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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."
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.
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.
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
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.
Buses are far more flexible than rail, for the simple fact that you can re-allocate buses, and create new routes anywhere you have a road. Laying rail does not have that flexibility. And that doesn't even consider the capital costs of acquiring real estate and building the appropriate rail infrastructure on it. . .
Because this cannot go wrong, right? faster buses, people getting on and off whenever wherever...allow drivers to drive off before people are seated...
Spot Mr. Risk averse. It's funny that you prove the author's point. You're so petrified of risks you'd rather peolpe do someething more dangerous instead.
And er, since when do you need to remain seated on a bus?
To examine the ridiculousness of this I suggest that Kauffman get into his car;
FFS, cars aren't busses. Busses are much much safer. The two are not equivalent,
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.
Why wouldn't you? If it was safer than a car and all those things made it feasible to ride instead of a car, you're safer overall.
WHICH IS THE WHOLE POINT!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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
Buses are far more flexible than rail, for the simple fact that you can re-allocate buses, and create new routes anywhere you have a road.
The most "unfunny" part of bus rides is that they often goes in a zig-zag pattern all over the city between origin and destination causing the average speed to be slower than a bicycle, albeit usually not as sweat-driving as a bicycle ride.
Buses and trams are good for short rides, subways are good within a city including suburbs while trains are when you are reaching further away to more distant parts.
The key part is to keep public transportation competitive with cars, but the catch is that politicians now have figured out that if we make car use more cumbersome without improving the public transport system then more people will use public transports. But that's not necessarily true, it would just make people despise politicians even more.
The hop-on, hop-off style is an interesting method, and works for normal healthy people but not for people with disability, children or elderly people. However I don't rule it out completely because having variation in transport modes would make the transportation more efficient, even if disabled people may feel discriminated. Just make sure that those that may suffer a discrimination because they are unable to do the hop-on, hop-off get other advantages instead.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
A bus, depending on features, costs $100,000 to $1,000,0000 (a city bus is nowhere near a million though!) and requires very little additional supporting infrastructure. A tram or trainset costs $6,000,000 to $35,000,000, and requires track installed (typically $25-75 million per mile), plus stations at a cost of $5M+ each.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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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?
It doesn't seem to be a problem in e.g. London.
But I think the problem here in the US is that we have a sue-happy culture without socialized healtcare. Often, the only way for someone who has had a fall accident to avoid bancruptcy is to find someone with deeper pockets to sue. And there are plenty of lawyers willing to line their pockets by assisting in just that.
Make people responsible for their own accidents, but provide them with decent free health care and employment compensation, and reinstate the old ius commune rule that no one must benefit from a lawsuit, not even the wounded party, and we might get rid of some of the nanny mentality.
It's discrimination no matter how you cut it. You cannot tell a person in a wheelchair that "Sorry, you have to wait 20 minutes for the next bus," while everyone else at the stop can hop on. And all for your convenience. This is classic discrimination.
We had them, nobody used them. Who wants to be waiting in a wheelchair in a snow storm? Instead, you can book a special handicapped bus or taxi door to door for the cost of a bus ticket, with the transit company making up the difference. Turns out it doesn't cost much more to the system, while allowing greater throughput and more precise scheduling of bus stops. An adapted minivan can take 3 wheelchairs and 3 attendants. A handicapped minibus can take more. We did keep the ability of the buses to lower the right side to make it easier for people with reduced mobility to get on and off. You'll get people to give up their cars if you make the service good enough.
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