Here's a non tech "breakthrough" to help people love the bus: have the goddamn police enforce people who double park, and rip out parking and car lanes for buses only. Buses are great when they work, and they fall off when not. Its easy AF and proven across the world without the need for techbro innovation.
Double parking is not even close to the number one concern making buses unpleasant.
1) Time it takes to walk to the station.
2) Waiting for an indeterminate amount of time, often in excess of 10 minutes, which is considered a good peak-hours frequency for some reason.
3) Standing-room-only, overcrowding, the relatively intense motor coordination task of staying upright while the bus lurches around, the unpleasantness of holding an arm over your head for tens of minutes.
4) Difficulty of escape from
someone trying to talk to you or polluting the cabin with the smell of urine or music from a shitty phone speaker.
5) Absurd travel times 3-5x what it would take in a car due to frequent stops and use of surface streets.
I rely entirely on public transit, and the only good bus experiences I’ve had were with a suburban commuter express which behaved like a car (or better, due to priority lanes) for the vast majority of the trip. But it was so infrequent, and the subway from my office to the bus depot had such high variance due to extreme congestion among trains, that it was no better for end-to-end travel time than a car.
There is also the loss of flexibility and freedom. Having your own car available -- even though it sits in your workplace's parking lot 99% of the time during business hours -- gives some comfort to some people. I have not lived in NYC for some time, but during the brief I did reside there, I never got used to being utterly dependent on public transportation. I suppose I would have in time. But, for the majority (in terms of area) of the country, taking public transportation occasions a nagging feeling of being 'trapped' at a location. (This isn't a knock on dense cities where subways/busses are essential due to the impossibility of everyone driving and parking... But, for a second-tier city where parking is plentiful, the 'freedom' factor is significant.)
The most flexibility and freedom comes from access to high-quality public transit in addition to a car. Only being able to go places with ample parking is also constraining.
Fixing double parking and having dedicated lanes would immediately help address three of your five points.
2) You're not supposed to need to wait an "indeterminate amount of time." Buses are supposed to be on schedule, a schedule that gets thrown out of whack by issues such as double parking.
3) More predictable, regular service should help with overcrowding. Buses that don't have to swerve in and out of blocked lanes don't have to lurch around as much.
5) Travel times are significantly shorter when they have clear lanes (ideally dedicated, or at least without double parking).
I've been taking public transit in Silicon Valley this week, which is fairly car centric. Unusually, because I live so close to work, my commute is 10 minutes via surface street. Corporate coaches don't stop near me, but a direct public bus route follows the same path with roughly the same travel time.
> 1) Time it takes to walk to the station.
Fortunately, there's a bus very near my section of the apartment building. It likely takes me longer to get my car out of the parking garage than to walk to the stop.
> 2) Waiting for an indeterminate amount of time, often in excess of 10 minutes, which is considered a good peak-hours frequency for some reason.
The bus here runs every 30 minutes. The keys here are flexibility, planning and predictability. If your schedule is flexible (mine is) then you're not stuck waiting 30 minutes for the next bus, you just need to be at the stop shortly before the 30 minute timer. Which means you kinda need to plan things out some, so your time isn't wasted.
Where this all falls down is predictability. Busses are incredibly bad here. The rides I've taken have been roughly 15 minutes late each, with a wide variance. That's what really kills the commute for me.
> 3) Standing-room-only, overcrowding, the relatively intense motor coordination task of staying upright while the bus lurches around, the unpleasantness of holding an arm over your head for tens of minutes.
At least when I take the bus, it's pretty light. Nothing like the free bus system I occasionally took working for a university. It's probably worse for longer commutes / Express busses where there's a ton of people who want to get from point A to a point B 50 miles way, but at least my bus there's a roughly even in/outflow.
There's only one coworker who gets off the bus with me, which I find a bit surprising given how convenient it is.
> 4) Difficulty of escape from someone trying to talk to you or polluting the cabin with the smell of urine or music from a shitty phone speaker.
Headphones work okay, but they're not a panacea for obnoxious people.
> 5) Absurd travel times 3-5x what it would take in a car due to frequent stops and use of surface streets.
That's what the commuter express is for.
So what tech innovations would help these concerns?
Well, Google maps has kinda deciphered business hours based on nearby cellphone usage and polling, it knows how delayed busses currently are, and could probably offer a predicted schedule.
Additionally, customers using commuter navigation apps like gmaps could probably provide additional insight into passenger needs. And if we're airing grievances, I could use an app feature that signals the driver to stop on my behalf, because 9 stops is not easily countable when you don't actually stop at every sign.
i love how SF deals with this: every muni bus has a camera that takes pics of parking scofflaws and they automatically get a ticket! :)
but the biggest thing that will make people flock back to the bus, imho, would if they actually ran on schedule. i commute to work daily via AC-Transit in berkeley and have already lost count this week alone how many times the bus was scheduled to appear and didn't...
>i love how SF deals with this: every muni bus has a camera that takes pics of parking scofflaws and they automatically get a ticket! :)
At best I begrudging tolerate some amount of automated law enforcement as a necessary evil. I don't love it. Then again, I'm one of the people who reads 1984 as a warning, not an instruction manual.
AC Transit is a dumpster fire. The schedules are so unreliable that I wonder why they even bother posting them anyway. It's insulting when they say a bus runs every half-hour, only to see it sitting in its downtown start-of-route spot with the driver nowhere in sight, five minutes after it's supposed to have gotten on its way!
For all the bleeding heart liberalism in Berkeley, it's amazing how little pride and professionalism AC Transit has in delivering a service the working poor need to depend on.
i've noticed this too and its fucking with my mind, since i end up using !g in a private window and not having the history (the whole point of being not tracked)
and because our criminal justice system is principally concerned with entrapping and prosecuting "TERRORISM!!111!!" cases, we don't get the manpower on these kinds of things, which persist across the states. So sad.
Same execs that probably sell you a line about R&D costs, right? Not sure why you'd ever trust them to speak truthfully about delivering good health to Americans.
You can't go wrong with JB. One of the most beautiful authors in history. His description of humanity - and inhumanity of many in the US - is without parallel, and worthy even more noawadays with the increasing deportation of "undesirable" people like fathers and mothers who are here legally but are brown.
