[bluGill]

None of those problems you name are inherent in a bus though. Those are common problems with buses, but they don't have to be. A bus should not "chugs along circuitously to a point that is not quite at your destination" - design a better network. A bus should stop so close to where you shop that it is easier than carting that stuff to your car. A bus stop should not be so far away that bad weather is a problem. You should never miss your next leg because the next leg bus is never long in coming. The bus should always come.

The only part of your list that your transit agency shouldn't solve are the raving lunatic. This is easy to solve though as there are not many raving lunatics in the world and so the number of not lunatics riding great transit means they are rare (and there are plenty of others to help deal with them when they get on).

Running great transit costs a lot more $$$ than most transit agencies get though, so they make the best of what money they have. (not really - most waste a lot of money on things that do not make for great transit, but even if they spent everything perfect they don't have anywhere near enough money to run great transit)

[FredPret]

These problems are inherent in buses.

Buses will always be open to the entire public. If "the public" includes raving lunatics, then they will find their way onto the buses.

To build a better network, you need to either throw a vast amount of money at it, or have a super-dense city. The public transit in London & NYC is merely OK. In other cities, it will always be prohibitively expensive.

And to say that "the bus should always come" is not exactly an argument in favour of transit. We all know the damn bus should come. But sometimes, it just doesn't.

[ryukafalz]

> And to say that "the bus should always come" is not exactly an argument in favour of transit. We all know the damn bus should come. But sometimes, it just doesn't.

A big reason that the bus doesn't come is that it's gotten stuck in traffic. As in, behind cars. Give the buses their own space so they don't get stuck behind cars and they can be a whole lot more reliable.

Of course, since we've handed over essentially all our street space to cars already, doing so involves taking some space away from them, and drivers will scream about that.

[hot_gril]

SF has bus-only lanes everywhere. The bus is still very slow, even if you don't have to wait, because of all the extra stops. I'm looking at visiting parts of western Europe where supposedly public transit is good, but actually it's far slower than driving. The only way driving ever ends up being less convenient is if there's constrained parking. It's just very hard to beat a car that can go directly from point A to B.

What also beats mass transit is walking, if a city is laid out such that you don't usually need to walk very far.

[estebank]

> SF has bus-only lanes everywhere.

I wouldn't say everywhere, but wherever they were introduced they reduced travel time significantly, and traffic in those corridors didn't get any worse. The 38AX became redundant after the Geary bus lane because the 38R is just as fast.

> The only way driving ever ends up being less convenient is if there's constrained parking. It's just very hard to beat a car that can go directly from point A to B.

Or if everyone else also decides to drive. Traffic continues to get worse until alternative ways to travel become faster. If there are no alternative ways to travel, traffic becomes worse and worse without bounds beyond human patience. Paradoxically it also means that improving transit travel times also improves driving times.

> What also beats mass transit is walking, if a city is laid out such that you don't usually need to walk very far.

There Venn diagram of people that want walkable cities and better transit might as well be a circle.

[hot_gril]

> Paradoxically it also means that improving transit travel times also improves driving times.

This is part of what I'm saying. If mass transit is improved, more people use it, so driving is still faster.

> There Venn diagram of people that want walkable cities and better transit might as well be a circle.

Walkable city works well with public transit along longer and simpler routes, like between cities or cross-town express. I'm not interested in public transit that stops every 2 blocks.

[bluGill]

As transit gets good people start to realize they don't need to drive so they don't even if they could. Yes driving gets easier, but transit should stand well even in the face of little traffic

[ryukafalz]

> The only way driving ever ends up being less convenient is if there's constrained parking.

And in cities there should be constrained parking, because parking takes up valuable space that could be used for lots of other things. If you have abundant parking, it's probably not a very walkable city, because the parking itself is dead space that pushes everything else farther apart.

[bluGill]

If the bus gets stuck in traffic that means there is enough demand to run a subway (often as an elevated train). A bus is the easy solution to routes where there isn't much traffic and there isn't as many people who want to ride. (you don't need many people on a bus to pay for it)