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.
If the headway between buses is greater than 15 minutes, then few people are going to chose it as their transportation option. If one bus fails to show, often enough for me not to bother and walk instead, then you have a 30 minute waiting time at an open bus stop in cold driving rain.
Now I live in Asia and the buses are extremely frequent headway is less than 10 minutes, and I have no need for a car.
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.
15 minutes isn't frequent enough if you live a block or so away from the bus stop, but it's pretty damn frequent if you live on the same road as the bus stop. If they can figure out how to make buses that aren't loud enough to wake the dead then I'll change my mind.
BTW I'm talking about diesel buses and electric trolley-buses. They're all loud.
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.
That would probably make it seem, though, that the buses actually don't arrive (on average) every 10 minutes, since you'd oversample the buses that take longer than 10 minutes.
A large part of my issue with busses is that where I am they stop literally every block. It makes them miss every light (since if there's any traffic, they can only get to their stop during a green light), which just makes them too slow to be very useful.
I'm from a medium-sized city on the US midwest, so my experience is that bus drivers sometimes decide "Fuck it, I'm not coming today," on a route where the schedule says they should be there every 30 minutes. I think most Americans outside of large cities have a similar experience. I was really struck going on vacation to San Francisco how together the bus schedule was, compared to how "meh" laid-back the city institutions I interacted with were about everything else.
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".
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.
The buses in my city are not close-to-on-demand, stop frequently, don't adjust their route based on requests and cost over $5/trip (without a multi-trip card).
I imagine something like this will arrive more quickly, not stop 15 times on the way, and get people closer to their home/work.
For two trips a day; they're effectively charter buses. And a lot of them take very long, circuitous journeys; my kid's bus comes at 6:45 AM, long before school starts!
Now make them run every 10-15 minutes so anyone can get anywhere any time, also add a bunch of transfer points and intermodal nodes...
15 minutes is not frequent enough.
reply