Survey: What Do You Dislike About Taking The Bus?

Actually, the thing I hate MOST about the bus is the bumpy, bouncy ride. I hate the way buses sway side to side, lurch through traffic and bounce and jostle. I think it's the most discouraging element in bus travel. Living in Toronto I'm lucky that I can sometimes choose a bus or a streetcar. I always choose the streetcar, even if it means walking an extra couple of blocks.

I don't know about you guys, but I like the bus just fine. My wife and I bought our home near a major bus route in Dallas, TX. (the 001 to be exact.)

I comment "others" for the improvement question.
For me, the most annoying thing concerning the bus is that you never now how much time you are going to wait for it, or when you will arrive.
Now in Paris, you can have this information for nearly all the bus lanes. The information is displayed at the bus stops (waiting time) and inside the bus (arrival time to major stops).
It is great and I take more the bus now thanks to this system.

The bus service I plan on using runs ever 30 minutes and I've heard people complain it runs late a lot.
I would ride it more if it could drop me off closer to work and if it ran later in the evening.

I voted for routes and other. My "other" is that every time I have been on a bus, I seem to be seated to a recently released felon. From that statement, you might think that I just feel uncomfortable about the person I'm sitting next to. No, EVERY time I've been on a public bus, the person next to or across from me tells me the story of how they were just released from prison and 1) on their way to their first job interview in 15 years, 2) How much the person standing in the aisle an blocking people is upsetting them, 3) how much they enjoyed prison!
Not that I think ex-cons shouldn't be on the bus, but I don't want to k now about their problems....

Other: Body odor; passengers shouting (often on cellphones); people blocking aisles or using two seats when one could do; passengers not giving up seats for disabled riders ....

OK, I'll admit it. I don't know how. I grew up not using a bus and I tried a few times. It sucked and I got lost. If it was as simple as get on this one bus and go to the store or whatever and get off at the store, I could handle it. I have no interest in learning the routes and schedules of the local buses yet. They are STARTING to expand into useful areas, but they're well behind the expansion of the city.

I get lost in my car driving in a city I've lived in for over 10 years. I can usually figure out where North is if I can see the mountains, but if I'm far enough away I need GPS, a map, a compass and a cell phone.

It's easy to point and laugh, but if you don't spend all day navigating the city why bother to learn where Elm Street is until you need to go there?

There is an image that the people riding the bus can't afford their own car. In a larger city that's probably less true... Whenever I did ride the bus I almost always noticed that it wasn't that cheap though.

I am a bike rider, who also takes the bus and I dislike when the bike racks are full. I am currently living in Kailua, Oahu, HI and it is on the windward side of the island. It is also over the "mountains" from Honolulu where I work and go to school. It is a very dangerous biking route, considering you can only make it across via the highway and there are two tunnels without any bike lanes, in fact there are no bike lanes at all. Anyhow the new surge in gas prices, especially in Hawaii (almost $4.50 a gallon here, ouch!) has brought out more bike riders, which is great, but can be inconvenient sometimes.

Other: lack of privacy. On my way home from work I simply want to be alone for a few minutes as a way of transitioning from office to home. It's not a time when I'm typically in the mood for socializing or even interacting with other people.

I'll take the bus if I can, but limited and changing routes keep it from being my primary mode of transport. It's just not reliable or convenient as it is now. I've turned to a walking lifestyle. Not because I'm so green, but because I really need to reduce my overhead and there's nothing more reliable than my own two legs. People are weird about it, though. Many think walking three or four miles a day is like training for a marathon.

Other: the people who dedicate a seat to their purse / backpack / shopping bag, and the people who hold very loud, very vulgar conversations.

I don't mind the time that it takes, because it takes me about the same time by bike; and I don't mind the unpredictable schedule, either: the main routes that I take run every 10 or 20 minutes, so I never have to wait long for the next bus to appear.

Really my city needs more light rail and more safe bike lanes.

In my city, the buses are fine if you live along a main route. If you have to make a connection or two, forget it, you have just tripled your travel time.

I wish there were a way to signal that you want a particular bus to stop without having to continually check, make yourself visible, or leave the bus shelter. Maybe lights on top of bus shelters?

I live approximately 14 miles from my work. There is a commuter bus from a nearby town which would allow me to cut my daily mileage in half (to/from commuter lot). However, the cost of the commuter bus and the subsequent city bus that I would have to take to reach my office would be about three times what it costs me to drive. I work for a relatively small employer, so there is no cost-sharing program for using public transit.

So for me, oddly enough, what I dislike most about public transportation is that it's too expensive.

I can speak on my hometown, that all routes lead to the downtown hub. However, there is little activity in the downtown and most passengers are heading elsewhere.
For most cases, that is a 25 minute trip in, 1-25 minute wait for the connection, and 25 minutes out to destination.
A trip for me to the big mall is 5 minutes by car via highway, 30 minutes by bike through town, or 1hour 15minutes by bus.

I ride my bike if its in a 10 mile vicinity of my home, but i use BART (bay area rapid transit) when i go to San Francisco unless i can grab some friends and make it efficient in a car. here are some accounts of my BART experience

- 2 completely loaded & belligerent women whooping it up, yelling nonsense and talking about getting a fix, not to mention stinking up the whole car with an aged vomit-urine smell.

- sitting down on a wet seat, don't know why but the seats are cloth on bart.

- standing in a super crowded J Church (this was on SF Muni) and having my butt grabbed by some dude.

- a guy was hammered and fell asleep on me, literally fell on to my lap.

I avoid taking PT because of these types of incidences, but i do sacrifice my personal comfort for the greater good when i have to. it seems all the addictions in the world, from alcohol to gasoline, make coexistence difficult in our heavily populated urban areas.

Funny though, never in all my european travels did i have any of these problems...

I can get anywhere in town quicker on my bike, even without taking into account the time to wait for the bus. Of course, that town is Boulder, CO which has really good bikeways/lanes, and is fairly small.

One thing that makes bus routes successful here (they're the only ones I use) are routes that have a service frequency of 10-15 minutes. That way, you don't really need to plan or know the schedule, you can just add a few minutes extra to your transit time. When the schedule is every 1/2 hour, you need to know the schedule and plan for it, so it's easier to just jump on the bike/in the car. Those more routes with more frequent service also use smaller buses.

"Shall we walk or do we have enough time to take the T?"

1- Any communal transport must deliver its passengers within very short distances of where they want to go. The overwhelming majority of those distances must be less than 300 m: about the outside length of a sports stadium.

2- People use communal transportation only if the overwhelming majority (better than 2/3) of trips require no more than one "mode change" - change from light rail to bus or bus to rail.

Any system that meets those two criteria, by itself, cannot offer regional speeds - the vehicles have to stop too offten. The answer seems to be at least two tiers of transit: local and regional, and that means "deep pockets."

I LOVE mass transit. I even select for vacation cities with good systems. Dresden and Boston are examples. However, the cost of implementing such a multitiered system is extraordinary, indeed.

Need more mini buses. Most of the time the bus is way too large & virtually empty. That way, if you miss one, another is along soon. At one industrial area in Santa Rosa, if you miss your bus, you wait a full hour for the next one, which may or may not come and has hardly any passengers.
Covered shelters with seating for rainy days or beating sun.
Transfers are scary to children & disabled adults. In my city all buses go through one designated area downtown, where you must transfer to go to another area of the city.

I despise the bus in general. All the stopping makes me motion sick, especially if I'm sitting upstairs (I live in London).

It takes too long to go short distances, and the dedicated lanes don't seem to help that much. (over an hour to go 6 miles is just a ridiculous amount of time, there weren't any major problems, the route was somewhat direct, it wasn't downtown or during rush hour, and I'm not counting the wait time for the bus).

I'm not a hater of public transit light rail and the underground are wonderful most of the time, I just hate the bus, and I'm pretty sure it hates me back.

I'm a mom of two and my kids and I are fans of mass transit and do use it [bus]. I'd like to see American buses work better for families. I rode buses while visiting relatives in Europe in 2007 that have far better access for strollers. Improvement in scheduling and routes also help families. Our transportation choices will influence the next generation. We can teach our kids that every trip doesn't begin in a car.

The biggest thing that puts me off about riding buses is taking time at every stop for other passengers to get on or off. Walking or biking - i only have to stop when crossing intersections. It can be fun to bike somewhere, taking shortcuts, and see the same bus again and again as it leapfrogs ahead then waits at a stop.

What I hate about the bus is that it adds to global warming!

I hate when I ride the bus it seems to stop on nearly every block! It takes forever just to get one mile because the bus stops so frequently and it drives me crazy. Let people walk more and stop less.

It's too hot!

Actually, our mass transit works quite well. True, sometimes the buses are overcrowded and some of them are quite old, but at least people are using them, right?
And they keep stick quite well to the schedule, which is available on the net along with the optimal route planner that can get you from A to B with the least amount of time (even though, sometimes cmputer gives you way too many exchanges to save a minute or two)
One thing that is probably the main argument not to take the bus are the occasional anti-social element. Believe me, a person with questonable hygiene can stink up a bus so bad, that the driver is forced to ride with the doors open.

"Other: Body odor; passengers shouting (often on cellphones); people blocking aisles or using two seats when one could do; passengers not giving up seats for disabled riders ...."

Hmmph. Driving is just as bad, you just don't get other people's BO. People are actively trying to kill you, passively trying to kill you, shouting into cellphones, blocking lanes, using four cars when one would do, and taking up the carpool lane with only one passenger...

Another thing is that taking large amounts of stuff (like groceries) on the bus is a pain. It is difficult to get the wheeled shopping cart on and off the bus.