Comment by skipkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skipkey | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

So the DFW metroplex is an example of why it's difficult to build decent public transportation - it has a population of about half that of Greater London, covering over 24k square kilometers. Very few people work in the downtown areas. Most people live in a suburb and work in a suburb.

I lived in the area for many years. At one point, I lived in a house, basically at Belt Line and highway 75, and worked at an office on Midway Road across from Addison Airport. About 13 kilometers on side streets. With traffic, about 20-25 minute drive on side streets, or about 15 minutes if I took the highway, which included a toll road. There were reasonable bus stops near both my house and my office. So I looked into what it would take to use public transportation if I had car trouble.

All bus routes went through downtown Dallas. So the most optimal route getting me to the office took almost 2 hours. And the earliest I could get there was 9:30am. Why did all routes go through downtown? Because in order to get the routes approved they had to serve areas that were considered 'disadvantaged'. And this makes sense - there probably wasn't enough potential traffic to make loop routes break-even.

Now I did use public transport regularly - I had Dallas Stars season tickets, and I'd ride the train downtown rather than park all the time. But if I didn't need to go downtown it was useless. And the reason is just math - half the population of greater London over 15x the area.

Bad operations is not the fault of transit it is the fault of operations. Making transit serve the poor is a political choice and the result is it didn't serve you. However there is every reason to think good operations with a good budget could serve you well.

No there really is not. The problem is that static routes in low density areas do not work. The reason the transit system has a policy about poor areas is because they know people with cars will never take the bus unless the government makes driving onerous which will never happen.

The idea of transit as welfare is a cancer to good transit in the US, even in places where it’s onerous to drive like NYC. This is how we end up with bus stops every block, buses from nowhere to nowhere instead of subway-like frequencies on well used routes, a lack of fare enforcement, running transit as a jobs program, etc.

Define low density....

In the typical suburb there is enough density for a good static network to work. Note that I said "good", and "network". A suburb cannot support a bus every hour, the service is too bad - but it can support a bus every 10 minutes or better because the service is acceptable. Also: network, not route - the important part is you need to be able to get to all the places you would normally go and that means the entire network matters and the ability to quickly/easially transfer to other routes is critical to success.

I really think the issue here is just that you are blinded by your own preferences. Buses will never be faster than cars in Dallas. Literally impossible. So if they’re not faster, and they’re not more convenient, what are the upsides? Well they’re cheaper, but everyone in Dallas already owns a car so that doesn’t matter. They have lower externalities, but that’s not convincing anyone to switch, Dallas residents are republicans. I just really don’t think there’s any realistic way to convince non poor Dallas residents to use a bus no matter what you do, as long as the state is red. And if you only get poor people to use it there will never be enough riders for it to make sense to have enough bus routes/consistency.

Buses don't have to be faster. They need to be as good or better for the trips you take. If it is 15 minutes to drive to work and 25 minutes by bus that is good enough. If you can get all your other errands done on the bus then you can save a ton of money by selling a car. Note that I said sell a single car - nearly everybody in Dallas lives in a "family" situation with more than one car, so you still have a car for the exceptions while saving a ton of money (this only works if everybody is using the bus for almost everything and so there isn't a conflict when one person needs the car for something weird)!

Also we should not assume only the bus. A train is a useful part of any large transport network. There should be a train between Dallas and Fort Worth that makes the trip in 10 minutes - you can't do that in a car (a race car with a professional driver could beat that if we block all traffic, but no normal car or driver can even if traffic is blocked). Sure the current train takes an hour, but we can make is faster with existing technology.

> If it is 15 minutes to drive to work and 25 minutes by bus that is good enough.

I really think this is completely wrong. You will convince approximately 0 people in Dallas to use a bus if this is what you are offering them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com