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 read the link I posted, which is the same one you linked. I think some of the way you presented your argument suggests to me that you’re making a distinction between well-executed and poorly-executed transit, and saying that because I find transit/buses to be inefficient and an unbearable mode of travel, I must be using a poorly-executed system. That sounds a lot to me like no-true-scotsman, because you seem to be judging whether I’m experiencing the “real thing” based on whether I thought it was efficient or not. Clearly I must be experiencing a bad version of it if it was inefficient or otherwise not to my liking - or at least that’s what you seem to have implied.
I agree that we probably don’t have a common definition of good or bad transit.
I also think you should read up on what a phallus is.
It’s sustainable, you just don’t understand the manufacturing process well enough. Seeds of old trucks are planted in the ground which generate the next truck crop for harvest in the fall.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Tldr: When you ride on a sidewalk, the risk of a driver hitting you at a driveway or intersection goes up substantially. That outweighs most of the other risks of being on the road itself in those studies.
Although it’s also worth pointing out that context and road design matter too. Speeds, the number of trees and shrubs by the sidewalk, and urban streets vs suburban stroads matters a lot.
There’s a reason that protected bike lanes aren’t just a sidewalk.
bicilists drive way faster on the roads, so this metric should be deaths per km/h. And there are a few more stistical biases that might be at play here.
You can achieve a very high quality of life if you are willing to waste resources. See private jets for an example.
If we want to preserve nature, we need to live denser than the large detached single family homes pictured.
However, row houses with a coop garden is probably a good compromise where people don’t have upstairs neighbors, and can grow things for fun. But you aren’t taking up a ton of space.
I don’t disagree. That actually sounds good to me. I’m just saying on a mass scale, most people don’t want to do the apartment thing.
I’d also rather not have to go up and down a million levels every time I leave home.
I’ve never lived in an apartment, so I don’t personally know the struggle of upstairs or downstairs neighbors.
I’ve only ever lived in 2 different houses when growing up, and then me and a few friends rented out another friend’s house when they moved out of town.
So that’s a pretty awesome situation, plus being able to smoke weed inside just by going down to the laundry room and almost always having at least one person around to smoke with is great.
But I’m used to having houses close by, so moving to row houses with a garden sounds perfect, especially if we can grow our own weed in said garden 😂.
Change the apartment to a condo and the answer shifts quite a bit. Condos offer lots of amenities and more luxury. Many people choose condos over houses because they like the lifestyle of not maintaining property and living in a dense area with lots of things to do. Even people living in suburban houses like dense cities, they just spend an hour driving to the city for evening or weekend recreation activities that a condo resident can walk to.
One problem with the picture is that if you want to spend much time doing certain things in nature, such as camping or kayaking, you need storage space for equipment. Condos and apartments tend to lack storage space.
I think problem there is more that people think you need huge pipes of stuff just to go camping. I don’t know of single person anymore who camps with a tent. They just can’t handle being so close to nature, I guess, even though that’s purportedly the reason they burned 100 litres of fuel hauling their mobile home 40 foot camper to the trailer park RV site.
As a student, I would rather rent in a modern apartment building than a house. No yard to take care of, closer to other stuff (grocery store is literally across the street), safer, no insects. I would 100% rather have a nice apartment over a meh house.
I’d choose a nice apartment over a nice house too. My dream is a nice two story apartment with big windows for lots of light and an open plan living space.
I’ve been living in a small one bedroom apartment in a modern 16 floor building for a bit over a year now. The only time I hear my neighbors is when they’re taking their dogs out for walking, you can hear them in the hallway. The hot water pressure is better than any house I’ve lived in in the past. I have a beautiful view outside and my own balcony. These are just some complaints about apartments I’ve heard from other people.
The reason I compared a nice apartment to a meh house was to be closer in cost, but I agree and would also prefer a nice apartment over a nice house.
you’d be hard-pressed to find one that actually likes it better.
It’s definitely a cultural thing. Here in Korea, the vast majority prefer apartments. Lower maintenance. More security. Convenience. The social aspect.
Have to or not, Koreans definitely favor apartments. There are western style houses here, and they’re just not as popular as apartments. Which is great. I’m living in a house that’s quite a bit bigger than a similarly priced apartment.
That’s likely partially because it’s “weird”. It can’t be normal since it’s not possible for a majority to live that way. There always people that are gonna like being unusual, but they’re the outlets by definition.
Or it could get well be that all else being equal, loans would still prefer it. My earlier comment was of course colored by US experience.
People live in apartments to afford shelter, you’d be hard-pressed to find one that actually likes it better.
I might want to live in one so that I could avoid doing 90% of the stuff that needs to be done in and around my house and focus on things I like doing.
They don’t do shit in general. Just barely enough to fulfill the letter of the law. Nothing even close to trying to maintain property value, just enough to keep them out of court.
I have plenty of friends and family that do though. And the house I lived in was rented and I had to deal with their maintenance or lack thereof in a very similar way.
Edit- never mind, this was directed at the previous guy
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