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Comment by naravara | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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