Blogging on the bus

Now that I can post from my phone, I decided to try posting from on board an LA city bus.  Normally I drive back and forth to work, but I decided that today I would try the bus.  It is an express bus that has stops right next to my office and home, so in principle it should be fairly convenient.  Driving takes half an hour, and according to the schedule, the bus should be fifty minutes.  While the bus is slower, at least I can do something else with my time while I'm waiting, like post to my blog.  Of course, the one day I decide to try this, traffic on one of the streets that normally moves quickly is completely clogged because of some construction.

This reminds me of what I always thought was the main problem with relying on buses alone as a public transit solution: they can't go any faster than prevailing traffic.  Of course, there are options for tweaking signal lights and so forth, but fundamentally, without their own rights of way, they'll never get people to their destination quickly in heavy traffic.  They either need their own rights of way, or we need to increase the speed of traffic by imposing road pricing and getting other vehicles off the road.  I like both of those ideas but the first is expensive to do properly, and the latter is politically difficult.

Why am I bothering to say this?  Because I keep reading about bus advocates here in LA who lobby to take all the money being spent on light rail and subway, and spend it instead on more buses, and I guess drivers.  I just don't see how that achieves anything.  As long as buses can't go any faster than traffic, more buses are not going to entice people out of their cars.  They will be end up being more competition for the roads.  Over the long term, it seems to me that continued expansion of light rail is better as a way of creating an alternative to driving.  Bus rapid transit on dedicated rights of way also makes sense. 

Again, I think the one context where a massive focus on bus would make sense would be in conjunction with road pricing that would get vehicles off the streets and increase speeds.  I was impressed with how well buses worked in london last time I was there, and I think they worked because road pricing had slashed the number of cars on the road that the buses had to compete with.  Somehow, though, road pricing doesn't seem to be on the agenda anywhere in the united states.

Anyway home now.  Speed picked up dramatically once we passed the construction.  If it hadn't been for the construction, I am guessing it would have taken about forty minutes, only about ten minutes more than driving.  So maybe I will be doing this more often, at least on days where my schedule is flexible and I can afford a delay like this one.