[AnthonyMouse]

> here's a good graph

The trouble with this graph is that it assumes the buses/trains are full. It obviously doesn't apply to a bus with one passenger on it, which takes up even more space than a car.

From which we can observe the problem. Alice is at home and wants to go to work. She travels along a low density street for a few miles, enters a congested thoroughfare for a few more miles, then travels along another low density street to her destination.

She can't take a bus at the endpoints because she would be the only one on it, but if she took a bus only on the congested thoroughfare then she'd end up on the far side of it without a vehicle to get the rest of the way to her destination.

To fix this the thing you need before mass transit (by several years) is zoning rules that allow higher density construction in a higher percentage of the land area where people live and work.

[jcranmer]

I've been traveling around in Europe without a car for several days now, including several fairly rural areas.

There's a distinctly American trope in play, that if the bus or train doesn't stop more or less exactly at your destination, then it's going to be totally useless. Except, you look at the rural European countryside, and there is still a fairly reliable--and well-used, certainly not "only one rider on the bus"--bus system. And this is in the countryside that is less densely populated than most American suburbs or exurbs. It is totally possible to make mass transit work, even in the car-oriented hellscape of most American cities.

The main thing that American public transit systems seem to be really allergic to is the concept of frequency--a high frequency transit system is generally necessary for usability, but your typical American transit system responds to a perennial funding crisis by cutting frequency, which tends to lead into a ridership death spiral--cutting frequency cuts ridership, loss of ridership leads to loss of funding, which they respond to by cutting frequency.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's not a matter of stopping exactly at your destination. If people had to walk two blocks it would do them some good.

The problem is that in a low density area, both frequent service and infrequent service result in a low number of riders. You have a neighborhood with three dozen people in it who go to work and back once a day. If you run a bus there every 15 minutes for 12 hours a day, the average bus carries less than one passenger in each direction. If you only run one bus in the morning and one in the evening then in theory it would be 75% full but in practice then nobody takes it at all because the bus comes at 7:30AM but they have to go to work at 7AM or 8:30 so they all just drive instead.

[jcranmer]

> You have a neighborhood with three dozen people in it

The average household size in the US is about 4. Three dozen people means 9 houses. That's not really a neighborhood, and most people don't live in that kind of low-density.

Picking a random cul-de-sac street somewhere in North Carolina (ended up being near Cary, NC), as representative of what a suburban/exurban density environment would look like, it has 22 houses on it by itself. Just guessing where I'd plop a bus stop on a collector road, there's 4 similarly-sized cul-de-sacs within walking distance, and a similar number of houses on the collector road. So that bus stop is going to have 100 houses it can service, or about 300-400-ish people.

One of the primary problems with transit discourse in the US is that people (on both sides!) tend to view transit as a Manhattan-or-Cimmaron-County density dichotomy, thinking that transit is unviable except in the highest density regions. But my point is that transit is absolutely viable at the density available in exurban, even a lot of "rural" regions (although that's rural more like Berkshires rural rather than Oklahoma rural). And because not a lot of people actually live in the lowest density regions where public transit is unviable... it doesn't actually matter: most people live some place where public transit is viable.

[trymas]

> The trouble with this graph is that it assumes the buses/trains are full. It obviously doesn't apply to a bus with one passenger on it, which takes up even more space than a car.

IMHO it's a bit moot to delve into extremes. Average car occupancy is around 1.5 passengers. I'd bet that such number is far from average for average bus/train/tram/metro. I also probably won't make a mistake stating that "Average car" in USA is either a very big SUV or even bigger "truck" (which probably has a footprint as half of a bus). You also need to park your car somewhere at the destination.

I also thought that there will be reply like yours, though you answered your own problem:

> To fix this the thing you need before mass transit (by several years) is zoning rules that allow higher density construction in a higher percentage of the land area where people live and work.

Of course you don't want to build trams and all in low density (and low population) areas and my comment didn't apply for such case. You must have density as well as mixed use zones. I am not from USA and seemingly prevalent single use zoning[1] is very foreign to me. It all comes down to efficient urbant planning.

[1] correct me if I am wrong on this.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You also need to park your car somewhere at the destination.

This is generally not the problem because most of the destinations aren't in the high-scarcity congestion area, people just have to go through it to get to their destination from their point of origin.

> Of course you don't want to build trams and all in low density (and low population) areas and my comment didn't apply for such case. You must have density as well as mixed use zones.

Which is the thing the US doesn't. Large percentages of land in the areas around many major cities -- some of them among the most congested -- is zoned exclusively for single family homes. There isn't enough density for mass transit to work and it's residential-only, so working within walking distance of those homes is essentially prohibited by law.

[aqme28]

I believe this is based on actual average usage, not by assuming the vehicles are full.

[AnthonyMouse]

Which would be even worse, since existing mass transit is naturally concentrated in the places where it can operate with high capacity, and it thereby has a higher existing average than passenger cars. Lots of mostly full commuter trains, not a lot of 8-passenger SUVs that actually have 8 passengers.

When the the proposal is to add more mass transit, it would then have to go in the places it currently isn't, i.e. the places where it would have to operate at lower capacity. Which leads to the problem described.