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0 pointsfaeriechangling2y ago0 comments

Having been a long time user of public transit in medium to low density areas, the issues are:

>there’s no fiscal case for stuff like heavy rail or light rail in the burbs, so you’re using buses until you travel somewhere more dense.

>the buses have limited geographical availability and it may be a long trip to or from a bus stop

>the buses have limited frequency and may run way every half hour or hour.

>Buses are generally going to be fine at getting you from suburbia to whatever downtown core efficiently maybe adding 25%-100% extra travel times mostly because the buses need to frequently stop and let on new people. Moving from suburb to suburb on the other hand often doubles to quadruples trip times. There isn’t enough demand for such trips to make improving this fiscally viable, but this is something you will likely want to do a fair bit in practice.

>It’s not rare for a 30 minute bus trip to take longer than if you used a bike while also being more expensive. So transit often isn’t doing anything besides long trips downtown faster and providing transport to those who can’t use a bike for whatever reason. So they’re a bit of a non-solution for many problems caused by low density.

>you are generally constrained in how much cargo you can keep on your person, so these have limited utility in terms of allowing you to bring goods back to your home. If you drop the car and rely on transit, you need to work out some solution for moving cargo in an affordable manner.

I have many strategies to compensate for this, but really, what you want to do is ensure as many services are possible are in walking, biking, or e-bike distance to reduce the need to lean on the public transit system and reduce how frequently one needs to use it. If things are in bike distance, people can load more cargo on a cargo bike and get it back to their homes than they can using a bus. At the same time, such densification will also mean more robust public transit systems as increased ridership means more money for improvements to the system. Increased densification also makes things like package delivery, ride sharing, car sharing, and so on cheaper/more available/faster which you will want to lean on if you don’t have a car.

Low density and public transit really do not mix.

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alamortsubite2y ago

Almost all the problems you've listed are implementation issues with bus routes. Adding more buses, stops, and/or express routes is a slam dunk compared to what you describe. I agree on your vision, but until it happens it seems unreasonable to dismiss attempts to help the homeless like the one Austin is taking.

faeriechanglingOP2y ago

I mean, it’s not just implementation problems, these are trade offs. You can increase frequency but might need to reduce geographic coverage. You might increase geographic coverage by using more buses but might need to increase fares. You might be able to tweak things and improve efficency but you can only do so much, it’s not like the people planning this stuff are all incompetent.

There is one and only one way to improve every aspect of the bus system at once and that is to increase ridership by increasing density. There is a reason public transit downtown is so much better than public transit in rural areas. It’s not because city folk are smart megageniuses who know how to run a bus system.

P.S. there’s often ways for citizens to get involved with planning things like bus routes if you look into it… I knew one guy who did this.

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