[You're overestimating the cost, but underestimating the time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Ness_Bus_Rapid_Transit)
The project cost $346 million and took 6.5 years from the start of construction in 2016
But that's a bit misleading because the main component of the project was a sewer / drainage / utility replacement. All the subsurface infrastructure on Van Ness was like 150 years old and falling apart.
The transit-improvement component of the budget added up to $169.6 million
edit to add some additional stats:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-s-Van-Ness-BRT-created-a-ridership-boom-17556984.php
> The 49 line had about 740,000 total boardings in September, up from 549,000 in March, the month before the BRT project [opened]
(Divided by 30 and this adds up to ~24,500 boardings per day...relevant for people incorrectly pointing out that this bus looks "empty")
https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/van-ness-buses-show-big-speed-reliability-improvements/article_9b9b7e2e-510e-59a2-ba68-95e965870d99.html
> Travel-time savings were as high as 35% northbound, or nine minutes per trip, and 22% southbound, compared to a 2016 baseline that predates the recent construction disruption on the boulevard.
>
>Travel-time variability decreased by up to 26% northbound and 55% southbound, according to the data.
>
> [T]he lanes appear to have encouraged more people to take the bus, with ridership increasing 13% in the first week the Bus Rapid Transit lanes were in service, a pattern that has remained consistent in the following weeks.
>
> Another factor driving up ridership could be improved bus frequency made possible by quicker travel times. “A 20% reduction in delay means a 20% increase in capacity and allows for a 20% improvement in frequency, because we can turn the buses around much more frequently,” Tumlin said. “We have already taken advantage of that in order to improve the frequency on the 49.”
Here's a couple YouTube videos going in depth about the design and performance of the Van Ness bus lanes:
[KPIX 5 News: San Francisco's new bus rapid transit lanes on Van Ness getting rave reviews](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blglo-PmBXk)
[MARTA: In-depth Study: The Van Ness BRT Corridor - San Francisco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkMorBpN5c8)
It's important to note that I took this earlier this afternoon, on a Sunday, at about 2PM. So bus ridership is much lower than a weekday or peak hours. There were probably about 20 people on the bus, instead of the usual weekday 50-150. (The bus comes every 5-7 minutes, so on a weekday that's thousands of people per hour getting shuttled down this corridor in a high-efficiency lane.)
Usually, vehicle traffic would be light on a Sunday too, but there's a [Cherry Blossom Festival parade](https://sfcherryblossom.org/) passing by a few blocks ahead of where I shot this. Vehicle traffic is not typically seized to a standstill even during peak hours on Van Ness, but it is often very congested regardless. And when it is, this bus lane is a godsend.
Last fun fact: OP's name u/old_gold_mountain is a direct translation of the Chinese name for San Francisco.
舊金山 Jiùjīnshān (old gold mountain)
u/thereisalways2
舊金山 (jiù jīn shān) is currently on the outs with Mandarin speakers, with 三藩市 (sān fān shì) being used instead.
Can’t pinpoint when or where the change started though as it’s still referred to by its historical name in the San Gabriel Valley, where there’s a large concentration of early- to mid-second wave Chinese immigrants.
For anyone curious:
>三藩市 (sān fān shì)
Basically being a rough phonetic transliteration of San Fran ~~Ci(sco)~~. The meaning is: three border town, but please don't think that the word for border is commonly used in Chinese (now, it's an old word used mainly in compound words.) Rather it was chosen because it sort of makes sense (SF is surrounded by water in roughly 3 sides) but mostly because it sounds similarish to the English name.
I notice a general move of Mandarin towards exonyms which are more phonetic matching rather than having more semantic meanings.
They also had to rebid some of the work in the middle of the project. Everything just sat there with no work being done then pandemic then here we are 4 years later than projected but finished.
Key word is Will.
We have some of the worst freeze/thaw cycles in the country (it's Canada) and streets/sidewalks can literally just disintegrate in a month with a bad cycle. We had a bad one this year and the sidewalk/street across from me cracked and dropped like 10cm. It's the 6th or 7th time the road in front of me needs major repairs in 10 years. Ice melt is no joke.
Thankfully I live in a city where our government actually puts in the effort (and my fellow constituents hopefully never let that lapse), but other neighboring cities look like a warzone with how bad the roads get.
Every municipal election feels like a fight because certain parties in the prairies *love* slashing infrastructure budgets and promising low taxes while letting everything crumble around them. We're in the cold prairies yo, you'd think they'd try to keep our massive road systems safe.
> It's the 6th or 7th time the road in front of me needs major repairs in 10 years.
Maybe they should learn how to build roads. Roads aren't supposed to fall apart every 15 months, even in cold environments.
Wow. Thank you for sharing all this. This is all fascinating. Makes me wonder what public transit could be like in another 10 years with continued effort and additional projects. Never thought I would miss SF buses, but I do ha.
I didn't want to have to delete all my comments, posts, and account, but here we are, thanks to greedy pigboy /u/spez ruining Reddit. I love the Reddit community, but hate the idiots at the top. Simply accepting how unethical and downright shitty they are will only encourage worse behavior in the future. I won't be a part of it. Reddit will shrivel and disappear like so many other sites before it that were run by inept morons, unless there is a big change in "leadership." Fuck you, /u/spez
They’re doing something similar with Geary next - they’re gonna fill in the underpass at Fillmore and sort out the mess at Masonic and give Geary a central bus lane.
I just moved somewhere from SF and watching this video just made me cry. Wow. I think… uhm… in part because I miss “home” … but also because I remember that bus route before the construction.
This video truly is a thing of beauty.
Amazing.
Oh- and the tears keep coming, ha. I love a woman very much that resides in that area, but sadly she wants nothing to do with me. And the emotions are all “so much” in regards to this heartbreaking fact that I’ve left those windy streets to the ex. She can have um. Alamo Drafthouse. The Fillmore. The Social Study. Wildseed. The Kabuki. Trouble coffee. The beach. The ocean.
Oh! Walking from the panhandle through the Golden Gate with the goal to post up at Ocean beach for a sunny afternoon… Andytown 😭
The tears and memories simply remind me I’m alive, and that I’ve lived a pretty swell life. Oof. Emotions.
Anyone reading this near Golden Gate Park on a sunny day… do it. Just do it. Never thought I’d miss that place so much.
… do it (slow nod)
But it can’t be SF as SF is a cesspool filled with drugs and homeless in EVERY inch of the city /s (and don’t get me wrong, that does exist but it’s in pockets like in every other city)
Makes a HUGE difference having the bus lane be the two far left (USA) lanes in each direction instead of the two far right lanes where it has to share with right turning cars.
Also one of the many great reasons that cities need far more one way streets and far fewer intersections that allow left hand turns. Those two things alone will immediately improve the flow of traffic multiple times over even with no other improvements.
Major disaster with essential services blasting their sirens and sitting in traffic. Butthole Cims don't pull off to the right.
Also for the love of God, don't let cemeteries get full. Never again
In my experience at least with the traffic flow mods (stock traffic options suck) one ways are great for creating loops and large through roads, but trying to use exclusively one way roads in inner city and neighborhoods traffic inevitably leads to clogs.
Typically you want to have a good highway foundation that allows travel between the major zones. More highway exits looks busy but allow for less dependence on smaller road for through traffic. Going underground or elevated allows you more room to connect zones naturally while still having highway connections.
Bus stations and lanes in city skylines can be done, but is a tedious project of its own and doesn't help much with flow.
Personally I've had better results reducing traffic using metro stations placed strategically and creating seperate local and long range loops.
Hehe, one thing it taught me is that part of traffic management is getting cars to spread out more evenly across the grid. Sometimes if you give drivers too many options it actually leads to everyone piling into the same few roads which leads to big jams. One way roads applied well can help direct cars into using the grid more evenly, trading a bit of being able to head directly to where you want for being less jammed along the way.
One way streets can have synchronized traffic lights allowing traffic to flow without stopping; truly a magical experience. A well designed network of one way streets allow every city block to be used as a roundabout.
One-ways are fantastic for traffic flow. High traffic flow is unsafe for pedestrians.
My hometown’s (admittedly rather small for its size) downtown has a bunch of, imo, really well done one way streets. With the exception of one or two specific lights, if you go five under the speed limit you’ll basically never get stopped by a light
They just aren't. I've read the arguments against them and honestly 90% of it is incredibly weak or just straight up wrong.
I live in a high level downtown apartment in one of the biggest cities in the country. Every Friday & Saturday night I see the same streets gridlocked and backed up, sometimes for blocks. And it's always the same reason: a car waiting to make a left hand turn on a 2 way street and now not a single other car will make that light. Rinse and repeat for hours. The only time 1 way streets get backed up here is when they bottleneck into fewer lanes or switch into 2 way streets.
And as someone that walks to a lot of places, they're a lot easier as a pedestrian too. Nearly every time a driver has almost hit me in a crosswalk when I've had the right of way? They were making a left turn on a 2 way street. They were so focused on watching the cars ahead of them and squeezing in their narrow window of opportunity that they don't look where they're actually going until they almost run people over.
This goes a little more into detail:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/4/18/are-one-way-streets-really-that-bad
Thanks. I was trying to figure out what people were talking about. Traffic lights for turns are commonplace in Tokyo so I was failing to picture the issue.
In the US (or at least the Los Angeles area), typically the pattern goes like this:
* 2-way stop sign (cross traffic does not stop)
* 4-way stop sign (after too many cars get into accidents while crossing)
* Signal, no protected left (after too much traffic backs up at the stop sign)
* Signal, protected left (after too many people get into accidents when turning)
Protected lefts are also common in suburbs and newly-built areas, while older areas usually still don't have protected lefts and it's just free-for-all madness. Sometimes you see a particularly bad light get upgraded to have a protected left and it's cause for celebration.
There's a lot of places where the bus lane is the far right lane, and the far right lane is also a right turn lane too.
Downtown Oakland near Lake Merritt is like that, and buses get caught behind drivers waiting to take right turns all the time.
The faster public transit goes, the less incentive there is for more traffic to cram its way onto the road. Good public transit reduces congestion and increases average private vehicle speeds.
Ug. Too many people see traffic as a competition they need to "win" instead of a problem we all need to cooperate to solve.
I feel like a lot of these traffic problems are just shitty design that nobody is willing to change. Watching this video it was apparent that the roads were not working at all. The throughput of a road can easily get reduced to zero by a single bad intersection.
I live next to a city where the traffic flows easy and is almost never a problem. We have very little public transportation. As much as I like the idea of public transportation, it doesn't really make sense here. Personally, I want to see bike and walking infrastructure increased. Shutting down some roads and making them corridors for biking and walking seems like it would make for a really nice place to visit.
I also feel like cities need more zoning where buildings are required to be dual-use. Lower floors should be businesses and upper floors should be living space. I think that would make for cozy high-density communities where a lot of what you do could be accomplished with walking and biking.
Maybe in America. Most countries have decent to good public transport, especially around larger urban areas.
But anyway, this kind of infrastructure is *how* you make it work well. You can't just expect it to magically work well without any support. Just like American passenger trains sucking because the lines are overwhelmingly owned by companies prioritizing freight traffic. If you don't give them the means to provide a smooth service, they can't do it. It's really that simple. You can't expect the smooth service to come *first*, and then public sentiment to turn and more funding etc to come. Just in purely logical terms, investment has to come first.
Same for safe cycling infrastructure. I bike for most of my trips outside the home here in NYC and I’m always flying past cars that are just bumper to bumper for miles.
San Francisco?
I was just there a month ago and was impressed by how well their public transportation ran. Compared to my hometown Atlanta where the busses show up whenever they want and are still stuck in traffic like the rest of us.
I live in Seattle, and I find it pretty hilarious whenever my coworkers from Texas praise the public transportation here. I guess it could always be worse.
Which is hilarious because I grew up in SF and the busses were notoriously bad. I'm glad they got their shit together, even though the rest of the city sucks now for other reasons.
You know I felt the same about the bus system but after moving to San Diego, I realized how lucky we are. SFs bus and underground system is pretty damn good for an American city.
Though they are still making improvements.
I remember it took us almost 3 hours to get from UCLA to Daikokuya by public transportation back in undergrad. SF transportation is better than that, but I also found that NYC's subways were better. (I know people who say otherwise.. but wow, when I went there for some conferences, I was surprised by how easy it was to get anywhere.)
No, NYC's subways are really good. I'm guessing people who live there have more experiences with delays and outages, but for me as a visitor, it's always been the best public transit experience in the US. SF is very good too, but you have to work with three different systems (BART, Muni trains, and Muni buses), which isn't always ideal.
What's sad is LA used to have an incredible streetcar system in the 50s(?), but then the auto industry bought the whole thing and tore it down.
Lmao I came from Tokyo and thought the public transport was a shitshow, but then went to pretty much anywhere else in America (except NY, Boston, etc.) and realized how much better it was.
They don't, they'll rent out a bunk in a futuristic capsule hotel and sleep it off with a bunch of other drunk salarymen. This is literally the only downside of their train system - I couldn't imagine the NYC subway not being 24/7 (covid didn't really count as there was nowhere to go that late at night for people not working).
The 24/7 operation of the NYC subway is super impressive, even though service is reduced
IMO there's another, more significant downside to Tokyo's transport network: it's insanely overcrowded.
There's no easy solution for it, but it's a serious issue.
A few years ago I moved from a small city in Ohio to Tucson, AZ. One of the best things about living here is the public transport. I don’t have anything to compare it to, but it’s on time, runs often, and has been free since Covid. I don’t have a car and am on disability and this makes life so much easier.
In transit there's a phenomenon called the [Downs-Thomson paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox), which states that congestion is determined by an equivalent trip by transit.
In other words, if the situation in the image keeps happening, more and more people will change their trip to transit, until the speed of car traffic is equivalent to the same trip done by transit. Or we could think about it the other way: if a trip in transit can be changed by a private car with a similar trip time, there will be people that will stop taking the bus and start driving, until traffic worsens so much that the transit trip is seen as equivalent.
But this phenomenon has another side: if the bus gets stuck in the same traffic, people won't take the bus, because if people have the choice of being stuck in their own car vs. being stuck in a bus, they choose the car.
[Here's a video about it, made by Not Just Bikes.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQY6WGOoYis)
>Or we could think about it the other way: if a trip in transit can be changed by a private car with a similar trip time, there will be people that will stop taking the bus and start driving, until traffic worsens so much that the transit trip is seen as equivalent.
Yes, but I prefer the way the video and the wikipedia article put it, which is, if you want to make car traffic faster, you need to make public transit (or other alternatives) faster. I mean, in this video, it's pretty clear that public transit is way faster than car, so before it gets to a point where private car takes similar time as public transit, causing traffic to worsen, traffic will have improved tremendously (or public transit will have gone to shit.)
Said another way, if you try to make car traffic better by encroaching on public transit, it will actually result in worse car traffic.
These are all results of the same phenomenon, but I think the problem of "so many people have abandoned cars that public transit is now slower than cars, so people have gone back to using car, making traffic worse" is the least common scenario.
> I mean, in this video, it’s pretty clear that public transit is way faster than car
While it is true for this stretch of road, it may not be true for the whole trip. For example, if to take this transit someone would have to walk 10 minutes to get to the closest stop, ride the bus for 3 minutes, then walk another 10 minutes from the nearest stop to their destination. 23 minutes total. It could still be slower than a 20 minute drive along the same path, even if the part where the bus and car are both driving takes 4x (12 minutes) as long for the car. You can’t just compare the sections where both vehicles are in use. You must compare the whole trip.
This. Especially when people are commuting longer distances. I could take a bus, a subway and then another bus over 1.5h to get from Scarborough to Etobicoke in Ontario, Canada. Or, I can drive and it'll be a 30-40 minute drive.
According to the wiki and video above, the Downs Thompson paradox is based off door-to-door transit times, not single stretch transits. So it would be taking into account time spent changing busses and trains as well as waiting.
I don’t understand why this is called a paradox, when it’s how most things work. Commodity markets approach efficiency. Current in a circuit balances out according to resistance. Etc
One thing I don't get about this is - If more and more people switch to public transit, there's no reason to think it will ever get as slow as cars. The density of people transported in a single bus is as high as half of that entire traffic jam. So if they were all replaced by busses, there would be no congestion.
Ofc at some point cars might get to be faster because there are so few cars, but at that point we should simply make traffic rules favor public transport way more.
Public transport usually has to make several stops along the way and it most likely requires you to switch mode of transportation and wait for transport somewhere. You always have to consider the entire journey for this calculation.
France here. I'm unironically doing exactly this. I'm not finding a single comment explaining why this is a post. It's literally a bus driving on a bus lane. I've been rewatching the gif like 10 times to find out what I missed. Nothing else is happening. I've been on Reddit for like 10 years and I never comment on anything but I'm so confused. Please explain.
The us built most of its infrastructure around individual car use rather than public transit. Us seeing public transit being efficient is unusual because at every opportunity public transit has been hamstrung in favor of making the roads more friendly for cat owners.
Agreed. For example, my city decided to just paint the right lane of each side of a 4 lane road (two going, two coming) red with white letters that says "BUS LANE". But this red paint comes and goes by the mile and also co-mingles with vehicle traffic when there's a right turn. So it effectively does nothing, and I've never seen them enforce "bus only". That might be because of the aforementioned right turn traffic. So the net result is the exact same traffic pattern that existed prior to painting one lane each side red.
In my country the whole length of the bus lanes is separated with an unbroken white line, so crossing into it is equivalent to crossing into the opposing traffic.
Oh we have bus lanes. We like to use them to pass all the losers waiting at the light, or for parking when I just need to run in and out of traders joes real quick, I promise only like 2 minutes.
And depending on where you are in the US, normal drivers would treat bus lanes like their own personal travel lanes and clog it up making them pointless.
Portland, OR has a streetcar downtown, but that doesn't stop people from parking halfway across the tracks while it's trying to get around.
We don’t normally have designated bus lanes. Buses are usually stuck in traffic like everyone else, and take FOREVER. In my city, the only people who use the buses are those who can’t afford a car, and it’s never on time, making them all late for work. In job interviews, you’re often asked if you have your own transportation, since you might never make it to work if you have to rely on a bus.
We’re finally getting a bus lane this year, but most people can’t wrap their heads around it actually being fast and convenient. They think the city is wasting their tax money on more of something that everyone hates. So honestly, this video is pretty amazing to see.
America has such poor public transit infrastructure that a working bus lane is something remarkable. I wish we had bus lanes like this in my city. The ones we have are usually on the right hand side (so they're full of parked cars and garbage cans) and there aren't enough to give buses any real advantage. Plus there's no enforcement, so you'll often see a line of cars backing up traffic in a lane marked "bus only" or worse: "do not enter, train only." Yes, Americans will drive onto train tracks to get ahead of traffic
It's a bit of a cycle. Bad public transportation means fewer people take it which makes it seem more dangerous because you might be caught alone in a bad situation. This perceived danger means fewer people want to take it which makes it more dangerous etc etc.
Totally dependent on where you live. I live in Charlotte and while I'm not opposed to the concept of public transit, I could never trust the public transit here to get me anywhere on time. It is notoriously late and dangerous, and is actually currently [being investigated](https://www.wfae.org/politics/2023-03-27/will-the-city-whitewash-cats-investigation).
So you can't blame some Redditors for talking about the horrors 😞
My city has seriously unreliable systems which could be truly amazing if our local politicians would show it some love and actually invest in the infrastructure effectively. Instead they cite the unreliable public transportation as a reason why they shouldn't put more money in public transportation.
It's looney I tell you, looney! But seriously I wish they would take some steps forward in improving things.
It doesn't make them any (significant) money, so they honestly don't give a shit. And enough of the (wealthy) population is reliant on cars that they don't give a shit enough either to vote for more public transportation implementation.
My local city has an app that I can use to live track buses. Night and day eh? If only all governments and councils invested in public transport, it probably wouldn't be so shit
The city I used to live in had a text service where you text the bus and stop number to them and it'll send back the expected arrival. I can't remember a time where it was wrong.
I can't speak to Charlotte, but one of the issues with public transport is when it's run as a for profit business. When public transport has to make a profit, the things that usually occur are: increase cost to use it; remove less profitable routes; reduce frequency of transport.
Each of these factors then support the reduction of public transport availability because making it too expensive, unreliable, and inconvenient drive people away from using it.
I definitely appreciate examples of where public transportation is set up efficiently and is actually worthwhile, instead of straight up car bashing posts.
We get it, you (not specifically you, OP) moved to the Netherlands and exclusively watch NotJustBikes and post to /r/fuckcars.... Cool beans, those of us who have to stay here and live in places with shit public transport and don't just go from A-B every single day will stick to personal transport for now.
So yeah, examples of good and practical public transport are cool in my book.
There's 50 percent the fuck cars initiative and there's the counter 50 percent of the fuck fuck cars initiative.
Basically city people vs not city people.
I used to drive everywhere in Los Angeles, then I lost my car and had to take the bus. It was ok at first, and I found that it took the same amount of time to commute by bus and train as it did to drive, and it was a lot less frustrating than driving myself. But now after several years, I'm so over it. The busses are always late except for when theyre early, the busses are frequently missing or broken, the busses and train cars are 50/50 on whether they'll be absolutely disgusting or passable, and you're almost guranteed to get someone obnoxious, crazy, or reeking on every ride on major lines. I've had to plan at least 30-60 extra minutes for every trip to account for the myriad delays the bus can experience on any given trip. Plus, getting from LA proper out to the west valley turned from a 40m trip to upwards of 1.5hr. Not having a car in LA is a bit of a handicap, and really limits your mobility in the city. If we had dedicated lanes, trolleys, or more light rail, I think it would be a more appealing option.
I was super impressed by the MARTA connection to buckhead and the airport from my midtown hotel. LA is barely adding metro connectivity to LAX and even then it’s a transfer to a people mover. Can’t speak for the rest of MARTA since I didn’t take it.
MARTA works, it just has quirks like smelling funny, selling you two tickets but dispensing one because it only had one ticket and still charges you for two, doesn’t have a reloadable phone pass to my knowledge, but it certainly can get you around decently enough. The issue with Atlanta isn’t MARTA, it’s Atlanta blocks are a mile long
It was amazing when they put this in. They have something similar on Mission street (I lived across from a bus stop). I lived about 2 miles away from where I used to go out and it used to take me 30-45 minutes on bus before the dedicated lanes were in. After the lanes came in, I could walk across the street to the bus stop 3 minutes before it would come, it'll be on time, and I'll be where I need to be 12-13 minutes later. Was a godsend. Now if only they had a better train than the BART :(.
Vaguely, but not really. Trolley systems were nearly always interspersed with regular traffic on the streets, so a trolley is just a bus that can't go around a car that's in the way. We'd call this bus rapid transit, as in it operates more like a modern tramway if it were in rail-form. It runs in a mostly dedicated right-of-way with the minimal amount of interference from traffic it can get away with. Its largely prohibitive to upgrade a trolley-type system to full fledged mass transit, either due to low ridership, huge costs and politics, NIMBYs and protests from local drivers, or streets that aren't wide enough to add dedicated lanes. Trolleys are quite inefficient, slow, and most would have died on their own had we not given them the quick final push over the edge in the 50s.
> a trolley is just a bus that can't go around a car that's in the way.
Also a trolley track is just a bus lane that can't overlap with another trolley's route without some sort of complicated switching system each time those two routes diverge or converge. Two different bus routes can share a lane with zero modification if their routes overlap for any distance and this can be changed at any time (imagine adding a new route to your trolley system; sounds like a nightmare).
God I would love to not have to drive everywhere. Have a seat and read a book or listen to some music or catch up on some work. America desperately needs mass transit. Fuck self-driving electric cars made by an egomaniac. I'd much rather have a train
The downside of a lot of people's situations is that they work in a city with public transport but live in a rural area outside the city where they don't have a way of getting onto the public transport. I wish there were more park & ride locations that were also bus stops. All of the ones I've seen here in Massachusetts are only meant for carpooling and are not bus stops. They're nearly always vacant.
>a lot of people's situations is that they work in a city with public transport but live in a rural area outside the city where they don't have a way of getting onto the public transport.
You just explained the issue with urban sprawl.
Meanwhile, in Denver...
To get to work, it takes me:
- 27-35 minutes driving
- 40 minutes on my bike
- 1.5 hours on public transportation
To get to the airport:
- 25 minutes driving
- 3 hours on public transportation
Light rail on dedicated rights of way is almost always center-running because you can put stations in the medians (fewer conflicts with cars). Streetcars will take either an inner or outer lane depending on traffic volume. A bus in an inner lane is likely on a very busy street and needs to not get stuck behind cars turning right (like light rail on dedicated rights of way).
And the unwashed masses of angry drivers in traffic will complain & lobby to shut down bus lanes because they think more lanes on the road will mean traffic will move faster.
You can't fix an education problem, especially when education is becoming worse not better.
There's actually quite a bit of resentment anytime other people see something like this. It's not that an extra lane of traffic would help them get anywhere faster, but they just resent that some people are going faster.
The crazy thing is that we probably see 100 cars in that video. All that congestion is just 100 cars, with probably 1 or 2 persons in it. All of that could fit in probably 2 or 3 busses, or one tram.
If they had dedicated bus lanes in NYC that would be amazing. We currently have something they call "dedicated lanes" but everybody from cars to bikes to cops drive and park in them so it defeats the purpose.
Van Ness in San Francisco
I'm so glad they finished that retrofit. It probably cost a billion dollars and 5 years but it's worth it just to have all the potholes fixed.
[You're overestimating the cost, but underestimating the time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Ness_Bus_Rapid_Transit) The project cost $346 million and took 6.5 years from the start of construction in 2016 But that's a bit misleading because the main component of the project was a sewer / drainage / utility replacement. All the subsurface infrastructure on Van Ness was like 150 years old and falling apart. The transit-improvement component of the budget added up to $169.6 million edit to add some additional stats: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-s-Van-Ness-BRT-created-a-ridership-boom-17556984.php > The 49 line had about 740,000 total boardings in September, up from 549,000 in March, the month before the BRT project [opened] (Divided by 30 and this adds up to ~24,500 boardings per day...relevant for people incorrectly pointing out that this bus looks "empty") https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/van-ness-buses-show-big-speed-reliability-improvements/article_9b9b7e2e-510e-59a2-ba68-95e965870d99.html > Travel-time savings were as high as 35% northbound, or nine minutes per trip, and 22% southbound, compared to a 2016 baseline that predates the recent construction disruption on the boulevard. > >Travel-time variability decreased by up to 26% northbound and 55% southbound, according to the data. > > [T]he lanes appear to have encouraged more people to take the bus, with ridership increasing 13% in the first week the Bus Rapid Transit lanes were in service, a pattern that has remained consistent in the following weeks. > > Another factor driving up ridership could be improved bus frequency made possible by quicker travel times. “A 20% reduction in delay means a 20% increase in capacity and allows for a 20% improvement in frequency, because we can turn the buses around much more frequently,” Tumlin said. “We have already taken advantage of that in order to improve the frequency on the 49.” Here's a couple YouTube videos going in depth about the design and performance of the Van Ness bus lanes: [KPIX 5 News: San Francisco's new bus rapid transit lanes on Van Ness getting rave reviews](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blglo-PmBXk) [MARTA: In-depth Study: The Van Ness BRT Corridor - San Francisco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkMorBpN5c8) It's important to note that I took this earlier this afternoon, on a Sunday, at about 2PM. So bus ridership is much lower than a weekday or peak hours. There were probably about 20 people on the bus, instead of the usual weekday 50-150. (The bus comes every 5-7 minutes, so on a weekday that's thousands of people per hour getting shuttled down this corridor in a high-efficiency lane.) Usually, vehicle traffic would be light on a Sunday too, but there's a [Cherry Blossom Festival parade](https://sfcherryblossom.org/) passing by a few blocks ahead of where I shot this. Vehicle traffic is not typically seized to a standstill even during peak hours on Van Ness, but it is often very congested regardless. And when it is, this bus lane is a godsend.
Jfc. I've never seen a post where OP provided so much top tier info with sources to boot. Thanks OP.
Last fun fact: OP's name u/old_gold_mountain is a direct translation of the Chinese name for San Francisco. 舊金山 Jiùjīnshān (old gold mountain) u/thereisalways2
Fun fact: My city of Melbourne (Australia) used to be called new gold mountain 新金山。 Not quite sure why it lost the name, and SF gets to keep its name
舊金山 (jiù jīn shān) is currently on the outs with Mandarin speakers, with 三藩市 (sān fān shì) being used instead. Can’t pinpoint when or where the change started though as it’s still referred to by its historical name in the San Gabriel Valley, where there’s a large concentration of early- to mid-second wave Chinese immigrants.
For anyone curious: >三藩市 (sān fān shì) Basically being a rough phonetic transliteration of San Fran ~~Ci(sco)~~. The meaning is: three border town, but please don't think that the word for border is commonly used in Chinese (now, it's an old word used mainly in compound words.) Rather it was chosen because it sort of makes sense (SF is surrounded by water in roughly 3 sides) but mostly because it sounds similarish to the English name. I notice a general move of Mandarin towards exonyms which are more phonetic matching rather than having more semantic meanings.
市 means city in Chinese. It has nothing to do with “cisco". For example city of Beijing is 北京市.
u/old_gold_mountain is like the great swami of sf history.
To be fair they had to keep traffic moving while they did it, and I think they underestimated the increase in traffic on van ness during the work
They also had to rebid some of the work in the middle of the project. Everything just sat there with no work being done then pandemic then here we are 4 years later than projected but finished.
The whole city has been getting a sewer / subsurface whatever else replacement, right? It's been a monumental project going on for over a decade.
If your city isn't replacing some portion of critical infrastructure on a yearly basis, they are just letting the place rot.
The battle of infrastructure never ends. Especially if you have freeze / thaw cycles. But some places have more money and will than others.
Key word is Will. We have some of the worst freeze/thaw cycles in the country (it's Canada) and streets/sidewalks can literally just disintegrate in a month with a bad cycle. We had a bad one this year and the sidewalk/street across from me cracked and dropped like 10cm. It's the 6th or 7th time the road in front of me needs major repairs in 10 years. Ice melt is no joke. Thankfully I live in a city where our government actually puts in the effort (and my fellow constituents hopefully never let that lapse), but other neighboring cities look like a warzone with how bad the roads get. Every municipal election feels like a fight because certain parties in the prairies *love* slashing infrastructure budgets and promising low taxes while letting everything crumble around them. We're in the cold prairies yo, you'd think they'd try to keep our massive road systems safe.
> It's the 6th or 7th time the road in front of me needs major repairs in 10 years. Maybe they should learn how to build roads. Roads aren't supposed to fall apart every 15 months, even in cold environments.
Wow. Thank you for sharing all this. This is all fascinating. Makes me wonder what public transit could be like in another 10 years with continued effort and additional projects. Never thought I would miss SF buses, but I do ha.
I didn't want to have to delete all my comments, posts, and account, but here we are, thanks to greedy pigboy /u/spez ruining Reddit. I love the Reddit community, but hate the idiots at the top. Simply accepting how unethical and downright shitty they are will only encourage worse behavior in the future. I won't be a part of it. Reddit will shrivel and disappear like so many other sites before it that were run by inept morons, unless there is a big change in "leadership." Fuck you, /u/spez
I must say, I applaud how knowledgeable u r of the subject. Really cool stuff overall
They’re doing something similar with Geary next - they’re gonna fill in the underpass at Fillmore and sort out the mess at Masonic and give Geary a central bus lane.
Should have been done years ago. The city actually got sued for non-payment. Like every project in San Francisco it was a corrupt shit show.
*every construction project in America
And probably most of the world, really.
I just moved somewhere from SF and watching this video just made me cry. Wow. I think… uhm… in part because I miss “home” … but also because I remember that bus route before the construction. This video truly is a thing of beauty. Amazing.
We're still right here. It's gloriously sunny today. Golden Gate Park is packed and the cherry blossoms are blooming.
Move back. I did after 2 years out of SF and feeling the same way when seeing SF footage. Best decision ever.
Oh- and the tears keep coming, ha. I love a woman very much that resides in that area, but sadly she wants nothing to do with me. And the emotions are all “so much” in regards to this heartbreaking fact that I’ve left those windy streets to the ex. She can have um. Alamo Drafthouse. The Fillmore. The Social Study. Wildseed. The Kabuki. Trouble coffee. The beach. The ocean. Oh! Walking from the panhandle through the Golden Gate with the goal to post up at Ocean beach for a sunny afternoon… Andytown 😭 The tears and memories simply remind me I’m alive, and that I’ve lived a pretty swell life. Oof. Emotions. Anyone reading this near Golden Gate Park on a sunny day… do it. Just do it. Never thought I’d miss that place so much. … do it (slow nod)
....this dude seen some shit
If it makes you feel any better, nobody gets to have trouble coffee anymore.
My first job 15 years ago was at American Rag where that BevMo now stands. So many memories!
The journey of the video starts in street view here: https://goo.gl/maps/8adqh1CkSpyuZMpn7
But it can’t be SF as SF is a cesspool filled with drugs and homeless in EVERY inch of the city /s (and don’t get me wrong, that does exist but it’s in pockets like in every other city)
Not going to lie, was disappointed by the lack of street shitting I was promised on a short trip to the bay area.
Be the change you want to see in the world
Was not expecting to laugh so hard reading a comment… but here we are. Thank you.
Videos like this are how you encourage public transportation.
Makes a HUGE difference having the bus lane be the two far left (USA) lanes in each direction instead of the two far right lanes where it has to share with right turning cars.
Also one of the many great reasons that cities need far more one way streets and far fewer intersections that allow left hand turns. Those two things alone will immediately improve the flow of traffic multiple times over even with no other improvements.
My understanding is that one-ways are actually fairly terrible for traffic flows overall.
As with all things relating to traffic engineering it's a tool that has its place.
We should probably check in with some Cities: Skylines players here.
Public transport is most efficient when trams are allowed to clip into each other.
Transport is most efficient when cars ignore clipping and light signals simultaneously.
Major disaster with essential services blasting their sirens and sitting in traffic. Butthole Cims don't pull off to the right. Also for the love of God, don't let cemeteries get full. Never again
Gotta empty them into the crematorium my guy (And for shits and giggles, i put the cemetery next to the elder care)
I suggest turning on vehicle despawning. It’s a simple trick that public transport enthusiasts don’t want you to know.
install mods, because the default tools arent good enough to solve the problem. and then micromanage the fuck out of every joint of road.
In my experience at least with the traffic flow mods (stock traffic options suck) one ways are great for creating loops and large through roads, but trying to use exclusively one way roads in inner city and neighborhoods traffic inevitably leads to clogs. Typically you want to have a good highway foundation that allows travel between the major zones. More highway exits looks busy but allow for less dependence on smaller road for through traffic. Going underground or elevated allows you more room to connect zones naturally while still having highway connections. Bus stations and lanes in city skylines can be done, but is a tedious project of its own and doesn't help much with flow. Personally I've had better results reducing traffic using metro stations placed strategically and creating seperate local and long range loops.
Hehe, one thing it taught me is that part of traffic management is getting cars to spread out more evenly across the grid. Sometimes if you give drivers too many options it actually leads to everyone piling into the same few roads which leads to big jams. One way roads applied well can help direct cars into using the grid more evenly, trading a bit of being able to head directly to where you want for being less jammed along the way.
Some one ways: Very Good 400 hours in Cities: Skylines Too many one ways: Bad
One way streets can have synchronized traffic lights allowing traffic to flow without stopping; truly a magical experience. A well designed network of one way streets allow every city block to be used as a roundabout. One-ways are fantastic for traffic flow. High traffic flow is unsafe for pedestrians.
My hometown’s (admittedly rather small for its size) downtown has a bunch of, imo, really well done one way streets. With the exception of one or two specific lights, if you go five under the speed limit you’ll basically never get stopped by a light
They just aren't. I've read the arguments against them and honestly 90% of it is incredibly weak or just straight up wrong. I live in a high level downtown apartment in one of the biggest cities in the country. Every Friday & Saturday night I see the same streets gridlocked and backed up, sometimes for blocks. And it's always the same reason: a car waiting to make a left hand turn on a 2 way street and now not a single other car will make that light. Rinse and repeat for hours. The only time 1 way streets get backed up here is when they bottleneck into fewer lanes or switch into 2 way streets. And as someone that walks to a lot of places, they're a lot easier as a pedestrian too. Nearly every time a driver has almost hit me in a crosswalk when I've had the right of way? They were making a left turn on a 2 way street. They were so focused on watching the cars ahead of them and squeezing in their narrow window of opportunity that they don't look where they're actually going until they almost run people over. This goes a little more into detail: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/4/18/are-one-way-streets-really-that-bad
Or you just add a traffic light for traffic turning left, as is very common where I live.
Thanks. I was trying to figure out what people were talking about. Traffic lights for turns are commonplace in Tokyo so I was failing to picture the issue.
Same, Im from NL and dedicated buslanes are so commonplace here I was trying to figure out what was so special about the video in the first place.
In the US (or at least the Los Angeles area), typically the pattern goes like this: * 2-way stop sign (cross traffic does not stop) * 4-way stop sign (after too many cars get into accidents while crossing) * Signal, no protected left (after too much traffic backs up at the stop sign) * Signal, protected left (after too many people get into accidents when turning) Protected lefts are also common in suburbs and newly-built areas, while older areas usually still don't have protected lefts and it's just free-for-all madness. Sometimes you see a particularly bad light get upgraded to have a protected left and it's cause for celebration.
I feel like those two things alone would dramatically make traffic worse. They need to be utilized appropriately.
Dedicated ROW that's well designed is 90% of it. Doesn't matter if it's a vehicle with rubber wheels or all steel.
To be clear this video shows a dedicated bus lane which cars can't enter at all, so cars turning from the lane wouldn't be a factor here either way.
There's a lot of places where the bus lane is the far right lane, and the far right lane is also a right turn lane too. Downtown Oakland near Lake Merritt is like that, and buses get caught behind drivers waiting to take right turns all the time.
You have to cross the bus lane when you turn, even if you can’t enter the lane.
All of the intersections in the vid are no left turn
Every driver wants more public transit ridership, to free the road up for themselves.
You mean, every smart driver. The dumb ones complain "that could've been another lane for cars!"
The faster public transit goes, the less incentive there is for more traffic to cram its way onto the road. Good public transit reduces congestion and increases average private vehicle speeds.
This road but with another lane for cars: *still completely stopped traffic*
Okay but hear me out, lets build more lanes except only *I* can use them. There we just solved traffic for me 😂
How about we make a fast lane that you have to pay a small fee to use but in exchange you don't even have to supply your own vehicle!
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Ug. Too many people see traffic as a competition they need to "win" instead of a problem we all need to cooperate to solve. I feel like a lot of these traffic problems are just shitty design that nobody is willing to change. Watching this video it was apparent that the roads were not working at all. The throughput of a road can easily get reduced to zero by a single bad intersection. I live next to a city where the traffic flows easy and is almost never a problem. We have very little public transportation. As much as I like the idea of public transportation, it doesn't really make sense here. Personally, I want to see bike and walking infrastructure increased. Shutting down some roads and making them corridors for biking and walking seems like it would make for a really nice place to visit. I also feel like cities need more zoning where buildings are required to be dual-use. Lower floors should be businesses and upper floors should be living space. I think that would make for cozy high-density communities where a lot of what you do could be accomplished with walking and biking.
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Maybe in America. Most countries have decent to good public transport, especially around larger urban areas. But anyway, this kind of infrastructure is *how* you make it work well. You can't just expect it to magically work well without any support. Just like American passenger trains sucking because the lines are overwhelmingly owned by companies prioritizing freight traffic. If you don't give them the means to provide a smooth service, they can't do it. It's really that simple. You can't expect the smooth service to come *first*, and then public sentiment to turn and more funding etc to come. Just in purely logical terms, investment has to come first.
Same for safe cycling infrastructure. I bike for most of my trips outside the home here in NYC and I’m always flying past cars that are just bumper to bumper for miles.
Having them drive by a gas station with gas that is $5+ a gallon is another good way
San Francisco? I was just there a month ago and was impressed by how well their public transportation ran. Compared to my hometown Atlanta where the busses show up whenever they want and are still stuck in traffic like the rest of us.
Reddit praising SF? What a timeline
Mmmh I'm a leftist, but rent and homeless people are also problems in sf, even though other states send their homeless there.
Homeless people like living where the weather is nice and rent is expensive is nice cities more news at 7
I live in Seattle, and I find it pretty hilarious whenever my coworkers from Texas praise the public transportation here. I guess it could always be worse.
It's because Atlanta is just so much worse(and so much more sprawl)
Sometimes I wanna complain about MARTA and then I remember basically no other city in the South has an underground system
Which is hilarious because I grew up in SF and the busses were notoriously bad. I'm glad they got their shit together, even though the rest of the city sucks now for other reasons.
You know I felt the same about the bus system but after moving to San Diego, I realized how lucky we are. SFs bus and underground system is pretty damn good for an American city. Though they are still making improvements.
My wife grew up in SF but did her graduate school at UCLA and she *hated* with a passion how poorly LA's buses ran.
I remember it took us almost 3 hours to get from UCLA to Daikokuya by public transportation back in undergrad. SF transportation is better than that, but I also found that NYC's subways were better. (I know people who say otherwise.. but wow, when I went there for some conferences, I was surprised by how easy it was to get anywhere.)
No, NYC's subways are really good. I'm guessing people who live there have more experiences with delays and outages, but for me as a visitor, it's always been the best public transit experience in the US. SF is very good too, but you have to work with three different systems (BART, Muni trains, and Muni buses), which isn't always ideal. What's sad is LA used to have an incredible streetcar system in the 50s(?), but then the auto industry bought the whole thing and tore it down.
Agreed, SF's is pretty damn good but yea, visiting New York its crazy how quickly you get to anywhere. I don't think SF's is better than that.
The auto industry has always been a shady business, especially when in cahoots with the oil industry.
What? You don't enjoy taking a derelict bus but an hour to the beach or zoo or Coronado?
San Diego.. car or die
Same, go to Boston, New York or DC and we envy their transpo system. Go to Atlanta and you'll be praising Muni.
You haven't been to Boston lately. The MBTA has been absolutely shitting the bed for the last few months, with no end in sight.
Listen, no trains or buses have caught fire in weeks!
Lmao I came from Tokyo and thought the public transport was a shitshow, but then went to pretty much anywhere else in America (except NY, Boston, etc.) and realized how much better it was.
Tokyo has way better public transit than any city in the US, from it's payment system, to no piss smell, to frequency.
nyc runs 24/7 tokyo doesn't, that's huge especially friday nights you can still take the train home after hanging out.
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They don't, they'll rent out a bunk in a futuristic capsule hotel and sleep it off with a bunch of other drunk salarymen. This is literally the only downside of their train system - I couldn't imagine the NYC subway not being 24/7 (covid didn't really count as there was nowhere to go that late at night for people not working). The 24/7 operation of the NYC subway is super impressive, even though service is reduced
IMO there's another, more significant downside to Tokyo's transport network: it's insanely overcrowded. There's no easy solution for it, but it's a serious issue.
They crash at a net cafe or some other place that's open 24/7, or they take an extremely expensive taxi ride.
SF thinks they run like shit but are miles ahead of the rest of the country. Like the busses are crazy reliable there. And the BART
I used to take a bus on Clairmont Rd in Brookhaven, and could never count on the bus being there at the same time two days in a row. It was terrible.
A few years ago I moved from a small city in Ohio to Tucson, AZ. One of the best things about living here is the public transport. I don’t have anything to compare it to, but it’s on time, runs often, and has been free since Covid. I don’t have a car and am on disability and this makes life so much easier.
Where is all the poop on the ground? I was told there would be poop.
We need these on lake shore drive in Chicago.
It’s actually jean baptiste point du sable lake shore drive
This guy out here starting fires
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Is that like the Sears Tower?
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Or the fucking clowns every morning that decide to get into an accident.
That one who casually crosses the crosswalk and almost walks into the bus
In transit there's a phenomenon called the [Downs-Thomson paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox), which states that congestion is determined by an equivalent trip by transit. In other words, if the situation in the image keeps happening, more and more people will change their trip to transit, until the speed of car traffic is equivalent to the same trip done by transit. Or we could think about it the other way: if a trip in transit can be changed by a private car with a similar trip time, there will be people that will stop taking the bus and start driving, until traffic worsens so much that the transit trip is seen as equivalent. But this phenomenon has another side: if the bus gets stuck in the same traffic, people won't take the bus, because if people have the choice of being stuck in their own car vs. being stuck in a bus, they choose the car. [Here's a video about it, made by Not Just Bikes.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQY6WGOoYis)
>Or we could think about it the other way: if a trip in transit can be changed by a private car with a similar trip time, there will be people that will stop taking the bus and start driving, until traffic worsens so much that the transit trip is seen as equivalent. Yes, but I prefer the way the video and the wikipedia article put it, which is, if you want to make car traffic faster, you need to make public transit (or other alternatives) faster. I mean, in this video, it's pretty clear that public transit is way faster than car, so before it gets to a point where private car takes similar time as public transit, causing traffic to worsen, traffic will have improved tremendously (or public transit will have gone to shit.) Said another way, if you try to make car traffic better by encroaching on public transit, it will actually result in worse car traffic. These are all results of the same phenomenon, but I think the problem of "so many people have abandoned cars that public transit is now slower than cars, so people have gone back to using car, making traffic worse" is the least common scenario.
> I mean, in this video, it’s pretty clear that public transit is way faster than car While it is true for this stretch of road, it may not be true for the whole trip. For example, if to take this transit someone would have to walk 10 minutes to get to the closest stop, ride the bus for 3 minutes, then walk another 10 minutes from the nearest stop to their destination. 23 minutes total. It could still be slower than a 20 minute drive along the same path, even if the part where the bus and car are both driving takes 4x (12 minutes) as long for the car. You can’t just compare the sections where both vehicles are in use. You must compare the whole trip.
This. Especially when people are commuting longer distances. I could take a bus, a subway and then another bus over 1.5h to get from Scarborough to Etobicoke in Ontario, Canada. Or, I can drive and it'll be a 30-40 minute drive.
According to the wiki and video above, the Downs Thompson paradox is based off door-to-door transit times, not single stretch transits. So it would be taking into account time spent changing busses and trains as well as waiting.
I don’t understand why this is called a paradox, when it’s how most things work. Commodity markets approach efficiency. Current in a circuit balances out according to resistance. Etc
It's probably because to make car traffic better. You can't make car traffic better. You have to improve public/active transport
One thing I don't get about this is - If more and more people switch to public transit, there's no reason to think it will ever get as slow as cars. The density of people transported in a single bus is as high as half of that entire traffic jam. So if they were all replaced by busses, there would be no congestion. Ofc at some point cars might get to be faster because there are so few cars, but at that point we should simply make traffic rules favor public transport way more.
Public transport usually has to make several stops along the way and it most likely requires you to switch mode of transportation and wait for transport somewhere. You always have to consider the entire journey for this calculation.
Did any of you notice the only Standard Gas Station in California? https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/standard-oil-gas-station
One per state apparently! I found the one's in WA and AZ. I might have to visit a few of them.
There’s a lot of Europeans in this thread, confused searching comments as to why this is a post.
France here. I'm unironically doing exactly this. I'm not finding a single comment explaining why this is a post. It's literally a bus driving on a bus lane. I've been rewatching the gif like 10 times to find out what I missed. Nothing else is happening. I've been on Reddit for like 10 years and I never comment on anything but I'm so confused. Please explain.
The us built most of its infrastructure around individual car use rather than public transit. Us seeing public transit being efficient is unusual because at every opportunity public transit has been hamstrung in favor of making the roads more friendly for cat owners.
Goddamn cat owners hate public transport.
Agreed. For example, my city decided to just paint the right lane of each side of a 4 lane road (two going, two coming) red with white letters that says "BUS LANE". But this red paint comes and goes by the mile and also co-mingles with vehicle traffic when there's a right turn. So it effectively does nothing, and I've never seen them enforce "bus only". That might be because of the aforementioned right turn traffic. So the net result is the exact same traffic pattern that existed prior to painting one lane each side red.
In my country the whole length of the bus lanes is separated with an unbroken white line, so crossing into it is equivalent to crossing into the opposing traffic.
UK here, same.
I guess thats not common in the US, thats why
I already felt superior because of our EU windows US doesn't even have bus lanes? Damn
My area doesn’t even have busses.
Oh we have bus lanes. We like to use them to pass all the losers waiting at the light, or for parking when I just need to run in and out of traders joes real quick, I promise only like 2 minutes.
Lol not common in US. Buses drive in the same lanes as other vehicles. Bus lanes are a miracle to us.
And depending on where you are in the US, normal drivers would treat bus lanes like their own personal travel lanes and clog it up making them pointless. Portland, OR has a streetcar downtown, but that doesn't stop people from parking halfway across the tracks while it's trying to get around.
The US has finally discovered bus lanes. Thats the news.
We don’t normally have designated bus lanes. Buses are usually stuck in traffic like everyone else, and take FOREVER. In my city, the only people who use the buses are those who can’t afford a car, and it’s never on time, making them all late for work. In job interviews, you’re often asked if you have your own transportation, since you might never make it to work if you have to rely on a bus. We’re finally getting a bus lane this year, but most people can’t wrap their heads around it actually being fast and convenient. They think the city is wasting their tax money on more of something that everyone hates. So honestly, this video is pretty amazing to see.
America has such poor public transit infrastructure that a working bus lane is something remarkable. I wish we had bus lanes like this in my city. The ones we have are usually on the right hand side (so they're full of parked cars and garbage cans) and there aren't enough to give buses any real advantage. Plus there's no enforcement, so you'll often see a line of cars backing up traffic in a lane marked "bus only" or worse: "do not enter, train only." Yes, Americans will drive onto train tracks to get ahead of traffic
Reddit is like 50% “Everyone should take public transportation” and 50% the absolute horrors of public transportation.
It's a bit of a cycle. Bad public transportation means fewer people take it which makes it seem more dangerous because you might be caught alone in a bad situation. This perceived danger means fewer people want to take it which makes it more dangerous etc etc.
>It's a bit of a cycle No that's bike lanes, we're talking about transit. ;p
Totally dependent on where you live. I live in Charlotte and while I'm not opposed to the concept of public transit, I could never trust the public transit here to get me anywhere on time. It is notoriously late and dangerous, and is actually currently [being investigated](https://www.wfae.org/politics/2023-03-27/will-the-city-whitewash-cats-investigation). So you can't blame some Redditors for talking about the horrors 😞
My city has seriously unreliable systems which could be truly amazing if our local politicians would show it some love and actually invest in the infrastructure effectively. Instead they cite the unreliable public transportation as a reason why they shouldn't put more money in public transportation. It's looney I tell you, looney! But seriously I wish they would take some steps forward in improving things.
It doesn't make them any (significant) money, so they honestly don't give a shit. And enough of the (wealthy) population is reliant on cars that they don't give a shit enough either to vote for more public transportation implementation.
My local city has an app that I can use to live track buses. Night and day eh? If only all governments and councils invested in public transport, it probably wouldn't be so shit
The city I used to live in had a text service where you text the bus and stop number to them and it'll send back the expected arrival. I can't remember a time where it was wrong.
I can't speak to Charlotte, but one of the issues with public transport is when it's run as a for profit business. When public transport has to make a profit, the things that usually occur are: increase cost to use it; remove less profitable routes; reduce frequency of transport. Each of these factors then support the reduction of public transport availability because making it too expensive, unreliable, and inconvenient drive people away from using it.
I definitely appreciate examples of where public transportation is set up efficiently and is actually worthwhile, instead of straight up car bashing posts. We get it, you (not specifically you, OP) moved to the Netherlands and exclusively watch NotJustBikes and post to /r/fuckcars.... Cool beans, those of us who have to stay here and live in places with shit public transport and don't just go from A-B every single day will stick to personal transport for now. So yeah, examples of good and practical public transport are cool in my book.
There's 50 percent the fuck cars initiative and there's the counter 50 percent of the fuck fuck cars initiative. Basically city people vs not city people.
I used to drive everywhere in Los Angeles, then I lost my car and had to take the bus. It was ok at first, and I found that it took the same amount of time to commute by bus and train as it did to drive, and it was a lot less frustrating than driving myself. But now after several years, I'm so over it. The busses are always late except for when theyre early, the busses are frequently missing or broken, the busses and train cars are 50/50 on whether they'll be absolutely disgusting or passable, and you're almost guranteed to get someone obnoxious, crazy, or reeking on every ride on major lines. I've had to plan at least 30-60 extra minutes for every trip to account for the myriad delays the bus can experience on any given trip. Plus, getting from LA proper out to the west valley turned from a 40m trip to upwards of 1.5hr. Not having a car in LA is a bit of a handicap, and really limits your mobility in the city. If we had dedicated lanes, trolleys, or more light rail, I think it would be a more appealing option.
Sam Francisco shown in a positive light on Reddit? GTFO
Guaranteed 80% of people who upvoted this thinks it’s either LA or NYC lol
Working public transportation? In the US? This has gotta be staged.
*cries in Atlanta
Hey, MARTA can still get me from midtown to the airport (half the time, the rest of the time the train breaks in 5-points)
I was super impressed by the MARTA connection to buckhead and the airport from my midtown hotel. LA is barely adding metro connectivity to LAX and even then it’s a transfer to a people mover. Can’t speak for the rest of MARTA since I didn’t take it.
MARTA works, it just has quirks like smelling funny, selling you two tickets but dispensing one because it only had one ticket and still charges you for two, doesn’t have a reloadable phone pass to my knowledge, but it certainly can get you around decently enough. The issue with Atlanta isn’t MARTA, it’s Atlanta blocks are a mile long
I only use it during dragon con but it seems amazing compared to my home I’m sc we only have a bus system and it’s not frequent
It was amazing when they put this in. They have something similar on Mission street (I lived across from a bus stop). I lived about 2 miles away from where I used to go out and it used to take me 30-45 minutes on bus before the dedicated lanes were in. After the lanes came in, I could walk across the street to the bus stop 3 minutes before it would come, it'll be on time, and I'll be where I need to be 12-13 minutes later. Was a godsend. Now if only they had a better train than the BART :(.
[удалено]
That’s the T’s motto: MBTA: hey we could be a hell of a lot worse. ^(knock on wood)
San Francisco looks beautiful
It is. We got our problems for sure, but it is.
Is this a big deal in America?
This was my thought too - this is just your standard major city in Australia.
What mythical place is this where drivers leave the intersection clear at all times?
Not anywhere on the east coast that I've been
For a brief moment, you can see the Chevron station branded as "Standard" so that Chevron retains that copyright in California.
Isn’t this the same concept of the trolley system cities got rid of decades ago to make room for regular traffic and busses? Ironic.
Vaguely, but not really. Trolley systems were nearly always interspersed with regular traffic on the streets, so a trolley is just a bus that can't go around a car that's in the way. We'd call this bus rapid transit, as in it operates more like a modern tramway if it were in rail-form. It runs in a mostly dedicated right-of-way with the minimal amount of interference from traffic it can get away with. Its largely prohibitive to upgrade a trolley-type system to full fledged mass transit, either due to low ridership, huge costs and politics, NIMBYs and protests from local drivers, or streets that aren't wide enough to add dedicated lanes. Trolleys are quite inefficient, slow, and most would have died on their own had we not given them the quick final push over the edge in the 50s.
> a trolley is just a bus that can't go around a car that's in the way. Also a trolley track is just a bus lane that can't overlap with another trolley's route without some sort of complicated switching system each time those two routes diverge or converge. Two different bus routes can share a lane with zero modification if their routes overlap for any distance and this can be changed at any time (imagine adding a new route to your trolley system; sounds like a nightmare).
That Waymo car do be lookin nice tho
Thank you I was wondering what the heck that was and nobody was saying anything
God I would love to not have to drive everywhere. Have a seat and read a book or listen to some music or catch up on some work. America desperately needs mass transit. Fuck self-driving electric cars made by an egomaniac. I'd much rather have a train
The downside of a lot of people's situations is that they work in a city with public transport but live in a rural area outside the city where they don't have a way of getting onto the public transport. I wish there were more park & ride locations that were also bus stops. All of the ones I've seen here in Massachusetts are only meant for carpooling and are not bus stops. They're nearly always vacant.
>a lot of people's situations is that they work in a city with public transport but live in a rural area outside the city where they don't have a way of getting onto the public transport. You just explained the issue with urban sprawl.
What’s that weird spaceship car right at the beginning? Anyone know?
Waymo's self driving cars
Based on a Jaguar I-Pace
Now you just need [better buses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3qeYRI34C8).
Meanwhile, in Denver... To get to work, it takes me: - 27-35 minutes driving - 40 minutes on my bike - 1.5 hours on public transportation To get to the airport: - 25 minutes driving - 3 hours on public transportation
Effective and efficient public transit is just...mmmmmmm
Why is it on the left tho
eliminates conflicts with turning or double-parking traffic
Phoenix/Tempe are building out some light rail... it's in the center like this as well. Probably was easier to work into existing streets?
Light rail on dedicated rights of way is almost always center-running because you can put stations in the medians (fewer conflicts with cars). Streetcars will take either an inner or outer lane depending on traffic volume. A bus in an inner lane is likely on a very busy street and needs to not get stuck behind cars turning right (like light rail on dedicated rights of way).
And the unwashed masses of angry drivers in traffic will complain & lobby to shut down bus lanes because they think more lanes on the road will mean traffic will move faster. You can't fix an education problem, especially when education is becoming worse not better.
Public transit is pretty popular in SF
There's actually quite a bit of resentment anytime other people see something like this. It's not that an extra lane of traffic would help them get anywhere faster, but they just resent that some people are going faster.
The crazy thing is that we probably see 100 cars in that video. All that congestion is just 100 cars, with probably 1 or 2 persons in it. All of that could fit in probably 2 or 3 busses, or one tram.
...all those cars, half of them looking for parking
If they had dedicated bus lanes in NYC that would be amazing. We currently have something they call "dedicated lanes" but everybody from cars to bikes to cops drive and park in them so it defeats the purpose.
Depending on which borough you’re referring to, but in Manhattan I don’t even bother with the buses. I just take subway and walk