Buses are the missing middle of good public transport and walkability, make buses more frequent, give them dedicated lanes and traffic signal priority and make bus shelters nice places with seating and safety lights.
hibikir_40k on
Often they aren’t there because the cities aren’t densifying enough.
Buses are the first form of transit a city should try, but they won’t make economic sense (ie, have good ridership) unless they are connecting dense enclaves. Nobody in their right mind is going to park & ride to a bus stop. But we call for transit well before neighborhoods are actually walkable, which means catchment areas around stops that are just not going to drive trips no matter what.
I am just afraid that North American densification isn’t going to aim for dense, but to a “valley of despair” situation, where it’s not low density enough to make the car comfortable, but not dense enough as to make the advantages of having most of life in a 5 minute walk apparent. It’s as if we had some ghost nostalgia for the streetcar suburb, which back in the day took you to a downtown that no longer exists, and where all the jobs and departmen stores were. We forget that at such density, the car will probably win.
If an area is dense enough, you won’t have to push for buses: the people will scream for them.
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!ping Can-BC&Transit
Buses are the missing middle of good public transport and walkability, make buses more frequent, give them dedicated lanes and traffic signal priority and make bus shelters nice places with seating and safety lights.
Often they aren’t there because the cities aren’t densifying enough.
Buses are the first form of transit a city should try, but they won’t make economic sense (ie, have good ridership) unless they are connecting dense enclaves. Nobody in their right mind is going to park & ride to a bus stop. But we call for transit well before neighborhoods are actually walkable, which means catchment areas around stops that are just not going to drive trips no matter what.
I am just afraid that North American densification isn’t going to aim for dense, but to a “valley of despair” situation, where it’s not low density enough to make the car comfortable, but not dense enough as to make the advantages of having most of life in a 5 minute walk apparent. It’s as if we had some ghost nostalgia for the streetcar suburb, which back in the day took you to a downtown that no longer exists, and where all the jobs and departmen stores were. We forget that at such density, the car will probably win.
If an area is dense enough, you won’t have to push for buses: the people will scream for them.