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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

#301

Post by angmarsbane »

adrianN wrote: post #163
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 live in Berlin and strongly prefer the bike over the bus because buses are slow and unreliable. I wish we had a lot more bus lanes and aggressively towed cars blocking them. More subways would be even better though.

When I was in Mexico City I was blown away and inspired that their bus lanes were actually physically separate from car traffic, sometimes they were even elevated a foot or so alongside car traffic. It made the buses so much faster! I wish bus and bike lanes in the USA were equally separated from car traffic. Different color paint and intermittent bollards don't cut it.

If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right and physically separate bus lanes is doing it right.

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

#302

Post by JoshTriplett »

mcv wrote: post #280
miltonlost wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 it…

> It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house.

And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient, if you can afford to use it. (That load-bearing "if" is important, though.)

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

#303

Post by EPWN3D »

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…

> One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US.

That's not what I read. The article is saying that you can get meaningful service improvements via what is essentially a free measure: cutting the number of stops. I personally regularly take a route in San Francisco that would unquestionably be better off by cutting a swathe of stops through the Mission, where it stops every two blocks on a street with painful light cycles and tons of pedestrian traffic.

The result is that by the afternoon, two or three buses on this route have piled up, one right behind the other, and passengers have to wait 45 minutes for the next one if they miss one of those.

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

#304

Post by fc417fc802 »

miki123211 wrote: post #267
enraged_camel wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Maybe it goes without saying, but the reason you don’t mind the bus in Europe is not because you are European but because the European buses are nicer. Actually I think it is both. Car culture in Europe is nowhere as dominant as it is in the US. Many Europeans grow up with public transportation as the default mode of getting around. So they are more likely to be accustomed to things that become grievances for Amer…

And this starts in primary school. Make it legal for kids to move around on their own and take transit to school, just like they do in most of Europe and beyond. Parents are lazy, so many kids will. That's a lesson in public transportation use right there.

> Make it legal for kids to move around on their own and take transit to school

... it is legal though? But if you live in the typical US suburb then good luck with that. You'll catch a district provided bus to school and if your parents don't want to drive you somewhere you'll ride a bike or just not go.

Taking the bus in the suburbs often means walking 15 minutes, waiting on 45+ minute service, and switching routes at a transfer station. It's an ordeal to say the least.

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

#305

Post by MrJohz »

MereInterest wrote: post #225
nickorlow wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing the stops helps a lot. As an example on SEPTA, the 124/125 [1][2] to Wissahickon T.C. takes 10+ minutes longer than taking the 27 [3] when starting at J.F.K. & 15th. (for context: the 124/5 operate locally west through center city before getting on the highway while the 27 only makes 1-2 more stops in center city before getting on the highway) Making these extra stops causes the bus to 'miss' the light cycle…

> Making these extra stops causes the bus to 'miss' the light cycle at almost every stop. This would be a much bigger change, but it's also possible for the lights to give priority to buses. When a bus approaches a light, that should trigger the lights to advance to the part of the cycle that gives the bus the green light. That way, you prioritize the 20 people in the bus rather than the 10 people each in their own c…

This happens with trams in the German city I live in. The other advantage is energy efficiency, apparently - if you can keep them traveling at a consistent speed, then they can maintain momentum, as opposed to if they're constantly stopping and starting and need to spend more energy getting up to speed.

It's slightly irritating as a pedestrian when you're waiting to cross the road to get to a tram stop, and you see that the tram is coming in less than a minute, and you know you're not going to be able to cross in time. But that's the sort of slight irritation I'm okay with for better fuel efficiency and faster trams.

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

#306

Post by mikestew »

sailingparrot wrote: post #227
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…

> Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget. But that’s not at all what the article is about? The thesis is not that having bus stops with music and heating and free drinks will make more people take the bus, it’s that in the U.S., the slowness of buses is making them an unattractive option. And stopping too often is a major rea…

The muni…because it has to mark every single stop at every block just like any car instead of just having priority.

What? I see English words, but it’s still not parseable.

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

#308

Post by estebank »

angmarsbane wrote: post #285
sailingparrot wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget. But that’s not at all what the article is about? The thesis is not that having bus stops with music and heating and free drinks will make more people take the bus, it’s that in the U.S., the slowness of buses is making them an unattractive option. And stopping too often is a major rea…

I'm confused, do you mean the bus stops at stops where no one is waiting to get on AND no one has asked to get off the bus?

It does that, but the parent means stop signs. San Francisco where there aren't traffic lights mostly blankets every intersection with 4 way stop signs. The parent is likely referring to The Sunset district, which looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7569397,-122.5007035,3a,75y,...

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

#309

Post by jjk166 »

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…

> The reason bus stops are so close in Philadelphia is because they stop every block

Which is the issue. Philadelphia's blocks were sized in the 1600s, they weren't designed to be the optimal spacing for bus stops. Given how tiny the blocks are, there is no need to stop at every block.

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

#310

Post by diacritical »

I'm in Europe and haven't experienced the US public transportation system, so I can't offer an opinion, but in my country the number of stops seem to have a negligible effect on the average speed.

Most of the slowness comes from traffic. Where there are bus lanes, the bus can even be as fast or faster than a car. Some of our trams stop every 300 meters or so, but since they have dedicated lanes, they are pretty quick. Some of the stops are at intersections where a car would also wait. When the timing is right, and most often it is, the trams don't waste more time than would've been wasted just waiting for you turn at the intersection.

Where there is a bike lane parallel to the cars, busses and trams, an electric bike with 35-40 km/h will usually be the the fastest method of transportation, especially if you cross on reds when there's 0% chance of a car hitting you. I'm talking about a busy main street with lots of lights and traffic, not a highway, of course.

Busses with no dedicated bus lanes are slower than cars, because cars are quicker to maneuver and accelerate when needed. I think if out city made the busses (and trams, and trolleys) 2-3 times more frequent, most people would use them. It would be a difference of driving in traffic for 1 hour vs sitting in a bus reading something (or doom scrolling) for 1 hour and 10 minutes. Shorter stops means less walking, so it would incentivize people to use the public transportation more. The benefits are obvious - less traffic overall, less pollution, less energy used, less road rage, more time to chill, and so on.

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