Yeah, this is something that really bugs me about public transport.
It's simply not acceptable to have to stand on a bus. Ever. It should be treated as some sort of breakdown/failure condition. If it happens on more than a few % of journeys, the public transport authority should be putting on more buses.
Otherwise people are just going to take their car because they actually have control over their own comfort.
With trains it's a little harder due to physical constraints on the network, but with buses it's inexcusable to not just have more capacity, particularly at peak time (London buses get silly in the morning peak, for example).
edit: Replies here are completely missing the point. A car has comfortable seats whenever you want them. It's honestly a comical joke to have to explain "why I don't want to stand up". The obvious answer is because I don't have to in my car.
Public transport can be, and should be as comfortable as that. It can't be as private, sure, but there's no need for it to feel like cattle class.
I'd gladly pay twice as much for it to be better. It easily could be; in London for example if everyone gave up their cars and put the money towards public transport we could double or triple the number of buses.
Also, wishing for a blanket increase in total number of busses by some huge percentage to avoid anyone standing probably sounds like a real nice plan until you have to pay for it... Capacity management isn't as easy as throwing drivers and busses at the problem.
Will they? When I drive I have to worry about parking and, you know, driving. If I take a taxi or ride share I'm paying on the order of 6x what the bus costs.
I think you're overstating the annoyance of standing on a bus.
> I'd gladly pay twice as much for it to be better.
Some other comments mentioned classism, and anti-social passengers, but a less emotionally charged way of framing it is just in terms of price discrimination.
Busses and subways have no "first class" or "business class" section. The passengers who would pay double or triple are doing so in their car payments, insurance, and gasoline, and riding in relative comfort, and the people left riding the bus are mostly those who aren't willing to pay more.
It's going to be difficult to get people to put their car payments toward better bussing, while still keeping it accessible to those who want to pay less.
> Busses and subways have no "first class" or "business class" section.
It depends. New York City has "express buses" that are basically long-distance buses repurposed for commuting. You pay an additional fare and are more comfortable. Commuter trains are of course more comfortable than subway trains. (This is why I usually fly out of JFK. Taking LIRR to the airport is much nicer than taking the bus to LGA.)
Japan's rail systems have higher-tier options on some route. JR has "home liners" that are long-distance passenger trains basically repurposed for commuters (actually very similar to the default commuter train in the US, whereas the normal commuter trains are very similar to metros). Tobu has the "TJ Liner" which is similar. The demand does exist.
I think the reality is that public transportation is too popular to reduce capacity by having more seating. Everyone in NYC would pay for a more comfortable subway, but there wouldn't be enough trains to carry them all. The completely-packed-at-rush-hour is a byproduct of the fact that cars just aren't faster in NYC, so you might as well pay $2.50 to get home faster but in less comfort. (I've looked into it. There were many times when I was running late and thought, "maybe I'll just take an Uber to work today". But the delayed subway would take 20 minutes and the private car would take 30 because of traffic. It only made a difference in the middle of the night when the subway was running on 30 minute headways and there was no traffic. Even then, still close to 20 minutes to drive. The subway is just that efficient, despite everyone's complaints.)
Yeah I think this is the main challenge - you can have private buses are that are comfortable and provide a net positive over driving yourself. These exist in the bay area (FB, Google, Apple all do this) but then they're not public transport.
Right, which is why public transport should be funded via taxation.
The way to achieve a reasonable service is actually to tax driving at a higher rate (to account for the externalities; pollution, congestion etc) and put the funds into infrastructure like buses/trains.
I often drive because it's more efficient and comfortable than using the bus. It's more efficient and comfortable than using the bus because the externalities are not priced in.
We can address that balance by taxing cars higher and putting on more buses / paying for more cleaners, etc.
Really depends on the distance and the rides harshness, that's why we have buses and carriages filled with people who didn't take a car anyway.
Definitely not ideal but we can't optimize just for one thing. Putting more busses on demand has really hard scaling problems because of these busses don't appear and disappear like a virtual machine, it needs to be stored somewhere and delivered to the location where that bus is needed. Then you have load-unload problems. This is also why cars that are just like the cars of today but electrical and automatical won't scale too.
You can't really divorce the design of the inhabited areas and the transport systems. This is also probably the reason why the Americans seem so hostile towards public transport. In Europe and even in Asia public transport works fine and the most annoying thing about cars is not that you have to drive them but you have to put them somewhere when you reach your destination.
> If it happens on more than a few % of journeys, the public transport authority should be putting on more buses.
That's unrealistic, because there are such huge peaks in traffic. You'd need a large number of extra bus drivers only from 7:30 to 8:30 and from 17:00 to 18:00 each day.
"such a job" would not be made available as bus drivers are typically unionized employees and that is one reason part-time bus driver positions do not exist
I take the bus and I'm neither poor, nor a particularly good environmentalist. They're convenient and cheap and I sorta prefer it to putting my life in the hands of a sleep deprived wage slave. Uber rides feel _consistently unsafe_ to the point I don't even consider it an option anymore.
IME most of the resistance people have to taking the bus is classism. They don't want to share space with "those people".
Presumably then, in your area, buses are superior.
This is exactly what I am talking about. They are not everywhere, and they should be.
I prefer buses too when they actually work.
I tend to take public transport a lot more off peak. At peak time I vastly prefer cycling or driving depending on the weather because I find being crammed next to other people disgusting (a failure mode unique to public transport).
It’s not about class at all. It’s that people don’t want to share space every day for an hour each way with loud people, smelly people, crazy people, violent people, etc. And if they do, they sure as hell don’t want to do so standing and packed up against them. Not all cities and routes have these problems, but many do.
Nobody objects to having to share space with a broke working class single mother taking the bus to go clean hotels downtown.
Aside from that, the weather can be a pain in the ass (rain, snow, wind, scorching heat), transferring buses/trains is a hassle, you cannot travel on your own scheduling terms, you can’t swing by the grocery store or run some errand on the way home, travel time is generally much longer unless you happen to live/work right beside an express stop that does not require a transfer, and the list goes on.
Or... cities see self-driving cars, draw the correct conclusion that they can put some smaller, cheaper and more efficient self-driving buses and blanket ban cars in places where there are too much of them. You either walk or take the bus.
Ok, but check this out: self-driving buses! It's easier to make a self-driving vehicle that follows a fixed route. Buy enough buses to cover the peak demand, then send most of them back to garage during non-peak times.
It's solvable, especially since it's the government that is responsible for public transportation. For example, you can arrange another job for the non-needed hours. For example - a taxi driver.
> It's simply not acceptable to have to stand on a bus.
you need bus fares to cost less than car travel or people'd just drive everywhere and car ownership/congestion comes with it's own set of issues.
it's annoying but having enough capacity to handle peak hours would also see lot more buses parked off hours, lot more technicians doing maintenance.
given the seated:standing capacity on current models, you'd end up with twice to thrice the buses to seat everyone.
now this wouldn't immediately mean to have triple the fares, but it'd be a significant factor and limit/reduce total bus usage, and there's no indication the consequences for society would actually be net positive compared to standing.
> Otherwise people are just going to take their car because they actually have control over their own comfort.
The fact that many people don't indicates there are other factors at play.
I bet there's a diminishing return to this. The more buses you add at rush hour the more traffic you cause and thus slow things down reducing capacity. In heavy traffic buses tend to clump together as they get stuck behind one another due to the nature of smaller vehicles around them.
Also, what would be an acceptable cost increase to pay for this additional capacity? You'd have to balance the theoretical increase in ridership against the decrease from raising prices. Keep in mind that public transport is usually heavily subsidized, in the US its on average 50%.
Nope. In my location trams are new and clean. I just prefer to lean against the windows and people who need it more can use it. I don't travel more than 20mins with public transport, though.
Well, when I was working in the City and living in south London I used to take the DLR (which is a self driving train btw) and walk for 10min.
I can confirm that there were drivers on the streets as well as cyclist, pedestrians, bus riders, tube riders and so on.
All of those at their limits at rush hour. Later the city banned private vehicles from certain locations at rush hour, so you can do such changes to favour one transportation method over the othet but it's far from solving it. It's a very hard problem, very unlikely to be solved without redesigning the city.
It's simply not acceptable to have to stand on a bus. Ever. It should be treated as some sort of breakdown/failure condition. If it happens on more than a few % of journeys, the public transport authority should be putting on more buses.
Otherwise people are just going to take their car because they actually have control over their own comfort.
With trains it's a little harder due to physical constraints on the network, but with buses it's inexcusable to not just have more capacity, particularly at peak time (London buses get silly in the morning peak, for example).
edit: Replies here are completely missing the point. A car has comfortable seats whenever you want them. It's honestly a comical joke to have to explain "why I don't want to stand up". The obvious answer is because I don't have to in my car.
Public transport can be, and should be as comfortable as that. It can't be as private, sure, but there's no need for it to feel like cattle class.
I'd gladly pay twice as much for it to be better. It easily could be; in London for example if everyone gave up their cars and put the money towards public transport we could double or triple the number of buses.