alt Hacker NewsBus 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.
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> 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.
> 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.