Bus routes are a circuit, so they are more heavily impacted by traffic than other modes of transportation. Thus, heavy traffic regularly makes Seattle's commuter buses 10-20 minutes late. The bus from Mountlake Terrace can sometimes be over an hour late, and rush hour makes this a 2-hour ride on top of the wait.
With a car, you can hop off the freeway and take a side street and you're there in 30-40 minutes instead of 2+ hours.
If you want to discuss borderline-criminal mismanagement, there's the $50 billion ST3 plan. We could put one WA State resident on the moon for that price.
This is not true in my experience, Seattle has a pretty solid bus system and we still felt like we were having to plan around them even though they generally would stop every 15 minutes. You could not count on them 100% either. Occasionally they just don't show up.
I spent a year in Seattle riding the bus to work. I couldn't tell you which one. The bus was a cold place for sure. To be surrounded by people all the time and have them all act as though no one else exists.
Former Seattle (now Las Vegas) resident here. To make the buses run on time, the planners build in "time stops." These are locations where the bus should go through at specific times to not be too early for the rest of the schedule, and they also provide some buffer for buses to recover time lost due to bike loading, disabled passengers, and traffic congestion. If you're getting the bus after a time stop, you'll likely almost always get it on time. If your stop is before the time stop, bus arrival times will vary wildly.
It gets even more interesting when you add transport of the bus: the Seattle (King County) Metro also serves Vashon Island, so some of the buses travel on ferries with their associated delays and peculiarities.
I ride busses around Seattle a lot and have never seen or heard of it happening. I'd be willing to entertain the possibility, but I don't believe it without evidence, and someone saying they are scared of it happening doesn't count as evidence.
ST 510 (Seattle - MLT - Everett, to reach Premera in MLT) was routinely 30+ minutes late, because buses would get stuck in traffic each way. So the common "2 buses at once" would occur. Or sometimes the 1st would be over-stuffed and the 2nd would be 5 minutes behind and almost empty.
MT 550 running 6 buses an hour felt the same in 2016 - packed in like a mosh pit during rush hour. That's when I gave in and bought a truck, and dealt with parking 6 blocks away instead of hiking 9 blocks down Cherry (and past the perpetual tent city) to the tunnel.
I just checked the bus stop near my parents' place in Miami (I'm living in NYC now). The next bus arrives in 14 hours lol. Busses for that stop run hourly between 11am-4pm.
I don't get how they think anyone can depend on that. Not only is an hour between busses incredibly frustrating, if I needed to do anything past 4pm, (like I don't know... commute to work?) I would have no way back home until the next day.
It's got nothing to do with traffic delays. There are plenty of buses at each leg in my route. My specific problem is that I have to ride for 20 minutes in the opposite direction to get to a transit station where I then transfer to an express bus out to UW Bothell. But the bus from UW to my office isn't synchronized with the express bus so I either wait 15 minutes or walk a mile and a half across I-405.
On the other hand it's very efficient for getting in to the city, as I can hop on a single bus and be in Green Lake or the U district in about 15 minutes, and it's another 10 to cross the canal.
It may be that one day, you'll be standing at a bus stop with no shelter in 46c weather with no water or hat waiting for a bus that is 20 minutes late.
If and when that happens, you'll understand why I once hit the external emergency door override for a bus that tried to drop off a passenger but not let me on, and gave the busdriver an earful when he tried to close the door on my arm.
Then, there's the Houston bus system ca. mid 2000's, where the bus might leave several minutes early or several minutes late. Imagine not making your connection in 100+ degree Fahrenheit 90+ humidity while dressed for a job interview. Contrast this with the Minneapolis bus system, where you could time the busses at stops within 2 minutes in the central city, even while a foot of snow covered the ground. Both systems used essentially the same equipment -- same models and manufacturers.
That is simply the state of public transportation in the US. I don't use buses very frequently, but the times I had to, my success rate with getting on a bus at the time it was scheduled is somewhere around 40%.
Sometimes it comes 15 minutes late, sometimes it doesn't come entirely and then it's a 30 minute wait (or longer) until the next one. One time it actually came early AND left early. I have no idea what the people who expected it 10 minutes later did. I guess they had to wait 40 minutes.
And it's not a walkable distance either (5-6 miles), so I still have to wait.
Take the Sound Transit 550. It is the main (only direct?) busline between downtown Seattle and Bellevue. During rush hour it comes at an interval of 10 - 15 min. The bus it self is a double wagon (with an accordion connection), it fits maybe (beware I'm pulling this figure from thin air) 50 people. It is always crowded with people standing back to front. During these 10 - 15 minutes one can only imagine how many people cross on the motorway between these places in their private cars.
So it is accurate (although it sounds like a contradiction) to say that *"Nobody wants to take the bus because it is too crowded".
Newcastle here - yep, you wait for a bus to get to work and it just doesn't arrive. That isn't once in a blue moon thing, it's a regular daily thing to a point where you literally can't rely on public transport to get to work or to school.
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