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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

#141

Post by epolanski »

jzebedee wrote: post #132
epolanski wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty. A single bus carries on average 20 times the people cars occupying the same space would (as you rarely get more than 1 person per car in peak hours). I'd rather take buses than the car in any city. Cars make cities dangerous, noisy, polluted, congestions make people nervous behind the wheel, fights are far from uncommon. Finding pa…

This is highly location dependent with how unequal the US transit infrastructure is. It'd help to add your city for anecdotes to mean much.

I lived in Columbus Ohio as an exchange student and I really disliked the car-centric nature of...everything.

I wish it had better public transport in general but I honestly wish that about pretty much any place.

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

#142

Post by axus »

culi wrote: post #129
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why have bus stops at all, waymo should build a transit bus or large van and run them autonomously. Then they could optimize the fleet as they please. Bus stops were a solution to a lack of connectivity and demand.

Those busses still need designated spots to stop at. They can't be stopping in the middle of a street

I think a bus could stop in the middle of the street, but a bus stop still removes dependence on a smartphone and protects from the weather.

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

#143

Post by janalsncm »

maldev wrote: post #110
stetrain wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would ride the bus if it wasn't filled with crackheads. Stopped Bart when it went downhill and all the white collar people stopped riding it and it just became desperate people, homeless, or crackheads.

The public services death spiral is real. Services get defunded -> they get worse -> reduced user base -> more cuts. The only way to break the cycle is to improve the services.

Safety is only one of the issues. Convenience and comfort are others. Basically a city needs to decide whether it wants people to use the bus, and then act like it.

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

#144

Post by munificent »

Any article about public transit in the US needs to discuss the opioid epidemic and mental health crisis. Otherwise, it's like claiming that bicycles work great for the Netherlands, so people should ride them in the Himalayas.

The situation is just so different in many cities in the US compared to Europe in ways that drastically affect public transit.

> By contrast, a bus stop in a French city like Marseille will have shelters and seating by default.

The bus stop I use regularly has seating and shelter. That's great because I currently have severe post-traumatic osteoarthritis in my ankle and it's painful to stand for several minutes while I wait for a bus.

One day, a homeless guy was sitting on the bench when I got there. A few minutes later, he stood up, walked to the bushes, pulled down his pants, squatted, and unleashed a liquified horror from his ass. He pulled his pants up, and sat back down on the bench.

I don't sit on that bench anymore.

Nearly everyone I know who rides the bus has a story of being harassed by a mentally ill person. Most women I know either refuse to take the bus, or only take it in very careful situations where the odds of being accosted are lower.

We can't have nice things as a public without figuring out a way to help the people in crisis who end up making it worse for everyone.

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

#145

Post by Wistar »

vkou wrote: post #114
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.

My observation at the time was mostly in Magnolia to the Belltown area and the place I thought had way too many stops was in the Magnolia neighborhood, almost per block and it seemed a terrible waste. Plus the buses themselves seemed to resent being stopped and started so much—they rattled and groaned and squeaked.

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

#146

Post by ambicapter »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #90
stetrain wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I find this very unlikely to be true for people who have spent any amount of time driving in a city.

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

#147

Post by dqv »

wnevets wrote: post #98
pavel_lishin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can't forget to add more lanes to support all of these new buses on the road, we need to keep our drive time low!

Not to mention we need places to park these buses. We should require every commercial location to have multi-level parking decks so that there is ample parking.

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

#148

Post by toast0 »

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.

Where I live, the bus line that serves me only has maybe one marked stop. There's a bus depot at the ferry; every where else, you can just stand on the side of the road and wave your hand when the bus comes by and it'll stop for you; when you want to get off on your way home from the ferry, you push the button and let the driver know where to stop.

But that only works because density is low and there's only one plausible destination.

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

#149

Post by realo »

janalsncm wrote: post #118

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. Cit…

I live in a relatively large Canadian city. Not as a suburbanite, but right in the heart of the city.

I have a car, which I use when the weather is not nice, or when it would be inconvenient to take public transportation.

Otherwise, on sunny week-ends i often chose public transports. Here they are efficient , clean, secure and most importantly predictable. We have apps for payment and bus status that show us , on the phone, exactly where every bus is at any moment.

You know your bus will be there for you in exactly 2 minutes. Like a Uber, but much much cheaper.

Predictability is a game changer.

Works very well.

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

#150

Post by mobilene »

When I rode the city bus as a teen in South Bend, IN, in the 80s, there were some designated bus stops. But buses worked on a hail model anyway. You could be on any corner on the route, and as the bus approached, you'd just stick up your arm and it would stop. It was really efficient. But I suppose that works best in a small city like South Bend.
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