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Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
31–40 of 656 posts
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#32> increasing the distance between stops from 700–800 feet [...] to 1,300 feet I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership. This feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing. Also, the example given cites New York City buses. But New York City is always the worst example because it's the most extreme of everything. The vast majority of US cities do not s…
I don't wanna be rude but when someone spends months researching an issue, which systems work and which don't, you should probably give some level of grace and understand how they came to those numbers rather than spit out your first mindless critique.
Whenever I see an article, and the top comment is StudMan69 saying "Uh, no, the article's conclusions are all wrong!" I think to myself: "Gosh! If only the article's author had consulted StudMan69 before writing the article, he could have avoided making such a grave mistake!
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#33As someone who rides the bus: it's payment that causes slowdowns. Waiting for everyone to get on the front of the bus and tap often takes multiple traffic cycles. If we wanted to treat public transit as a true public good (as it ought to be), it should be funded from taxes and free at point of service, and then front and back can be used. But that'd be too much efficiency and cost the rich too much.
This article feels like he's picking the one lever he can when it's a bad lever. He created a new kind of ethical trolley problem by making it less accessible vs more efficient
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#34The only stops needed are the ones outside my house and outside my office.
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#35Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#36> increasing the distance between stops from 700–800 feet [...] to 1,300 feet I suspect that removing half of the bus stops in a city will piss people off and cause even less ridership. This feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing. Also, the example given cites New York City buses. But New York City is always the worst example because it's the most extreme of everything. The vast majority of US cities do not s…
Nyc has a subway for longer trips. So shorter stops make sense as anyone with a longer trip should be on the subway. However most cities (in the world) are not dense enough to support almost redundant system and in those I believe the speed optimizationis correct.
time is important to bus riders, speeding up the buses helps them. It also attracts others. Only a few are harmed more than helped - but they tend to complain the most even though they are a minority
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#37> Bus stop balancing saves riders’ time. Riders save between 12 and 24 seconds per stop removed. I wonder if this savings includes the additional time to walk further to a stop. Especially in light of this quote: > In England, where 28 percent of all bus passengers are on concessionary fares for age or disability
I doubt they’d be able to measure that with any accuracy.
The wonders of statistics!
One can calculate how much area and thus passengers the stop covers and calculate walking times.
It's not completely trivial (with longer distance people chose alternatives), but can be done similar to the way the whole study was done with similar accuracy.
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#38>Many of the solutions to these problems require money – running more buses, improving stop amenities, or upgrading signals – or the political will to take away street space for busways and transit lanes. But stop balancing can have a meaningful impact on these issues for a fraction of the price.
To me, this exemplifies a type of thinking that is endemic to policymakers in the US. We can tinker at the edges, we can use computers to optimize what we have, but the idea of using money and political will to change anything at all in a meaningful way is anathema, beyond the pale. Giving up before even getting started. Sure, optimize away, but don't expect me to be inspired by pushing papers around.
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#39United states does not need buses ! What might benefit is smaller vans that do more intelligent routing than fixed bus routes. Unfortunately city admins run bus services as jobs programs for adults and not for the convenience of the people. Buses get funded by taxes and not fare collection and as a result even private competition can not emerge.
Tell me you don't live in a real city without telling me you don't live in a real city. Where I live the busses are quite useful and get used by a lot of people.
Don't discount the ability of political extremists to discount even the evidence they see themselves (or reframe it massively), if it conflicts with their agenda.
Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
#40This seems way too tightly focused on this one issue. If it were the case that longer distances between stops alone would result in increased ridership, then Las Vegas ought to have better ridership than most European cities by this article’s stats. Does it? Well, those stats aren’t mentioned in the article, but I’d be surprised, given that for the US cities for which I am familiar with their bus service, the average distance between stops is actually inversely correlated with the quality of the service. Hmmm.
I’m sure bus stop distance optimization is a good thing to do at the margins, but this article is not convincing that it’s the biggest problem with US bus service.