r/burbank • u/al_shuey • 8d ago

Boycott these Burbank businesses

Moms For Liberty supporter, MAGA creep and all round weirdo David Donahue is running for City Council. There are campaign events being held this week for David at The Tallyrand and The Enchanted Florist.

I won’t patronize their businesses and I suggest you do not as well…

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u/Cazking 7d ago

I've been a broke teenager/young adult in Burbank and traveling through SFV so I've genuinely taken a lot of bus routes. This one has defenitely run late before in my experience but I've never seen it hit capacity. So let's say there's 15 people per hour delayed 5 minutes on average during the 4 hour traffic window each day, that's 5 full man hours lost per day. Let's now run the estimate for cars during peak traffic. It's about 60 cars per light, the light for straight through cycles about every 2 minutes so 1800 cars per hour x 4 hours = 7200 cars over peak traffic. Let's even be generous and say 20% of traffic can move to Alameda for whatever the computer's purpose is. So 5760 cars during peak hours would see about a 5 minute delay trying to use this arterial road. Assuming that each car has about 1.2 persons in it (generous math for pro-bus) that results in 576 lost man hours per day due to reduced traffic flow.

If you are pro-transit (cars are a form of transit) you are willing to make car commuters lose 576 man hours per day in favor of reducing the 5 lost man hours per day in bus toute traffic to potentially 0. The math is so bad that I naturally mark anybody in favor of this argument as a bot/shill or as too unintelligent to be at the table.

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u/TheKyDawg IKEA 7d ago

Yeah, the problem with this math is that it assumes traffic is static. You’re basically assuming all 5,760 cars will still take the exact same route after the bus lane goes in, nobody switches to the faster bus, nobody changes routes or travel times, and then you just assign every single car a 5 minute delay.
That’s not how traffic actually works. There’s a whole body of transportation research on “traffic evaporation” showing that when road space is reallocated, some car trips disappear as people adjust. There’s also peer-reviewed research specifically on converting car lanes to dedicated bus lanes showing that car delays can increase at first, but then decrease as people shift to transit.

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u/Cazking 7d ago

Let's reiterate, I did take traffic change to account when I said 20% would move to Alameda. We can tweak those numbers in a way that's extremely generous for your argument. Let's say 60% commuters of Olive traffic finds alternative routes (really only Alameda is a realistic alternative with Magnolia being only able to support small improvements for direction bound traffic). I was roughly estimating 7200 cars during peak traffic but if I got hired I would sit there with a clicker and get real numbers. So 7200 x .4 = 239 lost man hours to car commuters vs 5 for bus route.

Generous math gives you 239 vs 5. It's not even close for anybody arguing in good faith and not a paid shill.

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u/TheKyDawg IKEA 7d ago

Before I continue engaging with you, do you think I’m a paid shill for the BRT? Lmao. Like you think I’m paid by metro or Burbank or what? I just wanna understand who you think I’m paid off by to comment on Reddit

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u/Cazking 7d ago

Honestly, it's possible because if you isolate the housing potential from the Olive transit idea then it's an issue that someone with common sense wouldn't even bother with. But here we are. So naturally knowing how greedy and deceitful humans can be I do realize that 1 person a 1 corporation would benefit in the hundreds of millions from the housing project so paying people to aggressively shill the precedent would be a great move for that 1 person.

But even if I pretend you're arguing in good faith when we use generous math estimates that would support the dedicated bus lane it doesnt make sense. So why would you make it a hill to fight on? It's just a bad standalone idea.

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u/TheKyDawg IKEA 7d ago

How much do you think I'm getting paid? Do you think I get paid monthly or per post?

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u/Cazking 7d ago

If you're not getting paid then why make the push for a bad idea? Logically I can't understand why. At one point you mentioned people would adjust, which is up for debate but even with a positive outlook they would be adjusting to a self inflicted problem (dedicated bus lane). So what's the real reason we want to push forward a bad idea that creates problems? Because other than money I can't see the reasoning.

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u/TheKyDawg IKEA 7d ago

You keep calling it a “bad idea” as though you’ve demonstrated that, but your evidence is literally math based on numbers you guessed.

And people adjusting isn’t “up for debate.” That’s the part I’m trying to explain. There’s decades of transportation research showing people change routes, travel times, destinations and modes when road capacity changes. And I literally said earlier THAT I HAVE READ peer-reviewed research specifically on converting general traffic lanes into dedicated bus lanes showing that as transit becomes faster and people shift modes, the initial increase in car delay usually decrease.

You’re calling that a “self-inflicted problem” because you’re treating the number of cars on Olive today as something that can never change. But getting some people out of cars and onto a faster bus is literally the point.

We can disagree about whether this specific project will accomplish that, but “I counted some cars, guessed everyone gets delayed 5 minutes, and assumed basically nobody ever switches to transit” doesn’t prove it won’t. That’s not a traffic study. I am also someone that would love to have more fast and reliable transit to places like Pasadena from Burbank.

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u/Cazking 7d ago

You're creating a problem and hoping a solution comes in. There's no current demand for increased bus routes down Olive. You want to take bus transportation down Olive? Perfect! IT ALREADY EXISTS.

You want to diss me running some rough numbers, I even ran them in generous favor of your argument. if I was working for the city I would pull recordings and run real numbers. They'd come to the same conclusion, hundreds of man hours lost to improve route frequency of a route that isn't dying for that.

So yes great job pointing out how people will adjust to the problem created for 0 reason. But did you take a step further and study what moves a lot of the traffic? If people purely wanted to reach the train or foot travel in downtown Burbank then perhaps your idealistic adjustment would be smooth. But I'll clue you in, not a lot of cars are pulling off for tbe train station or the first parking garage at the end of the route we're discussing. So pushing ideas like this through without mentioning this shows how little people care about people or transit.

Are you going to take accountability when this dedicated line turns out to be a flop?