What I find interesting is that people have a negative relationship with buses but not with trolley cars, like the old SF trolley cars where you could almost hang off them. If we injected some fun or joy into busses like trolley cars would that improve people's relationships or perspective of them too?
When I was in Mexico City I was blown away and inspired that their bus lanes were actually physically separate from car traffic, sometimes they were even elevated a foot or so alongside car traffic. It made the buses so much faster! I wish bus and bike lanes in the USA were equally separated from car traffic. Different color paint and intermittent bollards don't cut it.
If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right and physically separate bus lanes is doing it right.
Bus lanes are usually not a budget problem. The problem is car centric laws and regulations that make it hard to impossible to take space away from cars.
Nonsense. The infrastructure in much of the US is already there. All you need is willingness to enforce it. All you need maybe is a bit of paint. Police could actually make some money.
There's an intimidation factor that a lot of Americans won't quickly admit to when it comes to taking the bus. They don't know if they can tap with their phone to pay, if they need cash, if they can use change, if they need exact cash/change, if they need a specific transit card etc. They don't know the etiquette for asking to get off the bus and sometimes it varies by bus design. They don't know the routes or the time schedules and find it confusing and overwhelming and often have a low tolerance for the embarrassment that can come with publicly learning something.
Yes. As long as we're looking for relatively easy or cheap improvements, I believe that UX is a huge one. Buses have a long tradition of user-hostile design. "Exact change only", unhelpful and condescending and impatient drivers, unwritten etiquette rules, and everything else you listed.
It has always baffled me why they make it so hard for first-time users in particular. Sure, they mostly care about the regular customers who make up 99% of their passengers, but everyone has to be a first-timer before they can be a long-timer. It's not just UX papercuts, the experience seems designed to be maximally hostile. Is it because one more marginal person is a little more delay, a little more crowding, etc? It feels like there are perverse incentives at work.
> Buses have a long tradition of user-hostile design. "Exact change only"...
On every pay-in-cabin bus I've ever ridden, this is synonymous with "No change given". The machines are quite happy to accept more money than is needed for a single ticket, and the reason for that is pretty obvious.
> It has always baffled me why they make it so hard for first-time users in particular.
The SFMTA (the San Francisco bus/train operator) provides a document that addresses almost everything you brought up. [0] The "unhelpful and condescending and impatient drivers" thing isn't addressed, but I've never run into a Muni driver that was anything but helpful. [3] As an added bonus, the most useful information about fares is posted on the paybox inside the bus.
>> Buses have a long tradition of user-hostile design. "Exact change only"...
> On every pay-in-cabin bus I've ever ridden, this is synonymous with "No change given". The machines are quite happy to accept more money than is needed for a single ticket, and the reason for that is pretty obvious....the most useful information about fares is posted on the paybox inside the bus
That's fair, but (1) when I was a kid and starting out riding a bus, I didn't know that; and (2) as that same kid, neither my family nor I had very much money at all and paying "extra" for something is just not something you do. Consider it a cultural thing. "inside the bus" is good but insufficient when I'm deciding between walking a mile or chancing the bus that I don't understand. (I almost always walked the mile. I was cheap, and I hated looking stupid in front of unsympathetic people.)
As for Muni, I didn't live where I could use it until I was no longer that kid. But adult me fully agrees with you. My experience with Muni has been much better than with most other busses I've used.
I see. Your complaint is that in vehicles that are staffed only with a driver, the driver refuses to handle change, and that -in your youth- your parents didn't provide you with any information (whether directly from them, or published by your local transit authority) about how mass transit worked in your area.
There's not much the transit authority can do about your parents' decision to leave you ill-informed. I can tell you that obligating the solo driver to handle change would be significantly user-hostile for the passengers currently on the vehicle. The tradeoff made is the correct one.
As you're probably aware, there's also good news: for a while now, many (most?) transit systems permit payment with radio cards that are linked to a preexisting pool of money, rather than having to handle cash inside the vehicle.
Your post is a good illustration of the type of hostility I'm talking about. "If you don't already know, it's your fault, and if it's not your fault, it's your parent's fault."
I don't want the driver to handle change. I want to know what the price is before I board the bus and possibly discover that I do not have the right change (or enough money at all). Yes, I would also like the machine to give me change if I overpay. I'm demanding.
My parents do not know so cannot teach me. They live on a farm. When they visit cities, they rely on their social ties and meet someone to take them around. Plus, well, it was a farm; I had no need for buses until I moved away. There is no mass transit in the area I grew up, so there's no literature to peruse.
I apologize for not being gifted with the evidently superior parents you had.
I was not unusual. Many rural people moved to cities and ran into all this implicit knowledge that they were looked down on for not possessing. It's ok; we laughed at the city folks who came visiting or relocating to the country too. We also helped them with a straight face, or at least helped those who could be helped. The social contract is stronger in the country than in the city.
But anyway, this is veering away from the crappy UX of most buses. It is true that I could have researched bus systems before I ever encountered one and trained myself such that I could survive the bad UX. But that's kind of the point, right? UX design should require as little prior knowledge or understanding as possible (as in, as possible without harming the experience of regular riders too much or increasing cost excessively; I acknowledge the existence of tradeoffs.) You try to make it useful to country bumpkins, non-native speakers, youth, the poor, etc.
It's the same in Europe. There are many car drivers who would never admit that, but they just don't want to leave their comfort zone and learn how to use public transport. But when asked they will say stuff like "well, we live a bit outside the city", or "now with kids you basically need a car".
It does that, but the parent means stop signs. San Francisco where there aren't traffic lights mostly blankets every intersection with 4 way stop signs. The parent is likely referring to The Sunset district, which looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7569397,-122.5007035,3a,75y,...
Sorry, in the case of the bus there are too many bus stops (although there are more express lines now), so the bus stops a lot instead of having less stops where more people get off and walk one more block (what the article talks about).
The muni (tram), stops at stop signs at every block on the west side like the N line, so it’s extreeeemly slow. A system where the tram has priority over cars and does not need to stop at every single block would be life changing.
What if a degree could be seized? For example, what if bankruptcy courts could require a debtor to stop "representing themselves" as having a degree as a condition for discharging debt. If a court revoked a degree, it would effectively reset the graduate to the status of a dropout removing a significant amount of the degree's value (I know knowledge has its own value, but credentialism is a big part of a degree's value too).Universities already have the infrastructure to flag students. For example, many institutions withhold official transcripts or diplomas for academic fraud, moral infringements etc. Could this create enough of an incentive to pay back loans and not declare bankruptcy?
I don't think that would fly, since it would provide no benefit to the owner of the debt and would just be enormously punitive and feel pointlessly cruel.
It would be like if instead of a foreclosure they just took a bulldozer to the house, then salted the earth with asbestos and lead so nobody could ever build a house there again. What's the (acute) benefit in just destroying the value? Plus, it turns the four years into a complete waste of time, no matter how hard you worked to get the degree, just because you couldn't find employment after.
I know we're talking about tweaking incentives to make it not worth it to game the system, but this would also screw over people that found themselves in that position through no fault of their own, plus it would waste all the time and work of everyone that taught that person and contributed to their education (even though they got paid, people largely aren't in education for the cash).
I don't know, I think it would be too much of a bummer to work.
When student debt becomes dischargeable, market forces will finally price degrees according to their actual economic value relative to the risk of poor returns. Currently, that price discovery is broken; the cost of a degree bears almost no relationship to its real-world payoff. No need for degree seizure to correct it. Lenders can decide for themselves which degrees lead to returns, which in turn provides degree seekers with actual financial signals instead of vibes-based "go into programming" propaganda from FAANG.
We live in an apartment but use Costco to stock our freezer with meat and seafood. We also use it for gas, cat litter, eggs, and cheese (lasts a long time). Basically for perishables that only need to be stored so long.
We used to buy raspberries, blackberries, blueberries etc at Dollar Stores. They wouldn't last a week in the fridge which is why they were at the Dollar Store, but we were eating them same-day or next day so spoilage wasn't a concern. Really helped the berry budget with toddlers.
reply