Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

worksinprogress.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 656 posts

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

#271

Post by dghlsakjg »

paxys wrote: post #57

Something the article completely skips over is that European cities have significantly better and safer pedestrian infrastructure than their US counterparts. American streets are built to prioritize cars and cars alone. Sidewalks are often unmaintained, bumpy, and sometimes missing altogether. Crossings are often unmarked and dangerous. Stop signs and signals are routinely ignored, especially when turning. This is wh…

In many places, yes, US pedestrian infrastructure is worse.

In other ways - wheelchair accessibility for example - the US is miles better than many European cities.

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

#272

Post by enragedcacti »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #210
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing unnecessary bus stops is a prerequisite to making busses fast. You can't run a fast bus service if the bus is stopping every single block.

That optimizes speed, not latency. I don't care how long it takes to get off the bus nearly as much as I care how long it takes to get on .

For fixed route transit, speed is latency. The faster the bus can make the average trip, the tighter the timetable can be given the same number of buses. Fewer stops also improves consistency which means you can plan to arrive at the stop closer to the scheduled time, and timetables can be tightened even more by reducing the layover times that keep the bus synchronized with the time table.

Separately, the variability problem can be somewhat solved with the real-time location updates that many agencies provide. You'll still have to wait the same amount of time, but some of it can be done comfortably in your house when the bus is running late.

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

#273

Post by andy81 »

hirsin wrote: post #232
bogedy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

always seemed obvious to me that the reason for the disparity is that european buses are a way to get around dense cities and US buses are a welfare program for residents of sparser cities who can't afford cars. the bus lines don't actually go anywhere people care about, they're their just to provide the bare minimum ability to go somewhere. the top comment is right and this article is a good exmaple of what transit…

Which of the cities used as examples in the articles are "sparse"? LA? Pittsburgh is one of the smaller ones listed and while the bus network there is very hub and spoke, it's also still semi usable. But to call NYC, LA, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, etc sparse doesn't seem very accurate. Yes, LA is vast, but I wouldn't call it sparse.

LA is sparse by European standards, or rural by Asian standards.

http://www.demographia.com/db-worldua.pdf CTRL+F for "BUILT-UP URBAN AREAS BY URBAN POPULATION DENSITY: 2025"

America is the exception for population density in general.

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

#274

Post by miki123211 »

Moldoteck wrote: post #219
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…

I'm not a fan of busses and use em only by necessity. Otherwise I prefer trams and bicycles much more. Trams are more chill due to less hard turns and more space, bicycles are a beast for fast arrival if infra is ok. In Zurich trams are very nice, but bike infra comsi comsa up to bad depending on area.

Trams have the same problem trains have. If something happens on a tram line (and these are a lot more integrated with roads than train lines, so things do happen), a big segment of the network comes to a standstill. They're not like buses or cars that can drive around a major accident in an emergency, even if that meanns they'll skip a stop or two.

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

#275

Post by estebank »

mmooss wrote: post #75
miltonlost wrote: post #33

As 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 feel…

That is an accepted issue among bus planners. One solution, I think used at least in part of NYC is to pay at the bus stop, before you board. Related is enforcing boarding and paying in front and leaving via the back door, so the leavers don't delay the boarders.

> enforcing boarding and paying in front and leaving via the back door, so the leavers don't delay the boarders.

In my experience, being able to pay at any of the doors increases throughput because people are not bunched up in a single door, neither to get on or off, Parallelizing (and load balancing!) the movement of people. Not having to tap to pay (either because it is free, because monthly passes don't require it or because you can pre-pay at a machine or online) would have some additional time gains at rush hour on popular lines.

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

#276

Post by miki123211 »

rickydroll wrote: post #175
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…

I know I'm a corner case on this, but there are two cases where our car life significantly improves your quality of life. 1: you live with ADHD: "Oh my God, I need to leave five minutes ago" scheduling method. To anyone who says, "You just need to be more disciplined about time," I refer you to the part about ADHD. 2: If your quality of life depends on activities that are more wilderness/far away from cities, such as…

1. Makes sense.

2. This is why non-car-centric countries don't ban cars. If you're that kind of person (and not everybody is), you buy a car. You may not use it beyond these wilderness activities though.

3. Trains.

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

#277

Post by throw0101a »

epolanski wrote: post #128
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…

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…

> 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).

Some animated GIFs illustrating how much space automobiles take up compared to alternatives:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ft67...

* https://torontolife.com/city/transit-versus-cars-gif/

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

#279

Post by DontBreakAlex »

YES! I moved to SF from Paris (where I spent my whole life before that) a year ago. I exclusively use lime instead of public transit because of how slow it is! Going from Folsom&8th to Mason&Girard takes 50 minutes! And you spend most of the time stopped! With a lime I can usually get there in 20 to 25 minutes. I would use my own bike that I use to commute to work if you could lock a bike without getting it stolen almost immediately.

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

#280

Post by mcv »

miltonlost wrote: post #196
LucasBrandt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But lots of people _do_ already ride buses! There are already current riders, and potential riders who are making these marginal decisions. Occasional riders will decide between transport modes based on the trip - making marginal improvements (or regressions) would change the rate at which they choose to ride the bus. Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are…

> I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year! Until there' a snowstorm, and no one shovels. And you have a broken leg, or are elderly, or disabled. Sure, it might save you personally some time, but we live in a society and should try to h…

It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house. It's unavoidable that most people are going to have to walk a bit. How far is reasonable, is a matter of trade-offs. It also depends on how fine grained the network is. If there are buslines every block, it's annoying if they don't stop there. But you have to walk a block or two to get to a bus line anyway, walking that bit more to get to the stop itself, matters a lot less.
Post reply on HN