Buses? PAH. Begone with your filthy peasant-wagons A bus is a fantastically efficient way to move a large number of people. Buses however are not. They are a dreadful system for getting people to work. The difference is not as subtle as that sentence may make it seem. What lies behind it is that when you want to move a large number of people from one place to another all at …
'In a perfect world where everyone lived in Megacity One and worked in Megacity Two, then all trips for all people would be vectors from Megacity One to Megacity Two'
Actually, in a perfect world, everyone would both live and work in the same city, obviating the need to commute to work at all. All attempts to manage commuter traffic by whatever means of transport are, in reality, just treating the symptom. The disease is the perceived need to travel.
in this time of mostly decent comms and sometimes tolerable cargo transport, why do CBDs exist ? Why are not all high density clerk stacking sites (aka offices) not outside residential areas instead of in center of them ? Old Canberra used to have this idea until the developer funded pollies took over. One could sanely cycle or walk to work. Even buses were not a bad idea. Maybe smaller Google buses might help as they would be mostly direct. None of these affect me as I live miles from any urbanisation so I'll keep my horse scaring internal combustion engine things.
Because the entire point of an office block is to be near other office blocks.
This allows the high-ups to think that they are important because they have an office near the offices of %BIG_FIRM%, despite said firm not being a customer or supplier.
This isn't true. It's actually because most companies can only afford one location and don't like the idea of working from home.
Couple that with the fact that people generally don't like to move home, and you end up with large central blocks of "workplaces" where hundreds of employers exist, surrounded at a distance by homes.
Or a "city".
Zoning is what creates the problem.
It was a good idea 100years ago to stop slum landlords building houses against the walls of the United Asbestos, Arsenic and Cyanide factory - but it's crap when it doesn't let you build mixed office and apartment blocks in city centers or allow incubator office space in the suburbs.
@Richard; last para is exactly the point of what Old Canberra town centers were, a few office blocks surrounded by housing suburbs. The office blocks also have a mall and a selection of cafes and baristas so basic daily needs are met. No high density concrete canyons, no need for incredible electricity, water and sewer capacity as required for the Stalinist concrete high density future slums that greenies love.
People tended to buy houses near where they worked so over time, whole suburbs tended to have maybe 3 significant employers co-located. Simplified bus route planning even.
Indeed. The question of whether buses are more efficient than other forms of transport is irrelevant - right now there is no other form of transport that is more efficient for a buses particular use case if there were anything materially better buses would not exist
so yes the article was a long form troll. Or OpEd if it's written by a journo.
"Indeed. The question of whether buses are more efficient than other forms of transport is irrelevant - right now there is no other form of transport that is more efficient for a buses particular use case if there were anything materially better buses would not exist
so yes the article was a long form troll. Or OpEd if it's written by a journo."
His point was that for every full bus at rush hour there are lots of empty buses at other times. It's very true that public transport is necessary for four hours a day (roughly 7:30-9:30 and 4:30-6:30) but at all other times it's *less* efficient than say car use, because most buses are nearly empty at that point, as are most roads. The efficiency argument is time-dependent.
For example, I just drove my girlfriend somewhere, and it took ten minutes to get there. By bus it would be two buses and take over an hour. It's completely obvious that driving/taxi is the best answer in this case. The question of whether we can just get rid of all buses at off-peak times and replace them with a car-sharing taxi scheme is not obviously stupid.
An alternate answer?
In this increasingly virtualised "society of information" we are told we live in....
In this country where - according to some - the immense majority of jobs are in "services" spent in front of computer screens the whole day.....
In this country where - at least in urban areas - high speed wired and wireless communications are ubiquitous....
Couldn't we just simply massively reduce the prehistoric need for a daily physical commute by encouraging work from home ? (With employer subsidy since they could massively reduce their costs for expensive offices, and other people hosting infrastructures)...
Probably is too good to be true but isn't there some mileage in this idea?
No - its much more fun to spend half your sanity making your way into central London to sit at a desk that costs more in rent than you get paid so that you are immediately available for you boss to give you instant miss-instructions cos he's not capable of actually analysing your work or operating skype so you can work at home. And when you've been forced into the office so you are immediately available for your boss he's away at lunch most of the day - or working from home!
And then you have to stay late as its the only time you can get any work done is when everyone else has fucked off.
Nice try but they tend to flog off the site on a promise to build 'a substantial proportion of affordable housing' which either doesn't happen or is drastically reduced.
And in London there will be a big poster on the site saying 'Mayor of London' as if the Holy Floppy-Haired Twat even knows about the place.
"Affordable housing" now means "affordable by offshore kleptocrats who are investing in the London property market." That means the various Candy bars around the place, prices from £1-65 million per flat, are affordable for someone. So that's all right.
Remember what happened in Tokyo?
Couldn't we just simply massively reduce the prehistoric need for a daily physical commute by encouraging work from home ?
Unfortunately it doesn't fix the problem. I'm happy to work from home some days a week, but still need (and want) to meet with my colleagues from time to time. Unless people's WFH days can be coordinated over the week you'll still end up running a Mon-Fri bus service with half the buses running part-full most of the time.
Actually the "prehistoric need for a daily physical commute" isn't that prehistoric. It's very largely the product of post-war town (don't laugh) planning.
I grew up in one of the Pennine textile-producing valleys. In the '50s there were about 4 buses an hour doubled up in rush hours. That worked out very well. Most people worked in mills and had a potential work-place a short distance from home; in some cases their nearest mill would be closer than their nearest bus-stop. Typically a bus-seat would be occupied by several different passengers in the course of a journey as most passengers' journeys were small part of the route. And because some people who commuted travelled up the valley and some down the buses didn't need to make empty outbound trips.
Almost all the mills have now closed. But they haven't been replaced by other workplaces. The predominant theory of town planning seems to have been to separate workplaces and residential areas into separate zones. The workplaces have been concentrated in cities employing so many people that they need residential catchments of over a thousand square miles plus clusters of trading estates largely adjacent to motorway junctions. So the local mills have been replaced by housing (brownfield sites!) mostly inhabited by people commuting to the various cities 20-30 miles away.
The combination of rising population due to the extra housing, a greater proportion of the population being out of walking distance to their employment and the length of the commutes ensures that the old bus service couldn't cope so the car has to take over. But the current roads are simply the roads that were there all along and aren't really able to cope.
It isn't sustainable. And yet it's what 60+ years of town and country planning has worked towards. Adequate public transport is a joke; only a limited proportion of commutes fit neatly onto public transport routes.
Frankly I don't see how it can be fixed. Ideally the answer would be to convert some of the city centre workplaces into residential for those prepared to live and work there and replace them with a combination of home-working and workplaces out in what are currently the commuter belts to restore the balance. But the redevelopment of the old mill-sites into housing isn't easily reversible. As redundant mills the sites had a single owner wanting to sell. Now they have many owners of whom only a few at any one time wish to sell. Short of compulsory purchase it wouldn't be possible to reassemble a plot large enough to build a workplace and the whole notion of developing brownfield sites was to avoid using up more greenfield land.
This actually works AGAINST you when you're trying to establish relations with new clients. This is because newcomers like (and usually EXPECT) to be fawned upon. They expect you to go the extra kilometer and meet them in person, even if it means an 18-hour flight halfway 'round the world. And since a four-figure plane ticket can turn into a six-figure-plus contract, the ROI is there.
So telecommuting is fine for the hum-drum everyday stuff, but when it really has to count, the human condition demands a face-to-face engagement.
Even for low-level workers there are social issues. Management don't like it because of the problem ensuring the company is getting the time and attention they pay for - you need to set up a whole performance monitoring system, otherwise employees will 'steal' company resources by watching TV or chatting with family while on the clock. Workers don't like it because the informal socialisation that takes place at the workplace builds connections which are both good for productivity and good for job security: When the cuts come, the boss would rather fire Drone #291 than Dick from down the pub.
The wrong solution to the wrong problem.
HS2 does not solve transport problems and is a centrally planned solution to a non existent problem. Technology has already made the issue mute. WiFi on trains, 3G/4G mobiles, charging points, all allow people to work on trains so it doesn't matter that the trip takes 30 minutes longer than a hypothetical HS2.
Buses do not solve transport problems either. Centrally planned (bus routes set by planners) with no regard to how people actually live and work. Buses cause just as many traffic problems as they solve. Rather than trying to use an inappropriate method to solve transport issues, the best thing that politicians and civil servants could have done is to have done nothing. Technology always progresses at rate to overtake centrally planned solutions which is hindered by bureaucracy and red tape.
It's not so much that Google cars are a better solution to buses, but that UberTaxi is just as good. Anything that adapts to how people really live and work is the best solution. Maybe that might mean more small apartments closer to workplaces or more renting so that the workforce is more mobile and not tied to overpriced houses or it could mean better traffic flow or something that no one has thought of yet.
You've clearly never actually tried to use the WiFi or mobile signal on a UK train - put simply, they don't work.
Aside from that, most of the time it wouldn't matter if they did because you can't get a seat with enough space to open your laptop.
I regularly try to work on the train while travelling to or from a customer's site, and about half the time I don't get anything done and have to catch up the work late in my hotel room, instead of supping at the bar as nature intended.
If the train was half an hour quicker then that would be either half an hour longer in the office/in bed before setting off, or half an hour longer in the hotel bar.
WiFi on trains, 3G/4G mobiles, charging points, all allow people to work on trains so it doesn't matter that the trip takes 30 minutes longer than a hypothetical HS2.
That's not relevant. Shaving an hour off a round trip can make the difference between doing a business trip in a day, or having to stay overnight. Working on public transport, be it train, plane or bus, is rarely convenient, and doesn't require always-on connectivity anyway. It's easy to download mail, and work offline for a while. HS2 isn't just a slightly-faster alternative to other train services, it's an alternative to the hassle and pollution of plane or car travel. Other european countries that have introduced high-speed rail have all seen a drop in car traffic and virtual abandonment of plane travel between the served cities.
"HS2 does not solve transport problems and is a centrally planned solution to a non existent problem."
AIUI the journey time is one of the problems its supposed to solve, the other is the lack of capacity. Unfortunately the latter is a current problem to be solved by HS2 in n years' time.
You misunderstand. The HS2 is designed to solve a far different problem. What an EU central transport planning department is going to do with the billions its been given to develop a pan European transport system, without actually spending any of it on someone intelligent enough to provide cost effective solutions to real needs rather than high profile initiatives that end up in the majority of the cash being spent with the large businesses who support the EU and lobbies.
It has to be understood that it cots a lot less to bribe and lobby a bureaucrat to get your product defined as the only product to be sold, than it does to develop and market a truly better mousetrap.
Fine, except we still need to base some decision-making on rationality rather than ideology. Without buses the roads would be gridlocked twice a day on every working day. Less than half the population have access to a car (and when one family member is driving to work in the family's only car, that figure falls even further) and much of the population is too young / too old to drive safely. The concept of efficiency may be unfashionable here nowadays, but it is alive and well in the Far East.
I look forward to a careful explanation how uber taxis are going to solve the capacity problem that occurs when you mix London streets with large vehicles taking enormous amounts of road space for a single passenger - in other words: cars. And no, taxis aren't fundamentally different; while they work around the problem of parking, they do that by constantly taking space on the road. There may be a marginal increase in utilisation, but I doubt it's much beyond a rounding error.
So when you're in the back of your uber cab at rush hour, do get started on that essay. You'll have ample time. If you don't get distracted by the cyclists passing you.
I don't know about London buses, though London does get a lot more public money than the rest of us.
Around here there's a Great Divide between subsidised and un-subsidised routes. The subsidised ones tend to be the very rural routes where they serve a largely social purpose, while the unsubsidised are those with sufficient demand to make a profit.
All "local" bus companies receive large subsidies, it's the only way they can exist.
For example, Sheffield's buses receive a subsidy of over £1.6 million a year from central government alone.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/better-buses-for-sheffield
In 2013 the council then spent £4.5 million on bus stops etc - another subsidy.
I couldn't find figures for the fare take, but based on passenger numbers I'd guess the subsidy is probably 10% of total revenue.
Yet these 'subsidies' go to private companies - who cannot make a private profit without public money.
Which demonstrates that bus services are more of a social service than just general transport. If they were expected to make a profit they could, but with reduced timetables and very carefully selected routes. The subsidy is effectively welfare spending, the alternative would be to provide free "taxi passes" or similar.
Not _all_ local bus services. I can think of one local bus system which was most emphatically NOT subsidised: the bus 'service' in Kingston, St. Andrew, and St. Catherine, Jamaica between about 1987 and 2001. Until the early 1980s it was a nice, normal, subsidised, bus system, the Jamaica Omnibus Service, JOS, a.k.a. Jolly Joseph. Jolly Joseph was executed by (socialist!) politicians so that the, ahem, 'small man' could make a cut out of the 'vast profits' of the bus business (and so that the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation, the KSAC, could stop losing money at a truly remarkable rate). The 'small man' was invited to purchase a franchise and run their own buses on the routes; low passenger-level routes such as the 67 (Cross Roads to Hope Gardens) didn't have anyone applying for the route, and so had no buses anymore. (Jolly Joseph went everywhere, even if at times there were one or two passengers on a bus designed for 70+; that was one reason why it lost money.) The 75 route (Papine to Duhaney Park), now that had _lots_ of franchises. Every one of them with two to six buses which were designed to hold 30-40 passengers. The 'small man' (not very small if he could afford a half dozen Isuzu buses, called 'Quarter Millions' because they cost Ja$250,000 at the time, before the Jamaican dollar crashed to its current level) quickly discovered that the only way he was going to make money was to pack 'em in as much as possible, which meant 60-70 passengers. (Yes. 70 passengers in a space meant for 30. Tokyo at rush hour ain't got nothin' on Kingston... How'd they fit? They didn't. Passengers would be hanging out of the windows and doors...) The local newspapers ran articles showing how there was actually more space on slave ships in the Middle Passage than on a Number 75 on Hope Road, and that the passengers were expected to pay for the privilege. (A quick trip to the Jamaica Gleaner's or the Jamaica Observer's sites should be quite revealing. Search for 'bus' and 'middle passage'. Be prepared to see a _lot_ of articles, somewhat fewer at the Observer 'cause the Observer didn't exist until around 1994 while the Gleaner goes back to 1838.) Because schoolchildren paid a special, reduced, fare, the bus crews tried their best to not carry any schoolchildren. This policy resulted in a lot of screaming and shouting, and policemen deployed to major bus routes to ensure that the 'schoolers' got packed in with the adults. (I'm serious. The only way to get the children on the bus was to arrest a few of the bus crews.) Jolly Joseph had a schedule, and usually kept fairly close to it. The franchises didn't move until the bus was full, and by full I mean until there were 60-70 fare-payers aboard. Plus a crew of three or four (a driver, a conductor, and one or two packers).
A look here http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20081123/ent/ent10.html might be revealing. And also http://www.onlyinnajamaica.com/video/2010/03/16/two-white-girls-pon-a-minibus/ which shows a packer in action, packing the bus ('Two White Girls' is hilarious... unless you actually had to ride the damn buses. Then it's not so funny.)
The franchise system has since been abolished and Jolly resurrected, complete with subsidy. http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20000917/cleisure/cleisure1.html
On many (labour) council provided transport services, the subsidies of one sort or another comprise so much of the income that the companies involved really dont care whether anyone rides them or not.
I had that from a senior executive at a major rail company some years ago.
The main subsidy for buses in the UK is a grant that offsets some of the tax on fuel. If fuel tax and subsidies for diesel trains were accounted for in the same way, the rail subsidy figure would be much higher. The government also spend somewhere north of £1 billion every year on free rides for old and disabled people but this is a subsidy to the riders, not the mode.
""While a bus is massively subsidised..."
Well, if you're going to come out with blatant lies lies that, I'm going to stop reading."
IDK if you're pulling our leg, but just in case you're not, actually it's true. So also are trains, airplanes, and ... cars! No transportation system in the world actually pays for itself. Bus and train systems in particular run at a loss everywhere in the world. There's data out there, I looked this up a dozen or so years ago.
"IDK if you're pulling our leg, but just in case you're not, actually it's true. So also are trains, airplanes, and ... cars! No transportation system in the world actually pays for itself."
I'd be surprised if, in the UK at least, cars did not pay for themselves. I guess it depends on what you mean by the cost of the service, but car-based taxes were at one point six times higher than the Department of Transport's budget. Maybe that has changed, although I expect if it has it's become more than six, after budget cuts.
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