- he/him
- gameboat.org/
member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist
zip's bf
no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good
mastodon
mastodon.social/@vogontwitter (inactive)
twitter.com/vogonbluesky
if bluesky has a million haters I am one of them, if bluesky has one hater that's me, if bluesky has no haters then I am no more on the earth (more details: https://cohost.org/vogon/post/1845751-bonus-pure-speculati)
irl
seattle, WA
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in reply to @vogon's post:
i'm all for normalizing buses, but if seattle is their example i'm afraid i can't agree
sincerely, though: of course, all of the problems of king county metro are problems of budget cutting, the primacy of cars, and people being huge assholes who are unwilling to do anything about poverty except do everything possible to banish it from their line of sight
however, I do still wish it was possible for a metro trip to not be an agonizing ordeal ever
yeah zero judgment about the actual content of the video, and at a guess I bet the thesis is "you can have a bus system that contributes meaningfully to getting people to where they need to be!"
as someone who's lived in seattle for about 25 years though I have to respectfully disagree with the epithets "normal" and "good" for metro in particular (even though we're much better off with it than without it)
he tends to focus on cities in the us where it isn’t as awful to try to go without a car (or cities that are particularly awful), so i tend to cut him some slack because the baseline is so awful lol.
he also talks a lot about college football which is only relevant because it’s how i got my roommate to check his videos out
Where are buses not good? (Only could think of not enough buses) Or normal?
there's some strains of popular thought about urban planning that say that trains are the only form of mass transit you should consider as a transit advocate because they're faster/higher-capacity/more reliable, and from the first 30 seconds of the video, it's predominantly a counter to those forms of "train purism" by showing off cities where buses are heavily used and make an important way of getting around the city!
I kind of get where those people are coming from but buses seem a loooooot faster to deploy and then reroute as needs change?
valid, but also, compared to where I moved from, Sound Transit is fucking HEAVENLY. so, YMMV ;)
That's 4th Ave in front of Union Station, right? That is an ooooold photo.
context: im a recent seattle mover person and unfortunately Metro is far above average for the US even if it needs to be way way way better. my last full-time gig was for a transit agency in the bay area and their network was so much worse, with terrible frequencies and a poorly planned light rail network to boot. boston, where i lived for a while, has seattle beat on trains (but not train reliability!!) but is worse on buses and bus priority.
I'm not surprised that it's pretty good by US standards! I used to live in the Bay and I would easily take the average Metro bus over the Muni 22 which my apartment used to be on the route for. and despite making fun of it I still happily take Metro everywhere.
Even more context: this is mostly just him cracking into some transit data, filtering out smaller cities (college towns), and sorting by bus trips per capita. Then he provides some context for the top results. The value judgement is much smaller than the title implies!