So, a very talented friend of mine is having an exhibition of her art at a small town close to where I live. Its a 30 minute drive, but 2 hours on public transport, with 2 buses, one train, and a long walk under the summer sun on the way. Whatever, I'll sleep/read on the way, right?
so I show up at the bus station 10 minutes before the bus takes off, the bus arrives, and the driver gets off and turns off the bus. I think he's just going to the bathroom, to take a break, smoke a cigarette, whatever. Nope. He never returns.
I've now been standing at the bus station for an hour after the scheduled departure time, staring at the switched off bus, and fuming about how I have just lost 20 bucks because I missed all the other buses and trai (i had to buy the tickets beforehand), how now I can't get to the exhibition without being late for work, how I will have let down my friend by not showing up and supporting her, and how this wouldn't have happened if I just had a fucking car and wasn't a depressed mess who can't find energy to do anything until the very last moment, letting down everyone around me.
I don't normally get angry, but this whole thing has made me very upset.
I live in NYC, and don't have a car, one of the few places in the US where this is viable. And even here there days where shit just DOES NOT WORK and it is incredibly frustrating and dispiriting
Just a couple weeks ago I waited for over 30 minutes for a bus I saw on the tracker app. Our busses are supposed to come every 15 minutes but whenever the uni students have a couple days off the busses go down to half service or less. Because according to the bus service this town is 100% students I guess and no one has a need to use the busses if classes aren’t happening. After 30 minutes the app shows the bus drive past me, but no bus exists.
All of this when it was 96 degrees out, heat index of 110. It’s absolutely un fucking acceptable.
Hot take, busses are not an acceptable foundation for a public transit system. They’re too unreliable. They break down too often, they get stuck in car traffic, and so often “bus stops” are just a sign in the blazing sun on the curb.
If you don’t have rails, you don’t have a real transit system. Busses are good to fill in gaps in your light rail or metro transit, and for replacement lines during rail maintenance. They cannot and should not be the main or only part of your transit system.
And it’s not that you can’t solve those problems with busses, it’s just that nowhere does and really why would you want to? At their best busses are louder, slower, and more polluting than light rail.
Nowhere in a city should be more than a 10-15 minute walk from a light rail or metro stop, where trains should come every 5-10 minutes. Busses should be an extra layer on top of that to fill in gaps and run weird lines to assist the rail service.
Busses are bad because "bus infrastructure" magically becomes car infrastructure just by not funding public transit and terrible traffic laws.
If bus lanes aren't exclusive you lose most of the incentives to get people to ride them.
even if they're exclusive no one follows that rule lol. exclusive lanes just become parking or passing lanes dependent on the road it's on, same for bike lane unfortunately.
at least in large cities in the US, maybe smaller ones have better enforcement
Put a big plow with spikes on the front of the bus, and let them drive through any cars in the bus lane.
And how you make the bus lanes exclusive matters. If it’s just paint people will drive in them anyway. And if it’s curb separated you might as well use rails. Then you get rid of the tire pollution too.
The only “benefit” to busses is actually a huge downside, the fact that they use the same infrastructure as cars.
I assume you'd just have a cop on each bus and give them some sort of scalp quota
Also recently that tracker app went down for like a week, which would be fine if there was a reliable schedule I could look at and know when the bus would arrive, but we don’t have that. They have a tracker and an approximate frequency, “every 15 minutes,” no actual schedule.
A few weeks ago I had to wait in the shade, but still sweating my ass off from the heat. My bus departs right as I get there, but whatever, there’s another one down the road arriving in 7 minutes.
I get. 10 different buses pass, none of them are mine. My phone says that bus is literally right in front of me and that it’s departing, but number is like 4 apart.
I waited about 10-15 for minutes. Don’t see mine so I’m tempted to just grab the most convenient one and walk the rest of my way there. As as the door was about to close, I see my bus arriving despite it reporting that the bus is like 10 minutes ahead of me
I've lived over a decade without a car because I'm fortunate to live in one of the few cities in the States where that's feasible. But even today, I have to figure out how to get out to the suburbs because my child's friend out there is having a birthday and there's just no good way to do it. 12 miles away, but public transit will take almost two hours because of a train transfer and a half an hour walk at the tail end of it. Like you, I could probably do that if I was solo, but with a child that's basically a no go.
And that's when everything is working correctly. Who knows if it will be because our train system basically has to threaten to shut down entire stations to get local municipalities to give the paltry funding to the system they do.
Solidarity, comrade.
I was waiting for a bus the other day. It pulled up to the busy platform, but no one would know it because the driver had the "not in service" sign on and a closed door.
After a few minutes, it pulled away and got past the stop light, only then did the driver turned on the sign indicating their route.
It's a whole mess :/ I have been in that exact position, albeit with lower stakes, usually just trying to get myself home at night and missing the last bus. But one time it happened when getting home after a trip and my friend I was with was having a panic attack and it just broke me a little.
Plus, if I'm confused and screwed over by it, as someone who really likes transit and uses it all the time, how is anyone else supposed to get around like this? Its my biggest gripe is just how inaccessible/scary this kind of thing makes transit. If that bus driver just went "hey X bus is cancelled" or "hey what bus are you waiting for?" then you could have at least tried to get there another way. It's not the driver's fault, they don't get paid enough to be always-on customer service in addition to driving and everything else, but like... it'd be nice? Running all the scheduled trips more or less on time should be the bare minimum, not a lofty goal
My city does at least have a cool carshare thing, but thats an expensive bandaid solution.
That driver was probably "dead on the law" but it's fucked they didn't at least say something to you
I don't hold it against the driver, they finished their shift or had a scheduled break, but the point is that the bus should've left the station at the scheduled time, regardless of who's driving it. But nope, just a parked bus and no answers.
And a properly funded and staffed transit system would have more drivers available than needed so they’d have a driver to take over that route in this situation
Ah it's what we used to call it on the railroad to mean when you've gone over your FRA time limit for drivers, and can no longer drive for work.
Sorry bout that
In some regards bad public transport can be worse than no public transport because of betrayals like this tbh
That's a shitty situation, but you should redirect your anger towards cars. Cars allowed public transport to decay into its present state. Everyone involved in setting the transit budget drives, so none of them are impacted when it shits the bed.
Of course, capitalism allowed cars to run roughshod over everything, but if you're going to hate something with four wheels, make it the Escalade, not the bus.
Sorry bud, solidarity. Been there, and enough of those situations left me biking 4 hours a day (the buses were just that shit).
No Uber where I'm at, and taxis are rare and expensive. That 30 min drive would've costed me about 80 bucks.
