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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that is borne out by evidence. You build a better bus and people take it. Recent examples that are local to me include BRT lines in San Francisco and Oakland. These are very popular.

The reason transit systems fail is because governments sabotage them by prioritizing free-at-point-of-use car infrastructure like freeways, unmetered parking, etc. My favorite example being the extension of BART into Antioch, where the project budget was divided into half for BART and half for a toll-free 8-lane superfreeway, resulting in a system where nobody takes BART.

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I live in a city with a halfway decent (very good by US standards) transit system (Cambridge [Boston]).

My car is comically faster to get almost anywhere I have to go, unless I’m trying to get to the Dunkin’s or newsstand at a T station.

The random route ability of cars (and bikes) will dominate fixed route radial spokes from the city center as is overwhelmingly common from mass transit systems.

> My car is comically faster to get almost anywhere I have to go, unless I’m trying to get to the Dunkin’s or newsstand at a T station.

And if you ignore the time and monetary cost of finding parking.

That's a largely self-regulating problem: I mostly go to places with ample parking, which merchants (and my company) are willing to provide in exchange for the traffic it brings.

I think this speaks more to your (car-induced) travel patterns than to the inefficiency of the network itself (which might itself be inefficient, as you say). As a non-driver who needs to ride in cars occasionally, my experience is the exact opposite: mass transit almost always gets me there faster, except in cases where it’s been intentionally “nerfed” (including, inexplicably, NYC’s airports).

Indeed, there is a positive feedback loop that I choose to grocery shop at a grocer with parking (and the grocer chooses to provide parking in order to get customers) and I choose to drive to my office rather than commute by public transit due to the horrible time inefficiency of the MBTA "solution" to getting me there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197

I almost never want to go to the city center (in part because it's still a pain in the ass and time-consuming to get there, due to needing to use a bus and a subway or possibly a bus and two subway lines). I can find ready substitutes for most things in the mid-density half-urban area near where I live or in one of the nearby suburbs which are terribly connected by public transit [buses only and mostly radial bus lines].

If there was excellent public transit, I agree there'd be more services highly coupled to the transit hubs. As it is, much of the shopping areas have vast parking lots/garages instead, because that's how the merchants can stay in business: by catering to people who can actually get there efficiently.

Cambridge has very high non-car trip mode share by U.S. standards. Really, its working correctly as you describe it. One of the benefits of getting indifferent travelers out of their cars is that people who truly need or prefer to use a car can do so with less competition.

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