Comments on: Public Transportation Saved 865 Million Hours Of Delay On US Roads In 2011

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:59:00 +0000

Interesting. Hadn’t read about that.

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 17:58:00 +0000

i don’t know of such studies/data, but am sure it’s out there.

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 19:20:00 +0000

Add comfortable to the mix.

In Bangkok they run two levels of public buses. The regular buses are pretty much what one sees in cities everywhere.

The more comfortable buses, which cost a bit more, have fewer seats, more comfortable seats, AC and accept passengers only when there are empty seats. No standing.

That additional level of comfort gets people in suits on the buses.

—

What also really seems to help public transportation is the ability to move long distances within cities very rapidly.

Bangkok has both a subway and an elevated light rail system. The trains are very frequent. And they zip you past the clogged streets very rapidly.

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 19:14:00 +0000

I suspect your criticism is “dishonest”. You need to take a look at how the Texas Transportation Institute calculated their findings. I suspect you’ll find they used typical passengers per mile data.

Then, Nicholas used a single occupant car vs. a fully loaded bus in his example. The example holds. It may not be typical ridership but it is a valid example.

A more accurate example could be made using bus occupancy such as 10.75 (2001) and vehicle occupancy of 1.7 (2010). (Just grabbed some quick numbers.)

If you’d care to dig up some good recent data and redo Nicholas’s example you can post it here.

By: msantos1116

msantos1116 — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 13:27:00 +0000

You are comparing a vehicle with single occupancy with a fully occupied bus. In reality, the average occupancy of a vehicle is over 1.0 and the average occupancy of a bus is well under 84 passengers.

The comparison is completely dishonest. If you’re going to make this comparison, you need to a little more research to be a little more realistic and FAIR. I don’t think you can be taken seriously if you are making these comparisons.

Further, those 84 hypothetical environment killing jerks driving the single occupancy vehicles probably do not have the same origins and destinations along the same bus route. Otherwise, they would be on the bus.

By: dynamo.joe

dynamo.joe — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 16:19:00 +0000

To me, wide spread adoption of mass transit requires that mass transit be as convienient as personal transportation. By that I basically mean that I should not have to plan my day around a bus schedule. Where I live I think the buses are on half hour schedule during peak times and hourly on off peak hours. So to use public transportation I DO have to plan my day around the bus schedule.
Here is my question, do you know of any good data that show the relationship between bus frequency and ridership levels? My gut says ridership will increase dramatically when the bus arrives every 10mins or less and car use would be rare (nearly non-existent) if it was as low as 5-6 mins.