Problem is, in LA at least, the bus and the car are about the same amount of time. Maybe a smidge longer for the bus. So most people that can afford to will take a car to avoid the cranksters, shockingly rude bus patrons, and the chance of a 'piss bus' on their way home.
A bus anyway in LA is substantially longer than driving. LA traffic is so annoying that a lot of people would likely take the bus if it was faster.
If there were 10x more busses, and I could pay $10 for an all day pass, I'd take the bus every other day. Especially if the higher cost limited those who unfortunately use mass transit as temporary shelter. (And find some alternative temporary no strings attached shelter for them.)
Depending on traffic, the bus is typically about the same, maybe 5 minutes more on the hour long ride I took for 2 years under the 405 everyday. You have to add in the time it takes to find parking for your car, which a bus does not do. Yes, some days are worse, some are better, but for me it was about the same for a hour+ commute.
Something needs to be done about the bus lanes then. Buses should drive in dedicated lanes, that's the whole point. If you are stuck in traffic on a bus then something isn't right.
In LA, there are little to no bus lanes. Trying to introduce them is nonsense. You'd have to rip up the sidewalk too make the room. If you try to convert the street into having just one bus lane each way you have now converted 2/6 lanes into bus lanes, sometimes 2/4 lanes. The car traffic already extends for blocks/miles if you are trying to get onto the 405 from the Westside, bus lanes would extend it to a third to twice as long as it is. People would flat ignore the bus lane too, probably a Beemer driver. And if you think that the cops are going to ticket anyone, you have never driven in LA traffic at rush hour. You could kill 10 people in broad daylight, as long as you did not cause gridlock, and the LAPD could care less. LA is just plain super messed up with traffic from a structural level. New developments can be more dense, and many are. But if your job, your kids' schools, your spouse's job, and your grocery stores are not within walking distance (and are suuuuper stable) then you must have a car as the system currently is. These problems are not going to go away anytime in the next decade to half century.
Which only works if you can reduce traffic by an equivalent amount. Hence the congestion fees. The fee should clear up the lane AND pay for the bus to drive in the lane. Obviously, if there is no (reasonable) tariff that would actually make people not drive or change commute hours, then all you did was make it expensive to live in LA, while the public transit didn't improve. There is always a risk of that in the case of LA. But it might be worth trying at least.
> These problems are not going to go away anytime in the next decade to half century.
I completely agree - I think cities that are structurally messed up like LA have a long way to go, but that doesn't mean there aren't things that can be done. The question is what drives these changes. I think tolls, new zoning regulation, expanded public transit etc all have to be done, and no one action will solve the problem.
The problem is bus lanes are hopelessly inefficient, because there aren't enough buses to fully utilize them. And if you are stuck in traffic in anything then something isn't right.
If you want to spend resources to make buses more attractive, start by eliminating fares.
> The problem is bus lanes are hopelessly inefficient, because there aren't enough buses to fully utilize them
That means there is a lot of capacity to add buses without causing congestion in the bus lanes. That's good.
Obviously it might be tempting to say "look we can't sacrifice one lane of 4 here to buses when cars are jammed bumper to bumper in the other 3 lanes" but that's how bus lanes work. With too few buses, they are just an ineficcient demonstration to the people in cars that they really should be riding the bus.
> If you want to spend resources to make buses more attractive, start by eliminating fares.
If petrol taxes, parking and tolls are high enough, then the buses are already almost free in comparison. Whether it costs $0 or $4 to ride the bus to work shouldn't matter - if parking, gas and tolls are 10 times that for one day of driving. Eliminating fares is one way of making the bus relatively cheaper compared to cars - but there is very little room there. The room to increase the cost of driving is almost infinite and it can be tweaked with gas taxes, congestion fees and parking costs.
Btw: do people in US metro areas usually pay to park at work in inner cities? If metro area parking is a taxable comp then that's also a cost (e.g. if my marginal tax rate is 50% and free parking would be valued at $100 so I'd be taxed $50 per day for that benefit).
> That means there is a lot of capacity to add buses without causing congestion in the bus lanes. That's good.
Only if you actually add the buses, and people actually ride them, neither of which is a given.
> Obviously it might be tempting to say "look we can't sacrifice one lane of 4 here to buses when cars are jammed bumper to bumper in the other 3 lanes" but that's how bus lanes work.
That's the problem.
> With too few buses, they are just an ineficcient demonstration to the people in cars that they really should be riding the bus.
That only works if they can ride the bus.
The problem in most of the US is that you have a big congested highway, and then you get off the highway and drive another five or ten minutes on side streets to your destination.
You can't just tell those people to ride the bus, there aren't regular buses on the side streets because there isn't enough traffic there to justify them. And a bus that only takes you to the edge of the congested highway and then leaves you with an hour walk to your destination is useless.
> Whether it costs $0 or $4 to ride the bus to work shouldn't matter
It does matter to the tune of $4, and eliminating fares increases efficiency because you don't have to pay for a fare collection infrastructure, as opposed to bus lanes which dramatically decrease it because you're paying the full cost of a lane and then wasting most of it.
> if parking, gas and tolls are 10 times that for one day of driving
Stop trying to make driving worse. First you have to make the alternatives to driving better, and as soon as you do that, you don't need anything else.
Nobody actually likes driving to work, the only reason anybody does is that the alternatives are broken and terrible.
In order to make driving as bad as the alternatives without making the alternatives better, you would literally end up causing people and companies to move out of the city to avoid the expense. It's the same logic as arguing that burning down the city will reduce traffic congestion. Even if it does, that doesn't make it a good idea.
> The problem in most of the US is that you have a big congested highway, and then you get off the highway and drive another five or ten minutes on side streets to your destination.
> there aren't regular buses on the side streets because there isn't enough traffic there to justify them
That is the usual problem. But it's usually possible to have freeway buses connect to local buses that drive around an area. Driving around nearly empty buses might seem like a bad idea - but it's the best idea there is when people aren't in a car (because they just jumped off the train or freeway bus). A second solution is having people drive a short distance on local roads from their home to a public transit hub such as a train station, if there is no bus to take them near their homes - The problem is that once you get off a train or freeway bus you might not be at your destination. But that's where public transit can't solve the problem. Zoning and building also needs to change. Without that, people might still have to walk 30 minutes to the office.
The situation where a company puts up an office with a large parking in an "office park" (or whatever it's called) which might be 15 minutes from the closest public transit is the root of the problem. Since people have to use the car to their office anyway, they wouldn't be using the bus even if it existed, as you point out.
So the solutuion has to be in both ends: offices and housing needs to be in denser, more walkable areas, for example. I don't think the traffic problems in LA can be solved without fundamentally changing how and where people live and work.
> But that's where public transit can't solve the problem. Zoning and building also needs to change. Without that, people might still have to walk 30 minutes to the office.
This is my point. There is no amount you can add to the cost of driving that will get people to take a bus to a place the bus doesn't go.
And once you build high density office space next to a train station, people will take the train all on their own without any need to waste resources collecting regressive and privacy-invasive road tolls.
Or if the first 2h pay of your day is used to pay for parking, then a bus ticket is attractive.