
Tech Breakthroughs That Could Make People Love the Bus - jseliger
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/five-breakthroughs-that-could-make-you-love-the-bus/559832
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transitstory
Tech breakthroughs won't help. There's no replacement for an investment in
infrastructure. Let me explain.

I used to live in Seattle, without a car, which meant taking the bus. I
thought it worked pretty well until I moved out of downtown to just off the
main drag in West Seattle (California Ave.) There, the bus still worked great!
Until King County Metro decided to pull service. Suddenly, all-day, all-week
service from the stop by my apartment turned into 5 rush-hour trips to
downtown a day, weekdays only, peak direction only. Getting anywhere else
suddenly required a 2 mile walk to Alaska Junction (or, unrealistically, a
local bus transfer. The 2 mile walk was faster.)

I was naive and a fool (fortunately, didn't invest much and was able to move
shortly thereafter.) People who invest in areas on the basis of bus service
are fools. It's constantly being tinkered with for a host of regions
(fluctuating budgets, political pressures, and the damnable need for people
making careers to "do something.") You cannot trust a bus route.

Tunnels or tracks in the ground, and associated stations? Those don't move.
(They do sometimes get abandoned in the worst cases of nonfeasance.) One can
generally rely on continued service over a period of time suitable for
investment. There's no substitute for sunk costs as a signal of commitment.
It's the investments in density that come with a real transit network that
make the difference, not "attracting ridership with fancy buses." See yet
again, Seattle. (Sorry, RapidRide is a joke.)

You know what has historically driven ridership and attracted investment in
Seattle? Areas around the trolley bus lines. Because, again, you know the
route's not going away if the lines are up.

~~~
komali2
What did your local government say when you contacted them about this? That
sounds extremely frustrating.

~~~
xxpor
I'm guessing the OP is talking about the big service change in the Fall of
2012. In cases like that, the county council actually has to approve the
changes. So they'd probably tell him too bad.

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ajross
Of those, only "Seamless Payment" really seems relevant to most people. The
rest is just stuff transit nuts like to think about. But being able to pay as
a regular person without buying a pass or finding change or using a vending
machine is big. Just walk on the vehicle unimpeded and pay using nothing but
what you carry around with you (e.g. a smartphone).

And it inexplicably misses the single biggest and most obvious criterion:
_SERVICE FREQUENCY_. No one cares about how slick the bus service is if you
have to wait 10 minutes for it to show up. Because while 10 minutes might be
OK for most people what that really means is that inevitably a vehicle gets
skipped or breaks down (this happens a lot more than you think) and you have
to wait 20 on a day when you really can't wait 20 minutes for a ride.

If you can't get the buses to show with no more than 10 minute wait at every
stop on every day, people won't take them. If you can, they're better than
cars. But you have to have the service level first before worrying about glitz
like the stuff in the linked article.

~~~
bryanlarsen
From the article: "“If there’s a 12-person little vehicle coming down the
street every 5 minutes versus a 40-person vehicle coming every 20 minutes,
then you’ve got more capacity in that corridor and and a much better
experience for people,”

Total game changer.

~~~
ars
> If there’s a 12-person little vehicle coming down the street every 5 minutes

What about a 5 person little vehicle that only comes exactly when people call
it?

And for even better service it works point to point, which cuts down of fuel
and wasted time.

And to reduce costs even further maybe drive it yourself instead of paying a
driver. Although we need to a cost analysis on this. It could be some people
would prefer to pay a driver, and other would drive themself.

~~~
ajross
Because there's an external point that having a million "5-person" little
vehicles driving around the city containing on average only 1.2 people is a
tragedy of the commons. Personal cars _simply do not_ "cuts down of fuel and
wasted time", and to argue that is to argue in bad faith. Personal cars are a
disaster in the modern megapolis.

~~~
ars
But a 12 person car is alright?

Where's the sweet spot between 40, 12, and 5?

~~~
ajross
A vehicle carrying 12 passengers literally increases the bandwidth of the road
it travels on by an order of magnitude. Yeah, that sounds acceptable to me. If
you have alternative numbers I'd be happy to evaluate them. But "drive my own
car" is just not going to work in this realm.

~~~
ars
It's not that simple. First of all they are never full.

Second the trips are longer, since they have to drive fixed routes, so people
are in the vehicle for longer - sometimes MUCH longer, so more road capacity
is taken up.

They way they stop and start constantly also reduces road bandwidth.

To me bus service is about money and parking - not being able to afford a car
if you only rarely drive, and a place to put the car.

I am not convinced buses help with congestion. (Trains/subway/T are different
because they have a whole new road built just for them.)

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ebiester
In America, it's frustrating, but the breakthrough Americans need is some sort
of separation between mass transit and poverty - that mass transit is
something for all of us, not just the poor.

(I also argue that it needs to be faster than individual transit.
Unfortunately, individual transit is something people won't accept being
slower, even if mass transit could make the whole trip faster.)

~~~
ryandrake
Do NYC residents look at the subway as something only poor people use? Honest
question, I don’t live there. I don’t consider “associating with the poors” to
be an impediment at all.

What stops me from using mass transit (including bus and rail service) is that
its schedule in my town is totally inadequate. Stops are not frequent enough,
service starts too late in the morning and ends too early at night, and travel
time to most destinations is slower than by car. Fix these major problems and
I happily use transit.

~~~
cimmanom
> Do NYC residents look at the subway as something only poor people use?

No, but subway funding and management is controlled by the state, not the city
-- and the majority of residents of the state do not use transit. I get the
impression that a lot of people in the state still think of NYC as the
crumbling inner city of the 70's: the place where poor people live.

The governor is more interested in optics ("Now you can charge your phone on
the bus! We replaced the tiles in this subway station!") than restoring
service, let alone expansion. He has diverted funds from the subways to, among
other things, pretty light shows on bridges and supporting failing upstate ski
resorts. With the subways failing, those who can afford to are taking cabs and
black cars more and more, which contributes to the traffic congestion crisis.

The mayor gets driven everywhere in a black SUV and seems to have never
learned that not only to most of his constituents not commute in personal
vehicles, the majority don't even own cars.

Additionally, the city has a LOT of public buses. In some ways (frequency,
coverage), bus service in the city is much better than most of the rest of the
country. In other ways, it's unusably bad (mostly, time to get from A to B due
to traffic, too-frequent stops, silly winding routes, slow payment/boarding,
overcrowding, inufficiently frequent service outside rush hour, bus bunching
decreasing apparent/useful service frequency).

The NIMBYs and traffic enforcers all seem to believe that bus riders are "not
us" (and yes, outside of a few crosstown corridors, bus riders average poorer
than subway riders). The result is obstacles to the creation of bus lanes and
busways, and utter lack of enforcement of those we do have.

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falcon620
I live in Scandinavia where public bus systems are plentiful, heavily subsized
(with my taxes...) and reasonably on schedule.

The things that make me avoid them and instead use my car:

\- You get sick by using them. The passenger density is way too high and
invariably you'll end end up having a seat neighbor with some cold or flu
virus.

\- There is no privacy at all during rush time - it's super packed and just a
horribly stressed environment. I don't want to sit squashed up to some random
stranger.

The solution to all of this is obvious: Instead of 2+2 seat arrangements, look
at business class seat configurations. Or just make the buses longer, and go
with 1+1 seat configs.

~~~
2RTZZSro
1st class train service is one answer for this problems. While 2nd class
service remains jam packed during rush hour 1st class sections are always nice
and quiet.

~~~
falcon620
We are talking about buses there though.

------
ars
If you think these things will make "Normal People Love the Bus" you don't
have any understanding of why they hate the bus in the first place.

~~~
danieka
Care to elaborate? I love the bus and would like to think that I belong to the
category "normal people".

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emiliobumachar
>“The thing that Uber and Lyft have done that is really revolutionary was just
removing some of the transportation anxiety that exists from not knowing
whether you’re going to be able to get a ride, not knowing how long it’s going
to take for that ride to get there, not knowing exactly how much it’s going to
cost,” he said. If bus operators could make all of this information as
transparent as Uber and Lyft do, they’d win more riders.

I think up-to-the second awareness of time remaining would be a major
improvement to the experience. I know the time remaining is uncertain, but a
lot of information exists but is not making its way to the user.

Allow me to browse my phone while I wait, without paying attention at all,
until I get a notification when the bus is 30s away.

If I'm wandering whether to go in the nearby bakery, allow me to see a "best
guess" estimate and a "surely won't take less than this much" estimate for the
remaining time.

For very infrequent routes, allow me to set my alarm clock to X minutes before
the "surely won't take less than this much" estimate to the stop near my home,
to be evaluated at runtime.

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rufb
This post reads like a Buzzfeed article of pointing out not quite impressive
iterations of known technologies or fixes to "it ain't broke" situations.

Electric buses have been around for a while, they're called trolleys. Putting
the batteries inside the buses is an improvement, but hardly a breakthrough,
and I'm not entirely sure it would make me "Love the Bus"

Likewise, autonomous buses have been around for at least a couple decades in
the form of driverless trains. For high-density routes with lots of passengers
doing the same itinerary, I feel it's probably cheaper in the long run, more
maintainable and safer to use rails, so I'm not sure an autonomous bus is an
innovation we want over trains.

Seamless payment is not a tech breakthrough at this point, it's just a matter
of getting regulators and government contractors to implement seamless
payments.

"Accessibility" is not a tech breakthrough and the things mentioned in the
article make me question the author's understanding of the state of assistive
technology and the actual current needs of people with disabilities.

As for "Minibus or ‘trackless train’", that's indeed a super interesting
question that hasn't been solved in the space of transportation: given a very
dense ad-hoc demand for transportation from region A to region B, how can you
broker a collective transportation solution that is cheap, efficient and
desirable over, say, a slower multimodal option, or more expensive private
transportation. Sadly, the article discusses minibuses (which we've had, in
Brazil at least, for longer than I can remember) and only mentions they "can"
be routeless but doesn't fully explain how that could be achieved.

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jon_richards
A large part of my issue with busses is that where I am they stop literally
every block. It makes them miss every light (since if there's any traffic,
they can only get to their stop during a green light), which just makes them
too slow to be very useful.

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pjc50
Seamless payment is very handy. Buses should just take contactless payments;
some already do.

Driverless is an interesting prospect, but shared unsupervised transport
starts to feel like a safety issue, especially late at night.

Systems that don't already have live bus tracking, syndicated into map apps
etc, should get it - it makes the system _far_ more usable.

Edinburgh already has hybrid and full battery buses, and I believe Glasgow
will get some soon. The main driver here is dealing with diesel emissions.
[https://lothianbuses.co.uk/news/article/Lothian-introduce-
th...](https://lothianbuses.co.uk/news/article/Lothian-introduce-the-first-
all-electric-buses-to-Edinburgh)

------
lifeisstillgood
I commute daily by "coach" \- I live thirty miles outside London in the
commuter belt, and in general it is great. But it's great because mostly there
is a bus service locally (dr gong round picking people up every few hundred
yards) and then mostly a motorway drive to London - once past the first drop
off (Canary Wharf) it grinds to a halt along with every one else in sheer
weight of traffic

The fixes needed are simple - and related to the to comment on "infrastructure
as a commitment signalling device".

Just charge the living bejesus out of single occupancy cars, force major roads
to be bus and cycle _only_ , and have serious decade long plans for
pedestrianising most city areas - the car has to go.

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0xdada
I already love the bus. The trick is to live somewhere with great public
transport.

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kazinator
> _My brief electric bus ride was not mind-blowingly different from a
> conventional one._

It has been possible to experience an electric bus ride for well over a
century to verify that it's not "mind blowingly different".

Ever heard of the trolleybus? It's an electric bus that draws power from
overhead cables.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus#History)

~~~
iopuy
I lived in a city with a "trolley" that turned out to be a bus painted like a
trolley and I've heard of others with the same experience. I have to laugh
when I see a city advertise it's trolley service when in reality it is nothing
of the sort.

~~~
nataz
That's not really what the OP is talking about. Not sure why they aren't
popular in the US, but many cities in Europe have extensive electric bus
networks powered by electrical lines overhead.

I suspect the benefits are you don't have to lay rail + you can use normal
vehicle lanes + you get the benefits of not having a combustion engine (smog,
mechanical issues, fuel storage/re-fill).

------
Raphmedia
The only thing I want is a quiet engine and adult sized seats. I rode the bus
for two years until back pain and migraines from the noised made it so I vowed
never to ride one again.

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hprotagonist
Electrification will cut the exhaust stench down a lot, but it won't stop the
lurching or the overheating in winter, both of which reliably make me
nauseated.

I'll stick to my bicycle.

~~~
loser777
That depends on what the source of the lurching is---if you live in an area
where surface street road quality is rough (e.g., Seattle), then it won't help
much. But electrification can mean the bus will use a fixed gear instead of a
rough-shifting transmission.

------
wink
How about "enough room to sit comfortable if you have long legs" and then on
top "I can work on my laptop".

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mattnewton
I feel like what would make me love the bus is rails and a reasonable time
schedule. These are all lipstick on a pig for me.

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nategri
Wow do I resent this headline.

It implies that people who currently take the bus should for some reason be
considered _ab_ -normal, which they definitely should _not_ be, by any non-
classist definition.

~~~
sctb
We've removed that from the headline. Regardless of interpretation, it's a
little weird and clearly distracting.

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dodgedcactii
Here's a non tech "breakthrough" to help people love the bus: have the goddamn
police enforce people who double park, and rip out parking and car lanes for
buses only. Buses are great when they work, and they fall off when not. Its
easy AF and proven across the world without the need for techbro innovation.

~~~
closeparen
Double parking is not even close to the number one concern making buses
unpleasant.

1) Time it takes to walk to the station.

2) Waiting for an indeterminate amount of time, often in excess of 10 minutes,
which is considered a good peak-hours frequency for some reason.

3) Standing-room-only, overcrowding, the relatively intense motor coordination
task of staying upright while the bus lurches around, the unpleasantness of
holding an arm over your head for tens of minutes.

4) Difficulty of escape from someone trying to talk to you or polluting the
cabin with the smell of urine or music from a shitty phone speaker.

5) Absurd travel times 3-5x what it would take in a car due to frequent stops
and use of surface streets.

I rely entirely on public transit, and the only good bus experiences I’ve had
were with a suburban commuter express which behaved like a car (or better, due
to priority lanes) for the vast majority of the trip. But it was so
infrequent, and the subway from my office to the bus depot had such high
variance due to extreme congestion among trains, that it was no better for
end-to-end travel time than a car.

~~~
lurquer
There is also the loss of flexibility and freedom. Having your own car
available -- even though it sits in your workplace's parking lot 99% of the
time during business hours -- gives some comfort to some people. I have not
lived in NYC for some time, but during the brief I did reside there, I never
got used to being utterly dependent on public transportation. I suppose I
would have in time. But, for the majority (in terms of area) of the country,
taking public transportation occasions a nagging feeling of being 'trapped' at
a location. (This isn't a knock on dense cities where subways/busses are
essential due to the impossibility of everyone driving and parking... But, for
a second-tier city where parking is plentiful, the 'freedom' factor is
significant.)

~~~
closeparen
The _most_ flexibility and freedom comes from access to high-quality public
transit in addition to a car. Only being able to go places with ample parking
is also constraining.

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dsfyu404ed
None of these "breakthroughs" address cleanliness.

Dedicated lanes addresses timeliness but if the number of people per hour of a
bus lane is less than the traffic it replaces it's a net negative from an
infrastructure perspective (yes it's more environmentally friendly, whether
it's worth it is up for debate)

Autonomy would be nice because then you could cut some pretty big costs but I
expect unions to prevent that.

Accessibility is basically catering to edge cases. As others have pointed out
in the past, it's more efficient to have a subset of buses be handicapped
accessible or have a dedicated handicapped accessible van service

This is just a puff piece that doesn't really address any hard issues.

