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Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

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Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#81

Post by hypeatei »

renewiltord wrote: post #56
philipallstar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy to tax unrealised gains. You pay tax based on money you don't have, just a bureaucrat's decision as to how much your portfolio went up.

Yeah, I think so too. But if we’re going to tax them I think setting the limit to 5x median American wealth is fine. That way it impacts a broad enough base that it’s not two wolves and a sheep sitting down to dinner.

That's arbitrary and would still cause issues. You'd cause a mass liquidation event and discourage investing or create a bunch of winners in the tax accounting industry. Unrealized capital gains tax is very unserious and IMO just populist drivel.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#83

Post by pkulak »

wnevets wrote: post #52
petcat wrote: post #19

> 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…

We can optimize this further and remove all of the stops between the buses first and last stops. Drive time would be so much faster.

Most optimization is a curve. Arguing for moving closer to the top of the curve is not the same as arguing for moving all the way to the minima on the other side. But why do I have to say that?

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#84

Post by JackFr »

ulrashida wrote: post #71

So, given that Phoenix, Denver, and Vegas already have spacing similar to European nations do they see the benefits that the author is suggesting?

Phoenix metro has 5mm people and does 37mm bus rides. NYC has 8.5mm people and does 400+mm bus rides. London has 9mm and does 1.8 billion bus rides.

But those 37mm in Phoenix are probably going faster than 8mph.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#85

Post by stetrain »

petcat wrote: post #19

> 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…

There are two groups of people that you can optimize for. One is the group of people who already rides the bus. In most US cities this is a small group of people who have no real alternative.

The other is the group of people who might ride the bus if it were convenient. Not just in terms of accessibility to a stop, but also accounting for the journey time. If someone tries riding the bus and finds that a 20 minute drive becomes an hour with stops every single block, they might never ride it again.

In most US cities (outside of the few big ones with decent transit), public transit is basically treated as a welfare service for those who cannot get around by any other means. Not saying that this service doesn't have value, but making all decisions in that mindset isn't going to attract more ridership from those who could choose to drive instead.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#86

Post by steanne »

JBorrow wrote: post #54

At some level this is driven by street design. The reason bus stops are so close in Philadelphia is because they stop every block, and there's a stop sign every block. The blocks are very small. I don't know that 'removing' these as bus-stops would actually change anything. I think a larger question is whether route changes should occur. There was a large effort in Philly called the 'Bus Revolution' [1] that aimed to…

we'll see how cutting stops works out: that's part of what they're planning to rework the trolleys.

https://wwww.septa.org/trolley-modernization/

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#87

Post by dyauspitr »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #47
Bluecobra wrote: post #22

I'm for all for less bus stops, but how do you make it equitable for people who can't walk longer distances if they are disabled or have an underlying health condition? Run a separate paratransit line?

The answer is to keep the same number of stops but run two or more vehicles simultaneously. Or open more doors. Or expedite fares. The authors get mixed up equating count of marked stops with dwell time. Running leapfrogging vehicles , or numerous other strategies, reduces dwell time because one boards passengers and the other disembarks at any given stop or vice versa. In fact, I’d argue bus fare gates, steps, 1-doo…

> The answer is to keep the same number of stops but run two or more vehicles simultaneously.

How exactly does that help? If you’re suggesting every bus go to alternate stops leapfrogging each one in the middle then that will cause a lot of confusion especially for tourist heavy cities.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#88

Post by paxys »

knuckleheads wrote: post #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 u…

A large chunk of problems faced by regular Americans can be solved by money equivalent to a rounding error compared to how much we spend on military, private health subsidies, interest payments, corporate benefits. Yet the "who will pay for it??" narrative never comes up when talking about any of these, only school lunches and buses.

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#89

Post by helle253 »

I live on the north side of Chicago and, to be honest, one of my favorite modes of public transit is the express buses that go from Edgewater/Uptown to downtown.

It's MUCH faster than the train, because once it hits the highway, it doesn't stop till it gets downtown.

Dont get me wrong I love the train, but the red line suffers from the same too-many-stops problem.

Express buses thread the needle imo precisely because they hook into existing infrastructure (highways) and still move masses of people

Re: Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

#90

Post by pavel_lishin »

stetrain wrote: post #85
petcat wrote: post #19

> 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…

There are two groups of people that you can optimize for. One is the group of people who already rides the bus. In most US cities this is a small group of people who have no real alternative. The other is the group of people who might ride the bus if it were convenient. Not just in terms of accessibility to a stop, but also accounting for the journey time. If someone tries riding the bus and finds that a 20 minute dr…

There are very, very few people in America who - when given a choice between driving and taking public transit - will take public transit, no matter how convenient the public transit is.

And in this example, how many stops would you have to cut to turn an hour-long bus ride into a 20 minute one, to compete with the car? You're effectively cutting it down to two stops - where you board, and where you disembark. That's just not a plausible way to organize a bus route, aiming it at one person with a car.

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