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Why Buses Need To Be More Dangerous
HughPickens.com writes: Is there such a thing as being too safe? Jeff Kaufman writes that buses are much safer than cars, by about a factor of 67 but buses are not very popular and one of the main reasons is that if you look at situations where people who can afford private transit take mass transit instead, speed is the main factor. According to Kauffman, we should look at ways to make buses faster so more people will ride them, even if this means making them somewhat more dangerous. Kauffman presents some ideas, roughly in order from "we should definitely do this" to "this is crazy, but it would probably still reduce deaths overall when you take into account that more people would ride the bus": Suggestions include not to require buses to stop and open their doors at railroad crossings, allow the driver to start while someone is still at the front paying, allow buses to drive 25mph on the shoulder of the highway in traffic jams where the main lanes are averaging below 10mph, and leave (city) bus doors open, allowing people to get on and off any time at their own risk. "If we made buses more dangerous by the same percentage that motorcycles are more dangerous than cars," concludes Kauffman, "they would still be more than twice as safe as cars."
Making the ride could be funnier as well...
Never going to happen though. Once someone as much as mentions a potential risk, the result with the current culture is an overreaction to avoid it.
...you could just replace buses with trams or trains, because people like those and will travel on them if they're built.
Everyone hates buses, because they are an inferior mode of transport compared to rail.
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Because this cannot go wrong, right? faster buses, people getting on and off whenever wherever...allow drivers to drive off before people are seated...
How much time will be saved overall per trip? does that justify the risk?
To examine the ridiculousness of this I suggest that Kauffman get into his car; drive with doors open, let his family get on and off as they please and make sure not to remain stopped when they do not have their seatbelts on.
Even if he thinks this is a great idea and willing to do that with his kids how many of us will follow? -I sure aint.
Otherwise bus lanes on highways is not new...
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
No what is needed is having bus routes not suck. Wan to know why i drive instead of taking the bus? Because I dont have 1.5 hours for my commute to take the bus that goes from the stop near my home, to the mall, then to the other community and then finally downtown. Public transportation needs 2X the number of buses and 2X the number of routes.
PLUS there needs to be high speed limited stops large bus lines from suburbs to city and small cities around the large one at the fare rate that makes them usable.
Greyhound service is available from my city to where I work 40 miles away... at 3X the price of me driving and 5X the amount of time it takes to get there.
Public transportation in most american cities are not set up to be used, they are set up for the unemployed where they have 2 hours to fuck around on bus routes to get somewhere.
And that is not even covering the subject of the old man that smells of puke in the back that is screaming passages from revelations and never get's off the bus.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...as our local bus drivers are maniacs. Weaving in and out of traffic like ambulance drivers on meth.
Buses need to be faster, even at the cost of reducing safety. Arguing that buses need to be designed to be more dangerous is disenguous. No one *wants* more dangerous buses. Better title: Buses need to be faster, even if more dangerous.
- Ben Bederson Professor Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction Lab University of Maryland
If executing one man per month reduced car accidents to 0, should the government approve such execution?
Jeff Kaufman should be a bit more careful on his analysis on decisions that involve actively sacrificing some human beings to save others.
The logic is sound, if people were cattle.
What do you think about when you hear "bus" and "accident" in the same phrase? Lawsuits? Pedestrians hopping on the crashed bus?
This is so frequent there have been stings set up purposely to single out the fraudsters
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Road shoulders for bus use already exist.
Leaving doors open while running makes passengers less comfortable in hot or cold weather, makes them worry about falling out, and barely increases speed. So it's not recommended.
At-grade crossings of rail lines are rare, so not much is gained by ignoring safety rules at them.
Driving while people are still paying their fares is a good idea. But really people shouldn't be paying their fares at the front of the bus. There should be fare payment machines scattered throughout the bus, so people can get on by any door and pay there shortly after boarding. Occasional inspectors will make sure that fare evasion is minimal. This system is widespread in Europe, but the only US city that I know of to implement it (on more than a handful of routes) is San Francisco.
The mechanisms that *really* increase bus speed do so by impacting the speed/capacity of a smaller number of car users. These include separate bus lanes, and traffic signals that automatically turn green when a bus approaches. These are politically difficult to implement in the US.
We could slow down other traffic. Perhaps by having snipers shooting out the tyres of every hundredth car? That should have the same effect of encouraging people onto public transport.
Seriously. Sometimes thinking the unthinkable is stupid.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Replace the tires with racing slicks, re-paint the entire thing with primer only, loosen a few body panels, disable the governor, install a rear spoiler and fart can and you're ready to go.
It's sort of been done, in London, since forever. It still doesn't make buses faster than driving.
Part of the speed equation is convenience. It is faster and far more convenient to drive(ride) on demand, rather than waiting for a scheduled arrival/departure. It is also faster and more convenient to go directly from embarkation to destination, than it is to walk/ride to a bus stop, ride the but and possibly transfer buses, arrive at another bus stop that then also requires walking/riding to your final destination.
Unless there no parking available, driving is almost always faster than riding a bus. You can't change that. People ride buses for two reasons. 1. They can;t afford a car. 2. There's no parking for their car.
If they can afford a car and there is parking, they will never ride a bus. Never!
My biggest complaint with busses is that they have other people on them.
People don't use buses in US because there are no buses. Outside New York, there is scarcely any usable public transportation in even largest metropolitan areas. Washington DC (with the second largest metro in US, which is also something like 50th world-wide) has what would be considered a "well developed" bus system for US. The buses in many areas run only during rush hour, and even then - 1-2 an hour. Outside rush hour (and immediate city center) buses run once an hour or not at all. The routes are designed to bring suburban commuters to metro stations or city center. There are virtually no usable routes that could take a person shopping, to school, much less from one non-central area to another. Making these buses faster won't change the fact that they are not very practical and few and far between.
Public transportation requires commitment of public funds and desire to develop and support a system. No city in US seems to have the will.
I support anything that makes commutes more dangerous. The highway was closed this morning due to yet another accident... The more morons that get killed, the easier my commute to work.
In the north of the UK, busses set off while people are still walking down the isle - always have. In the countryside they drive like maniacs. They're still outrageously slow and not that much cheaper than getting a cab.
When I was in collage, there was a bus that went door to door. It took between 45 minutes and 70 minutes depending on traffic. The same trip takes 10 minute by car.
There's a bus stop outside a pub I frequent, but I wouldn't consider using it. Busses are for the poor. People with adults jobs either get a cab or drive.
... where the bus drivers usually start while you just climbed the bus, always go over the speed limit, and they already keep the door always opened (in order to be able to start while you are in the first rung).
And still, less accidents with them, because other drivers know they're crazy and take care to never drive around them.
PS: Crazy Bus, sounds like a Sega game.
All buses should have a polar bear as a passenger.
The added excitement and danger would make bus travel more attractive to potential customers.
A bus doesn't need to go faster for in-town stuff... plenty fast for that already. Well, except that one that can't go below 50mph...
The reason a bus takes forever to get across town that may take you 20 minutes in a car is that they are stopping every half mile to pickup/drop off passengers.
If a bus route system is designed with multiple "hubs" - where multiple routes intersect - then having a few buses doing nothing but "hub to hub" runs without any stops in between could probably make things better in some cases.
Example - here where I live the "main" central hub for most routes is down town, and a second exists out at our mall 6 miles away. But any bus traveling from down town to the mall area could potentially stop 10 times between those 2 points to drop off or pick up passengers. So to go from down town to the mall area and then out to a local community college, you have up to 10 extra stops (at 2 minutes each lets say) and then the mall to the college there are 4 or 5 more stops. This route would take 20 minutes by car, but with the bus not only do you have that 20 minutes but you also have a potential for up to 15 stops at 2 minutes each ... which doubles the time the ride takes.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Also,
- You can opt to play a round of Russian Roulette instead of purchasing a ticket.
- A random seat in the bus is a catapult seat. The roof may or may not be retractable over that seat.
...a specially reserved lane where only buses (and taxis, in some jurisdictions) may drive. We have tons of them in the Netherlands. Depending on the environment, they may go 50 km/h, 80 km/h, or even 100-120 km/h (on highways). High-speed bus lanes also exist, where only specially developed buses may drive, at a higher speed than the other traffic on normal roads, and, like trams, they get absolute priority over all other traffic. Wikipedia has a in English page on one of the first lines developed, here: Zuidtangent (sadly, most other pages are in Dutch)
No need for more danger, only for better buses and dedicated infrastructure.
Suggestions include not to require buses to stop and open their doors at railroad crossings
Eh? They just stop at any railroad crossing they come to and open their doors? Why?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Buses and (short-distance/commuter) trains both suffer from nearly the exact same drawbacks; buses have traffic issues but can be rerouted according to needs (such as re-evaluating the route layouts on a yearly basis). Trains don't suffer from road traffic, but are far more expensive to reroute if changes in demand calls for it.
And anyway,,,, all mass-transit suffers from two major utilization issues that are inherent in the very concept. One is that to be useful during peak-use times the carrying capacity runs nearly empty the rest of the time. How can that ever be considered efficiency? The other is that to be useful to lots of potential riders, mass-transit must be accessible (with lots of boarding and exiting locations) but increasing the number of stops lowers the average speed until the service overall becomes undesirable compared to other methods.
The way of the future is not mass-transit at all, but individual transportation. That is--motorized vehicles built for JUST one person.
The problems of individual vehicles are technological and can be easily improved upon. Smaller 1-2 person vehicles, less cost, lighter weights, better safety in crashes, better fuel economy, and so on.
The utilization problems facing mass-transit are inherent in its design and cannot be solved.
Why do we need people to ride buses? After all, per passenger, carbon emissions from buses are worse than from your typical modern economy car.?
You just hate looking at cars that much you'd like the environment to take one in the teeth to keep your eyes from being sore?
Busses are a convenience factor for the government, not for the people. It's a way of putting in a mass transit system without having to build anything more than a few signposts and buy a vehicle.
You want faster buses, put in the necessary infrastructure. Bus lanes, priority traffic lights, busways, heck some cities have built massive underground bus stations complete with interconnected stops, tunnels, and dedicated highways / bridges (think a metro system which isn't confined to tracks).
Currently buses share the road with cars and all the downsides that traffic, red lights, and stop signs entail. You're never going to be faster or more convenient than a car unless you do something serious to tip the scales in favour of the buses.
Take MARTA sometime in Atlanta. First, you pick up your bus and after many stops, it has to go to a terminal where you have to pick up another bus that isn't due for another 40 minutes because of its route and many stops. What is needed is more buses covering smaller routes.
But that won't happen because they don't have the money. Why?
Because busses are for poor slobs - or Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta as MARTA is know by non-PC people.
It's all about class and prestige. People would rather sit in traffic for hours than ride the lowly bus with blacks, white trash and us kooks who think cars are the biggest waste of money in our society.
Use taxes as an excuse? Well, total up your car payments, insurance, maintenance, taxes and you are going to tell me that extra 1% sales tax is going to be a burden?!
People in this country are so retarded when it comes to taxes and money.
How about just stop accepting cash? I know this isn't practical in some places, but here in London where you have the choice of Oyster or contactless debit/credit cards, this has worked well.
Personally I don't like buses because I get motion sickness on them, or their ride is uncomfortable. Oh, and their reliability in terms of turning up when they're supposed too. I always take the Tube or rail if I can instead.
Pop quiz, hotshot. There's a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do?
Given that a bus has frequent stops it is going to be hard to speed up unless you also increase the acceleration and deceleration which will make riding the bus far less pleasant. In addition the call to make them more dangerous is likely to have exactly the opposite effect. How long do you think you will be delayed if someone falls off the open door trying to get on or off the bus?
A far better way to increase the speed of the bus is to have bus lanes. No increase in danger with a huge increase in speed in heavy traffic. Surely this is the best way to go before introducing buses which might cause the occasional massive delay at the expense of someone's life?
Nonsense.
The key issue with public transport is frequency, not speed. When I'm sitting on the bus, I don't want the driver to stop and go at breakneck pace - especially if I'm trying to drink my take-away latte or get some code done on my laptop. Or, perhaps even both at the same time. You have your head free and are not in racecar mode, that's a killer cirteria of PT.
Frequency is the actual issue with busses and other PT. It goes a long way that busses and taxis here in Germany often have their own lanes, but double the frequency and you'll reach a tipping point for PT. The streets here in Europe are clogged and cluttered to a max, stuffed with cars parking 97% of their lifetime. It's insane. Car love is basically modern days mass psychosis.
I hope that all changes when the self-driving cars come. That's actually the exact issue Sundar Pichai and the Google Car crew are aiming at.
Once we have robots driving busses, we can have them go more often and needn't train and pay busdrivers. I really hope to see that day soon.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
When I regularly used buses and had just missed a bus, I could often walk two or three stops in the time until the next bus arrived. This tells me that stops are too close. Also, stop making people pay individual fares. The bus doesn't cost more because there's one more person on it, and the time it takes to pay significantly reduces the value of the entire product not just for the person paying but also for everybody else who's already on the bus. Figure out a way to eliminate the individual payments.
A large part of the bus perception problem is the slow, smoky, lumbering diesels. A hybrid design with fully regenerative braking could accelerate and stop a lot faster, because there would no longer be such a fuel penalty for zippier operation.
I'm sure that statistics collected under one set of conditions will not lose any of their "predictive" force if you completely change the underlying conditions. Also, I'm sure there is nothing else wrong with whatever "model" the OP used to underpin the 75-word analysis posted on his personal webpage. After all, he lists a 1580 SAT score on his resume. I'm sold. Love, Legal.Troll
Buy the ticket online or at the cashier's, the driver only needs to point the code reader at the ticket (printed or on-screen) and off you go. Or use a transportation card with an embedded RFID chip akin to the Oyster in London. No need to wave your coins and waste other people's time. Use designated public transportation lanes (also available to taxis and perhaps electric cars). No stopping at stops where no one is waiting and no one in the bus has pushed the "I want to get off" button. Mandate seatbelts on long distance trips.
See, I made buses way faster *and* safer. Now, if anybody could explain this stopping and opening doors at railway crossings, cos that definitely sounds stupid.
DUMBASS!
Jeff Kaufman writes that buses are much safer than cars, by about a factor of 67....If we made buses more dangerous by the same percentage that motorcycles are more dangerous than cars," concludes Kauffman, "they would still be more than twice as safe as cars."
So, to get more people to ride buses, we increase the risk to those already riding buses by a factor around 32. I guess those people don't matter in the equation. How about something much more practical -- the author states that many who don't ride do so because it is faster to drive. But faster is also riskier to themselves, but more importantly others. So, remove that advantage to driving by lowering the speed limits and enforcing it. That way, everybody is safer, there are fewer accidents and a smaller carbon footprint because more people in the cities will ride mass transit.
Since any accident not only can hurt the driver that caused it, but any passengers and people in the other vehicle(s), plus the delays to thousands in the ensuing snarled traffic, this is a way for everybody to win. Of course, I am sure it won't be popular, but most safety regulations are rarely popular.
And anyone who is ever injured on or by a bus can sue the jew who voluntarily made them less safe. This guy should be locked up. The goal is always "as safe as possible" it's never "meh, it's too safe lets take some safety away".
When you get on a bus here the driver looks at you, assesses how likely you are to actually pay, then peels off if he thinks you will. If not, he waits until you tap your card or plink your change, THEN peels off. You get a helpful burst of acceleration to encourage you to move to the back of the bus.
Whenever the bus is not actually moving you can open the doors and get off. Often you have to because the drivers frequently miss stops.
Still nobody likes mass transit. Something about having to wait for it in the snow, and it taking twice as long when it does come.
Humans, as a whole, are poor evaluators of risk. "That will happen to the other guy, it could never happen to me." I'm sure you've all heard that or some variation on it.
It's like watching people in a casino. The vast majority will play blackjack until they go bust. A very few, with iron discipline, will walk out with a profit-and that is because they have carefully evaluated the risk and are willing to fold when they are behind.
Objective risk evaluation is very hard and most people don't want to conceive of the fact that they could lose or be injured by their actions. Even with informed consent, there are still lawsuits about people not understanding the risks involved.
I can't see any municipality being willing to make the argument in a court of law about a citizen's ability to objectively make a risk evaluation. "We did something other than make sure our citizens were as safe as possible" That municipality would be writing big checks.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Buses drive on the shoulder on many highways and roads. So people stopped in traffic get to watch people surfing their phone or reading books go ahead of them. And buses here don't stop and open doors for railroads at all. Maybe school buses do.
But the routes are the problem. Spouse takes the bus in because it's quicker than driving, cheaper than parking, etc. I drive because it's a 12 minute drive or a 45 minute bus ride (IF I don't miss the connection, which I almost always do). But spouse is downtown, I'm not.
"allow the driver to start while someone is still at the front paying"
SEPTA drivers do this all the time. Even when there's a 90 year old guy who can barley walk with a cane standing there.
Indeed, safety is not the issue, otherwise it would see them used way more. As someone living in Europe and a company that pays my public transport (so money is not even an issue) what realy stops me fom using buses is frequency copared to distance/time I need to travel.
If I need to trave 1 hour, I have no issue have 4 per hour. It ads about 10% on average to my travel time. If I have to traver 5 minutes, 4 per hour will almost double my travel time.
So what can you do to enhance this? More buses that are smaller. Have them pass every 2 minutes and you bet I would use it all the time. More would mean also smaller busses. That would enhance the getting on and off time.
It would also mean a lot more drivers and thus a much higher cost. That till we have driverless cars and can fire those expensive drivers and kill them, so they ar not a burden on society anymore.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
One of the huge reasons that bus is not a viable means of transportation for me, despite there being two routes that with incredible convenience service my daily commute is that they make too many stops. They stop, quite literally, every two blocks. On the plus side, this implies the maximum distance you need to walk to a bus is a block (and the mean will be about half a block, depending on variability in housing density). Yes, that's remarkable convenience. But it means that the 10 minute drive it should take from my apartment to my office is 20 minutes by bus, and that's just shy of the amount of time it takes to walk. If we were to inconvenience the riders by eliminating half of the stops, it would mean a very slightly longer walk to the stop (mean of a block, maximum two), and a 25% reduction in transportation time.
Also, since there are an insane number of bicyclists on the same route, having the bus stop less frequently means fewer incursions into the bike lanes, and I'm sure, fewer bus-bicycle accidents. I'd expect the number of bus-car accidents to go down as well. The amount of pollution buses emit would go down, as would the their maintenance costs. If we go all radical and decommission the now unused bus stops, we could, for example, convert the space to bike racks, getting parked bikes off the sidewalks where they damage car doors and interfere with pedestrians, or parking for ride sharing cars.
The only negative aspect -- the only negative aspect -- is a slightly reduced level of bus-riding convenience from wildly to merely very.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I'm going to address the problem as a whole at the bottom, but I'll start by pointing out some specifics that suggest this guy is clueless:
"Suggestions include not to require buses to stop and open their doors at railroad crossings"
Recently a bus in Ottawa failed to do this, for an unknown reason, and was hit by a train, killing six people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_bus-train_crash
This is not going to change, even if these are rare events. When these rare events occur, it's not a single-occupant car getting hit, they wipe out multiple people. The risk factor is multiplied, and that's precisely why they started doing this in the first place. And it happens all the time, Google it yourself and you'll find dozens of examples in the last couple years.
"allow the driver to start while someone is still at the front paying"
A far better solution to this problem is to remove cash payments and require some form of automatic payment. Place ticket machines at the larger stops, and accept some form of NFC solution that's fast. If people hate buying tickets at the street, or there isn't one at their stop, they can get a free reloadable card. Don't like it? Tough.
"allow buses to drive 25mph on the shoulder of the highway"
Thereby blocking emergency traffic if they break down. There's a reason you're not allowed to drive on shoulders, and a bus would make that problem even worse. There are, however, places where the shoulders are wide enough that a bus won't block both it and the lane beside it, and in those cases they already use it - like on the DVP in Toronto.
"leave (city) bus doors open, allowing people to get on and off any time at their own risk"
So the bus might randomly start up while someone is getting off, and we'll just accept the resulting lawsuit?
Is this guy mad?
Beyond all of these seemingly ridiculous suggestions is the elephant in the room: the reason busses are slower isn't because they are physically slower, as anyone that's ridden a modern bus on the highway will be aware. It's because *they stop all the time*. You can make busses (et all) run much, much faster if you remove stops.
But we know from a century of statistics gathering that if you do so *less people will use it* because they are unbelievably lazy about walking to stops. For instance, when I lived downtown there was a bus stop one block south of me. The terminus of that route was a subway station that was three blocks south of me. You could see the station from the stop. Yet there were always lineups of people waiting at that stop, even in the rain. And since the bus ran every 15 minutes during rush and every 30 off rush, they were waiting much longer than the time that it would take to walk to the station, 2 or 3 minutes, tops. And I'm not talking people who might have locomotion problems, mostly it was people my age or younger.
This is the typical case, not the uncommon one. You can see it anywhere. If you add space to get the busses moving faster, people just won't use it. And that defeats the entire point of his concept. Anyone writing on this topic should be perfectly aware of this, and if he isn't, why is he writing about it?!
If you are poor and have to get across town, a bus is a necessary evil at best. Buses damage roads an order of magnitude more than all those riders driving their own cars. Buses have to stop all their bulk every time anyone wants to get off. Buses are massive and take up a massive footprint on the road, harming traffic patterns when traffic is congested, e.g. in SF, where buses re-entering the roadway cause accidents on a regular basis.
Whether we go full-genius and replace cars with PRT, or go full-idiot and implement self-driving cars on rubber tires when we have had the technology to guide self-driving cars and keep them from crashing since the 1800s and it is called rail, either way buses are going away. The driver is the expensive piece that makes buses desirable. Take away the driver, and you can use smaller vehicles. Then there is no need to do anything to buses, because they will be gone, and good riddance. Buses are shit if you're on them, and shit if you have to drive around them. We've only been using them to amplify the ability of one human driver that we're about to remove from the equation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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All of the ideas listed in the summary are stupid and clearly written by someone that has never used a bus as their primary method of commuting. If anything, we need more buses to increase frequency and they need to slow down. Major roadways need light rail and reduced lanes to encourage greater usage of public transit and passenger vehicles need to stop driving like self-entitled maniacs. I can remember when there was a bus every 15 minutes and they ran until midnight, now you are lucky if they run once an hour on Wednesdays and Saturdays the third week of every odd numbered month. Hell, where I live now there is 1 bus and it only runs twice a day at 10AM and 2PM, talk about useless.
Wasn't this already accomplished?
Trains, trams and trolleybuses are betteer becausr they can be powered by non-carbon energy.
Buses and cars have to run on diesel or gasoline, which may be cheaper now than a few years ago (and sourced from withing the country instead of the middle east) but it still contributes to global warming.
Anyway public transport really only exists in 'the Metro' It is either useless or non-iexistant in small towns that are hundreds of miles from the cities.
Spot Mr. Risk averse
Yes, sir, right away. OK, spotted him. Now what?
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
"...even if this means making them somewhat more dangerous."
What you do with your life bores me to the point of distraction. When it comes to the loss of loved ones, speak for yourself.
Of course, "need to be more dangerous" is a catchy flamebait — they need to be made faster (perhaps at the expense of safety, but not necessarily). How exactly to do it, should be decided by people betting their own (rather than the taxpayers') money on the success of the enterprise.
The collective ownership is the root of this and other problems of mass transit. Let them be privately owned and operated — and have the private owners make the risk-reward and other decisions. Too slow — not enough customers. Too many accidents — insurance becomes too expensive... ..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Bus 1hr 5 minutes. Riding the bus, not only do I have to pay, I have to travel based on their schedule which is completely inconvient.
It would be better use of my time and money to just to walk or bike. My fat ass could use the excercise anyway.
Other reasons not to ride the bus:
Poor/crazy people. There is no shortage of them near college campuses.
The bus is typically pretty gross.
Don't forget to update the "what to do in an emergency" information.
I come here for the love
Just make all buses like the one in that Sandra Bullock movie
That would be dangerous AND cool.
The main issue here is that this is specifically talking about problems with the US bus systems, and is suggesting extreme fixes that won't address the underlying problems. Many cities worldwide have extremely good and popular bus systems that in many cases work better than driving in those cities. The US needs to learn some lessons from these cities first, which would go a long way towards addressing these issues.
Off the top of my head:
- analyse people's journeys to ensure buses cover the routes people want, and efficiently.
- enable priority or dedicated bus lanes to ensure the buses maintain journey times at all times (including peak) so they can be reliable
- introduce a more efficient payment system (such as contactless / something like Oyster in London) where large volumes of people can board and leave the bus quickly
- ensure bus routes intersect with other transport terminuses to benefit them both.
- subsidise to provide price incentives
As someone that drives a car on roads with multiple bus routes I would have to say they are pretty unsafe. The way they stop and start seriously disrupts the flow of traffic as cars get stuck behind them and have to turn into other lanes. Also for some unknown reason they have the bus stops immediately after the light in an intersection, so if you aren't careful you can be stuck in the intersection when the light turns red. I would be curious to know how many accidents are due to buses that don't directly involve the bus.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Allow the use of NASAs new Mars expedition termo nuclear engine
I went somewhere in Brazil where the buses had a turntile inside and second employee to gather tolls. The bus only had to stop long enough for customers to get into the font section of the bus.
The old London bus with a conductor and open rear access was great. Sadly, labour costs killed them as they were replaced by "one driver" buses which then held everyone up as the driver had to finish giving change before driving off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It sounds dangerous, but the presence of a conductor on the rear step made them pretty safe. (S)he would signal the driver when it was OK to depart, giving flexibility for those running for the bus! The place you worked was in between two stops? Just wait for a jam or red light and hop off safely direct onto the pavement.
Same for hopping on.
Of course in those days, the attitude was more on individuals being responsible for themselves rather than the "someone else is always to blame" we have now.
The interior ergonomics of the Routemaster would be criticised today, but back then the conductor, and/or passengers, would typically help elderly, infirm, pregnant or shopping-laden people. These days people on public transport seem too engrossed in their telephones to even notice other, even less that they might need help.
Now get off my lawn!
With a few exceptions (perhaps rush hour commuter buses in large cities without subway / light rail) - municipal buses have no future. Expect them to be replaced by Uber-like apps combined with self-driving vehicles.
[Insert pithy quote here]
" allow buses to drive 25mph on the shoulder of the highway in traffic jams where the main lanes are averaging below 10mph "
I'm guessing this guy doesn't get out much. One of the biggest reasons that the main lanes are crawling along is due to something happening ON the shoulder itself.
Someone changing a tire, a stall, police have someone pulled over, etc.
The shoulder is also usually a magnet for all sorts of debris which tends to get thrown everywhere when some idiot drifts out of their lane.
Actually, riding the bus is plenty dangerous - due to some of the people that ride them and the germ infested seating.
They can do anything they want - I'm not riding a bus.
Why do buses generally not have seat belts for anyone but the driver? Add seatbelts, and then do your "safety-endagering" things to balance things out, eh?
Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. You can say "at your own risk" as much as you like, but once the agencies have to defend against lawsuits this may come to a screeching halt. You can hop on and off, but the driver may speed up/down or pull away from the curb unexpectedly (from what you were anticipating they would do) and your suddenly laid up. How many emergency room visits for sprained ankles or worse is considered acceptable?
The people that can afford it take Uber not the bus. People what to get from Point A to Point B in the shortest fastest and most comfortable way. Once the Uber cars become autonomous then it's like your own personal bus and almost the same cost. Here in LA the buses are fast and used alot and they have speed lines, But the people that ride the buses are not complaining they are not fast enough or want them to be more dangerous. Trying to change an outdated system to get people that would not ride them anyways. Revolutionize and democratize, not incrementalize.
Picture the guy in the wheelchair trying to get on the bus. He gets flattened. End of THAT problem.
I come from India and many of the things mentioned about buses are already done. No doors, buses start while people are still getting in. They are still safer than cars. However, that is only because, mostly full able bodied strong people take buses. If you are weak, child, old, disable, you tend to avoid buses. If you make demography of buses same as that of car occupants, I believe, buses will become considerably more dangerous. None of the references mentioned in this story have any demography analysis and hence are barely worth 2-cents.
The US had 45,000 miles of streetcar lines in 1917 --- and all the speed and danger you could ask for But most lines were all but bankrupt before World War I and never really recovered. The automobile was cheaper, more comfortable and more flexible. Portal-to-portal with passengers and cargo for about 1 cent a mile in those days.
Few American cities have ever approached the density of their European and Asian counterparts, and de-centralization began early. It's why you begin building a bridge to Brooklyn in 1869. This works against the success of any mass transit system, road or rail --- which is inherently stop-and-go.
There has been a revival of sorts in the central city, but usually at the expense of low and middle class families, who have been priced out.
The key to effective mass transit is a single-payer (taxpayer funded) system.
Get rid of tickets, the student discounts, the enforcement overhead, the delays for each new passenger getting on, etc.
If you already have a car, it's significantly cheaper to use it to get from point A to point B, and that's ridiculous.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
This law of averages logic is stupid. Do you want your cancer removed ASAP, or do you want to wait for surgery to be extended to the average wait time? Perhaps laws which are seldom prosecuted can be removed because the average court case doesn't need them? How about ceilings reduced to 6 feet 4 inches tall because most people can handle it and we get more floors per elevation feet of building? Heck, put us in coffins with life support and diapers for airline travel, to get the most persons per flight. At what point is the pursuit of efficiencies and pure bean counting thinking understood to be super dumb?
Average people can run, can chase moving buses, or hang on to something while simultaneously paying their fare. Others cannot, but it doesn't mean they should be left out of these services.
of the other people that ride busses, some people are just nasty vectors of infection of contagious diseases, other people are just chronic criminals that think they can rob anyone they want, and other people are just plain obnoxious and rude, so fuck public transportation, it is the bottom of the fucking barrel for transportation,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
"According to Kauffman, we should look at ways to make buses faster ..."
We already have those, they are called trains.
That is the exact feeling I get living on the West coast. In an earth quake zone, you prep some stuff ahead of time and go about living your life, it might happen today or maybe never. If you live in a Tornado zone there is that dreaded period before the storm that you huddle behind boarded windows and pray that your house survives the incoming storm.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Firstly: High Speed + No Seatbelts = Death. The lack of speed isn't the biggest problems with buses.
Buses are noisy, with rattling windows and diesel engine rumbling. They are more expensive transportation than cars. They don't go everywhere you need to go. It's hard to bring groceries on them. For a half hour at a time, you are in a box where you can't drink, eat, or go to the bathroom.
Besides city buses, I've taken highway buses like Greyhound, in which your knees touch the seat in front of you.
I think that it's a better strategy for the masses to mandate smaller vehicles, and make things safer for pedestrians and bicyclists. We need smaller vehicles like electric bikes, scooters, skateboards, even Segways.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
None of the reasons given in the article are even close to the reasons I don't take the bus. Some of them exist on my list of reasons not to take the bus, but they are statistical noise compared to my top reasons:
1) Other person 1 on the bus.
2) Other person 2 on the bus.
3) Other person 3 on the bus.
.
.
n) Other person n on the bus.
n+1) Getting from point A to point B on a bus takes forever. My newborn baby will be graduating from college first.
Controversy surrounding the German open elevator known as a 'Paternoster' leads the way in the danger/efficiency tradeoff.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster
Whoever wrote this is a complete moron and obviously never took a bus in his life during traffic hours.
That's just asking for someone to be "pushed out" when the bus is literally packed full and driving at 20+mph on the road.
"When these rare events occur, it's not a single-occupant car getting hit, they wipe out multiple people. The risk factor is multiplied,"
No, it's not. The risk of an accident per passenger-mile is not dependent on the number of passengers per vehicle because the same factor applies for every accident-free trip.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Which confirmed my suspicions on the issue, but have never seen tested. If it's cheaper on the calculation offered, the collective value of speeding up the buses makes it a shoo in. Which makes me wonder if the car companies are encouraging 'disabled rights' in order to discourage bus usage; after all it's generally recognised that the car firms bought up and closed down the LA tram system in the 50s for this purpose.
While I agree that buses should be made to go faster and avoid stopping and waiting as much, this acceleration should be done with care so as to not end up like the anarchist minibuses of India.
Bus drivers here do a lot of those things anyways.
- I've seen them open the doors before the bus has stopped. I've even seen them have the door open between stops.
- Some think that they are driving sports cars and try to stop and start on a dime. Not fun when you are standing on a packed bus.
- They will skip stops because the bus in front of them covers most of the same route as them anyways.
- Many will roll away from the stop as soon as the last person is on the bus, not seated
- In Ottawa only school buses need to stop at railway crossings
I've been on a bus that went through three stops. Two stop signs and a flashing red stop light. And not a rolling stop. He didn't even slow down. I reported the driver to the bus company and the police. The police got back to me in a month and a half to say they left it to the bus company. It's been almost six months and I haven't heard a thing from the bus company.
Most frequent users of public transportation are the elderly and disabled. Do you really think you are going to keep those customers when the bus is going to start doing these dangerous things just to save time?
Besides that, basic math tells me this is a crock. Pull away before people sit down?! How many seconds did you just save? 10 maybe? If there were 20 stops between my start and destination stop, we just saved 200 seconds.. about 3.5 minutes. Big deal. 3.5 minutes is not getting me to use the bus more and those elderly, cripple, and blind people that WERE your main customers are going to be the ones put most at risk.
Risk vs reward people! Do your math!
The word RETARDED comes to mind here.
I love trains, but the argument for having them serve intracity traffic for all but the most traffic clogged of cities is very hard to make.
Buses, trams, subways, etc., all have range of usage levels. It's best to start with buses, but after a certain point, a route would just need a ridiculous amount of them (plus the drivers, plus the drivers' pensions) to keep up with demand. Once you reach a certain ridership level you really should switch to trams, as one tram/streetcar or train set can carry many more passengers. Once trams/LRTs start reaching capacity then you start looking into subways / heavy rail. Rough guidelines:
* buses, at grade: 90 passengers per vehicle * 15 vehicles per hour = 1,350 passengers per hour per direction. 20,000 per day like the LA Metro Orange Line.
* buses, grade separated: 90 passengers per vehicle * 30 vehicles per hour = 2,700 passengers per hour per direction
* LRT, at grade: 90 passengers per vehicle * 3 vehicles per train * 15 vehicle sets per hour = 4,050 passengers per hour. 60,000 per day
* LRT, grade sep: 90 passengers per vehicle * 3 vehicles per train * 30 vehicle sets per hour = 8,100 passengers per hour.
* subway, 100 passengers per vehicle * 10 vehicles per train * 30 vehicle sets per hour = 30,000 passengers per hour.
Each should be used in their time and place.
All these things, including doors at railroad crossings, (what about NO DOORS) have already been well tested in the Philippines! With these other features implemented: start-stop anywhere, failure to signal or failure OF turn signal indicators, conductor moving OUTSIDE the moving vehicle with mere handholds because the bus was designed with THE ENTIRE SIDE PANEL MISSING for easier boarding. I mean, come on! Leave your car behind, why don't you! Live a little! Inhale all those fumes coming in through the windows! And please, try the seafood! And your bumpy ride is just about to start (where were you headed anyway?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
...benefits for most of those suggestions, and doors-always-open with people falling off is pretty unlikely. But having the bus wait while someone's in the door but standing in the front is ridiculous. Put a guard rail around the driver so if the passenger falls he won't fall on the driver, then as soon as that door closes start rolling. Sure, the driver can use some common sense about the situation, but get rid of the all-or-nothing rule. Cameras (with monitors for the driver) are so cheap now that they absolutely should be inside and outside the bus anywhere it enhances safety. Also, as big as buses are, it wouldn't hurt to put a big pillow on the front to bounce suicidal pedestrians off of. Same with trains. Nothing holds up a bus or train like hitting a pedestrian.
Cities are constantly changing, and track. . . doesn't.
Track can change but it does tend to be at a slower pace - even underground trains can change, just look at the tube in London with it's closed stations and old tunnels. However you are forgetting the feedback effect. Having easy access to trains is a huge plus when building shops, housing and offices so while the city will change it will likely change to take advantage of the transit available provided you have a sensible amount of infrastructure.
The problem I saw when living in the US was that your public transit is appalling so it isn't possible to build near it because there is so little of it and when new buildings do go up they come surrounded with massive parking lots which means the density is low so a station cannot serve that many.
Buses can be made faster without necessarily making them more dangerous, insofar as discounting the inherent danger in speed itself. In fact, it's a well known concept. It's called Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and it's being implemented in urban areas all over the world.
Well when I used to commute to work I would ride one of my motorcycles to work every day, as long as the road was clean and dry and ice free. On days that it wasn't I rode the bus. I hated the bus. The commuter bus took the long way to work and I had to get up real early to make it to work by the same time that I started without the bus. Where I worked I was allowed to come to work anytime between 6:30 and 9:00 am. I usually like to get in by 7:00. So I could leave around 3:00 and 3:30 pm. The motorcycle was the best way to get into the city by far than any other method transportation. You can lane spit you can go up the breakdown lanes you can bob and weave in traffic. It would take me 1/2 the time to get to work on a bike than a car and it would take 3 times longer on the bus. The bus cost about 6 dollars a day to ride or you could purchase a pass for 35 dollars a month. A bus can't operate like a motorcycle no way no how. It can't lane split, bob and weave in and out of traffic and I don't even think I want to be on a bus that is dangerous. They don't have seat belts. If anything I would like to see buses safer not less. They had a buss in Avon CT that got hit by a dump truck coming off Avon Mountain at 55 / 65 mph with no brakes. The bus caught on fire and they could not get people out because the crash damaged the front door. Those people on the bus burned alive. That whole episode burned into my brain and I thought those poor people. Buses need to be safer not less. Point is, if I ride my bike to work and do crazy stuff I'm only putting my own life at risk and no one else. That motorcycle will probably only hurt me. If I do crazy stuff in my pickup truck, I put my life in danger and others on the road but that would be 1 + whoever is in the other vehicle. So the damage is still limited. You put a bus in danger you have that thing packed with say 20 to 30 people that sucks big time.
Paul E. Bahre
I ride the buses in Boston. I can assure you, I have never seen the bus driver wait until people finish paying before they drive away. the buses get so overcrowded that they are routinely operated while passengers remain forward of the yellow line.To demand otherwide would cause ugly protest from miserable passengers.This article cracked me the heck up. In Boston, bus drivers aggressively pursue motorcyclists and bikers, taking delight in getting as close to them as possible. The buses are not slow when there is no traffic. What makes the buses slow is the quantity of automobiles on the road clogging up the streets. We need bus lanes, more light rail and much more robust train systems in place.
YOU need to be the one to be the accident victims, and also pay all the resulting law suits and other costs associated with all the added mishaps.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.