In San Francisco the current standard is 800–1,360 ft between bus stops depending on the grade. Street car stops are every 2–3 blocks. The MTA's spent years trying to cull stops because many are much closer than that, so no… walking to a Muni stop in San Francisco is perhaps one of the easiest things you can do in the city.
Edit: ca. 2008 the policy was 800–1,000 ft for bus stops and 1,000–1,200 ft for street car stops. On grades between 10–15% the standard is 500–600 ft for bus stops, and on grades above 15% the standard is 300–400 ft. Trunk routes have 24x7 service, and (I can't find it now) there are standards about the amount of service on the other routes but it's something along the lines of 80% of residences are supposed to have frequent service ~18 hours a day and reduced service in the wee hours. Currently the tightest headway I can find is 8 minutes for travel during peak hours along the busiest routes.
Muni is often inefficient but it can get you pretty much anywhere in the city (including places you can't walk to like Treasure Island) for most of the day.
Edit: For reference San Francisco is roughly 7 miles by 7 miles. So you're talking about transiting halfway across town.
Cars (with or without drivers) are competing for the same right of way as the bus, so more of them will simply slow everyone down. A 60ft bus can fit, what, about 100 people? A self-driving car can fit, what, 5? The current quantity of Lyft/Uber/Waymo/Cruise vehicles already has a negative impact on traffic. Put enough self driving cars on the street to make up for the capacity that buses provide and you're going to make traffic much, much worse.
It's a capacity issue. You just can't transport as many people with cars.
In a completely empty city, the first car handily beats transit. Of course.
In a traffic-laden city, separated PT tends to determine how long it takes to travel instead. 12AM it takes me 25min to get into the centre of the city - at peak hour it's more than an hour. Curiously, the train also happens to take approximately an hour to get into the city.
If public transit exists, it becomes the upper-bound for traffic travel time as if it takes longer than that people start to take the constant-time PT trip instead of the variable car trip.
In a software sense you can usually view decent PT (ie. not busses stuck in traffic) as having a high but constant time cost, whereas cars have a low but increasing cost corresponding to the traffic load (with non-separated transit incurring the same costs but being worse due to traffic stops :()
Fair argument. Public transit caps downside case and upside case. Cars can have downside but have upside too.
I want to have my cake and eat it too and I think we can with driverless cars. Lots of software tricks we can do with a network of driverless EVs + city traffic lights to dramatically increase capacity.
My roadmap for SF would be:
- allow waymo and others to scale driverless cars
- stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)
- give the same per passenger subsidy to riders of driverless cars that current public transit passengers receive per trip
- require that driverless cars in SF should send realtime destination info to the traffic light network
- remove parking spots on high traffic streets effectively creating two more lanes
- allow bus lanes to be exclusively used by driverless cars
- tax driverless car rides based on occupancy+distance+time of day so you can traffic shape
> - stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)
As long as we're throwing out fantasies, I'd like us to spend $2B more, and have the Chinatown subway run all the way out to Fisherman's Wharf and the Marina district, and also expand capabilities west out to the avenues.
I'm amazed we got the Chinatown subway and I'm excited to see the city develop around it!
Wait really? Genuinely curious. Do you think $2B was worth it?
Like I just implicitly assumed that that is way too much money for the value it provides but admittedly I didn't think much about it. Can you quantify how the benefit might be worth that much?
I think Cruise Automation has roughly raised that amount over it's entire lifetime. Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.
Congratulations you just reinvented communism. We don’t want cities making those kinds of investments for hopefully obvious reasons in that context.
Subway lines can pay for themselves across hundreds of years. It’s the best kind of investment for cities because it operates on their timescales and use ultra cheap bonds responsibly and it doesn’t interfere with free markets.
People’s willingness to buy very low yield government bonds is independent from people willing to make high risk investments in private companies. Trying to get people in group A to make investments of type B through government action is the kind of central planning you don’t want.
Cities taking advantage of people with ultra low risk tolerance to make infrastructure investments at ultra low rates that only make sense with very long time horizons is dependent on markets.
> Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.
Ahh, so by ‘we’ you didn’t actually mean a group you are part of but instead other people.
Your premise is, to put it politely, completely wrong. Even considering how broad the scope was, Van Ness took well longer than it should've. The delays were almost entirely political, driven by one supervisor who was on a mission to preserve the street lights.
Meanwhile the solution you've put forth is almost entirely political and even were there general acceptance of privatizing the roads that sort of project would be mired in just as much NIMBYism. Even then you're talking about, what, refunding federal monies that have already been spent? Levying a new tax (which will require a 2/3 voter approval), subsidizing private corporations, and kneecapping transit? And for what? A system that has a fraction of the capacity of the existing bus and tram infrastructure?
Beyond the gall to suggest privatizing our roads, you're suggesting handing it all over to Google? Really? A corporation with a track record of zero customer or long-term product support is not in a position to run our roads.
Ok I agree I was being a little ambitious :) Let me tackle your points one at a time:
- cities already pay private companies to help manage the traffic infrastructure so it doesn't seem too crazy. Seems hyperbolic to claim that's "privatizing roads"
- subsidizing private corps - ok maybe we shouldn't do this. but we should stop subsidizing public transit. it should have to compete with private alternatives now that we have them. previously there were no alternatives to public transit so we kind of had to subsidize it for equity, but now I think private enterprise (given fair competition) could deliver the same outcome. Instead of subsidizing the method (public transit) we should subsidize the outcome we want (equitable access to transport - which might mean that you need to provide low income rides as a ride share provider)
- on the money spent on the SF subway and bus lane, you're right, we're not getting that back. But we can just stop doing those going forward.
- regarding van ness bus lane, I didn't know it was because of the street lamps. But that actually proves my point. Basically to make any improvement, we just have to steer clear of new physical infrastructure. I'm suggesting no new physical infra, just software.
- regarding the tax on driverless rides, we kind of already have it. SF has a 3.25% tax on all ride sharing rides. We'd just need to update that to price the tax dynamically to help traffic shape. And if we don't get that piece, it's not critical.
- on giving it to Google. Fine... not them then. Whoever can provide the best service for the lowest cost. Perfect for free markets. In fact, if we make the API to traffic system standardized, you could plugin and hot swap different providers. You could even back test new providers on historic data to see what their performance would have been like and swap to new providers as they demonstrate their improvement over the current system
- cars have a fraction of the capacity of buses - yeah only if they are fully utilized and you're not counting getting to and from the bus station nor the loss of productivity waiting for a bus
All of these are possible to implement in a really short amount of time (because its mostly software) compared to public transit (10+ years to make a bus lane on van ness)
NYC is the one US city where trains almost make sense, but there are a ton of downsides related to cost, safety, etc. I'd love to see all those dedicated right-of-ways put to more efficient use with self-driving vehicles.
Great for uber is still limited by traffic and is a lot more expensive than great transit which doesn't get stuck in traffic, and thus is much cheaper than uber for better service.
Any bus that has stops every 100-200 feet is unbearably slow. Even every 1/8 of a mile is too much to be an time efficient mode of transportation unless you have BRT imo.
I’ve said it several times but you average ~165 feet when walking to a stop every 1/8th of a mile. Max is 1/2 the distance because you can walk either direction and average is again 1/2 the max because you start at a random point not the worst possibility. 5280/8/2/2 = 165.
As to unbearably slow, there’s this idea of express busses and buss only lanes etc. The core of cities really isn’t that big, it takes forever because traffic is slow or mass transit is infrequent.
All these calculations are only true if your destination is on the road the bus runs along. Since not every road has a bus line, you also usually have to walk multiple blocks perpendicular _away_ from the bus line in addition to some of the distance between stops.
If your road doesn’t have a bus line then that’s a problem not an inherent limitation.
Ideally you want a grid where bus lines are near intersections so going from North to East means crossing 1 street so you can go anywhere with 2 waits and a street crossing.
Fair enough. Not familiar with SF bus system but the bus system where I live, which is considered quite good I think, has each bus line 1/2 mile apart from each other. Almost no one lives directly along a route so there's an extra 1/8 mile average walk just to get to the route, not a stop on it. Fine by me but a lot of people don't seem capable of that for whatever reason. Combine that with the bus not actually going to where you're trying to get and I can see why people aren't huge fans.
(On average), for a walk to the stop of 100-200 feet the bus would need to stop every 200-400 feet. 300 ft seems to be roughly 100m, which is probably much too short a distance still. 250m or ~800 ft aligns better to my experience with cities with good transit, and in the worst case scenario you have to walk 125m to your nearest stop.
1/8th of a mile is every 660 feet, but the farthest you can be from one is the midpoint so 330 feet. However for every trip starting at the midpoint there’s another at and the bus stop thus the average would be 1/2 that distance again or 165 feet.
Assuming a 1D world, you can beat this in practice.
Busses around me don't stop at every stop, only if there are people waiting at the stop or someone has requested a stop by pressing a strip along the windows or one of the almost dozen buttons on the bus.
show me an american city where a bus stops every 100-200 feet every 3 mins. Heck show me where it'd even be possible in an american city. That sounds like the most inefficient bus ever.
That’s a bus stop every ~1/8th of a mile not 200 feet.
You cut it in half because you can walk to the closest stop and cut it in half again before you’re starting at a random point not the worst possibility so 5280/8/2/2 = 165 feet. Except we don’t exit buildings or get on busses in the middle of the street so it’s not random.
