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The answer: Not if they have to share the road with cars.
Busses are the least pleasant, slowest, least reliable form of public transit. When people say they don’t like taking public transit, busses are why. Give me rails or give me death. BRT is the bare minimum. But if you have BRT, the main question is “Why isn’t this on rails”
Trains are very limited, they cannot serve all purposes, especially building off a car centric place like the US
especially building off a car centric place like the US
Why?
The only advantage buses have over trains is their flexibility, owing to their ability to literally go off the rails.
The predictable and unchanging routes of a suburban commute call for rail service rather than bus service. And besides, any American transit project that proposes suburbanites take the bus will be dead on arrival, given the social stigma against riding the bus.
social stigma against riding the bus
Yanks are incredibly weird
buses generally suck so much here most people think the only reason to ride them is if you are too poor to afford a car, so really it’s just the usual classism.
not true in all cities though, but most
The only advantage buses have over trains is their flexibility, owing to their ability to literally go off the rails.
And this is a double edged sword, I’d argue it’s more of a negative than a positive. The inability of trains to go off route means they’re a more stable and reliable system. The physical infrastructure of rails is a sign of commitment by the city to having quality transit.
If you’re gonna open a business or buy a house, would you rather be on a light rail line or a bus route? Obviously it’s the light rail. A bus route could change at any time, or busses could be reallocated to higher demand lines. Rails show that there will be reliable transit to this area for the foreseeable future, which attracts both people who want to live nearby and businesses that want customers the transit will bring.
Not to mention all the other reasons rail is better, like busses being louder, rougher, more cramped, and coming with a social stigma that terrifies the White Suburbanite.
before the car lobby ruined everything we had a bunch of local trams and trolleys.
Trains are kind of expensive if you live in and are trying to get around a small to medium sized town that is underfunded by your government. BRT is fast to implement and cheaper (although yes, a lot easier to get rid of if the party in charge of your country is obsessed with austerity).
Cause we already have all the bus infrastructure (roads). Stops are pretty easy to build. I’m not talking about theoretical benefits.
You are still going to have to reconfigure highways for bus lanes and build bus terminals for a bus service that is even remotely competitive with driving. And then, you are going to have to get over the social stigma against riding buses, which is going to take a generation to fully remove.
Also roads need to be fully rebuilt about every 10 years so on the time scale these things take to change anyway we’ll have to rebuild it all anyway
As long as buses have to share the road with cars, it cannot be a faster (and therefore superior) mode of transportation than private automobiles.
A bus that shares the road with cars forces riders to both wait for the bus and to wait in traffic, while a car only has to wait in traffic.
For riding the bus to be superior to driving, the time spent waiting for the bus needs to be made up with time saved skipping traffic.
We need BRT NOW! Lets GOOOOOO
BRT with the light changers so they dont stop at lights too. They really improve transit time.
Get that mixed traffic shit outta here.
Not until buses go the places I want to go. Some places do planning well, many do not.
In case it was not clear, the physical bus is not my issue. The routes are my issue.
Edit: ignoring the strange troll, but clarifying. I think some level of customer driven dynamic routes will be helpful. Central planners have limited knowledge about where I work or the times I need to be there.
I find routes, frequency and timetable of buses to be the issue, I get worried I’ll be out stranded because I missed the last bus.
But it’s odd that you say customer-driven routes are a good thing when I assume that is the very system that is not providing the routes you need. Though obviously these systems should be determined by demand to some degree.
Interesting. I have presumed the current routes are pruned due to a lack of ridership, and extra busses added due to high ridership. Not that entirely new routes are added by any means other than a top-down decision.
I would like something more like the ride sharing apps. I enter my location, destination, and time requirements. Then at some future point when a useful route exists, I will get a message.
Even better would be an ephemeral route the is created when a minimum number of riders have interest along some shared part.
I don’t imagine the ephemeral routes being a thing until self-driving busses are cheap and reliable.
I share your timing fear. In the twin cities many routes only run up to 3 times a day in a certain direction. An unexpected issue at work, and I am jammed.
Do you live in a detached single-family home in a neighborhood of detached single-family homes?
I don’t but they’re not wrong about the transit. I live in a row home within 6 miles of the Minnesota state capital building, the state the user you’re replying to is from.
Sorry to ruin your gotcha moment.
Twin Cities has great transit. Is it just that wherever you’re going requires a transfer?
Twin Cities has great transit.
No, the Twin Cities has highly ranked mass transit in the United States. That doesn’t mean it’s great, it instead speaks to how poor mass transit is in the US.
The Met Council and partners are working to improve and make it better but they’ve got a long way to go.
I’d love to get rid of my car and use the mass transit, I hate driving. As it currently is though I’ll be better served when I buy an e-bike this coming spring and use that to get around instead.
Mass transit in the Twin Cities is ass by any metric except comparison to other US cities
We first have to care about public transportation before we can pretend to make it better.
every home and workplace will have a cannon that you climb into that launches you across town to your destination
ME WHEN TRANSIT DISCOURSE
Since getting a car it’s nice getting in extra sleep and visiting family that decided to move out to the fucking boonies, but I really do miss the bus. I shouldn’t drive, especially with LED headlamps teaming up with my deteriorating night vision.
they’ll also make the ghost of Margaret Thatcher really angry
