[dghlsakjg]

This assumes that cars are the only way to get around.

A bus that starts and stops as it goes through traffic calming with 100 people on it will make an absolute joke of the efficiency of even the most fuel efficient of cars.

In areas where transit is given its own lane, or is a train, the time efficiency is much better as well. Plus if you give buses their own lanes you can remove traffic calming measures for them and give them signal priority, thus making them even more efficient from a resource, and time perspective.

[AnthonyMouse]

> This assumes that cars are the only way to get around.

Which is true in many cases, and would take decades of construction to do anything about, e.g. because people would have to move out of the suburbs or else at least one end of the trip will require a car, which would require massive long-term new housing construction in urban areas and has no short-term solution.

> A bus that starts and stops as it goes through traffic calming with 100 people on it will make an absolute joke of the efficiency of even the most fuel efficient of cars.

A city bus will get around 5MPG. The most efficient cars get more than 50MPG, so a city bus isn't even as fuel efficient as the cars until it's carrying more than 10 passengers. In theory they can carry 30-40 passengers, but generally in practice they don't, and in theory that 50+MPG car can carry five or more passengers too.

> In areas where transit is given its own lane, or is a train, the time efficiency is much better as well.

"In areas where the time efficiency of car traffic is purposely degraded, car traffic has lower time efficiency" is kind of tautological, but that's a silly argument for doing it, especially when the proposed alternative isn't available, e.g. because one of the endpoints is in the suburbs and the bus doesn't go there.

> Plus if you give buses their own lanes you can remove traffic calming measures for them and give them signal priority, thus making them even more efficient from a resource, and time perspective.

It's kind of odd that the same people who talk about wasted space from parking want to allocate entire bus lanes worth of space for a vehicle that only uses them 0.2% of the time. Also, what are you proposing here? 50+MPH buses traveling next to bike lanes and pedestrians? It would have to be even higher than that, because the bus is constantly starting and stopping to pick up passengers (and is then stationary for several seconds), so to achieve an average speed of e.g. 30MPH, its cruising speed would have to be above 60MPH, which is not only dangerous if adjacent to pedestrians, it's extremely inefficient as you're repeatedly accelerating a huge bus to highway speeds and then back again.

When the alternative is a car traveling a constant 60MPH on a highway, the bus compares unfavorably in terms of both time and fuel efficiency.

[dghlsakjg]

I’m not going to point by point you.

I will say that I lived in Vancouver. A city where I have never seen fewer than 10 people on a bus, where driving is frequently slower than transit, where you are rarely more than a 10 minute walk from a bus, where during rush hour, they convert parking lanes to bus lanes. It does take time to change, but it will take longer if we wait.

All of this works fine in places where they have been enacting all the things that you are saying don’t work. Most people just can’t imagine it working until they see it.

[AnthonyMouse]

> A city where I have never seen fewer than 10 people on a bus

Presumably during rush hour, which is kind of the issue. You can get more people on the bus during peak hours, but then it's off-peak and you're in a place where you don't have a car. Now you're either waiting an hour for a bus so it can be full (which is slower than a car) or you're maintaining frequent service by running mostly-empty buses (which is less efficient than a car).

Vancouver is also a coastal city the size of Boston with a fairly high population density. Things will work there that won't work in smaller inland cities surrounded by suburban and rural areas.

> where driving is frequently slower than transit

But because driving there is slower than it is in most US cities, right? That's not really an attractive way to get the result. The goal is to make the new thing better, not to make the existing thing worse.

> All of this works fine in places where they have been enacting all the things that you are saying don’t work. Most people just can’t imagine it working until they see it.

The real problem is that people propose these things in places where they don't work. If you have an urban city with dense urban housing, obviously people will be able to use mass transit. But you can't just add a bus lane to a city where most of the population commutes in from the suburbs and expect it to have the same effect. Everyone still has to drive and all you've done is remove a travel lane and make the traffic worse.

[david-gpu]

Allowing the construction of mixed-use medium density buildings reduces the distance of the average trip, which allows more people to choose walking and cycling.

At the end of the day, the more you design a neighborhood to facilitate driving, the more car traffic it will suffer. And the more convenient you make it to any other form of transportation, the less car traffic there will be.

[AnthonyMouse]

Allowing the construction of mixed-use medium density buildings reduces the distance of the average trip several decades from now, after the new zoning has filtered out into the already-constructed installed base of existing buildings. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it -- in fact we should do it immediately for precisely this reason -- but you can't expect it to have an instantaneous effect.

Meanwhile people keep proposing things like bus lanes as something we should do in the present day, in places where they can't work until after that construction has already happened. Also, bus lanes are never a good idea because the density required to justify a bus lane (which is very high because it consumes a significant amount of surface land in an area with high land scarcity) is higher than the density required to justify a subway line (which doesn't).

[david-gpu]

Unless we push for better transportation infrastructure today it won't be there thirty years from now. Nobody is suggesting to put a bus lane in a boring cul-de-sac, either.

For several decades, North American suburbanites have been living comfortably in their quiet bubble of car-dependent neighborhoods, completely disregarding the noise, danger and other externalities that their traffic imposes onto the people who choose sustainable transportation options in more densely-populated urban areas. It's time that we design our urban neighborhoods around the daily needs of the people actually living there rather than the speed and convenience of visitors.