[LucasBrandt]

But lots of people _do_ already ride buses! There are already current riders, and potential riders who are making these marginal decisions. Occasional riders will decide between transport modes based on the trip - making marginal improvements (or regressions) would change the rate at which they choose to ride the bus.

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!

[janalsncm]

Marginal changes cut in both directions. The transport duration between A and B is only one part of the calculation. A rider also needs to get from their starting point to A, and from B to their destination.

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.

[bunderbunder]

I also live in Chicago. The closest bus stop to my house is 2 blocks away, and the 2nd closest stop on that same line is 3 blocks away - just one block further in the direction I’m going.

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.

[tr_user]

You could just have two bus stops. People who live and work at both ends will be very happy. But everyone else gets thrown under the bus.

[natecham]

Why stop there. Build enough buses for everybody so they can choose where those two stops are.

[terminalshort]

Great idea! And then what if we went even further and made enough busses so we could all have one waiting at our houses at all times?

[sethammons]

You might need to make the buses smaller. Maybe give some options on the number of seats. You could also tailor the bus; different colors and shapes. Heck, you could store and transfer things easier. Personal buses sound like a marketing win.

[fragmede]

You'd have to invest so much money into putting roads everywhere, and then the personal busses need to have their own refueling depots everywhere, and getting the oil for those depots in the first place is going to be the cause of needless war and deaths. That's totally never gonna happen!

[terminalshort]

That sounds like a great idea! But what if you have to catch your bus when it's cold or raining? To solve this problem we can build mini indoor bus terminals and attach them to each house.

[pocksuppet]

You couldn't afford the bus drivers. The convenience of the bus is that someone else drives for you. If you have to drive, it's not a bus. Maybe a wealthy tech investor could announce self-driving cars...

[mattmaroon]

And then what if you owned the bus so it was super convenient. And maybe made it smaller so it was easier to drive and park.

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

[wsatb]

I also live in Chicago and wouldn’t mind walking extra to another stop, but Chicago also has a massive traffic problem, particularly post pandemic. During rush hour, the bus is stop and go already.

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

[tcoff91]

I think the only way to solve this is to invest much more into making buses nicer & increasing the numbers, and then instituting bus-only lanes on major arterial roads so that taking the bus becomes faster than fighting traffic.

[pocksuppet]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox asserts that the speed of cars is caused by the speed of public transit. Improving public transit reduces traffic jams, even if you take away car lanes to do it.

[femiagbabiaka]

Chicago has already done all of those things unfortunately (or fortunately).

[coryrc]

If they have bus-only lanes then they won't be stuck in traffic, so I don't think they have.

[femiagbabiaka]

Bus only lanes exist, but not everywhere (some streets are not wide enough). Additionally, at the moment (and really always) there's a ton of construction on the bridges going in and out of the city, causing buses to miss out on the bus-only lanes for years or more at a time. Bus systems are a complicated beast.

[coryrc]

You don't have to allow cars on every single paved surface. Cars aren't supposed to be on wide sidewalks, you don't have to allow them on every single road either.

[tcoff91]

Yeah if they aren't enforcing the bus-only aspect then it's not really a bus-only lane. If a bus only lane exists but people violate it in cars with impunity then obviously it's not going to work.

[cleandreams]

San Francisco put in some bus only lanes and those routes have greatly improved bus speed and ontime performance.

[femiagbabiaka]

The traffic downtown is really nuts now that the bridges are all shut down.

[hardolaf]

I also live in Chicago but unlike you, I have musculoskeletal issues that can be minor to the point of not noticing or to the point of it being painful to walk more than 2-3 blocks at a time. So doubling the distance between blocks would be the difference between me being able to use the bus and me needing to drive or use the far more expensive for taxpayers paratransit service.

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.

[miltonlost]

> 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!

Until there' a snowstorm, and no one shovels. And you have a broken leg, or are elderly, or disabled. Sure, it might save you personally some time, but we live in a society and should try to help out the one's who need help.

[mcv]

It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house. It's unavoidable that most people are going to have to walk a bit. How far is reasonable, is a matter of trade-offs. It also depends on how fine grained the network is. If there are buslines every block, it's annoying if they don't stop there. But you have to walk a block or two to get to a bus line anyway, walking that bit more to get to the stop itself, matters a lot less.

[JoshTriplett]

> It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house.

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.)

[xmprt]

> And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient

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.

[AnthonyMouse]

Bus lanes still seem like the thing people who hate cars propose to intentionally screw over the people who have them. "Hey, we have this road with two or three lanes in each direction but it's fairly congested. Each of the lanes is carrying something like 50 cars per minute during the day! Why don't we impound one of them so we can have a bus carrying 40 people drive on it once every 15 minutes?"

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

[Karrot_Kream]

> If you have enough density to support a bus lane, you have enough density to support 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.

[jltsiren]

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

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.

[pocksuppet]

We did that with computer networks. We had this high-quality voice call service, and then someone thought it should be switched to transmit data instead, of which voice calls were just one type. Now you have a minimum voice latency of a few hundred ms because voice traffic is competing with data traffic, and you didn't actually get much more data throughput because it was only one wire pair.

[JoshTriplett]

> Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right.

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.

[xmprt]

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

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?

[njarboe]

Self driving cars for hire (Waymo, Tesla, others) can be that point-to-point system that is affordable. We will just have to build tunnels to deal with the increase in traffic. Hopefully the Boring Company or someone else can get tunneling costs way down.

[llbbdd]

I generally agree that self-driving cars are going to take this niche, but not with tunnels. Tunnels add the same dedicated infrastructure problems as mass public transit.

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.

[mulmen]

As long as one of those points is a transit stop then yeah, robotaxis make sense. In that model you don’t need the tunnels.

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.

[janalsncm]

If you are not being facetious, what you are describing is closer to a subway system, which has the disadvantage of being very expensive.

[JoshTriplett]

Hopefully someone else, so it actually happens and isn't overpromised and underdelivered.

(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.)

[cyberax]

No, it's not unavoidable. Just ditch the buses and switch to cars, soon to be self-driving.

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

[wussboy]

Not Just Bikes makes a compelling argument that self driving cars are not the answer, and will almost certainly make things worse

[jacobgkau]

Would you care to summarize their argument?

[mcv]

Self-driving cars still take up space on the road. Even more than human-driven cars, because now there will also be cars transporting 0 people. It's going to make congestion worse. Public transit is the solution to congestion. Well, one of the solutions, because bikes are probably a better solution for most people: they do start in front of your home, can park anywhere, and don't cause congestion the way cars do.

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

[kjkjadksj]

The solution for that is offering express routes not forcing everyone onto a slow frequently stopping local bus and making everyone worse off for it.

[cozzyd]

that's right, the best solution is probably something like every other bus (excepting very low frequency buses that have fewer than 5-6 buses per hour) to only stop at every other stop (of course always including interchange points).

[crummy]

So... Should the bus stops be even closer together?

[ecshafer]

Does Chicago not mandate people shovel their drives ways? In most towns/cities in upstate new york you can get a fine if you don't shovel your sidewalk.

[fuzzzerd]

Chicago does have rules for timely show removal on sidewalks. In practice I have never heard of anyone receiving a fine even when the walk in front of a property remains uncleared for weeks on end. There is essentially little to no enforcement.

[SoftTalker]

I'm not in Chicago but where I am you have 24 hours after the snow stops to shovel your sidewalk. And realistically, they don't start handing out fines until at least a few days after that, if at all.

[Filligree]

What? Why do they care whether people shovel their driveway?

[JoeMerchant]

sidewalk, not driveway. It's so folks can walk on said sidewalk.

[Retric]

> I'm personally able to walk a block or two further

“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.

[iamcalledrob]

I think this is a US-centric perspective.

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.

[socalgal2]

Then there's the even better alternate universe. Japan, where there are ~100 train companies, almost all of them are private. There are at least 10 in Tokyo, all but one are private. They are setup so that they have a positive feedback loop. Each train company owns land at and around the trains stops. They open office buildings, apartments, groceries stores and shopping centers around those stops. The more people ride their trains, the better their other businesses do. The more compelling their other businesses are, the more people want to ride their trains to get to them. The also often run buses so you can take a bus to their stations.

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.

[xp84]

Spot-on analysis. I agree that transport should operate on a basically break-even basis, but offset in two ways:

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.

[iamcalledrob]

Incidentally, London has a "Freedom Pass" (free transport for retirees), which is funded in the way you describe.

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.

[rjmunro]

I agree and disagree with this. Sometimes older people using the busses are what keeps the routes busy and makes it worth running a good service for everyone else. But on the other hand, I have seen abuses. Years ago I somehow got chatting to a fellow bus passenger who liked to ride the busses all day as a hobby. I think rather than charging I'd limit it to 10 free rides a week or something, where a ride is equivalent to a hopper fair - as many connections as you need within an hour of the first touch-in. After that it should use pre-pay credit at a normal rate.

[xp84]

Idk... If the tiny population of those bored "hobbyists" taking up space is the only reason a given route was overcrowded, I'd be surprised. If it's basically at capacity in general, I'd rather they add more busses than to crack down on the elderly, because I guarantee that if you just subtracted those "abusers" (and not elderly people who actually need to ride the bus for legitimate trips) the same bus would still be basically as crowded.

[pocksuppet]

Fare-charging for public transit has significant frictional overhead. I think in Luxembourg they just made it all free and it didn't cost much money because they didn't need to spend anything on collecting fares. The D-Ticket in Germany too: in some cities, almost everyone has a D-Ticket so the frequency of ticket checks was drastically reduced.

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?

[iamcalledrob]

The cost to taking an additional passenger is latency.

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.

[mjevans]

Taking such a fee also has transaction costs, in the time if nothing else.

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.

[Someone]

Nowadays, both are “scan your card at entry and exit”, aren’t they?

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.

[pasc1878]

But for many old people walking that one stop is difficult. So this charge would partially defeat the object of the pass.

[Karrot_Kream]

It's a chicken and egg problem. The way to make buses competitive is to build bus only lanes. But to do that you end up removing a lane for drivers and dedicating enforcement resources to keeping bus lanes free of private vehicle traffic.

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.

[closeparen]

Bus lanes solve for variability during peak traffic, but speeds even in free-flowing traffic are far from good enough.

[AnthonyMouse]

> 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.

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.

[pocksuppet]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox

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

[AnthonyMouse]

Induced demand is a rubbish theory to begin with. The effect is explained by insufficient capacity suppressing natural demand, which returns when capacity is increased and thereby consumes some or all of the added capacity until you have enough capacity for the actual demand.

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.

[closeparen]

Even in a dense city with no parking, it takes an unusually fast and frequent bus to compete with a brisk walk, and a heavy-rail subway to beat a fit or electric-assisted cyclist.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's assuming you're only going a short distance. The average commute is around 15 miles. That's something like a five hour walk.

[closeparen]

And the average commute duration is around 27 minutes. If you happened to live in one of the very few places in America where there even are 15 urban miles to cross, doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.

[iamcalledrob]

> ~$500/mo for a typical car payment

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.

[AnthonyMouse]

> $5000 can get you a reliable but unsexy used car.

$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.

[analog31]

This idea occurred to me while I was traveling in Europe. Many of their trains have two classes of cars, where the first class is just slightly nicer. This could be done with buses too. Just alternate buses on the same route, that are expensive and free. The poor can take the free bus, and those who want a more exclusive social experience can pay for the expensive bus.

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.

[bboozzoo]

I believe we already have that, and it's called a cab. You pay extra, get an exclusive social experience and, at least in some parts of the world, get to share the bus lanes with other folks taking the bus.

[philwelch]

Private car ownership is a better everyday solution for almost anyone who can afford it, which includes the vast majority of Americans. If buses tried to compete with cars, they would lose. The only remaining niche for the bus is as a public accommodation for the poor, disabled, and elderly, or occasionally in dense city centers.

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.

[sensanaty]

But this comes down to how your city is planned. Amsterdam and the Netherlands in general is making it much less attractive to be a driver, for example. Public transportation has its own dedicated roads and even entire regions where cars aren't allowed, bicycles are first class citizens that take equal if not more consideration when streets are designed, streetside parking is limited and getting even more so with basically every city having as a goal the reduction of the number of parking spaces.

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.

[eertami]

I think it isn't as absolute as you suggest, and that it depends on city planning. I own a car but in the city I live it is not a better solution for everyday trips. Walking, cycling, or bus/tram are all far more convenient - it is only when leaving the city that the car becomes better.

(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.)

[matips]

Poland? I live in Cracow and have same experience.

[bdauvergne]

If people without cars could stop subsidizing those with one i would agree (and include the lost land to mandatory parking places in your account). Car driver should pay a specific tax for that. A bus just need a lane on every road direction and no parking (and use it less than hundred of cars).

[cleandreams]

Private car ownership is better everyday for suburbs and rural areas but in cities that is not true. Public transit can improve downtown access and reduce congestion. You need some density for transit.

[pocksuppet]

That can't be the whole equation. Why do so many people in London choose to ride the bus and the tube instead of taking private cars?

[iamcalledrob]

Exactly.

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.

[philwelch]

> occasionally in dense city centers

[Retric]

Busses get tiny subsides in the US.

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.

[iamcalledrob]

The farebox recovery ratio in the US is awful. Most cities are somewhere between 5-25% of operating expenses coming from fares.

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

[philwelch]

Buses are implicitly subsidized by road maintenance spending. Road wear and tear occurs according to the fourth power of axle weight, which effectively means almost all of the wear and tear is incurred by the heaviest vehicles, which include buses.

[Retric]

Roads still need maintenance even if nobody uses them, so a significant portion is split evenly across all traffic.

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.

[coryrc]

> Roads still need maintenance even if nobody uses them, so a significant portion is split evenly across all traffic.

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.

[philwelch]

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

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.

[adgjlsfhk1]

Axle weight and vehicle weight aren't the same (or even very closely correlated). A bus will weight ~3-4x more than a car, but has wider tires, and carrying far more people. As such the weight of a bus is likely similar to or lower than an equivalent number of cars.

[coryrc]

Wider tires do not reduce axle weight.

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.

[rbanffy]

> In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term

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...

[amanaplanacanal]

In the US, the roads aren't break even either. They are massively subsidized, but people don't even think about it, whereas with public transit the expectation is that it should break even. We aren't comparing like for like.

[bccdee]

> as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation

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

[Retric]

Around 1/5 of the US population is elderly ~1/4 by 2050, add in moderately disabled people and this isn’t a small population we are talking about.

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

[bccdee]

So elderly that they can't walk to the bus? I suspect your data mean retirement age, i.e. 60-65+. They don't all need paratransit.

[xp84]

Having lived in SF I've seen many cycles where the SFMTA says "We'd like to make (insert any changes)..." and the 'advocates' immediately come out of the woodwork to make the argument you're making, about how walking another block or two is impossible for some constituents.

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.

[mulmen]

In Seattle large employers still run their own private busses. This has been going on since long before the pandemic. These busses often tie in to existing transit options. They take you from the office to a neighborhood transit hub.

[Retric]

The US already has a completely separate model where we send yellow busses to pick up and drop off school kids which involve buses going to a large fraction of US homes 4 times a day 180 days a year for minimal expenses that’s free at the point of use.

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.

[bandrami]

Unfortunately DC found out something does stop you from doing that, namely activists who flood your public meeting and say that a new bus line designed to meet the needs of young urban professionals is a gentrification accelerant and must be prevented.

[eptcyka]

Sure, lets have the minority of the population force us into design choices that are detrimental to the majority of bus users.

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.

[LorenPechtel]

How about a compromise:

Alternate buses stop on the one-mile points only.

[amrocha]

I live in Japan, where most people are old, and I can confidently say you’re wrong

[behringer]

It also completely eats up their time savings.