3mo ago

Insanity

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Lets assume we disqualify the cars going left ro right, and if we also assume each car only has 1 person per car, that means the cars is 32.
A bus that size is usually built to fit around 50ish people using every seat, but none standing.
I ride my local bus everyday. It's NEVER full like that. I might have 6 people on the bus. Sometimes I'm the only rider.
So, yeah, a bus CAN hold roughly as many prople as cars, (again assuming only 1 person per car, which probably isn't the case 100%), the reality is that's not functionally true.
- Even if it's only carrying 6 people it's still doing a better job than the cars which on average probably have 1-2 people in each of them.
  
  Yes, but it's also the length of 4 cars, and uses diesel.
  
  You can see on the road that it takes up one lane like the cars and is equivalent to about 2.5 cars lined up accounting for gaps. Also the point of this post is that if public transport was normalized then this bus wouldn't have six people in it because half of these cars would be people on the bus instead.
  
  On the road, 4 cars would take more space lined up one behind another.
  I don't know what the law is where you live but i know what it is where i live, so excuse my weird metrics for a sec while i explain how wrong what you said is.
  In order to facilitate proper reaction time for yourself as the driver, you must have about two "seconds" (as in if you stared at the road beneath the car in front of you, your car would be there in about two seconds) between your car and the one in front of you.
  Meaning the faster the vehicles are, the larger the gaps, and if we're talking 4 vehicles, it's 3 gaps.
  For maneuverability's sake, it's worth mentioning the "wave propagation" that happens during brake time, but I won't get into it.
- The bus I ride every morning is always so full you struggle to get past the standing people to get to the door. The bus home is usually a little less busy, but I'm currently writing this comment while having to stand on that bus.
  
  I absolutely avoided riding the bus in my native city. If a place wasn't within a mile from a subway station then it might as well be in a different country because I'm not taking the bus there. The buses were always crowded and hot. Subway got crowded during rush hour, but at least there was good AC no matter where you stand.
  
  We've only got busses. The climate control is usually pretty good though; decent AC in the summer and heated in winter. Just the occasional shitty driver that doesn't set it correctly.
  Tbh the worst part is inconsolable crying babys. That's been pretty frequent this summer; but isn't usually a problem throughout the rest of the year. Otherwise people just keep to themselves, it's pretty peaceful.
  
  Wow, that actually sounds awful.
  
  The morning bus just sucks to get off, but I get on at one of the first stops so I pretty much always have a seat. I even nap most of the way there as it's a ~40min ride.
  The ride home I've often gotta stand for the first 3-4 stops until I can get a seat. Then I can just peacefully watch youtube or scroll lemmy, ignoring the world around me for a bit.
  For a flat $70/mo for unlimited rides; it's not a bad deal really. I'd rather this than driving and being frustrated dealing with the morons on the road; while paying significantly more between car payments, insurance, maintenance, and gas.
- tbf, it's only possibly not true because of intentional choices in city design and general social attitudes.
  That being said, I live in a pretty shitty area for bus transport (I'm in the USA, no less) and the busses are still usually mostly full when I use them.
  
  There are many other reasons why a bus might not be used at full capacity beyond just city design combined with the general attitude of "society".
  
  In individual cases, sure. But a well-designed city and public transport system should not be running skeleton capacities at daylight hours on the regular.
- Badly designed transit is not a condemnation of all public transit. Specially when in most of the world public transit is vastly more occupied than in the US and Canada, by the simple fact of actually connecting places people want to go, where people can then walk around when they get there. Parking lots are not destinations.
  
  I lived in a European capital until 28 and never got a driver's license because public transport was faster than driving through horrible traffic.
  Moved to the US and in less than a year had to buy a car because it was impossible to do anything without one. And that was in am area with considerably better public transport than usual for the US. It was just my wife driving, but after a few years I had to get a driver's license too and buy a second car. I like walking, I prefer good public transit to driving, but it's simply not an option in most of the US.
  Oh, and another story. In my hometown I absolutely loved the subway as THE way to get around. It was cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and average wait was 2-3 minutes. I visited New York one summer and as per habit I went to take the subway to my destination. It was sweltering hot and I waited 20 minutes for a train. Up to that point I considered NYC to be the closest US city to what I'm used to, but that would have been a deal breaker.
- is it not packed because all those people who could be inside are outside driving their own cars?
  is it not packed because the bus line doesn't have much demand?
  either case is not an argument against public transit. the point is to make public transit more convenient and utilized.

148 comments