets are more like a maze so that residents can get in (they know the way), but anyone just passing through cannot find a path (without a map). Since everybody has a car it is only a couple minutes to a main road and so good enough - but that is still a long walk and so nobody walks to get places. (People do walk their dogs on the sidewalk, and generally there is a park inside that the kids will walk to)

It isn't big auto that designs these places. Big auto likes them, but the people like it because they don't know anything other than cars, and they know they hate living on a busy street with lots of cars. Those are the only two options they know about so don't bother replying with all the others you know about, they don't exist as options.

I've seen big yellow buses driving through every neighborhood I've ever lived in picking up and dropping people off on a fixed schedule... Seems like the concept works just fine when it's not being actively fought against and sabotaged.

school buses only work because their customers have no other options. Take a look at transportation methods among Dallas high schoolers old enough to drive. Suddenly big yellow buses arent so popular.

Your entire view point is framed incorrectly. The problem isn’t can a bus solve the problem, it’s the majority of people don’t want to endure the hassle of riding the bus.

Not saying to refute your point just flagging that in places like Germany the bus works flawlessly. People there are really proud that you can even go hiking with public transport, buses are clean, safe and cheap (cheaper than using your car).

The human geography of Germany is completely different from the US. The US has much more continuous sprawl vs Germany has more clearly defined borders between higher density areas (towns and cities) and lower density ones along with land use laws that maintain this. Also US zoning laws typically don't help either with clear divisions between commercial and residential instead of more mixed use zoning.

I am pretty pro transit and urbanism but it really annoys me in these discussions when people (not you specifically) just wave their hands and go "add more buses, ez, problem solved", completely disregarding the physical realities of how we have constructed our civilization.

In Germany they penalize using cars by taxing cars and fuels. They reward using public transport by subsidizing it. Car owners pay so public transit users get cheaper rides.

So people are using public transit in Germany not because they love to but because they are forced to.

And the system is far from perfect, Germans are complaining because public transportation is having a lot of delays. You can't reach every point you need, you have to wait and some times public transportation is dirty and filled with dirty, rude, violent people, drug addicts and drunks. Not a lovely way to travel.

ok... Why the majority of people don't want to endure the hassle of riding the bus?

Because most buses have terrible service and people are confusing the service with the vehicle. Where buses get good service they get used.

When the bus is once per hour nobody uses it except those who have no other option and those are people who likely have 'issues'. Those people exist in every city but they a rarely seen anywhere else because they are a tiny minority of all people unless you look for a place they concentrate.

Build a useful bus system and people ride it. However a useful system is expensive and so you can't get the money. In car cities 'liberals' support transit for other people not themselves and so they object to the costs that good transit would cost. If they had good transit it would save everybody money over their cars, but even 'liberals' can't see that that and so won't support it.

Oh I fully agree. One thing that (I think) is being overlooked is that when some people switch from cars to public transit, the congestion eases. One doesn't have to make everyone switch to buses/light rails. Just enough for everyone to benefit.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. People don’t comprehend some areas of the world are simply different. If you could get a bus to pick up near my house and drop me off near work absolutely I would consider it but the reality is everyone in most US cities are going in many different directions. It’s not a problem a bus can even solve and like you said, folks don’t want to take a bus.

Why not both? Driver-less (or even just with drivers) mini buses, without fixed stops and dynamic routes/stops based on demand.

I guess you don't want to stop more times than needed, so maybe you'd want to cluster the demand somehow into "virtual stops", and you may lack some amenities like shelters.. so maybe the traditional bus route is good enough. Though it feels like it's ripe for optimisation (you know the classic no buses come for 30min then 3 arrive at once, or these buses are all full whilst others are roaming empty)

Why would you think it works? Let’s say you have a community of 100 people in Dallas. That neighborhood is going to be commuting in all sorts of directions, sure you might be able to transport some groups going the same direction but there is a complete lack of central offices so how does the last mile work? Lots of transfers would be required and that’s a nonstarter

Your community should be more like 500 people. Each house will have more than two people (most people live with a romantic partner, and kids are still common enough) and there are more than 100 houses in the neighborhood.

And now what? You now have 500 people going in every different direction still sure some overlap but in a metro like DFW you probably don’t see anything meaningful until the thousands and DFW does not have that kind of density.

A bus isn't going to be able to pull into my driveway, obv.

Buses were indeed the logical solution before Waymo/etc. Now, they are just a modern version of horse carriages. Dirty, slow, smelly and insecure.

The faster you get out of the bus, the faster you liberate grandma and kids from a fall, being mugged, or from freezing to death while waiting, and instead you promote an active lifestyle.

Waymo-like transport is incredibly liberating for low middle class parents, that cannot be trust their young kids to ride a bus alone and take time off blue collar work to take their kids to X practice.

Plus, they are much cheaper and safer to operate long term

Buses are a solution today, but only for upper class americans & soccer moms, who don't realize the issues that low income or limited fixed income seniors face in their everyday life.

They made it work in hong kong with buses/minibuses... it can work everywhere, as long as you try it a tiny bit. But no let's send billions to private company to add more 2500+ kg of metal that displace a single 70kg meatbag, such a waste of resources and energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus

Is it not simply a density problem? HK is a very different beast or any other major dense urban area. Dallas is a sprawling with an urban communities and office buildings.

Hong Kong is around 5x the density of Dallas.

So what? One day the excuse is "it's too small", the next "it's too dense", the next "it's too large", meanwhile the 200 hab village next to mine in Poland has better bus coverage than the uni I attended in Los Angeles

I find it a rather offensive that the suburbs don't have walking/bike path cut-throughs. They're cheap. They can cut down on non-car travel by a ton. They're just damn nice.

Some do. It all comes down to whether the local government cares/thinks about this when setting up ordinances and approving PUDs. I was also appalled when I moved from a place that did this to one that didn't. There were so many obvious opportunities to improve connectivity with a few hundred square feet of easement.

No, it's not. It's a car for hire. Problems created by car-dependency will not be solved by adding more/cheaper cars.

> (and indeed most of America)

Cookie cutter developments where each street is a culdesac or horseshoe with it's own HOA is the only economically sane way to any serious volume of detached single or multi unit detached housing development thanks to federal environmental regulation.

Who screeches bloody murder at even the mere hint of making some adjustments there? Why nearly the same people who complain about the current copypasta suburban sprawl paradigm of course.

Can you explain how environmental regulations induce that housing style? I struggle to see the connection

Basically every rule that tries to piecemeal outlaw the concrete jungle (muh setbacks, muh maximum impermeable area percentage, and so on) winds up introducing sprawl because you wind up wasting site plan space on whatever it is in your context.

I'm pretty sure you are confusing your state's zoning laws with federal environmental regulations.

You don't have to nuke anything. Every street is fixed/rebuild from time to time (30-40 years). The steps to follow are: 1) Allow mixed use zones. 2) Update the specs how the roads/streets are supposed to look like.

After that, grab a pint and watch how your neighborhood transforms.

"If I had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse." Henry Ford, about the resistance to a paradigm change.

So you are pro-bus? Because Waymo is the faster horse for someone in Dallas while a working public transit would be the paradigm shift.

For the average person in Dallas the car they already own is faster than waymo: it is sitting in their driveway where they left it (or in the parking spot where they left it - while cars are stolen that is rare enough to ignore). They don't need to summon it and wait for it to show up - which saves a lot of time. Those who drive used cars (which is most people) the car is cheaper than waymo as well.

My impression is Waymo is used as taxi replacements: people who normally take transit but there is one trip that it won't work for; or travelers who don't live there and don't want to rent a car; or people who plan to drink. They make perfect sense to anyone in Dallas for these reasons. However nobody is planning on giving up their own car and it doesn't make sense for them to do that.

Working transit would be a paradigm shift of course.

What if the public transport solution involved policies like taxing the existing suburbs in a way that ensures a break-even on infrastructure upkeep and operating costs so that the people who live in them aren't unfairly pushing costs onto other people in society?

We could go a step further and tax automobiles in such a way that they covers the negative externalizes that their use results in so that again, the users of them don't unfairly burden others with the cost of their choices?

The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas as well as things like high speed rail to connect those regions allowing the people who chose to live in those areas an easier and cheaper day to day life as well as the access to distant cities and all the economic opportunity that this encourages both in the destinations and in the economic corridors that arise along them?

Places like the US and Canada may be able to stave it off a bit longer because of relatively open immigration policies but the demographic collapse is coming. That means that cities are going to start fighting to attract a dwindling pool of people and cities with less debt, be it financial or infrastructure will fare better than those that have suffered under decades of perpetual growth mindset based policy making.

Many suburbs are a rot on a city's finances and will inevitably need to be amputated. The sooner the better I say.

From a municipal finance perspective, most Dallas-Fort Worth suburban municipalities are far and away outperforming urban Dallas (the City of Dallas proper). That's not opinion, you can see the finances as they are all public. Ask the LLM of your choice to make research easy.

I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities where dense american urban centers are overflowing with revenues. The opposite is the case almost everywhere you look. Or that suburbs are only surviving by pushing costs unfairly onto cities. Most suburbs (in the case of Dallas being plano, irving, frisco, southlake/westlake) are self governing municipalities with their own school districts, police, city management, and credit ratings. Sometimes people say it's just that suburbs are new and have yet to pay the piper, but even in america's (and Dallas') oldest suburbs, many of which have replaced/renovated infra several times over at this point, they are indeed stronger financially than the urban centers they surround.

I think you're sort of missing my point.

After decades of ignored negative externalities from unchecked suburban growth and car-culture are coming to an end. As populations decline and temperatures increase places like Dallas and the wealthy suburbs around it that you mention will have less and less relevance.

There isn't going to be a future where the citizens of suburban Dallas are enjoying Starbucks coffee in single-serving cups delivered to them in Waymo vehicles. It isn't viable to just paper over unsustainable nature of these places with self driving cars and ignore urban environments and mass public transit as the comment that started this thread suggested.

The only places that are going to survive what is coming are ones that are dense, well managed, and sustainable.

The climate part is certainly an issue for dfw, but the superiority of dense urban areas from a financial or ecological standpoint isn't backed by data. Buses were better for fuel efficiency, but now the bus and robotaxi are both ev, the robotaxi has a smaller impact ecologically due to microplastics scaling with axle weight ^4 and financially because road wear scales with axle weight ^3. If buses and trash trucks didn't drive on streets they would last virtually forever the way they are built now. While the glorious excesses of the last 75yrs are definitely going away, the suburbs may very well not. Urban cores might instead rot in infrastructure until only the highways between them with low density adjacent settlements remain.

What is the timeline you expect for this?

What about the problems negative externalities from unchecked crowding and bus culture? Like overcrowding, sky high prices for housing, very high prices for everything, broken infrastructure that is to expensive to fix and over capacity?

The finances of these metros rarely incorporate road costs; their accounting does not require them to incorporate the future liability for infrastructure maintenance and so everything looks good until they need to redo the roads.

What leads you to say that? Capex is typically budgeted.

If it's anything like my municipality, all that stuff is balanced in the budget by issuing bonds. My accounting knowledge is weak, but as I understand it, even though a city's credit rating and the prospective interest on its bonds are a feedback mechanism to help moderate the spending, it's still tempting for a city to overbuild without a plan to fund the bonds plus the incurred cost ongoing maintenance without ending up with too much debt.

The other thing people often get wrong is these things are funded by 20 year bonds, but they last for much longer. If you make the incorrect assumption that something must be replaced when the bond is paid off the suburb cannot support itself. However pipes last a lot more than 20 years in most cases. Even if the road surface only lasts 20 years (which is true in some extreme cases but not in general), the right of way is a one time expensive, and the ground work below the surface is generally one and done so the replacement costs are much less than the first time new road costs.

>I'm not really sure where people get this idea that suburbs are drowning in liabilities

Because from the 70s onward the former industrial northeast and miswest was actively de-urbanized and suburbanized with environmental and zoning law (don't blame this all on the locals, a lot of this rolls downhill from the states). This obviously coincided with de-industrialization. So basically all these former market and mill towns basically wound up underwater because they not only kicked out their economy but wound up in a situation where every stupid sidewalk repaving costs a bajillion bucks because pursuant to state law whatever it needs to be brought up to code which means some BS green space buffer, etc, etc.

Source: Live in one.

At the end of the day you're basically right it's a lie when it comes to some random Dallas suburb.

I wouldn't dispute Dallas numbers and I may be wrong. But in general this feels wrong at a first approach. Denser low rise apartment blocks with more commercial square are per inhabitant and fewer expensive infrastructure per inhabitant (road area, length of water/sewers/electricity/data lines, amount of common things like lamp posts, signs, security (police/fire/medical etc.)) just logically should be better financially performing than single family home suburbs. In any part of the world at any age or local variation. And in fact in most countries that's true so far.

When logic and the observation disagree that means your logic is missing something. Don't double down on flawed logic, figure out where the flaw is.

I don't know where your flaws in logic is coming from, but I have seen the numbers enough different places to know there is one someplace.

I know this isn't /. but a car analogy seems appropriate here. A city is like a modern cramped engine bay vs an old one where you can sit next to the motor to work on it. Anything you try to fix or upgrade in a dense city causes large problems.

Also, governance isn't like manufacturing, it doesn't get easier at scale, it gets so much harder.

Living in a perfectly planned super dense urban utopia where I can quickly walk wherever I want is extremely appealing to me. I would also like living in the wilds where once a week I drive to the general store and back as the full day's task. Suburban living is my least desired outcome. But everywhere there is room for it, it happens, even without a city to latch onto. There are good reasons for that.

You are missing one thing. Logic can be faulty AND observation can be faulty just as well (it's just more rare usually). Especially in the financial reporting. I've seen enough to immediately doubt and try to find intentional tricks in any level of financial reporting or analysis. The tools are endless - simple faking, reclassifying specific inflows and outflows to the different time frames or divisions or even separate companies (both fake and real), confusing or obscure terminology is certainly widely deployed, metrics can be fudged from industry standards to some better looking custom ones, companies can "forget" some of their liabilities and debts or even rename them into something unrecognizable.

I'm prepared to be wrong though. The question is, are you?..

When you step back you can see that suburbs have existed since 1880 (street car suburbs), and most of them are still around. The roads have been replaced several times since then in most - they don't last for 140 years so they must have been. Likely the first ones didn't even have water/sewage pipes, but they all have that now so somehow they added them. We know how long pipes in the ground last (both average and maximum), so we know they must have replaced at least some of them at some point since they were added. We know that telephone and electric would have been built sometimes between 1920 and 1950 - and we know those wires don't last forever so they got replaced. We know that cable TV was added likely between 1970 and 2000, some of those much be wearing out and been replaced. We know that fiber is being added now.

I don't know how they managed to do the above. However we know that they have done it, and the costs must have not been excessive.

When you show me facts I'll change my mind. Until then the above facts are compelling.

Sure. But you are assuming that somehow all those expenses come strictly from those same suburbs. Or if there is the is an external inflow (also known as debt) it is not larger than for the similar population low rise blocks. And I say that is far from fact, even without giving my own opinion.

Basically you are making correct observations but only for part of the picture. And if the discussion is about finances and economics, I would say that the part about where money comes from is pretty damn important, no? :)

Also, even from across the pond, I also saw historical photos of the old USA. Those suburbs from before WW2 were way closer to the Europe really. There were more small businesses everywhere, there were commerce blocks etc. And pre-WW2 infrastructure was much cheaper and less complex that contemporary one. So sure, old suburbs were probably much healthier economically.

As for the moderns suburbs (from 50s and up) you can view more knowledgeable people than me if you really wish to uncover facts and truth. I won't post spoilers, but you may guess them from the context easily.

>so that the people who live in them aren't unfairly pushing costs onto other people in society

>The money generated from these endeavours could be used to fund the development of mass public transportation infrastructure in more, dense, sustainable areas

So you still want to tax some people to subsidize other people. Why?

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