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Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

worksinprogress.co

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

#111

Post by vkou »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #92
wnevets wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We can also make the bus smaller. And to give the passengers more agency, we can let them drive it. Instead of paying bus fare every time they board, they can pay a larger up-front cost for this bus, and of course, ongoing gas & maintenance. To make sure they don't pose a danger to others, they can also purchase insurance, and of course have some sort of license to operate it.

We should also quadruple the road space, so that these buses don't just sit in gridlock all day.

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

#113

Post by michaelmrose »

jonbaer wrote: post #68

We need smarter dynamic fares, it shouldn't be a $6 flat tax on all destinations. I think this hurts local businesses, or all local (non business) residents should automatically get half fare.

Since it is already mostly paid for by taxes why not just make it free.

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

#114

Post by vkou »

Wistar wrote: post #102

Although long ago now, When I moved from Denmark to Seattle and tried to use the bus, it was immediately apparent that there’s at least double, maybe triple, the number of stops in Seattle’s Metro as there are in the same distance in Copenhagen. At the time I remember thinking that the average Seattle trip would be SO much faster if the number of stops were dramatically reduced.

The average Seattle trip would be so much faster if bus coverage and frequency were increased, and they got dedicated travel lanes.

The reason 'Race the 8' is an event isn't because there are too many bus stops on Denny, it's because all the cars cause traffic to slow to a crawl for 6 hours of the day.

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

#115

Post by lavelganzu »

Meanwhile here in central Austin, it's a 0.9 mile walk from my door to the nearest bus stop that I can use to commute, walking along major stroads some of which don't even have sidewalks, much of the year in Texan heat with no scrap of shade. Then it's up to a 30 minute wait for the delayed or canceled bus, then almost exactly a 1-hour ride on the express 801 to go 7 miles to work downtown.

Somehow we combine inaccessibly rare bus stops with speed barely over walking.

The solution, I imagine, requires many changes that are politically infeasible. First, double the number of buses to reduce the wait between them. Second, add neighborhood circulator buses to get people from the neighborhoods to the express buses. Third, either add dedicated bus lanes in congested areas or, in an ideal world, make all congested inner-city roads toll roads, and use the tolls to subsidize buses.

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

#116

Post by pkulak »

petcat wrote: post #106
pkulak wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've watched 30 kids get off at their school in the morning. It takes 15 seconds. By your logic, 30 stops adds 15 seconds to a bus's schedule, which is pants-on-head crazy.

Emptying a school bus completely is a lot faster than a city bus stop where people are simultaneously trying to get off the bus and then the new people are also trying to get on the bus and jockey for position and for a seat before the bus can start moving again

The experience I shared was on a city bus.

My point is that you're totally disregarding everything a bus does to stop apart from waiting for passengers to board and de-board. At the very least it has to slow down, then accelerate. Half the time it has to swing the ramp out, which takes forever. Maybe someone has to load or unload a bike. Then it has to re-merge with traffic, and maybe every 10th car will let it in, so that can take a long time too. I don't even know if waiting for passengers is _half_ the time spent, let alone all of it.

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

#117

Post by 5upplied_demand »

petcat wrote: post #70
bluGill wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only because you know your loss but cannot imagine your gains in time.

The gains just mean that I sit on the bus while twice as many people are trying to board at every stop. The bus is stopped for twice as long.

> The bus is stopped for twice as long.

I'd like to see your math, as it isn't just the loading of passengers that takes time. It would seem that slowing down, completely stopping, lowering the bus, opening the doors, and then closing the doors takes up at least some of the time at each bus stop.

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

#118

Post by janalsncm »

I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false.

One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership. This is the central thesis of the article.

Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget. They’re asking themselves how much they have to spend on buses. This is the core of the problem: low cost services are in a death spiral in the US. Budget cuts -> services get worse -> reduced users -> more cuts.

In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile. Further, the arrival times are not reliable and are often a long time apart. This means you need to arrive ~10 minutes early and time your bus so that you also arrive at your destination early. You will be wasting possibly 20+ minutes each way. Of course you are also standing in the sun or the cold or the rain while you wait, and probably walking on a hostile stroad and across several lanes of traffic before that point.

So while the number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter. If you want to improve ridership, you need to make the bus an attractive option for more people.

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

#119

Post by michaelmrose »

skywhopper wrote: post #40

This 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…

It's arguments is that all the better things are impossible to do without political will and money and therefore we should implement their bad idea.

Bus stops at the margins are actually cheapest because it often consists of a pole which is skipped 90% of the time. At the margin you already have fewer stops further apart and there is basically nothing to trim. If nobody is at the stop 90% of the time does it mean we don't need it? No. Your riders in that area may largely not be commuters and grandma needs to get out of the house and go to the store periodically.

You are paying near zero for 10 stops over 5 miles so that each run the bus can stop at a different 2 at a cost of 30 seconds per run.

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