[xmprt]

> And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient

Point-to-point transportation is faster and more convenient because:

1. we don't have bus lanes so buses are forced to sit in the same traffic as cars and 2. buses are often underfunded so have slow/infrequent service.

Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right. I can count on my fingers the number of times I used an Uber or drove a car in the 1 month that I stayed in Europe - this was going out every day, in multiple cities, rural and urban, and across different countries.

This is a good thing! If more people use public transit when it's possible, it opens up the roads for the handful of people who actually NEED to use a car.

[AnthonyMouse]

Bus lanes still seem like the thing people who hate cars propose to intentionally screw over the people who have them. "Hey, we have this road with two or three lanes in each direction but it's fairly congested. Each of the lanes is carrying something like 50 cars per minute during the day! Why don't we impound one of them so we can have a bus carrying 40 people drive on it once every 15 minutes?"

If you have enough density to justify a bus lane, you have enough density to justify a subway.

[Karrot_Kream]

> If you have enough density to support a bus lane, you have enough density to support a subway.

Not at all. Building a subway in most US cities right now is very expensive. Raising the tax revenue alone is probably a non-starter.

Moreover you're going to have to close the road down anyway to do any form of cut-and-cover or even deep bore construction, which means every business on the corridor and every person who lives on it is going to get angry for as long as the subway is being built.

There's no painless way to do infill public transport. The problem is that nobody in the US is willing to compromise.

[jltsiren]

> If you have enough density to justify a bus lane, you have enough density to justify a subway.

That assumes a linear city, where everyone lives within a short walking distance of the same street.

In actual cities, bus lines from different neighborhoods converge on main streets. While individual lines may have 10–15 minute intervals, bus traffic on the main streets may be high enough to justify dedicated bus lanes.

Then, as the city grows, it can make sense to replace the bus lanes with light rail and direct bus lines with collector lines connecting to the rail line. Which should be cheap, as a dedicated lane is usually the most expensive part in building light rail.

But you generally want to avoid building subways until you have no other options left. Subway lines tend to be an order of magnitude more expensive than light rail lines. Travel times are also often higher, as the distances between stops are longer and there is more walking involved.

[pocksuppet]

We did that with computer networks. We had this high-quality voice call service, and then someone thought it should be switched to transmit data instead, of which voice calls were just one type. Now you have a minimum voice latency of a few hundred ms because voice traffic is competing with data traffic, and you didn't actually get much more data throughput because it was only one wire pair.

[JoshTriplett]

> Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right.

Only if you're also intentionally making point-to-point worse.

Note that I'm not comparing to "get in your own car and drive", which has the disadvantage of having to park. I'm comparing the ideal taxi-shaped thing to the ideal bus-and-tram-and-train-shaped thing.

[xmprt]

> Only if you're also intentionally making point-to-point worse

I feel like you missed my last paragraph. If public transit is better then more people would use it and there would be fewer cars on the road. Can you imagine how terrible point-to-point traffic in SF would be if everyone was driving to work instead of relying on Caltrain or BART?