Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are always "new adults" learning to get around and forming opinions.

So I strongly disagree: marginal improvements DO matter. And I agree with the author that this would be a relatively easy improvement to deliver for many cities.

I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year!

Decreasing the number of As and Bs by half might reduce that 20% start/stop time by half, shaving 10% off the total time. (This is ignoring the fact that more people will need to board and leave at each stop, which might mean in reality you’re saving like 8%.)

But you will also increase the distance walked to the bus stop. That means battling cars and weather.

I simply don’t believe that eliminating that closet stop would worsen my commute. When I’m leaving home, I would walk a block further, but probably 80+% of the time it would not increase the time I spend out in the elements because I’d just replace time standing at the bus stop with time walking to the next one. The only time it would hurt me is on the rare occasion that the bus passes me while I’m walking that extra block. (Pessimistically assuming 2 minutes to walk one block, and with buses coming every 10 minutes on average, is how I get 80%.) But I bet doing that all up and down the route would make the bus much more predictable. That closest stop is within the distance that cars back up from a traffic light at that next intersection when there’s traffic, and when the bus stops at my intersection it can often get pinned in the stop for a while when motorists aren’t in the mood to let the bus re-enter traffic. Multiply that phenomenon by, say, 20 extra stops and you get to some pretty unreliable service for people trying to get to work in the morning. I bet most of us would happily walk an extra block if it means we no longer have to leave for work half an hour early. 2 minutes extra walking on either end adds up to 4 minutes “wasted” time walking (I also am not sure I count walking as wasted time, by the way - physical activity is good for me) is a lot less than 30 minutes wasted time padding my commute to account for less reliable service.

And then when I’m coming home I get off at that stop that’s a block further away anyway. Because there’s a light at that intersection but not at the one where the close stop lies. I can easily spend more time waiting for a gap in traffic large enough to cross a busy street during the evening rush than it takes to walk that extra block.

Just like a little 4 seat bus you could just have all the time. I bet that would be popular!

I’m really curious how this would pan out here, but it can’t be the only solution.

And beyond that, the 6% of average time savings seen in studies of similar systems would be about the same improvement as adding curb bump outs which would save the bus time by not needing to repeatedly merge back into traffic. And that work is already happening across the city without inconveniencing anyone or causing users with disabilities from being discriminated against by armchair urban planners.

And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient, if you can afford to use it. (That load-bearing "if" is important, though.)

Point-to-point transportation is faster and more convenient because:

1. we don't have bus lanes so buses are forced to sit in the same traffic as cars and 2. buses are often underfunded so have slow/infrequent service.

Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right. I can count on my fingers the number of times I used an Uber or drove a car in the 1 month that I stayed in Europe - this was going out every day, in multiple cities, rural and urban, and across different countries.

This is a good thing! If more people use public transit when it's possible, it opens up the roads for the handful of people who actually NEED to use a car.

If you have enough density to justify a bus lane, you have enough density to justify a subway.

Not at all. Building a subway in most US cities right now is very expensive. Raising the tax revenue alone is probably a non-starter.

Moreover you're going to have to close the road down anyway to do any form of cut-and-cover or even deep bore construction, which means every business on the corridor and every person who lives on it is going to get angry for as long as the subway is being built.

There's no painless way to do infill public transport. The problem is that nobody in the US is willing to compromise.

This is true but seems like a problem worth solving. It's also true of more than subways; we have the same problem with bridges, housing and many other things. Better to get on with fixing it than use it as an excuse for doing something worse.

> Moreover you're going to have to close the road down anyway

That's a one-time cost, and you're not required to close a 500 mile stretch of road for years on end. Dig one block, install the tunnel, cover it, dig the next block.

IMO it comes back to the fact that Americans are just not willing to accept change of any kind right now. The economy feels too shaky, the electorate too divided (even within states and municipalities), and there's too little faith in government to architect the kind of change you'd need to build subways, underground metros, or even BRT. We need a larger feeling of unity even at a state level to make the changes necessary, which is why municipalities continue to do bare minimum maintenance of roadways and pretty much nothing else. The last big set of constriction in dense urban areas was funded by the Obama stimulus from the GFC which was passed 17 years ago.

That assumes a linear city, where everyone lives within a short walking distance of the same street.

In actual cities, bus lines from different neighborhoods converge on main streets. While individual lines may have 10–15 minute intervals, bus traffic on the main streets may be high enough to justify dedicated bus lanes.

Then, as the city grows, it can make sense to replace the bus lanes with light rail and direct bus lines with collector lines connecting to the rail line. Which should be cheap, as a dedicated lane is usually the most expensive part in building light rail.

But you generally want to avoid building subways until you have no other options left. Subway lines tend to be an order of magnitude more expensive than light rail lines. Travel times are also often higher, as the distances between stops are longer and there is more walking involved.

Isn't that the assumption you're making? That there is a single primary street that everything converges and then diverges from which is common to every bus route? Meanwhile in practice any given person standing on the You Are Here dot could want to go in any of the eight directions from where they currently are.

A route that goes east-west isn't going to have much in the way of shared route with one that goes northeast-southwest except for the one point where they intersect, and isn't it better to have multiple routes intersecting in multiple places in terms of minimizing trip latency and maximizing coverage?

> Which should be cheap, as a dedicated lane is usually the most expensive part in building light rail.

But that's the thing that makes the bus lane so expensive!

By the time you have an area with enough congestion to be considering a bus lane, the problem is generally that you can't add a lane because the land adjacent to the existing road is already developed and not available, otherwise you would just add an ordinary lane that buses could use too. But converting one of the existing lanes in an area which is already congested makes the traffic exponentially worse than putting the new thing underground.

Essentially, if you can add a lane then you add an ordinary lane and if you can't add a lane but need one then it's time to dig.

A typical direct bus line starts from somewhere, goes through a number of neighborhoods, reaches a major street, and follows it to a central location. The number of directions that need a bus line is typically much higher than the number of streets reaching the central location. (For example, you need ~10-degree intervals at 10 km from the center to guarantee a reasonable walking distance to the nearest bus stop.) Hence the bus lines eventually converge.

Once you have enough bus traffic that a dedicated lane makes sense, transforming an ordinary lane into a bus lane will make the traffic faster for the average person. It's not a Pareto improvement, as the traffic will become worse for those who drive on that route. But it's not a huge loss for them either. If you already have 20+ buses/hour making frequent stops during the rush hour, the throughput for that lane will already be much lower than for the other lanes.

Public transit depends on the assumption that there is enough density along a given route to justify its existence. Take a look at the NYC subway map. In the highest density boroughs (Manhattan and Brooklyn) the routes basically go from everywhere to everywhere. Even more so for the Manhattan bus map. That's what you want in a large dense city.

In smaller cities, the "build a high density core surrounded by lower density areas" model is the thing that causes more congestion, because then the core ends up as a bottleneck but people don't want to take transit to get there because it doesn't have frequent service to the areas outside the core at one of the traveler's endpoints. For those cities it's better to have medium density everywhere than try to make transit work in a city where a large proportion of the population is coming from an area with density too low to make it viable.

And if the whole "city" is low density, i.e. it's a rural small town, then it's not likely you're going to make public transit work there whatsoever. The best option there is to use mixed zoning so people so inclined can live within walking distance of shops.

> It's not a Pareto improvement, as the traffic will become worse for those who drive on that route. But it's not a huge loss for them either.

It is though? The premise to begin with is that road is already too congested and is slowing down the buses. Removing a third to half of its capacity is going to make it dramatically worse. That's what many of the proponents of bus lanes are after -- they want to force people onto the bus by snarling the cars.

They refer to this as "induced demand" by inverting the sign when what they really mean is to suppress demand for driving by making it more miserable, but don't want to call it that because it would be unpopular.

Consider a low-density urban area with 1500 people / square km (~4000 people / square mile). You could achieve that with a uniform sprawl of single-family homes on half-acre lots, or with a network of towns / villages / neighborhoods surrounding the city center. The former generates more car traffic, while the latter makes public transit useful for a large fraction of trips. And the latter also makes local services viable, as there will be enough population within a walking distance.

And if you have a 2+2 lane street with enough bus traffic to justify bus lanes, most of the capacity is in the inner lanes not used by the buses. Urban buses stop frequently, making the traffic flow much worse than in lanes without buses.

Only if you're also intentionally making point-to-point worse.

Note that I'm not comparing to "get in your own car and drive", which has the disadvantage of having to park. I'm comparing the ideal taxi-shaped thing to the ideal bus-and-tram-and-train-shaped thing.

I feel like you missed my last paragraph. If public transit is better then more people would use it and there would be fewer cars on the road. Can you imagine how terrible point-to-point traffic in SF would be if everyone was driving to work instead of relying on Caltrain or BART?

I'd suspect most car trips today are 1 or 2 passengers with the back seat and trunk empty; we'll eventually see new form factors of on-demand vehicle that trim off unneeded space. If you need to get from A to B alone, no cargo to speak of, you order a ride that covers that class and it's small. If you're taking a shuttle from the airport with your whole family and luggage, you order a ride with those specs.

They make even more sense if they are a bit larger and can accommodate multiple people at once. Something like a large van or small bus.

(Also, tunnels are useful not just for the increase in traffic, but for moving car traffic away from non-car traffic, which makes both kinds of traffic safer, faster, and more efficient.)

Even the rush hour traffic is trivially solved by mild carpooling (small vans for 4-6 people).

We're talking about cities, of course; in rural areas, nothing beats cars.

Ultimately the thing you want to transport is not cars, it's people. Walking fits the most people in a limited amount of space, then bikes, buses and other forms of public transport, then cars with 4 people in them, then cars with 3 people in them, then cars with 2 people in them, then cars with only 1 person in them, and finally empty cars. More cars will never reduce congestion.

But to address your point: A bus in a dedicated lane takes up more space than a bus that's stuck in car traffic, you are right about that. On the other hand, when congestion is so bad that cars simply don't move, no matter how many lanes they have, getting people out of cars into more efficient forms of transport, will also help cars. And a bus that actually goes, can do that. If you look in cities with good public transport, more people go by public transport than by car. In cities with good bicycle infrastructure, more people go by bike than by car. That means even cars are less likely to get stuck in traffic in those cities. Even if you take away a car lane.

I don't know where you got the idea that a bus needs 3 drivers.

And? There are also buses that trundle around with nobody but the driver in it. Or unused bikes and e-scooters that litter the sidewalks.

> Ultimately the thing you want to transport is not cars, it's people.

Yeah. And let's make it efficient. Put these people into 3-level bunk beds. This way they can travel all together in just 1 bus to their assigned workplace. And you don't need to run buses until they're allowed to clock off their shift.

Efficiency!

> On the other hand, when congestion is so bad that cars simply don't move

In this case you close the downtown offices and force them to work on alternate days, like they do in India with cars. Remote work already can replace 70% of all work, and with AI this number will grow.

Apart from that, mild carpooling will decrease the number of cars by 2x. Small vans with 6 seats can _easily_ remove all congestion.

> no matter how many lanes they have, getting people out of cars into more efficient forms of transport, will also help cars.

Just one ask for urbanists. Can you just stop lying, please? Just one thing. Don't say that "transit help cars". It doesn't. There is a lot of research from _you_ (e.g. https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/7/does-buildi... ) that proves this. Transit does NOT decrease the travel time for cars ("traffic") it _increases_ it by increasing congestion due to increased housing density that transit forces.

You want to pack people into 3x3 jails ("microapartments")? Fine. But be honest about it.

uhhhhhh what. What does every 10 minutes have to do with this at all

> It easily "takes" as much space as 100+ cars.

are you ok??? have you seen a bus before??

> A single bus needs about 3 drivers to be effective

I have never ever seen a bus with 3 drivers in it. If you're talking about 3 drivers over the course of 24h, those drivers are not in the bus at the same time, and therefore don't make up 20% of the passengers on the bus. If you're saying the average bus route serves 15 people per day, you are certainly mistaken.

Definitely mistaken for London - currently (according to DFT's numbers) about 18 people per bus average (not per day, though.)

Excepting the case of a dedicated bus lane, the amount of road space a bus is preventing other cars from taking up at a given time is equal to the size of the bus. Technically, it's less than that in the case of bus stops littered amongst parking. In the case of a dedicated lane, it reduces the maximum throughput of the thoroughfare, but it's not a simple thing to model as there are other effects that the bus can have to reduce the number of cars when the rate limit of thoroughfare would be pertinent (i.e. usually rush hour). Just saying "think about it" when saying a bus takes up the space of 100+ cars doesn't really substantiate such a bold claim.

> Yes, I'm talking about the drivers that are needed for a reasonable 16-hour bus service. And the typical ratio is actually a bit more than 3 drivers per 1 bus.

> No. I'm saying that on _average_ there are 15 people in a bus. More during the rush hour, fewer during the off-hours.

If there is an average of 15 passengers on the bus during the operations of the bus and there is an average of 1 driver on the bus during the operations of the bus, then it is 1/16th occupied by driver(s). For it to be taken 20% by driver occupancy, then it would require there to be an average of 4 passengers on the bus during operations.

> If there is an average of 15 passengers on the bus during the operations of the bus and there is an average of 1 driver on the bus during the operations of the bus, then it is 1/16th occupied by driver(s)

No. For the bus to be viable, all 3 drivers have to be "virtually present" there. A bus _has_ to be available at all times with a reasonable interval, otherwise it might as well not exist.

Or in other words, a passenger needs to be paying the salary for even the missing drivers.

until this moment, you were only claiming.

> the section about computing the efficacy of bus lanes

> Excepting the case of a dedicated bus lane

Not all buses require a bus lane. A bus lane is a deliberate choice that doesn't make sense in all areas and for all bus routes. It is disingenuous to reference the reduction in throughput due to a bus lane as a blanket claim that an individual bus takes away the room of 100+ cars on the road.

> you have almost 20% of the bus taken by the drivers on average

> No. For the bus to be viable, all 3 drivers have to be "virtually present" there.

Your claim is about how much of the bus is taken by drivers, which while having some correlation to cost, really doesn't have anything to do with the cost of operating the bus. An oversimplification of this is to posit a magic bus that runs 24 hours a day with 8 hours shifts by 3 drivers. That means that the drivers take up 24 person-hours of capacity on the bus. If we say they have 15 passengers on average, then the passengers take 360 person-hours of capacity on the bus. Thus, drivers take up 24 / 384 or 6.25% of the capacity.

Honestly, I never really cared enough to convince you that transit is a good thing because that feels like a fool's errand. But these weird claims and fallacies bother me. If you want to claim that a bus isn't cost effective, then great. Just cite an actually relevant metric and actually calculate it correctly.

Where I grew up in NW Scotland, it's a five hour round trip to go to the supermarket. You pretty much need a car for that.

Where I live right now it's a five minute walk to the supermarket, but I still need a car because the things I work on are a long way from where I live, often up steep muddy mountain tracks.

When I lived in the middle of Glasgow people used to come up and have a go at me about driving a massive V8 4x4 in the middle of a city. What am I supposed to do with it? Bike to the suburbs and then go and drive up a mountain?

"But why not get a job where you don't need to drive hundreds of miles in a massive 4x4?"

Because then the things on the tops of mountains don't get fixed when they break, and the radios don't work properly, and then people like you die in a fire.

Sometimes it's hard for people to grasp that just because their not-really-a-job tapping numbers into an Excel spreadsheet all day can be done from home or from an easily walkable city centre location, it doesn't mean that everyone's job looks like that.

I do wish I could usefully use a cargo bike. Those things are awesome.

We just want there to be viable public transportation options for situations where it makes sense. This even makes it easier for the people who do have to drive, like you, as there will be less congestion because a single bus can replace literally dozens of cars, combine that with a single tram and a single metro car and you're replacing literally hundreds of cars that would otherwise be on the roads instead.

But growing up in a rural area where there are two buses a day none of which are useful for anything other than high school pupils (although they're not school buses) it does tend to limit everyone's options.

I find this statement utterly hypocritical. Sure, we're not killing off driving. We are just choking off the roads with bike lanes, forcing extra-high density ("just build more"), removing parking, forcing the drivers to pay for transit that they don't use, and just to pay in general.

But no, we're not preventing driving. Not at all.

Urbanists want to stop people from using cars as much as they can force that.

Suburbs are _cheaper_ than dense cities. In fact, they generate most of the wealth of the country. It's easily proven by checking the amount of personal income taxes from suburbs versus cities.

People who claim that "suburbs are subsidized" typically check the _corporate_ taxes that are paid (surprise!) usually at their headquarters' locations. Usually in downtowns. But _people_ who create wealth overwhelmingly prefer suburbs.

And yeah, if your goal is to maximize the profit that you're extracting from companies by exploiting people, then dense cities are perfect.

Consider that the "one size fits all" approach into forcing people out of cars breaks down very rapidly once you get out of sight of the sickly LED glow of streetlights.

If you live in a city, you probably don't need a car.

And the fact that you're complaining about "removing parking" is hilarious. Street parking is objectively the most useless, wasteful allocation of already limited public space imaginable. You expect cities to dedicate premium real estate to act as a subsidized storage locker for your private, empty vehicle for the 95% of the day you aren't even using it. Then you complain about non-drivers "forcing" you to pay for transit, while everyone else's taxes are literally subsidizing the free public storage of your personal property.

Let's also talk about your entitlement to those roads. When you complain about "choking off" streets, what you're really whining about is that cities are finally prioritizing actual residents over commuters who are just driving through. Most car traffic in urban centers is just people transiting. Why should a neighborhood sacrifice its safety, noise pollution levels, air quality, and public space just to act as a high-speed shortcut for people who don't even live there?

And please, spare me the inevitable "but what about rural areas" argument. We are talking about dense cities. Nobody is coming for your car in bumfuck nowhere; you can keep driving there all you want. (Though honestly, here in the Netherlands, you don't even have to drive in the countryside because you can usually just grab a train or get anywhere by bike, but that's beside the point.) Urban planning applies to urban areas.

I live in the Netherlands. Millions of people here take transit and ride bikes every single day. And guess what? Nobody banned cars. In fact, it's widely considered one of the best places in the world to drive specifically because everyone who doesn't want or need to drive isn't forced to be on the road getting in your way. We just realized that sacrificing huge swaths of our cities so commuters can treat our neighborhoods as a shortcut is incredibly stupid, and there are infinitely better ways of using the limited space in cities than to let drivers park their cars there.

Giving people viable choices isn't a totalitarian conspiracy to oppress drivers, it's just good urban design. It's wild that you are so used to forced car dependency that simply offering people an alternative feels like a personal attack.

P.S., I'm also a driver, I just don't need to do it 90% of the time because I live in a sane country where I can just bike to the other side of the city in 20 minutes.

Except that bike lanes in the US, on average, carry fewer people than car lanes that they replaced. So yes, it's indeed "choking off". It's done to force the density increases. After all, if you can't commute anymore (roads are sabotaged and transit is slooooowwww), you'll have an option to live closer to the workplace. In a new expensive apartment in a high-rise.

Bike lanes also kill businesses. There were studies showing otherwise, so I replicated them, and they now show the opposite. Places in Seattle and Portland with bike lanes that displaced traffic lanes are declining faster than areas around them. The previous positive results were caused by spurious correlations during the general upswing in the urban economy after the 2008 crisis.

> Then you complain about non-drivers "forcing" you to pay for transit, while everyone else's taxes are literally subsidizing the free public storage of your personal property.

There is no free parking around me anywhere. And I'm also paying around $2000 a year in car tab and property taxes for transit that I don't use. And before you ask, in my state user fees pay for 90%+ of the total road maintenance expenses.

> We are talking about dense cities.

Yeah. They need to be _de_-densified in the longer term. But even dense cities will benefit from removing bike lanes and adding self-driving taxis.

> I live in the Netherlands. Millions of people here take transit and ride bikes every single day. And guess what? Nobody banned cars.

I got my driving license at the age of almost 30, and I lived in several large cities. And I _also_ lived in Amsterdam. People ride bikes in Amsterdam because there usually are no other comparable options. Transit typically takes ages longer, and car parking is non-existant. Of course, people justify that by telling themselves how they love to ride bikes even in cold wind and rain.

“A block or 2” each way at the start and destination is a significant difference (4-8 blocks) for most elderly people.

Busses fill two different roles, as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation. They can serve a vital role for cities without the kind of investment it would take to make most typical HN reader consider them as a primary means of transportation.

As such latency isn’t necessarily as critical vs coverage here.

In the US, buses (and public transport in general), are thought of as social programmes. Anyone can use them, but they are really for people who can't drive or are too poor to own a car.

The rider makeup then looks like that. The elderly and the poor, sadly. Services run at a huge loss and are dependent on massive and unpopular government subsidies. Quality of service is bad. There's a stigma to using it. You end up with long, slow bus lines because this allows as many of the current demographic (elderly, poor) to take the bus. And there are always bailouts or brutal cuts on the horizon. You end up at a sort-of local maxima of inadequacy.

In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving.

This alternate universe is a city like London. Transport for London has a balanced budget, and despite what grumpy Brits like to say, quality of service is on an ever-upwards trajectory.

In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term. You make public transport attractive to more demographics.

These means the trains constantly improve and there's no poltitians trying to cut funding or under budgetting. The 10 companies in Tokyo I can name are JR East, Eiden, Toei, Tokyu, Seibu, Tobu, Odakyu, Keio, Keikyu, Keisei. There are actually more but they generally run 1 line each, at least at the moment.

Of those, only Toei (4 lines) are run by the government. Eiden (the Tokyo Subway) is private but gets some goverment backing. The others are all private. JR East was public in the 70s. The other 7 have always been private.

Unsurprisingly, only Toei, the government run one, is not setup with all of the positive feedback loops that keep the others going.

Note that it's similar in the Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe area. JR West and 5 other big companies, 3 subway companies, a bunch of other 1/2 line companies.

Another thing to note is, AFAICT, the population density of Kyoto is generally less than Los Angeles but they have great transporation from these private companies.

Conversely, the London Underground has had notorious underfunding issues.

1. Where the Government wants to subsidize some group (e.g. help the disadvantaged by giving them discounts) they should pay the fair price to the transit agency out of the budget of Welfare, not drag on the financials of the transport agency. In other words, it shouldn't be possible that the transport agency is insolvent only because most of their customers are paying next to nothing. Discussions about whether we should spend a certain sum on subsidizing the poor to ride the bus/train/etc are purely welfare budget discussions.

2. The Government should move additional money into the system when they realize an expansion of transport helps further societal goals: e.g. congestion pricing funds should help to expand transit, or the government pays part of the cost to build new rail service to reduce congestion on the roads.

Instead of TfL being forced to take the loss, they are reimbursed by local government cost of the transport.

As an aside, I also take some issue with this pass being completely free to use. In my experience, people end up using it to go a single stop just because it's free, so why not -- which slows bus service for everyone else. I think it should be 20p per journey or something like that.

Another counterpoint: if the bus isn't overloaded, taking an additional passenger costs next to nothing, while delivering significant value to the passenger. Don't we want to create as much value as possible?

The bus has to stop, let the passenger on, and later let them off.

This affects everyone else on the bus and reduces the quality of service.

You can see that a long-distance train has doors only at the end of carriages, and stops for several minutes, but a subway has doors about every 10 seats, and stops for 20 seconds.

To liken this back to the old days - the difference in time between flashing a valid transfer slip (of paper) and having to drop change into the automated till.

Elderly will have to do that, too, because a) I expect they still want to track usage, and b) allowing some passengers to hop on a bus without checking in makes it too easy for those ineligible to do that (e.g. elderly who do not live in London) to try and do that, too.

Unfortunately the bus passes and freedom passes are not interchangeable and sometimes have to be manually checked if not in the local region,

The usual pattern is when a bus only lane is proposed, drivers complain because they view the bus as a social program. Local legislators often take the drivers' side because they also view the bus as a social program. Even if you get the political capital to push a bus only lane, traffic enforcement will routinely ignore bus lane violations. LA is making waves on the latter problem by attaching cameras to buses which automatically write tickets for cars blocking the bus lane.

Ultimately it's a politics problem. If nobody wants to spend political capital on running a bus system as a transport program, it ends up as a social program.

The problem with this in the US is that it's nearly impossible for the bus to be faster than a car without making the car slower on purpose, and the latter is the thing which is going to create the most opposition, because you're essentially screwing people over during the transition period -- which would take years if not decades.

In the meantime people still can't take the bus because the higher density housing that makes mass transit viable where they live hasn't been built yet etc., and as long as they're stuck in a car they're going to fight you hard if you try to make being stuck in a car even worse.

Meanwhile, cars are expensive. ~$500/mo for a typical car payment, another $100+ for insurance, another $100+ for gas, you're already at $8400+/year per vehicle before adding repairs and maintenance etc. For a two-car household that's more than 20% of the median household income. Make mass transit completely free and people start preferring the housing where mass transit is viable, which means more of it gets built, which is the thing you need to actually make it work.

Switching a car lane to a bus lane actually makes the cars in the remaining lanes move faster.

But it's especially rubbish when converting an existing lane, because the existing lane will have already allowed the demand to be high, e.g. people already built houses outside the range of mass transit and those residents are now locked in to using that road in cars, and you then remove the lane even though the demand is sticky.

LA average vehicle speed during rush hour is 27.6km/h (17 mph) according to Tom Tom [1]. So a 10 mph bus would turn that 27 minute journey into 46 minutes which I'll admit is more than desirable, hardly catastrophic though.

But remember that each bus can carry about fifty people which would remove close to fifty cars from the road resulting in less congestion and faster buses. Fifty cars need 400 m of road, one bus needs only 20 m.

And on your way home you can doze in your seat without causing an accident.

[1] https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/city/los-angeles-ca

There is another interesting US-centric perspective here. For some reason, US consumers feel the need to drive new or nearly-new cars.

$5000 can get you a reliable but unsexy used car. I think there is a sort of "Parkinson's law" of consumer spending at play, where financial outgoings will expand to match disposable income.

I also think there's a problem with fixed spend (e.g. car payment, insurance) vs per-trip spend. Per-trip costs are felt more.

A reason that public transport is often more popular in European cities because driving isn't even an option. There's literally nowhere to park. Even the rich need to get around, and this creates pressure to improve non-car transport from all sides.

$5000 can get you a 10+ year old used car with 100,000+ miles on it and no warranty. That's fine if you know how to do repairs and maintenance yourself, because then you're buying a part from the internet with a low markup and installing it yourself instead of paying four times as much for someone else to do it. But not every knows how to do that, or has time, or knows how to tell if a used car with no warranty will be reliable before buying it. And if you plop $5000 down on something with no warranty and then have to scrap it after the first year because your $5000 car needs a $5500 new engine, you're not saving money.

There is also the matter of where used cars come from. You can get one for $5000 because someone paid $30,000 to buy it new ten years ago. If more people did that, fewer new cars are sold and then fewer enter the used market and used car prices go up. So you can buy a used car for $5000, but it's not possible for "most people" to do that because if they tried to, they would no longer be available for $5000.

> I also think there's a problem with fixed spend (e.g. car payment, insurance) vs per-trip spend. Per-trip costs are felt more.

Which is the problem with mass transit. You get in your car and it feels like it costs nothing, the only thing that changed is the gas gauge went down by half a tank and the odometer went up. Meanwhile the amortized cost was actually over $100. Then you go to get on the train and you immediately have to swipe your card and get a bill for $40, which feels like a lot for one trip.

Worse, the car is $100+ per trip only if you're amortizing the fixed costs, i.e. comparing to the alternative of not having a car at all. If the fixed costs of having the car are sunk, the incremental cost of the trip is maybe $15, and then when the train is $40, nobody with a car is saving money to take the train when they can.

Whereas if the train is $0, then it's "hey that goes right where I'm going this time and I don't have to buy gas". Which, if it happens often enough, means more people don't need a car to begin with.

> A reason that public transport is often more popular in European cities because driving isn't even an option.

Obviously if you make something unavailable then people use alternatives. But in the US it's the other way around -- half the population lives in the suburbs where there is no public transport, nor can there be because the density is too low.

So then you need to find ways to make public transit more attractive (like eliminating the fares) rather than making cars less attractive, because making cars less attractive is going to encounter major opposition from the people who have no available option other than to use cars.

I can't make any excuses for the social and class implications, but if it got more people on the bus, it might only need to be a temporary measure.

At least that’s what I think. But if you’re right, and there’s a version of bus transport that’s viable without subsidy, then there should be a market opportunity for a private business to provide that type of bus transport. This actually exists for long range intercity buses already, but you’d think it should be possible inside of some cities. I haven’t looked into this in a lot of detail but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was effectively impossible to try and start a private bus service in most cities, specifically because that would reduce ridership of city transit and threaten all of the unionized public sector jobs in that system. In which case the bus system isn’t really even for the poor and elderly anymore; it’s for the transit workers union, which undoubtedly is a player in city politics.

Of course, there's still plenty of drivers, but the nice thing is that you have options here. Why would I want to drive if I can just take the metro, or tram, or train, or hell just cycle? Within Dutch cities cycling is often much faster than any other mode of transport, and the great thing is that everyone uses the cycling infra, young or old, rich or poor, able bodied and otherwise.

(Even then, it depends on the destination - if it's to another city then the intercity trains are still better but for 2+ people it ends up being the premium/expensive option and the car is cheaper.)

The city heavily discourages car use for commuting.

Offices have no parking spaces.

Any parking you do find in central London will be paid at an extreme rate.

To drive into the city costs around $20 per day, increasing much further if you have an older, polluting vehicle.

There is so much congestion that it is usually faster to walk than drive.

It’s a large percentage of total bus revenue by design, and a significant expense for some local governments. But the number only look large because of how we split the vast majority of government spending into federal and state budgets with local budgets being relatively anemic by comparison.

Perhaps the tiny subsidies (in absolute terms) are because the bus systems are just so small?

SFMTA's farebox recovery is around 25%. London Underground is about 130%. Osaka Subway is 209%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

Busses are light compared to 18 wheelers and other heavy equipment, they also replace many cars and SUV’s which keep getting heavier.

Finally that rule of thumb isn’t really that accurate, “A 1988 report by the Australian Road Research Board stated that the rule is a good approximation for rutting damage, but an exponent of 2 (rather than 4) is more appropriate to estimate fatigue cracking.” Rutting really isn’t that significant in most cases, but can instantly destroy road surfaces when fully loaded construction vehicles etc drive over something once.

Your former doesn't imply the latter. Here in Seattle we even still have cobblestone roads without heavy traffic and they spend very little money on them.

We have extensive rutting damage on the lanes use by busses and requires more expensive, deeper road base when they get replaced. This cost is due to the heavy traffic.

Even if squared, the buses are still 22 tons instead of 2-3 tons. 49 times more damage isn't good.

Also that visible ware is noticeable because it hasn’t been replaced. Looking worse when you resurface on the same schedule isn’t an actual cost.

We also have many concrete roads and closely-spaced axles, if they had them, would not help.

> Looking worse when you resurface on the same schedule isn’t an actual cost.

I addressed this: they have to dig much deeper and replace with much thicker road. Much more expensive. It's not "looking worse", it's actively dangerous to cyclists and other road users, so the surface must be replaced more often too.

But this is where you need to do a deeper analysis than just a simple rule of thumb. Even adding extra wheels to the same axle makes a big difference to road surfaces.

> so the surface must be replaced more often too.

Level of ruts you see are considered acceptable or they would be replaced.

However, ultimately the same entity is paying for the busses and road maintenance. If lighter busses saved taxpayers money that’s what they would use which is a major sign your analysis is inherently flawed.

I guess you don't know how the USA works, and Seattle in particular. We are spending a fraction of what is necessary to keep infrastructure from failing. We had a major bridge nearly collapse and was out of commission for years. https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-dep...

Many of our roads are not what we call acceptable.

> However, ultimately the same entity is paying for the busses and road maintenance.

Hahaha nope. We have so many different organizations with their own funding sources. Roads come from State and local funds. Metro is primarily funded with dedicated sales tax.

> If lighter busses saved taxpayers money that’s what they would use which is a major sign your analysis is inherently flawed.

Sorry, but this is possibly the most naive thing I've ever heard.

I can’t help but chuckle at the idea you actually believe that. Stop reading headlines and do some actual research into what’s actually going on.

If the US was utterly failing in maintenance you’d see ~6,000 random bridge failures per year based on the number of bridges in existence instead they are incredibly rare showing that we are actually doing a great job overall.

They don’t replace nearly enough cars and SUV’s to make up for the difference in fourth power of axle weight. But yes, 18 wheelers are worse.

A modest bus holds 40-50 people. Most commuter traffic is single driver, single vehicle. I don't know to which power the difference in axle weight would have to be to surpass the efficiency gains of replacing 40 to 50 American sized SUVs with a city bus, but I suspect it's more than four.

(I don't really understand how the fourth power of axel weight thing can possibly be true, though. Why would joining two vehicles together into a mega vehicle with double the weight and double the wheel count suddenly cause the combined vehicle to inflict 16x more wear than before you joined the two together? It makes no sense.)

A Ford F-150 weighs about 2 tons and has two axles, for an axle weight of 1 ton. 1^4=1.

A garbage truck weighs maybe 30 tons and has three axles, for an axle weight of 10 tons. 10^4=10,000.

So if you drive an F-150, you’re doing as much road damage driving down the street 10,000 times as the garbage truck does once. Rural areas that don’t have garbage trucks and just expect everyone to haul their garbage to the dump in the back of their pickups are onto something.

So, scenario A:

    4 ton vehicle, 2 axles
    load per axle is 2 tonnes.
    2^4 is 16
    2 axles - so load is 32.
    Another vehicle the same - also loading 32
    Total: 64

    8 ton vehicle, 4 axles
    load per axle is 2 tonnes
    2^4 is 16
    4 axles - load load is 64
    Total: 64

Doubling the weight and doubling the wheel count leaves the axle weight unchanged.

In Europe, the numbers differ even more. Lighter weight cars typically 1.5-2 tons, a new London bus can be upto 18 tons when loaded - that's ~5-16 units of wear for the car to 104,976 units for the bus...

But this is all supposing we're optimising for road wear, which isn't really the point of a bus system.

Here in Seattle, the busy roads with older lanes used for buses are obvious, because they have two deep canyons while the lane next to them is fine. In fact King County Metro has to pay millions in fines to the state because the buses are excessively heavy.

No roads without bus traffic have the same type of damage.

Which is part of the reason to know that axle weight alone isn't a sufficient scale. If you connect 2 cars axle to axle, they won't start doing 8x as much damage. What matters is axle weight divided by tire width.

I wish you did a little more studying before talking so authoritatively.

Yesterday I came across a couple articles that encapsulate this thought.

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/zohran-mamdani-efficiency-nyc-bu...

And

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/11/15/excellence-over-mediocrity...

One bus route can't wear two hats. Faster, sparser routes are typically complemented by slow, meandering collector routes which provide the kind of backstop you describe. Moreover, elderly and disabled people can use paratransit [1], which exists precisely to serve people with mobility issues too severe for regular transit.

Anyway, I reject the notion of buses as a second-tier transit option reserved for poor and disabled people. The only way poor people ever get decent service is when they use the same infrastructure that affluent people do. A bus system that doesn't serve the middle class is a system that will quickly lose its funding and become inadequate for anyone to use.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratransit

Paratransit is for a far smaller percentage of the population due to the significant expense.

Fundamentally as another commenter here said, a bus "can't wear two hats." In most large US cities, the bus, and sometimes the subway (if one exists), is mostly a welfare program, and its target demographic is the elderly, the poor, and the homeless. Two of those groups are rarely in any hurry.

The fact that urban professionals also rely on transit to actually get to work is not very much considered in the decisions ultimately made. This is why any changes to it are so fraught.

To actually serve both populations, you'd need to have two independent systems, but that would represent a tremendous amount of incremental cost. That's why they used to have (do they still? I'd guess not, post-pandemic) buses paid for by Apple, Google, Facebook etc. to shuttle people to work -- it's something the city government could never accomplish because the choices that make transit useful to those with jobs make it problematic for the other group.

Nothing stops you have adding express bus routes, thus allowing busses to work for yet another population. Further, bus networks are inherently cheap as long as they see reasonable ridership numbers it’s more economically efficient than cars.

When living in many a European city, I have chosen to walk instead of using a bus route due to the frequent stops making the bus trip a lot more expensive and marginally quicker. I have also lived in places where the eldery get a separate service, tailored to them, if they need it. Works a lot better IMO.

Alternate buses stop on the one-mile points only.

I don't use GitHub occasionally, I use it throughout every workday. Power-user tools like the command palette feel like exactly the kind of feature that fits a tool like GitHub.

Every. Single. Day. I see parents on their phone blowing through the stop signs in the alley at that intersection. During school drop-off! While there are kids and parents walking in that alley to get to the school!

It is utter madness.

Source on page 79 - https://www.onisr.securite-routiere.gouv.fr/sites/default/fi...

(Meanwhile, 190 pedestrians were killed in just my state of Illinois in 2022)

You have a practical vehicle for your situation and location. We would all be better off if a lot of urban/suburban SUV purchases were minivan purchases instead - like they were 20 years ago, and like your more recent purchase was.

The strategic reasoning module generates "intents" (a set of planned actions for the agent and its speaking partner) which are sent to the dialogue module.

They trained the model to be able to generate messages from those intents using data from messages in real games which were manually labeled with intents based on the content of the message.

> I walk for exercise in my neighborhood

> Public transit will never work for me ... I hate wasting my time traveling and cars are the only things fast enough to make going anywhere vaguely tolerable

The suburban model doesn't allow people to live close to any of the places they go. I too dislike wasting my time traveling, but I don't have to: I can walk five or ten minutes to the grocery store, dentist, park, restaurants, etc. I end up walking a lot over the course of a week, and personally I also bike to further destinations (a lot more people would here too if there were protected bike lanes like you mentioned you want). My travel time _is_ my exercise time - no need to spend time on extra walks to accomplish that, and there's interesting things around me when I go from place to place. The subway or commuter rail can take me further away faster than a car when I need to go somewhere distant.

But I'm lucky I can afford to live in a part of Chicago that hasn't been totally disinvested in over the last half century, like a lot of the city has. The state didn't pave a highway through the middle of it like they did to other - mostly black and brown - parts of the city to convenience suburban drivers.

The suburban model that works just fine for you comes at a cost to society. We need to reckon with that and build more places where people aren't forced to drive for their day-to-day necessities and desires.

My walking is to get me away from urban noise and people. My recreation takes me to places like get away from urban noise and people.

I find your travel time report interesting. I believe it that for where you go, it works. But I did a test with places I would go to in the Chicago area and none of them accessible by public transit and are typically an hour to an hour and 1/2 drive away (state parks). I test travel time by Google maps and driving is almost always significantly faster.

Yes I am glad that parts of Chicago were spared the insanity of interstate highways into urban spaces. It makes no sense doing that. Interstates should bypass urban centers. Although we should probably look at history as to what might happen. I suggest looking at what happened to urban centers that lost the competition for rail lines back in the late 1800s.

Another interesting experiment would be to map out the impact of replacing highways with train lines and full switching yards etc. that carry the same load of passengers and freight in the same timeframe.

I agree with you that we do need to work out a way to minimize costs of human existence both suburban and urban. We also need to fully account for all the externalities for both living spaces. We also need to reckon with there are country mice and city mice. We have very different values and very different physical tolerances in our living space.

We also need to look beyond the dichotomy of driving or walking but instead consider neighborhood delivery services for food and other ordered goods. see: https://www.businessinsider.com/lifvs-grocery-store-sweden-u.... I found this article interesting because I got a chance to see firsthand urban and rural Sweden and Finland this summer. Both places have food deserts of a sort. I don't fully grok it yet but it looks like people are comfortable with having only one or two vendors for a given item in a small store with a relatively small selection. There didn't seem to be the same "obsession" we have with getting a better price.

You're correct, people generally aren't too bothered if there are only a couple of choices, either of shops (e.g. two supermarkets) or products (two types of cereal bar).

I wouldn't in any way call it a food desert though. All the normal food for the region is available, the rest is just luxuries.

(And to the general point, people owning cars but mostly using them for recreation would still be a huge reduction in traffic, noise and pollution. That's not unusual for European city-dwellers, who often own one car and use it once or twice a week.)