Comment by closeparen
17 hours ago
Even in a dense city with no parking, it takes an unusually fast and frequent bus to compete with a brisk walk, and a heavy-rail subway to beat a fit or electric-assisted cyclist.
17 hours ago
Even in a dense city with no parking, it takes an unusually fast and frequent bus to compete with a brisk walk, and a heavy-rail subway to beat a fit or electric-assisted cyclist.
That's assuming you're only going a short distance. The average commute is around 15 miles. That's something like a five hour walk.
And the average commute duration is around 27 minutes. If you happened to live in one of the very few places in America where there even are 15 urban miles to cross, doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.
> doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.
LA average vehicle speed during rush hour is 27.6km/h (17 mph) according to Tom Tom [1]. So a 10 mph bus would turn that 27 minute journey into 46 minutes which I'll admit is more than desirable, hardly catastrophic though.
But remember that each bus can carry about fifty people which would remove close to fifty cars from the road resulting in less congestion and faster buses. Fifty cars need 400 m of road, one bus needs only 20 m.
And on your way home you can doze in your seat without causing an accident.
[1] https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/city/los-angeles-ca