[acdha]

The experience is bad because we don’t invest in them. Most cities have heavily prioritized single-rude vehicles and act like the resulting congestion is a natural part of life. If instead we had priority signals, lanes, etc. the experience would be far more pleasant. Unfortunately in most cities, however, that’s deemed a lower priority than more subsidized street parking.

[cameldrv]

If you want better public transit, advocate for transit agencies to buy these. I agree that the problem with busses is that they're slow and unpleasant to ride. Your solution is to speed them up by avoiding congestion. That would certainly help.

Even if we eliminated congestion though, with 30 people on a bus, average riders wait for 30 people to get on and 30 people to get off on their ride. The average person also has 30 people walk past them and possibly bump into them. Also, any time you get 30 random people together, probably one of them will be doing something unpleasant.

The alternative smaller busses. More, smaller busses make you wait less for others getting on and off, and there are less people to disrupt the ride. It means that the bus system can serve more routes, moving people more directly. ince you're not making 30 people make a detour, you can make bus routes dynamic and get closer to a perfect route for every passenger. With more busses, you can run more frequently, so there's less waiting for your bus to arrive. Smaller busses are also more maneuverable, so it's easy to get in and out of traffic. Smaller busses can also serve areas where the ridership doesn't support a big bus driving past every half hour.

The only thing stopping this from happening before was the cost of all of those drivers. If we solve that, public transit has the potential to get way better.

[acdha]

> Even if we eliminated congestion though, with 30 people on a bus, average riders wait for 30 people to get on and 30 people to get off on their ride. The average person also has 30 people walk past them and possibly bump into them

This is too simple a model: not all stops are equally popular and especially it’s leaving out the time needed to stop and start again relative to the time it takes people to board, not to mention the limiting factor in many areas being traffic and signals.

[cameldrv]

Like I said, reducing the traffic congestion that busses deal with will speed them up.

However, it is completely unavoidable that if there are 30 people on the bus at all times, the average person will have to wait for 30 people to board and 30 people to get off. That could mean 60 stops, or it could mean one stop where everyone gets off and everyone gets on. Obviously the second one is faster, but reducing stops also means people have to walk further, which increases travel time.

Except in extraordinarily dense cities, the iron math of transit is that if you want to have 30 people on a bus, you're going to have to make people do some walking, they're going to have to wait a little while for a bus, and even without any congestion, they're not going to go very fast because of all of the stopping. That makes the door to door time very unfavorable relative to driving, and so except in those extraordinarily dense cities, very few people that can afford a car use transit.

Because there are a bunch of people on the bus, getting on and off has to be hurried and stressful, because you're making 30 people wait. This is particularly annoying if you're traveling with luggage or kids.

The environmental benefits of transit are potentially big, but let's do the math. A city bus gets about 3.3 MPG (https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10310) It's low mostly because the bus is so heavy and has to stop so frequently. If you have 30 people on the bus, it's about 100 passenger miles/gallon. The average car is about 24 MPG. If you have 4 people in it, it's 96 MPG. If you have 1 person in it, it's 24 MPG, so we can see that the big efficiency benefit of putting people together happens with just a few people. Smaller vehicles are also more flexible. The city bus that is running full at rush hour is also running with 2-3 people on it at 10 at night. It might be getting 6 MPG with less stopping, but it's very wasteful to run such a large vehicle almost empty. Smaller pooled vehicles can still run relatively full in off hours, and the extra capacity sits parked not using any energy.

My point overall is that transit just gets much better in basically every dimension if you reduce the number of passengers per vehicle.

The only reason transit agencies aren't doing this now is the cost of the drivers. Even with the cost of the drivers, UberPool is a similar product with non purpose built vehicles that has been fairly successful. If you took out the cost of the driver and reduced the ride price accordingly, it would dominate passenger transportation.

[anigbrowl]

Widening a street to put extra lines isn't a small undertaking. I like taking the bus and chose where I lived based on transit availability but I would much prefer small buses that run more frequently. Bigger buses are only full a small amount of time each day, but then run slower because they have to make more stops, and when they're not full they still take up a lot of room and require a lot of energy to run.

I'm so down with small self-driving buses.

[ericd]

At the risk of stating the obvious, you don't have to add extra lanes to make dedicated bus lanes, you just have to take lanes away from cars. Would not be popular, but if you could guarantee that these things didn't get stuck in traffic, and they ran frequently, I think they'd steal a huge amount of share from cars, and it would lessen the sting for many people.

[anigbrowl]

Walk around a real neighborhood, most of the roads have only two lanes. There are no lanes to take away unless you want to convert every second street into a one-way, and that (by definition) is going to double the distance people have to walk to take a bus because they won't be able to run buses in both directions on the same street. You don't have to sell me on the virtues of public transit, but it's just a fact that large buses are not efficient in many respects because they are carrying only a fraction of their capacity most of the time.

Small buses that run more frequently address this problem.

[Dylan16807]

> that (by definition) is going to double the distance people have to walk to take a bus because they won't be able to run buses in both directions on the same street

No it won't. At most it adds about a block. At best the new route is closer.

[ericd]

True, I mean mostly for main roads. Sibling post also had a good point that we could remove street parking and make another lane, in many cases.

[acdha]

In most cities you don’t even need to take a traffic lane: just the subsidized parking. Let people use garages or, better, take the bus and the entire area works better for everyone.

[ericd]

Oh yeah, great point.

[baddox]

You haven't actually proposed a solution though, because I have very little control over how much is invested in public transit, but I do have near total control over whether I take public transit.