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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

#351

Post by rickydroll »

tikhonj wrote: post #283
rickydroll wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Living with ADHD also increases your chances of getting into a car accident substantially. I can't find the numbers now, but the increase is non-trivial and there are some clear mechanisms (inattention, impulsivity and risk-seeking behaviors). ADHD is a big part of the reason I don't drive. I'm lucky enough to live in Berkeley which is very walkable with decent transit, and I would hesitate to move anywhere more car-…

Yeah, ADHD does affect one's ability to drive safely. On the other hand, I've been driving for over 50 years. I've had one accident that I was responsible for. Various other vehicles have been involved in five other accidents where the other driver backed into my parked car.

I think the reason I've been hypervigilant about safe driving practices is that my father owned a rigging company, and I was driving forklifts and stake trucks in the yard from about 13. I understood the impact a vehicle could have on other things, people included. Living in that world from about age nine on teaches you to be obsessive about properly securing a load (Molding machines, air handling units, lathes, etc.).

I've often thought people would be better drivers if they started their driving experience with the motorcycle safety training course curriculum and drove for a year on motorized two wheels, taking up the lane and keeping up with traffic.

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

#352

Post by [deleted] »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #168
ambicapter wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the majority of city residents tend not to own cars, but I could be wrong about that.

[deleted]

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

#353

Post by ambicapter »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #168
ambicapter wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the majority of city residents tend not to own cars, but I could be wrong about that.

They don't own cars because owning a car in the city sucks in a lot of ways, more so than in rural areas.

So yeah, if your point is that if you take away all the bad parts of using a car, and leave public transit as is, then using a car comes out ahead. Splendid.

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

#354

Post by wsatb »

LucasBrandt wrote: post #165
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…

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 also live in Chicago and wouldn’t mind walking extra to another stop, but Chicago also has a massive traffic problem, particularly post pandemic. During rush hour, the bus is stop and go already.

I’m really curious how this would pan out here, but it can’t be the only solution.

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

#355

Post by unglaublich »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #271
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.

Wheelchair users are a subset of pedestrians. If your pedestrian infra is shit, your wheelchain infra can't be much better. (Sure, only if you count whatever remains of pedestrians infra, it might look acceptable).

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

#356

Post by bgnn »

closetohome wrote: post #193
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…

Similarly, the article also glosses over the issue of disability. Perhaps because the US tends to treat its bus system as welfare, it is adapted heavily to people with disabilities and limited mobility. I'm sure there are solutions to this, but at the moment removing bus stops tends to disenfranchise people who can't walk longer distances.

This is true for everywhere tbh, and thr solution is to make the last mile walkable by people with disabilities.

I see a lot of idolization of NW Europe from the US, but this is still a problem in Europe too. True, it's better than most of the world, but not every NW European city is as walkable or as accessible as people think it is.

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

#357

Post by wussboy »

cyberax wrote: post #337
mcv wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, it's not unavoidable. Just ditch the buses and switch to cars, soon to be self-driving. Even the rush hour traffic is trivially solved by mild carpooling (small vans for 4-6 people).

Not Just Bikes makes a compelling argument that self driving cars are not the answer, and will almost certainly make things worse

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

#358

Post by maldev »

jacobolus wrote: post #247
maldev wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

BART is full of white-collar people who use it to commute and to travel around the area (alongside all sorts of other kinds of people, as you would expect for a broadly used service). Ridership collapsed in 2020 because of the pandemic, for obvious reasons, but it's hard to really blame that on the service itself, or the riders. Ridership has been gradually recovering since then. Total trips are now up to something l…

I left SF ~2021, but even in 2019 it was kind of in a death spiral. Hopefully it's better now, loved it back when I lived there. But still hear mixed reports from friends.

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

#359

Post by iamcalledrob »

Retric wrote: post #205
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'm personally able to walk a block or two further “A block or 2” each way at the start and destination is a significant difference (4-8 blocks) for most elderly people. Busses fill two different roles, as primary means of transportation and arguably more importantly as a backup means of transportation. They can serve a vital role for cities without the kind of investment it would take to make most typical HN reade…

I think this is a US-centric perspective.

In the US, buses (and public transport in general), are thought of as social programmes. Anyone can use them, but they are really for people who can't drive or are too poor to own a car.

The rider makeup then looks like that. The elderly and the poor, sadly. Services run at a huge loss and are dependent on massive and unpopular government subsidies. Quality of service is bad. There's a stigma to using it. You end up with long, slow bus lines because this allows as many of the current demographic (elderly, poor) to take the bus. And there are always bailouts or brutal cuts on the horizon. You end up at a sort-of local maxima of inadequacy.

In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving.

This alternate universe is a city like London. Transport for London has a balanced budget, and despite what grumpy Brits like to say, quality of service is on an ever-upwards trajectory.

In my opinion, operating transport as transportation programme, not a social programme, is how you get more adoption in the long term. You make public transport attractive to more demographics.

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

#360

Post by Moldoteck »

miki123211 wrote: post #274
Moldoteck wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In most situations you want trams to have own lanes and semaphore priority which reduces collision chances to a minimum. Worst case you can have some spare busses to provide temporary replacement services for such situations or you can divert some buses from other lines to provide services in problematic sector till situation isn't resolved.
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