If the bus had dynamic routing, so it could show up where I am when I’m ready, and take me where I want to go, I’d be a huge fan. I don’t mean this ironically! I think dynamically dispatched, self-driving buses and vans will eventually save public transit. They’ll enable a much higher quality of service than current bus systems. Which drive around mostly-empty stopping every few blocks so it takes forever to get anywhere.
You don't want dynamic routing. You want frequent predictable routing.
Dynamic means you call and 1-15 minutes later a bus comes. Then it takes you to your destination, but you have no idea when you will get there because sometimes it takes long detours for someone else.
Frequent predictable routing means when you feel like leaving you just walk out the door confident that the bus will be there soon (even if you see it pulling away just as you arrive), and you quickly learn which buses to transfer to, to get where you want to be.
The problem is for the bus to stop near you, it has to stop often. To stop often, it has to move slowly, which means it will take forever to get to your destination. A separation of local and express busses you transfer between could possibly help. But if the theory is that you’re going to take a local, to get to an express, to get to a local near your destination, then you’ve wasted a ton of time on transfers. Good luck getting to your destination in less than an hour.
I’m a fan of public transit and have experienced many good public transit systems. The unfortunate truth is that in any neighborhood with less-than-extreme population density, you have to shape your life around the system by living and working near core transit lines to get reasonable travel times. That works great for people who can do that (I’ve done it myself!), but a better system could aim higher to serve the entire public. The American built environment simply can’t be adequately served by traditional bus networks.
> The problem is for the bus to stop near you, it has to stop often. To stop often, it has to move slowly, which means it will take forever to get to your destination.
Add bus lanes and smart traffic lights (giving busses permanent green waves), this stops being the case. Busses should never be stuck in traffic. That's bad for scheduling and makes them needlessly unattractive.
Living in city with frequent stops, the stops do not slow them down so much. IF you add "looking for a parking place" into estimation for a car, going by bus is frequently faster (which is why I frequently pick bus - it is more predictable and faster).
That seems like very 20th century thinking. We should be aspiring to shape public transport to the needs of the riders instead of making the riders learn fixed routes and transfers. Waymo is very likely to be superior to existing public transportation in all dimensions for almost every transit need. There might still be a role for big buses and trains in the peak of rush hour (if that still exists).
The needs of the rider are predictable. You cannot make shared vehicles both flexible and predictable. Fixed routes are predictable and thus easy to plan your life around. When fixed routes are also frequent there is no sacrifice in that.
I don’t think the needs of the riders are predictable. Large upfront costs and static design routes are a major risk (see the Detroit public transit that serves areas no longer of much interest and is often empty). That’s why many politicians favor buses as an example; they’re flexible enough to move with demand.
Public transportation depends on a critical mass of customers with significant overlap in their trips. If you deviate from fixed routes you start to describe a taxi service.
But the bus is already stopped, its in my garage waiting for me. And I don't need to figure out what bus lines I need to change to or understand their schedules, the route for this bus happens to be exactly where I want to go.
I'm generally pro-transit and continue to vote for it, but in many places and routes a car is often more convenient if one can afford it.
A bus/tram that shows up every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) is going to generally beat dispatched self driving cars in terms of convenience. 20 busses per hour is a completely reasonable level of service for most of the day in a major city and doesn’t need any kind of routings because swapping lines has such a minimal wait time.
However, if you’ve only experienced terrible public transit then it seems like you need fundamental change rather than simply doing the same old things just better. Self driving seems like a solid fit for 2am, but driving empty vehicles only makes congestion worse.
A respectful culture is needed for public transit to properly function, and the Bay Area doesn’t have that.
Some behaviors I’ve seen on public transit in the Bay Area: loud music, dumping beer and food on the floor, clipping toenails, smoking, jumping up and down on seats, drug deal, fighting, hitting the driver, attacking the bus with a machete. All in the past year. Granted I take transit more than most.
And people are generally afraid to speak out against bad behavior because you never know when someone has a knife/gun and is mentally unstable.
So I don’t think it’s just a frequency/headway problem. I wish it was better, but I also understand why many people are decide they’d prefer a private car.
Frequent, accessible public transit is the main point. Anything else is more of an excuse, honestly. Nothing puts people off more than the bus being 15 minutes late on a half-hourly schedule. 5, or even 10 minute frequencies are required to get the level of service you need for people to reliably use public transit in a "turn up and go" manner.
The more common public transit use by the general population the more you dilute the fringes of society with normal people. There’s vastly more normal people than people on the fringes of society but if it’s normal for people to drive then that’s what normal people will do. Lots of normal people also tends to enforce social conformity.
You see the same effect in any pace where the general public visits. Walmart at 6pm is a very different place than Walmart at 3AM not because the store is different but because you’re self selecting for people who don’t need to be asleep at 3AM.
Oh whatever. Short of attacking the driver I saw most of that in a relatively short stay in Paris. So, yeah, okay that kind of behavior drives people to private vehicles… where the anti-social behavior involves shooting at each other or running people off the road.
A road rage incident where someone pulls out a gun is notable enough to get a newspaper article. Phone snatching, seeing people smoke meth on BART, encountering disgusting things, etc, etc are daily occurrences. This is not an apples to apples comparison.
I find your experience very different from mine. I live in Texas. I would expect a number of open carry handguns in any public place, and if someone started shouting half of those open carrying would put a hand in their gun and look tense.
OTOH, stealing a phone, smoking meth, or disgusting excretory things outside of a bathroom would be unthinkable. I would not worry if I left a cell phone on the seat if my pickup in Waxahachie or Hurst with the window down all day. I did leave my wife's cell phone in the seat of my pickup with the windows down when I ate in a restaurant in Waxahachie a day or two ago. She made fun of me for it, and I replied "It's Waxahachie."
BTW, the last car dealership I passed on the way home (before I stopped for dinner and answered this post) is called "Lifted Trucks." Seriously. You can look them up on Google Maps in Hurst, TX. LOL. This is Texas.
This might be true in rural Texas, but it's certainly not true in any of the major cities. People do crazy shit all day long and no-one bats an eyelid at it.
A small minority do crazy things anywhere. People exaggerate how often it happens.
Transit looks worse just because the people most likely to do that have 'mental issues' (possibly drug caused, but there are other causes) that also mean they can't keep a job and thus can't afford a car. However even then they are a small minority that you see because you are paying attention not because it is very common.
Yeah, well. It's not that you're exaggerating about how bad BART is (although there is that to some extent), it's that you're downplaying how much nonsense goes on with personal vehicles. Over the past couple decades I've commuted by car, Muni, and BART and while Bay Area transit isn't as bad as the suburbanites claim the drivers are among the worst I've experienced anywhere. At this point post-pandemic it's like a parody of Max Max.
> This might be true in rural Texas, but it's certainly not true in any of the major cities. People do crazy shit all day long and no-one bats an eyelid at it.
I mean, there's a whole stretch of Lake Merritt where people go park and hotbox their cars and the drive away every single day. That doesn't make the news even though the consequences of riding BART while high are much, much lower than the consequences of piloting a car while high. And I'm sure you've seen the videos of people driving up to do what the kids these days call 'bipping' (a.k.a. snatch and grab).
Making the news isn't really a good indicator of risk here.
> Oh whatever. Short of attacking the driver I saw most of that in a relatively short stay in Paris.
When public transit advocates dismiss such inhuman conditions as a non-concern, I can only laugh. The average driver in America will never be shot at in any point in their entire life, but by your own admission inhumane filthy conditions are so common on city buses that you saw all of the above behaviors, excepting only the assault, during a short stay in Paris. I prefer the very infinitesimally small chance of getting into some sort of Mad Max scenario in my car to a 100% chance of encountering disgusting filth on a city bus. Most Americans agree with me. Most people who say they disagree actually have no choice and when they say they prefer the bus they're just coping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
If America had a civil and clean population like Japan, then the situation could be different. Clean city buses would be inoffensive, but that's not the reality we're dealing with. The deranged antisocial population of America is substantial. Maybe you'll say that we should fix that. You bet your ass we should. But until that happens, don't expect people to put up with city buses when they have any other choice. Just because you're okay with wallowing in filth doesn't mean the rest of us should be.
The fact that there are drug addicts and people with mental health problems is a problem that a public transport system cannot and should not solve.
Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems. Fair play but I don't think any public money should ever go to solving problems in this way.
> a problem that a public transport system cannot and should not solve.
Then people will continue to drive, no matter how much you whine about it. If you can't make city buses safe and clean, then people won't use them.
> Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems.
In fact, owning and using a car is an effective way to avoid the filthy of city buses. You seem to think this is a mistaken belief, but you're simply wrong. You will never persuade Americans to give up their cars and use buses instead unless you acknowledge the problem of filth and fix it. You can't gas light people into thinking the filth is fine or their cars aren't an option. Denying the problem and trying to shame people who acknowledge it will never get you to the state you want society to be in.
> A bus/tram that shows up every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) ... is a completely reasonable level of service for most of the day in a major city
When living in London a few years ago (clearly a major city), the wait times between buses were pretty short. They might have been about 6-10 minutes for some of the more central areas (rough guess from memory).
I'd be surprised if they were "every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) though".
Meanwhile, in Melbourne and Sydney though (substantial cities, but not London sized) the buses are more like 1/2 hour apart.
In Brisbane (capital city of the state of Queensland, Australia) the buses are 1 hour apart, and seem to stop about 7pm each night.
I'm in London and every 4 minutes isn't far off. I live in suburbia like most people and can walk 10 minutes to a high street where there and multiple routes at 8 min frequency each way, which overlap for large parts of their route, therefore some journeys really do have a bus every 3 minutes. And if it's a journey from central London to central London then there's going to be 2+ routes that serve every journey.
Buses that look empty generally have 5 people on them, and so are still more efficient use of space. Either that or at the end of the route and will soon turn around and fill up again.
In San Francisco the current standard is 800–1,360 ft between bus stops depending on the grade. Street car stops are every 2–3 blocks. The MTA's spent years trying to cull stops because many are much closer than that, so no… walking to a Muni stop in San Francisco is perhaps one of the easiest things you can do in the city.
Edit: ca. 2008 the policy was 800–1,000 ft for bus stops and 1,000–1,200 ft for street car stops. On grades between 10–15% the standard is 500–600 ft for bus stops, and on grades above 15% the standard is 300–400 ft. Trunk routes have 24x7 service, and (I can't find it now) there are standards about the amount of service on the other routes but it's something along the lines of 80% of residences are supposed to have frequent service ~18 hours a day and reduced service in the wee hours. Currently the tightest headway I can find is 8 minutes for travel during peak hours along the busiest routes.
Muni is often inefficient but it can get you pretty much anywhere in the city (including places you can't walk to like Treasure Island) for most of the day.
Edit: For reference San Francisco is roughly 7 miles by 7 miles. So you're talking about transiting halfway across town.
Cars (with or without drivers) are competing for the same right of way as the bus, so more of them will simply slow everyone down. A 60ft bus can fit, what, about 100 people? A self-driving car can fit, what, 5? The current quantity of Lyft/Uber/Waymo/Cruise vehicles already has a negative impact on traffic. Put enough self driving cars on the street to make up for the capacity that buses provide and you're going to make traffic much, much worse.
It's a capacity issue. You just can't transport as many people with cars.
In a completely empty city, the first car handily beats transit. Of course.
In a traffic-laden city, separated PT tends to determine how long it takes to travel instead. 12AM it takes me 25min to get into the centre of the city - at peak hour it's more than an hour. Curiously, the train also happens to take approximately an hour to get into the city.
If public transit exists, it becomes the upper-bound for traffic travel time as if it takes longer than that people start to take the constant-time PT trip instead of the variable car trip.
In a software sense you can usually view decent PT (ie. not busses stuck in traffic) as having a high but constant time cost, whereas cars have a low but increasing cost corresponding to the traffic load (with non-separated transit incurring the same costs but being worse due to traffic stops :()
Fair argument. Public transit caps downside case and upside case. Cars can have downside but have upside too.
I want to have my cake and eat it too and I think we can with driverless cars. Lots of software tricks we can do with a network of driverless EVs + city traffic lights to dramatically increase capacity.
My roadmap for SF would be:
- allow waymo and others to scale driverless cars
- stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)
- give the same per passenger subsidy to riders of driverless cars that current public transit passengers receive per trip
- require that driverless cars in SF should send realtime destination info to the traffic light network
- remove parking spots on high traffic streets effectively creating two more lanes
- allow bus lanes to be exclusively used by driverless cars
- tax driverless car rides based on occupancy+distance+time of day so you can traffic shape
> - stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)
As long as we're throwing out fantasies, I'd like us to spend $2B more, and have the Chinatown subway run all the way out to Fisherman's Wharf and the Marina district, and also expand capabilities west out to the avenues.
I'm amazed we got the Chinatown subway and I'm excited to see the city develop around it!
Wait really? Genuinely curious. Do you think $2B was worth it?
Like I just implicitly assumed that that is way too much money for the value it provides but admittedly I didn't think much about it. Can you quantify how the benefit might be worth that much?
I think Cruise Automation has roughly raised that amount over it's entire lifetime. Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.
Congratulations you just reinvented communism. We don’t want cities making those kinds of investments for hopefully obvious reasons in that context.
Subway lines can pay for themselves across hundreds of years. It’s the best kind of investment for cities because it operates on their timescales and use ultra cheap bonds responsibly and it doesn’t interfere with free markets.
People’s willingness to buy very low yield government bonds is independent from people willing to make high risk investments in private companies. Trying to get people in group A to make investments of type B through government action is the kind of central planning you don’t want.
Cities taking advantage of people with ultra low risk tolerance to make infrastructure investments at ultra low rates that only make sense with very long time horizons is dependent on markets.
> Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.
Ahh, so by ‘we’ you didn’t actually mean a group you are part of but instead other people.
Your premise is, to put it politely, completely wrong. Even considering how broad the scope was, Van Ness took well longer than it should've. The delays were almost entirely political, driven by one supervisor who was on a mission to preserve the street lights.
Meanwhile the solution you've put forth is almost entirely political and even were there general acceptance of privatizing the roads that sort of project would be mired in just as much NIMBYism. Even then you're talking about, what, refunding federal monies that have already been spent? Levying a new tax (which will require a 2/3 voter approval), subsidizing private corporations, and kneecapping transit? And for what? A system that has a fraction of the capacity of the existing bus and tram infrastructure?
Beyond the gall to suggest privatizing our roads, you're suggesting handing it all over to Google? Really? A corporation with a track record of zero customer or long-term product support is not in a position to run our roads.
Ok I agree I was being a little ambitious :) Let me tackle your points one at a time:
- cities already pay private companies to help manage the traffic infrastructure so it doesn't seem too crazy. Seems hyperbolic to claim that's "privatizing roads"
- subsidizing private corps - ok maybe we shouldn't do this. but we should stop subsidizing public transit. it should have to compete with private alternatives now that we have them. previously there were no alternatives to public transit so we kind of had to subsidize it for equity, but now I think private enterprise (given fair competition) could deliver the same outcome. Instead of subsidizing the method (public transit) we should subsidize the outcome we want (equitable access to transport - which might mean that you need to provide low income rides as a ride share provider)
- on the money spent on the SF subway and bus lane, you're right, we're not getting that back. But we can just stop doing those going forward.
- regarding van ness bus lane, I didn't know it was because of the street lamps. But that actually proves my point. Basically to make any improvement, we just have to steer clear of new physical infrastructure. I'm suggesting no new physical infra, just software.
- regarding the tax on driverless rides, we kind of already have it. SF has a 3.25% tax on all ride sharing rides. We'd just need to update that to price the tax dynamically to help traffic shape. And if we don't get that piece, it's not critical.
- on giving it to Google. Fine... not them then. Whoever can provide the best service for the lowest cost. Perfect for free markets. In fact, if we make the API to traffic system standardized, you could plugin and hot swap different providers. You could even back test new providers on historic data to see what their performance would have been like and swap to new providers as they demonstrate their improvement over the current system
- cars have a fraction of the capacity of buses - yeah only if they are fully utilized and you're not counting getting to and from the bus station nor the loss of productivity waiting for a bus
All of these are possible to implement in a really short amount of time (because its mostly software) compared to public transit (10+ years to make a bus lane on van ness)
NYC is the one US city where trains almost make sense, but there are a ton of downsides related to cost, safety, etc. I'd love to see all those dedicated right-of-ways put to more efficient use with self-driving vehicles.
Great for uber is still limited by traffic and is a lot more expensive than great transit which doesn't get stuck in traffic, and thus is much cheaper than uber for better service.
Any bus that has stops every 100-200 feet is unbearably slow. Even every 1/8 of a mile is too much to be an time efficient mode of transportation unless you have BRT imo.
I’ve said it several times but you average ~165 feet when walking to a stop every 1/8th of a mile. Max is 1/2 the distance because you can walk either direction and average is again 1/2 the max because you start at a random point not the worst possibility. 5280/8/2/2 = 165.
As to unbearably slow, there’s this idea of express busses and buss only lanes etc. The core of cities really isn’t that big, it takes forever because traffic is slow or mass transit is infrequent.
All these calculations are only true if your destination is on the road the bus runs along. Since not every road has a bus line, you also usually have to walk multiple blocks perpendicular _away_ from the bus line in addition to some of the distance between stops.
If your road doesn’t have a bus line then that’s a problem not an inherent limitation.
Ideally you want a grid where bus lines are near intersections so going from North to East means crossing 1 street so you can go anywhere with 2 waits and a street crossing.
Fair enough. Not familiar with SF bus system but the bus system where I live, which is considered quite good I think, has each bus line 1/2 mile apart from each other. Almost no one lives directly along a route so there's an extra 1/8 mile average walk just to get to the route, not a stop on it. Fine by me but a lot of people don't seem capable of that for whatever reason. Combine that with the bus not actually going to where you're trying to get and I can see why people aren't huge fans.
(On average), for a walk to the stop of 100-200 feet the bus would need to stop every 200-400 feet. 300 ft seems to be roughly 100m, which is probably much too short a distance still. 250m or ~800 ft aligns better to my experience with cities with good transit, and in the worst case scenario you have to walk 125m to your nearest stop.
1/8th of a mile is every 660 feet, but the farthest you can be from one is the midpoint so 330 feet. However for every trip starting at the midpoint there’s another at and the bus stop thus the average would be 1/2 that distance again or 165 feet.
Assuming a 1D world, you can beat this in practice.
Busses around me don't stop at every stop, only if there are people waiting at the stop or someone has requested a stop by pressing a strip along the windows or one of the almost dozen buttons on the bus.
show me an american city where a bus stops every 100-200 feet every 3 mins. Heck show me where it'd even be possible in an american city. That sounds like the most inefficient bus ever.
That’s a bus stop every ~1/8th of a mile not 200 feet.
You cut it in half because you can walk to the closest stop and cut it in half again before you’re starting at a random point not the worst possibility so 5280/8/2/2 = 165 feet. Except we don’t exit buildings or get on busses in the middle of the street so it’s not random.
I am not aware of a single city across the world that has such a thing, and yet public transit remains incredibly useful and functional in places not-the-US. An enormous part of Europe, for example, even in towns and cities with far less density than those here.
Can we pretty please stop acting like this is a complete enigma that nobody else has managed to figure out?
Hello from Oxford, UK, where we have the Pick Me Up[0] bus! Far more useful than standard buses, unless you live near a bus stop and need a hub and spoke journey into/out of the centre.
AVs should in principle liberate public transit from a lot of limitations. Surge capacity should be easier to deploy. Smaller busses on smaller routes should be at less of a cost disadvantage. Pick up and drop off could be more flexible.
I live in a semi-rural area that used to have a trolley line to the next town where one could catch a train into Boston. It's also a challenge to optimize school bus routes in a sparsely populated area, and AVs could help with that.
Oddly enough they got rid of both Uber Pool and Lyft Shared in most cities. Definitely Boston, but also half a dozen other cities I've visited. It may still exist somewhere.
I wish they hadn't, because my commuter card works with the shared rides. So even if a shared ride was the same price as a normal Uber/Lyft (or even more) I'd do it just to be able to use the commuter card.
It was supposed to be for covid I think, but worked after for a while too. The commuter card just verifies that the charge is billed as something under "transportation" (and probably that it's not airfare). It's the Lyft/Uber app that appears to stop you from using the commuter card for non-shared rides.
Honestly (and since this is a hacking forum) I have a theory that if you could hook the Lyft/Uber app with Frida or a modified kernel you could push through payment using a commuter card on regular Lyft/Uber rides.
