#not as good as tokyo where airport limousines (theyre buses) take you to the hotel to drop off your luggage (so no taxi required)

[cometchasr]

please look at singapore. even my constant screaming in agony over bus timings (im looking at YOU, 197!) has them at, max, 15 minutes. waiitng half a fucking hour for a bus sounds like hell. sometimes buses will purportedly arrive in 40 minutes (i had this happen once)...

... and then it comes within the next 10 because our bus timing app is fucked up in a weird way. seriously, the longest time id had to wait for a bus was 20 minutes tops, and that was one time. usually buses come every (varies by bus) about 8 to 10 minutes (as mentioned previously, 197 is an exception, and i hate it. im writing this at 10am, which is quite not-peak hours, and the buses still come every about 10 minutes. making a good bus system is possible, making it supplant cars (at least to an extent) is also possible. it's been done before. the problem is that the government itself needs to want to make the transit network better (because in its current state no one wants to pay for it), so getting your voice heard is important.

If you are thinking about it on paper, the bus running every half hour doesn't sound so bad, until you're waiting at the stop and you miss a bus or it's delayed. Then you're waiting a very, very long time. To people who never take transit, that's probably fine. Why do you care. To people who only take transit, they're expecting it, it's baked in their lives. But the important part, what really impacts our cities, is what happens to people for whom transit is an option.

The spiral goes like this. You go to take the bus instead of driving, thinking "I'm going to o have a couple drinks" or "I don't want to worry about parking where I'm going." So you take bus. First bus is right on time. But then you transfer from your neighborhood line to the line that takes you where you actually want to go. And your bus is delayed. And it only comes every 30 minutes. And then you're waiting, 40 minutes later, wondering where your bus is, knowing you could have driven there in 20 minutes.

Why would you ever chose to take a bus again? The bus made you waste precious time on your day off just sitting there. So next time you drive. Ridership goes down. When the transit authority asks for more money for more buses and more drivers, people point to the ridership numbers and say "why should we pay for this instead of paying for our schools/police/baseball stadium/parks/police again (let's be real that's who's taking all the money)?" If we want to increase ridership we need to actually design and fund functional transit networks. If we want people to actually ride the bus we need to make it a better option than driving, which means reliable service, which you don't get with a bus every 30 minutes.

Every 15 minutes, everywhere, all of the time.