Having been a long time user of public transit in medium to low density areas, the issues are:
>there’s no fiscal case for stuff like heavy rail or light rail in the burbs, so you’re using buses until you travel somewhere more dense.
>the buses have limited geographical availability and it may be a long trip to or from a bus stop
>the buses have limited frequency and may run way every half hour or hour.
>Buses are generally going to be fine at getting you from suburbia to whatever downtown core efficiently maybe adding 25%-100% extra travel times mostly because the buses need to frequently stop and let on new people. Moving from suburb to suburb on the other hand often doubles to quadruples trip times. There isn’t enough demand for such trips to make improving this fiscally viable, but this is something you will likely want to do a fair bit in practice.
>It’s not rare for a 30 minute bus trip to take longer than if you used a bike while also being more expensive. So transit often isn’t doing anything besides long trips downtown faster and providing transport to those who can’t use a bike for whatever reason. So they’re a bit of a non-solution for many problems caused by low density.
>you are generally constrained in how much cargo you can keep on your person, so these have limited utility in terms of allowing you to bring goods back to your home. If you drop the car and rely on transit, you need to work out some solution for moving cargo in an affordable manner.
I have many strategies to compensate for this, but really, what you want to do is ensure as many services are possible are in walking, biking, or e-bike distance to reduce the need to lean on the public transit system and reduce how frequently one needs to use it. If things are in bike distance, people can load more cargo on a cargo bike and get it back to their homes than they can using a bus. At the same time, such densification will also mean more robust public transit systems as increased ridership means more money for improvements to the system. Increased densification also makes things like package delivery, ride sharing, car sharing, and so on cheaper/more available/faster which you will want to lean on if you don’t have a car.
The problem with public transportation in suburbs isn't the spread out nature of them so much as the lack of straight lines to run transit on. While it is annoying to wait that long, a bus every 10 minutes can be self supporting in the suburbs, but you can only get that frequency and ridership if everyone rides it and nobody will do that unless it is reasonably fast to get to the destination. The crooked roads in most suburbs mean that the bus is slowly winding around. Not only do cars corner better, but they also spend less time winding because they leave the local neighborhood for a main road which isn't bus friendly.
Don't get me wrong, density is better, but putting the blame on lack of density gives suburbs an excuse they are not worthy of.
You really can't add little things to existing infrastructure because you can't smoosh buildings closer. People want 3000 sq ft homes on an acre of land on a quiet street and to drive to their shopping and to drive to their walmart, and no bus service can service a neighborhood like this because either the stops are so far apart it's a 5 minute walk to each one, or it stops so frequently that it takes an hour to get across town, or a compromise of both, leading situations where driving is nicer than taking the bus. And even then, a bus service is not going to reach everywhere you want to go, because house-to-house travel is the absolute longest possible. Even on a decent feeder system, going from the suburbs to a normal part of the city takes forty-five minutes to get into the metro because of all the parking lots, for all the cars, that people own, because the bus service takes too long to get anywhere. The only way to start is to build a dense neighborhood where people can live and work within it, as a new neighborhood, with collective parking and minimal concessions to car traffic. It has to work as a system, or it doesn't work at all.
> A proper transit network and walkable design ensures that this doesn't become a problem.
While that's true, if you don't have a proper transit network, it's a real problem. And many cities aren't in a position to build a proper transit network at the drop of a hat. Don't get me wrong, I wish they did or could efficiently build one. But sometimes you have to deal with reality as it is, not as you'd like it to be, unfortunately.
That is the real problem. Suburbs are mostly dense enough to support good transit, but you can't get good transit into cul-de-sacs. The bus takes too long getting down each one, and if you live in the next one it is a waste of time going down it - while if you do live down that one it has to because you don't live in walking distance of a road they can get down. No cul-de-sac alone has enough people to support the bus.
A subway could be dug under everything, but the $$$ are too high. A gondola system could potentially go between houses and so serve a few cul-de-sacs before coming out at a suburban station - this looks like the lowest cost answer, but it still isn't cheap.
Coming from a rural area, I’m really appalled at how inefficient public transit is.
Coming from a rural area, you should be more cognizant about how density affects public transit. Compare SF Muni (density=18,000 people per sq mile) and VTA light rail (5700/sq mi)
a) fortuitous enough to live right by public transit centers
many people that live near transit didn't arrive there fortuitously, they made the tradeoff between living farther away in cheaper/larger/nicer housing, and living close to transit. I live in a small condo that's a 10 minute walk from a train station, but I didn't end up there by accident -- I chose between a 3 bedroom single family home a 40 minute drive from work and a much smaller condo, and I chose the condo. Ironically, I don't even take transit, when I bought the place it was a 30 minute bike ride from work (which is poorly served by transit), then I moved to a job that's a 10 minute bike ride away (well served by transit, but too close to make transit worthwhile)
The less dense an area is, the less effective buses are.
If everyone lived in a dense, urban environment, buses would be great. But they're not useful for large portions of the population, in America at least.
I wish park-and-rides were more common. I'd use that, if it was an option. But for now, I'm not going to walk four miles to take a bus the remaining 15 miles to work.
Stuff like getting rid of parking minimums might help, but making it less convenient to have a car is one part of the solution alternative transit option, it's mostly just going to frustrate all involved.
I think the problem is we already have suburban sprawl. Rezoning and rebuilding the community with mass transit, buses or better yet subways/trams is not cheap. Then you need to get the community that has already invested in their suburban homes, to put their tax money into such public infrastructure.
> Most suburbs in the United States are built very very intentionally to accomodate car and discourage other modes of transportation. Cul-de-sacs and winding roads only make sense with cars. The logistics of having a bus serve an area like that don't make sense, and even walking these winding, dead-end streets is a much bigger chore than, say, walking on relatively straight streets that try to connect point A to point B efficiently.
Well, one could make an on-demand share taxi/microbus service that serves between those cul-de-sacs and the closest avenue that is served by full size fixed-route scheduled buses.
"The rail doesn't go where you want it to go" comment is directed at Muni, not Chicago's or New York's system. Chicago's and New York's largely goes where people want it to go because development springs up around the transit.
The problem with buses is capacity. If you city is relatively sensibly laid out and commuters tend to follow certain predictable routes, you can get far more capacity on a rail line than on roads. Not only does a bus carry a lot fewer people (an NYC reticulated bus can carry about 120, a full NYC subway train about 2,000), but as a practical matter you can't run the buses as fast or as frequently as you can run trains.
Predictability is also a problem. Buses are at the mercy of street traffic. Trains run on a schedule. My commute from northern Virginia to d.c. by highway used to take anywhere from 40 minutes to 80 minutes depending on traffic. My commute from westchester to new york city by train (which is actually 2 miles longer) takes exactly 34 minutes almost every day. About once a month a train will be 5-7 minutes late (which is consistent with the ~95% on-time performance of Metro North). I can leave my house 5 minutes before the expected departure time (with a 3-4 minute walk to the station) because I can count that the train will arrive within a minute of its scheduled time. You can't replicate this by car or bus in a dense metro area.
Pollution is another problem. Air pollution has huge externalize costs in a city because of the density. With electric rail, you can build the power plants out in the country where the pollution affects fewer people. With buses, you're clogging up the air breathed in by several million people in close proximity. Buses are prime contributors to sulfurous and particulate pollution in cities.
Moreover, it's not like bus infrastructure is free. You have to build and maintain the roads, and if you want to replicate the capacity of trains you need to build isolated bus highways through the city. These are not cheap, and have a very damaging effect on the communities they run through by cutting them in half. Highway construction inside a city is an absolute terrible idea from an economic point of view.
It's wholly inappropriate to compare the operating costs of transit to revenues. First, the shortfall in the MTA isn't because it can't charge high enough fares, but because the ticket prices are kept artificially low ($100 for unlimited rides per month!) as a subsidy to low-income people. Second, transit infrastructure generates high positive externalities. You have to look at the net impact on the whole economy instead of looking at just a piece of it. E.g. consider the highway system. It brings in a few tens of billions in revenue each year via gas taxes. Is that the whole of the economic benefit of the system? Are people like me, who don't drive, subsidizing people who do? Imagine if we got rid of the highway system. What would be the impact on GDP? A hell of a lot more than a few tens of billions, I can tell you.
The author says "we've tried density" to fix traffic. It's just not true. Also trying public transportation means it should be useful enough to be used: when I was in LA that wasn't the case.
I do not own a car. Love living in a transit forward city. But I understand the reality, that is not a real solution for most Americans who live in suburbs where good transit is just not possible due to the original layout. Instead of trying to shoehorn a solution that isn't practical we should focus on ones that potentially are.
> Bus rapid transit is one of the most underrated modes of transportation and light rail easily the most overrated
Bus rapid transit is great and vastly cheaper than anything on rails upfront, but even really well designed ones like Curitiba's one has lower capacity (albeit at a higher frequency, in their case). However until electric buses become the norm BRT has a few other massive downsides - pollution, noise, maintenance, emissions.
Overall, each transportation method (bike, e-scooter, BRT, regular buses, trolleybuses, trams, light rail, heavy rail, commuter rail, car) has it's own set of advantages and disadvantages, and they are often location and urban design specific. The best public transit systems are those with a mix that works for them.
As the original poster I'd mention that I'd love to see a much better public transit system but that I've also seen it repeatedly stymied by car-centric interests. I've seen stupidly large bus exchanges placed in the middle of fields because all the land closer to what people actually want to get to is covered with acres of parking and I've seen bus lanes shot down because of the expected impact on traffic. We need to accept that car infrastructure will be degraded to actually get meaningful transit changes and city densification efforts through and those box stores in lakes of parking need to die as a default footprint to build retail. If it takes seven minutes to walk from one storefront to the next then you're never going to get people out of their cars no matter how many buses you throw at the problem.
At the end of the day it comes down to: car infrastructure, walkability - choose one.
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.
You're the one who dismissed gathering evidence about real usage of streets because the only sensible solution is to live in dense housing and use mass transit. Which fails to recognize that solving the density problem involves major political battles that make it a generally nonviable solution to real problems that cities are faced with. Refusing to consider a politically workable solution because it is not your preferred one is counter-productive. And your preferred solution is NOT politically workable.
Second, in my reply to a sibling comment I showed evidence that electrification of cars is proceeding faster than electrification of bus fleets. So even though there are more of them, electrifying cars is actually proving to be politically easier.
Third, I picked on buses because they are the easiest form of mass transit to move to from cars. If buses can't be made to work for a particular metro area, then nothing else is likely to work either. And buses are failing to work very well in most places where they are used.
And fourth, the big problem with buses in America is population density. We're driving mostly empty buses that make little environmental sense. This is a sign that we're not actually underinvesting in bus routes. But it is hard to make mass transit work when people aren't all in one place. And as much as you might wish it otherwise, we're not inclined to congregate in a small area for convenience.
The biggest issue I've seen with public transportation is it almost always works on some varient of a hub and spoke system. If you don't
a) Live downtown and commute to a suburb, or
b) Live in a suburb and commute downtown
it's basically useless.
I live SE from downtown and work due south of downtown. To bus to work, I'd have to take a 30 minute bus downtown, then a 45 minute bus back out to work. My drive is only 25 minutes.
Until they dramatically expand the bus lines, my only option is to either move or pursue a job that matches our transportation system.
Yeah, I agree that bikes and public transport can't meet everyone's needs right now.
I'd also point out that the traffic holding up your bus is mostly cars :) so if enough people can be persuaded to shift to the denser form of transport (buses), those buses would waste less time in traffic — and so would the fewer people using cars out of necessity, and emergency services and so on.
"except when I live 20 miles from work and the public transit system has no regular schedule that will suit my needs"
That right there is the vicious cycle that has brought us to the mess we're in today. The answer is not to keep feeding the monster of urban sprawl with bigger and faster roads to encourage even longer hellish commutes by car. The answer is to encourage mixed developments where a majority of people live close to the business centers and have short commutes (so a mix of public transit/biking/walking is practical for most people).
>there’s no fiscal case for stuff like heavy rail or light rail in the burbs, so you’re using buses until you travel somewhere more dense.
>the buses have limited geographical availability and it may be a long trip to or from a bus stop
>the buses have limited frequency and may run way every half hour or hour.
>Buses are generally going to be fine at getting you from suburbia to whatever downtown core efficiently maybe adding 25%-100% extra travel times mostly because the buses need to frequently stop and let on new people. Moving from suburb to suburb on the other hand often doubles to quadruples trip times. There isn’t enough demand for such trips to make improving this fiscally viable, but this is something you will likely want to do a fair bit in practice.
>It’s not rare for a 30 minute bus trip to take longer than if you used a bike while also being more expensive. So transit often isn’t doing anything besides long trips downtown faster and providing transport to those who can’t use a bike for whatever reason. So they’re a bit of a non-solution for many problems caused by low density.
>you are generally constrained in how much cargo you can keep on your person, so these have limited utility in terms of allowing you to bring goods back to your home. If you drop the car and rely on transit, you need to work out some solution for moving cargo in an affordable manner.
I have many strategies to compensate for this, but really, what you want to do is ensure as many services are possible are in walking, biking, or e-bike distance to reduce the need to lean on the public transit system and reduce how frequently one needs to use it. If things are in bike distance, people can load more cargo on a cargo bike and get it back to their homes than they can using a bus. At the same time, such densification will also mean more robust public transit systems as increased ridership means more money for improvements to the system. Increased densification also makes things like package delivery, ride sharing, car sharing, and so on cheaper/more available/faster which you will want to lean on if you don’t have a car.
Low density and public transit really do not mix.
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