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Ask HN: How close together are your bus stops?

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Re: Ask HN: How close together are your bus stops?

#71

Post by seanmcdirmid »

School-Cotton wrote: post #51
cletus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to mention NYC too but in terms of the Subway, which is related. The "local" stops on a lot of Subway lines really shouldn't be there. I'm looking at you 18th Street, 28th Street, 50th Street and so on. 18th Street in particular is 4 blocks away (where 1 block = In the other direction 23rd Street is 5 blocks away. The Subway spends billions of dollars a year on power. Most of that power (for trains) is sp…

When I visited Shanghai, I noticed that late at night when there are not many passengers, they will kick everybody off the train at a random stop. They do this with a few trains in a row until there are enough people waiting in the station to fill up a train to some acceptable level. I assume that the point of consolidating everybody into one train like this is so they can avoid wasting power decelerating/acceleratin…

Same thing happens in Beijing. Where they kick you off happens to be a subway depot where the train will sleep for the night (which isn't always at the terminus, e.g. if it is a loop line or at a remote junction); or it will simply express to the terminus after dumping all of its passengers. Usually, it's just the train's "time" to be off duty, they aren't actually looking at passenger densities or anything like that.

Re: Ask HN: How close together are your bus stops?

#72

Post by School-Cotton »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #71
School-Cotton wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I visited Shanghai, I noticed that late at night when there are not many passengers, they will kick everybody off the train at a random stop. They do this with a few trains in a row until there are enough people waiting in the station to fill up a train to some acceptable level. I assume that the point of consolidating everybody into one train like this is so they can avoid wasting power decelerating/acceleratin…

Same thing happens in Beijing. Where they kick you off happens to be a subway depot where the train will sleep for the night (which isn't always at the terminus, e.g. if it is a loop line or at a remote junction); or it will simply express to the terminus after dumping all of its passengers. Usually, it's just the train's "time" to be off duty, they aren't actually looking at passenger densities or anything like that…

Thanks for the clarification. Good chance that this is what's going on in Shanghai as well. I don't speak Chinese at all so I was pretty clueless.

Re: Ask HN: How close together are your bus stops?

#73

Post by robrenaud »

LandR wrote: post #69
JackFr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an important distinction to be made here -- in Manhattan, in general, there are crosstown buses and buses which go uptown or downtown. And there are 2 kinds of 'block' in Manhattan, 'long blocks' are crosstown (east/west) and 'short blocks' which are north/south. Long blocks are irregular depending on where you are, and are typically much longer than short blocks ~3x. Most uptown and downtown buses offer limi…

Stupid question, probably. But I'm not American. Is a "block" just a continuous building with no gaps for a road or pavement? i.e. [#########building##########] [###### building###] [###] Would be 3 blocks? Or is a block only delineated by a road, but not a pavement? Or something else? Can you have "blocks" with a lot of detached houses, I would guess that yes you can? So that makes me think its blocks of possibly ma…

In American English, blocks are deliminated by roads and mostly used in dense urban environments, often where the blocks are rectangular.

Re: Ask HN: How close together are your bus stops?

#74

Post by vorg »

School-Cotton wrote: post #51
cletus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to mention NYC too but in terms of the Subway, which is related. The "local" stops on a lot of Subway lines really shouldn't be there. I'm looking at you 18th Street, 28th Street, 50th Street and so on. 18th Street in particular is 4 blocks away (where 1 block = In the other direction 23rd Street is 5 blocks away. The Subway spends billions of dollars a year on power. Most of that power (for trains) is sp…

When I visited Shanghai, I noticed that late at night when there are not many passengers, they will kick everybody off the train at a random stop. They do this with a few trains in a row until there are enough people waiting in the station to fill up a train to some acceptable level. I assume that the point of consolidating everybody into one train like this is so they can avoid wasting power decelerating/acceleratin…

> They do this with a few trains in a row until there are enough people waiting in the station to fill up a train to some acceptable level

The "acceptable level" probably doesn't account for everyone getting a seat on the continuation train. This used to happen with buses in Wuhan 10 years ago. If two buses on the same route met up and each had only seated passengers, one would send its passengers to the other bus to stand for the rest of the journey. This was annoying because I would travel places at off-peak times just so I could get a seat.

And of course, because this happens occasionally, it affects everyone using the Shanghai Metro because they all need to build in contingency time when planning a trip to get somewhere by a certain time for an appointment.

Re: Ask HN: How close together are your bus stops?

#75

Post by InitialLastName »

LandR wrote: post #69
JackFr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an important distinction to be made here -- in Manhattan, in general, there are crosstown buses and buses which go uptown or downtown. And there are 2 kinds of 'block' in Manhattan, 'long blocks' are crosstown (east/west) and 'short blocks' which are north/south. Long blocks are irregular depending on where you are, and are typically much longer than short blocks ~3x. Most uptown and downtown buses offer limi…

Stupid question, probably. But I'm not American. Is a "block" just a continuous building with no gaps for a road or pavement? i.e. [#########building##########] [###### building###] [###] Would be 3 blocks? Or is a block only delineated by a road, but not a pavement? Or something else? Can you have "blocks" with a lot of detached houses, I would guess that yes you can? So that makes me think its blocks of possibly ma…

A block (which, as you've pointed out is an ephemeral phrase), in NYC at least, is the space along a road from intersection to intersection. It thus usually doesn't count gaps between buildings or alleys or the like. Many of the long (east/west) blocks in Manhattan, for example, have pedestrian pass-throughs in the middle, but that doesn't count as a split in the block.

Re: Ask HN: How close together are your bus stops?

#76

Post by asdff »

UncleEntity wrote: post #66
cletus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the 18th Street stop. You actually can't get in or out of this station without using stairs AFAIK. There are other stations like this. Are you really using these stations if you're unable to walk a few blocks? It's expensive in time and money to stop and start the trains. Also you need to maintain a station and employ people there. If you want to provide for those with physical difficulties where walking 4 block…

> Why do houses in Malibu and Beverly Hills need caps on property taxes because of some retired person in Bakersfield? The house my father grew up in in San Jose is now worth multi-millions but my grandmother couldn't possibly have paid the ever increasing property taxes while she was still alive and I think people would have whined about subsidies in well-off neighborhoods like you're doing now. I mean, she lived in…

That's always the case. Parts of Manhattan used to be absolute squalor, the worst conditions a city had seen, complete slum housing packing 8 people in a bedroom. Now the area has changed and those same 1 bedrooms might go for 4k a month after a power wash and fresh primer. In Detroit, the city used to be very nice and developed instead of derelict before all the rich white people fled to the suburbs. Cities have never not changed, and it's shortsighted to think that they should exist in stasis when that's never been the case in the 10,000 years of history of cities on earth. I find it ironic that the generation which celebrated ripping out entire neighborhoods for interstates and airports and sports stadiums and parking lots complains when someone wants to build an apartment of all things in the lot across the street.

Prop 13 is a bind for people like your grandmother who live on fixed income and who anticipate living at a fixed level. This law insulated them from the housing market, yet they benefit from it's insulation from property tax when they do finally sell their 100k home, in the tax man's eyes at least, for 2m. In that case, surely it would be better to pay your back taxes when you sell, after you've realized your 2000% gain, but that just would make too much sense I guess.

Re: Ask HN: How close together are your bus stops?

#77

Post by heleninboodler »

drewrv wrote: post #60

Here's an interesting write-up about Seattle. The tldr is that it's about 280 meters for the median, 341 for the mean, in the city proper. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-distance-between-s...

Feels roughly right. My only other observation on seattle buses is that some of the more ridiculous routes have stops every two blocks on an Ave (north-south), which works out to one every 200m or so, if you use the rule of thumb that the most uniform parts of the city have 16 blocks per mile.

Re: Ask HN: How close together are your bus stops?

#78

Post by jlg23 »

LandR wrote: post #69
JackFr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an important distinction to be made here -- in Manhattan, in general, there are crosstown buses and buses which go uptown or downtown. And there are 2 kinds of 'block' in Manhattan, 'long blocks' are crosstown (east/west) and 'short blocks' which are north/south. Long blocks are irregular depending on where you are, and are typically much longer than short blocks ~3x. Most uptown and downtown buses offer limi…

Stupid question, probably. But I'm not American. Is a "block" just a continuous building with no gaps for a road or pavement? i.e. [#########building##########] [###### building###] [###] Would be 3 blocks? Or is a block only delineated by a road, but not a pavement? Or something else? Can you have "blocks" with a lot of detached houses, I would guess that yes you can? So that makes me think its blocks of possibly ma…

Wikipedia has a great explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_block

Re: Ask HN: How close together are your bus stops?

#79

Post by JackFr »

robrenaud wrote: post #73
LandR wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupid question, probably. But I'm not American. Is a "block" just a continuous building with no gaps for a road or pavement? i.e. [#########building##########] [###### building###] [###] Would be 3 blocks? Or is a block only delineated by a road, but not a pavement? Or something else? Can you have "blocks" with a lot of detached houses, I would guess that yes you can? So that makes me think its blocks of possibly ma…

In American English, blocks are deliminated by roads and mostly used in dense urban environments, often where the blocks are rectangular.

Etymology note: The word 'blockbuster' was coined by the press to describe the largest conventional bombs used by the RAF in WWII, because they could destroy a city block.
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