This road right here in a west coast US city used to be four lanes of car traffic (two in each direction), but two (one in each direction) were taken out and dedicated for bus service.
Shortly after, the middle lane of each direction became a bus-only lane, but this was implemented with temporary road modifications. (So each direction has 1 bus lane and 2 car lanes.) The middle part of the road was rebuilt from 2019 to 2020, making this feature permanent.
They're building up more and more Bus-Only lanes here in the Twin Cities, and as a daily bus commuter, the change has been fantastic. Really makes a big difference in speed & reliable bus timings when the bus gets its own space to operate.
Transit can never compete with cars on speed in well-designed cities.
Cars are the least efficient form of mass transit yet devised. They take up inordinate amounts of space to move very few people. This creates unavoidable congestion problems at very realistic levels of urban density, problems which are only solvable by enabling people to use viable alternatives.
This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars. (https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus...) (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/manhattan-drivers-face-9-fe...)
Speaking of "wasting life in buses", did you know that the average LA / Chicago / NYC driver spends 85 to 100 hours a year just sitting in traffic? Food for thought (https://inrix.com/scorecard/)
No comparable European city is even close to Houston in average commute time. Go on, fact check me.
> This is why the subway and buses in Manhattan move 5x and 2x more people respectively per day than cars.
Manhattan is a hellscape that needs to be de-densified (with some neighborhoods preserved as museums of human folly).
Even if that is true, average commute time is just a single factor. There's also health, cost, comfort, the environment, safety. Comparisons using a single metric are simply invalid.
> Go on, fact check me.
Ok.
Couldn't find any reliable data, could you cite your sources? What I have found is a few sources with wildly different data, e.g.:
- [1] puts Houston at 42 minutes, very different from your claim of 28 minutes.
- [2] claims the average time for the EU is 25 minutes.
Most of the sources I've found are based on self-reported data (surveys) so I do not put much weight on them. Do you have any sources that provide reliable data?
[1]: https://www.theworldranking.com/statistics/125/traffic-commu...
[2]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
For certain high frequency routes in Chicago, I never minded sitting on the bus to get across town. At least once I got off I didn't have to find a parking spot. Now wasting life waiting for a bus is another story.
Yup. Wide roads, plenty of parking, distributed industry and office space, low density.
And that’s leaving aside all the issues with our of control transit budgets or crime on public transit in many cities.
This means that a single bus lane has as much transport capacity as 4-5 car lanes. A single light rail track as much as 10 or more car lanes. It’s just physically impossible to fit all the lanes for cars. The correct answer to congestion is not to build a second lane. It is to add a bike lane and a bus lane, and if the bus lane is full - upgrade to tram.
(Corollary: this is also why bike lanes always look empty. A full bike line would be equivalent to seven lanes of cars. At an equivalent of 3 full lanes of cars, the bike lane is half-empty)
Bullshit. You are a victim of propaganda.
In reality, a car lane can carry 2000 people per hour with an average car load. With mild car-pooling, it's easy to increase it to 6000 people per hour.
A bus in the US has an average load of just 18 people. So with 10 buses per hour, you get just 180 people per lane per hour. Even at peak loads (200 people per bus) and a bus every 2 minutes, you get 6000 people per lane per hour.
Transit sucks and will always suck. It's pure math. Transit slowly consumes lives and increases misery. All it's good for is to move people to "misery centrals" (downtowns) where pretty much nobody really wants/can live in comfort.
So for spread out places with lost of space cars will usually be the fastest.
However if we look at dense city centres you have a lot of people competing for parking and a lot of people competing for road throughput.
Say we want to move from A to B, assuming infinite throughput the car is fastest. Take the same route, but it can handle only 200 cars/hour and 10000 people want to take it, we end up with a lot of cars waiting for each other. In this case, slower but more efficient modes of travel will be faster at getting all these people to their destination.
This leads us nicely to the Downs–Thomson paradox. When people in the above scenario start to take other modes of transport it reduces the load on our bottleneck. Eventually reaching an equilibrium where the speed of different modes of transport balances out (as people stop switching from one mode to the other)
The hate for traffic calming is an interesting point, as it assumes cars are the only thing that exists. Unfortunately our cars don't exist in a vacuum, but interact with other object in the world like buildings, and people. The goal of traffic calming is to make it so that other things are protected from cars. (mainly by lowering speed in places where there is lots of other stuff, you wont see traffic calming on a highway)
The premise here is that travel time can be the only trade off, but suppose we make a different one: Stop charging fares for mass transit. Then more people take it because it costs less rather than because it's faster and it can be less expensive (and only slightly slower) even when the roads are minimally congested.
If that increased to 100%, you wouldn't be able to park anywhere without paying a lot, and getting anywhere would be super slow.
It might make sense on a per-individual or per-trip basis to say that you prefer using a car, but if everyone makes that choice (old used cars are fairly cheap), it's a problem.
A classic case of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma .
I think they're intended to be anti-"getting killed by a car" measures. Traffic fatality statistics speak for themselves.
