Secondly and more importantly for me (and I know unpopular) - kick off the drunk / other rule-breakers and anyone who threatens people even if its just a result of mental illness. No one wants to start their day next to someone yelling - "I'll f* you up... etc" on a crowded bus. At least where I am the bus drivers don't do anything from small - blasting music -> to larger - nonstop threats of violence.

I have only small anecdotes but other places seem to empower the drivers etc more. And the jitney cabs in the Caribbean would flat out leave people on the side of the road if they were sloppy drunk.

If there was a conductor on the bus then they could deal with inappropriate behaviour, but no bus company wants to pay two members of staff when they can get away with one.

In my city the ticket checkers are always in groups of 3.

How many commuters are even armed? A shocking number of offices have begun to forbid it.

Therefore, arming conductors helps even when nobody walks around with a firearm.

This is not a realistic proposal. Have you ever gotten a bus?

In my experience they take within a few minutes of walking somewhere, and perhaps three times as long as bicycling, never mind driving.

Perhaps someone will say that this indicates my local bus system is terrible, but I don't see what could be improved about it. If they want to serve the people who actually ride the bus, they have to go on routes with riders, and stop at all the places people want to get on and off.

But I've tried riding the bus on trips ranging from <1 mi, to 3.5 miles, to 6-10 miles, and there's just no point, except in the case where I need to go get my car and I have no alternative (or if I didn't own a car). For a longer trip, it means sacrificing an entire evening for what would be a 10-15 minute trip going directly.

For the longest trips (>6 miles) which coincide with a single route, the bus can be substantially faster than walking, but it's still way too long to be a viable commute. And shorter trips are very comparable to walking.

People say or imply that something could be different that would make a typical bus system in a US city more effective for people who have alternatives, but what?

The idea of the bus being "more convenient" with a few tweaks seems wildly implausible to me based on my experience.

This is an interesting trade-off. Assuming that people get off the bus somewhat randomly, then average stop spacing should be about a quarter-mile: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/10/30/sometimes-bus-...

But the above assumes a nice grid. Many suburban bus routes have awkward deviations which cost time on side streets to get to an office park or similar. Fundamentally the trade-off is additional walking for some vs. additional time on the bus for all.

In NYC, buses work, and people take them because they have to. They could be better but the alternative is hundreds of dollars in parking if you think about owning a car.

Cities have actively made decisions to design cities around the car at the expense of every other mode of traffic. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that the status quo can't change.

In fact if you look at the Bay Area, the problems with transit are largely due to other sorts of dysfunction, not due to lack of funding. Los Angeles, OTOH, has been building out public transit in a coordinated way (far more successfully than the Bay Area has). IOW where there's a will there's a way.

That's more dense than Oslo, which has several major rail arteries and a light-rail/subway system, most of which was initially built at a point where Norway was still a relatively poor country. It's vastly more than e.g. Bergen, which has 280k people, a tram

It boils down to whether or not you're willing to actually plan for it and spend money on it.

If I didn't have a car, of course I would ride the bus to the train station. And I have in the past taken a fairly long distance bus to get to an airport hub.

But this doesn't seem to have any relationship to daily life where I am, or similar places, because train or plane rides are for going on long trips, say over 200km.

Indeed, to travel to NYC from where I live by train would be the same time as driving, and considerably quicker than a bus. But no way would I ever spend about 2.5 hours daily going back and forth, so it's all unrelated to my normal transportation needs.

Maybe by a "well developed rail system" you mean a subway, but it doesn't seem realistic for an area with a million or two people to support one. With infinite resources, you could run infinite free buses too, rather than indirectly trying to create some sort of synergy.

Population of Kyoto: 1.47 million

Kyoto subway map:

https://youinjapan.net/maps/kyoto/kyoto_metro_train_map.png

I didn't cherry pick this from some ordered list of cities by train lines to population ratio; I just picked it because I lived there and the train was as incredibly convenient as it looked. And also gorgeous:

https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%AC%E9%98%AA3000%E7%B3...

The net result is that a good subway system in Kyoto can serve a majority of the metro population, while that is not true for Philadelphia or Atlanta. (That is true even though Kyoto is not particularly dense--closer in Atlanta to density than to Philadelphia.)

But let's look at Boston instead. Population 700,000 in the city limits; 4.8 million in the metro area, so about one seventh lives in the city proper.

http://www.rochestersubway.com/images/photos/boston_subway_m...

While perhaps not as developed as Kyoto, that's still a very healthy rail system. And its first subway was built in 1897 when it had a population of just about half a million.

The metro area in which Kyoto is located is around 20 million people. The metro area of Boston is almost 5 million people, you say. These are not counterexamples to what I was trying to communicate. I don't really think my comment was as hard to understand as you make it seem.

The best car alternative is not going anywhere.

Begging the question is a logical fallacy.

If you can do your job on a train on your laptop, why the hell are you traveling to an office in the first place?

Potentially there are some, but not all, parts of the job that can be done without face-to-face interaction. Or potentially there are parts of the job that can be done without face-to-face interaction but would still benefit from being in the office.

The drawback would be that the train isn't that smooth or quiet.

Which seems to suggest you live somewhere without a well developed rail system.

I grew up in Norway - a country with a population density of ~14 or so people per square km. Only 8 US states (Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, New Mexico, Nebraska, Nevada) has a lower population density. But yet, like in the US, most of the population live in much denser conurbations.

What is different from the US is that most of these people as a result also live along rail corridors that makes rail competitive with or faster than driving as the commuting option for a large proportion of the population.

> Maybe by a "well developed rail system" you mean a subway, but it doesn't seem realistic for an area with a million or two people to support one.

Oslo has a light rail/subway system with a population of 673k in the city itself and 1m in the urban area, or 1.6m in the metro area (though the latter includes towns well outside of Oslo proper separated from the city by forest in many cases).

The London suburb I live in has a tram system that is grade separated along substantial parts of the network, for a population of about 400k.

> Indeed, to travel to NYC from where I live by train would be the same time as driving, and considerably quicker than a bus. But no way would I ever spend about 2.5 hours daily going back and forth, so it's all unrelated to my normal transportation needs.

And yet large cities like NYC does have commuter belts that stretch out that far. E.g. London as well - the typical Londoner commutes an hour each way, and about 70% of journeys happen by public transport, because car largely is not competitive unless you happen to live in really odd locations relative to were you work.

But smaller towns do as well - my London suburb attracts commuters by rail from similar distances away, some in fact coming by rail through London from the other side.

But many people commute in to London from 2h+ away - the first trains to arrive in towards London from the South Coast in the mornings are always full of commuters.

Of course London does have the advantage of significant density.

But this was true even when I lived in Norway - trains in to Oslo in the early morning brought in long range commuters, and then filled up by people like me travelling "only" 20-30m from a nearby small low density town, because taking a bus to the local train station and the train in was competitive with car unless you live 20-30+ minutes by bus away from the nearest train station, in which case you'd be living in the middle of the wilderness.

Which of course is possible, but the proportion of the population that is true for even in Norway with it's extremely low population density, is extremely low - even in the US states with lower population density, most of their population is concentrated in relatively dense conurbations.

The point being that once you actually develop rail networks out to those kind of locations, people start using them over time - this is true in the US too - a whole lot of US towns grew out of development around the rail rather than being somewhere that existed prior to rail. Once you then add feeder bus routes utilization tends to go way up, as it takes away the day parking problem.

This whole "the US is just too big" thing just doesn't make any sense, because as you point out, most people have a clear limit on how far they want to commute, and if you parcel up the US similarly based on commuting centres and a ~1h travel radius around them, you cover the vast majority of the US population in regions that are for the most part more dense than many places with perfectly fine rail networks.

Nobody is suggesting rail, or light rail/subways or buses will be viable for absolutely everyone, but as someone who has lived somewhere with population density well below the US average without a car, I'll tell you that it seems weird to you because you have a century of no policy of trying to create an integrated transport system most places.

Which seems to suggest you live somewhere without a well developed rail system.

I grew up in Norway - a country with a population density of ~14 or so people per square km."

If I Google "Norway" and "subway", I get hits for Oslo. The Oslo metro area is close to two million people.

So I don't see any indication that my view of what's possible is likely wrong.

Patronizingly saying "you don't have a well developed subway system" implies that is something that could be changed if Americans were just sensible like Scandinavians. But is there any magical solution outside the largest population centers, in any country? In another post, Kyoto was mentioned, as though that was a refutation of something.

When I ask how you can have a certain level of infrastructure in an area with a million people, pointing to all the arbitrary boundaries enclosing a million people within a significantly larger population doesn't seem like constructive dialogue to me.

[0] Even in London where buses stop every few hundred meters they are faster than walking (unless there is a lot of traffic). How badly designed is GPs system?

In short stop subsidizing the actual fiscal and opportunity costs for driving personal vehicles and mass transit starts looking pretty good.

Grievances:

The 101 is a great idea, a limited stop bus from SF to Santa Rosa that can basically camp out in the carpool lane. Except that in their infinite wisdom, Marin Transit doesn't actually time transfers in San Rafael. Unless you live within walking distance of a 101 stop you're often just wasting your time.

Real-time predictions sound great, except that Marin Transit is pairing with the Transit app. For a while was providing completely fabricated predictions. Sorry, you're only going to leave me stranded in the middle of the night once before I dump your app. NextBus has its share of problems too, but the difference is that Muni runs such frequent service you're more concerned with predictions and headways than with schedules. Marin Transit runs such sparse service that you absolutely need to adhere to a schedule.

A zone based fare system sounds reasonable to most people. Unfortunately Marin Transit is not set up to refund overcharges when you can't tag off as you exit the vehicle (e.g. when their own equipment doesn't work). Zone based fares also complicate cash payments wildly slowing down the boarding process. Unfortunately Marin Transit refuses to let people alight from or board with RFID payment via the rear doors slowing down the whole process even more.

The Golden Gate Bridge District (one of the folks Marin Transit contracts out to) leased another ferry knowing that the engine wasn't compliant with California emissions requirements. In their due diligence they never realized that it is physically impossible to retrofit a compliant engine into that heap. It's still not in revenue service.

Historically there have been very few feeder routes because people tend to like to keep the poors out (Tiburon is notoriously bad). So to get from Marin to San Francisco you're often walking all the way out to the highway, sometimes along roads with no sidewalks (I'm looking at you Sleepy Hollow). SMART also suffers because of this. Getting to a SMART station can easily be a 30 minute walk along a route with no bus service.

That said, things don't actually have to be this way. But Marin likes its privilege[1].

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Marin/comments/coz8ro/smart_train_s...

I took the 24 and yes i lived near a bus stop because thats what you should do when you have money (like everyone in marin) and are choosing where to live.

Marin is by far the most livable and accessible place in all the bay area. You can get to all parts (including the coast and natural areas) via regular bus service and some walking which puts it lightyears ahead of South bay.

Marin Transit contracts out to Golden Gate Transit (the bridge district), Marin Airporter, Whistlestop, and MV Transit. For many years they simply used the bridge district but that was too expensive so they've farmed many routes out to cheaper (read: non-union) companies using smaller equipment.

Bus service runs much more consistently from and to more parts of the city than anything from South bay (if i recall correctly, some routes are 24/7)

Here's a map of late night public transit service. Note that Marin is conspicuously devoid of any routes. While it will take an extraordinarily long time you can get from San Francisco to San Jose late at night on public transit. Public transit in Marin shuts down between 9pm and midnight.

https://511.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/RTC/allnighter-v10....

I took the 24 and yes i lived near a bus stop because thats what you should do when you have money (like everyone in marin) and are choosing where to live.

Most people don't and can't do this. Transit oriented development is regularly protested to a degree that SF NIMBYs would be green with envy if they saw how things worked in Marin.

Marin is by far the most livable and accessible place in all the bay area.

Based on?

You can get to all parts (including the coast and natural areas) via regular bus service and some walking which puts it lightyears ahead of South bay.

Yeah, that's definitely not true.

You are completely wrong about transit shutting down between 9 and midnight. The 101 route definitely has north bound buses runnjng every hour at that time (my wife and i took them regularly). This is really low effort critique on your part: http://goldengatetransit.org/schedules/updates/route_101.php

The livability claim is based on how east I found it to live in marin compared to mountain view, Palo Alto, and sunnyvale. It is a personal claim. Marin is way less stressful and overall better connected with san Francisco.

And yes, you can go from east marin to west marin via bus and you can go to mt tam via bus and you can go all the way to inverness via bus, passing through a good portion of marins natural areas.

I was referencing the entire system, the 101 is a minuscule fraction of the overall service. But if you'd like to look at the timetables, the last southbound 101 leaves Santa Rosa at 9:55 PM, arriving in SF at 12:17 AM. The last northbound 101 leaves SF at 12:08 AM and arrives in Santa Rosa at 2:30 AM. So, sure, some parts of the route get service past midnight. But if you're counting on taking the 101 home from SF past midnight, good luck.

Meanwhile SamTrans, for instance, runs hourly service to San Francisco between 1–5 AM.

The livability claim is based on how east I found it to live in marin compared to mountain view, Palo Alto, and sunnyvale. It is a personal claim.

Personal claim, perhaps, but it's objectively false. During the day you've got a few different rail options to get from SF to SJ as well as regular bus service.

Meanwhile Marin sees a few routes to SF maybe twice an hour during peak hours, and a handful of ferry trips. During the weekend you're typically down to hourly service and maybe three ferry trips a day.

And yes, you can go from east marin to west marin via bus and you can go to mt tam via bus and you can go all the way to inverness via bus, passing through a good portion of marins natural areas.

Sure, if you time it right. The timetable for the 68 may as well be swiss cheese though.

Point being that there's nothing stopping Marin County from doing a good job with transit. Nothing, that is, except for a populace that would rather sit in traffic.

It costs me $22 to get train to the airport (it's around $17 from central station to airport). I can get a flight to Melbourne for ~$70 it shouldn't cost 1/3 of my plane ticket. If there are two people traveling in a group taxi is cheaper and depending on time of day faster.

A good hack is getting off the train at Mascot, walking across the road and catching the 400 one stop. They come every few minutes and you save the airport train station fee!

I've found the same with walking in some cases.

Why is this wanted? We have bus/taxi lanes here as well, but Uber is allowed to go there as well (they require the same taxi license as anyone else).

If anything, only pool ridesharing companies should get the benefit of these intracity HOV lanes.

I think the transit lanes can be used by buses, taxis, chauffeured cars, etc. Mainly for politicians/important people to get the airport or city quickly I suppose.

I think since taxis pay heavy license fees to the state (whereas Uber etc. cars only pay car registration like all other cars) allowing them to use the lanes has been justified by the city. But of course, these licenses aren't open to Uber or other providers so it's a difficult situation that does stifle competition.

If you just needed to sign up to be an Uber driver, and you could use the HOV lane, everyone would do it. Even if you had to do that and pay a fee of $5000/year, there would be plenty of people who could justify that over the time saved in traffic (but probably not Uber drivers).

When Uber et al took all the value out of the expensive taxi number plate one of the few ways the government had to compensate their owners is that advantage they still have, so they haven't leveled the field there. That conversation might open up the entire concept to evaluation though.

And as I about to post this, the price for UberX changed to $49.80. Thanks for the illustration, Uber.

The real solution should be to expand the number of HOV lanes.

Haven't you heard that increasing the number of lanes makes traffic worse?