Or maybe tell bosses that if your job can be done remotely it should be done remotely. Then there's more room on the bus for people who need to be in meatspace to do their jobs.
As much as I enjoy wanton violence for the ruling elite, a good start would be threatening the politicians with this unless they implement laws that make it unprofitable to force people into offices.
It should be codified that if a job can be performed remotely, it ought be, with the voluntary option to have people go to offices and such.
I wish I didn't need hands for my job, 90% of it is brain work with a tinker here and there. I see so many videos of robotic hands being used for things and can't wait for the day I can just send one of these out to a site equipped with some tools and just remotely tap into the video stream. It's coming and I don't think it will be too long. Hell, I'm just a layman and if you gave me a dedicated year and some funding I could get something viable up to par so I'm sure it's possible, guess it just won't profit anyone enough to sell it yet.
We used to have trolleybuses when I was a kid in the 70's, they were so insanely much more nice to ride than a diesel. No bad smell, and they were smooth and quiet.
I guess we will get back to something similar soon, but with batteries.
Yes in some aspects, it's like we are moving backwards. Funny since the talk about environment is more serious now than back then, still we often use unnecessarily polluting solutions, where the older "too expensive" solutions were viable when we had way less money as a country than we have now?
One would have thought the oil crisis had made us keep the trolley busses?
It is easier and cheaper to make one larger electric vehicle than 68 smaller ones, and they would damage the road less too. Of course this kind of comparison between two different things is inherently very difficult to do fairly
Ik that ttolleybuses are better than electric cars in carbon footprint, traffic, etc. I'm just proposing that we compare things with the same power source together. It makes more impact to say that an electric trolley is x% better on y metric compared to electric cars, than to say they are x% better than gas cars.
Imagine a situation where you say electric trolleybuses are superior to gas cars for reasons x, y, and z on xcretion or speddit. Then some elon musk bootlicker or big oil bootlicker replies to you saying "what about electric cars" or "what about gas buses"? You craft a meticulous reply about why gas buses are better than electric cars. But it's too late. Thousands of lurkers saw the bootlicker's reply to you but will never see your rebuttal. Many of them are now more against public transportation.
How are buses still not better? The ratio of individual people being moved to total mass being moved is better. The maintenance and insurance fees are collective. The driver of the bus is a trained professional vs some rando commuter.
Nope, a car electric or not creates multiple issues like urbanism, pollution (i.e: noise, visual, microplastics), hotspots, hostiles environment like parking lots, increase deaths rates, consequences on flooding, etc.
A lot of them can be solved with public transportation.
Until in 5-10 years when the batteries are fucked.
That's the beautiful thing about trolley buses - they do not need a (substantial) battery. They are basically trains on wheels.
There are some places where battery powered buses make sense - for example, where I live, lucerne Switzerland, there is one bus line that just goes up and down a rather steep hill. By using recuperative braking, the battery powered bus is super efficient. For other, normal 'high traffic' lines, trolley makes so much more sense
Trolleys don't really make any sense. I come from Riga, it has a lot of trolleys and the city is designed around trolleys and trams. And yet modern trolleys have bloody diesel engines, because being permanently hooked to the wire makes no sense at all. It's much better to have electric buses with a few overhead wires here and there to fast charge on the go.
Lucerne has a few trolley lines. They are ONLY trolley buses. The long, 3 Segment ones. Then, some 1 Segment hybrid buses that have pantagraphs. At the end of those lines, there is a longer stop where the trolley lines end, the pantagraph gets pulled down and the bus trucks along the last few stations with diesel.
Then theres just normal hybrid buses for more rural lines, and a battery operated bus that goes up and down a hill.
There's a solution for every line - you just need the proper infrastructure. The reason that we have this great pantagraph-compatible infrastructure is that, while there are a lot of trains in Switzerland, there is no metro. So in lucerne, the trolley buses work almost as a metro, with the main lines having buses every 7 minutes.
While that's true, they "solve"* the two issues that are most pressing with ICE cars, air polution and fossil fuel use. I'd rather have EVs over ICEs, and I'd rather have walkable cities and robust public transit than either of the car options.
That was, of course, just a random example of a job that cannot be done from home. A lot of jobs do require physical presence of people, that's all I was trying to say.
Of course, a milkman would also require to travel to and fro their place of work, dunno why they cannot be on a bus for that.
You do not actually see many milkmen these days. A milkman's business was ran a bit like McDonalds's with the milkman buying the as an individual and then selling it door to door. Every single milkman that I have known has worked from home.
So kind of a bad example but I get your point. No not all people can work from home, but those who can should surely be given that option. I have a wife who is a civil servant. She is required to travel to work for 40% of her hours worked. This is for no other reason than going into work by direction of the Tory party. This was not really an issue until they moved the place of work 8 miles away. She literally has to pay for a bus, sit on a bus for an hour each way, while carrying all her PC equipment with her, just so she can do exactly the same job while sitting in an office. All her meetings are done online, even while in the office. So there is a lot to be said regarding this Tory agenda of forcing people to work from the office just to appease their Donors.
To be fair 1 person using car is not 450 people that could use a car. To be fair at most 20% of people have a car in heavily car-centric cities. In good cities it hangs in single-digit.
That one bus company in the nearby city that absolutely refuses to replace their miserable old buses 🥴🤡 while the others run modern air conditioned hybrids, and some fully electric
Multiple bus companies can be a good thing if done well. The busses in Taiwan are also privatized and the service is quite good. In Japan even the metro and rail networks compete in a private market.
When you privatize a company and make it a monopoly though you get the worst of both worlds.
Imagine how bad it would be without the tube and busses! All these people trying to drive in London? Just thinking about it I shudder and I've never even seen London.
According to a study conducted in 1000 cities in 50 countries based on data from connected vehicles and phones. Not disagreeing with the premise but I expect there are plenty of other more "congested" cities, visit Manila or Jakarta for example. The UK should however definitely do more to fund its public infrastructure.
The only issue I have with this is there's a British gallon (that is DIFFERENT from the American gallon) that is used to measure milk. :D. That was the only place I saw gallon being used.
Still british units :D. In 1826 Britain decided to redefine gallon to mean "10 pounds of water". The earlier standard was 231 cublic inches (potentially meant to be 8 pounds of water). The US never adopted the new gallon.
Actually, as much as I dislike imperial units, when it comes to body temperature I do think in Fahrenheit. Mostly because that's how my mum would tell if we were too sick to go to school. 99 - just a little ill, but you can have the day off. 100 - pretty ill, probably at least 3 days off. 101+ - super mega ill, off all week.
If you read the Highway Code, you'll learn that it's all over the place. Long distances on signs are in miles. But distance markers are placed in metres. But emergency phones are placed every mile. And distance markers, which are placed in metres and indicate distances in meters can also have a distance to the next emergency phone in fucking yards. One sign, two numbers, no letters, two systems. FUCKING HELL!!!
You make a good point but only if your country has people.
If you live somewhere with no people and only animals, then you can't get anywhere and must traverse the jungle with a machete and a canteen full of either rainwater or your own piss.
If you live somewhere, you're a part of the body that decides things like that. If you want public transit in your community, and you certainly should, take the steps to get the action started.
Nobody is going to change the world on our behalf; it all falls on us.
Starts by being an active member of the community. Attend counsel meetings, town hearings, etc. Bring up the topic at these, gauge the response. Talk to the people who seem enthusiastic in response. Work together and build a petition, then seek signatures first amongst the people who attend, then talk to your neighbors.
I never said it was going to be easy, I only said nobody else is going to do it on your behalf.
but this isn't new technology where you can write a 100 bullshit news article about and prais it as the next big thing because it actually works and is efficient
The correct answer actually should -and could- be 0 gallons if they simply cycle to work. Granted, that requires them to have the right infrastructure available, but if (once) that existed, the vast majority of the work force could cycle to work happily. Most people don't live 20 miles or more from where they work
It could also be 0 gallons if the busses are electrified, or if the rail system is expanded, or if we stop pushing office workers to commute every day.
I'm just sayjt that we need to change the way we live. Like you said, people should not be required to work in offices anymore. If they physically need to be at locations, let them walk for short distances, cycle for medium distances and use public transportation for large distances.
Most cities in the world have been redesigned over the past 80 years for cars. It's insane and it left most cities awful places to live in. Almost all Dutch cities have been redesigned for people. So people walk and cycle because they can, and the cities look and feel amazing and beautiful.
45 minutes is a long time near nightfall, though... Honestly I'd rather take a bus at 5PM, even at 12km, since there are other people and it feels much safer.
I was being facetious; ambulance fuel use is a silly comparison :)
Listening to all y'all winter cyclists I lament that I live in a city where the bike lanes are where the city piles up the snow it plows off the car lanes on the streets. RIP me. It gives me hope and happiness to know that there are cities that don't do this!
Fun fact. None of those things are perfect except staying away from everyone and your entire household doing so as well. Cloth masks work better when both/everyone wears one; that lowers the chance of getting infected to 3%. If only one person wears a mask, there's a much higher risk of infection. The vaccine and booster are great, but again, not 100%. It is good to stack things in your favor, but stuff still happens. To take the small percentage where people still get sick and use that to decide masks don't protect anyone at all is ridiculous.
Literally the only person I know that didn't get it was my mom and we were all masking, vaccinated, washing hands, etc. All those precautions did nothing but delay the inevitable.
I mean, sure, but if you hadn't used those precautions you would have gotten it sooner, likely spread it to more people who would have them spread it to more people, ect. The point wasn't to prevent infection for eternity.
Getting it sooner would have gotten it out of the way sooner and the whole ordeal would have been over with after it ran it's course instead of dragging it out for 2 years.
So, it does have to be a mask that will actually protect you.
If you didn't pay, a pretty steep price at the time, for the right mask (like something that will protectv you from paint fumes) then you were wasting your time.
Source: When I mask up I use N95's. I use best judgement, haven't gotten covid. Not too late to protect yourself. I don't think I'll be able to keep it up forever, but I'm banking on new vaccines kicking covids ass.
So the very first result on Google for "double decker fuel efficiency" give the result "per gallon, while a 'double-decker' bus with a Diesel engine will run 11 miles per gallon".
44 / 5 days is approx 9 miles poet day. 4.5 miles to and 4.5 miles back.
I didn't want to believe this but I guess city dwellers where double deckers operate would probably have short commutes like this on average
In civilized places, buses take about as long as a car, as they're prioritized in infrastructure. The added benefit is that you don't even need to own a 2 ton death machine.
Fair, but it is the reality a lot of people live with. I would love for us to have a Netherlands approach to biking, but we don't. And we have brutally cold winters, where waiting for a bus is made even more undesirable, and biking less of an option because of how treacherous the snow makes everything (including driving).
To me it seems more like a pleasant fantasy than a realistic expectation. For other places I'm sure it is an attainable reality.
I don't think you'll meet a transit/urbanism advocate who will tell you to ride transit that doesn't exist where you are or that is wildly impractical for you. I certainly won't. For me, it's more about doing what makes the most sense for you, while also pushing to change the infrastructure where you are to make transit and urbanism better and more feasible for more people.
I have written my council pushing for changes to existing biking laws to make it safer in my city. So you're rightz we have to push for what we need. Nothing changes if we don't voice our concerns.
Local climate really isn't a reason to avoid public transportation infrastructure, as you have VERY hot and humid places (São Paulo, Brazil during summer) and very cold places (Netherlands during winter) with perfectly functional services. It's all about HOW said infrastructure is deployed and cared for.
Netherlands is quite warm from my perspective and a poor comparison to the extremely harsh winters we experience.
Thier average winter temperature is our late fall and early spring temp (November and March). The months of December, January and March are more comparable to Siberia.
That's great when all those people live in the same block and go to work at the same company and have the same hours.
But Frank lives 10 miles away and works on the other side of town. And Tim lives 3 towns over and works the night shift. Bill lives in the country and works 40 miles away. Eddy lost a leg in the war and while he is only 1/2 mile from the bus station, can't walk that far with his disability.
When it is convenient, it is convenient, but there's a reason why when given the choice, most normal people will drive their car instead no matter what the nonsense in this subs likes to pretend is real.
Don't forget Susan, whose base wages are so low that she has to work overtime to make ends meet. But the bus doesn't run that late, so 2/3 of her overtime goes to an uber, whose driver also can't feed her children.
Well Susan sounds rather dumb if she is using an Uber as a daily form of transportation where 2/3rd of her money is going to. She should consider getting a car.
Hand-controls are a thing. Eddy is perfectly fine driving his handi-van around. He's not too keen on when motorcycles part in between the handicapped spots though.
Jessie got shot in the face in the war, his lack of depth perception from having one eye stops him from driving.
Fred, Stephanie, Phil, Jack, and Masha all have severe hearing loss from the war (Jack's is actually from training for the war), while they can still drive, it's safer for them not too.
Nick, Chloe, Phil (different Phil), and Jessie (same Jessie) all got blown up in the war, driving vehicles is extremely stressful for them. Being a passenger to varying less degrees. Trains don't seem to trigger any reaction, and busses don't for at least one of them (not sure about the others)
The post is a meme about how buses are a better option than cars because they can transport more people at once using amount of gas less than what would be done on a 1:1 basis.
I feel like you’ve not ridden a bus before though - you didn’t mention schedules or routes once which solve the majority of your claimed points.
The disabled persons perspective is an interesting point, but shuttle services for the disabled would be even easier to run, as they would require vans instead of buses. Also, choosing to live in the country side away from bus routes when you can’t fucking walking is not the fault of the bus haha
Maybe your public transport infrastructure needs improvement? I don't think this post wants to judge you— it's advocating for public transport to be paid more attention. My cousin lives 3 towns away from her workplace— she commutes with a bus or jeepney. We have either buses, vans, or jeepneys; combined they operate 24/7. Hell, my university has students more than 5 municipalities away, the buses start operations early in the morning. Our classes start at 6:30 AM. Oh and btw, our buses have routes more than 300km. Maybe even more. Regarding Eddy, we have something in my country called a motorela or a tricycle, that operates locally in neighbourhoods. He won't have to walk far, he just has to wait for one and let it deliver him to a waiting area.
Fair enough. I start to get grumpy at 24 but I grew up in the desert SW USA but have acclimated to our temperate PacNW weather. I'd say similar to Manchester and Liverpool but summers definitely get hotter.
Lmao exactly. I’m all for better public transportation but these comments seem like they’re from kids who don’t have people depending on them for a roof and food.
Let me lose my job so I can go yell into the void for better bus routes
If you don't have a bus route, no one is here telling you to hitch hike or cycle in heat stroke weather for long commute or not go to work. Can you please point out where I or anyone here said so?
But "what can I do" was the question.
You can recognize the benefits of a good urban infrastructure and public transportation, highlight the lacking infrastructure in your areas, and support the goals of building that up by contacting your local officials or participating with groups who do organize.
This "child" lives within walking distance of his work office (for the few times I even have to to in) and on a bus route that can get me there as well (a bus system that is highly lacking in its own ways, to which I make note of to my local council).
I guess I should act like an "adult" and go "oh your work isn't near a bus route. What can I do? Guess nothing."
That is how we solve problems.
This post isn't attacking you for your area's lack of infrastructure.
Edit - also surely mean you need to average 7 people as when it's full it'll be a little over 12 times as efficient as when there's 7 people. So it could run for 10 minutes full then about 2 hours completely empty and it would balance.
No i meant 7 cars worth of people. If a bus can displace 7 cars then it is only equal in efficiency. This applies to hybrid buses too as they only get marginally better performance per energy needed to use.
So you'd need the bus to have 10.5 people at all times? But why doesn't an average capacity work? Do you have an figures to back so this up, especially the hybrid bus claims?
I don't know how it is in other places/countries but in Paris (inside and in the ≈ 15km area) , clearly, there is always at least 10 passenger in the same bus, I would say 25 average and at the peak hour an easy 50.
So I think buses are still an energy efficient transport, at least in some places.
Which is really just a bad choice. We could have proper town planning if we wanted, and in fact we used to have it. But then we knocked down neighborhoods to make room for highways and that was that. We can work our way back to good towns of any size, if we wanted.
Yeah man if you solution doesn’t completely solve the problem, fuck it! Throw it away it must be entirely useless right. No merit. And plus we have all the time in the world to wait until we have a perfect solution right? Duh!
With the exclamation mark, it's obvious to me that this is sarcasm. However Lemmings seem to take anything not marked with /s seriously or interpret things in the most negative way to the degree that I'm starting to question myself.
They pretty much do have to suck. They arrive infrequently, stop frequently, accelerate like an overloaded lorry, and are only remotely feasible if your start and end points are on the same route. Switching buses is a huge time penalty. They only approach usability in urban hellscapes that are so densely populated, it makes my skin crawl.
Yet they keep putting them in small cities and towns where they take 3x as long to get anywhere as driving because of indirect routing, while causing traffic congestion because of frequent stops and low performance. Seriously, fuck buses.
None of this is inherent to buses. Poorly planned and managed bus routes may have some of these features. And in the US this may be common but there are many many bus routes that do not resemble this at all.
Also the idea that buses make traffic worse than cars is absurd. Buses are a solution to traffic, not a cause of it.
I swear this is a no-true-Scotsman argument: "you don't hate buses/apartments/transit, you just have never lived anywhere that has the good stuff".
I've lived many places and traveled plenty, and I'm convinced there's no good stuff. To have transit that works, you need density that's oppressive. I did it in NYC, which is a best-case scenario for transit facilitated by high density. NYC has transit that runs frequently, and 24/7/365. Buses, subway, trains, and even ferries. It's so dense most people don't own a car (I certainly didn't). Everyone lives in apartments. Walking and biking is the norm. Even pizza delivery is done by bike instead of car. Catching an Uber was still much faster for many point-to-point trips, because transit necessarily can't go direct from everywhere, to everywhere.
Now that I'm back in suburbia, a trip to the grocery store takes 1/4 as long by car (same distance). I don't have to spend a ton of time waiting to catch a connecting train or bus that I missed by 30 seconds. I don't have to ride though stop after stop, packed in with other people. I can just go direct from origin to destination in quiet comfort, without the headaches
I'm not claiming your bad bus experiences aren't true buses, so that phallacy doesn't apply in any way I can tell. You described what you said were universal features of bus routes. I pointed out that those are not at all universal. And indeed, you now admit that you yourself have used buses that run frequently, which undermines your original argument, even if they had other flaws in your view.
I've never lived in New York but I think there's still lots of room for improvement even there. But regardless, I've used transit that was better and faster than driving many times. So that remains my point, even if you haven't experienced that.
It sounds like you just don't like cities or being around too many other people. Which is fine for you but tons of people do or at least it does not bother them. And for those people, buses, when run properly (clean, on time, frequent, with dedicated lanes so they don't get stuck in traffic, and directly connecting places people need to go) are an excellent way to get around. I've even used some buses in rural areas that beat out car travel, though that's more rare obviously. So yes, it can be done well. Maybe not to your standards of zero wait time ever and zero tolerance for being around other people but most people aren't that picky.
Me: but it says here that a Scotsman committed the crime
You: No true Scotsman would commit such a crime...
Compare:
You: buses are great!
Me: I take buses and they suck!
You: good buses are great, you just aren't taking the good ones...
It's exactly the same. You get to decide who is a true Scotsman for the purpose of argument, and what constitutes a good bus service. You can simply declare that the bus service isn't a good one and therefore doesn't reflect badly on bus services, just as you can decide the criminal wasn't a true Scotsman, and therefore you're always right.
you now admit that you yourself have used buses that run frequently, which undermines your original argument, even if they had other flaws in your view
I have used buses which run frequently for buses, but which are still too infrequent and thus add lots of unnecessary time.
I think NYC is an excellent representative of transit done well. It may not be world-best, but there aren't many places that are as dense or more dense and that creates a best case scenario for running at all hours and with maximum frequency. Also, most people don't own cars and don't drive there. There are few places with so many built-in advantages for transit as NYC.
It sounds like you just don't like cities or being around too many other people.
It applies to generalized statements, which I never made. You even had to falsely paraphrase my statement to make it more applicable (that phallacy is called a straw man by the way). But I never said all buses are great. In fact I think you’re right that most buses in the US are terrible. I’m just saying that they don’t have to. It’s a totally different type of claim. If anything your argument is more logically similar because you are making a universal claim that buses are always bad.
Part of the issue is that we probably don’t have a common definition of a good or bad mode of transit. I would say cars are a terrible way to get around in most urban areas, but you obviously don’t agree because we have different definitions of what makes something a good or bad way to get around.
But I will maintain that bus systems, when properly managed and implemented would be preferable over driving for that majority of people in urban areas, and even in some rural or small towns too.
I dont know how are bus in your country but here they are really bigs and not rarely they drive 2/3 together what makes the traffic slowly and by read traffic light everything stops not only in the direction from the read traffic lights but in all directions because the bus blocks everything. If the all people in the bus drives a car the traffic would be more fluid.
I accept the bus makes less pollution but not better traffic.
When im a little late for work and i see a bus its done ..... at least 15m stoped in the trafic is guaranteed
if you don't think 68 people trying to drive 68 cars on the same route is going to cause congestion on the roads, and thus "halting", where do you think traffic jams come from?
Nice. I have to travel like 17 miles to the nearest bus station. This fixes everything! /s
Better off with my own vehicle when it's only like 8 miles to work. I'd be literally wasting 9 miles to the bus station and 9 miles back in my own vehicle to even get back and forth to the bus station.
Edit: Seriously, have any of you tried traveling 17 miles to the west, only to catch a bus going 25 miles to the east, passing your own town to get to work? Then going 25 miles back, only to have to drive your own vehicle back home, because the bus don't stop there?
The area I live in actually used to have its own bus station within walking distance from my place. Until 2009 when they totally shut it down, for basically no good reason.
They nickname our town Ghost Town ever since then. We're even a bicycle friendly community, but not a single bicycle shop in town anymore either. Ever since 2011 we bicyclists gotta travel at least 8 miles to get tires and tubes.
Please make sure to read my other comment, our town was once developed with mass transit in mind. We even have our own railroad tracks, also within walking distance.
But God forbid the citizens get to use such things, too much industrial transportation on the tracks.
Sounds a lot like my town. This place used to have a train station and regular trains to major cities, and now it's used only for freight and they turned the old station into a railway museum. It's absurd.
Even if we assume this is true, that's literally meaningless - you can be attacked anywhere by anyone for any reason. Your comment implies this is a common occurrence, which it isn't.
And never mind the rampant spread of bedbugs and disease, being exposed to violence and sexual assault, risking being arrested simply for angering the bus driver, being made late to work or even missing it entirely because of bus breakdowns, route changes or cancellations, or any number of problems that are more easily rectified with an electric car or a bike
Yes, they are inherent issues. You can't control who goes on that bus and therefore can't guarantee the safety of passengers. You can't control whether buses break down or if the routes will change or not, so you can't guarantee riders will get to work on time, if at all. And in many cities, bus service is so poor that jobs will not hire people who ride the bus for those reasons.
You also can't stop people from spreading bedbugs and disease, and we all saw how well you reacted to that during covid.
Accept that you're just wrong on this. No matter how much you want buses to be a viable solution, they just aren't.
Normal people don't live in your strawman world of mental conjurations. Civilized countries already have great public transportation infrastructure working for hundreds of years.
This is the propaganda I can get behind.
And with trolleybuses powered on a renewable grid, it's zero gallons!
Or maybe tell bosses that if your job can be done remotely it should be done remotely. Then there's more room on the bus for people who need to be in meatspace to do their jobs.
If only bosses were open to persuasion.
They kinda forgot that unions and strikes are already the better alternative for them.
As much as I enjoy wanton violence for the ruling elite, a good start would be threatening the politicians with this unless they implement laws that make it unprofitable to force people into offices.
It should be codified that if a job can be performed remotely, it ought be, with the voluntary option to have people go to offices and such.
Yeah, tell it my boss. I had this conversation today with her.
I wish I didn't need hands for my job, 90% of it is brain work with a tinker here and there. I see so many videos of robotic hands being used for things and can't wait for the day I can just send one of these out to a site equipped with some tools and just remotely tap into the video stream. It's coming and I don't think it will be too long. Hell, I'm just a layman and if you gave me a dedicated year and some funding I could get something viable up to par so I'm sure it's possible, guess it just won't profit anyone enough to sell it yet.
We used to have trolleybuses when I was a kid in the 70's, they were so insanely much more nice to ride than a diesel. No bad smell, and they were smooth and quiet.
I guess we will get back to something similar soon, but with batteries.
It's still a shame because the batteries are less environmentally friendly than the old trolley busses.
Yes in some aspects, it's like we are moving backwards. Funny since the talk about environment is more serious now than back then, still we often use unnecessarily polluting solutions, where the older "too expensive" solutions were viable when we had way less money as a country than we have now?
One would have thought the oil crisis had made us keep the trolley busses?
While I agree with the comparison in the post, the trolleybus powered by renewable energy shouldn't be compared to gas cars.
It should be compared to electric cars powered by renewable energy.
I disagree, the bus is still replacing the purpose of the gas cars. The bus should just be compared to both gas and electric cars.
It is easier and cheaper to make one larger electric vehicle than 68 smaller ones, and they would damage the road less too. Of course this kind of comparison between two different things is inherently very difficult to do fairly
Trolleybuses are much lighter, cheaper and reliable than regular electric bus or car. Also: a car is still a car.
Ik that ttolleybuses are better than electric cars in carbon footprint, traffic, etc. I'm just proposing that we compare things with the same power source together. It makes more impact to say that an electric trolley is x% better on y metric compared to electric cars, than to say they are x% better than gas cars.
Imagine a situation where you say electric trolleybuses are superior to gas cars for reasons x, y, and z on xcretion or speddit. Then some elon musk bootlicker or big oil bootlicker replies to you saying "what about electric cars" or "what about gas buses"? You craft a meticulous reply about why gas buses are better than electric cars. But it's too late. Thousands of lurkers saw the bootlicker's reply to you but will never see your rebuttal. Many of them are now more against public transportation.
How are buses still not better? The ratio of individual people being moved to total mass being moved is better. The maintenance and insurance fees are collective. The driver of the bus is a trained professional vs some rando commuter.
Nope, a car electric or not creates multiple issues like urbanism, pollution (i.e: noise, visual, microplastics), hotspots, hostiles environment like parking lots, increase deaths rates, consequences on flooding, etc.
A lot of them can be solved with public transportation.
Trolleybuses are great. Fuck Sobyanin.
New electric buses in London are fucking amazing, no need for trolleys.
Until in 5-10 years when the batteries are fucked.
That's the beautiful thing about trolley buses - they do not need a (substantial) battery. They are basically trains on wheels.
There are some places where battery powered buses make sense - for example, where I live, lucerne Switzerland, there is one bus line that just goes up and down a rather steep hill. By using recuperative braking, the battery powered bus is super efficient. For other, normal 'high traffic' lines, trolley makes so much more sense
Trolleys don't really make any sense. I come from Riga, it has a lot of trolleys and the city is designed around trolleys and trams. And yet modern trolleys have bloody diesel engines, because being permanently hooked to the wire makes no sense at all. It's much better to have electric buses with a few overhead wires here and there to fast charge on the go.
Lucerne has a few trolley lines. They are ONLY trolley buses. The long, 3 Segment ones. Then, some 1 Segment hybrid buses that have pantagraphs. At the end of those lines, there is a longer stop where the trolley lines end, the pantagraph gets pulled down and the bus trucks along the last few stations with diesel.
Then theres just normal hybrid buses for more rural lines, and a battery operated bus that goes up and down a hill.
There's a solution for every line - you just need the proper infrastructure. The reason that we have this great pantagraph-compatible infrastructure is that, while there are a lot of trains in Switzerland, there is no metro. So in lucerne, the trolley buses work almost as a metro, with the main lines having buses every 7 minutes.
... why not have as many cables as possible so you can simply minimize battery size? Trolleybuses are just more efficient battery buses.
Cables are expensive and dangerous. Why have them at all?
Batteries are also expensive, and how are cables dangerous? We use them for trams without issue.
People die from touching cables quite regularly.
VPN uses 0 gallons.
Acktually, to use a VPN, you would need to turn on your PC or phone, which uses a small but existent amount of petrol -🤓
Solar power. Checkmate, atheists.
and EV car. also fuck petrol. and gallons while I'm here.
EVs solve about 2 of the 20 problems cars create.
While that's true, they "solve"* the two issues that are most pressing with ICE cars, air polution and fossil fuel use. I'd rather have EVs over ICEs, and I'd rather have walkable cities and robust public transit than either of the car options.
* are better, not perfect
perfect is the enemy of good.
With climate change, we have a multiplication of flooding and heat wave. Cars increase the effect of both of them. EVs or ICEs, it doesn't matter.
EVs are not and will never ever be the answer. It's a myth like many created by the car industry.
no one said they were, calm down.
It's nighttime doe
Pumped storage hydropower works all the time.
Never give up
Collect moon and starlight
The real waste is in converting solar to electricity. Use fiber optics, powered by light! Simplify! 🥴
Hydroelectricity, nuclear, wind and solar BABEEYYYYYY!!!!!
Hydro destroys environments, uses enormous amounts of concrete and the related disasters have killed orders of magnitude more people than nuclear.
Orders of magnitude more than nuclear is a low bar, nuclear is quite safe. How does it compare to coal or oil?
Yeah if three gorges broke then it would be the biggest mass death event in human history. Hydro dams are at the bottom of my list
perfectly valid point to bring up on a community dedicated to hating on polluters even if it was originally just a joke. Pretty serious matters
Very hard to deliver milk over VPN
When was the last time you saw a milkman on a bus?
That was, of course, just a random example of a job that cannot be done from home. A lot of jobs do require physical presence of people, that's all I was trying to say.
Of course, a milkman would also require to travel to and fro their place of work, dunno why they cannot be on a bus for that.
You do not actually see many milkmen these days. A milkman's business was ran a bit like McDonalds's with the milkman buying the as an individual and then selling it door to door. Every single milkman that I have known has worked from home.
So kind of a bad example but I get your point. No not all people can work from home, but those who can should surely be given that option. I have a wife who is a civil servant. She is required to travel to work for 40% of her hours worked. This is for no other reason than going into work by direction of the Tory party. This was not really an issue until they moved the place of work 8 miles away. She literally has to pay for a bus, sit on a bus for an hour each way, while carrying all her PC equipment with her, just so she can do exactly the same job while sitting in an office. All her meetings are done online, even while in the office. So there is a lot to be said regarding this Tory agenda of forcing people to work from the office just to appease their Donors.
68 men plus the driver makes 69, amirite?
But the driver is already at work
That made me laugh out loud in the literal sense of the phrase
But how does the bus driver get to work?
To be fair 1 person using car is not 450 people that could use a car. To be fair at most 20% of people have a car in heavily car-centric cities. In good cities it hangs in single-digit.
At some point, public transport had housing nearby the depots. Employees could walk or bicycle to the workplace.
Then some douchebag neoliberal thinking @&€#!?/((+ thought it was privilege and that it has to be cut...
And it takes them all at the same time?? 😳
nice
Ah, you should see buses in my city. Dirty, thirty years old, overpopulated graves on wheels with no air conditioners.
Never again.
That one bus company in the nearby city that absolutely refuses to replace their miserable old buses 🥴🤡 while the others run modern air conditioned hybrids, and some fully electric
You have multiple bus companies in one city?
Privatisation ☹️
Recently the fares were combined so we no longer need to get separate tickets for each
Having to buy different tickets for bus lines sounds miserable. Wtf.
Multiple bus companies can be a good thing if done well. The busses in Taiwan are also privatized and the service is quite good. In Japan even the metro and rail networks compete in a private market.
When you privatize a company and make it a monopoly though you get the worst of both worlds.
Dear Faust. Are they using Soviet minibuses?
Ha! I have nothing but good memories about PAZ-3205. Fast, comfortable, with working AC.
LIAZ-677, on the other hand... now that's a proper torture machine
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/LiAZ-677_bus_in_Bor.jpg
Whoa! Bus from 60-ies!
Thirty years old is a perfectly reasonable age for a big chunk of a city's fleet. You're still talking kneeling busses.
Then start campaigning for better public infrastructure.
Recently visited York (UK) and they have a fantastic bus system - and they're electric.
Busses in my city are also going electric. So far only the local routes. The longer distance routes are still diesel
I could take 68 men. That's a normal Saturday night for me.
...in a fight right?
Uuuhhhh....
Can't take any more, because at 69 you'll blow a rod.
And not in a good way either...
But everybody loves cars! Just look at how many cars people buy all the time!
/s
But that'll take away people's freedom to pay a subscription for heated seats 😔
Despite having the tube and double-decker busses, London is the most traffic congested city in the world.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-10/these-are-the-world-s-most-congested-cities
Imagine how bad it would be without the tube and busses! All these people trying to drive in London? Just thinking about it I shudder and I've never even seen London.
Good job they have them, in that case!
According to a study conducted in 1000 cities in 50 countries based on data from connected vehicles and phones. Not disagreeing with the premise but I expect there are plenty of other more "congested" cities, visit Manila or Jakarta for example. The UK should however definitely do more to fund its public infrastructure.
London has one of the best transport system in the country.
Manila is hell
Not all sources agree on that. Also, I can think of a way or two to eliminate all traffic congestion.
I was in London for a few days last year and it was pretty fine
At least in my experience most of the traffic is people trying to go into London from commuter towns, and they'll take the motorways not the streets
Gallons? Shouldn't it be liters?
Shamelessly stolen from I can't remember.
The only issue I have with this is there's a British gallon (that is DIFFERENT from the American gallon) that is used to measure milk. :D. That was the only place I saw gallon being used.
Oh no, so we have metric, imperial units, and now colonial units?!
Still british units :D. In 1826 Britain decided to redefine gallon to mean "10 pounds of water". The earlier standard was 231 cublic inches (potentially meant to be 8 pounds of water). The US never adopted the new gallon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_gallon
Brits use tons and tonnes as separate units? Not confusing at all
I mean there is have metric ton, british ton and american ton. Or tonne. Idk, its all the same in our language.
When I think tonne, I think 1000kg. When I think ton, I just think of the vernacular "tons of stuff" type expression.
Actually, as much as I dislike imperial units, when it comes to body temperature I do think in Fahrenheit. Mostly because that's how my mum would tell if we were too sick to go to school. 99 - just a little ill, but you can have the day off. 100 - pretty ill, probably at least 3 days off. 101+ - super mega ill, off all week.
I believe England, GB maybe, is very much a mixed bag when it comes to measurement standards.
The thing is gallons are different.
For some reason I think, driving distance is kilometers, while driving speed is miles per hour. Is that right?
If you read the Highway Code, you'll learn that it's all over the place. Long distances on signs are in miles. But distance markers are placed in metres. But emergency phones are placed every mile. And distance markers, which are placed in metres and indicate distances in meters can also have a distance to the next emergency phone in fucking yards. One sign, two numbers, no letters, two systems. FUCKING HELL!!!
At least when I was there circa 2006, distances were miles as well.
It's Bri'ish, innit
No, litres.
It's not a modern poster
Reminds me article name from USSR newspaper about plane crash: "Gallons let down"/"Подвели галлоны".
It would be nowadays, but this is an old old advert.
It makes a good point but only if your country actually has public transport.
If you live somewhere with zero public transport, the car is your only option.
You make a good point but only if your country actually has roads.
If you live somewhere with no paved roads and only railroads, then that and walking are your only options.
(Sarcasm but I’m curious if you see the point)
You're trying to be sarcastic but you just described rural Canada
Well yes, except all the railroads where removed. Just lifted trucks and gravel roads as far as the eye can see.
You make a good point but only if your country has people.
If you live somewhere with no people and only animals, then you can't get anywhere and must traverse the jungle with a machete and a canteen full of either rainwater or your own piss.
😊
If you live somewhere, you're a part of the body that decides things like that. If you want public transit in your community, and you certainly should, take the steps to get the action started.
Nobody is going to change the world on our behalf; it all falls on us.
Whats one of the concrete steps? I don't know where you lives but here it seems impossible to push for that.
Starts by being an active member of the community. Attend counsel meetings, town hearings, etc. Bring up the topic at these, gauge the response. Talk to the people who seem enthusiastic in response. Work together and build a petition, then seek signatures first amongst the people who attend, then talk to your neighbors.
I never said it was going to be easy, I only said nobody else is going to do it on your behalf.
That's why the post advocates for public transport. So that we can have better options.
Now consider an electric bus
Now consider a trolley.
Are there multiple tracks?
Well, there's two. Only problem is the often obstructions and questionable breaking system
but this isn't new technology where you can write a 100 bullshit news article about and prais it as the next big thing because it actually works and is efficient
The correct answer actually should -and could- be 0 gallons if they simply cycle to work. Granted, that requires them to have the right infrastructure available, but if (once) that existed, the vast majority of the work force could cycle to work happily. Most people don't live 20 miles or more from where they work
It could also be 0 gallons if the busses are electrified, or if the rail system is expanded, or if we stop pushing office workers to commute every day.
There are many routes to 0 emissions.
Oh sure.
I'm just sayjt that we need to change the way we live. Like you said, people should not be required to work in offices anymore. If they physically need to be at locations, let them walk for short distances, cycle for medium distances and use public transportation for large distances.
Most cities in the world have been redesigned over the past 80 years for cars. It's insane and it left most cities awful places to live in. Almost all Dutch cities have been redesigned for people. So people walk and cycle because they can, and the cities look and feel amazing and beautiful.
Sure, I'd love to cycle 56km to and from work each day. Especially right after a night shift.
We should just invent portals already.
If we invented portals I feel like they would use more fossil fuels than just driving.
I think the bones are fully consumed by the teleportation ritual.
bones will be the fuel
Green and renewable fossil fuel (don't ask where we get the bones)
56 kms is far, indeed. Thsts what you make public transportation for. Trains, busses.
Well done, the would be more comfortable and faster than a car.
However, I did 25 kms to and from every day. Took me 45 minutes and it was super healthy
I commute with a car to a bus. I lived closer but this only takes 15min more.
45 minutes is a long time near nightfall, though... Honestly I'd rather take a bus at 5PM, even at 12km, since there are other people and it feels much safer.
Maybe... Move closer to where you work?
Then why wife would be further from where she works.
I never thought of that. Thanks! Now I just need a shit ton of money to do so!
How many gallons does the ambulance take to get the cyclist to the hospital after the hit and run?
(Seriously tho bicycles ftw except in winter)
Winter cycling is awesome*, I can finally get to work without being sweety.
*Winter experience is highly dependent on how well your area does SNIC
Less, probably, because cycling in on itself is safer than driving a car. Lower speeds, less mass, less injuries.
Also, winter cycling.is awesome
I was being facetious; ambulance fuel use is a silly comparison :)
Listening to all y'all winter cyclists I lament that I live in a city where the bike lanes are where the city piles up the snow it plows off the car lanes on the streets. RIP me. It gives me hope and happiness to know that there are cities that don't do this!
Yeah those would be cities that see bikes as children's toys instead of what they are: a better form of medium range transit
We need to get one more man to work
This was a lot more appealing before COVID.
Masks work.
Vaccines exist. COVID is not a thing anyone I know worries about anymore. I keep getting surprised on the internet.
Fun fact: first working vaccines were created during first months of pandemic.
Yeah, but it took ages for them to be manufactured in large numbers.
I wore a mask had the vaccine and a booster and social distanced and still got it.
Fun fact. None of those things are perfect except staying away from everyone and your entire household doing so as well. Cloth masks work better when both/everyone wears one; that lowers the chance of getting infected to 3%. If only one person wears a mask, there's a much higher risk of infection. The vaccine and booster are great, but again, not 100%. It is good to stack things in your favor, but stuff still happens. To take the small percentage where people still get sick and use that to decide masks don't protect anyone at all is ridiculous.
Literally the only person I know that didn't get it was my mom and we were all masking, vaccinated, washing hands, etc. All those precautions did nothing but delay the inevitable.
I mean, sure, but if you hadn't used those precautions you would have gotten it sooner, likely spread it to more people who would have them spread it to more people, ect. The point wasn't to prevent infection for eternity.
Getting it sooner would have gotten it out of the way sooner and the whole ordeal would have been over with after it ran it's course instead of dragging it out for 2 years.
Not necessarily. I know several people who got it several times within that period. And we dragged it out on purpose to not overwhelm our hospitals.
So, it does have to be a mask that will actually protect you.
If you didn't pay, a pretty steep price at the time, for the right mask (like something that will protectv you from paint fumes) then you were wasting your time.
Source: When I mask up I use N95's. I use best judgement, haven't gotten covid. Not too late to protect yourself. I don't think I'll be able to keep it up forever, but I'm banking on new vaccines kicking covids ass.
So "masks" don't work. Specific masks work. No one was mandating n95 masks it was all those shitty paper ones then acting like that was sufficient.
The mask isn't to protect yourself, it protects everyone else from being infected by you.
Won't work in the US. We all hate each other.
British people all hate English people. Even the English.
damn english people, they ruined england
So the very first result on Google for "double decker fuel efficiency" give the result "per gallon, while a 'double-decker' bus with a Diesel engine will run 11 miles per gallon".
44 / 5 days is approx 9 miles poet day. 4.5 miles to and 4.5 miles back.
I didn't want to believe this but I guess city dwellers where double deckers operate would probably have short commutes like this on average
And six times as long as best.
Exactly!
70mins of walking/train/walking... Or 25mins door to door in the comfort of my car.
In London?
In civilized places, buses take about as long as a car, as they're prioritized in infrastructure. The added benefit is that you don't even need to own a 2 ton death machine.
Fuck off with your condensed bullshit, not everyone lives in cities, not everyone wants to live in cities.
Yes, the people who don't want to live in cities are called "clinically insane".
Where do you think your food comes from?
Where do you think all of your tech gets made?
Where do you think all the resources those factories consume come from?
Cut the crap and stop acting like city life is the only way to live.
Not the case where I live. What is a ten minute drive quite literally takes the bus 50 to 80 minutes.
I can't justify that much wasted time both ways. That's about two hours of my day I could be spending doing anything but riding the bus.
That's not an argument against mass transit as much as it's an argument against building car-centric infrastructure.
Fair, but it is the reality a lot of people live with. I would love for us to have a Netherlands approach to biking, but we don't. And we have brutally cold winters, where waiting for a bus is made even more undesirable, and biking less of an option because of how treacherous the snow makes everything (including driving).
To me it seems more like a pleasant fantasy than a realistic expectation. For other places I'm sure it is an attainable reality.
It's all about location.
I don't think you'll meet a transit/urbanism advocate who will tell you to ride transit that doesn't exist where you are or that is wildly impractical for you. I certainly won't. For me, it's more about doing what makes the most sense for you, while also pushing to change the infrastructure where you are to make transit and urbanism better and more feasible for more people.
I have written my council pushing for changes to existing biking laws to make it safer in my city. So you're rightz we have to push for what we need. Nothing changes if we don't voice our concerns.
Local climate really isn't a reason to avoid public transportation infrastructure, as you have VERY hot and humid places (São Paulo, Brazil during summer) and very cold places (Netherlands during winter) with perfectly functional services. It's all about HOW said infrastructure is deployed and cared for.
Netherlands is quite warm from my perspective and a poor comparison to the extremely harsh winters we experience.
Thier average winter temperature is our late fall and early spring temp (November and March). The months of December, January and March are more comparable to Siberia.
With the added bonus of storage space for all sorts of things!
Let me guess, you're a 'murican?
Nice assumption you wrongly made.
That's great when all those people live in the same block and go to work at the same company and have the same hours.
But Frank lives 10 miles away and works on the other side of town. And Tim lives 3 towns over and works the night shift. Bill lives in the country and works 40 miles away. Eddy lost a leg in the war and while he is only 1/2 mile from the bus station, can't walk that far with his disability.
When it is convenient, it is convenient, but there's a reason why when given the choice, most normal people will drive their car instead no matter what the nonsense in this subs likes to pretend is real.
Don't forget Susan, whose base wages are so low that she has to work overtime to make ends meet. But the bus doesn't run that late, so 2/3 of her overtime goes to an uber, whose driver also can't feed her children.
Well Susan sounds rather dumb if she is using an Uber as a daily form of transportation where 2/3rd of her money is going to. She should consider getting a car.
Paycheque to paycheque can't buy you a car, but it can guy you multiple cabs.
It's expensive to be poor.
Being stupid is even worse.
Bit of a dick, aren't ya?
Only sometimes. Imaginary "gotcha" type of hypothetical situations tend to bring that out.
Not imaginary but ok. Didn't realize you were one of those insufferable "actually" kind of trolls. My bad, I really should have clued in. Carry on.
Susan should've been born on a civilized country, as those run buses around the clock
Neither he can drive. Or in some countries even not allowed to.
Hand-controls are a thing. Eddy is perfectly fine driving his handi-van around. He's not too keen on when motorcycles part in between the handicapped spots though.
Jessie got shot in the face in the war, his lack of depth perception from having one eye stops him from driving.
Fred, Stephanie, Phil, Jack, and Masha all have severe hearing loss from the war (Jack's is actually from training for the war), while they can still drive, it's safer for them not too.
Nick, Chloe, Phil (different Phil), and Jessie (same Jessie) all got blown up in the war, driving vehicles is extremely stressful for them. Being a passenger to varying less degrees. Trains don't seem to trigger any reaction, and busses don't for at least one of them (not sure about the others)
The post is a meme about how buses are a better option than cars because they can transport more people at once using amount of gas less than what would be done on a 1:1 basis.
I feel like you’ve not ridden a bus before though - you didn’t mention schedules or routes once which solve the majority of your claimed points.
The disabled persons perspective is an interesting point, but shuttle services for the disabled would be even easier to run, as they would require vans instead of buses. Also, choosing to live in the country side away from bus routes when you can’t fucking walking is not the fault of the bus haha
Spoken like a true clueless 'murican. What the fuck do you think bus lines are?
Maybe your public transport infrastructure needs improvement? I don't think this post wants to judge you— it's advocating for public transport to be paid more attention. My cousin lives 3 towns away from her workplace— she commutes with a bus or jeepney. We have either buses, vans, or jeepneys; combined they operate 24/7. Hell, my university has students more than 5 municipalities away, the buses start operations early in the morning. Our classes start at 6:30 AM. Oh and btw, our buses have routes more than 300km. Maybe even more. Regarding Eddy, we have something in my country called a motorela or a tricycle, that operates locally in neighbourhoods. He won't have to walk far, he just has to wait for one and let it deliver him to a waiting area.
Not only that, there are buses intended for long and short routes. So even if you live some towns away, your bus won't have to stop as often.
Nobody is arguing it isn't efficient. It's a pain in the ass and I need to deal with randoms in public.
This isn't intended to refute people saying it isn't?
What do I do when there's no bus route anywhere near my work? I cycle when it's weather appropriate but I ain't cycling to work in 20°C heatwave.
20 c is a heatwave? Isn't that like 68 F? I'd think 30+ is heatwave territory.
Nah, 30° is hot, heatwave territory is 35+
20 is enough to be generally uncomfortable all day.
I think you've become confused?
Nope.
Are you secretly a penguin?
Be honest.
And here my air conditioner settings are set to 24C°...
Fair enough. I start to get grumpy at 24 but I grew up in the desert SW USA but have acclimated to our temperate PacNW weather. I'd say similar to Manchester and Liverpool but summers definitely get hotter.
20° heatwave? It's 33° tomorrow and I'll be cycling.
Campaign for better bus routes?
Yeah the suggestion was "organize for better bus routes and in the meantime don't go to work". Exactly what was said. Word for word.
Lmao exactly. I’m all for better public transportation but these comments seem like they’re from kids who don’t have people depending on them for a roof and food.
Let me lose my job so I can go yell into the void for better bus routes
Except you're the two being childish.
If you don't have a bus route, no one is here telling you to hitch hike or cycle in heat stroke weather for long commute or not go to work. Can you please point out where I or anyone here said so?
But "what can I do" was the question.
You can recognize the benefits of a good urban infrastructure and public transportation, highlight the lacking infrastructure in your areas, and support the goals of building that up by contacting your local officials or participating with groups who do organize.
This "child" lives within walking distance of his work office (for the few times I even have to to in) and on a bus route that can get me there as well (a bus system that is highly lacking in its own ways, to which I make note of to my local council).
I guess I should act like an "adult" and go "oh your work isn't near a bus route. What can I do? Guess nothing."
That is how we solve problems.
This post isn't attacking you for your area's lack of infrastructure.
Your ability to think, or rather the lack of it, is astounding.
You're quite picky. Appropriate for a 1st Worlder, I might say.
You need about 7 cars displaced per bus at all times in order for it to be more efficient in gas.
I would rather have a world full of velomobiles than buses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport#US_Passenger_transportation
Is that still true for modern hybrid buses?
Edit - also surely mean you need to average 7 people as when it's full it'll be a little over 12 times as efficient as when there's 7 people. So it could run for 10 minutes full then about 2 hours completely empty and it would balance.
No i meant 7 cars worth of people. If a bus can displace 7 cars then it is only equal in efficiency. This applies to hybrid buses too as they only get marginally better performance per energy needed to use.
That makes no sense
The average number of people per car is 1.5 so its not like its crazy off. Not sure how that doesnt make sense
So you'd need the bus to have 10.5 people at all times? But why doesn't an average capacity work? Do you have an figures to back so this up, especially the hybrid bus claims?
Only 7? That's about 10% of rated capacity or 6% of sardines-in-can capacity. And that is for single-section bus.
I don't know how it is in other places/countries but in Paris (inside and in the ≈ 15km area) , clearly, there is always at least 10 passenger in the same bus, I would say 25 average and at the peak hour an easy 50. So I think buses are still an energy efficient transport, at least in some places.
Moscow, usually all seats are taken(25 people), maybe only during night passanger count is single-digit.
I think most people recognize buses are effective for major cities. It gets murkier for less populated locations. America doesn't really build dense.
Which is really just a bad choice. We could have proper town planning if we wanted, and in fact we used to have it. But then we knocked down neighborhoods to make room for highways and that was that. We can work our way back to good towns of any size, if we wanted.
Public transit doesn't require density. Example: Old Oskol tram.
This assumes all of them live right next to each other though
Is the idea of 68 people living within a few blocks of a bus line hard to believe? You know they don't all get on on from the same stop, right?
they only need to live within walking distance from any bus stop along the line. the difference averages out to something around that ballpark
People people. We need to solve the problem of cars by building bigger cars!
Yeah man if you solution doesn’t completely solve the problem, fuck it! Throw it away it must be entirely useless right. No merit. And plus we have all the time in the world to wait until we have a perfect solution right? Duh!
/s
With the exclamation mark, it's obvious to me that this is sarcasm. However Lemmings seem to take anything not marked with /s seriously or interpret things in the most negative way to the degree that I'm starting to question myself.
This is sarcasm right?
No that's not it. They need to be smaller
Well if they get smaller we’ll need more of em!
Yeah, but buses generally suck. Give me actual rail, thanks.
The DC Metro was amazing.
They don’t have to suck though.
They pretty much do have to suck. They arrive infrequently, stop frequently, accelerate like an overloaded lorry, and are only remotely feasible if your start and end points are on the same route. Switching buses is a huge time penalty. They only approach usability in urban hellscapes that are so densely populated, it makes my skin crawl.
Yet they keep putting them in small cities and towns where they take 3x as long to get anywhere as driving because of indirect routing, while causing traffic congestion because of frequent stops and low performance. Seriously, fuck buses.
None of this is inherent to buses. Poorly planned and managed bus routes may have some of these features. And in the US this may be common but there are many many bus routes that do not resemble this at all.
Also the idea that buses make traffic worse than cars is absurd. Buses are a solution to traffic, not a cause of it.
I swear this is a no-true-Scotsman argument: "you don't hate buses/apartments/transit, you just have never lived anywhere that has the good stuff".
I've lived many places and traveled plenty, and I'm convinced there's no good stuff. To have transit that works, you need density that's oppressive. I did it in NYC, which is a best-case scenario for transit facilitated by high density. NYC has transit that runs frequently, and 24/7/365. Buses, subway, trains, and even ferries. It's so dense most people don't own a car (I certainly didn't). Everyone lives in apartments. Walking and biking is the norm. Even pizza delivery is done by bike instead of car. Catching an Uber was still much faster for many point-to-point trips, because transit necessarily can't go direct from everywhere, to everywhere.
Now that I'm back in suburbia, a trip to the grocery store takes 1/4 as long by car (same distance). I don't have to spend a ton of time waiting to catch a connecting train or bus that I missed by 30 seconds. I don't have to ride though stop after stop, packed in with other people. I can just go direct from origin to destination in quiet comfort, without the headaches
I'm not claiming your bad bus experiences aren't true buses, so that phallacy doesn't apply in any way I can tell. You described what you said were universal features of bus routes. I pointed out that those are not at all universal. And indeed, you now admit that you yourself have used buses that run frequently, which undermines your original argument, even if they had other flaws in your view.
I've never lived in New York but I think there's still lots of room for improvement even there. But regardless, I've used transit that was better and faster than driving many times. So that remains my point, even if you haven't experienced that.
It sounds like you just don't like cities or being around too many other people. Which is fine for you but tons of people do or at least it does not bother them. And for those people, buses, when run properly (clean, on time, frequent, with dedicated lanes so they don't get stuck in traffic, and directly connecting places people need to go) are an excellent way to get around. I've even used some buses in rural areas that beat out car travel, though that's more rare obviously. So yes, it can be done well. Maybe not to your standards of zero wait time ever and zero tolerance for being around other people but most people aren't that picky.
Nice.
Your argument parallels the no true Scotsman fallacy much closer than you realize.
You: no Scotsman would commit such a crime
Me: but it says here that a Scotsman committed the crime
You: No true Scotsman would commit such a crime...
Compare:
You: buses are great!
Me: I take buses and they suck!
You: good buses are great, you just aren't taking the good ones...
It's exactly the same. You get to decide who is a true Scotsman for the purpose of argument, and what constitutes a good bus service. You can simply declare that the bus service isn't a good one and therefore doesn't reflect badly on bus services, just as you can decide the criminal wasn't a true Scotsman, and therefore you're always right.
I have used buses which run frequently for buses, but which are still too infrequent and thus add lots of unnecessary time.
I think NYC is an excellent representative of transit done well. It may not be world-best, but there aren't many places that are as dense or more dense and that creates a best case scenario for running at all hours and with maximum frequency. Also, most people don't own cars and don't drive there. There are few places with so many built-in advantages for transit as NYC.
No argument there.
I think you need to read up on what that phallacy is before tossing it around: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
It applies to generalized statements, which I never made. You even had to falsely paraphrase my statement to make it more applicable (that phallacy is called a straw man by the way). But I never said all buses are great. In fact I think you’re right that most buses in the US are terrible. I’m just saying that they don’t have to. It’s a totally different type of claim. If anything your argument is more logically similar because you are making a universal claim that buses are always bad.
Part of the issue is that we probably don’t have a common definition of a good or bad mode of transit. I would say cars are a terrible way to get around in most urban areas, but you obviously don’t agree because we have different definitions of what makes something a good or bad way to get around.
But I will maintain that bus systems, when properly managed and implemented would be preferable over driving for that majority of people in urban areas, and even in some rural or small towns too.
London buses definitely don't suck. You can't lay light rail everywhere and buses are great at bridging that gap.
We'll here in my city it not cuts congestion it MAKES congestion
a bus makes more traffic congestion than people travelling in separate cars? how?
I dont know how are bus in your country but here they are really bigs and not rarely they drive 2/3 together what makes the traffic slowly and by read traffic light everything stops not only in the direction from the read traffic lights but in all directions because the bus blocks everything. If the all people in the bus drives a car the traffic would be more fluid. I accept the bus makes less pollution but not better traffic. When im a little late for work and i see a bus its done ..... at least 15m stoped in the trafic is guaranteed
but how many gallons does it take without hating to your life?
see answer 1
if you don't think 68 people trying to drive 68 cars on the same route is going to cause congestion on the roads, and thus "halting", where do you think traffic jams come from?
'murican behaving as a 'murican, as usual. Just live in a civilized country, friend.
I live in Finland and drive an EV, good attempt. My reply was just a joke 🤦♂️
Nice. I have to travel like 17 miles to the nearest bus station. This fixes everything! /s
Better off with my own vehicle when it's only like 8 miles to work. I'd be literally wasting 9 miles to the bus station and 9 miles back in my own vehicle to even get back and forth to the bus station.
Edit: Seriously, have any of you tried traveling 17 miles to the west, only to catch a bus going 25 miles to the east, passing your own town to get to work? Then going 25 miles back, only to have to drive your own vehicle back home, because the bus don't stop there?
Better off just taking my own vehicle to work.
Infrastructure and non transit orieted developmental problem. the place you live was likely built with only the car in mind.
The area I live in actually used to have its own bus station within walking distance from my place. Until 2009 when they totally shut it down, for basically no good reason.
They nickname our town Ghost Town ever since then. We're even a bicycle friendly community, but not a single bicycle shop in town anymore either. Ever since 2011 we bicyclists gotta travel at least 8 miles to get tires and tubes.
Please make sure to read my other comment, our town was once developed with mass transit in mind. We even have our own railroad tracks, also within walking distance.
But God forbid the citizens get to use such things, too much industrial transportation on the tracks.
Sounds a lot like my town. This place used to have a train station and regular trains to major cities, and now it's used only for freight and they turned the old station into a railway museum. It's absurd.
Dang, you folks have a railway museum?
Closest we got is to ask the nearest homeless dude where the parked antique trains are.. ☹️
That's fine when back in the day they didn't want to stab you for looking their way for 0.3 ms
Seek mental help, you may be paranoid.
Not sure why I'm down voted, I literally got attacked in a London bus...
Even if we assume this is true, that's literally meaningless - you can be attacked anywhere by anyone for any reason. Your comment implies this is a common occurrence, which it isn't.
And never mind the rampant spread of bedbugs and disease, being exposed to violence and sexual assault, risking being arrested simply for angering the bus driver, being made late to work or even missing it entirely because of bus breakdowns, route changes or cancellations, or any number of problems that are more easily rectified with an electric car or a bike
Yeah man because these are all inherent issues and not at all to do with the implementation
Yes, they are inherent issues. You can't control who goes on that bus and therefore can't guarantee the safety of passengers. You can't control whether buses break down or if the routes will change or not, so you can't guarantee riders will get to work on time, if at all. And in many cities, bus service is so poor that jobs will not hire people who ride the bus for those reasons.
You also can't stop people from spreading bedbugs and disease, and we all saw how well you reacted to that during covid.
Accept that you're just wrong on this. No matter how much you want buses to be a viable solution, they just aren't.
Ok, I'm curious if you think all mass transport is just a no-go then. What can be done?
Electric cars, of course
I’m not gonna argue with a troll lmao we’re done now
Normal people don't live in your strawman world of mental conjurations. Civilized countries already have great public transportation infrastructure working for hundreds of years.