> Had this really not been done before? Apparently not on land. Ferries are an ancient idea, both for crossing water bodies and for traveling along them. They are fixed routes, of course, but that’s mostly because the shore is fixed.
Historically, not true for the “trekschuit” in 1632. For that, the shore didn’t exist before the route was envisioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekschuit:
“The first trekschuit 'sailed' in 1632 between Amsterdam and Haarlem and could carry 30 passengers. The trekvaart or canal was dug in a straight line to facilitate an easy pulling process and to guarantee the shortest route”
brnt · 2026-10-26 12:59:09 UTC
My late grandmother once told me this is how she travelled longer distances on occasion as a youth/young woman. Was a good lesson for me in understanding exactly how much she had seen the world change in her lifetime.
rationalist · 2026-10-26 13:30:38 UTC
Just imagine how much we will see change in our lifetimes.
For some of us; that's dial-up, to AI, to who knows what.
bloak · 2026-10-26 16:08:48 UTC
We don't know yet, of course, but I have the impression that the century in which things changed most was the century from about 1865 to about 1965. Stuff seems to have slowed down a bit since then. But it's all subjective, really: it depends on what you think is important.
brnt · 2026-10-26 17:34:29 UTC
1969 is a big year due to man landing on the moon. Cars becoming ubiquitous (they certainly were a luxury item well into the sixties here). 1970s gave us the integrated circuit and arguably the start of modern computing. 1980s the collapse of the Soviet Union, genetic research. 1990s: well, I can go on :P
eszed · 2026-10-26 19:31:28 UTC
Agree. For the drama of it, I'd move the end-date up to 1969, just to catch the moon landing.
My great-grandfather learned to care for horses, and drive a wagon / buggy, and keenly remembered the first time he saw an automobile. He qualified as a doctor before antibiotics were invented, and then lived long enough to at least exist in a house with a personal computer - whether he ever used it is something I never thought to ask my grandfather!
readthenotes1 · 2026-10-26 12:55:19 UTC
"He was fortunate to live at a time (the mid-1600s) when, if you were born to the right parents, nobody told you you needed to specialize."
Or, he could have been just that much smarter than you you, dismissive author.
"At age 11, Pascal had re-derived much of Euclid’s geometry from scratch because his father kept the books from him"
Guessing not in the author's bio
flexagoon · 2026-10-26 13:38:23 UTC
Two things can be true at the same time. Pascal was certainly a prodigy, but he was also largely living off family wealth and could afford to not specialize.
mr_toad · 2026-10-26 13:31:18 UTC
I don’t think that there was much fixed scheduling for water transport prior to the the development of steam engines either, because you were usually at the mercy of the winds and the tides.
bluGill · 2026-10-26 13:50:33 UTC
Rowing was common and well known. Many ferries cross rivers where tides and the wind are not concerns. Winds near shore are often consistent enough to have near fixed frequency routes.
Ancient Mediterranean maps often reveal ferries and such were not going vast distances but rather they would go from small settlement to small settlement. This would be much smaller boats that could be easily rowed and, in turn, have relatively fixed frequencies. The small boats could get into ports that would be impossible to put a large ship into. As ships grew larger and sailing became more popular, longer distances would happen and then winds and tides would be more important.
AlotOfReading · 2026-10-26 14:02:06 UTC
Scheduled sailings were common in the Roman world, and some medieval European economies. It helped keep ship sizes small when merchants could anticipate the fixed schedule.
“Trekschuit (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈtrɛksxœyt] ⓘ; lit. 'tug-boat', i.e. 'tugged boat') is an old style of sail- and horse-drawn boat specific to the Netherlands, where it was used for centuries as a means of passenger traffic between cities along trekvaarten, or tow-canals.
[…]
By 1700, an extensive network of trekschuit- and ferry services linked all of the important cities in the coastal provinces of the Netherlands. Travel by trekschuit was reliable, comfortable, and cheap. The speed was about 7 km/h, which was faster than walking, and more comfortable than by coach. Many foreigners praised the advantages of the system, leading to the introduction of canals, such as the Erie Canal, in the United States. The boats were pulled along by horse on a towpath (in Dutch called jaagpad, named after the jager (chaser) which accompanied the horse)”
barbazoo · 2026-10-26 15:44:22 UTC
That's right, I just read about that. Even crossing the English channel apparently was unpredictable at times.
gpvos · 2026-10-26 15:48:35 UTC
Just dig a canal along the route you want, and use horses to pull the boat along it. See the other comments about the trekschuiten in the Netherlands.
mft_ · 2026-10-26 13:42:46 UTC
Regarding public transport route design, I've long wondered how much efficiency current routes in a given country might be leaving on the table.
As in: if one collected sufficient anonymised travel data to offer a reliable understanding of the population's travel needs, and given the fixed constraints of the existing road and rail network, and the existing number of buses and trains, how much more efficient could the network be by varying routes, timings, stops, and interactions?
Imagine if such a dataset was made available, and a prize offered for the best solution.
The challenge could also be extended to explore optimal areas for investment in additional infrastructure - a wider road here, a new roundabout or branch line there.
bluGill · 2026-10-26 14:04:22 UTC
Well, there is some of that. It's not near as much as you might guess. Predictable transit is very helpful because people plan their life around it. What the data you're looking at will show where the bottlenecks are, and yes, you can remove a few bottlenecks and make people's life a little bit better, but it's not going to be a major change because of major change will not show up in the data until well after it's made.
I don't remember the terms used, but I've seen data sets of where people live and work in Manhattan, and you do see people who live on subway lines take jobs on that same line, and they don't take jobs on a different subway line that while possible is overly inconvenient.
people have already arranged their life around the existing transportation that exists around them. They are not going to change their life because it is already in place. They want bottlenecks fixed but otherwise don't really need a change to their life. Even if a change would greatly benefit them, they often can't see that and wouldn't imagine themselves making the change to their comfortable life.
The real value of transportation experts is they can look at a map and all your data and say, if we make these changes, over 20 years, the city will redevelop in this way, and then we can ask questions. "Is that how we want the city to develop?" however, the data is never going to show that because the data shows what people are doing today, not what they're going to do in 20 years. Don't get me wrong, experts get this wrong too when they make predictions. However, there is a lot of things we can use to inform our predictions. even though we're not perfect, we can make predictions that are usually right.
Varying the route timing is the absolute worst thing you can do. People need to depend on your transport system. If they have to look at a schedule that's going to change by day to figure out when they can actually get somewhere, they're going to get frustrated and start looking up for an alternative that they control. If you vary your timing at all, it's only because you're changing between a train every minute to train every five minutes. You don't get to go any farther apart than that without losing writers because they no longer can trust that the system will get them there when they want to be there. Physics puts a lower limit on time. I believe the current record is a train every 90 seconds, and I'm not sure how much closer together you can get. The limit for a bus is three minutes apart and even that is extremely hard.
Transit systems that are running worse than 5 minute frequencies have large drops in ridership and as they increase frequency: ridership jumps because people start to use, they can always just go out when they're ready to go. If this wasn't so expensive, everyone in the world would be running 5-minute frequencies all day.
ghaff · 2026-10-26 15:20:25 UTC
I live fairly near a commuter rail stop—about a 8 minute drive but not walkable or cycle really even if I biked which I don’t.
It sorta works for going into the nearish big city for a 9-5 event. But it’s worthless for the evening because of infrequent trains.
bonzini · 2026-10-26 16:32:14 UTC
I think Manhattan is kinda special because the lines are mostly parallel, there aren't as many east-west lines.
asdff · 2026-10-26 17:12:07 UTC
There’s also enough job density to be this particular.
bluGill · 2026-10-26 18:58:26 UTC
It is and it makes my point exactly. People have arranged their lives around the east west line they live on. They wouldn't accept a job on a different east-west line even though as a crow flies it's not far - Getting there is not easy.
The question that we cannot answer for Manhattan data is what if Manhattan added a few North South lines or I can think of hundreds of different things that Manhattan could do. I don't live there and I haven't studied the data in depth so I couldn't tell you what is a good useful thing for Manhattan to do. But I can tell you that there are lines that would over the next few decades greatly change how people in Manhattan and the rest of the city live. Unfortunately, Manhattan is particularly bad about the costs and so they can't even afford to remove the obvious bottlenecks much less a whole new line that would over time be make the city much better.
bonzini · 2026-10-27 14:29:10 UTC
No wait - Manhattan only has N-S lines (well, Manhattan is tilted, so more precisely, only has "Avenue-parallel" lines). There are no E-W ("Street-parallel") lines because it is too narrow.
abdullahkhalids · 2026-10-26 14:04:34 UTC
Pretty much all large public transit authorities already collect all sorts of data about requirements and usage, and have scientists/engineers on payroll to optimize the network within the economic and political constraints these systems operate in.
bryanlarsen · 2026-10-26 15:10:32 UTC
I know my city has that data, but it doesn't help if you optimize for the wrong thing. AFAICT the highest priority is that "everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop", resulting in serpentine routes the article decries.
abdullahkhalids · 2026-10-26 15:37:10 UTC
"everybody has to be within 3 blocks of a bus stop" is a political choice. It might result in a system that is not optimal from the perspective of a different metric. If you think that different metric would serve people better, go advocate for it politically. But realize that whatever metric gets adopted will still be a political choice. There is no escaping that.
Of course, as you say in the OP, one can certainly encourage the public to use simulations based on publicly made-available data as a guide during these political discussions to convince people that a certain metric is better than others.
nickorlow · 2026-10-26 14:05:33 UTC
due to how hard it is to change the networks, I think there's a lot of inefficient route design. if you look at SEPTA in Philadelphia, they're in the middle of realigning a lot of their bus routes for the first time in 60 yrs and ridership has increased noticeably since they started.
supertrope · 2026-10-26 16:16:28 UTC
Not much. People plan for the lowest common denominator. If service levels surge during certain days or hours that's great, but people don't want to get burned by a period of thin service. Imagine if Fedex said overnight mail could no longer be delivered on Thursdays in certain towns. You'd have to remember to check if today's Wednesday and if the recipient's town is a low service zone. Or you could just switch to a more consistently available network like UPS.
asdff · 2026-10-26 17:10:08 UTC
Most transit is already biased to the 9-5 with thin nighttime service. As such most people uber back from the bar than wait for the 30 min owl bus service.
stevekemp · 2026-10-26 16:21:04 UTC
I live in Helsinki, where there is a good tram and bus network. Every now and again a major road will be dug up, in the city center, and trams often get rerouted for a few months to work around that.
I've noticed that there are some diversions which are definitely beneficial to me. There are busses from my house to the city center, as well as a tram. If the tram diverts to a different destination that essentially doubles my available "travel destinations" in a way that's really useful.
So no doubt, for me personally, there are changes that could be useful. But perhaps they would be less useful for others.
waterheater · 2026-10-26 16:50:41 UTC
"Efficency" in what domain? Travel time? Cost? Convenience/comfort?
asdff · 2026-10-26 17:08:01 UTC
The interesting thing with transit is that optimal may not be the most optimal. E.g. your model might suggest half mile stop frequencies. Seems good, until the public comment period and all the old folks who take the line show up and ask their particular stop not be displaced.
There is a reason why a lot of american bus networks basically follow the same old streetcar routes that were always there. People become used to existing patterns and build lives around them. New transit is a good opportunity to apply this model, but reworking old transit is tricky because some of your existing ridership will end up with a worse offering by definition, and they will protest. While the people who might benefit will not show up with equivocal advocacy in the public comment meeting.
supertrope · 2026-10-26 17:13:48 UTC
The bus stop spacing problem is very real. Buses stop every other block in my area. The average speed end to end is no faster than riding a bike! If you suggest deleting some stops people scream about their own convenience or pretend to care about the disabled. By trying to cater to every single constituency, we've designed a bus route that serves no one's interest. A slow bus might not exist at all. People will just buy a car, going into high interest debt if need be.
ButlerianJihad · 2026-10-26 17:17:06 UTC
Buses can stop every other block, but in practice, they rarely do. Most bus routes that I've taken are neither full nor busy with passengers at every stop. Certainly not all day long. Most bus routes can get away with bypassing several miles' worth of stops at a time. Passengers tend to cluster around certain spots at certain times. Even the main routes have busy times, as well as quiet times in long stretches.
By building in the capability to stop very frequently, they can serve the most people and every area in the route, equally. But day to day, hour to hour, they are definintely bypassing stops, and I can name at least 3 bus routes where the vehicle will certainly reach the speed limit of 45mph or so in-between.
asdff · 2026-10-27 17:00:22 UTC
Depends on bus usage in your city. Mine is pretty high so it stops every stop. I’ve had bus trips that were 50 stops a leg and people are stopping at every one. That is a lot of delay right there. Doesn’t even get better at night; service pattern contracts then so ridership per bus is still high enough even at those hours. There ought to be more express service offerings that would skip over local stops.
MiroslavPokorny · 2026-10-27 03:30:13 UTC
Bus speed is also reduced by people scanning tickets etc. THe simple answer is to skip the charade about pretending public transport is a business and concentrate on moving people and safety.
asdff · 2026-10-27 16:57:14 UTC
Bus always has longer dwell time than rail in general. The biggest time sink I see is in disabled passenger operations. Ramp has to come down, passenger goes in, then the bus operator has to leave their cockpit to lift up the disabled area seats to be flush to the wall, and hook in the tiedown straps in the wheelchair, before returning back to the cockpit, closing their door, buckling in, raising ramp again, and finally going.
For trains there is of course no difference in dwell time between disabled and able bodied passengers. Not sure how this issue gets solved with bus if the issue is they are too rocky to not have the chairs strapped down. BRT platforms would solve the ramp issue with flush floor boarding but you still have the strapping down delay.
mncharity · 2026-10-26 19:46:15 UTC
You might explore "gray" semi-formal bus networks. Where the on-the-table gap is sufficient to fund businesses. And where the efforts to shut them down, provide insights into mechanisms, incentives, and interests, around that inefficiency.
MiroslavPokorny · 2026-10-27 03:29:08 UTC
The best answer for many problems, is to avoid the action in the first place. Just because you can do it doesnt mean you should do it, and public transport is mostly thought to serve commuting.
A lot of people commute for hours to sit at a computer...which means they could work at home.
fifticon · 2026-10-27 07:56:29 UTC
(source, 20+ years experience working in traffic planning software industry).
Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much).
You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general.
The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation.
- your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem.
- your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home.
- once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic.
- you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay).
- lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned.
On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel.
The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus.
In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week,
and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string
(so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
fifticon · 2026-10-27 10:56:43 UTC
UPDATE, for some reason edit did not work. (source, 20+ years experience working in traffic planning software industry).
Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much). You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general. The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation.
- your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem.
- your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home. - once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic.
- you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay).
- lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned. On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel. The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus. In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week, and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string (so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
UPDATE: an example of the differences in the setups:
Typically, Europe and US will fund/run buses/public transport differently.
in US, traditionally, you would task a company with running the whole
operation: Both plan the services to be provided,
and then implement/deploy/operate them.
So they would both decide the structure of the bus services to be offered,
and then do the actual operations of the same plan.
in Europe/many parts, they instead divide like this:
A public transport authority designs the structure of the services to be operated
(this many buses, running these roads, at these intervals,
and ALSO _at these times_).
The 'times' part is important, because it determines which transfers are possible
(between two lines).
That package will then be tendered to private companies, who bid on running those planned operations;
they are then paid by the public transport authority, what they offered to operate for in the contract.
These two structures give wildly different transport structures and operations structures.
In the european model, it leads to very complex timetables,
where bus services are trimmed to the perceived demand - every week, hour, day where
the demand is perceived to be less, is cut from the planned timetables.
So when you look at the time tables, you need to check complex date periods
for whether the bus you want is operating today or not.
The reasoning is of course, that since the transport authority must pay for each trip serviced,
they try to cut any trip they don't "need".
Contrast that to the american, "older" model, with a full-service operator.
They already have their money, and are already running and out on the roads with their equipment.
To them, it doesnt matter much, whether they run 5 additional trips between 22:30 and 23:30 or not;
they already paid the costs of having a driver present, and bought the buses,
so once they are running, might as well keep them running
(a similar thing in the middle of the day, in the lull.)
I of course "prefer" the european model, but I can see the issues it causes too (it makes things more complex but
better trimmed and fitted.)
As an example, these differences made it so we had difficulty offering the same planning software
for europeans and americans, because the planners simply needed different tools for their scenarios.
nickorlow · 2026-10-26 14:03:25 UTC
> Frequency ranged from 7.5 minutes to 15 minutes, so these came often enough that people could just go out and wait for them, not worrying about a schedule'
If only most cities could have this today
extraextra · 2026-10-26 14:42:35 UTC
If I were to speculate, I'd say that perhaps it might only be feasible in small & dense cities with low traffic, as such high frequency requires a lot of resources.
Was born in a small city with frequent public transportation (5-10 minutes for most routes). As I moved to larger & more congested cities, public transport became less convenient and the schedule more erratic.
nemomarx · 2026-10-26 15:08:11 UTC
Tokyo manages a very tight schedule and they're enormous, so it can't only be scale that matters. And how do you fund effective transit in a smaller city with less of a tax base?
extraextra · 2026-10-26 15:45:56 UTC
I haven't visited Tokyo, but I definitely plan to.
Regarding your question, if the city is made up mostly of apartment buildings & parks, with limited parking space available, almost everyone uses public transport.
There is obviously a trade-off between how pedestrian-friendly or car-friendly a city can be, thus if a city goes hard in the pedestrian-friendly (removing parking spaces, narrowing streets in the center etc.) direction, public transport becomes very attractive & convenient. Having a car becomes a burden.
thenthenthen · 2026-10-26 16:17:20 UTC
Rail plus property model like in Hong Kong could be one (‘tax free’ zone…)
williamdclt · 2026-10-26 15:13:37 UTC
Definitely not only small cities. Only dense cities maybe, but I'm not sure that the causality link is in the direction you present: big european cities are dense in part _because_ of public transport. They couldn't be so dense without it, you'd need much more car infrastructure (roads, parking lots) which already decreases density, and people would more readily live further out given they'd already need a car anyway.
extraextra · 2026-10-26 15:54:19 UTC
It's obviously a virtuous cycle, but in the case of European cities, they are the way they are because they began when walking was the preferred mode of transport ("preferred" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence, I know). The most luxurious transport option back then was a horse carriage, which is not much faster than walking. Everything had to be close to everything, streets had to be narrow.
Another important feature that makes public transport suitable is that they developed concentrically, having only one city center.
With such city planning in mind, public transport is the only rational way to move around lots of people on narrow streets.
eldaisfish · 2026-10-26 17:42:17 UTC
North American cities very much were built around walking and trams.
The US auto companies paid for the destruction of tram lines with the long term goal of selling more cars.
asdff · 2026-10-26 16:59:52 UTC
European cities, geographically at least, are a lot smaller than american cities. A dozen or two miles across only for the urban area before you get to the rural parts generally. Berlin has a smaller footprint than a lot of rust belt cities for example. Amsterdam is downright tiny by american standards, maybe even smaller than Toledo, OH. What is more is the road capacity is significantly overbuilt in the US, even in cities like Toledo. A lot of americans have a car based frame of reference where they expect to go arbitrary 30 mile distances in about 30 mins.
druskacik · 2026-10-26 15:56:02 UTC
Isn't it the opposite? Larger city -> denser population -> more public transport demand -> better public transport?
asdff · 2026-10-26 17:02:50 UTC
Better doesn’t always follow. Nyc has had constant public transit demand but there’s been barely any expansion since public takeover of the private subways.
buuyytp · 2026-10-26 14:48:30 UTC
This exists in many cities. See Bus Rapid Transit and many rail lines. Seattle's network has many instances of this.
gs17 · 2026-10-26 18:12:26 UTC
Seattle has instances of it, but there are still many parts of the city not well connected by transit.
buuyytp · 2026-10-26 18:27:15 UTC
That's a different goal post. The original claim was:
"If only most cities could have this today"
Seattle has this. No one claimed or required it to be universal within the city.
ahartmetz · 2026-10-26 15:02:51 UTC
Most European and East Asian major cities do have that. A train every 2-5 minutes during busy hours. In smaller cities (below one million people or so), a train / bus / tram every 10 minutes is probably most common.
loloquwowndueo · 2026-10-26 15:07:30 UTC
Perhaps the poster is in the US where frequent-schedule public transit is a rarity save in a few select cities.
nickorlow · 2026-10-26 15:08:48 UTC
yes
SoftTalker · 2026-10-26 17:07:55 UTC
Yes, my local transit system has 15 minute intervals at best, most routes are 30 or 60 minutes. And if you need to transfer routes, that's normally even more waiting. That really limits its attractiveness and so with a few exceptions it's mostly used by people who can't afford a car and are physically unable to bike.
I've often said that if I ran it I would concentrate resources on more frequent service on the highest ridership routes and cut the low ridership routes entirely. But for a variety of reasons that probably isn't possible, e.g. they are getting funding contingent on serving a wider area, etc.
A transit system should ideally be attractive to people who can afford to drive, but choose not to out of convenience. That's a pretty high bar in most areas.
999900000999 · 2026-10-26 17:41:44 UTC
Most Americans can not afford to buy a new car cash.
Only Chicago , and maybe Pittsburgh allows the average(income ) person to live car free and have a decent apartment.
You have folks in LA who pay upwards of 800$ a month in car payments on a 70k yr salary.
bluGill · 2026-10-26 19:02:41 UTC
Most people are not buying a new car. The typical new car is bought, or more often leased, by someone who keeps it for three years. However, the average car on the road is 12 years old, which means there are a lot of cars that are being driven by someone who didn't buy them new.
999900000999 · 2026-10-26 20:07:31 UTC
Used cars are still expensive. I remember looking a Toyotas and a used Corolla was about 2000$ less than new.
I'd argue that individual car ownership is generally not affordable for most people. You can easily spend over 25% of your income just on transportation.
It's almost a structural problem. America isn't built for public transportation
bluGill · 2026-10-26 21:50:05 UTC
How used? 2010 Corolla is about $10k, while 2024 will be $20-30k.
America is plenty dense for transit, but you need to build it first and that is expensive.
999900000999 · 2026-10-26 22:13:06 UTC
It was basically a year old, but with financing incentives a new car was the same price.
A 15 year old car will have 15 years of issues. I might be willing to risk it at 3 to 5k. 10k is a lot to gamble.
SoftTalker · 2026-10-27 03:06:37 UTC
There are used cars available for any price you can afford to pay.
nickorlow · 2026-10-27 13:01:33 UTC
I wouldn't think of Pittsburgh as a place where car free living is popular. It is in Philadelphia, however
999900000999 · 2026-10-27 18:47:32 UTC
But then you're in Philadelphia.
bijowo1676 · 2026-10-26 19:17:12 UTC
this is a function of population density, it is impossible to have a frequent and reliable public transit in a low density suburban sprawl.
baxtr · 2026-10-26 15:05:26 UTC
Most big European cities run trains every 10-15 minutes and every 5 minutes during rush hour.
chasd00 · 2026-10-26 16:06:42 UTC
In Dallas TX our lightrail runs about every 15 min too. It's works pretty well and is big enough to be actually useful. I like to use for big events when you know parking is going to be a nightmare or expensive. It's slower than a car though, the trip about doubles in terms of time taking the train vs driving.
bspammer · 2026-10-26 17:06:36 UTC
On a lot of London Underground lines, 5 minutes is considered poor service in rush hour. Every 2 minutes is required to handle the sheer volume of passengers
drstewart · 2026-10-27 10:51:16 UTC
And yet the tube has poor service a lot. 2 minutes is required but it very, very often isn't met, leading to wild overcrowding on platforms.
"But it's old!"
Okay - that's why it's unreliable, not an excuse for it.
PorciiVorbesc · 2026-10-26 17:27:49 UTC
Maybe the capitals and major metro ones. My tier-2 EU city is has commuter trains every hour and every 30 minutes at rush hour.
Yeah it sucks, making car commutes the way better alternative.
throw0101c · 2026-10-26 17:32:34 UTC
> Maybe the capitals and major metro ones. My tier-2 EU city is has commuter trains every hour and every 30 minutes at rush hour.
I wonder if some more automation (GoA3/4) would help in being able to run things more often (at least during rush hour?):
It's a rich first world country. Everything is already automated. The driver/conductor is justo monitoring.
embedding-shape · 2026-10-26 15:18:36 UTC
> If only most cities could have this today
Judging by the rest of the replies (most of which I'd agree with), it seems more uncommon that they do not, than they do :) I think this heavily depends on how friendly your government in general is to public transport, which can vary heavily if you're in some specific places in the world.
arjie · 2026-10-26 15:31:51 UTC
You need some combination of high-ridership and low-personnel-cost. You can get that in most of Europe and Asia, but incomes in North America are quite high and labour capture is high too. Most jurisdictions cannot afford the drivers necessary at high frequency because there isn’t enough density for it.
Skytrain bypasses this by not having drivers and perhaps as buses become AVs we could add many more of them here in the Bay Area with much higher frequency.
buuyytp · 2026-10-26 15:36:07 UTC
You could do it in most American cities. You would need to remove car infrastructure to do it. Bus Rapid Transit with protected lanes and median platforms along major arterials is a method most American cities could absolutely support. Some cities might be a stretch, Houston's nightmare sprawl for instance. But I'd put money on it being feasible in 70-80% of cities.
gwbas1c · 2026-10-26 15:41:33 UTC
It's a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop: Public transport needs riders to fund / justify it; and people drive because the public transportation sucks.
supertrope · 2026-10-26 15:59:18 UTC
When the Federal, state, and local government direct 97% of transportation infrastructure spending toward making driving easy, we should not be surprised when 97% of people choose to drive their daily trips.
xp84 · 2026-10-26 16:56:55 UTC
People already take transit everywhere it has been economic to build good transit. You’re simply not going to have a good system in any area outside the built-up urban areas, because you would need to hire an army of drivers and buy many thousands of vehicles, at absurd expense, to provide a rider experience that would be even close to acceptable in spread-out areas. Transit works due to many origins and destinations being concentrated in small areas. Blocks full of five story apartment buildings. Stadiums. Airports, ferries, commuter rail termini. Tall office buildings, colleges, hospitals. Applying the same model to cities that aren’t big enough to have professional sports teams, the only kind of transit you can afford to build is buses that run every hour or so, and which require you to walk a mile or two at each end for the privilege of using it.
i’m arguing that this is not a chicken or egg situation because the costs involved to bring that chicken to life (especially when starting today - at least the 19th-century head start NYC got allowed them to build quick and cheap!) would be so high that your farm is going to be bankrupt before anybody lays any eggs.
buuyytp · 2026-10-26 18:25:41 UTC
No one is talking about spread out areas. This conversation is about US cities.
Pick a US city, then pick a neighborhood within that city you feel is emblematic of the pattern you observe. We've selected a few -- Seattle, Minneapolis -- go ahead and you pick one where a US city would not be able to support it. Then we can look at that example together.
gwbas1c · 2026-10-26 19:59:32 UTC
> This conversation is about US cities.
Yes, exactly. Massachusetts; specifically the area around Boston, has this problem. There's plenty of land set aside for public transportation, but it's significantly underused for the reasons I described a few posts above.
When I started going into Boston one day a week, I tried the commuter rail twice, but it was so horrible I decided it was easier, and more comfortable to sit in traffic. (Even though it costs about 1/3rd to take the commuter rail into Boston.)
I was expecting an experience like Caltrain, I used to take it between Palo Alto and San Francisco and it was delightful. Not only are the trains more reliable, the seats are comfortable too.
schoen · 2026-10-27 13:26:35 UTC
Can I assume you were taking the new electrified Caltrain? It feels a lot nicer than the old diesel Caltrain, including, I think, the comfort of the seats.
xp84 · 2026-10-26 21:35:30 UTC
Can you define city for me first? Not being a jackass. I'm defining them more broadly than you are, perhaps.
buuyytp · 2026-10-26 22:46:49 UTC
I'm thinking predominantly urban area, probably at least 100k people in a non seasonal capacity. Eg. Pullman Washington is a small rural town that becomes huge during college and quiet in the summer as the students leave.
I tend to think of city limits as the boundaries of a city -- not the broad metropolitan area. Shorline is not Seattle, neither is Bellevue or Renton.
Edit: That said, we used to have streetcar suburbs as a prevailing model. Spokes that radiated out to the suburbs on relatively fast, uncomfortable streetcars. A similar model with trams or BRT could function.
xp84 · 2026-10-27 00:34:06 UTC
Okay. The type of city I'm talking about would be like Aurora, Colorado.
I'm specifically not making any claims about cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, etc. Other than to say I think most of them already have all the transit that is economic for them to construct given each city's layout, makeup, climate etc.
Taking Aurora[1] there are almost 400,000 people and a median car ownership of 2 per household. This is the type of city where a lot of Americans live, and where no amount of BRT, Light Rail, etc. will convert them to a place where people can rely on transit for most of their trips, or even to decrease that car ownership figure to one per house.
You'd have to change some lights, right of way, and lane use.
I think you run Peoria Station, past the university hospital, down Peoria, cut through to Havana, the commercial districts (The Gardens) on Havana, hit Kaiser hospital, and end at Nine Mile station. Those anchors are high volume destinations -- workers, shoppers, students. It also ties into two regional rail lines, so commuting into Denver becomes a lot easier.
Over all route length is maybe 8.5 miles. Put 8-12 stops along it, particularly along the big anchors. Convert some of those six lane roads into four plus two lane roads. Havana is perfect for mid lane platforms -- these provide not only good transit dwellings time, they also reduce pedestrian panic over having to cross six or seven lanes at once.
Get across town, park n ride to park n ride, in around 35 minutes, protect that time using infrastructure changes. Car trips off the same distance can be faster, but are often slower due to traffic. Once people realize their median transit time can go down by bus, they'll come. Additionally, BRT can spur investment in mixed use development along the corridor.
It would be unpopular at first, because it would mean making choices that prioritize buses. But anyone who has ever tried parking at a medical center knows how expensive and painful that can be. That region already supports some of the highest traffic on transit in Aurora, with three of their heaviest routes running along that corridor. Retail and medical workers have to get in to those workplaces. So they either commute by transit or would be served well here.
You'd need ~6 buses in fare collecting service at a time to hit <15 minute service.
If you want some comparisons, look at SWIFT Blue line in Snohomish county, a suburban sprawl outside Seattle. Or Indianapolis's IndyGo Red line. Both took highly car centered infrastructure and became their highest ridership lines, exceeding the buses they were replacing in very car centric environments.
solyin · 2026-10-27 13:28:20 UTC
In order to be considered a city, it has to be dense enough to support a bus network. If no bus, then no city. Sprawling town.
LorenPechtel · 2026-10-26 17:16:40 UTC
There's a big problem with transit in the suburbs: speed. I'm going to compare the two systems I have some reasonable idea on:
Local. Because of all the stops buses average 25 mph. Long runs, this adds up considerably. It can't be fixed without a lot more buses and a lot fewer stops.
Shanghai. Buses stop much less frequently. More walking, but a bus is not that much slower than a car. And the subway doesn't have traffic jams, long runs you'll almost always get there faster with walking/subway than by car. There is also a climate factor--they get more rain but much fewer extreme days.
coldpie · 2026-10-26 15:43:04 UTC
Excited to say we are doing exactly this up here in the Twin Cities. The local transit agency has been planning a bunch of BRT routes and implementing about one every year or two. Often they have dedicated lanes for much of the route, and they typically have wait times around 7-15 minutes depending on time of day. BRT is extremely affordable and efficient and fits quite nicely into legacy car-based infrastructure, too.
Bus Rapid Transit is neat but you don't need it to create a reliable public transit system. A smattering of American cities have had reliable and popular public transit system (Portland in the late 90s I recall). The problem is that good transit system get gutted whenever a city runs a deficit and so public transit converges to its stereotype - a slow moving, irregular single line filled with those not having a choice about riding it.
Comments
Historically, not true for the “trekschuit” in 1632. For that, the shore didn’t exist before the route was envisioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekschuit:
“The first trekschuit 'sailed' in 1632 between Amsterdam and Haarlem and could carry 30 passengers. The trekvaart or canal was dug in a straight line to facilitate an easy pulling process and to guarantee the shortest route”
For some of us; that's dial-up, to AI, to who knows what.
My great-grandfather learned to care for horses, and drive a wagon / buggy, and keenly remembered the first time he saw an automobile. He qualified as a doctor before antibiotics were invented, and then lived long enough to at least exist in a house with a personal computer - whether he ever used it is something I never thought to ask my grandfather!
Or, he could have been just that much smarter than you you, dismissive author.
"At age 11, Pascal had re-derived much of Euclid’s geometry from scratch because his father kept the books from him"
Guessing not in the author's bio
Ancient Mediterranean maps often reveal ferries and such were not going vast distances but rather they would go from small settlement to small settlement. This would be much smaller boats that could be easily rowed and, in turn, have relatively fixed frequencies. The small boats could get into ports that would be impossible to put a large ship into. As ships grew larger and sailing became more popular, longer distances would happen and then winds and tides would be more important.
“Trekschuit (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈtrɛksxœyt] ⓘ; lit. 'tug-boat', i.e. 'tugged boat') is an old style of sail- and horse-drawn boat specific to the Netherlands, where it was used for centuries as a means of passenger traffic between cities along trekvaarten, or tow-canals.
[…]
By 1700, an extensive network of trekschuit- and ferry services linked all of the important cities in the coastal provinces of the Netherlands. Travel by trekschuit was reliable, comfortable, and cheap. The speed was about 7 km/h, which was faster than walking, and more comfortable than by coach. Many foreigners praised the advantages of the system, leading to the introduction of canals, such as the Erie Canal, in the United States. The boats were pulled along by horse on a towpath (in Dutch called jaagpad, named after the jager (chaser) which accompanied the horse)”
As in: if one collected sufficient anonymised travel data to offer a reliable understanding of the population's travel needs, and given the fixed constraints of the existing road and rail network, and the existing number of buses and trains, how much more efficient could the network be by varying routes, timings, stops, and interactions?
Imagine if such a dataset was made available, and a prize offered for the best solution.
The challenge could also be extended to explore optimal areas for investment in additional infrastructure - a wider road here, a new roundabout or branch line there.
I don't remember the terms used, but I've seen data sets of where people live and work in Manhattan, and you do see people who live on subway lines take jobs on that same line, and they don't take jobs on a different subway line that while possible is overly inconvenient.
people have already arranged their life around the existing transportation that exists around them. They are not going to change their life because it is already in place. They want bottlenecks fixed but otherwise don't really need a change to their life. Even if a change would greatly benefit them, they often can't see that and wouldn't imagine themselves making the change to their comfortable life.
The real value of transportation experts is they can look at a map and all your data and say, if we make these changes, over 20 years, the city will redevelop in this way, and then we can ask questions. "Is that how we want the city to develop?" however, the data is never going to show that because the data shows what people are doing today, not what they're going to do in 20 years. Don't get me wrong, experts get this wrong too when they make predictions. However, there is a lot of things we can use to inform our predictions. even though we're not perfect, we can make predictions that are usually right.
Varying the route timing is the absolute worst thing you can do. People need to depend on your transport system. If they have to look at a schedule that's going to change by day to figure out when they can actually get somewhere, they're going to get frustrated and start looking up for an alternative that they control. If you vary your timing at all, it's only because you're changing between a train every minute to train every five minutes. You don't get to go any farther apart than that without losing writers because they no longer can trust that the system will get them there when they want to be there. Physics puts a lower limit on time. I believe the current record is a train every 90 seconds, and I'm not sure how much closer together you can get. The limit for a bus is three minutes apart and even that is extremely hard.
Transit systems that are running worse than 5 minute frequencies have large drops in ridership and as they increase frequency: ridership jumps because people start to use, they can always just go out when they're ready to go. If this wasn't so expensive, everyone in the world would be running 5-minute frequencies all day.
It sorta works for going into the nearish big city for a 9-5 event. But it’s worthless for the evening because of infrequent trains.
The question that we cannot answer for Manhattan data is what if Manhattan added a few North South lines or I can think of hundreds of different things that Manhattan could do. I don't live there and I haven't studied the data in depth so I couldn't tell you what is a good useful thing for Manhattan to do. But I can tell you that there are lines that would over the next few decades greatly change how people in Manhattan and the rest of the city live. Unfortunately, Manhattan is particularly bad about the costs and so they can't even afford to remove the obvious bottlenecks much less a whole new line that would over time be make the city much better.
Of course, as you say in the OP, one can certainly encourage the public to use simulations based on publicly made-available data as a guide during these political discussions to convince people that a certain metric is better than others.
I've noticed that there are some diversions which are definitely beneficial to me. There are busses from my house to the city center, as well as a tram. If the tram diverts to a different destination that essentially doubles my available "travel destinations" in a way that's really useful.
So no doubt, for me personally, there are changes that could be useful. But perhaps they would be less useful for others.
There is a reason why a lot of american bus networks basically follow the same old streetcar routes that were always there. People become used to existing patterns and build lives around them. New transit is a good opportunity to apply this model, but reworking old transit is tricky because some of your existing ridership will end up with a worse offering by definition, and they will protest. While the people who might benefit will not show up with equivocal advocacy in the public comment meeting.
By building in the capability to stop very frequently, they can serve the most people and every area in the route, equally. But day to day, hour to hour, they are definintely bypassing stops, and I can name at least 3 bus routes where the vehicle will certainly reach the speed limit of 45mph or so in-between.
For trains there is of course no difference in dwell time between disabled and able bodied passengers. Not sure how this issue gets solved with bus if the issue is they are too rocky to not have the chairs strapped down. BRT platforms would solve the ramp issue with flush floor boarding but you still have the strapping down delay.
A lot of people commute for hours to sit at a computer...which means they could work at home.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned. On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel. The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus. In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week, and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string (so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
Such data do exist. But they won't avail you (much). You have similar problems as when you optimise the energy sector, or economy in general. The "actual" problem you will be optimising on/for, has a lot of conflicting needs and interests, and choosing your trade-offs resemble the 'trolley problem'. I will just enumerate a random list of things that affect and collide with your optimisation.
- your vehicles and vehicle fleets (and road networks, with congestion) provide one part of the problem.
- your vehicle drivers etc., have other needs and union rules; they need to sleep, have breaks, go to the bathroom, eat; swap places on the road, they need to arrive and get home. - once you are on the road 'you might as well continue driving': There is a huge startup cost each time you pull into traffic.
- you have two peak hours (morning, evening); what should your drivers and buses do in the lull in the middle of the day? (spoiler: they reasonably hate sitting idle for 3 hours, with or without pay).
- lots of politics related to how it is funded and votes, who is paid for operating it. These are the shameful parents for things like frankenstein bus-routes, where 2-3 cancelled budget-cut bus-routes are merged into a single meandering remaining bus-route that makes all its passengers miserable.
- a lot of it is probablility-based/spontaneous; only some traffic patterns are regular (children to school); to service the probability-need, you need a regular service that may run empty/low half of the time, until people need a hair-cut.
The whole thing is handled on a sliding-scale/spectrum, ordered by how short/far into the future, the travel is/can be planned. On one end, you have taxi/uber, which is on-the-spot travel. The other end is planned year-service, e.g. a summer schedule of a bus. In between, with computers we have a lot of "urgent-but-planned" flexi-flexible traffic, where people book on the day or the week, and a number of bookings are then weaved to be driven like a pearl string (so e.g. a number of people will share a ride in a medium sized bus, that does pre-planned pseudo-taxi-service.)
UPDATE: an example of the differences in the setups: Typically, Europe and US will fund/run buses/public transport differently.
in US, traditionally, you would task a company with running the whole operation: Both plan the services to be provided, and then implement/deploy/operate them. So they would both decide the structure of the bus services to be offered, and then do the actual operations of the same plan.
in Europe/many parts, they instead divide like this: A public transport authority designs the structure of the services to be operated (this many buses, running these roads, at these intervals, and ALSO _at these times_). The 'times' part is important, because it determines which transfers are possible (between two lines). That package will then be tendered to private companies, who bid on running those planned operations; they are then paid by the public transport authority, what they offered to operate for in the contract.
These two structures give wildly different transport structures and operations structures. In the european model, it leads to very complex timetables, where bus services are trimmed to the perceived demand - every week, hour, day where the demand is perceived to be less, is cut from the planned timetables. So when you look at the time tables, you need to check complex date periods for whether the bus you want is operating today or not. The reasoning is of course, that since the transport authority must pay for each trip serviced, they try to cut any trip they don't "need".
Contrast that to the american, "older" model, with a full-service operator. They already have their money, and are already running and out on the roads with their equipment. To them, it doesnt matter much, whether they run 5 additional trips between 22:30 and 23:30 or not; they already paid the costs of having a driver present, and bought the buses, so once they are running, might as well keep them running (a similar thing in the middle of the day, in the lull.)
I of course "prefer" the european model, but I can see the issues it causes too (it makes things more complex but better trimmed and fitted.)
As an example, these differences made it so we had difficulty offering the same planning software for europeans and americans, because the planners simply needed different tools for their scenarios.
If only most cities could have this today
Was born in a small city with frequent public transportation (5-10 minutes for most routes). As I moved to larger & more congested cities, public transport became less convenient and the schedule more erratic.
Regarding your question, if the city is made up mostly of apartment buildings & parks, with limited parking space available, almost everyone uses public transport.
There is obviously a trade-off between how pedestrian-friendly or car-friendly a city can be, thus if a city goes hard in the pedestrian-friendly (removing parking spaces, narrowing streets in the center etc.) direction, public transport becomes very attractive & convenient. Having a car becomes a burden.
Another important feature that makes public transport suitable is that they developed concentrically, having only one city center.
With such city planning in mind, public transport is the only rational way to move around lots of people on narrow streets.
The US auto companies paid for the destruction of tram lines with the long term goal of selling more cars.
"If only most cities could have this today"
Seattle has this. No one claimed or required it to be universal within the city.
I've often said that if I ran it I would concentrate resources on more frequent service on the highest ridership routes and cut the low ridership routes entirely. But for a variety of reasons that probably isn't possible, e.g. they are getting funding contingent on serving a wider area, etc.
A transit system should ideally be attractive to people who can afford to drive, but choose not to out of convenience. That's a pretty high bar in most areas.
Only Chicago , and maybe Pittsburgh allows the average(income ) person to live car free and have a decent apartment.
You have folks in LA who pay upwards of 800$ a month in car payments on a 70k yr salary.
I'd argue that individual car ownership is generally not affordable for most people. You can easily spend over 25% of your income just on transportation.
It's almost a structural problem. America isn't built for public transportation
America is plenty dense for transit, but you need to build it first and that is expensive.
A 15 year old car will have 15 years of issues. I might be willing to risk it at 3 to 5k. 10k is a lot to gamble.
"But it's old!"
Okay - that's why it's unreliable, not an excuse for it.
Yeah it sucks, making car commutes the way better alternative.
I wonder if some more automation (GoA3/4) would help in being able to run things more often (at least during rush hour?):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
Judging by the rest of the replies (most of which I'd agree with), it seems more uncommon that they do not, than they do :) I think this heavily depends on how friendly your government in general is to public transport, which can vary heavily if you're in some specific places in the world.
Skytrain bypasses this by not having drivers and perhaps as buses become AVs we could add many more of them here in the Bay Area with much higher frequency.
i’m arguing that this is not a chicken or egg situation because the costs involved to bring that chicken to life (especially when starting today - at least the 19th-century head start NYC got allowed them to build quick and cheap!) would be so high that your farm is going to be bankrupt before anybody lays any eggs.
Pick a US city, then pick a neighborhood within that city you feel is emblematic of the pattern you observe. We've selected a few -- Seattle, Minneapolis -- go ahead and you pick one where a US city would not be able to support it. Then we can look at that example together.
Yes, exactly. Massachusetts; specifically the area around Boston, has this problem. There's plenty of land set aside for public transportation, but it's significantly underused for the reasons I described a few posts above.
When I started going into Boston one day a week, I tried the commuter rail twice, but it was so horrible I decided it was easier, and more comfortable to sit in traffic. (Even though it costs about 1/3rd to take the commuter rail into Boston.)
I was expecting an experience like Caltrain, I used to take it between Palo Alto and San Francisco and it was delightful. Not only are the trains more reliable, the seats are comfortable too.
I tend to think of city limits as the boundaries of a city -- not the broad metropolitan area. Shorline is not Seattle, neither is Bellevue or Renton.
Edit: That said, we used to have streetcar suburbs as a prevailing model. Spokes that radiated out to the suburbs on relatively fast, uncomfortable streetcars. A similar model with trams or BRT could function.
I'm specifically not making any claims about cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, etc. Other than to say I think most of them already have all the transit that is economic for them to construct given each city's layout, makeup, climate etc.
Taking Aurora[1] there are almost 400,000 people and a median car ownership of 2 per household. This is the type of city where a lot of Americans live, and where no amount of BRT, Light Rail, etc. will convert them to a place where people can rely on transit for most of their trips, or even to decrease that car ownership figure to one per house.
[1] https://datausa.io/profile/geo/aurora-co/
I think you run Peoria Station, past the university hospital, down Peoria, cut through to Havana, the commercial districts (The Gardens) on Havana, hit Kaiser hospital, and end at Nine Mile station. Those anchors are high volume destinations -- workers, shoppers, students. It also ties into two regional rail lines, so commuting into Denver becomes a lot easier.
Over all route length is maybe 8.5 miles. Put 8-12 stops along it, particularly along the big anchors. Convert some of those six lane roads into four plus two lane roads. Havana is perfect for mid lane platforms -- these provide not only good transit dwellings time, they also reduce pedestrian panic over having to cross six or seven lanes at once.
Get across town, park n ride to park n ride, in around 35 minutes, protect that time using infrastructure changes. Car trips off the same distance can be faster, but are often slower due to traffic. Once people realize their median transit time can go down by bus, they'll come. Additionally, BRT can spur investment in mixed use development along the corridor.
It would be unpopular at first, because it would mean making choices that prioritize buses. But anyone who has ever tried parking at a medical center knows how expensive and painful that can be. That region already supports some of the highest traffic on transit in Aurora, with three of their heaviest routes running along that corridor. Retail and medical workers have to get in to those workplaces. So they either commute by transit or would be served well here.
You'd need ~6 buses in fare collecting service at a time to hit <15 minute service.
If you want some comparisons, look at SWIFT Blue line in Snohomish county, a suburban sprawl outside Seattle. Or Indianapolis's IndyGo Red line. Both took highly car centered infrastructure and became their highest ridership lines, exceeding the buses they were replacing in very car centric environments.
Local. Because of all the stops buses average 25 mph. Long runs, this adds up considerably. It can't be fixed without a lot more buses and a lot fewer stops.
Shanghai. Buses stop much less frequently. More walking, but a bus is not that much slower than a car. And the subway doesn't have traffic jams, long runs you'll almost always get there faster with walking/subway than by car. There is also a climate factor--they get more rain but much fewer extreme days.
It appears to be quite successful in terms of ridership, too (warning: local news website, but you can get all you need from the URL slug): https://www.fox9.com/news/6-months-in-minneapolis-e-line-nea...