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Comment by mayneack | Hacker News Reader

I live in West LA and have been commuting by bus for the last year after ditching my car. I think it's actually been a significant improvement to my life as it's a lot less stressful to sit in a bus for an extra 10 minutes rather than spend my commute worrying over how slow everything is moving in traffic.

Everyone here seems to want everyone else to use public transit for all the right reasons, but isn't willing to adjust their own behavior to accommodate that.

The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt.

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The reason mass transit works in Manhattan is that you can have a subway train arrive every five minutes and still have it full of people. The reason you can do that is that Manhattan has more than 25 times the population density of LA County.

To fill the same subway cars in LA would require intervals more than 25 times longer, i.e. more than two hours instead of every five minutes, and then it's garbage and nobody wants to use it. Or, in practice, you only run mass transit along the most popular routes and then the majority of people can't use it because it doesn't go where they're going.

Making it less convenient to drive doesn't really fix that, all it does is make more people miserable, because you make driving worse where no viable alternative to driving is available. The only real way to fix it is to reduce sprawl so that you have more density over less area -- and that's only possible in the long-term, so in the short-term LA is pretty screwed for traffic. But that's no excuse to not be working on the long-term solution.

The density of the LA MSA is 2,744/sq mi, the New York MSA is 4,432/sq mi. The average commute in each area is only about 1 mile longer in LA (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Srvy_Jo...) And yet, there are vastly different commute patterns. (And still over half of people in the NY MSA commute by car). It's not at all clear that density plays nearly as much a role in this as you suggest.

That's not a good baseline for comparison. The MSA you're looking at covers a much bigger area, lumping in parts with lower population density which, no surprise, don't all have subways every five minutes that the GP was referring to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

comparing MSAs is more apples-to-apples than comparing manhattan to LA county, which is roughly what was being done. an MSA bounds the totality of the economic reach of a city, which more-or-less coincides with the commute boundaries.

LA (the city) is relatively dense (medium-high density) compared to its cursory reputation of being low density.

but public transit here is imperfect, to be sure. it's good if you live near a train line, and not so good if you have to depend only on buses. LA metro and LADOT are trying to change that, but it's a frustratingly slow process. micro-mobility options (e-scooters, e-bikes, car share, etc.) help.

It's definitely more apples-to-apples for some statistical comparisons, but as a New Yorker it really does feel ridiculous to include Beacon and the Hamptons in to the equations when considering density for a subway system. Those places are hours away in the suburbs.

Density of city limits would maybe be more appropriate when talking about subway service or LA's light rail. So that'd be about 8,092/sq mi for LA and 28,491/sq mi for NYC. Maybe MSA would make sense for things like commuter rail, which runs something like every 20 or 30 minutes (hourly on weekends) for Metro North.

Why is it a requirement to fill every car? Why not provide transit along many routes and often enough to be useful?

Money presumably. The fact that it's comically expensive in per mile costs, in some cases nearly $1 billion/mile[1] in LA, in addition to maintenance costs would just nuke the ideas.

[1]https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...

To some degree this is a zero sum game. Bus lanes are pretty magical in that they make the buses faster than the cars and reduce road capacity to reduce induced demand. Plus they're cheap because the infrastructure is just paint.

Bus lanes are hot garbage. Their mechanism of operation requires them to not actually solve the problem, because if they actually reduced traffic congestion then the buses wouldn't be faster anymore.

And "induced demand" is a misnomer. Existing congestion suppresses existing demand, which comes back when you relieve some of it. You need to find better ways to satisfy the demand, not find ways to further suppress it.

The best way to do that is to increase density, because that both makes mass transit more viable on its own terms (more frequent trains and they're still full) and decreases the number of miles people have to travel because things are close together.

Or you could just run the subways in LA more often/not full. Then the experience would be enjoyable and living near the lines would become more desirable, and the more people take the transit and then oh look spread starts to contract a bit and your long term plan is starting to materialize!

It would be idiotic to create an LA train system designed to handle only the amount of people that will busing it within the first year.

Operating mass transit when it isn't full serves no purpose. The entire point of mass transit is that it's more efficient than cars when it's full -- when it's not full it's less efficient. A bus carrying the same number of people as a car takes up more space and uses more fuel, and requires a driver which makes it dramatically more expensive when amortized over that number of people.

> It would be idiotic to create an LA train system designed to handle only the amount of people that will busing it within the first year.

Of course you do. Trains replace buses in the places with enough density to justify them. You don't build a train in a place that would only see it half full, you just run a bus there which holds half as many people.

The problem is most of these places can't even fill a bus every ten minutes because everything is so spread out. You need more taller buildings first.

you could increase train frequency during rush hour. One every 5 minute between 7-9am and 4-6pm.

I live in Orange County and commute to La Mirada (only ~13 miles away). The bus routes are so inefficient that it would take me 1.5 hours to get to work by bus. Biking would be faster (although significantly more stressful and dangerous). Some areas just need to add more and better routes.

Orange County and the IE are some of the worst public transit in the country. LA's trains/ Metrolink are actually an improvement over sitting on the 10 by quite a bit. The accessibility to the metrolink and the trains have a lot to be desired though in the OC and the IE...

When I did a couple bus commutes while living in OC, I remember the bus actually stopping on the side of the road for a while because it had got ahead of schedule. Probably a good thing given the infrequency of buses for the buses to stick religiously to the schedule (as opposed to suburban Chicago where I live now where it's actually impossible for the buses to meet the posted schedules even if they travel at the speed limit without stopping).

> The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc.

After thinking about this a moment, you might realize that this mostly just makes life harder and more miserable for the poor, disabled, etc. Most people don't have a plausible option to change their mode of transportation--they just have to suffer.

Beyond that, these "improvements" often don't even benefit their intended targets. I currently live in a city that has this "make it harder" smug in spades. Ironically, the resulting improvements have made it a scarier place to walk and bicycle, due to the attention overload induced on drivers.

As the saying goes: God save us from people that only mean well...

It's obviously hard to tell by looking in windows, but there's plenty of poor and/or disabled people riding the bus and already dealing with the problems you think removing cars would give them.

Indeed. But "make it harder" isn't about them (it won't change their behavior). It's rather about the poor and disabled for whom public transportation isn't their best option. It's a message from the elite telling them that their suffering doesn't count.

I once did the LA transit ride from Thousand Oaks to Pasadena and back entirely by transit (40 mi one way by driving, transit was more circuitous than that). More frequently, I would take Thousand Oaks to Hollywood or Thousand Oaks to DTLA transit trips. The Red and Gold lines seem quite reasonable. Though short of something I would want to take daily given that I lived far away, it was still a lot less exhausting than trying to drive from Santa Monica to the other side of 405 during the afternoon. Now I’m in a different city and take transit daily.

40 miles is a pretty long commute. A modern city shouldn't be optimized to make that experience the norm. Most trips are much shorter.

I moved to the bay area in 2006. Between then and now, each employer I've had was at least 30 miles away from the next.

That makes you quite an outlier. 95% of trips are < 5 miles

https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicle-trips

I don't think we should optimize our cities for that.

They also report that under 17% of trips are for work, which is surprisingly low and seems like too much noise to learn much about the distribution of peak hour commuting distances.

If I had a five mile commute, I would use surface streets. Congested highways are full of people going far enough in roughly that direction that even the congestion plus the first/last mile is faster than countless stoplights on the direct route.

I lived on the east side and my job offered a free transit pass. It was a 15m drive for me or a single bus. My car broke down fairly often and I tried to give public transit a shot. The single bus took an hour and arrived every 30m. I was often standing during busy times and we'd all talk about the loud, likely mentally ill people, who caused disruptions. I'd often work later than the busses would run.

Biking had similar hazards when trying to use it as an alternative.

Almost all of those downsides still exist in places with great public transit, it's just the incentives compared to the alternatives are better. LA needs more incentives; continue investing in public transit, incentivize it, and disincentivize driving.

No, in places with great transit people with a 15 minute drive have at most 20 minutes on the bus and for some it is only 10 minutes on the bus. Of course where transit is great people also move to live near the right line, so the 1 hour trips like you see still exist - but those are different neighborhoods where you rarely go.

The universal downsizes I was talking about were dealing with obnoxious riders, having to stand during rush hour, and not always running as late as you need it to. I completely agree with your points.

The big thing I notice is that where transit is good I find having a car to be a chain around my neck. Parking is difficult/expensive to find, it's often just easier to walk to the next thing, and navigating roads/traffic is often difficult.

Almost never deal with crazy people on Munich public transit. That's a combination of a broader swathe of society taking transit here, plus German society doing a better job of taking care of the homeless and mentally ill.

The buses are generally reliable and frequent. Train + bike is comparably fast to driving during rush hour.

How's the situation with having to wait for buses? Are the stops shady or covered? Do they give you indicators for when you can expect the next bus or if there are delays?

In my experience those are pretty big indicators of how pleasant a system is to use.

You can't really use the busses in Orange County because of the routes and the traffic. Cars are pretty much required unless you're <5 miles from work, then biking is a decent option.

If the bus comes every 5 minutes nobody asks the questions you asked. Comfort waiting only matters when the bus doesn't come.

5 minutes of having a mid-summer sun beating down on you, after you've possibly walked for up to 15 minutes to even get to the stop, can feel like a lot. Especially if you don't know with any confidence that the next bus is coming in 5 minutes.

If you are not confident that the next bus will be there in less than 5 minutes, then my criteria are not met.

It costs about $500,000 to run a bus for a year (every day, 16 hours a day). If you have that extra half a million in the budget you should run another bus someplace (preferably getting some existing route to the under 5 minutes headway). If you don't have that much in the budget but have something spending money on shelters isn't a bad use of money but it is way down on the list of what riders really want.

10 years ago they had GPS maps on the bus showing your current location, but afaik you couldn't access that when waiting for the bus. There were covered bus stops, just none of the ones I used were. They were only "ok" at marking stops when routes changed. The bus schedule (for the routes I used) was sparse.

So it seemed like they were tying to invest in these things, but weren't quite at the level of being pleasant.

These days, that kind of thing is offloaded to third-party smartphone transit apps. Most people have working smartphones, and are probably using them while waiting for the bus anyways, so it's more helpful (and cost-effective) than to provide signage at every stop.

It depends. Lots of stops are covered, but lots aren't. Sometimes there's someone sleeping/living on the bench in the covered area. Unlike the train stations, the bus stops don't have any signage showing when the next vehicle will arrive. However there's a phone number you can text to get a list of upcoming buses for your stop with ETA. There's also a website that shows the realtime bus locations. However they don't tell you how full the buses are, so you can spend 10 minutes waiting for a bus that just cruises on by past the stop

Lived on the west-side for a few years in the '10s, so my anecdata may be dated:

The stops are variable in terms of nice-ness. Generally, if there is a shelter (mostly just for lightly falling rain), there is a bum there. Generally, those bums have lived in/about that shelter for a number of years and tend to have mental health problems [0]. Generally, if you an able-bodied male, you should be alright around them during the day. If the stop has no shelter, it's like any other patch of sidewalk.

The Big Blue Busses were mostly ok for commuting. You'd get to work about 10 min later, so with waiting, you spend about another 30 min/day commuting. Most of the time, the busses had sitting space even during commute hours, but not always. You can't count of getting work done on the bus and having a seat the whole way. Also, if your plans have to change in the middle of a Tuesday (your kid gets sick at school, dentist appointment, etc), likely you have to go all the way home to grab your car and then drive to the shindig. That said, I was a LOT calmer than my co-workers that drove in. LA traffic is terrible.

Busses were intermittent and not always on time. So you have to plan for that. Sometimes the piss bus would come along and then you're an hour late, so that sucked.

Generally, if you have to be at work on time, have kids, or are female, taking the bus on the west-side is going to be very very tough to finagle.

[0] The vast majority of homeless people in LA are in vehicles/tents and are trying to stay out of the public view (MANY horrible reasons for this). If you want to help out your fellow homeless citizens, and they NEED the help, here is a good run down: https://la.curbed.com/2018/1/22/16911052/homeless-count-volu...

Please donate time or money, these organizations are saints.

My route (704 along santa monica blvd on the west side) has a mix of shaded or uncovered stops. That bus is pretty reliably tracked by google maps and other transit apps. I get delayed less than once a month. They're actually about to merge the express and local lines into more frequent, slightly farther spaced routes, so it's supposed to change to every 10 minutes or so.

My timing is usually flexible, so I can absorb one delay a month, but when I'm in a hurry (like today), I'll just string together two buses (1 to 4) if the 704 doesn't show. I've taken ubers in a pinch before, but way less than once a month.

> The city needs to actively make it harder to use cars with bus lanes, road diets, removing parking, etc. It's moving in that direction bit by bit, but takes a long time and the NIMBYs fight for every inch of asphalt.

FWIW these are actually NIMBY policies. NIMBYs don't like it when people drive cars on their streets.

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