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Creating a robust bus network with dedicated bus lanes vs an extensive rail system.

I've also lived in both cities and Seattle's buses are timely and clean. MTA buses are much, much worse.

In general, for a big city, you need _both_; there is only so far you can push the capacity of a bus lane (even the most ambitious BRT lanes are really only comparable to trams, not heavy metro rail, capacity wise), but it’s not feasible to serve everywhere with rail. You also ideally want simple interchange between them.

One thing we did in Dublin that greatly improved intermodal journeys was a travel card that works across everything. You tap it on rail/bus/tram, you’re debited 2 eur, and anything else you get on in the next 90 minutes, you’re charged nothing. This replaced a baroquely complex staging system, and it’s amazing how much simpler it has made things.

If everyone riding the NYC subway every day took a bus instead, it would need over 3x the bus capacity (2022 subway ridership was 1B, buses were 425M). Personally, I don’t think that’s going to make bus timeliness any better, even with more dedicated bus lanes. The answer is likely that we just need way fewer cars in the way even now. Have a look at 14th St. as an example.

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