It depends on the city, but in bigger cities it's frequently the traffic from cars that keeps busses from being on time.

Separately, there's a chicken-and-egg problem. In order to run busses every five minutes—which is what you really want—you need enough bus riders to fill all those vehicles.

The easiest way to solve the problem, as I understand it, is to ignore the urge to cover the whole area in bus lines, because it's expensive and many of them won't have enough ridership to justify the cost. Instead, look where your density is highest, change zoning to let it get even higher, and build, like, 1 or 2 bus lines with very frequent service (less than about 12 minutes gap). That's the magic threshold where you don't need to look at a schedule -- if you miss one bus, a 10-12 minute wait won't make much difference. And that makes it an inflection point for ridership too -- you can get a lot more people with frequent service, meaning you get enough riders to make the whole thing worthwhile.

Best is if you can get a lane dedicated entirely to buses, and ticket cars that drive in it. You want buses to be a pleasant alternative to driving -- since you already have a walk at the beginning and end of your journey which takes time, it's nice if your bus can get priority over car traffic.

And from there, build up the areas with good bus service more and more, add more buses as needed due to population growth, lengthen lines, add new lines gradually as people see the success of the first ones. Incremental implementation is the trick.

> Best is if you can get a lane dedicated entirely to buses, and ticket cars that drive in it.

Counterintuitively this even is useful for people who have to go by car. A bus has a lot higher density in people transported. By making it attractive for people to use the bus they don't take away space on the road, which can increase the flow of the remaining cars, even if road space is reduced.

I really envision a hub/spoke wheel design. Run rail as the spokes. Once you get far enough out, the gap between the lines can be managed by a circular rail line and/or a couple bus lines. I guess I don't really like busses.

Buses are much easier to add in a city that's already built for cars. You just build some stations instead of having to dig up the whole road to add rails.

That's only really useful if you also get rid of enough cars to make the busses effective and not stuck in traffic.

True, but that's only busses. Rail lines were (are?) commonly 5-15 minutes off schedule depending on the time of day.

For people to use the system, they have to trust the system. Depending on the city, rail infrastructure can get you close enough to walk to many places. The stuff that crushes trust even then is the rail lines being off schedule and strikes. Safety can be a major concern too, like the woman who was raped on a SEPTA train recently (WTF). These should be simple asks. Maybe we just need to charge/tax more so they have more money (or maybe we need better people making the decisions with that money).

If only there was a solution to this problem. If only we could make the public transit go from “sucking” to “not sucking”. Guess we can’t. Throw in the towel. I’m buying a truck and America better damn we’ll go bomb someone to make sure gas is cheaper than milk.

That's not a helpful comment, nor is that what I'm saying. People can continue to go to meetings and write their reps. But until the number of people doing that gets big enough, it's not going to change (ie a centralized system needs a significant number of supporters to overcome status quo).