Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

Most stops should in fact be a pole where the bus stops frequently enough that you don't care about other amenities.

Furthermore it is deeply ironic that it suggests that we invest in fewer stops further away with more niceties for the elderly and disabled whilst suggesting they walk further because these folks often have more trouble getting up and down and walking longer distances than they do standing 3 minutes until the next bus.

May I also suggest that any study that compares prospective travel times before and after stop balancing especially if it be especially aggressive consider whether the actual decrease in time is just not having to stop because ridership actually decreased. See

> San Francisco saw a 4.4 to 14 percent increase in travel speeds (depending on the trip) by decreasing spacing from six stops per mile to two and a half.

If you had to walk half a mile on each end of your bus ride and possibly some more when you change busses you might reconsider the utility of public transit.

Whereas routes are often going to deliberately intersect to facility changing busses efficiently and this is trivial in small suburban areas in cities with a tangle of routes I've often found many practical routes suggested by google maps to involve getting off at a random midpoint of a route and crossing the street and getting on another even when traveling to fairly central locations. These fortuitous connections would certainly be decreased if stops were aggressively trimmed.

I also question that virtue of real time arrival information which is very expensive per installation and trivially delivered to the phone in everyone's pocket anywhere and everywhere for almost nothing if you are already collecting positioning info on the busses. I use one bus away for this. Put a QR code on the stop on the pole.

> Many of the solutions to these problems require money – running more buses, improving stop amenities, or upgrading signals – or the political will to take away street space for busways and transit lanes.

The solution is to do the things that are actually required. Not one weird trick to fix the bus system.

You already know what the conclusion is going to be, the interesting part is how the author gets there.

Crawling busses are an issue all over the place. The easy way to spot it is when noticing stacked busses during peak periods.

These issues are really hard because they are fundamentally local and change is difficult and fraught with NIMBY bullshit. There is a strong inertia. My small city has a pretty good bus service that winnowed out surplus stops and added BRT. In the public hearing, one of the loud objectors to moving a bus stop 1000ft was that it would encourage inner-city youth to "rape and pillage" in the "good" neighborhood. We're literally talking two blocks away.