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Comment by pjlegato | Hacker News Reader

Because the heavily subsidized public bus service in San Francisco, Muni, operates abysmally.

Buses are usually filthy, massively overcrowded during rush hour, often very late, and make frequent stops. In many cases, taking the bus is only slightly faster than walking. Compounding the problem is the lack of buses on many popular commute routes, such as the Lombard-downtown route that Leap follows.

They will either avoid these pitfalls or go out of business, because nobody will pay 3x more for a private bus service that is just as bad as the 1x public bus.

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> In many cases, taking the bus is only slightly faster than walking.

I live in Soma, within one block of stops on several ostensibly good bus routes, but I still find that I need to be going at least 2 miles (sometimes even 3, depending on the destination) for it to be faster to bus than to walk. This obviously wouldn't be the case if any of said bus routes stuck even remotely to the stated schedule, or if traffic was at least somewhat predictable. Heck, it wouldn't even be the case if the real-time bus tracking worked (it doesn't), because then I could at least time my departure to avoid waiting 15+ minutes at the bus stop.

> This obviously wouldn't be the case if any of said bus routes stuck even remotely to the stated schedule, or if traffic was at least somewhat predictable.

These are symptoms of the same problem. In France (at least in Grenoble where I worked for a year) there are dedicated bus lanes (dedicated lights for those lanes). Without those, buses are subject to the same issues caused by traffic.

I agree with the commenter above who remarked that the public transport woes are due to poor urban planning. To answer why urban planning is so misguided you'd have to follow the money.

The two problems are definitely not always related. There have been plenty of times where traffic is mild and buses simply aren't coming.

San Francisco has those too, like on the Geary/O'Farrell corridor, though not on every bus route.

The bus is pretty heavy on shenanigans, but I have found the real-time tracking to be pretty accurate - though there are a few places it can get way off (especially where it's not tracking an already-moving bus, e.g., at the transbay terminal).

Traffic is probably the biggest factor that causes randomness and there's no avoiding that, private bus or no.

Bicycling, though... is often the fastest way for me to get around the city.

This is very true, but it does bring up a point about scaling. Bus services aren't as terrible in other cities, though there are always some deficiencies.

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