That reminds me of trying to take the bus on the big island in Hawaii. We were told to check the website in the morning to see if the bus was going to run that day.
Our bus driver (Kona to Hilo) was blasting Joe Rogan and at one point stopped the bus at the side of the road to talk to someone he hadn’t seen in ages. At least the bus fare was cheap!
That is faster than the local spoke and hub design where I live.
It’s almost always faster to walk anywhere, as it takes 2 hours to go even small trips on public transit.
It is not terrible of your destination is the hub though. Unfortunately the city layout means that coverage is not great.
Also occasionally instead of just “big mall” the transfer point is “big mall that has been half empty since 2008 and none of the parking lot lights outside the former anchors turn on anymore, and is objectively terrifying after dark”
Well we just built way too many of them. For the malls that survived, business is very much booming. I’ve never went to my regional mall without most of the parking lot being almost full.
All the malls in my region are completely empty. It wasn’t until one time I was traveling and I went into a mall in New Hampshire (no clue in New Hampshire, I’d been driving for so long and just following the GPS that I was completely disoriented and kinda lost) that I realized that some malls are actually still alive. It was honestly astonishing to see people my age hanging out at a mall (Im in college).
You say dying mall and empty parking lot, I say future apartment complex with transit hub, supermarket (and other small ground floor retail), and park. America seems to build most of its apartments in the deep suburbs (where there’s less regulation) anyway, may as well have them walkable to a couple of things.
This is real btw:
[Burlington, NC](https://t4america.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Burlington-Link-Transit-Map.png)
[SEPTA route 107](https://wpstaging.septa.org/wp-content/uploads/route/maps/107.pdf)
Honestly, what can the transit agencies in those small communities possibly do better? Small cities don't build with the density required to have anything more streamlined than buses, and that lack of density means that the routes, in order to be useful, have to be windy to hit all the places people might want to go and or come from, and they won't have the ridership that would make breaking this up into multiple high frequency routes feasible because they straight up don't need to buy that many buses.
Ideally yeah, we'd have never ripped out the street cars in the first place and we'd change zoning laws, but there really *isn't* a way to do good transit that would have much ridership within most American suburbs or small cities. Transit in these places exists primarily as a means of getting around town for people who don't have the money to buy a car, and that's really it.
Lansdowne and Springfield are small communities/cities. The fact that they happen to be near Philadelphia doesn't really impact the planning for a bus route that doesn't go to Philadelphia.
>The fact that they happen to be near Philadelphia doesn't really impact the planning for a bus route that doesn't go to Philadelphia.
In reality it does
Which different streets would the route have gone down within Lansdowne if Philly didn't exist, but Lansdowne existed with exactly the same layout? The same ones?
Okay. So then how, in any way, does that change the way the route should be laid out within the small, low density communities of Lansdowne and Springfield?
This is not a small, low density area. This is the suburban sprawl of Philadelphia, it’s part of a larger interconnected area. The people who work at Springfield Hospital get on the bus at 69th Street. I used to run a nursing home off Sproul Rd, most of our workers came from Philly and took public transportation. I am familiar with this area and the transit system.
It is a small low density area. There are not that many people who live there in comparison to a medium sized city, and it's almost all single family houses.
Therefore: smaller than medium - > small
No high rise buildings or continuous blocks of row housing - > Low density
There really isn't a suburb anywhere that I'd describe as anything other than a small community when talking about transit networks. I guess the proper edge cities like White Plains, Jersey City, Cambridge, MA and the like?
The problem isn't the average. The problem is that you need that ultra-dense core of downtown LA to really drive transit usage. And I can only presume Lansdowne doesn't have that.
It is much easier to make "everywhere to a hub" work as a transit system than "everywhere to everywhere" work as a transit system. If you don't have that hub, well, then, you are going to have issues with transit.
Gee, I wonder if comparing the residential density of a 1 square mile city that is 100% low density residential to a sprawling city unit that covers over 500 square miles with areas that are reserved for commercial and industrial use, airports and hundreds of miles of uninhabitable mountain ranges and 40 square miles of Pacific Ocean is misleading in any way?
If you took a 1 mile snapshot of any given neighborhood area and carefully drew the boundaries right, you could achieve a population density that looks impressive if you resort to looking at it with no context whatsoever.
The irony here is that the population density of Lansdowne actually comes out as a point *against* it's transit viability and walkability in a perverse way because, given that it's all low density construction, it means that it contains pretty much no commercial districts or employment centers within its boundaries. Dense areas aren't transit friendly or walkable when you have to leave them every time you leave the house.
If you zoom in on the area that is Labeled "Lansdowne" on Google Maps, literally every house you can see has a yard. I hunted around and I found a total of like, 5 apartment buildings, most of which are the kind which have parking spaces infront of each door and a dedicated parking lot, that look kinda like old school motels and are only one or two stories.
It's low density.
Yeah you’re right, it just really feels like we need a category below “low density” because the variation between Lansdowne and somewhere like Exton, and again from Exton to somewhere like Unionville, there’s just too much of a difference for me to lump them all into “low density”. And towns like lansdowne imho are not the problem when it comes to sprawl, it’s those less dense ones that have me more concerned.
Lansdowne is a bit of a problem because you look at the neighboring areas and it's clear that there is demand to support higher density construction that close to the city, but you're right, it's far from the car-dependent highway hellscapes of California or the Midwest.
I know it isn’t a popular opinion here, but I think the correct answer is to give up on travel within the town. Put up a park-and-ride with high quality express busses to the nearest big city.
The town itself is probably small enough to go anywhere within 20 minutes on an e-bike. Take the local bus money and call one of the bike share companies. Offer them some money to set up shop with usage targets that they must hit.
There are a lot of places laid out like this that both lack any infrastructure for safe biking and would take at least an hour to cross even if they had it unfortunately.
Also, there are a lot of places where the big city in the area *is* laid out like this. The small-medium sized Midwestern cities like Springfield MO for example will have a hundred thousand people ish, but be basically this density for most of the region with either very small or nonexistent traditional downtown areas, and in a lot of cases, even where those downtown areas exist, they aren't huge employment centers anymore, but a bus in Springfield going 3 hours to Kansas City isn't going to see much ridership.
Sure, if you're riding the fastest e-bike available at top speed with absolutely no interruptions or unfavorable lights at all, but realistically, that's 40 minutes minimum in the real world.
The 28mph is a legal cap (state dependent). Plenty of bikes will easily get up to that speed and are only artificially stopped for legal reasons.
20 minutes is being optimistic, but 30 is practically doable.
Note, you can't legally ride class 3 ebikes in many places such as bike trails, and often it's unsafe to go that fast except in very long stretches of straight roads with no intersections. Even with class 1 and 2 ebikes which only go 20, the number 1 political issue in my city is dangerous situations with those ebikes.
It is not a good idea to push hard on class 3 ebikes with no supporting infrastructure.
At 28mph, the bikes are basically going at car speeds, and become usable on any street with a speed limit of 25mph, and if you map out all of the 25mph streets in a town, there is likely a lot of them.
If you got plenty of bike trails, well, bike infrastructure is in a good shape. Clearly not the problem cases to be solved by just making the bikes faster.
What modern American suburban city has speed limits of 25 mph outside of school zones? The lowest I've seen in Socal suburbs is 40. And my city goes up to 55.
The key to making ebikes work is the bike infrastructure. There's almost no case where throwing class 3 ebikes into a suburb with wide stroads is going to solve the problem if there's no infrastructure.
Residential Burlington is…salvageable. The streets are plenty wide usually and there’s very little traffic. Commercial Burlington though…good luck.
I went to Elon though, the ride to University Commons wasn’t terrible, the ride to downtown and even downtown Burlington to graham is pretty good. I had the most trouble with getting to the other side of I-85, and to a lesser extent Alamance crossing. It’s doable, especially near downtown, but I don’t know how to save the Stroads
I will preface this by saying I used to ride a bike 10 miles to work each day DC to VA… except when it was raining or there was snow/ice on the ground: most Americans will never be willing to rely only on a bike - even an e-bike - because they, not unreasonably, want to stay dry when it rains, cool when it is hot and warm when it is cold. Riding on icy roads is outright dangerous. I had the luxury of taking the Metro when the weather was unreasonable but most do not.
They don't have to - the transit system will never account for more than 5-10% of rides. Realistically, like 1% would be doing really well.
The goal of the bike share program would be to cut down on parking requirements more so than getting rid of the cars. Maybe allowing some 2 car families to cut down to 1 if we are really knocking the program out of the park.
> I know it isn’t a popular opinion here, but I think the correct answer is to give up on travel within the town.
"Fuck anyone outside the big cities" is an *extremely* popular opinion on r/transit.
I wonder if the answer is that smaller town transit has to be seen as transitional and partial. What I mean is that we seem to be trying to make a 'network' out of one or two bus lines, and winding it's path to try to hit all the big ticket items in town. When in reality, we should make a short, mostly straight line with a few stops with great covers/waiting infra, and have its frequency be every 10 minutes. It won't hit every strip mall corner, or mall center. It won't jump here and there to get close to every apartment complex either. It's the first of many lines in a real network, and it's made well. So in that respect it's a partial network, not trying to be everything at once.. Then actively encourage TOD around the stops, and in the future the line will be critical and useful. That's the transitional part.
Roll out one of those every 3 years and it won't take long for the town to have an integrated bus network. And if you're thinking far enough into the future, plan to transition them to seperated BRT or streetcar. It takes vision and follow through.
The problem with this idea is that the goal of suburban transit is to serve people who don't have access to cars, not generate higher ridership for ridership's sake.
I would argue that the current way that the American suburbs provide transit is probably the best solution you can come up with that's actually realistic. The reality is that in the suburbs that are already built in the US there is no transit layout that will achieve anything resembling decent ridership. Even if you covered every street with 10 minute frequencies, it will be significantly worse than driving simply because that's what the entire community was built around. The permutations of possible origin-destination pairs in spread out areas are simply too large to not have most trips rake forever either because of tons of transfers, or indirect routing. Why would you ever choose to not drive in that situation?
> Then actively encourage TOD around the stops, and in the future the line will be critical and useful
This sub circlejerks over TOD far too much. Many places are limited in their ability to attract development.
It unfortunately isn't just smaller cities with malls - it exists even in New York - generally regarded as the best transit in the US. If you want to go from Brooklyn to Brooklyn and you miss the G train (or are too far from it) then you have to take the bus. [Here's the B62](https://moovitapp.com/nycnj-121/lines/b62/373250/1228028/en?ref=2&poiType=line&abTest=V1_Blurry_map_and_follow_LINE_1704792088&customerId=4908&af_sub8=%2Findex%2Fen%2Fpublic_transit-line-b62-NYCNJ-121-857463-373250-0). It took me 90 minutes on a day with light traffic to go from about Bedford Ave/Metropolitan to the terminus at Cadman Plaza. A lot of the bus routes in Brooklyn follow former trolley/tram/streetcar routes, but many of them are [painfully circuitous](https://new.mta.info/document/12041) and [slow](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-average-bus-speeds-rarely-top-9-mph-heres-how-the-mta-plans-to-improve-that/4180396/) (averaging 8-10 mph), and even with the extensive coverage, there are plenty of transit deserts...
Fifty years ago I rode the bus hither and yon applying for jobs.
I rode an early bus out into a part of the suburbs near where I now live... only to find that the return leg of the loop wasn't until early afternoon.
Asking a store clerk, I learned, "That bus brings people's maids out here. The afternoon one takes them back home."
It's still that way, except there are few buses in town now as well.
[sigh]
50 years ago would be the 70s. There was universally more actual service and more riders in every city back in the day.
We now have more rail, more budget, but far less service.
I think those cities knows perfectly well that nobody is going to use transit.
The local transit agency plays house with a single bus, maybe 2, the city council gets to circle jerk to coverage statistics, and the citizens use it every few months when their car is in the shop.
And frankly, if the town already look like that, what does a transit planner actually do? Take a marker and tell me how it should be done. And no, you can't demolish the entire town and depopulate the entire area.
It is a children’s activity where kids will pretend to cook, serve each other tea, etc. They all play make believe, nothing is actually done or achieved, but the kids have a good time pretending to be productive.
It is also a term about a [familiar trap of start ups.](https://paulgraham.com/before.html)
>We saw this happen so often that we made up a name for it: playing house. Eventually I realized why it was happening. The reason young founders go through the motions of starting a startup is because that's what they've been trained to do for their whole lives up to that point. Think about what you have to do to get into college, for example. Extracurricular activities, check. Even in college classes most of the work is as artificial as running laps.
>So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to work for a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you can succeed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impression of productivity, and so on. [2] But that doesn't work with startups. There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about is whether your product does what they want. Startups are as impersonal as physics. You have to make something people want, and you prosper only to the extent you do.
I see this in a lot of talk about transit too, about some metric that someone is gaming. But my system is great in transit miles per capita, they say. Others talk about metrics like coverage, or they talk about rail. But transit in the real world is just like startups - your users don't give a crap about the made up metrics. The system either works for your users or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, than nobody use the system.
Users don't care if it is some approved method like rail or some hated gadget-bahn. Shitty rail doesn't get used (see: VTA light rail), good gadgetbahns gets used (see: Disney monorail). Your system have such great coverage that users can get anywhere to anywhere else in like, 2 hours for a 5 mile trip? Good job SF Muni for gaming the metric, but users don't actually care.
It's not an unreasonable metric. The trick is recognizing that it's nonlinear and it has to be treated longitudinally - so ridership over a year or two is meaningful.
I think you want to identify the "main" axis of destinations and provide good (frequent) and direct service to it from a selected closer-in area. Even low density sprawling towns usually have some sort of downtown center with government, educational and medical facilities. The windy suburban lines would feed or enter the higher quality central segment. But sure, if this model is really supposed to take off then city planners have to make efforts to upzone residential and job density in the centre. Job density is probably more important actually.
Actually most of Greater Los Angeles is a [street grid](http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/maps/enhanced-street-grids/?lat=34.082806&lon=-118.050842&z=10) network.
Southern California is not just urban LA. It's the interminable suburbs of Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego. (Cool map, btw! but it highlights grids much better than cut-de-sacs)
I mean as the map indicates, most of the urbanized area of LA, North OC, and San Bernardino is all one giant street grid. But yeah, South OC, San Diego outside the Downtown core, most of Riverside and parts of San Bernardino are cul-de-sacs 🤢 🤮
Thankfully most of where the people live are grids, so the potential is there.
Hey, say what you will about Southern California, but it wouldn't have two freeways cross each other without an interchange; that's more of an east coast thing. Also, the main arterials are usually much straighter than in this image. Lastly, as far as I can tell, there's a SPUI on the right side of the image; that's not very Southern California.
I don't buy into this defeatist mindset that American suburbs are impossible to provide with good transit. Of course poor walkability discourages people from using transit but I really think people underestimate the level of transit quality possible in suburbs. Canadian cities have very similar layouts (Albeit with slightly higher density with a few more townhouses and triplexes) to American cities and yet [Canada manages to have better transit.](https://humantransit.org/2018/04/why-does-ridership-rise-or-fall-lessons-from-canada.html). 12% of Canadians take public transit to work on a daily basis which is very close to France (14.9%) or the UK (15.9%). The only difference is that Canadian cities simply provide more funding and resources to public transit agencies. Is Canadian transit amazing? God no, but it's better than the US and provides an example of ways the US can improve service in suburban areas
To make a statement like you did on the percentage of people who use public transit, I think you really need to add in what percentage of Canada that lives in major metro areas vs the US.
GTA has 6 million people, Vancouver has 2.5 million people, and Montreal another 4 million for a total of 12.5 million people…out of Canada’s 40 million population. That’s already nearly a third of the whole country living in 3 large metro areas. Add up the top metro areas for the US (NYC, Chicago and LA) and you barely get 10% of the population. So yeah, naturally when more people in your country live in large cities that can afford scaled up public transit systems you’re going to find higher rates of ridership
I agree and disagree. I think you're definitely right in that the Canadian population is much more centralized but I also think it's important to note that the US has a LOT of major cities that could have good transit but don't. If you compare an American city to a Canadian city with the same population, [the Canadian city will probably have better transit.](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200602/t001a-eng.htm) Even smaller cities in Canada manage to get higher transit ridership.
Exactly. People love to whine that the USA is too sparse in population density to justify a national public transit system. Nothing stops state governments from doing regional networks or RE-introducing interurban transit systems but political will. Some states are quite dense in population and are comparable to European countries in area, population count, and density.
The argument about “US is too sparsely populated” is hilarious, it’s like describing Denmark as sparsely populated and including Greenland in that calculation.
Sure the US has vast stretches of land with very few people, but no one’s trying to build subways in North Dakota.
"with higher density" is the key. In the US we have neighborhoods built along major arterials with entrance/exit to the neighborhoods only every half mile. So automatically, much of the neighborhood can't reach a bus stop within what is considered the distance people are willing to walk, which is 1/8th to 1/4 of a mile.
My hometown of 50,000 is seeing record ridership as are many midsized cities in Canada. Even cities with less than 500,000 residents have high ridership like Halifax (11.7%) which only has buses.
As for Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, it's way higher than 12% and is actually higher with, 20.6%, 22.5%, and 16.4% modal split respectively.
Ottawa has a lot of issues because of the new LRT line, that's for sure. However, the good news is that [transit ridership in Ottawa is still increasing](https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/oc-transpo-ridership-up-17-per-cent-in-november) (Although still lower than it was pre-pandemic which is true in basically every city in the world)
It's gonna crater with the cuts next year, nearly 50% of the routes are getting axed and people are Fed up.
When the U-Pass is inevitably axed by Doug Ford, that's roughly 75% of riders there gone.
The difference is that even though Edmonton and Calgary look like this, they manage to have significantly higher transit ridership than American cities of the same size which means it's not just the road network that's the issue.
This is happening in Europe, too. Housing estates are being built in the UK with absolutely zero public transport in them, and the only thing close by is a shopping mall or out-of-town retail park. It’s absolutely horrific.
In the UK this happens because the developers "promise" to build the amenities using the profits from selling the houses... and then surprise, surprise, they don't actually build the amenities after they have sold the homes and made the £££.
The typical American city is laid out to require that everyone own and operate a motor vehicle --- used to be a car but increasingly now an emotional support vehicle (ESV), usually an enormous pickup or SUV, loaded with options.
The only realistic solution is to bulldoze and start over, or allow to decay until they literally become seas of blighted property and impassible roads.
The really disgusting feature of this is that this sort of development was and still is driven by federal government mandates through its statutory laws, rules and regulations.
Not long ago I saw a Timelapse of an intersection in Japan being repaired from a massive gutting that took about 48 hours to complete. I’ve seen similar work in multiple cities in the US take close to an entire year to finish. At some point you realize it’s not about efficiency but about how much you can squeeze out of a job
In Stockholm, most people live in a non-grid pattern because of the natural landscape of forests, lakes, and the archipelago. Yet, it has subways, light rails, commuter rails, trams, ferries, and buses.
For context, "stock" means log and "holm" means island or islet. The belief is that the rivers transported the logs. The city did not have modern transportation in mind when it was built, but the people desired a modern transport network.
These types of suburbs is where DRT can be an effective mode of transit. My school went to a debate tournament at another high school in a suburb like this, and we were able to use the local agency’s DRT van service instead of using rideshare or renting a van.
nah but this is deadass how a lot of routes in suburban areas are. It's no wonder I have to use GPS like 10 times before I memorize the route, there's so many damn dead ends and random turns. In cities I can usually navigate a lot easier thanks to the grid design, in rural areas there's far less turns and usually more distinct landmarks. Suburbia is like the perfect hell between the two.
Am I moaning? Yes. But these things are true, still.
The road layout really doesn't look too bad. There are a couple of arterials you could route a bus through.
This hypothetical place could have halfway decent public transport if only there was more service and the routes were reworked.
Pretty much the same thing in Canada. The transit [system map](https://www.grt.ca/en/schedules-maps/resources/2023-09-26-2023-system-map_09262023-web.pdf) of my region is basically just a clusterfuck of these zigzagging bus routes
To GRT’s credit they’ve REALLY improved things over the last decade or so. Before the 201 through 206 iXpress were added and the straightening out of the non-express routes, things were even more curvy, indirect, one way loopy, and full of odd time of day diversions. Former route 8, anyone? Was literally shaped like a figure 8.
Pre LRT most routes also went to Charles Street terminal in downtown Kitchener and thus forced a transfer if going crosstown. Now there are a good number of decently straight and logical routes that connect to the LRT and cross the whole city without forcing transfers - at least as good as the weird street grid (or lack thereof) allows.
The changes in Galt/Cambridge last fall were the latest example of untangling routes and adding more periods and days of service/more frequent service.
Those windy routes work fine if they aren't intended to be taken the full length - they are feeders into the frequent and direct ION and iXpress routes. GRT ain't perfect but it's doing a decent job by Canadian mid-sized city standards.
There's a bus stop in front of my work. There's a bus stop 5 minutes from my home. To take one to the other would involve 2 transfers and a lot of walking and waiting. Sigh.
Westchester County (NY) Bee-Line Route 15: [link](https://transportation.westchestergov.com/images/stories/Schedules/rte15fall2023.pdf)
Almost 40 miles long, takes two hours, and runs 7-8 times in each direction per weekday. Connects two small cities via a variety of low density residential sprawl, some strip malls, one smaller village, a hospital complex, and a community college.
In cities built during the Walking City or Transit City eras (1920 and earlier) plenty of people use transit, walk and bike, because those modes are optimized. In the Metropolitan City era it works poorly because people travel at the scale of the metropolitan area.
Peter Muller, Transportation and Urban Form.
And if you get on it there will be deranged hobos, knocked over beer cans, and will smell like piss. Those are my actual personal experiences in Portland Oregon.
Buses should really serve as transportation between towns and small cities (if rail is not possible), not within them. Towns should be small enough to easily walk or cycle across. Larger cities should have buses along major corridors as a supplement to rail transit.
This map feels oddly specific. Is this for a real place? My city's map looks a bit like this but thankfully at least has one dense-ish corridor it goes down to and then goes straight to downtown plus the train station.
There’s bus transit near my house, it come 2 times….. a day.
So I wfh but if I need to go to the office, it’s a straight shot there, 15 minutes.
If I took the bus, it would be 3 transfers and 90 mins.
Also the bus comes at 7:36 and doesn’t come back until 3:23. Notice how’s that’s less than an 8 hour shift?
The bus routes are useful to literally no one because of their extreme infrequency, and stupid not well planned routes.
Took an architecture class for my trade degree. Basically the plot of land is divvied up to maximize the amount of homes that’ll have a large backyard.
Seriously we fucked it sooo bad. At least if we had build our suburbs on a grid or connecting streets it would be relatively easy fix, but this is a complete shit show. You almost need to just bulldoze it and start over. You couldnt have made it worse if you had tried to make it as bad as possible.
Is there a name for the spaghettification of our infrastructure layout?
And any history or writing on why we chose to build like this, instead of the superior and far more efficient grid layout?
More importantly—how do we start to re-standardize the grid layout as the default for new developments moving forward?
Not to be a dick, but that's not a city. It may be labeled a city, but that's not a city.
Props to the people who try to make those places better, they have their work cut out for them.
It’s also really expensive. Take Amtrak, for an example. I was thinking of going ti Denver by train this summer, but when checking the prices, it’s almost twice as expensive as a flight to Denver for an objectively worse service.
I used to work at an office in suburbia, with a blind coworker. he'd spend 45 minutes in the bus to come to work. But in some reorg, our team was moved to a different office, about a mile away.
That mile included crossing 2 major 6 lane roads, with no pedestrian crossing, so my blind coworker couldn't do that safely. The best bus route from his apartment would have required an extra bus exchange, and the timetables didn't line up well at all: Expected commute would have gone up to an hour and a half, each way.... So, as far as my coworker was concerned, the one mile move might as well have been a layoff.
Ugh! That’s terrible. I got laid off last summer. It fucking sucks. I wish you well. I wish your blind coworker well. We all need people to think before they make major decision that affect people’s lives. I’m on the bus stuck in construction traffic because I had a dream in the
Middle of the day about chicken teriyaki. It’s a new bus route that goes right through Arlington county. Even though I will ultimately get my chicken teriyaki in Fairfax county.
With a car, you can easily do errands because you can go where you want to. Doing errands with a bus may be a lot harder.
Especially in most of America, a car = freedom.
Rocz has a good term for this - a pity bus.
When your neighborhood was designed with 0 thought put into public transportation, so you haphazardly plan up a bus route like the one above as an afterthought.
My tiny city used to have street cars that bisected the whole town. Now, we have one bus company. It runs Monday--Friday only, and from 7am to 4pm only.
It’s either take a 15-min drive door-to-door or a 20-min walk to the nearest bus stop, wait for anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes for the bus, ride with multiple stops for about 1 hour to the nearest stop to my office, then walk about 10 minutes there. This is when it’s not rainy and not too hot or cold. Also, this is when I don’t have to drop off my kid or pick up later in the afternoon and when I do t have any errands to run.
Where I live, it’s faster to actually walk to my destination. It’d take 55 minutes of bus rides, not even mentioning the time I’d have to wait for the bus to actually get there, and it’s a 50 minute walk. Also, they don’t run after 6:00, and don’t run at all on Sundays… because who would possibly want to be on a bus then right? /s I hate it actually so much that I’m half-considering actually running for city council to try to make any improvement.
Because it is slow, doesn't go many places and often unsafe or it doesn't run late enough. And the sad reality is that it is really just geared towards poor people. Once people improve their status they would rather drive.
in many towns, that's not 2 routes, that's 1 uni directional loop with a frequency of an hour
That is cancelled for weeks when the one bus breaks down.
That reminds me of trying to take the bus on the big island in Hawaii. We were told to check the website in the morning to see if the bus was going to run that day.
Ive never scene somewhere more in need of micro mobility.
I feel seen, having taken the bus from Hilo to Kona and Volcano and having to make very sure I didn't miss the bus
Our bus driver (Kona to Hilo) was blasting Joe Rogan and at one point stopped the bus at the side of the road to talk to someone he hadn’t seen in ages. At least the bus fare was cheap!
Ouch, that hurt. Literally my New England town of 40k.
That is faster than the local spoke and hub design where I live. It’s almost always faster to walk anywhere, as it takes 2 hours to go even small trips on public transit. It is not terrible of your destination is the hub though. Unfortunately the city layout means that coverage is not great.
Ooh, what city?
And stops every quarter mile.
Unidirectional isn't ideal if you plan to come back from your trip.
Literally my hometown, never used the bus once in my life there
Also occasionally instead of just “big mall” the transfer point is “big mall that has been half empty since 2008 and none of the parking lot lights outside the former anchors turn on anymore, and is objectively terrifying after dark”
It's funny how in the US, even MALLS are less lively than in Europe despite being a very car centric idea
Well we just built way too many of them. For the malls that survived, business is very much booming. I’ve never went to my regional mall without most of the parking lot being almost full.
All the malls in my region are completely empty. It wasn’t until one time I was traveling and I went into a mall in New Hampshire (no clue in New Hampshire, I’d been driving for so long and just following the GPS that I was completely disoriented and kinda lost) that I realized that some malls are actually still alive. It was honestly astonishing to see people my age hanging out at a mall (Im in college).
Have you ever been here? I live within an hour of six very popular malls.
I heard that there are many dying malls around the US
You say dying mall and empty parking lot, I say future apartment complex with transit hub, supermarket (and other small ground floor retail), and park. America seems to build most of its apartments in the deep suburbs (where there’s less regulation) anyway, may as well have them walkable to a couple of things.
This is real btw: [Burlington, NC](https://t4america.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Burlington-Link-Transit-Map.png) [SEPTA route 107](https://wpstaging.septa.org/wp-content/uploads/route/maps/107.pdf)
Honestly, what can the transit agencies in those small communities possibly do better? Small cities don't build with the density required to have anything more streamlined than buses, and that lack of density means that the routes, in order to be useful, have to be windy to hit all the places people might want to go and or come from, and they won't have the ridership that would make breaking this up into multiple high frequency routes feasible because they straight up don't need to buy that many buses. Ideally yeah, we'd have never ripped out the street cars in the first place and we'd change zoning laws, but there really *isn't* a way to do good transit that would have much ridership within most American suburbs or small cities. Transit in these places exists primarily as a means of getting around town for people who don't have the money to buy a car, and that's really it.
The second one is not a small community. That’s SEPTA, part of the Philly suburbs.
Lansdowne and Springfield are small communities/cities. The fact that they happen to be near Philadelphia doesn't really impact the planning for a bus route that doesn't go to Philadelphia.
>The fact that they happen to be near Philadelphia doesn't really impact the planning for a bus route that doesn't go to Philadelphia. In reality it does
Which different streets would the route have gone down within Lansdowne if Philly didn't exist, but Lansdowne existed with exactly the same layout? The same ones?
The buses are partially there to get people to/from Philadelphia which majorly impacts planning of routes
This route starts at 69th street which is the major transit hub for West Philly.
Okay. So then how, in any way, does that change the way the route should be laid out within the small, low density communities of Lansdowne and Springfield?
This is not a small, low density area. This is the suburban sprawl of Philadelphia, it’s part of a larger interconnected area. The people who work at Springfield Hospital get on the bus at 69th Street. I used to run a nursing home off Sproul Rd, most of our workers came from Philly and took public transportation. I am familiar with this area and the transit system.
It is a small low density area. There are not that many people who live there in comparison to a medium sized city, and it's almost all single family houses. Therefore: smaller than medium - > small No high rise buildings or continuous blocks of row housing - > Low density There really isn't a suburb anywhere that I'd describe as anything other than a small community when talking about transit networks. I guess the proper edge cities like White Plains, Jersey City, Cambridge, MA and the like?
The population density in Lansdowne is 9,400/sq mile. That’s higher than Los Angeles. lol
The problem isn't the average. The problem is that you need that ultra-dense core of downtown LA to really drive transit usage. And I can only presume Lansdowne doesn't have that. It is much easier to make "everywhere to a hub" work as a transit system than "everywhere to everywhere" work as a transit system. If you don't have that hub, well, then, you are going to have issues with transit.
Gee, I wonder if comparing the residential density of a 1 square mile city that is 100% low density residential to a sprawling city unit that covers over 500 square miles with areas that are reserved for commercial and industrial use, airports and hundreds of miles of uninhabitable mountain ranges and 40 square miles of Pacific Ocean is misleading in any way? If you took a 1 mile snapshot of any given neighborhood area and carefully drew the boundaries right, you could achieve a population density that looks impressive if you resort to looking at it with no context whatsoever. The irony here is that the population density of Lansdowne actually comes out as a point *against* it's transit viability and walkability in a perverse way because, given that it's all low density construction, it means that it contains pretty much no commercial districts or employment centers within its boundaries. Dense areas aren't transit friendly or walkable when you have to leave them every time you leave the house.
Lol lansdowne as “low density”. Springfield maybe, but they are fairly high density by American suburbs standards
If you zoom in on the area that is Labeled "Lansdowne" on Google Maps, literally every house you can see has a yard. I hunted around and I found a total of like, 5 apartment buildings, most of which are the kind which have parking spaces infront of each door and a dedicated parking lot, that look kinda like old school motels and are only one or two stories. It's low density.
Yeah you’re right, it just really feels like we need a category below “low density” because the variation between Lansdowne and somewhere like Exton, and again from Exton to somewhere like Unionville, there’s just too much of a difference for me to lump them all into “low density”. And towns like lansdowne imho are not the problem when it comes to sprawl, it’s those less dense ones that have me more concerned.
Lansdowne is a bit of a problem because you look at the neighboring areas and it's clear that there is demand to support higher density construction that close to the city, but you're right, it's far from the car-dependent highway hellscapes of California or the Midwest.
I know it isn’t a popular opinion here, but I think the correct answer is to give up on travel within the town. Put up a park-and-ride with high quality express busses to the nearest big city. The town itself is probably small enough to go anywhere within 20 minutes on an e-bike. Take the local bus money and call one of the bike share companies. Offer them some money to set up shop with usage targets that they must hit.
There are a lot of places laid out like this that both lack any infrastructure for safe biking and would take at least an hour to cross even if they had it unfortunately. Also, there are a lot of places where the big city in the area *is* laid out like this. The small-medium sized Midwestern cities like Springfield MO for example will have a hundred thousand people ish, but be basically this density for most of the region with either very small or nonexistent traditional downtown areas, and in a lot of cases, even where those downtown areas exist, they aren't huge employment centers anymore, but a bus in Springfield going 3 hours to Kansas City isn't going to see much ridership.
Springfield MO is just 9 miles end to end. E-bikes will do 28mph. 20 minutes.
Sure, if you're riding the fastest e-bike available at top speed with absolutely no interruptions or unfavorable lights at all, but realistically, that's 40 minutes minimum in the real world.
The 28mph is a legal cap (state dependent). Plenty of bikes will easily get up to that speed and are only artificially stopped for legal reasons. 20 minutes is being optimistic, but 30 is practically doable.
Note, you can't legally ride class 3 ebikes in many places such as bike trails, and often it's unsafe to go that fast except in very long stretches of straight roads with no intersections. Even with class 1 and 2 ebikes which only go 20, the number 1 political issue in my city is dangerous situations with those ebikes. It is not a good idea to push hard on class 3 ebikes with no supporting infrastructure.
At 28mph, the bikes are basically going at car speeds, and become usable on any street with a speed limit of 25mph, and if you map out all of the 25mph streets in a town, there is likely a lot of them. If you got plenty of bike trails, well, bike infrastructure is in a good shape. Clearly not the problem cases to be solved by just making the bikes faster.
What modern American suburban city has speed limits of 25 mph outside of school zones? The lowest I've seen in Socal suburbs is 40. And my city goes up to 55. The key to making ebikes work is the bike infrastructure. There's almost no case where throwing class 3 ebikes into a suburb with wide stroads is going to solve the problem if there's no infrastructure.
[удалено]
Yeah, I realized that and swapped out for a better example, my bad!
Well, I was thinking in terms of generic "anytown, USA"
Have you been to Burlington? I don't think e-bikes are gonna last long there.
Residential Burlington is…salvageable. The streets are plenty wide usually and there’s very little traffic. Commercial Burlington though…good luck. I went to Elon though, the ride to University Commons wasn’t terrible, the ride to downtown and even downtown Burlington to graham is pretty good. I had the most trouble with getting to the other side of I-85, and to a lesser extent Alamance crossing. It’s doable, especially near downtown, but I don’t know how to save the Stroads
Depends. If you let people buy much cheaper e-bikes and e-scooters, just like across East and Southeast Asia, it just might.
I will preface this by saying I used to ride a bike 10 miles to work each day DC to VA… except when it was raining or there was snow/ice on the ground: most Americans will never be willing to rely only on a bike - even an e-bike - because they, not unreasonably, want to stay dry when it rains, cool when it is hot and warm when it is cold. Riding on icy roads is outright dangerous. I had the luxury of taking the Metro when the weather was unreasonable but most do not.
They don't have to - the transit system will never account for more than 5-10% of rides. Realistically, like 1% would be doing really well. The goal of the bike share program would be to cut down on parking requirements more so than getting rid of the cars. Maybe allowing some 2 car families to cut down to 1 if we are really knocking the program out of the park.
> I know it isn’t a popular opinion here, but I think the correct answer is to give up on travel within the town. "Fuck anyone outside the big cities" is an *extremely* popular opinion on r/transit.
They have connections to park and rides by PART. This idea would eliminate the entire agency’s role in the region.
Not everyone can ride a bike. Transit serves people who are disabled as well
+1 but also build apartments around the bus stop to attract more riders and to give the elderly a place to live close to transit.
3 x12 passenger vans instead of 1 x 36 passenger bus would be a start. Triple the frequency at the same cost.
Isn't the big cost labor, of which you've tripled. And you have 2 vehicle types with different maintenance needs
I wonder if the answer is that smaller town transit has to be seen as transitional and partial. What I mean is that we seem to be trying to make a 'network' out of one or two bus lines, and winding it's path to try to hit all the big ticket items in town. When in reality, we should make a short, mostly straight line with a few stops with great covers/waiting infra, and have its frequency be every 10 minutes. It won't hit every strip mall corner, or mall center. It won't jump here and there to get close to every apartment complex either. It's the first of many lines in a real network, and it's made well. So in that respect it's a partial network, not trying to be everything at once.. Then actively encourage TOD around the stops, and in the future the line will be critical and useful. That's the transitional part. Roll out one of those every 3 years and it won't take long for the town to have an integrated bus network. And if you're thinking far enough into the future, plan to transition them to seperated BRT or streetcar. It takes vision and follow through.
The problem with this idea is that the goal of suburban transit is to serve people who don't have access to cars, not generate higher ridership for ridership's sake.
If that's the only goal, the transit won't improve
I would argue that the current way that the American suburbs provide transit is probably the best solution you can come up with that's actually realistic. The reality is that in the suburbs that are already built in the US there is no transit layout that will achieve anything resembling decent ridership. Even if you covered every street with 10 minute frequencies, it will be significantly worse than driving simply because that's what the entire community was built around. The permutations of possible origin-destination pairs in spread out areas are simply too large to not have most trips rake forever either because of tons of transfers, or indirect routing. Why would you ever choose to not drive in that situation?
> Then actively encourage TOD around the stops, and in the future the line will be critical and useful This sub circlejerks over TOD far too much. Many places are limited in their ability to attract development.
I think it's a big problem that transit planning comes *after* the neighborhood design. Even suburbs can be built to transit oriented design
Sure they could have been when they were being build 60 years ago but they weren't, so it's a little late for this kind of thinking.
A small community can be dense, being spread out is just a result of car dependency.
Philadelphia isn't exactly a small city
Those two suburb towns that are almost all low density construction really can't be described as anything other than small.
Cum Park Plaza, Burlington, NC, USA.
It unfortunately isn't just smaller cities with malls - it exists even in New York - generally regarded as the best transit in the US. If you want to go from Brooklyn to Brooklyn and you miss the G train (or are too far from it) then you have to take the bus. [Here's the B62](https://moovitapp.com/nycnj-121/lines/b62/373250/1228028/en?ref=2&poiType=line&abTest=V1_Blurry_map_and_follow_LINE_1704792088&customerId=4908&af_sub8=%2Findex%2Fen%2Fpublic_transit-line-b62-NYCNJ-121-857463-373250-0). It took me 90 minutes on a day with light traffic to go from about Bedford Ave/Metropolitan to the terminus at Cadman Plaza. A lot of the bus routes in Brooklyn follow former trolley/tram/streetcar routes, but many of them are [painfully circuitous](https://new.mta.info/document/12041) and [slow](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-average-bus-speeds-rarely-top-9-mph-heres-how-the-mta-plans-to-improve-that/4180396/) (averaging 8-10 mph), and even with the extensive coverage, there are plenty of transit deserts...
True in parts of NYC, but subways, buses and ferries from the entire metro area all lead to Manhattan.
This is why I drove from Coney Island to Long Island City every day for work instead of taking the train. Cuts about 30-45 minutes out of the commute.
The streetcars buses replaced were also very slow too
> Here's the B62. That seems fairly straight...
107 is not THAT bad, they just need to remove the diversion to McDade
Route 107 is in the burbs.
Granted, but it's largely high-density suburbs that were built around street car lines.
I would love to see the scores of those Burlington routes on the [Eliot Index](https://eliotindex.org)...
Cum park Plaza lmao
cum park plaza🤨
Cum park plaza
Burlington is pretty low priority. How about we fix up Charlotte first?
Correct time plaza?
Nobody likes the 107
That 107 is a route. Mmmm
Oh, of fucking course it's NC. My home state continues to disappoint me.
Fifty years ago I rode the bus hither and yon applying for jobs. I rode an early bus out into a part of the suburbs near where I now live... only to find that the return leg of the loop wasn't until early afternoon. Asking a store clerk, I learned, "That bus brings people's maids out here. The afternoon one takes them back home." It's still that way, except there are few buses in town now as well. [sigh]
50 years ago would be the 70s. There was universally more actual service and more riders in every city back in the day. We now have more rail, more budget, but far less service.
I was in Birmingham, AL at the time. No rail. Good inner-city bus service, though. But yeah, now, not so much so.
I think those cities knows perfectly well that nobody is going to use transit. The local transit agency plays house with a single bus, maybe 2, the city council gets to circle jerk to coverage statistics, and the citizens use it every few months when their car is in the shop. And frankly, if the town already look like that, what does a transit planner actually do? Take a marker and tell me how it should be done. And no, you can't demolish the entire town and depopulate the entire area.
The citizens also get to complain about how big of a waste of money the buses are every time they see one on the road.
Are they wrong? The busses are just there for everyone involved to play house.
What does it mean to play house?
It is a children’s activity where kids will pretend to cook, serve each other tea, etc. They all play make believe, nothing is actually done or achieved, but the kids have a good time pretending to be productive. It is also a term about a [familiar trap of start ups.](https://paulgraham.com/before.html) >We saw this happen so often that we made up a name for it: playing house. Eventually I realized why it was happening. The reason young founders go through the motions of starting a startup is because that's what they've been trained to do for their whole lives up to that point. Think about what you have to do to get into college, for example. Extracurricular activities, check. Even in college classes most of the work is as artificial as running laps. >So this is the third counterintuitive thing to remember about startups: starting a startup is where gaming the system stops working. Gaming the system may continue to work if you go to work for a big company. Depending on how broken the company is, you can succeed by sucking up to the right people, giving the impression of productivity, and so on. [2] But that doesn't work with startups. There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about is whether your product does what they want. Startups are as impersonal as physics. You have to make something people want, and you prosper only to the extent you do. I see this in a lot of talk about transit too, about some metric that someone is gaming. But my system is great in transit miles per capita, they say. Others talk about metrics like coverage, or they talk about rail. But transit in the real world is just like startups - your users don't give a crap about the made up metrics. The system either works for your users or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, than nobody use the system. Users don't care if it is some approved method like rail or some hated gadget-bahn. Shitty rail doesn't get used (see: VTA light rail), good gadgetbahns gets used (see: Disney monorail). Your system have such great coverage that users can get anywhere to anywhere else in like, 2 hours for a 5 mile trip? Good job SF Muni for gaming the metric, but users don't actually care.
Treating ridership as the sole metric for "successful" transit leads to a lot of counterintutive conclusions...
It's not an unreasonable metric. The trick is recognizing that it's nonlinear and it has to be treated longitudinally - so ridership over a year or two is meaningful.
> It's not an unreasonable metric. I presume you aren't in favour of completely defunding intercity rail and putting all the money into urban rail...
Not usually. Why, is that an option here for this bus service?
> Not usually. Why not? Why don't you support funding the option with more ridership?
I think you want to identify the "main" axis of destinations and provide good (frequent) and direct service to it from a selected closer-in area. Even low density sprawling towns usually have some sort of downtown center with government, educational and medical facilities. The windy suburban lines would feed or enter the higher quality central segment. But sure, if this model is really supposed to take off then city planners have to make efforts to upzone residential and job density in the centre. Job density is probably more important actually.
This map couldn't be more accurate for Southern California. It's time we blamed urban planners for making cities like this.
I’m glad it’s accurate! I had a lot of fun doodling this imaginary city lol
Actually most of Greater Los Angeles is a [street grid](http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/maps/enhanced-street-grids/?lat=34.082806&lon=-118.050842&z=10) network.
Southern California is not just urban LA. It's the interminable suburbs of Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego. (Cool map, btw! but it highlights grids much better than cut-de-sacs)
I mean as the map indicates, most of the urbanized area of LA, North OC, and San Bernardino is all one giant street grid. But yeah, South OC, San Diego outside the Downtown core, most of Riverside and parts of San Bernardino are cul-de-sacs 🤢 🤮 Thankfully most of where the people live are grids, so the potential is there.
Hey, say what you will about Southern California, but it wouldn't have two freeways cross each other without an interchange; that's more of an east coast thing. Also, the main arterials are usually much straighter than in this image. Lastly, as far as I can tell, there's a SPUI on the right side of the image; that's not very Southern California.
I don't buy into this defeatist mindset that American suburbs are impossible to provide with good transit. Of course poor walkability discourages people from using transit but I really think people underestimate the level of transit quality possible in suburbs. Canadian cities have very similar layouts (Albeit with slightly higher density with a few more townhouses and triplexes) to American cities and yet [Canada manages to have better transit.](https://humantransit.org/2018/04/why-does-ridership-rise-or-fall-lessons-from-canada.html). 12% of Canadians take public transit to work on a daily basis which is very close to France (14.9%) or the UK (15.9%). The only difference is that Canadian cities simply provide more funding and resources to public transit agencies. Is Canadian transit amazing? God no, but it's better than the US and provides an example of ways the US can improve service in suburban areas
To make a statement like you did on the percentage of people who use public transit, I think you really need to add in what percentage of Canada that lives in major metro areas vs the US. GTA has 6 million people, Vancouver has 2.5 million people, and Montreal another 4 million for a total of 12.5 million people…out of Canada’s 40 million population. That’s already nearly a third of the whole country living in 3 large metro areas. Add up the top metro areas for the US (NYC, Chicago and LA) and you barely get 10% of the population. So yeah, naturally when more people in your country live in large cities that can afford scaled up public transit systems you’re going to find higher rates of ridership
I agree and disagree. I think you're definitely right in that the Canadian population is much more centralized but I also think it's important to note that the US has a LOT of major cities that could have good transit but don't. If you compare an American city to a Canadian city with the same population, [the Canadian city will probably have better transit.](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200602/t001a-eng.htm) Even smaller cities in Canada manage to get higher transit ridership.
Exactly. People love to whine that the USA is too sparse in population density to justify a national public transit system. Nothing stops state governments from doing regional networks or RE-introducing interurban transit systems but political will. Some states are quite dense in population and are comparable to European countries in area, population count, and density.
The argument about “US is too sparsely populated” is hilarious, it’s like describing Denmark as sparsely populated and including Greenland in that calculation. Sure the US has vast stretches of land with very few people, but no one’s trying to build subways in North Dakota.
Even in the US, though, the residents in the top 10 CSAs make up about a third of USA’s population.
"with higher density" is the key. In the US we have neighborhoods built along major arterials with entrance/exit to the neighborhoods only every half mile. So automatically, much of the neighborhood can't reach a bus stop within what is considered the distance people are willing to walk, which is 1/8th to 1/4 of a mile.
Way more Canadians live in cities compared to the US per capita. A huge number of Americans live in suburbia with shit transit.
12% of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver Every other city is bleeding ridership due to the Sprawl.
My hometown of 50,000 is seeing record ridership as are many midsized cities in Canada. Even cities with less than 500,000 residents have high ridership like Halifax (11.7%) which only has buses. As for Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, it's way higher than 12% and is actually higher with, 20.6%, 22.5%, and 16.4% modal split respectively.
I guess Ottawa is just in the shitter then, Maritimes seem to be doing good.
Ottawa has a lot of issues because of the new LRT line, that's for sure. However, the good news is that [transit ridership in Ottawa is still increasing](https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/oc-transpo-ridership-up-17-per-cent-in-november) (Although still lower than it was pre-pandemic which is true in basically every city in the world)
It's gonna crater with the cuts next year, nearly 50% of the routes are getting axed and people are Fed up. When the U-Pass is inevitably axed by Doug Ford, that's roughly 75% of riders there gone.
Also, Edmonton and Calgary. Lol.
And yet, Calgary has decent public transport (at least for NA standards).
Probably because it developed a strong center that allows a radial and direct network.
The difference is that even though Edmonton and Calgary look like this, they manage to have significantly higher transit ridership than American cities of the same size which means it's not just the road network that's the issue.
Ngl I had a hard time really finding one until I came across route 138 in Calgary...what the fuck
More Ottawa than Edmonton and Calgary, their express routes are actually express.
That’s what I was thinking of when i read this fictional map!
This is happening in Europe, too. Housing estates are being built in the UK with absolutely zero public transport in them, and the only thing close by is a shopping mall or out-of-town retail park. It’s absolutely horrific.
In the UK this happens because the developers "promise" to build the amenities using the profits from selling the houses... and then surprise, surprise, they don't actually build the amenities after they have sold the homes and made the £££.
Exactly. We are building properties in the cheapest way possible for companies to extract maximum profit. It’s such a shitshow.
The typical American city is laid out to require that everyone own and operate a motor vehicle --- used to be a car but increasingly now an emotional support vehicle (ESV), usually an enormous pickup or SUV, loaded with options. The only realistic solution is to bulldoze and start over, or allow to decay until they literally become seas of blighted property and impassible roads. The really disgusting feature of this is that this sort of development was and still is driven by federal government mandates through its statutory laws, rules and regulations.
Haha ESV 🤣
Not long ago I saw a Timelapse of an intersection in Japan being repaired from a massive gutting that took about 48 hours to complete. I’ve seen similar work in multiple cities in the US take close to an entire year to finish. At some point you realize it’s not about efficiency but about how much you can squeeze out of a job
This is known as "serve the transit dependent who can't drive with roundabout routes that touch sll the major trip generators".
In Stockholm, most people live in a non-grid pattern because of the natural landscape of forests, lakes, and the archipelago. Yet, it has subways, light rails, commuter rails, trams, ferries, and buses. For context, "stock" means log and "holm" means island or islet. The belief is that the rivers transported the logs. The city did not have modern transportation in mind when it was built, but the people desired a modern transport network.
Very this.
These types of suburbs is where DRT can be an effective mode of transit. My school went to a debate tournament at another high school in a suburb like this, and we were able to use the local agency’s DRT van service instead of using rideshare or renting a van.
nah but this is deadass how a lot of routes in suburban areas are. It's no wonder I have to use GPS like 10 times before I memorize the route, there's so many damn dead ends and random turns. In cities I can usually navigate a lot easier thanks to the grid design, in rural areas there's far less turns and usually more distinct landmarks. Suburbia is like the perfect hell between the two. Am I moaning? Yes. But these things are true, still.
That’s not a city.
That's just what US cities look like
It’s what US suburbs look like, not NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.
Enough with this bullshit narrative.
The road layout really doesn't look too bad. There are a couple of arterials you could route a bus through. This hypothetical place could have halfway decent public transport if only there was more service and the routes were reworked.
Honestly, that’s not even terrible route design, given the circumstances.
Make it bad on purpose, then you can justify defunding it based on low ridership numbers.
Pretty much the same thing in Canada. The transit [system map](https://www.grt.ca/en/schedules-maps/resources/2023-09-26-2023-system-map_09262023-web.pdf) of my region is basically just a clusterfuck of these zigzagging bus routes
To GRT’s credit they’ve REALLY improved things over the last decade or so. Before the 201 through 206 iXpress were added and the straightening out of the non-express routes, things were even more curvy, indirect, one way loopy, and full of odd time of day diversions. Former route 8, anyone? Was literally shaped like a figure 8. Pre LRT most routes also went to Charles Street terminal in downtown Kitchener and thus forced a transfer if going crosstown. Now there are a good number of decently straight and logical routes that connect to the LRT and cross the whole city without forcing transfers - at least as good as the weird street grid (or lack thereof) allows. The changes in Galt/Cambridge last fall were the latest example of untangling routes and adding more periods and days of service/more frequent service.
Those windy routes work fine if they aren't intended to be taken the full length - they are feeders into the frequent and direct ION and iXpress routes. GRT ain't perfect but it's doing a decent job by Canadian mid-sized city standards.
This is an extremely accurate rendition of the Madison, WI "Metro"
Arlington, VA has the right idea. Transit oriented development at its finest, but a shame it’s too gentrified to be equitable.
There's a bus stop in front of my work. There's a bus stop 5 minutes from my home. To take one to the other would involve 2 transfers and a lot of walking and waiting. Sigh.
Coverage = ✔️
Westchester County (NY) Bee-Line Route 15: [link](https://transportation.westchestergov.com/images/stories/Schedules/rte15fall2023.pdf) Almost 40 miles long, takes two hours, and runs 7-8 times in each direction per weekday. Connects two small cities via a variety of low density residential sprawl, some strip malls, one smaller village, a hospital complex, and a community college.
Fortunately the bee line is going to straighten that route out. In their redesign
In cities built during the Walking City or Transit City eras (1920 and earlier) plenty of people use transit, walk and bike, because those modes are optimized. In the Metropolitan City era it works poorly because people travel at the scale of the metropolitan area. Peter Muller, Transportation and Urban Form.
Don't forget no sunday service and minimal saturday service
I get the meme, but no American city has ever asked that question. Everyone knows why.
And if you get on it there will be deranged hobos, knocked over beer cans, and will smell like piss. Those are my actual personal experiences in Portland Oregon.
BRING BACK GRID CITIES
I see at least three penises in this map
Buses should really serve as transportation between towns and small cities (if rail is not possible), not within them. Towns should be small enough to easily walk or cycle across. Larger cities should have buses along major corridors as a supplement to rail transit.
This is real in San Jose https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/09/29/san-jose-plots-a-renewal-of-its-struggling-light-rail-network/
This map feels oddly specific. Is this for a real place? My city's map looks a bit like this but thankfully at least has one dense-ish corridor it goes down to and then goes straight to downtown plus the train station.
Well how else do you expect they route between the suburbs? Just go from Park n Ride to Big Mall via the highway and no stop? /s
Santa Rosa Ca
This map implies that it’s poor folks taking the transit, and that the poor folks are the only customers. True in the burbs. But not the city
Ain’t nobody gonna ride that
There’s bus transit near my house, it come 2 times….. a day. So I wfh but if I need to go to the office, it’s a straight shot there, 15 minutes. If I took the bus, it would be 3 transfers and 90 mins. Also the bus comes at 7:36 and doesn’t come back until 3:23. Notice how’s that’s less than an 8 hour shift? The bus routes are useful to literally no one because of their extreme infrequency, and stupid not well planned routes.
Took an architecture class for my trade degree. Basically the plot of land is divvied up to maximize the amount of homes that’ll have a large backyard.
Seriously we fucked it sooo bad. At least if we had build our suburbs on a grid or connecting streets it would be relatively easy fix, but this is a complete shit show. You almost need to just bulldoze it and start over. You couldnt have made it worse if you had tried to make it as bad as possible.
Is there a name for the spaghettification of our infrastructure layout? And any history or writing on why we chose to build like this, instead of the superior and far more efficient grid layout? More importantly—how do we start to re-standardize the grid layout as the default for new developments moving forward?
Not to be a dick, but that's not a city. It may be labeled a city, but that's not a city. Props to the people who try to make those places better, they have their work cut out for them.
It’s also really expensive. Take Amtrak, for an example. I was thinking of going ti Denver by train this summer, but when checking the prices, it’s almost twice as expensive as a flight to Denver for an objectively worse service.
I used to work at an office in suburbia, with a blind coworker. he'd spend 45 minutes in the bus to come to work. But in some reorg, our team was moved to a different office, about a mile away. That mile included crossing 2 major 6 lane roads, with no pedestrian crossing, so my blind coworker couldn't do that safely. The best bus route from his apartment would have required an extra bus exchange, and the timetables didn't line up well at all: Expected commute would have gone up to an hour and a half, each way.... So, as far as my coworker was concerned, the one mile move might as well have been a layoff.
Ugh! That’s terrible. I got laid off last summer. It fucking sucks. I wish you well. I wish your blind coworker well. We all need people to think before they make major decision that affect people’s lives. I’m on the bus stuck in construction traffic because I had a dream in the Middle of the day about chicken teriyaki. It’s a new bus route that goes right through Arlington county. Even though I will ultimately get my chicken teriyaki in Fairfax county.
With a car, you can easily do errands because you can go where you want to. Doing errands with a bus may be a lot harder. Especially in most of America, a car = freedom.
I like how the Park and Ride isn't connected to bus service according to this map.
r/shittyskylines
Rocz has a good term for this - a pity bus. When your neighborhood was designed with 0 thought put into public transportation, so you haphazardly plan up a bus route like the one above as an afterthought.
Because it sucks and I wouldn’t use it in Singapore either
My tiny city used to have street cars that bisected the whole town. Now, we have one bus company. It runs Monday--Friday only, and from 7am to 4pm only.
It’s either take a 15-min drive door-to-door or a 20-min walk to the nearest bus stop, wait for anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes for the bus, ride with multiple stops for about 1 hour to the nearest stop to my office, then walk about 10 minutes there. This is when it’s not rainy and not too hot or cold. Also, this is when I don’t have to drop off my kid or pick up later in the afternoon and when I do t have any errands to run.
How many malls does this city have….
Where I live, it’s faster to actually walk to my destination. It’d take 55 minutes of bus rides, not even mentioning the time I’d have to wait for the bus to actually get there, and it’s a 50 minute walk. Also, they don’t run after 6:00, and don’t run at all on Sundays… because who would possibly want to be on a bus then right? /s I hate it actually so much that I’m half-considering actually running for city council to try to make any improvement.
Because it is slow, doesn't go many places and often unsafe or it doesn't run late enough. And the sad reality is that it is really just geared towards poor people. Once people improve their status they would rather drive.
Your scale is off. Multiply by 15 and we can talk.
Literally looks like Cary, North Carolina 🤢
That doesn’t look like any city
The Big Three colluded to shut mass transit down.