The Failure of Bus Grids at the Scale of Los Angeles

Alon Levy · 30 Jul 2026 · pedestrianobservations.com ↗

2 korrents from this piece

Alon Levy did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Bus grids cannot function as a city's primary transit backbone at the scale of a very large, low-density city like Los Angeles, no matter how much priority the buses get.

Their wordsBut in fact, the scale of buses is rather short, and in a Los Angeles-size city they are hopeless, no matter how much priority they have.
Our reading
On-street separated bus lanes cannot match the speed of grade-separated rapid transit.

Their wordson-street separated lanes don't go at the speed of rapid transit, and the counterexamples you're thinking about right now are either freeways or things that might as well be freeways.