Urbanized (Gary Hustwit, 2011) highlights the TransMilenio bus system, which serves the city of Bogota. It specifically covers elevating the experience and status of taking the bus by adopting positive aspects of rail systems: covered waiting areas, dedicated transit lanes, more reliable service. Except it's less expensive to implement and more flexible.
TransMilenio bus and station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Av_Am%C3%A9ricas_Transmil...
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio
With so much road already laid, LA is a perfect candidate for a system like this!
However a better idea would be to reduce the need to travel long distances by building denser. LA roads are super wide right now, so the easiest way to raise density would be by putting buildings in the middle of the road, leaving a Really Narrow Street (tm) along either side. Ground floors of new buildings could be commercial, upper floors residential. (Some LA roads are so wide we could put 2 or more blocks of Really Narrow Streets in the space consumed by a single car-oriented surface street).
This would reduce housing prices by bringing a crazy amount of inventory online, and would greatly lower maintenance expenses by severely curtailing the number of square feet of publicly-funded roads, traffic lights, signage etc. If we structured this correctly, the city could make a giant pile of money in both land sales and new real estate taxes. Maybe they could then use the surplus money to build a real train system or just reduce taxes. Lastly, there would obviously also be large environmental benefits such as smog reduction, CO2 emission reductions etc.
Yes, I realize this will never happen, and yes, I realize I'm proposing turning LA into old Paris. Old Paris is great, we should copy it more.
I stole these ideas from [0].
I spent three months working in Paris and many of the younger people lived further out and had a 45min - 1hr commute by public transport or driving.
The link you posted talks about narrow streets, this is true in some areas of the city, but Paris also has many wide boulevards.
The traffic during peak hour was pretty bad - the French driving on the footpath meme has some truth to it.
Also old Paris can be like it is because the CBD is located just outside the Peripherique at La Defense.
That being said, the roadways are public property, and should be redesigned to be on a road diet, but building structures in the middle is perhaps not the best idea. Parkifying some sections, expanding others into plazas (while infilling parking to densify) and selling the edges of the roadway to new development so it may be denser would be better approaches.
The rezones happening in our city boost the building density permitted in most of the city while requiring that some of that extra capacity be dedicated to low-income units. It's net positive for those in need of affordable housing and lets developers build bigger, which hardly hurts the economy.
We can have $800 apartments inside the city if we so choose, but with zoning forcing developers to build skinny dual towers and similar, we are forcing the minimum apartment price skywards.
Zoning adds risk to projects and creates an overheated housing market, where the cost of housing is land cost, construction costs, & zoning cost plus whatever the seller can get thanks to the artificially constrained supply.
"They aren't making more land" is entirely due to zoning ensuring most of the city is underdeveloped.
Paris has a set of issues like any major city but when it comes to managing urban density it does it broadly better than LA, for that matter so does New York.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
These systems operate mostly in dedicated right-of-way. There are more planned. I think they have been quite successful, for the reasons you describe.
It's something I imagine people using only they're not in a hurry or can't drive for whatever reason.
I'm now back in Australia, and despairing because my small city is putting in a light rail solution when a bus rapid transit option would be so much cheaper, given our low ridership. But buses aren't cool. :(
Busses just plain suck.
I don't think it's a bad idea as such, particularly if you consider it planning ahead for projected growth, but there are a lot of much larger cities in Australia that could use the same money more usefully.
Building a BRT in Canberra now would be kind of pointless, since traffic jams are essentially non-existent, making ordinary buses rapid enough already.
I don't agree that we should always build more roads if there is traffic, but building a light rail solution when the bottleneck is one congested car lane each way seems a bit unusual.
Newcastle is doing a 4km line...
I've taken busses through Sydney for years, and to be honest, I'm really hoping the LRS does what they promise it will, because the bus system here is so bad.
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/sydney-cbd-and-south-east-light-ra...
One can't help but imagine how many more buses we would need without light rail, no?
With the light rail already blowing out as of November last year from $1.6bn to $2.1bn [1] I can't help but think of the merit of heavy rail.
My understanding is heavy rail is very expensive, but how much more? I haven't been able to find a comparison of a heavy rail design on this route.
[1]: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/sydney-cbd-and-e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Bahn_Busway
It's fast, comfortable and those buses are able to collect passengers in suburbia.
Taking a bus within the same city has never been a problem and these routes are typically pretty full. However, once you're going from one city to another, within LA county, the added time of transfers and making dozens of stops on city streets really starts to add up. A trip that might take 45 minutes by car sitting in traffic could easily take 2+ hours by bus. Nobody who values their time would choose the bus option if they can afford a car.
People don't avoid the bus because many of the passengers are downtrodden. Many of the passengers are downtrodden simply because anyone who isn't chooses the quicker more efficient option of driving.
The buildout of rail and the addition of more express buses I agree will help alleviate a lot of traffic issues. Buses can be the solution to the last mile issues. But like you said, there needs to be a lot more of them to cut down on waiting time.
Why?
1) Traffic is terrible. It will take 1hr+ to do a journey the central line does in 15-20m.
2) Even if you want to drive, parking costs around $1500/month in the square mile.
3) On top of that, you have the congestion charge for entering central London (£11.50/day - soon to be £25/day if you have a particularly polluting vehicle).
You're looking at about $2000/month if you want to drive, which takes 4x as long and costs about 15x more than the train.
This is what happens when you price effectively for the externalities of traffic congestion. People will switch to transit en masse, and 'loud music' will not be seen as a problem.
[1]this also means there is the political will to build massive transit infrastructure, like crossrail, which will relieve the central line at a cost of around $20bn.
Actually it's not so bad - the central line at rush hour is abnormal.
Not sure how productive it is taxing buses...
The new taxi regulations are a welcome improvement [1], but they're weaker than they should be. Why are Euro IV cars still allowed as new taxis? Why is it only voluntary for >10 year old vehicles to be replaced? No doubt it was the best deal Kahn etc could get, but it's disappointing that London/Britain can't do better.
The buses[2] at least, are all Euro 4 standard or better, with the majority Euro 5 or better, i.e. made since 2010.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/ultra-low-emission-zone/tax...
[2] https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/bus-fl...
The buses still have to go somewhere though - the huge number of routes along Oxford Street is not about serving Oxford Street per se so much as about getting them across town. Honestly I'd be surprised if buses were the big source of pollution though - the fleet is quite modern and many of them are hybrids that deliberately run electric-only through the most polluted areas.
I don't see what's wrong in pointing out the obvious. If public transit organizations are prevented from even recognizing the issue because of misguided shaming, they sure as heck won't lure more drivers to public transit. And we can't expect people to fix all the world's problems before we allow them to address their immediate issues.
So, I think by being a technology working I am doing my small part in helping, and I don't think not wanting to feel threatened on my commute contradicts that.
By advocating for legislators and public administrators to hide the problem from their constituents, you create a situation where "out of sight, out of mind" takes the pressure off the government to solve the problem at all.
This is independent of personal occupation or hobbies. I'm not impugning your goals of solving the problem through your career in technology. It's about enforcing the accountability of the people who have the ability to make the changes to solve the problems at scale.
As far as we know, he might vote for candidates who promote such social services at every election. But there's nothing he can do if the politicians don't do what they promise, or other voters vote for politicians who work against this goal.
Or if the first 2h pay of your day is used to pay for parking, then a bus ticket is attractive.
If there were 10x more busses, and I could pay $10 for an all day pass, I'd take the bus every other day. Especially if the higher cost limited those who unfortunately use mass transit as temporary shelter. (And find some alternative temporary no strings attached shelter for them.)
Which only works if you can reduce traffic by an equivalent amount. Hence the congestion fees. The fee should clear up the lane AND pay for the bus to drive in the lane. Obviously, if there is no (reasonable) tariff that would actually make people not drive or change commute hours, then all you did was make it expensive to live in LA, while the public transit didn't improve. There is always a risk of that in the case of LA. But it might be worth trying at least.
> These problems are not going to go away anytime in the next decade to half century.
I completely agree - I think cities that are structurally messed up like LA have a long way to go, but that doesn't mean there aren't things that can be done. The question is what drives these changes. I think tolls, new zoning regulation, expanded public transit etc all have to be done, and no one action will solve the problem.
If you want to spend resources to make buses more attractive, start by eliminating fares.
That means there is a lot of capacity to add buses without causing congestion in the bus lanes. That's good.
Obviously it might be tempting to say "look we can't sacrifice one lane of 4 here to buses when cars are jammed bumper to bumper in the other 3 lanes" but that's how bus lanes work. With too few buses, they are just an ineficcient demonstration to the people in cars that they really should be riding the bus.
> If you want to spend resources to make buses more attractive, start by eliminating fares.
If petrol taxes, parking and tolls are high enough, then the buses are already almost free in comparison. Whether it costs $0 or $4 to ride the bus to work shouldn't matter - if parking, gas and tolls are 10 times that for one day of driving. Eliminating fares is one way of making the bus relatively cheaper compared to cars - but there is very little room there. The room to increase the cost of driving is almost infinite and it can be tweaked with gas taxes, congestion fees and parking costs.
Btw: do people in US metro areas usually pay to park at work in inner cities? If metro area parking is a taxable comp then that's also a cost (e.g. if my marginal tax rate is 50% and free parking would be valued at $100 so I'd be taxed $50 per day for that benefit).
Only if you actually add the buses, and people actually ride them, neither of which is a given.
> Obviously it might be tempting to say "look we can't sacrifice one lane of 4 here to buses when cars are jammed bumper to bumper in the other 3 lanes" but that's how bus lanes work.
That's the problem.
> With too few buses, they are just an ineficcient demonstration to the people in cars that they really should be riding the bus.
That only works if they can ride the bus.
The problem in most of the US is that you have a big congested highway, and then you get off the highway and drive another five or ten minutes on side streets to your destination.
You can't just tell those people to ride the bus, there aren't regular buses on the side streets because there isn't enough traffic there to justify them. And a bus that only takes you to the edge of the congested highway and then leaves you with an hour walk to your destination is useless.
> Whether it costs $0 or $4 to ride the bus to work shouldn't matter
It does matter to the tune of $4, and eliminating fares increases efficiency because you don't have to pay for a fare collection infrastructure, as opposed to bus lanes which dramatically decrease it because you're paying the full cost of a lane and then wasting most of it.
> if parking, gas and tolls are 10 times that for one day of driving
Stop trying to make driving worse. First you have to make the alternatives to driving better, and as soon as you do that, you don't need anything else.
Nobody actually likes driving to work, the only reason anybody does is that the alternatives are broken and terrible.
In order to make driving as bad as the alternatives without making the alternatives better, you would literally end up causing people and companies to move out of the city to avoid the expense. It's the same logic as arguing that burning down the city will reduce traffic congestion. Even if it does, that doesn't make it a good idea.
> there aren't regular buses on the side streets because there isn't enough traffic there to justify them
That is the usual problem. But it's usually possible to have freeway buses connect to local buses that drive around an area. Driving around nearly empty buses might seem like a bad idea - but it's the best idea there is when people aren't in a car (because they just jumped off the train or freeway bus). A second solution is having people drive a short distance on local roads from their home to a public transit hub such as a train station, if there is no bus to take them near their homes - The problem is that once you get off a train or freeway bus you might not be at your destination. But that's where public transit can't solve the problem. Zoning and building also needs to change. Without that, people might still have to walk 30 minutes to the office.
The situation where a company puts up an office with a large parking in an "office park" (or whatever it's called) which might be 15 minutes from the closest public transit is the root of the problem. Since people have to use the car to their office anyway, they wouldn't be using the bus even if it existed, as you point out. So the solutuion has to be in both ends: offices and housing needs to be in denser, more walkable areas, for example. I don't think the traffic problems in LA can be solved without fundamentally changing how and where people live and work.
This is my point. There is no amount you can add to the cost of driving that will get people to take a bus to a place the bus doesn't go.
And once you build high density office space next to a train station, people will take the train all on their own without any need to waste resources collecting regressive and privacy-invasive road tolls.
Oh my. Is this a regular enough occurrence that there's a name for it?
Buses have a bad reputation compared to other modes of transit because they're so easily re-routable. A political whim could shut down a whole bus route in a day, leaving commuters stranded. Rail signals long-term investment, and neighborhoods will grow around rail because they can guarantee it'll be there for years to come.
Much of that could be fixed with enough investment, but we're talking a huge investment.
Also when looking at e.g. Light Rail that goes on the road (like Muni's LRVs) you should consider the socioeconomic factors - the bus is looked down as for poor people in a way rail transit isn'. (Which is why, for instance, the NX is a thing; people wanted and got a specially painted bus while the N was undergoing renovations so they wouldn't be on the "common people" bus.)
Remember - a "regular" bus is never faster than driving.
I've always thought that was an advantage for buses. With rail, you have to plan it to go through areas that are not only popular now, but will be popular in 30 years. If some neighborhood suddenly becomes the happening place 10 years from now, you have to build a whole new, expensive line. But with buses, you can just add a new route.
It's more like, with rail, you build the line, and if it's a useful line then the neighborhood around it will become popular. In NYC throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, they built rail lines through farmland and the (medium/high density) neighborhoods followed. In LA, we're seeing better rail access revitalize areas like DTLA (or at least contribute to it). It's always a hard sell building rail lines through areas already connected by highways/roads, but if we watch LA over the next few decades we'll see what happens.
If you build a bus route into the middle of somewhere, even a good/reliable one, it probably wont change the neighborhood or stimulate nearly as much development. But hey, now you have a bus line. I used to ride one from my suburban high school in upstate NY into the small city's downtown, and it was fine.
> Several scholars have described Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) as an attractive modal transit option (R. B. Diaz and Schneck 2000; Levinson et al. 2002; Polzin and Baltes 2002; Vuchic 2002). The attributes favoring BRT are its lower capital cost relative to other modes (such as fixed rail) (US GAO 2001) as well as its implementation and operational flexibility (Jarzab, Lightbody, and Maeda 2002).
> There is limited evidence about the relationship between land values and BRT (Rodriguez and Targa 2004; Johnson 2003). Similarly, traditional bus service is rarely considered when discussing the impact of transit on housing costs. In their review of the literature, Hess and Almeida (2007, p. 1043) explain that “…property values near bus routes have only modest gains, if any, from transit proximity, because most bus routes lack the permanence of fixed infrastructure.”
...
> In North America, the relationship between accessibility to BRT and land values is only examined by a handful of studies focusing on bus priority treatments (high-occupancy vehicle (HOV)-bus lanes) and transit ways. In an early study, (Knight and Trygg 1977) examined HOV-bus lanes in Washington, DC, California, Seattle, and Florida. They relied on previously published reports, interviews, aerial photographs, and other secondary sources available at the time to conclude that exclusive bus lanes incorporated into highways appear to have no impact on either residential or commercial development. A later study by Mullins, Washington, and Stokes (1990) found that the BRT in Ottawa, Canada, appeared to have some effect on land development in areas surrounding stations. A review of studies from Houston, Texas, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and San Francisco, California conducted by Rodriguez and Targa (2004), revealed that bus transit had no impact on either residential or commercial development. A hedonic analysis applied to Los Angeles’s BRT, one year after its initiation, did not detect any evidence of benefits to nearby multi-family parcels (Cervero and Duncan 2002a). Recent work by a UCLA student, however, found that Los Angeles’ Orange Line (BRT) had an effect on the neighborhood real estate market. In between 2000 and 2012, areas near the Orange Line (BRT) fixed-guideway saw median rent increase by 25% compared to 15% in the control area, renter occupied units increased by 9% compared to 0% in the control area, and home value increase by 47% compared to 34% in the control area (Brown 2014). No significant differences in median income or household vehicle ownership were found, however other demographic characteristics (growth, education, and race) were found to significantly change.
> Rodriquez and Targa (2004) suggest that these mixed results could be partially explained by the BRT’s lack of fixed guideways, as well as the cross-sectional research design and the newness of the service. Indeed, a study of a 25-year old bus rapid transit (BRT) system in Pittsburgh found a significant price premium for homes selling near the BRT line (Perk and Catala 2009). The implication is that where a BRT system can bring lasting improvements in accessibility on par with a fixed rail transit system housing markets may respond accordingly.
1: http://iurd.berkeley.edu/uploads/Displacement_Lit_Review_Fin...
Not that I disagree but it's no less backed up than the theory you support.
I think a lot of people in the US associate mass transit with sociallism and associate socialism with "everyone should live like the dirt poor live". But come to Prague and ride the trams, and you will find that mass transit can be a luxury item.
No, it's because busses in the US are actually full of dirt poor people. I know it sounds cruel, but given the choice, most Americans would rather drive than sit next to dirty, smelly homeless people and also have to listen to shouting matches, sit in close proximity to fist fights, etc. Oh, and did I mention that they're rarely on time? Busses in the US are legitimately not a pleasant experience, it's really that simple.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Estaci%C3%B3n_SetDomingue...
In any case, over time the price of the busses goes up steeply. You need to replace a bus after 20 years, where-as trams last 50-60 years. Prague is replacing their Tatra T3 [1] trams from the 60s, not because they are worn out (they still run like new) but because they are more dangerous in accidents for the driver (they have no crumple zone and worse brakes) and because they don't have wheel chair access. Other, poorer cities have even older trams that still run fine. When they upgrade, those old machines aren't scrapped, but are sold to more eastern ex-soviet contries as working vehicles and actually put into service there. When was the last time you road in a 50 year old bus?
There is a difference, because a pure asphalt track is easy to lay, and especially easy to rework.
Train tracks, especially those running in asphalt (shared road between cars and trams), have a host of problems:
1) It's really expensive to build them - trains weigh a LOT and the rails need adequate foundations
2) It's really expensive to maintain them - you can't just go with a miller over the asphalt, because there are, obviously, the rails themselves but also delicate wiring for positioning/switch controls, signalling etc.; also, in most cases there are no alternate routes, which means you have two weeks of no service at all where a bus might just be re-routed one parallel street away.
3) It's really expensive to keep them operational: unlike with rised rails, street-level sunk rails act as sinks for everything from ordinary dirt from leaves to stones idiots place in the rail or stuff that falls into the rail from improperly secured vehicles.
4) They're friggin' dangerous hazards for bicyclists! I can't count the number of falls and crashes I had due to being forced to escape into a sunken rail.
5) Idiots with huge trucks or who are not careful when operating stuff like lifters or excavators near the overhead wiring. Happens surprisingly often that someone accidentally damages or destroys overhead wiring.
3) I know that they have to sweep the tracks, (Modern trams actually have brushes installed in the front) but when you have tram lines with a tram comming through once every two minutes at rush hour, carying thousands of people in a day it hardly seems like a large expense to have an old man in red overalls come in at night sometimes an polish and sweep out the tracks.
4) I know, this sucks. Especially when there is an illegally parked car, forcing you to lane change.
Yeah, we do that in Munich too, but it sucks real hard. Especially when the replacement buses are also in the same traffic jam created by the construction site... and all the replacement buses cost big money these days, given that there are nowhere near enough bus drivers to serve the demand.
ad 3) Yeah of course, but it's still a huge cost factor ;)
ad 4) I know someone who carries self-made stickers with penis stencils. He places these on idiot car owners' cars.
The biggest problem with mass transit in most of the US isn't "socialism" it's that everything is so spread out that it's impossible to make it economical. The attitude is kind of a way to help people ignore the fact that alot of people can't drive and have trouble getting around to where they need to go with the way the cities are set up. I think the best solution I've seen is for the city to contract for minibuses or other transport to help pickup some of the people. But that only works because they are often disabled and get special funding to get transport that can pick them up.
Ironically, a kind of anticapitalism, unionism, plays a big role in this. Unions in the construction industry have played a big role in making prices in the US higher than they should be, though even this cannot be the entire explanation. Prague has its corruption, I like to think of it as being a %20 tax on all government projects, but still we manage to do things for prices that are reasonable, even within the context of our economy. And the price of concrete aint any cheeper here than it is anywhere else, and the Czech Republic is far less wealthy than America. Somehow, America has learned to oscify itself to the point where it is less capable of building real infrastructure than the average eastern european deap state protodemocracy, it is really strange.
I used to code on a bus-commute in germany, i honestly must say i liked it more then driving around in a car. Its quiet, you can focus, and its the perfect length to create a feature.
The problem with buses is they attract those who are no longer allowed to drive (alcoholics, drug-addicts) - but overall.
Maybe something like the african Matatu system for comuters would be ideal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matatu
I wonder if it's a feedback loop sort of issue. The buses are old and crummy -> people avoid the bus -> bus modernization is deprioritized -> buses get older and crummier. If a city invests in buses that don't feel like an afterthought, then perhaps more people would use them.
There are wayyyyy too many problems with public transportation in the US that stem from decades of car-centric urban and suburban growth. It seems like nobody wants to pay for public transit development and maintenance around here.
As far as I can tell they're much more expensive per mile, have difficulty on hills, and make the street more dangerous for cyclists. The only advantage trams seem to have is that they don't have the stigma of busses.
Fundamental reasons:
1) The tram is a heavy vehicle running on rails and uses heavy spring shocks with one degree of freedom of movement (to tilt side to side). The bus is a light vehical with softer shock springs which have 360 degrees of freedom of movement. That is, that the bus can shake up/down, side to side, forwards/backwards and anything inbetween. This is the biggest difference. It is much more comfortable to be in a stable vehicle than one that rocks like a boat. You can read much more easilly on a tram than on a bus.
2) Related to the first reason, the tram has no rocking caused by breaking, as the forward/backwards up/down rocking motions are impossible due to the restriction of movement caused by the rails and the weight of the vehicle
3) The fact that the wheels are hard means that it is much more efficient.
4) Tram cars are significantly wider than busses and therefore have much more comfortable inside spaces.
5) Since the rails are always in the same place, you can design a tram with almost no gap between the platform and the floor of the tram, so that a person in a wheel chair/with a stroller can ride in without any ramp!!!!
6) Due to the heavy build of the tram, and the fact that there is no internal combustion engine or batteries that would wear out, trams last cca 3x longer than busses. This will always be the case. It is like the difference in lifespan between a brick house and one made of mud.
7) The wheel wells of the tram are shorter, making for a much more open, less awquard space.
8) Due to the width, stability, and length of the tram, it is possible to walk to the other side of a non-crouded tram to get away from an alcholic person.
1) Electric is better than deisel. Deisel busses are noisy, vibrate, and make toxic fumes which give many people nausia. (this isn't fundamental to busses, you can have trolley busses, or electric ones)
2) Trams have much larger windows/more window space making for a less claustrophobic ride.
3) Trams use a cellphone based tracking software for determining which stop they are at, which makes for very very smooth audio indications of where you are. The anouncment system on busses is manually controlled and sometimes the bus driver forgets to announce a stop. We even have digital reader boards with the amount of time it will take the tram to arrive, and those numbers are accurate. For busses this system also exists, but it is worse.
4) On rainy days, the bus comming into the bus stop may splash you with mud, trams never do that.
5) The trams have closed cabins for the drivers, meaning that stupid tourists cannot be tempted to ask the drivers for directions, thus delaying the journey and causing everyone stress.However, I'd argue that these benefits are outweighed by their prohibitive cost. According to the American Public Transportation Association it's roughly $30-$70m per mile, as opposed to $3-$30m per mile for busses. For example, with the $133m spent on Cincinnati's 3.6 mile tram line, you could have purchased about 300 electric busses.
Additionally, trams in the U.S. usually end up running in lanes that are also occupied by traffic, which means that they have to start/stop much more frequently and can't achieve the speed/efficiency that many european trams can.
There are several reasons. I'll devide them into to groups. Fundamental reasons:
1) The tram is a heavy vehicle running on rails and uses heavy spring shocks with one degree of freedom of movement (to tilt side to side). The bus is a light vehical with softer shock springs which have 360 degrees of freedom of movement. That is, that the bus can shake up/down, side to side, forwards/backwards and anything inbetween. This is the biggest difference. It is much more comfortable to be in a stable vehicle than one that rocks like a boat. You can read much more easilly on a tram than on a bus.
2) Related to the first reason, the tram has no rocking caused by breaking, as the forward/backwards up/down rocking motions are impossible due to the restriction of movement caused by the rails and the weight of the vehicle
3) The fact that the wheels are hard means that it is much more efficient.
4) Tram cars are significantly wider than busses and therefore have much more comfortable inside spaces.
5) Since the rails are always in the same place, you can design a tram with almost no gap between the platform and the floor of the tram, so that a person in a wheel chair/with a stroller can ride in without any ramp!!!!
6) Due to the heavy build of the tram, and the fact that there is no internal combustion engine or batteries that would wear out, trams last cca 3x longer than busses. This will always be the case. It is like the difference in lifespan between a brick house and one made of mud.
7) The wheel wells of the tram are shorter, making for a much more open, less awquard space.
8) Due to the width, stability, and length of the tram, it is possible to walk to the other side of a non-crouded tram to get away from an alcholic person.
Non-fundamental reasons:
1) Electric is better than deisel. Deisel busses are noisy, vibrate, and make toxic fumes which give many people nausia. (this isn't fundamental to busses, you can have trolley busses, or electric ones)
2) Trams have much larger windows/more window space making for a less claustrophobic ride.
3) Trams use a cellphone based tracking software for determining which stop they are at, which makes for very very smooth audio indications of where you are. The anouncment system on busses is manually controlled and sometimes the bus driver forgets to announce a stop. We even have digital reader boards with the amount of time it will take the tram to arrive, and those numbers are accurate. For busses this system also exists, but it is worse.
4) On rainy days, the bus comming into the bus stop may splash you with mud, trams never do that.
5) The trams have closed cabins for the drivers, meaning that stupid tourists cannot be tempted to ask the drivers for directions, thus delaying the journey and causing everyone stress. reply
Putting a motor on each axle or wheel normally solves the problem.
For more extreme situations: cable car, cog railway, linear motor... all of which can actually go vertical but then we call it an elevator.
Also, it takes 39 minutes to go to my office using public transit, and 18 by car, and that's the worst case.
What happens when you crash your car, are you going to buy a plane?
That is true only for heavy rail (commuter trains). But light rail (trams, or perhaps called streetcars in American English) can have stops as often as buses.
Here is a tram in Karlsruhe, Germany: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3470/3906930335_f3b2e209c2.jp...
Here are some in Helsinki, Finland: http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/47004637.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_jhbBeEkiyc/maxresdefault.jpg
I have a hard time justifying trams/streetcars over buses. They largely seem equivalent except that buses are more flexible since they're not bound to a set of tracks. For example, if a car crash or other obstacle blocks the tram tracks, the trams have to wait for the obstacle to be cleared. A bus can just go around it.
Buses can (and do, in some places) carry transponders to give them signal priority, just like trams. They can even be given dedicated lanes. And trams don't really carry more passengers per square meter than buses do. The one advantage trams have that I can see is that they avoid the weird cultural stigma that buses tend to carry here in the US.
If you have less than 1000-1500 passengers per hour, buses can work fine. You cannot stuff much more than 100 passenger per bus, and you cannot run buses much more frequently than once per 5 minutes, otherwise the buses tend to cluster and not stay on schedule. (The first bus stops at all stops to pick up all passengers, and the next bus gets less passengers and starts to catch up on the first.)
You can stuff 200-300 passengers into a tram, and a single driver can also drive two linked units, so we're up to 500 passengers. So a single line with 5 minutes intervals can serve up to 6000 passengers per hour.
On the other hand, buses are far more flexible; a minor glitch like an accident or someone unloading their moving goods stops a tram on the street totally, because it absolutely doesn't go round any obstacle. Buses do.
https://www.hsl.fi/en/news/2015/first-fast-charging-electric...
Then neighbouring Helsinki:
https://www.hsl.fi/en/news/2017/helsinkis-first-fully-electr...
It's very small still, of course, but seems to progress without major problems. (They make a point about the exceptional arrangement for the risky investment, i.e. the municipal company bought and operates these buses themselves; normally they just organize the procurement of transport services from private companies who own the buses and hire drivers.)
Not to mention, trains are a way more space efficient way to move people, and aren't at the mercy of traffic jams caused by car accidents, construction, and bottlenecks. Granted, this hasn't completely solved the traffic problem in the NYC metro area, but without it, traffic would be a nightmare, and having the option to bypass it is great.
The fact that I can take a 15 min walk to my suburban town's train station, take it to Jamaica, Queens, transfer to the Airtrain and arrive at JFK airport without ever stepping foot in a car is something every city needs. Also, buses are notoriously unreliable schedule-wise, and people dont like having to wait in bad weather (not as much of a problem in LA) for it to arrive.
I actually rode the buses in LA for about 2 years (Westside to UCLA). Adding more buses, and I mean a LOT more buses (10x), may actually work. However, the issue with LA buses is not the frequency or the timing of transfers, it is the city and the people themselves. LA is not meant for buses, it is meant for cars. That means you'll have to tear up a lot of road-way to get the proper street design for 10x the buses. Anyone that has lived in LA knows that major road construction is nearly unending and yet is horrific at the same time. Doing that kind of work will not be just 'normal' expensive, but you'll also have to pay for the massive corruption issues along with it. There exists no political willpower to do so and it is unlikely to come about anytime soon as voter participation in LA is abysmal (1 voter for ~50k residents).
Also, have you ridden the Big Blue Bus on an August Tuesday in 90+ degree heat at 5 pm? You will discover the surprisingly rank nature of the human body's ability to produce truly nauseous smells and leave them on the seats. The bums man, they are just plain smelly and stabby and awful. The bums prevent most unaccompanied women from even considering taking the bus, they really are that bad. LAPD gives exactly 0 shits about the bums as long as they don't actually try to kill you. You ever make the mistake of getting onto a piss bus? Whatever is left of that dying human being in the far back seat just makes for horrific smells that will not come out of your clothes, you really have to throw them out. I learned that lesson only once. I was not late to work, but I should have been. You just have to skip that bus and be an hour late or come in smelling of death itself.
So most single women just take their cars. It is a far safer way to get about town.
So the buses in LA don't have air conditioning?
> The bums
It seems a bit uneconomical, if a population 10k smelly homeless prevents a population of 1+ million people getting to their work comfortably and efficiently.
It is indeed. Clearly something has broken down somewhere. But do you have any proposal for a politically-acceptable way to resolve it?
there are about 4 million residents in LA. 1 voter per 50k residents amounts to 80 voters. i must be misunderstanding your comment...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_mayoral_election,_...
When you need to transfer on the LA Metro, it's normal to wait up to half an hour for the connecting bus. If you have to transfer multiple times, it's not feasible to make that part of your daily routine so you are forced to take your car.
The direction for the metro here is massive investment in more rail. But to really fully utilize that, they need to fix the first/last mile issue. They are trying with bike sharing, more dense housing, etc. But those are too slow and just don't have enough impact. LA doesn't have to be a car city, but it will always be a road city. We need to work on connecting that road network to the rail. Buses could've been the solution, but won't happen due to bad reputation. Uber/Lyft could try with their car pooling service, but there's a conflict of interest working with rail because it decreases revenue for them since rail would take a big chunk of the distance traveled. Short distance carpooling is a potential good solution and I hope some startup here or the metro does something about this. This kind of first/last mile carpool + rail solution also has potential in other cities that are investing in rail (like Seattle, Denver, etc.). If it works well, it could become the model for transportation in US cities.
I would still argue that prices should be set however high whereas to eliminate congestion, even it is seems "too high", simply because there is a limit to how many lanes can be constructed and no amount of lanes can eliminate congestion, and then we must allow market forces to occur such that development and lifestyle patterns change, which takes time.
Do an image search for tráfego em sao paulo site:.br if you're curious how that's working out for them.
I like this one: http://f.i.uol.com.br/folha/cotidiano/images/13164124.jpeg
Metro is good, but it is nowhere near 90 seconds - specially with the long stops in between stations.
Roads are enormously expensive both for construction and maintenance, and in most places AFAIK fuel taxes and vehicle registrations do not cover that cost, so they are being subsidised by the general taxpayer.
But 20 minutes between each bus during rush hour is just indefensible. It's not a viable transit system, it's just a last ditch option. When two buses get bunched together, now it's suddenly 40 minutes. Throw in a transfer and things can get ridiculous.
The Red Line train comes every 13 minutes but at least it actually comes when it says it will (most of the time). The bus is scheduled to come every 15-20 but in practice it's more like two come five minutes apart and then you wait 25-30 for the next one.
I'm not convinced. I live in Berlin and hardly ever have to take the bus to get anywhere. In the city center, there is usually a subway or S-Bahn station within 500m.
Light rail blows buses away.
And yet, bus transit is invariably a dismal experience, simply the worst. I think it's because a bus gives you the worst of both worlds — the stop and go headaches of personal automobiles, and the forced interaction with strangers on trains. (This isn't a real problem on a train, however, because one can usually simply walk away from an unwanted interaction.)
And having bus lanes, which can still be blocked, does not make them cheap light-rail. You also need to upgrade all lights at intersections to allow the bus to override the current signal.
I'm not sure I understand the "terrible capacity" argument. An articulated bus can seat 50-60 people without standing passengers. Are you suggesting that a light rail train holds more? This seems like a solvable problem - just run buses at twice the frequency, no? The point is the right-of-way prevents them from getting stuck in traffic without having to lay expensive off-grade track.
I've been semi-expecting to see UberVAN pop up actually. It doesn't seem like the kind of idea strange enough that nobody else would think of it.
That's why a good toll system should fund the public transit. The higher you set the tolls, the more buses you can offer to those who find it too expensive.
* Schedule 23 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999, to be precise, but the whole act is a 500 page PDF, so my curiosity ended there: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1999/29/pdfs/ukpga_19990...
At once the singularly most politically and practically incorrect assessment of LA traffic issues. How did this get top comment?
I'll agree with you in one key way: it's less ridiculous than Elon Musk's obsession with tunnels. It's a lot less ridiculous than Nolan Bushnell's obsession with self driving cars. Both fundamentally don't get how far away those solutions are from meaningful implementation. More busses, critically, could be added tomorrow, if we wanted to.
Yet others have already pointed out that buses have a bad reputation. It's only partly because of poor performance like you say. I'll put it more plainly: Los Angeles is a deeply racially segregated city, in ways that the bourgeois in California rarely admit. It's a travesty but it's also reality.
And some people characterize bus reputation as a chicken and egg problem: good riders improve the reputation, but they won't get on board when the reputation is bad. Those commenters don't understand how deeply entrenched racial segregation is in Los Angeles and how naive they sound. They're comparing Los Angeles to cities like London and New York, with huge metro systems, repeating popular whataboutist memes. They don't realize that London and New York have merely had more time to develop segregation underground.
Busses have fundamental inefficiencies, like slow patrons, that are basically uncorrelated with the number of busses on the road. And like any transport, capacity tends to get filled. And then we've all seen simulations of how bus transport falls apart due to one vehicle on a line getting behind—called bunching up[1].
I wrote to LA Dept. of Transportation years ago[2], and they characterized the problem then (and now) as fundamentally political: "Such issues require legislation." California and Los Angeles have voting systems that are good for solving many kinds of issues, but transportation is not one of them.
In my opinion, increasing licensing requirements, like disqualifying many current drivers from using freeways or vehicles entirely, would at least reduce deaths on the road. [3, 4, 5] Fewer accidents, as a side effect, could reduce congestion.
[1] E.g. http://setosa.io/bus/ [2] https://gist.github.com/doctorpangloss/a71db50d371e914a5d4f5... [3] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/118/1/56.short [4] http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/198945 [5] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022437502...
Since the bad reputation of buses will likely never go away, it seems rail + uber pool/lyft line might be an alternative. It won't be as good, but could be good enough. I wish there was a company other than uber/lyft which focused on just this first/last mile issue for rail. Or maybe the metro here could just start a service like that themselves. Something like Rail Pool to get people from/to the rail stations. It combines the best of both transports (the rail covers 90% of the trip, the extensive road network is used for the first and last miles).