Comment by LucasBrandt
17 hours ago
But lots of people _do_ already ride buses! There are already current riders, and potential riders who are making these marginal decisions. Occasional riders will decide between transport modes based on the trip - making marginal improvements (or regressions) would change the rate at which they choose to ride the bus.
Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are always "new adults" learning to get around and forming opinions.
So I strongly disagree: marginal improvements DO matter. And I agree with the author that this would be a relatively easy improvement to deliver for many cities.
I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year!
Marginal changes cut in both directions. The transport duration between A and B is only one part of the calculation. A rider also needs to get from their starting point to A, and from B to their destination.
Decreasing the number of As and Bs by half might reduce that 20% start/stop time by half, shaving 10% off the total time. (This is ignoring the fact that more people will need to board and leave at each stop, which might mean in reality you’re saving like 8%.)
But you will also increase the distance walked to the bus stop. That means battling cars and weather.
You could just have two bus stops. People who live and work at both ends will be very happy. But everyone else gets thrown under the bus.
Why stop there. Build enough buses for everybody so they can choose where those two stops are.
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I also live in Chicago and wouldn’t mind walking extra to another stop, but Chicago also has a massive traffic problem, particularly post pandemic. During rush hour, the bus is stop and go already.
I’m really curious how this would pan out here, but it can’t be the only solution.
I think the only way to solve this is to invest much more into making buses nicer & increasing the numbers, and then instituting bus-only lanes on major arterial roads so that taking the bus becomes faster than fighting traffic.
San Francisco put in some bus only lanes and those routes have greatly improved bus speed and ontime performance.
The traffic downtown is really nuts now that the bridges are all shut down.
> I'm personally able to walk a block or two further
“A block or 2” each way at the start and destination is a significant difference (4-8 blocks) for most elderly people.
Busses fill two different roles, as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation. They can serve a vital role for cities without the kind of investment it would take to make most typical HN reader consider them as a primary means of transportation.
As such latency isn’t necessarily as critical vs coverage here.
I think this is a US-centric perspective.
In the US, buses (and public transport in general), are thought of as social programmes. Anyone can use them, but they are really for people who can't drive or are too poor to own a car.
The rider makeup then looks like that. The elderly and the poor, sadly. Services run at a huge loss and are dependent on massive and unpopular government subsidies. Quality of service is bad. There's a stigma to using it. You end up with long, slow bus lines because this allows as many of the current demographic (elderly, poor) to take the bus. And there are always bailouts or brutal cuts on the horizon. You end up at a sort-of local maxima of inadequacy.
In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving.
This alternate universe is a city like London. Transport for London has a balanced budget, and despite what grumpy Brits like to say, quality of service is on an ever-upwards trajectory.
In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term. You make public transport attractive to more demographics.
Then there's the even better alternate universe. Japan, where there are ~100 train companies, almost all of them are private. There are at least 10 in Tokyo, all but one are private. They are setup so that they have a positive feedback loop. Each train company owns land at and around the trains stops. They open office buildings, apartments, groceries stores and shopping centers around those stops. The more people ride their trains, the better their other businesses do. The more compelling their other businesses are, the more people want to ride their trains to get to them. The also often run buses so you can take a bus to their stations.
These means the trains constantly improve and there's no poltitians trying to cut funding or under budgetting. The 10 companies in Tokyo I can name are JR East, Eiden, Toei, Tokyu, Seibu, Tobu, Odakyu, Keio, Keikyu, Keisei. There are actually more but they generally run 1 line each, at least at the moment.
Of those, only Toei (4 lines) are run by the government. Eiden (the Tokyo Subway) is private but gets some goverment backing. The others are all private. JR East was public in the 70s. The other 7 have always been private.
Unsurprisingly, only Toei, the government run one, is not setup with all of the positive feedback loops that keep the others going.
Note that it's similar in the Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe area. JR West and 5 other big companies, 3 subway companies, a bunch of other 1/2 line companies.
Another thing to note is, AFAICT, the population density of Kyoto is generally less than Los Angeles but they have great transporation from these private companies.
Conversely, the London Underground has had notorious underfunding issues.
Spot-on analysis. I agree that transport should operate on a basically break-even basis, but offset in two ways:
1. Where the Government wants to subsidize some group (e.g. help the disadvantaged by giving them discounts) they should pay the fair price to the transit agency out of the budget of Welfare, not drag on the financials of the transport agency. In other words, it shouldn't be possible that the transport agency is insolvent only because most of their customers are paying next to nothing. Discussions about whether we should spend a certain sum on subsidizing the poor to ride the bus/train/etc are purely welfare budget discussions.
2. The Government should move additional money into the system when they realize an expansion of transport helps further societal goals: e.g. congestion pricing funds should help to expand transit, or the government pays part of the cost to build new rail service to reduce congestion on the roads.
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It's a chicken and egg problem. The way to make buses competitive is to build bus only lanes. But to do that you end up removing a lane for drivers and dedicating enforcement resources to keeping bus lanes free of private vehicle traffic.
The usual pattern is when a bus only lane is proposed, drivers complain because they view the bus as a social program. Local legislators often take the drivers' side because they also view the bus as a social program. Even if you get the political capital to push a bus only lane, traffic enforcement will routinely ignore bus lane violations. LA is making waves on the latter problem by attaching cameras to buses which automatically write tickets for cars blocking the bus lane.
Ultimately it's a politics problem. If nobody wants to spend political capital on running a bus system as a transport program, it ends up as a social program.
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> In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term
Yesterday I came across a couple articles that encapsulate this thought.
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/zohran-mamdani-efficiency-nyc-bu...
And
https://coreyrobin.com/2025/11/15/excellence-over-mediocrity...
> In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving.
The problem with this in the US is that it's nearly impossible for the bus to be faster than a car without making the car slower on purpose, and the latter is the thing which is going to create the most opposition, because you're essentially screwing people over during the transition period -- which would take years if not decades.
In the meantime people still can't take the bus because the higher density housing that makes mass transit viable where they live hasn't been built yet etc., and as long as they're stuck in a car they're going to fight you hard if you try to make being stuck in a car even worse.
Meanwhile, cars are expensive. ~$500/mo for a typical car payment, another $100+ for insurance, another $100+ for gas, you're already at $8400+/year per vehicle before adding repairs and maintenance etc. For a two-car household that's more than 20% of the median household income. Make mass transit completely free and people start preferring the housing where mass transit is viable, which means more of it gets built, which is the thing you need to actually make it work.
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This idea occurred to me while I was traveling in Europe. Many of their trains have two classes of cars, where the first class is just slightly nicer. This could be done with buses too. Just alternate buses on the same route, that are expensive and free. The poor can take the free bus, and those who want a more exclusive social experience can pay for the expensive bus.
I can't make any excuses for the social and class implications, but if it got more people on the bus, it might only need to be a temporary measure.
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Busses get tiny subsides in the US.
It’s a large percentage of total bus revenue by design, and a significant expense for some local governments. But the number only look large because of how we split the vast majority of government spending into federal and state budgets with local budgets being relatively anemic by comparison.
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Private car ownership is a better everyday solution for almost anyone who can afford it, which includes the vast majority of Americans. If buses tried to compete with cars, they would lose. The only remaining niche for the bus is as a public accommodation for the poor, disabled, and elderly, or occasionally in dense city centers.
At least that’s what I think. But if you’re right, and there’s a version of bus transport that’s viable without subsidy, then there should be a market opportunity for a private business to provide that type of bus transport. This actually exists for long range intercity buses already, but you’d think it should be possible inside of some cities. I haven’t looked into this in a lot of detail but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was effectively impossible to try and start a private bus service in most cities, specifically because that would reduce ridership of city transit and threaten all of the unionized public sector jobs in that system. In which case the bus system isn’t really even for the poor and elderly anymore; it’s for the transit workers union, which undoubtedly is a player in city politics.
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> as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation
One bus route can't wear two hats. Faster, sparser routes are typically complemented by slow, meandering collector routes which provide the kind of backstop you describe. Moreover, elderly and disabled people can use paratransit [1], which exists precisely to serve people with mobility issues too severe for regular transit.
Anyway, I reject the notion of buses as a second-tier transit option reserved for poor and disabled people. The only way poor people ever get decent service is when they use the same infrastructure that affluent people do. A bus system that doesn't serve the middle class is a system that will quickly lose its funding and become inadequate for anyone to use.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratransit
Around 1/5 of the US population is elderly ~1/4 by 2050, add in moderately disabled people and this isn’t a small population we are talking about.
Paratransit is for a far smaller percentage of the population due to the significant expense.
Having lived in SF I've seen many cycles where the SFMTA says "We'd like to make (insert any changes)..." and the 'advocates' immediately come out of the woodwork to make the argument you're making, about how walking another block or two is impossible for some constituents.
Fundamentally as another commenter here said, a bus "can't wear two hats." In most large US cities, the bus, and sometimes the subway (if one exists), is mostly a welfare program, and its target demographic is the elderly, the poor, and the homeless. Two of those groups are rarely in any hurry.
The fact that urban professionals also rely on transit to actually get to work is not very much considered in the decisions ultimately made. This is why any changes to it are so fraught.
To actually serve both populations, you'd need to have two independent systems, but that would represent a tremendous amount of incremental cost. That's why they used to have (do they still? I'd guess not, post-pandemic) buses paid for by Apple, Google, Facebook etc. to shuttle people to work -- it's something the city government could never accomplish because the choices that make transit useful to those with jobs make it problematic for the other group.
The US already has a completely separate model where we send yellow busses to pick up and drop off school kids which involve buses going to a large fraction of US homes 4 times a day 180 days a year for minimal expenses that’s free at the point of use.
Nothing stops you have adding express bus routes, thus allowing busses to work for yet another population. Further, bus networks are inherently cheap as long as they see reasonable ridership numbers it’s more economically efficient than cars.
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In Seattle large employers still run their own private busses. This has been going on since long before the pandemic. These busses often tie in to existing transit options. They take you from the office to a neighborhood transit hub.
Sure, lets have the minority of the population force us into design choices that are detrimental to the majority of bus users.
When living in many a European city, I have chosen to walk instead of using a bus route due to the frequent stops making the bus trip a lot more expensive and marginally quicker. I have also lived in places where the eldery get a separate service, tailored to them, if they need it. Works a lot better IMO.
How about a compromise:
Alternate buses stop on the one-mile points only.
I live in Japan, where most people are old, and I can confidently say you’re wrong
It also completely eats up their time savings.
> I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year!
Until there' a snowstorm, and no one shovels. And you have a broken leg, or are elderly, or disabled. Sure, it might save you personally some time, but we live in a society and should try to help out the one's who need help.
It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house. It's unavoidable that most people are going to have to walk a bit. How far is reasonable, is a matter of trade-offs. It also depends on how fine grained the network is. If there are buslines every block, it's annoying if they don't stop there. But you have to walk a block or two to get to a bus line anyway, walking that bit more to get to the stop itself, matters a lot less.
> It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house.
And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient, if you can afford to use it. (That load-bearing "if" is important, though.)
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No, it's not unavoidable. Just ditch the buses and switch to cars, soon to be self-driving.
Even the rush hour traffic is trivially solved by mild carpooling (small vans for 4-6 people).
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So... Should the bus stops be even closer together?
Does Chicago not mandate people shovel their drives ways? In most towns/cities in upstate new york you can get a fine if you don't shovel your sidewalk.
I'm not in Chicago but where I am you have 24 hours after the snow stops to shovel your sidewalk. And realistically, they don't start handing out fines until at least a few days after that, if at all.
What? Why do they care whether people shovel their driveway?
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The solution for that is offering express routes not forcing everyone onto a slow frequently stopping local bus and making everyone worse off for it.
that's right, the best solution is probably something like every other bus (excepting very low frequency buses that have fewer than 5-6 buses per hour) to only stop at every other stop (of course always including interchange points).