I timed it. Most of that time is waiting for a transfer, yes, but getting there by car takes about 20 minutes...

There has been more than one time, where it has been raining when I got on the first bus, and then not raining anymore when I got off the second.

There's no benches where you transfer buses and it's supposed to be the bus center for the city. It's an island of curb in the middle of a huge mall parking-lot. You stand there or sit on the curb for like forty minutes sometimes.

You can actually see the swirls of the wind in the plastic wrapper garbage that blows by. The area is like semi enclosed by big box stores so my theory is that it like accumulates the airborne garbage somehow.

Another reason why it takes so long is that the first stop which is by my neighborhood...

(For context my neighborhood is like an isolated suburb off of a four lane highway...)

(Except it's a not really a highway and there are houses with driveways connected to it. I guess it's more like an arterial road of the city or something, but if I'm remembering correctly, it doesn't merge with a highway, it becomes one.)

You can't get off on the first stop because it's on the other side of the highway / street / road. It's impossible to cross. There's just no way.

What you have to do to not get stranded when you get off the second bus, is wait until the route cycles through all the stops in the outskirts of the city, and then get off at that stop when it's coming the other way, on the other side of the road.

There is no bus sign, just an indent in the sidewalk wide enough and long enough for a vehicle to park. There are no benches.

Then I walk for around 2 minutes (that I'm not counting) through the suburbs to get to my house.

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[–] 4 points 1 day ago (7 children)

It's pathetic that buses take 2-3x longer than driving, I have the same situation for most destinations. It's especially grueling in the darkness of winter.

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  • [–] 1 point 15 hours ago (4 children)

    That's bad design.

    We need to make roads and highways have fewer car lanes (covert existing lanes to bus-only or bicycle-only lanes. Or build light rail). Ideally Max 1 car lane in every direction.

    Then busses and trains will be faster than cars.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

    a lot of the time it's not even the fault of the road design, it's that bus routes are stupid. Especially america seems to suffer a lot from bus routes that make no fucking sense whatsoever, it's like they're actively designed to be as circuitous and slow as possible.
    And even if they're not that horrendous it's very very common worldwide to just have way too many stops along the way, like 200 meters between bus stops is not uncommon and that shit slows them way the fuck down.

    The most charitable interpretation of this is that public transport organizations know that disabled/elderly people need the buses to get around, and thus they prioritize minimal walking distance to the bus stops over having the buses go fast.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago (2 children)

    The solution to this is 4 lanes dedicated to busses only.

    The outer lanes are express busses. The inner lanes are local busses.

    Also with dedicated bus lanes, you can hang electric lines above the lanes and get electric busses with very small batteries

    Ideally the express busses turn into local busses (and vice versa) when they cross some delimiter (eg bypass highway, river, downtown city limit, etc)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago (1 child)

    this "solution" is not much better than saying "just fix it".
    Yeah sure they could implement those things if we magically gave 10x the budget to public transport, but until then.. none of that is happening.

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  • The key is to charge exorbitant fees to cars in order to subsidize public transport.

    Eliminate all free street parking, and charge several dollars per hour. Double the cost of gasoline for noncommercial purposes. Charge $20-100 for crossing a bridge or tunnel.

    Eventually the vast majority of the population will sell their cars and opt for public transportation. And when that happens, you'll have all the funding you need.

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